Category Archives: Just Thinking Out Loud

Ghostly Net Snags Computers

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Toronto researchers of the University of Toronto’s Munk Center put the world on alert, according to the NY Times.  GhostNet is watching and so far has “..in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.”

“Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.”

In a separate report, the University of Cambridge calls China, the Snooping Giant.  They warn social-malware surveillance and say “other hackers could adopt the tactics used in the malware operation.”

Dark Days Ahead

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The Lenten readings are growing darker as Jesus approaches His hour

In Wisdom 2, we read:

The wicked said among themselves,
thinking not aright…
“Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us;
he sets himself against our doings,
Reproaches us for transgressions of the law
and charges us with violations of our training.
He professes to have knowledge of God
and styles himself a child of the LORD.

The Gospel of John, too, sounds an ominous note:

“Jesus moved about within Galilee; he did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill him. But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near…But when his brothers had gone up to the feast, he himself also went up, not openly but as it were in secret.” John 7:1,10

Why did things have to go this way.  Why the rejection?  Why the Cross?  And while we’re questioning; why do they sour for us?

Today, Fr. Michael, faced with these questions, asked one of his own (I’m paraphrasing.) Who made us judge and jury?  Who confirmed us in our righteousness; which is, if honest, our self-righteousness?”

The Gospel of Light treads a path through every darkness and Darkness, itself.  Without the stuff of darkness, weakness, war, tragedy and desperate dilemma, we  go unchallenged, self-satisfied.  We pursue our dreams and go willy-nilly, perhaps, even, to our own dissolution, seeing only the darkness around us, and none within.  What we don’t like of Gospel or Church, we ignore or eliminate from our daily lives. “Let us condemn him to a shameful death.”

Until the unthinkable forces itself upon us and our decisions, we are content not to think but to ride the fence. The problems remain out there with “them.”  If we do take a stand and speak the Gospel truth, we find what Jesus found: rejection and betrayal, even from within our families, the cruelest blow.  It might not be explicit.  It may be that no one has time to visit.  Perhaps, the grand-kids are withheld and holidays less joyful.  How doesn’t matter so much as that it happens. We are left on our Cross.

What to do?  Look first to yourself.  Question your ways and your motives.  Repent, is the Gospel word for it.  Then pray and wait.  Wait upon God; first of all with praise and adoration, thanksgiving, and finally with petition.  Place all the rest, loves ones and world, in the Tabernacle with the Lamb who was Slain and still lives.  Then go on; “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” This is the Way until the end of the world and the coming of the Day.

From the Office of Readings – for Friday of fourth week of Lent from Easter Letter of Athanasias:

How fine a thing it is to move from festival to festival, from prayer to prayer, from holy day to holy day. The time is now at hand when we enter on a new beginning: the proclamation of the blessed Passover, in which the Lord was sacrificed.

Signs of the Times

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The Great Leap Forward -Get ready!  Soon the posters will hit the billboards. Best seen in an exhibition and not along American highways or in our schools.

The Anchoress worries about mandatory volunteerism.  Our “Good Sister”

should worry.

The Whole Truth – Make it Plain, Brother!

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You don’t usually get to hear a Lutheran congregation holler an, “Amen” or “Preach it, Brother. ” Today was no  different, but the minister seemed to want one.  I was visiting with the Lutherans and the minister confessed that the one time he could remember that someone called out, “Amen, Brother”, it caught him so by surprise that it totally threw him into confusion.  Now, however, Jesus was talking plain in the Gospel and the minister felt he could use a reminder from the pews to, “Make it plain; make it plain!” He was preaching John 3:16, “the Bible in a nutshell.”

The evening before, I heard a priest of the Roman Catholic Church preach it.  He truly kept it simple.  He said,
“Life is short. Hell is for Eternity. Think about it!”  He sat down.  That was it! Talk about nutshells.

My Lutheran friend said a bit more, before remembering his injunction to himself, “Make it plain!”  The plain fact was that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” The minister said that the love He bore us was not the stuff of  “warm fuzzies” but “agape”, that  to die for love that willing died for all mankind; sparing not a drop of blood, or leaving a breathe unspent.

The sermon in my head reminded me, Jesus plainly and emphatically proclaimed that verse, now made famous by placards at football games and  verse17: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” However, not many people finish the message.  Jesus’ “make it plain” message,  was also recorded by John in chapter 3:18-19.

No “warm fuzzies” here, either, only the uncomfortable part of the Truth, John 3:18-19.

“Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.  And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.”

Jesus spoke the whole Truth and so should we because:  “Life is short. Hell is for Eternity. Think about it!”

Somewhere Nebraska – Somewhere Springtime

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Getting to Nebraska, we passed a lot of dry, brown land.  Colorful Colorado was a grayish tan.  But here and there bright green fields told you things were ready to burst out at the first fall of rain.

On the surface things can look bleak.  Beneath the surface, they are ready to pop. What I have to keep reminding myself is that life is thriving on planet Earth.  God is in His heaven and that makes all the difference.  Somewhere the bountiful and beautiful is happening, maybe not here, perhaps in distant, hidden places, but it’s happening and its abundant!  While, there are dry spells, and dormant periods with things that go wrong, other things are so very right.

Change, for all my discomfort, is as ordinary as air. I know that if it’s happening, at very least, God is permitting it. He always has a plan and I don’t understand simply because He hasn’t run it past me.  That does make even the present dilemma a work in progress – mysterious design and all that.

In the world or in the Church, it all hangs together.  We are waiting for rain.  John Paul II spoke of a Springtime for the Church and I believe that now, in this very dark hour, we are actually living it.  Beneath the materialism and relativism and all those other ism’s, is a harvest in the making. It waits, perhaps, on laborers and a rain of prayer, but it none-the- less is hanging fire.

I find my Springtime in my prayer.  Whether my experience of prayer is dry or consoling, doesn’t matter, anymore.  I am praying.  Day by day, I’m just doing it…. and I’m not alone in this.  Whoever is waiting on change can actually move the hands of God in His heaven, turning the dreary grey of their waiting, into a poppin’ Springtime.

For me, it’s hidden but it’s happening.  For each of us, it’s a “Just do it!” thing, hanging on a decision.  What you don’t see, none-the-less, is building beneath the surface of our day to day.  Days past, present and to come, days for forgiving, repenting, and imploring; all prayer, all the time. Springtime will come without me, but don’t want to miss it.  I want to run through the fields and feel it in my soul.

No Perspective – No Compunction!

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Does the Mainstream Media feel any guilt for the media basis that is now part and parcel of its product and its legacy?  Do their heavy-hitters feel any compunction for putting Barak Hussein Obama, a relative unknown with little experience and a shady past into the White House as President of the greatest Nation on this earth.  The answer is “No!” and “Hell, no! respectively.  Perspectively, they have no perspective!

Bernard Goldberg of “A Slobbering Love Affair” fame, reminds us of the “bubble” in which these guys live.  A “Vast Left-wing Conspiracy” has not been organized, but they live and move and have their being
as though there were one.  According to Goldberg, “The problem, in a word, is group-think.” An “institutional bias,” that is insidious because it is “too  comfortable” and “dulls the senses,” is turning “even well-
educated journalists into narrow-minded provincial rubes.”

In a time of national crisis, those the 1st amendment intended to protect the Nation by
manning the watchtowers, are in denial and worse. They are in lockstep, much as the spaced-out fictional
Borg, zombies acting, but not thinking critically.