This is the closest analogue to the New Heavens and the New Earth I have found so far.
Amusingly, I would even factor in the cargo ship. In the New Creation, there are many great things to do, perfect works big and small to attend to.
It is, quite literally, the way things should be.
From Whiffing on Nero and Romans 13 by Jordan Wilson
—<Quote begins>—
Question:
“What would you tell an individual who references Roman’s 13 being written during the reign of Nero and therefore believing that Paul was suggesting we obey even a pagan government when it’s in control (so long as it doesn’t force you to do specifically anti Christian things)”
Answer:
We are obligated to obey governments to the extent the laws they administer are just and to the extent the commands are within the proper jurisdiction of the governing civil authority. Nero wasn’t persecuting Christians at the time Paul wrote Romans.
Romans 13:3-5 makes this obvious.
“For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
How in the world would Nero be mass murdering Christians and burning them alive if Nero was known to punish evil and reward good? Was he administering God’s wrath by murdering Christians? Beyond that, sources put the beginning of Neronic persecution of Christians after the fires in Rome in AD 64 and the book of Romans was written in AD 56/57.
Additionally, notice that this passage in Romans doesn’t even give an exception to disobey the civil magistrate if the magistrate commands you to sin. This exception needs to be implied through necessary consequence and a broader biblical understanding of what delegated human authority is and how we are to interact with human authorities in light of God’s commands. It is not there immediately in the text.
[…]
From a broader reading of scriptures, we know that the only one who has unlimited authority and jurisdiction is God. Limited authority is then delegated to various forms of government among men, according to their specific jurisdiction: Self government, family government, church government and civil government.
The civil government should not magically be treated as less susceptible to jurisdictional limits than other human authorities. To understand where these jurisdictions are limited and where they intersect, we must look to the whole of scripture, not just cherry pick a passage from Romans 13 which we treat differently than other authority structures.
A great place to start is to look at the role of the civil magistrate in the life of the people under Moses with the attending civil case law infrastructure. When the ceremonial elements are stripped away, what we are left with is a civil authority which has a jurisdiction limited mainly to punishing murder and theft. There are disagreements about further transcendent responsibilities of the civil magistrate related to expressions of false religion and sexual sin, but that’s for another article. You can also look at what a departure from that structure looks like in 1st Samuel 8 (A great book on this here) where due to idolatry, the people demand a greatly inflated jurisdictional role for the civil government and the destruction that ensues.
Under the biblical model of civil governance, the civil magistrate may not punish all kinds of sins. What sins were not punishable by civil sanctions were left to the family and the church to adjudicate. There was no carte blanche jurisdictional authority for civil government then and no such jurisdictional understanding should be inserted into the responsibility of civil government to punish evil in Romans 13. The civil government was not given authority to act as a source of welfare through confiscatory taxation, again this was not its proper jurisdiction but was left to the family and to the church. Old Testament Israel was given all kinds of positive commands for which the civil government was not entrusted to enforce with sanctions.
—<Quote ends>—
As the book of Romans was set before the persecutions, it is reasonable to assume that tyrannical rule delegitimizes a government. We are not obliged to obey a State that hates righteousness, and despised the righteous.
Obedience may – or may not – still be necessary for the ordinary Joe.
But, there are always places where the Hateful Masters can’t reach, things they do not see, and ways to widen the cracks in their power structure.
A good article covering the limitations of the home-based workplace is on Mises, The Economics of Working from Home by Harald Eustachius Tomintz. I support working from home, but you should hear both sides of the story.
Also of interest is How to Join the Alt-Tech Exodus by Horea Christian. Not only social media and video, but email, search privacy, and text messaging is covered. The focus is on knowing what you want, not particular one-size-fits-all suggestions.
Politics and religion are inseparable.
This fact alone accounts for the persecution of the early Church by the Roman State. Francis Legge stated the matter clearly when he said that “The officials of the Roman Empire in time of persecution sought to force the Christians to sacrifice, not to any of the heathen gods, but to the Genius of the Emperor and the Fortune of the city of Rome; and at all times the Christians’ refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as a political offence.”
At the trial of Christ the chief priests of the Jews said to the officials of the Roman Empire: “We have no king but Caesar” ( Jn 19:15). The early Christians, when faced with the same question, replied: “We have another King: the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Romans understood what this meant: either Jesus would bow the knee to Caesar or Caesar would have to bow the knee to Jesus (cf. Jn 19:12).
The Church faces this same question again today, and in a way that she has not had to face it since the days of the Roman emperors. Who is Lord: Christ or Caesar? Christ or the modern secular State? There was, and is, no third option, no “third way.” This was, and still is, a political issue. Jesus Christ was victorious in his struggle with the Roman State. He will be victorious in his struggle with the modern secular State. The only question that remains is this: on whose side will you stand? Whom are you for? Whom will you obey? The Lord Jesus Christ or the modern idolatrous secular State?
