Don’t Go to College, Miss V.

After giving some sound advice, Gary North continued:

She did not take my advice. She took the scholarship. She graduated. No job offers. So, she earned a Master’s degree. No job offers. She is now working on a Ph.D. To support herself, she teaches children how to play piano.

She still paints, but only for amusement. I wrote: “I realize that there are a lot of young Chinese painters who sell their paintings for very little money. But you could become a regional painter. That would give you an edge.” She moved away from the region. She never perfected that edge.

At 16, she was one of the most sophisticated and charming young women I have ever met. Nice looking, too. She would have blown the regional art world away for five years: a prodigy in every sense. That opportunity is gone.

She won a scholarship a decade ago. It was a very expensive scholarship.

My bet? There will be no job offers after she gets the Ph.D, either.

Getting an official job hunting license from an accredited institution is only worth it if you can’t make your own job, and stand on your own two feet.

Ad when I say “job hunting license”, I mean a B.A./B.Sci for everything except a medical physician, or for a handful of uniquely talented technologists, engineers, etc.

Miss V. didn’t need any of that, but I bet she listened to her Chinese parents.

• Not the smart, gutsy ones who build their own business serving others.
• Nut the dumb, fearful ones who lust for job security via guild membership, certified by Proper Authority.

Summary

The era of guild controls are dying.

Don’t go down with the ship, like Miss V. did.

Christian Academic Incompetence: The Core

What you will hear in this speech is typical of all Christian higher education for the past thousand years. There is no appeal to the Bible in search of solutions. This has led to the secularization of Western civilization.

The Well-Deserved Inferiority Complex of High-Tuition Christian Colleges
by Gary North

(Also see: “Christian Higher Education” Is an Oxymoron
‘You know: like “jumbo shrimp.”‘)

This is the core of the issue.

If “Christian scholars” will not hear and obey what God says… if they won’t take what God says as authoritative and definitive, why should any other thinker?

They won’t. That’s what.

But the abject failures of a sterile, corrupt, and worthless “Christian” academic tradition will be swept aside in the coming years and decades.

After all, Christian scholars just the hollow, powerless shadows, echo chambers, and fawning imitations of the far more formidable and authoritative academic secularist.

An academic superstructure which is also rapidly withering and dying:

• unable to tell men from women,
• or that 2 + 2 = 4 whether you are white or black,
• or that the innocent are not to be killed,
• or that theft is wrong,
• or that the Law stands above powerful men,
• or that actual science is science that requires actual evidence that can be duplicated, and that can be refuted/disproved.

It’s long past time that Christians stopped aping their dying, intensely anti-Christian, and increasingly delusional masters.

You know, the kind of people who increasingly rely on censorship and government/corporate power to win “arguments”.

After all, Darwinism is at the core of modern Western thought.

And Darwinism is not about the need for truth and justice.
It’s about the need for survival and safety… and, therefore, it’s about the need for power and control.

A.k.a. “Mighty Men Will Save Us!”

The secularist insists in trusting in lawyers and certified experts and guns and badges and media management… regardless of the evidence before him.

Talk about faith in mirages and delusions!

Get off the singing ship of Man, and obey the living God.

Playtime

Christian parents need to go play with their kids.

Gotta show love, gotta show concern… and gotta show joy!

Having fun and enjoying each other’s company is not a bad thing, either…

Christian Academic Incompetence

My words are in bold.

Deneen is one of the brightest Christian scholars in the country. His book, Why Liberalism Failed, was published in 2018 by Yale University Press. It is a very good book. […]

The problem is this: Deneen does not go to the Bible in search of either his analysis or the potential for reconstructing both political theory and political society. In an hour-long speech, he only mentioned the Bible at 56:40. He insisted that the various theories of society that he offered, which do not agree with each other, are also taught in the Bible. He did not offer any specifics. He expected the students to believe him. They should not have believed him. In any case, this is irrelevant if he cannot show which Bible passages affect political theory in what ways. He has not attempted this.

