The Kyle File

I've been far too silent about this for far too long, but certain aspects of tonight's VMA award show have made me pray about writing this, and here is the result. God hates racism. God also hates homosexuality. He hates both these and all other sins equally. However, we have a political homosexual agenda in this country that is hijacking the Civil Rights movement, trying to bring together the rights of people who have fought, bled and died for something as simple as the right to vote or to sit down at a lunch counter with the rights of people to lust after people of their same gender. These things are by definition separate issues, and any attempt to bring them together or to in any way say that we can't have equal rights for people of all races without giving special privileges to people who want to redefine marriage and family is a lie perpitrated by none other than satan. I’m all for people having the choice to do whatever they want to do in private, but there should be nothing in the world that says I have to like it, or even recognize, in my business, my church or even in the government, the desires of people who want to have sex with others of the same gender, or to allow them to redefine God's definition of Marriage and family, and to force me or anyone else to accept their definition.

Racial equality has nothing in the world to do with homosexuality. I know of no one who chose the color of their skin. Yet especially in this country, people have a history of being discriminated against, denied jobs, the right to vote, and even equal justice under the law and have even been enslaved and killed for no reason other than the color of their skin. And this racism and unequal justice still exists in this country today, and it is making a big comeback in the public spotlight over the last few years, where it had previously been hiding just under the surface and never completely went away. On the other hand, I know of no one who has chosen to live a homosexual lifestyle who has been denied the right to vote. I know of no one living a homosexual lifestyle who has been denied the right to own land or a home, or even the right to rent an apartment or house. I know of no homosexual person who has been denied a job unless they wore their sexual orientation on their sleave after they began working, and those who have lost jobs in this way are rather few. They certainly weren't denied a job simply because of a name or checkmark on an application. I know of no place in this country, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, with “gay only” and “straight only” bathrooms, water fountains, lunch counters, movie theaters, schools, bus seating or anything else. In fact, homosexuality has been fashionable for a long time, and permiates radio, TV, pop culture and society in general, and I will personally be hated by many, and may even lose friends, just because I have written this piece expressing God's view that it is a sin, and that He hates it as much as racism, injustice, murder, and yes, all manner of other sins, sexual or not.

Having said all this, I do believe in a God who forgives. I believe in a God who made us in His image, and wants nothing more than for us to turn away from all our sins and turn to Him. I believe in a God who will help us up when we fall, and who will help us when we want to become more like Him. And yes, I believe in a God who is faithful and just to deliver us from all manner of sins, including racism and homosexuality, we must only ask with sincerity of heart. He has delivered me from my own sins and made me more like Him, and He will do it for anyone else also. Believe in the One true God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Believe in His Word: the Bible. Believe in real Love, not lust. Believe in salvation, and God will save you. Believe in deliverance, and God will deliver you.

One of them, about 10 years old, is one we actually still use, although it’s a bit too old to run the Windows XP service pack 3 that was on it when we got it about 5 years ago, and Arch Linux + GNOME was freezing at times, especially when the browser was being used, and was also displaying fallback mode. The other computer has a default BIOS date of October 14, 1999, which I am guessing is the day the BIOS firmware was installed onto the motherboard. The CD-ROM drive appears to be broken, and it was therefore incapable of booting to anything but the hard drive running the same, even slower, Windows XP service pack 3 or a floppy disk. The 10-year-old computer has 512MB Ram, a 20GB hard disk and a Pentium iv processor that it claims runs at 2GHz, but feels much slower than that. The 1999 box actually has 224MB RAM, some of which was added later and is a different brand from the original, a 45GB hard drive, which I can only conclude was added at least 2 years later, and a Pentium 3 820MHz processor. Both of these machines are now running Arch Linux, and are quite happy to run a command shell, and even the XFCE desktop. I had to use a bootable floppy disk image with a USB driver to load Arch Linux, but once I got it installed onto the hard drive, it came up so fast I at first didn’t believe it could have booted so quickly. I then installed XFCE 4.10, and was still impressed with the boot time, and even the responsiveness of the base desktop system overall, including how much Orca far exceeded my expectations on such an old underpowered box. I’m still looking for a leaner browser and office suite to run on the oldest dinobox as I affectionately call it, which actually has the brand name “tiny” on both sides of the case, even though it is as large as my workhorse desktop that I bilt, but the slightly newer Del Optiplex looks like it will run Firefox and LibreOffice with less difficulty now that the desktop environment uses less resources, which are certainly at a premium on both boxes. It’s certainly good to know that although there is little I can do with the hardware on either computer short of rebuilding it from the motherboard up, it is still possible to run a decent modern operating system, and even some modern applications, on both of them.

I got an email today with a petition telling Google to stop analysing users' email messages to target advertising to their inboxes. Well, first off, petition the Postmaster General, Congress, the President, or whoever has such power, to ban all the spam everyone with a postal mailbox receives nearly every day, then we can talk about email. It’s easy enough to hit the delete key on an e-mail, but postal spam wastes my time and energy, in addition to helping to decrease the number of life-giving trees on our planet. Also, I can’t read all that mess they send me anyway, so companies won’t get a cent from me via a printed ad in my mailbox. It just doesn’t work. Believe it or not, I hold the rather unusual opinion that if you want my business, you are more likely to get a response if you send me an email, especially if it is selling a product or service I have found I need or want. Maybe that’s because I am visually impaired, but either way, electronic communications just work better for me, even if used for marketing purposes. Can’t we hav a “Canned Spam Act” for postal mail? Please? No, I don’t want that credit card. If I did, I certainly would have applied by now, seeing as you’ve sent me the same cute-looking glossy envelope with the same fake plastic card inside about 40 times just this year, and even more before that, and I still haven’t taken the bate!

Secondly, regarding email, I do receive spam, most of which is from fraudulent, non-existing companies or other scammers, but it goes into my spam email folder, or is tagged as spam by my filtering system. Although I do get the occasional email from Google Shopping or Google Play, they are rather infrequent, and they are also mass mailings sent to all users of these services, and in no way appear to be targeting me based on email messages I have sent or received, products I have purchased, or even apps I have downloaded. I have seen targeted ads on the Gmail website, as well as other sites with Google ads, but these are completely separate from my inbox, and I generally use Thunderbird to access my mail anyway, which receives no Google ads, and also adds nothing to my incoming or outgoing messages. Believe me, I check this feature quite frequently to be sure my email providers don’t start doing such crazy things, as this is probably the most important reason why I refuse to use Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. I can easily delete ads that come into my inbox, but don’t do the Yahoo and Hotmail thing by forcing me to advertise products and services I know nothing about, or even your oen email service, just by sending a message to a friend, or especially to an email list, and don’t insert advertising into email messages that my friends or lists send me either. This is not cool, and you will forever go on my list of hated email providers if you do any of these things.

So far, Google keeps my inbox fairly clean, as does GMX, but there is nothing in the world like running my own mail server on my own VPS. Now there’s full control. Yeah, it does cost a bit more to run your own VPS rather than getting a free address from Google, GMX or even your ISP, but it’s much more trustworthy than expecting another company, or the NSA for that matter, to handle your email messages appropriately, not to mention that a VPS can do much more than just email. For example, I use mine to run some websites and even seed torrents for a couple of Linux distributions. Yeah, I know, I should get that Fedora 19 torrent up there, but I’ve got Talking Arch, and I plan to put up the unmodified Arch Linux as well, which are even better 😀.