[…]
The Lord Jesus Christ does not merely demand that we refrain from burning the incense to Caesar; he demands that Caesar burn the incense to him and acknowledge his lordship and sovereignty over Rome and the empire.
[…]
There is no area of religious neutrality anywhere in the created order. Politics is not a religiously neutral enterprise, it is an intensely religious enterprise. Burning the incense was a religious act of political submission. Refusing to burn the incense was not a religious crime in the narrow sense (a devotional offence); it was, rather, a religious act of political rebellion against Rome.
Christianity is the True Politics by Stephen C. Perks
It is time for Christ to be exalted above all earthly authorities.
Something both church and state are resisting at the moment.
And yet, “All who hate Me love death.”
First, we need to prepare to expand Christ’s Kingdom into the future.
Second, if we have time, and after the living get the care God expects, we need to dig two sets of graves.
“Learn the natural, logical outcome of those who hate God, and do not follow in their path.”
Third, work and pray very strongly, to avoid the need for a third grave!
In the Roman empire, law and order was at a minimum. It was a society going down the drain. And as a result the church had a continual problem, here were adulterers, and sometimes murderers whom the law was not punishing, how were they going to deal with them? For other crimes that the scripture spoke of there was restitution required, and the restitution here was the death penalty, but the church had no power to enforce the death penalty. Wherefore, what was the church to do? Just tell them: ‘As long as you say you are sorry and repent, come back in?’ No. that was to make adultery or murder a lesser crime then say, the theft of $10, where restitution was required, the return of the $10 plus another $10.
And so they set up certain requirements. Penances to do, which would demonstrate the sincerity of the repentant person. Some times for 7 years they would be barred from Communion. And during that time they would be required to do a number of menial services. These were not works to work out there sin, but measures to require restitution and to demonstrate their repentance, that they were truly sorry and were humbling themselves before God. Unfortunately when Protestants think of the penitential system they think of the later medieval abuses which were fearful. But in its origin it was the churches way of dealing with crimes that society no longer paid any attention to, and which they felt somehow had to be penalized.
It would be wise for even hard-core Reformers to brush up on how the Ancient and Medieval church handles criminals without a sword.
Yes, the Power-Elite have the money and the guns: but both will dissolve in their hands. The humanistic Order is rotting before our eyes, and lay Christians will have to work hard to uphold local order until a proper Christian magistrate is raised up.
The spark of a Christian social law-order can be the ‘natural aristocrats’ and leaders of a given Christ-exalting society. But it could be democratic as well: every adult (adult and child?) who uphold the Nicene Creed and the Sovereignty of Christ, say. Or maybe debt-free Christian landowners, or every God-fearing head of a family, male or female.
In any case, Christians are not to place the yoke of a pagan lord upon their shoulders. A lesson we are being firmly taught today.
“There is no neutrality, no unbiased judge between the believer and the unbeliever,.
And the secularist state is your enemy, not your friend.
As secularists would gleefully and joyfully spell out for you.”
A government that is built on truth, law and service — and a people, families, churches, businesses and banks that are built on truth, law and service — is what we need.
(For a bank to be built on truth, you’ll have to ban fraudulent fractional reserve systems and use honest commodity money – gold, silver, etc. Also, free banking is needed, where people — not a self-serving state — choose what money is legitimate. “Legal tender”laws will have to be ditched.
The wise government would go with gold, and a wise people will agree.)
The life of the body of Christian as a social order, a kingdom, a nation as the Bible calls us, was replaced by a clerical order that performed the faith on behalf of the believers in the form of rituals, and the citizenship of the kingdom was effectively stolen from the faithful and vested in the clergy.
All Church Services are Syncretistic with Paganism: Change my Mind, by Stephen C. Perks
This will have to change.
“Elders are given the authority to lead the church by teaching the word and ministering to the needs of their local congregation. They are not authorized to rule the church by issuing mandatory orders that are not found in Scripture.”
In short, pastors/elders are leaders, not rulers.
It is important to make a semantic distinction between ruling and leading for the reason that the contrast between these two terms is where the debate lies. A ruler possesses decision-making authority over others and coercive power to enforce his will. In contrast, a leader may direct other’s course of action by their instruction and/or by using themselves as examples to emulate without coercive power. Elders are given the authority to lead and are forbidden the authority to rule.
Elders Are Not Rulers by Ben Moore
Christians need to know the difference between rulers with the power of punishment, and leaders who do not have that authority.
The future starts with us. Not the denizens of some Imperial Capital, nor the delusional in academia or media.
But it gets worse. This principle [of a higher duty to God] is no longer even believed in the Church on the whole. And the reason that this principle is no longer acknowledged by the State is because the Church herself has abandoned it. The apostasy of the Church has paved the way and lighted the path to the apostasy of the State.