This has been the strategy of Christian scholars for 1800 years. They devote their lives to studying what pagan philosophers and pagan social theorists have taught, and then they offer a few disjointed biblical insights that seem to confirm the worldview of the pagan humanists they have been quoting. They expect faithful Christians to believe them.

Don’t.

The Well-Deserved Inferiority Complex of High-Tuition Christian Colleges
Gary North

Most of what we have had, for 1800 years, are “Christian intellectual leaders” who cringe before the pagans.

The hour-long speech is here, by the way.

I would analyze political theory in terms of the Bible’s five-point covenant structure: sovereignty, authority (representation), law, sanctions (oaths), and succession.

The Well-Deserved Inferiority Complex of High-Tuition Christian Colleges
Gary North

A single sentence from a scholar who takes God seriously offers more hope for God-ordained justice and truth than entire libraries and universities stuffed with pious Christian cant.

The world thinks of Christians as third-rate performers in every field. That is generally a correct assessment. These is no commitment to excellence in the subculture of Christianity. “Shoddy is good enough for Jesus.” When there is a glimmer of desire to produce something marginally superior, they go to humanists to baptize them institutionally. That is why accreditation by their enemies is such a powerful lever of control. This is why Christian scholars have had an inferiority complex for over a century. They deserve it.

There is a reason why Christian colleges will not post all of their lectures on YouTube. The whole world could see how third-rate they are. The schools prefer to charge parents $25,000 to $55,000 a year in tuition, plus $10,000 for textbooks, room, and board. The parents are terminally naïve. They think their children are getting first-rate educations. If Christian colleges believed in academic excellence, they would post their videos online for everybody to see. That is what the best universities do.

The Well-Deserved Inferiority Complex of High-Tuition Christian Colleges
Gary North

A time will come when fourth-rate Christian academic institutions will be openly laughed at and brushed aside.

That will be a good day for the Kingdom of God, even as the Christian “scholars” and “theologians” flee the mocking public eye in shame and failure.

As they should.

Salvation, Extended to Families

We are commanded to teach all that Christ commanded. So, what did Jesus teach? He taught about the validity of God’s law, condemned antinomianism, preached on hell, stressed the doctrines of grace, and touched on the doctrines of the covenant, church discipline, and marriage, etc. In short, Jesus covered the fullness of scriptural teaching. To be faithful to the Great Commission, we must teach everything that Jesus taught — and we must disciple the nations with those truths.

Other Scripture passages stress this comprehensive task. In his closing challenge to the elders at Ephesus, for instance, Paul stresses that he declared to them the “full counsel” of the Word of God. Elsewhere Paul notes the church’s obligation to take “every thought captive to the obedience of Jesus Christ.”

In Acts 16 there is a picture of crisis evangelism. The distraught jailer, preparing to kill himself, asks what he must do to be saved. This was the time, if ever there was one, for a quickie gospel invitation. The response of Paul and Silas was: “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved — you and your household.” In addition to the expected exhortation to faith and salvation, the evangelists slip in a teaching about God’s grace to families.

Years ago I heard a fascinating testimony from a woman in northern Minnesota. She and her husband, Swanny, were unsaved and resisted the gospel, though it was faithfully presented by her brother, John.

“Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?” John asked. “No,” Swanny replied carelessly, “I don’t care if I go to hell.” John pointed to the children in the room and asked, “Do you want your children to go to hell?” At this point the woman’s voice cracked and her eyes grew teary. “You know,” she said, “John had us there. We hadn’t thought about the children… and we didn’t want to gamble with their eternal destiny.”

John used an important element of covenantal evangelism. God gives this promise to Abraham — to be a God to him and to his children after him (Acts 17:7). Peter reemphasized that message at Pentecost reminding the people that the promise was for their children (Ac. 2:39). And God gives this promise to the church — that in Christ our seed is holy (I Cor. 7:14). The apostles evangelized this suicidal man by using the doctrine of the covenant — reminding him that God would save both him and his household. They followed up with a good old-fashioned household baptism. And if that approach was good enough for the apostles, it is good enough for me!

The Comprehensive Gospel: Recovering Biblical Evangelism
By Roger Schultz

Household baptism is a promising, if largely untried, way to extend the Kingdom of God.

We should follow the example of the Apostles, and of Jesus Christ Himself.

The Pointedly Pagan Demand for Tolerance

Almost at once, the early church attracted hostility and soon had pagan philosophers attacking it as a threat and a danger. C. N. Cochrane, in Christianity and Classical Culture, has given us a remarkable analysis of that debate.

Our purpose here is a humbler one. What were some of the simple, practical arguments against Christianity? On this level, we can see the contrast between Christianity and paganism in a dramatic way.

Perhaps the most offensive aspect of Christianity to the Greco-Roman world was its exclusiveness. The Roman Empire was ready to tolerate any new religion as long as it accepted the supremacy and priority of the Roman state. It regularly gave legal status to one new religion and cult after another, always subject to their acceptance of imperial supremacy and emperor worship. The various religions borrowed at times from each other, but, whatever else was done, Roman supremacy was maintained.

The Christian refusal to mix or unite with other faiths was taken as evidence of their ill will and their dangerous exclusiveness. The Jews previously had been disliked for their religious exclusiveness, but, after the Jewish-Roman War, A.D. 66–70, and the subsequent failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, they were not a significant factor. Moreover, the Christian rejection of compromise was so radical that Rome was concerned with this dissident force in its borders.

Syncretism, the blending of various religions, was a way of life for the Romans. It was held, by men like Aurelius Symmachus, that there are many paths to the gods or God, and various peoples find one or another path most to their tastes and aptitudes. Thus, a variety of ways to God is a stimulus to religion, and it opens the doors to God to more people.

This position was essential to the argument. For the pagans, the way to the gods or God depended on human initiative. Given this fact, different men had varying natures, and a variety of religious choices gave men not only more freedom of choice but also a greater opportunity of finding a way suitable to themselves.

The battle over this point was critical. The Christian rejected all attempts by man to find God. The essence of Christian faith is that God finds wayward, sinful man. Man seeks to flee from God, and it is God who arrests man’s flight, and, by His sovereign grace, redeems him. Quite naturally, some of the earliest Christian apologists stressed predestination, God’s absolute initiative in choosing men.

This was a total rejection of every man-made religion. There were not many roads to God. Rather, there was only one, from God to man, and the name of that route is Jesus Christ, the only way (John 14:6). The pagan plea was for toleration; the Christian insistence was on truth, Jesus Christ. If truth is absolute, then there can be no other way. Error can at times be tolerated, but it cannot be accepted.

The Pagan Critiques of Christianity
By R. J. Rushdoony
Chalcedon Position Paper No. 176, June 1994

When Christians don’t kneel to the idols of their enemies, they are hated.

Also, when Christians don’t kneel, they give a living testimony to Christ’s supremacy and His Law-Word.

Lots and lots of Christians – pastors and priests and theologians and laymen – stress the Christian duty to kneel to the idols of the day.

What a bunch of evil, cowardly losers.

Next, Christianity was seen as anti-state. Now the Christians were, as Tertullian and others pointed out, the empire’s most loyal and honest citizens, but they could not worship the emperor. At this point, the debate reversed itself on the matter of tolerance and intolerance. The Christians did not tolerate nor compromise with other gods, religions, or moralities. The Romans did. The Christians, however, while unhappy with a non-Christian state, were obedient to it. But they could only give priority to the triune God. They saw themselves as citizens of the Kingdom of God. They held that Rome was under Christ the King, not the church under Caesar. At this point, Roman intolerance was severe. Every system of life and thought has its areas of intolerance, and, for Rome as for the modern state, the priority of the state is central, and deviations from that are not permitted.

Christianity insisted that for all time, it is the only catholic or universal faith, whereas “eternal Rome” saw itself as the true city of man, and it rejected the ultimacy of God and His Kingdom. In the best sense of the word, both Rome and Christianity were imperial: they had a faith that circumscribed all things. The conflict became
one between the holy faith and the total state.