To What Shall We Compare These Times? by Stephen C. Perks
The Church is the source of our corrupt, lawless society.
Thus, this evil must be cleansed out of her first.
There is no doctrine in all of Scripture more forgotten than the Mediatorial Dominion of Christ. Rarely is it ever chosen to be taught in Bible studies or devotionals. The doctrine is so neglected that we’ve forgotten what it means for Jesus to be king. What exactly do we mean when we sing on Sunday morning, “rejoice, the Lord is king,” or “crown him with many crowns”? What exactly is Jesus king of, and how far does his dominion extend? When asked this question, many Christians are quick to reduce the extent of Christ’s reign to strictly the church. We are often told he rules the hearts and minds of his people. While this is certainly true, it is incomplete. The extent of Christ’s Mediatorial Dominion reaches over all of creation, both visible and invisible. It includes all creatures both heavenly and earthly. His reign is both comprehensive and universal in that it includes all things, and not limited to the church only.
The Extent of Christ’s Mediatorial Dominion, by Ben Moore
Isn’t it time that Christians believed in the Lordship and Authority of Jesus Christ?
Yes. Yes, it is.
From a broader reading of scriptures, we know that the only one who has unlimited authority and jurisdiction is God. Limited authority is then delegated to various forms of government among men, according to their specific jurisdiction: Self government, family government, church government and civil government.
The civil government should not magically be treated as less susceptible to jurisdictional limits than other human authorities. To understand where these jurisdictions are limited and where they intersect, we must look to the whole of scripture, not just cherry pick a passage from Romans 13 which we treat differently than other authority structures.
Whiffing on Nero and Romans 13 by Jordan Wilson
Bearing uniforms, badges and guns are not enough to escape the Law-Word of God.
Jesus never told us to plant churches. He said he will build his church. He told us to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness (i.e. justice, not piety) and the Great Commission he gave us is a command to disciple nations, not plant churches. Churches are a consequence of the Great Commission not its goal. The goal is all nations embracing the kingdom of God and living according to his covenant.
Church Planting – Totally Cockeyed! by Stephen C. Perks
The goal we are to work for is the expansion of His Kingdom, Christian civilization.
Not planting churches: that’s His job.
Today Christianity is on the very periphery of learning in our culture. More problematically though, learning is on the very periphery of Christianity. The idea that the Holy Spirit works through the renewing of the mind, which is what the Bible teaches, has been replaced by the idea that the Holy Spirit works through the removal of the mind.
The dedication of one’s mind to God in the service of his kingdom is looked upon today with suspicion in particular by evangelicals, for whom on the whole anti-intellectualism has become almost an article of faith.
The New Christian Dark Age—Just What The World Didn’t Need! by Stephen C. Perks
Ignorant obscurantists will have little – I pray no – authority in the coming post-humanism, post-statism Christian civilization.
Over the past century Christianity has increasingly ceased to function as public truth in the Western nations. Whatever a society considers to be public truth will inevitably function as the religion of that society. What functions as public truth in modern Western nations is secular humanism. Secular humanism is the religion of the West today. Christianity has been reduced to the status of a mere mystery cult, i.e. a personal salvation cult.
But secular humanism is too relativistic to function as a stable foundation for civilisation and must eventually give way to some other religious foundation. Only Christianity can provide a true, stable and lasting foundation for civilisation, and the abandonment of Christianity as public truth in the twentieth century has led to world into chaos. The answer to the chaos that the modern world faces is therefore the revival of Christianity as public truth, i.e. as the religious foundation of our civilisation, in terms of which both individual men and nations, with their civil governments, must organise their whole life by conforming to the precepts and teachings of the Bible. In other words Christianity must be the established religion of all nations. This is precisely what the Great Commission commands us to pursue.
The Kingdom of God is a Social Order by Stephen C. Perks
This is where the future starts.
Below is something of a potpourri of tools and books and systems that I have picked up and hope will be useful to the homeschoolers out there!
The Riot and the Dance Curriculum by Dr. Gordon Wilson: useful for foundational science. (I’m pushing for the dance, myself!)
Freckle by Renaissance: the main focus of this platform is “differentiation”:
Every classroom is made up of unique students who are all at different levels. Freckle’s differentiation platform makes it easy for teachers to reach each student at their own individual level—without having to spend extra time preparing many different lessons every day.
If Freckle helps the teacher to really understand how her students differ, and how to reach them at their levels, then it’s paying its way.
Tiny Theologians could be quite useful, for parents who are uncertain how to guide their children in the faith. Note that the family that runs this site are “non-denominational, leaning Reformed Orthodox Christians”, based on their own description.