Michael Grant called attention to the statement of Pliny the Elder: “Chance is our god.” This meant that for the Romans the empire, the state, is the principle of order, not anything beyond the state. In such a view, the state, then, must be determinative: the state is the principle of order.

For the Christians, God and His predestination, not the state, provide order. The state must be instead a minister of God, serving Him (Rom. 13:1ff.). If chance is god, however, then the state must control and predetermine all things. Such a view requires a totalitarian state, then and now. The modern state, like Rome, seeks total control in all spheres. It was not an accident that some of the earliest Christian apologists stressed predestination. Quite logically, too, Cicero stressed the need for the state to use religion to control the people.

The Pagan Critiques of Christianity
By R. J. Rushdoony
Chalcedon Position Paper No. 176, June 1994

The State makes for a poor God.

And I suspect, as the years and decades roll on, an increasingly powerless one.

Africa: Not So Resource-Rich

Quora: Why are countries in Africa the poorest in the world if they have rich resources?

Balaji Viswanathan, CEO of Invento Robotics.

Most of Africa is not as resource rich as it is believed. It is just their scarce few resources were denied access to their local population, and carted off to foreign countries giving an illusion of resource richness.

For instance, the continent’s largest oil producer — Nigeria — produces about 1.5m barrels per day. This sounds a lot, but is just 10% of what US produces and again much less than Russia or Canada. If Nigeria grows its middle class, it won’t have sufficient oil for its own population.

Most of Africa’s population don’t have oil, coal or other key energy access. And nuclear power is nearly absent from most of the continent.

Here is water — the most critical resource for mankind. Most of the continent is either in red or yellow (deserts). The dark blue zone in the center is rainforests and not as suitable for farming. That leaves very few parts of Africa that are suitable for large scale farming.

This leads to this map of farm lands.

And that brings the food production. This chart is a bit old, but the ratio has not changed a lot.

Let’s come to metals. The continent’s largest producer of iron ore — South Africa — produces about 77000 tons/year a third of India’s and less than 10% of Australia’s. And most of rest of Africa have hardly any iron ore mines.

The continent’s largest producer of Aluminium — Mozambique — produces 1/7 of India and 1/70 of China. Most of Africa have hardly any aluminium production. The continent as a whole have very limited Bauxite reserves.

In copper, the continent does a little better — Congo and Zambia have decent copper resources — but a fraction of what a major producer like Chile produces.

People think of diamonds, gold etc as profitable. But, they are not. South Africa and Botswana each export about $2billion a year worth of diamonds and they cost a lot to mine. India and Israel make far more money off these diamonds than the two African producers. Diamond Exports by Country

$2b is not bad, but not world changing either. To put that in context, Norway exports $49b in Oil & Gas and they are fairly cheap to extract too. Whenever you think Africa has gold, diamonds, lithium etc, convert that to dollar terms and you would find it pretty average.

The countries in the continent that have some natural resources — South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana — are also among its richest. And the countries that are pretty poor also tend to be ones without a lot of resources.

So, being a comparatively resource-poor part of the world, the varied African nations and tribes are going to have to funnel their resources into

• improving cropland,
• improved water distribution…
• and improving the lawfulness & self-discipline of her people, a la Japan or Singapore or South Korea.
  • Higher education is no guarantee of excellence, per se. But literacy, numeracy, entrepreneurship, and a respect for other people’s lives and property will go a long way.
  • There’s still something to be said for leveraging internet access for improved education and gaining the needed job-hunting credentials.

And the Africans had better get started. Now.

As the population of the rest of the world is slated to age out and fade away over the next century: no more helping hands from outside.

(Or oppressive/thieving hands, for that matter.)