The Daily Grace Co. provide mainly Bible studies (and assorted paraphernalia) to its targeted audience of Christian women. Frankly, it reminds me of the long-gone Christian bookstores of yore. It’s not for me, but it might be for someone you know…
Gather Round Homeschool is a woman’s artisan homebrew that strives to encourage curiosity and connections between subjects. As you know, I’m more into the academic rigor of the Ron Paul Curriculum: but while important in shaping the culture, academic rigor far from the only thing in life.
Sometimes, you should sharply divide things up into tidy compartments. But sometimes, you should follow the hazy web of links, tying things together. The world has room for both philosophies, each in it’s proper place as determined by God.
My Father’s World is based on the ideas of Charlotte Mason, a notable English education reformer of the 19th/early 20th centuries. Unfortunately, this curriculum is tied to “Classical Christian Education”, an attempt to re-clothe the demonic, prideful cultures of Greece and Rome with sprinkled Christian verbiage.
(See: Classical Christian Education: The Real Deal, The Trivium: Pagan vs. Christian, and Why Classical Education Is Statist Education for more.)
Singapore Math is a demanding curriculum that provides a strong grounding and mastery in math. It’s worth looking into.
Answers Bible Curriculum looks to be a good Bible Curriculum, for all ages that covers the entire Bible in four years. There are quite a bit more educational resources on the site as well.
If you are going to use Saxon Math, a good comparison between editions is available here.
But frankly, I prefer Ray’s series of mathematical books to Saxon Math, which breaks up rote memorization and is rather weak on application. (One critical review to read.)
But on to something I feel is better:
The textbook we’ll be using is Ray’s New Intellectual Arithmetic, the second volume in the Ray’s Arithmetic series.
If you are unfamiliar with Ray’s Arithmetics, these were widely used as a companion series to the McGuffey Readers in mid-19th- to early 20th-century America. Generations of children — and adults — learned math from them. This means generations of scientists, engineers, businessmen, entrepreneurs, statesmen and homemakers learned from them. The books remained popular and in widespread use until the 1920s when “progressive” education theories began to replace them and the methods taught in Ray’s. They continue to be popular in the home-schooling community.
Ray’s Intellectual math is just that. It stresses mental (“intellectual”) math. Whereas the Primary Arithmetic — grades 1 and 2 — taught the basics of numbers and math using both visual and “concrete” means, Intellectual Arithmetic helps the student to advance to the next level of his understanding of math using drill and practice at solving problems mentally as well as on paper.
Through the use of drill and “story problems,” math concepts are learned gradually. Your child will find that the story problems seem more like riddles and mysteries to be solved rather than math problems. Repetition is used throughout.
“Over-learning” is the key to mastery.
Mathematics 3
Paul Ramirez, Ron Paul Curriculum
Christians must know their math and their logic, if they wish to lead the world.
Creation Evolution Headlines has an interesting article, Design of Snowflakes Explained.
It’s worth checking out!
A few snippets to whet your appetite:
llustra has released a new short film on snowflakes. What kind of design do crystals represent, natural or intentional?
Here is a new short film by Illustra Media posted on their free-video website, The John 10:10 Project: “The Jewels of Winter.” It’s beautiful and fun to watch. This season of the year, people can romp like a dog in a crystal palace.
[…]
Two Ways to Measure Design
The film makes an inference to design in snowflakes, and most viewers would certainly agree that the beautiful crystals look designed. But a rigorous inference to design—one that would convince a skeptic—requires more evidence. Advocates of intelligent design (ID) theory point out that crystals are not sufficient to make a design inference.
[…]
he Robust Way
Determining a robust method for inferring intelligent design led William Dembski to devise a Design Filter. One formulation looks like the flowchart at right. An object under consideration must pass three tests: contingency, complexity and specification.
[…]
The Fine-Tuning Way
Another way to approach the design inference is to back up and look at the big picture. Why do natural laws produce these crystal works of art?
[…]
A Third Way: Aesthetics
One response that will probably be universal among viewers of the film is that snowflakes are beautiful. What is the purpose of beauty? Why do we respond to it? Why do we recognize it? Beauty in nature seems gratuitous; life could exist without it.
The power’n’control drones — you know, the intellectuals who raved about Stalinist architecture and Le Corbusie brutalism– would adore a word stripped of all beauty. None of that wasteful, inexplicable nonsense about grace and elegance!
God disagrees.
And I value His thinking far, far more than I value theirs.
A direct copy-paste from the Mises article
No, the Chinese Won’t Invade America If Secessionists Succeed
from Ryan McMaken
When political secession starts to become more of a realistic policy goal—and less of a theoretical ideal for the future—that is precisely when we can expect opposition to become the most dismayed and panicky. For now, critics are careful to make it appear that they regard the idea with mere dismissive contempt. The angry threats and predictions of doom from critics of secession will come later.