COVID: An Excuse to Punish the Young

From Tom Woods email: Student writes: my world has become a COVID prison

I received this email from a young person the other day, and all I can say is: I cannot understand how we’ve allowed the deranged lunatics who are doing this to him to claim the moral high ground. This isn’t pleasant to read, but as you’ll discover, it needs to be read: I am a college student at a major US university pursuing a degree in STEM. A few years ago I was diagnosed with a very mild form of schizophrenia. I am considered extremely high functioning. I have friends, do well in school, and I am able to hold a part-time job where I get along with everyone. Ever since the lockdowns began, our school has treated us in a manner that can only be described as abusive. Our online education has essentially meant that we have to teach ourselves, because our instructors won’t. The workload for every single class for everyone I know doubled as soon as we got sent home, since every instructor believes we have all the time in the world now. Homework and exams have been made more difficult in an absurd attempt to prevent “cheating.” (This is their own explanation.) They have given us no resources to work with, and instructors treat us in an almost combative manner. I am a hard worker, but I can’t do this anymore. Last semester, I was working for about 16 hours every day, seven days a week, with no outside assistance outside of our halfhearted lecture videos. Near the end, I had five weeks in a row where I worked for 48 hours straight with no sleep to try and make deadlines I couldn’t even hit. A friend of mine was falsely accused of an academic integrity violation, given virtually no chance to appeal, and is now on probation for the remainder of his time here. Our families are paying a fortune for us to teach ourselves through YouTube. Walking onto campus feels like going to a wake. There is a morose atmosphere in the air, and everywhere is as quiet as a library. There is absolutely no social interaction except amongst friends who already know each other. There are volunteer students who act as the school’s Stasi to enforce covid guidelines. I myself am reduced to a broken mess. I feel like I have nothing. All my friends are depressed from stress and work. My family cares for me but doesn’t know how to console me. The doctors just want to experiment with a cocktail of medications that have every side effect imaginable, and they aren’t even confident it would help me. I have nobody anymore. I have always appreciated the work you and others have done to help advance the cause of liberty. I know you were aware of how much of a racket higher education was before all this madness again, but now it feels like a hostage situation. I can’t think of ever starting a family now if my child would have to go through this just to do decently well in life. I needed to write this so I could know that someone out there understands what they are doing to us. I can’t stress how bad it is, sir. There are freshman killing themselves here. My mental health can’t take this. I fee like my youth has been stolen from me, and turned against me. Life doesn’t feel worth living anymore. Please never stop fighting against this. This is a horrific institution run by genuinely evil people. The people at these universities are more soulless than anyone in office. People like you are all we have left. I am truly speechless. Even before the virus fiasco, we lived in a society in which major institutions treated people like you and me with open contempt. Things are suddenly far worse. The K-12 system isn’t exactly our friend, either, needless to say. The well-known “serenity prayer” is probably the one good thing Reinhold Niebuhr ever did: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I can’t change the university or K-12 systems. But I can create parallel institutions, which is what I’ve done with Liberty Classroom, for adult victims for educational malpractice, and I helped create the self-taught Ron Paul Curriculum to give parents a top-notch alternative to the K-12 indoctrination factories. My own site throws in $160 in free bonuses along with the curriculum, so check it out to see if it’s right for your family:   http://www.RonPaulHomeschool.com Tom Woods

Why were the so-called experts wrong yet again? Remember the admission — which I will never tire of quoting — from White House COVID adviser Andy Slavitt, who, when faced with a comparison between locked-down California (with its young population) and open Florida (with its older, much more vulnerable population), was reduced to saying, “There’s so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that’s just a little bit beyond our explanation.” You don’t say. […snip…]

Our Betters have smashed up much of society, and destroyed many lives, in some unwarranted and untested and novel exercise in public control and oppression.

What en evil ‘scientific experiment on the masses’ this has turned out to be.

Of course, I don’t expect a gram of sympathy from Our Betters, as they are far to busy posing how superior they are to me and to you.

But the public – especially the poor and the young – would be wise to remember who their contemptuous and mocking enemies are.

“You pay all the costs. I get all the benefits.
And it’s all because of my deep concern for your welfare.”