In that case, opponents will present many different reasons why secession must never be contemplated. Advocates of separation will be called traitors and unpatriotic. They’ll be told that secession will bring poverty. Indeed, we heard some of this in the controversy over Scottish secession in recent years.
But much of the debate will also focus on foreign policy. In Scotland, for instance, some foreign policy hawks sternly warned that Scottish independence would lead to nuclear disarmament of the UK. The implication, of course, is that the UK would then be unable to defend itself from foreign enemies.
We’d hear much the same thing in the US in the face of a growing secession movement. We’d hear repeatedly about how any weakening of the American regime through secession would be, as Andrew Longman put it at the conservative magazine American Thinker: “a gift to the [Chinese] communists” and would soon lead to the conquest of North America by China. Longman’s article is borderline hysterical, but he’s really just ahead of the curve. We’ll hear something very similar from the regime and its allies on a regular basis as secession becomes more mainstream.
But how plausible is this?
To address the issue, we can look at it in two ways. First, we can examine the likely defensive capabilities of the new American states were the current USA to fracture along blue-red lines. Moreover, given that any successor states to the US will share a common language and similar foreign policy needs, we’ll need to look at how nations of similar backgrounds interact with each other.
As we shall see, the claim that decentralization of the US regime through secession would leave it a sitting duck for foreign power is not very convincing.
China certainly isn’t the only country that matters as far as American international relations are concerned. But it is likely to be held up as the great bogeyman and the reason for why secessionists must never be allowed to succeed.
So let’s compare China with the status quo USA.
As a single unit, the US economy can support an enormous military machine. All combined (according to the World Bank), the USA produces a national gross domestic product of approximately $21.4 trillion. This is compared to China’s $23.4 trillion GDP. In both cases, that’s an enormous amount of production. But perhaps more telling is the GDP per capita in each country. China’s per capita GDP is only $16,800, while the United States’s is nearly quadruple that: $63,000.1 But here’s the rub for China: The US produces its gargantuan GDP with only 328 million people. China, meanwhile, requires more than 1.3 billion people to produce a similar output.
This means, on a per person basis, the American economy is far more productive than China’s.
As shown by political scientist Michael Beckley, this wealth advantage gives the United States an enormous advantage in terms of available military resources. Yes, a billion people can produce a very large GDP, but those billion people have to be fed and housed using a sizable portion of that GDP. In the United States, on the other hand, most of the population lives so far above subsistence, and produces so much more than is necessary to meet basic needs, that military defensive capability far outstrips that of much larger countries. This reality is partly reflected in per capita GDP.
It is important to not ignore the military benefits of surplus wealth, as opposed to sheer aggregate size. Political scientists and historians have developed a number of ways to measure “military effectiveness.” But many of these methods tend to overestimate the military prowess of large—yet relatively poor—states. These methods that favor size often cannot explain why smaller states like Britain have so often defeated larger states like China, as occurred repeatedly during the nineteenth century.
[Read More: “When It Comes to National Defense, Bigger Isn’t Always Better” by Ryan McMaken]
A more realistic view of the importance of economic wealth can be found with an index developed by Beckley and Paul Bairoch. This method combines both GDP and GDP per capita, and it prevents us from exaggerating the power of highly populous—but relatively undeveloped—nations.2
Once the benefits of per capita GDP are considered, we find that even with China’s enormous GDP, the US’s military capability is considerably larger.
Now, how would things look if, say, the United States broke up into smaller pieces?
We could play out many different scenarios, of course, but just as one of many potential thought experiments, let’s assume the United States devolves into only two new countries: the Blue States of America (BSA) and the Red States of America (RSA).
These two new countries are composed of the following states:
Red (27 states): Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Blue (23 states, plus DC): California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin.
As American leftists are often happy to point out, blue America—at least in the aggregate—is richer than red America. This is largely due to the presence of a large number of big, productive cities in the blue states. As a result, the BSA contains most of the USA’s current $21 trillion GDP: $12.3 trillion. The BSA contains 170 million residents, for an overall per capita GDP of $73,000.
In the RSA, these numbers are smaller. In the 27 states, total GDP is $8.9 trillion, spread out over a population of 158 million. The GDP per capita is $56,000.
In terms of economic power, both of these new countries remain near the top of the heap. The BSA, of course, has a per capita GDPs among the highest in the world, right behind Ireland, and ahead of Switzerland. The total GDP for the BSA is behind only the EU and China, and larger than those of India, Japan, and Germany.
In the RSA, the per capita GDP puts it well within the company of wealthy nations. At $56,000, it’s right between Austria and the Netherlands. Total GDP, although behind that of BSA, is about equal to India’s, and remains larger than those of Japan, Germany, and all the rest.
Using the Beckley-Bairoch approach, we find that the relative military power in both the BSA and the RSA is still larger than that of the Chinese regime. Naturally, neither has the total military resources of the United States as a whole, but great wealth goes a long way in either case.
This is just a very basic calculation, but it’s easy to see how successor states to the US would retain advantages over China even if the US broke up into smaller pieces. China would still have all the usual troubles in its own backyard. No matter how many new pieces the United States might devolve into, the fact remains that North America is insulated from Asia and Europe by two oceans. In China, meanwhile, the regime
does not devote all, and perhaps not even a majority, of its military resources to contingencies involving the United States. China shares sea or land borders with nineteen countries, five of which fought wars against China within the last century; its northern and western borders are porous and populated by disaffected minority groups; and its government faces a constant threat of domestic rebellion. As a result, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) devotes substantial resources to internal security and requires 300,000 troops just to police China’s borders….In a separate study, I found that developing countries systematically fail at warfare, regardless of the size of their defense budgets, because they lack the economic capacity to maintain, modernize, and integrate individual technologies into cohesive military systems.
We’ve been assuming so far, however, that these postsecession states in North America would have to each face China independently in case of a clash. This, however, is not a good assumption. It is not at all a given that these independent states would shun the idea of mutual defense. In fact, experience suggests the opposite. This is apparent even to those who are not exactly entrenched advocates for secession. As noted by Eric Sammons at the conservative Crisis Magazine:
Foreign policy presents another challenge for an American secession movement. Secession opponents fear weakening American hegemony across the world. Would a divided America result in greater global influence for China or Russia? Would it lead to a possible invasion by those countries?
It’s impossible to say for sure, but there is no reason that a divided America could not remain a confederation of allies when it comes to military defense. An attack on any one new American nation-state could be considered an attack on all nation-states.
This observation that a NATO-like institution for North America could easily arise should be obvious to anyone who’s noticed that countries with similar backgrounds—think Canada, the USA, Australia, and the UK—have been generally united on foreign policy for well over a century now.
In spite of this, it’s not uncommon to hear claims that neighboring states are all poised to go to war with each other at any given moment. This, we are told, would be the natural outcome if the United States allows any portion of the nation to become independent. These antisecessionists often point to examples like the Yugoslav wars and claim ethnic cleansing is on the horizon. But North America isn’t southeastern Europe. In the case of North America, we’d be dealing with countries that share a common language, a high standard of living—and thus much to lose from an internecine war—and have deep and extensive trade relations.
Moreover, if one is going to claim that two nations with such similar backgrounds are bound to go to war, one will need to explain why Canada has been at peace with the United States for 205 years. Conceivably, one might claim this is only because Canada was too small to challenge the US. But this ignores the fact that Canadian foreign policy was set by Britain—a world power and peer of the US—until 1931. Yet, in all those years after the War of 1812, during which the British state shared both extensive land and maritime borders with the US through British Canadian domains, London was apparently uninterested in war with the US.
However, we’re expected to believe that if the United States were to break into smaller independent states, the “Blue States of America” will welcome a Chinese invasion of Tampa Bay just to stick it to the red states. This may seem plausible to more paranoid anti-China Cold Warriors who seem to believe every left-of-center American is an agent of Beijing. But the Tampa Bay scenario is about as likely as Canada asking the People’s Liberation Army to invade Boston.
1. GDP and GDP per capita (PPP) numbers are provided by the International Monetary Fund.
2. Beckley explains:
Dividing GDP by population controls for some of the costs that make the difference between a state’s gross and net resources. Combining GDP with GDP per capita thus yields an indicator that accounts for size and efficiency, the two main dimensions of net resources.
To create a rough proxy for net resources, I follow Bairoch’s advice by simply multiplying GDP by GDP per capita, creating an index that gives equal weight to a nation’s gross output and its output per person. This two-variable index obviously does not measure net resources directly, nor does it resolve all of the shortcomings of GDP and CINC. By penalizing population, however, it provides a better sense of a nation’s net resources than GDP, CINC, or other gross indicators alone.
An interesting video, on the Biden Administration’s push for a witchhunt on dissent opinion:
A good read for today is North’s The New, Improved War on Terrorism: “Crush the Deplorables!”
In the article, he mentions Angelo Codevilla‘s article Clarity in Trump’s Wake. Here, Codevilla writes:
At this moment, the oligarchy wields an awesome complex of official and unofficial powers to exclude whomever it chooses from society’s mainstream. Necessarily, however, exclusions cut both ways. Invariably, to banish another is to banish one’s self as well. Google, Facebook, and Twitter let it be known that they would exclude anything with which they disagree from what had become the near-universal means of communication. They bolstered that by colluding to destroy their competitor, Parler. Did they imagine that 74 million Americans could find no means of communicating otherwise? Simon and Schuster canceled a book by Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) critical of communications monopolies. Did its officials imagine that they would thereby do other than increase the book’s eventual sales, and transfer some of their customers to Hawley’s new publisher? The media effectively suppressed inconvenient news. Did they imagine that this would prevent photos of Black Lives Matter professionals in the forefront of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol from reaching the public?