What a crock of lies.

“Amid COVID-19 pandemic, flu has disappeared in the US”

NEW YORK (AP) — February is usually the peak of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals packed with suffering patients. But not this year.

Flu has virtually disappeared from the U.S., with reports coming in at far lower levels than anything seen in decades.

Experts say that measures put in place to fend off the coronavirus — mask wearing, social distancing and virtual schooling — were a big factor in preventing a “twindemic” of flu and COVID-19. A push to get more people vaccinated against flu probably helped, too, as did fewer people traveling, they say.

Another possible explanation: The coronavirus has essentially muscled aside flu and other bugs that are more common in the fall and winter. Scientists don’t fully understand the mechanism behind that, but it would be consistent with patterns seen when certain flu strains predominate over others, said Dr. Arnold Monto, a flu expert at the University of Michigan.

Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record,” according to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Amid COVID-19 pandemic, flu has disappeared in the US
By MIKE STOBBE

Dollars to donuts, the flu has been merely rebranded as COVID to reach certain political goals, “to keep those numbers up”.

The question who benefits is something more people need to start asking. For as a certainty, the general public has not benefited by the impoverishing, disruptive and psychically crippling lockdowns over a disease with a 99.995% survival rate.

Experts say…

I prefer Dr. Philipp Bagus’ viewpoint on the current manufactured medical hysteria, to whatever the carefully selected “experts” say.

One Week or Thirty Years

When the rioters began their push to breach the Capitol Building, lawmakers were forced to shelter in place, before then evacuating to a secure location. For some of them, the day’s events were evidently traumatic. That can be seen in the hyperbolic language that’s been used to describe the storming, like Chuck Schumer likening it to Pearl Harbor. The stormers crossed the threshold of the establishment’s cushy elitism and exposed lawmakers to the real-world ire their actions create. As described in a passage from Cato’s Letters, “The only secret … in forming a free government is to make the interests of the governors and of the governed the same.” Angry populists, who’ve watched federal decrees wreak havoc on their lives, turned around and gave lawmakers a taste of their own medicine.

In the wake of this, the media-government alliance has clamped down against the populist right harder than ever before. Yet, in this vicious pushback, one can sense a prescient hint of panic within establishment ranks that the threads of their dominance may finally be unraveling. Far from playing a domineering role, the establishment politicos find themselves on the defensive in a politically unstable position. Someday—whether it be in one week or thirty years—the US could face a serious period of mass antiestablishment demonstrations; if that day comes, it’ll signal the Washington elite’s ultimate failure.

With no cards left to play, they may be forced to tread lightly on the right-wing populists and avoid violent confrontation as much as possible, for fear of repercussions like those of January 6. This may force their hand into granting the Right some concessions—perhaps some very big ones, like a return to more states’ rights or, better yet, the right of unilateral secession. This would short-circuit the federal order and help restore to America’s overtaxed and overburdened some of their long-withheld freedoms. With everything in view, it looks like the journey down this path may have already begun.

Why the Capitol Riot Terrified the Elite by James Ketler

If I were a betting man, I’d suggest 15 years for the target date for the fall of the Establishment.

In about ten years, there should be no longer any such thing as a “mainstream narrative”.

But the real clincher will be the end of the welfare state – Social Security, yes, but especially Medicare and Medicaid. When those programs get round after round of “temporary restrictions”, “sustainable age limits” and “additional means testing”, the delegitimization of the Progressive Order will accelerate in speed, becoming simply unstoppable.

No more treats for the dogs, to insure obedience and submission.

Aside: note that the above focuses on the end of the welfare state for the masses, which leads to the discrediting and collapse of a century of Progressive Rule.

There is a distinct possibility that the welfare state for the financial institutions and the major corporations will also go belly-up. Should that happen, the collapse of the government of the United States of America (and a majority of the G-20 governments!) becomes a live possibility.

My advice?

Go local. Build your community.

It is those who take responsibility, who pay the price today, who will gain legitimacy as leaders tomorrow.