In sum, intending to relegate conservative America to society’s servile sidelines, the oligarchy’s members drew a clear, sharp line between themselves and that America. By telling conservative Americans “these institutions and corporations, are ours, not yours,” they freed conservative America of moral obligations toward them and themselves. By abandoning conservative America, they oblige conservative America to abandon them and seek its own way.
The powerful make their own enemies… and teach them how to fight.
To think of conservative America’s predicament as an opportunity is as hyperbolic as it was for Machiavelli to begin the conclusion of The Prince by observing that “in order to know Moses’ virtue it was necessary that the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt, and to know the greatness of Cyrus’s spirit that the Persians be oppressed by the Medes, and to know the excellence of Theseus, that the Athenian people be dispersed, so at the present, in order to know the virtue of an Italian spirit it was necessary that Italy reduce herself to the conditions in which she is at present . . .”
Machiavelli’s lesson is that the clarity of situations such as he mentions, and such as is conservative America’s following the 2020 election, is itself valuable. Clarity makes illusions of compromise untenable and points to self-reliant action as the only reasonable path. The people might or might not be, as he wrote, “all ready and disposed to follow the flag if only someone were to pick it up.” But surely, someone picking up the flag is the only alternative to servitude.
Angelo Codevilla in Clarity in Trump’s Wake.
And that is exactly what is going to happen.1
If you love safety and are comfortable with servitude, bend the knee and serve those who despise you.
If not, don’t.
If you hate your chains, look for lawful, peaceful ways to erode and stress and fracture and degrade and corrode them. The crack of their snapping is the end, not the start, of a long process of relentless hard work.
This starts with freeing your children from Establishment Indoctrination Centres.
Increasingly, conservative Americans live as if under occupation by a hostile power. Whoever would lead them should emulate Charles de Gaulle’s 1941 basic rule for la résistance: refrain from individual or spontaneous acts or expressions that produce only martyrs. But join with thousands in what amount to battles to defeat the enemy’s initiatives, weaken his grip on power, and prepare his defeat.
I would recommend a careful analysis of the Civil Rights movement, as (for obvious reasons) it’s better suited for the American environment.
Even if the participants were of the wrong colour, and led by Leftists (as Southern White Christians point-blank supported their oppression to the hilt) they were most certainly Americans.2
That oppression still goes on: but the chains get weaker and lighter, more and more fragile and brittle. And, in many (I would suggest most, but not all) ways, those chains have been broken.3
And reality must be acknowledged: the solid majority of Progressives, while influenced by Europeans, are Americans.
Upper-class White Americans.4
And they do have a large voting block of Americans – living and dead – to back them. Not German tanks.
As to exactly where this group of American-born but intensely anti-Christian, anti-liberty upper class people came from? I suggest you look to the public schools and the universities… and the cultural envy & inferiority complex the White American upper-class have towards the White Europeans they love to ape.
White Americans intellectuals love White European intellectuals, publicly detest the White American Working Class, and publicly use Black Americans as profitable virtue-signalling props.
Sorting ourselves out into congenial groups has been part of America’s DNA since 1630, when Roger Williams led his followers out of Massachusetts to found Providence Plantations. In the 19th century, the Mormons left unfriendly environments to establish their own settlements. Since 1973, Americans who believe in unborn children’s humanity have largely ceased to intermarry with those who do not. Nobody decided this should happen. It is in the logic of diverging cultures.
Christians are not forbidden from marrying across racial boundaries: but they are commanded to respect religious borders.
And of course marriage is between one man and one women.
Try to stay connected to reality… as opposed to fearfully thrashing about in the world of delusions, as Our Betters are currently doing.
As conservative America sorts itself out from oligarchy’s social bases, it may be able to restore something like what had existed under the republic. Effectively, two regimes would have to learn to coexist within our present boundaries.
The Ruling Class wants just one regime: theirs.
They won’t get it.
Not so much because of conservative resistance: most conservatives are comfortable with surrendering and retreating and kneeling to and looking up to their Betters, whining behind closed doors, and praying for mystical Rapture escapes from both reality and responsibility.
Conservatives won’t take their children out of the public schools: therefore, they will not pay the price for their liberty.
The Ruling Class will fall for the same reason why the Soviet Union fell, and why the EU — and even the UK itself! — will also fall: economic bankruptcy.
If the Owners don’t have the carrots to buy off the dogs (regardless of colour), the level of resistance spikes up, the cost of resistance collapses, the legitimacy of the Establishment becomes a public laughingstock, and the only real alternative — a limitless number of sticks, prisons, and mass graves — becomes too expensive to purchase.5
God just doesn’t like slave states: and He has angled history to gradually but relentlessly break them down, piece by piece.
God’s friends are welcome to assist Him in His work, as children imitate their fathers.
The reward for taking responsibility and offering diligent service is earned leadership.
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
Quoted from an interesting OpenCulture article
The Inferiors might want to take another look at Rules for Radicals.
Who knows — it could be quite useful in today’s situation.
1As an aside: Teaching a fair percentage of the American population — say, 10% — to never kneel to you isn’t really a masterclass in leadership.
But the Superiors must publicly demonstrate their Superiority on someone’s back.
2Consider: roughly 15 percent of the American population were out-and-out enslaved, then politically and culturally suppressed, for centuries by the malice and contempt of their Betters.
If those forms of oppression — fully backed by the Progressives, from, say, 1880 to 1961 — failed, why should we expect today’s flavour of oppression, frantically slapped together by terrified and culturally isolated politicians, to succeed?
Maybe if it was 1917 Russia (which failed after 70 years) or 1933 Germany (which failed after 13 years).
Governments are good at killing people and taking their things: a power that is legitimate, but needs to be tightly restricted by law. The rest of their promises are blather and fodder.
A different hand is needed to redeem society: the power that Christians need to access does not grow from the barrel of a gun.
3The two final major set of chains are the drug war and the urban public schooling system (the public indoctrination centres apply to all Americans, but the worst and most incompetent ones are placed in majority-Black districts).
It will take a while for the profitable drug war to end, with it’s civil asset forfeitures and it’s targeted hatred of blacks, dating from the time of Nixon and given a protective coat of pious moralization by Nancy Reagan. It will take even longer for the government-funded atheistic churches to be closed: people love their free gruel and to ditch their responsibilities on someone elses’ feet.
But both control systems will end, defunded by the God of Reality…
…and not by some Mighty Leader of the Right. After all, the conservatives heartily back the drug war and the public schools (and the military empire of bases, and the alphabet agencies, and the White Welfare State of Social Security and Medicare – with an increasingly hollow (but vigorously repeated) set of lies.
I almost forgot Medicaid, the welfare payoff to keep Black opposition quiet. Along with a few coins tossed about for Black mothers: “far safer than breaking down the restrictions keeping Blacks from standing on their own feet.”
Odd, that Black Community Leaders refrain from demanding an end to the unwarranted licensing and bureaucratic barriers on Black businesses and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, they are always crying out for more money to be out in the Straw Leader’s hands, to be handed out to buy more friends, more power, and more home comforts.
Well, maybe not that odd.
4With, admittedly, a large number of purchased Black supporters who mistake money, establishment prizes, and racial set-asides for love and concern.
Tell me when the Black Leadership start asking why Democratic Blacks and the Democratic Police aren’t on the same page, and then I will start taking them seriously.
5Unless you are the Khmer Rouge.
Progressive intellectuals wouldn’t mind this much, so long as they are in charge of the camps (see The Love of Your Betters for details), but the money-boys who finance them won’t tolerate that road.
“When you take the King’s Coin, you are the King’s Man.”
On day 1, Biden unilaterally eviscerates women’s sports. Any educational institution that receives federal funding must admit biologically-male athletes to women’s teams, women’s scholarships, etc.
A new glass ceiling was just placed over girls.https://t.co/cGWZqDpxl8
— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) January 21, 2021
From Steve Sailer on Unz, Biden Abolishes Female Sports Champions
“Free stuff” isn’t free… as the feminists get ground down & redefined out of existence.
Or worse.
Christians should learn the lesson, and shun the King’s Coin and his promises of love and compassion and power over their enemies — “chauvinists” and “patriarchs”, in the feminist’s case — handed down form the hand of the Mighty Man.
As the feminists with dawning realization recognize as they dry up and fade away, with the next generation of the Better Class of ideologically-compliant, government-schooled women dismissing the objective reality of their own sex.
The chauvinist was a minor-league, easily intimidated foe, compared with the State-fueled Progressive entity the easily-deceived feminists nurtured and created in their own bosoms.
Forget the promises of instant, cheap victory handed down from on high by the Mighty Man.
Do the hard work, in your town and your community, to build the Kingdom of God step by step, with truth and compassion, word and deed.
From the ground up.
It is sufficient for the magistrate to stick with punishing murders and thieves and fraudsters: the (limited) destructive, “cursing” aspect of the Kingdom of God,
The vastly larger, constructive, “blessing” aspect of the Kingdom — healing and redemption and regenerating and reconstructing society — is the duty and work of the Body of Christ.
And not distant, uncaring, unaccountable bureaucrats (religious or state!), backed by men with badges and guns.
