Author Archives: rg

Martyrdom in the 21st Century

Persecution of Christians in the West is psychological, not physical

Pastor Andrew Isker has written a piece on “The Psychological and Social Persecution of Christians in Current Year” With the title “Martyrdom in Trashworld”. Below are some excerpts (emphases are mine).

Stories [of Christian martyrs in the past] that show the devotion of faithful Christians give us heroes to emulate. Of course, the second you begin to apply the lessons of Christian martyrs in our age, malicious people, often within the church, will attack you. College campuses are a window into the future 15 years down the road (or maybe five or ten—the pace has quickened considerably). When I was in college nearly 20 years ago, I began to see the growing hostility to the Christian faith.

[…]

Now, simply being a Christian who believes the Bible is true and who desires to live a life according to the commands of Jesus Christ, is something which is a clear impediment to pursuing a “normal life.” A successful career, finding a spouse, and gaining the respect of your friends and neighbors, all of these become much more difficult to attain if you are a Christian living in Trashworld. Then, as now, the Christians devoted to collaborating with the enemies of Christ will say, “that’s not real persecution.” Of course, it is not the same as Richard Wurmbrand having the flesh of his feet torn off or Saint Bartholomew being skinned alive. No one would dare claim such a thing. Nevertheless, it is a real thing that is happening to us. You wouldn’t say to someone who just broke their leg and was on the ground writhing in pain, “get over yourself. I know someone in hospice with stage four cancer and has way more pain than you.” Only a monster would behave that way.

[…]

Such overt, direct persecution that came at the hands of First Century Jews, Romans, medieval governments, French Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Jihadists is not the kind of martyrdom we face. The demons that rule over us are not so direct and confrontational, not so masculine. No, the demons that rule over us are passive-aggressive and rely upon psychological and social manipulation to torment us.

[…]

If you are a Christian, you will suffer persecution for your faith. There is no way around it. That persecution isn’t always going to come in the form of men with swords or guns at your door ready to torture and kill you. But if you are a faithful man in a godless world that rages against its Creator, you are the tangible, flesh and blood representative of that Creator it is raging against. You are going to suffer. The suffering you are going to face and many of us already face is the social exclusion and intense, unremitting psychological torment of a godless society that is almost designed to get you to apostatize from Christ. There are myriad vectors and mechanisms it employs. It will use your family to pry you away. It will use corporate financial power to dangle incentives for you to compromise just a little bit. It will rob you of your children, and then hold them hostage against you. Every message, from every corner of the world is a constant, 24/7 stream of that preaches the oh-so-subtle message of: “if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you believe the Bible is true, you are a loser and we hate you. You have no place in our society. We hope you kill yourself.” That is the subtext of every form of popular culture that Trashworld pumps out. You are not being killed and tortured, but your mind, soul, and spirit absolutely are. Trashworld has perfected a kind of persecution that is even worse than lighting you on fire or feeding you to a starving lion. It has industrialized a kind of persecution of the Christian that 1. doesn’t look “like persecution,” 2. when it is successful makes it appear as if the apostate one day woke up and freely chose to just stop believing in Jesus, and 3. therefore causes Christians to not have their guard up when they face it, leaving them totally vulnerable to its pernicious effects.

But what is the answer to this problem? It is to understand that you are at war against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, no less than the saints of old. is to bear this suffering with dignity and resolve just as the heroic martyrs of the early church did. It doesn’t matter what faithless collaborating Christians say; they already have their reward. Just as St. Paul said we will suffer for pursuing a Christian life, fake Christians are going to mock us when that suffering comes. But those with eyes of faith understand we pursue a golden crown from the hands of our king. And though the scars of our persecution cannot be seen with eyes, it is a kind of suffering for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, one we should count as joy, having been found worthy to bear it. That is the perspective ancient Christians had of their suffering for the sake of Christ, and that is how we should view it as well. Whatever affliction we bear is adding to the suffering of Christ. Remaining faithful to Christ and losing out on career opportunities is a genuine sacrifice. Sacrificing a much more comfortable life so you can protect your children from those who seek to do them harm is a very real sacrifice. Being called a bigot, racist, homophobe, fascist, and every other slur because you refuse to bend the knee to anyone but He Who Rules at His Father’s Right Hand is a very real indignity and is very much worth it.

The Bible describes the suffering of Christians as filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Col. 1:24). It may not seem like it at all, but by suffering in this way, you are conquering. Just as the blood of Christ’s people spilled out does not fall on deaf ears but cries out to heaven, so also does the anguish and terror you experience for the sake of steadfastly holding to Christ. Your duty as a Christian is to band together with those who bear Christ’s name and build real, flesh-and-blood communities impervious to the terror of the “Negative World.” Christ’s enemies are forcing us to band together, which is what we must do. We must build our own society with our own economy within the one that is collapsing before our eyes. “Negative World” is not the end of the story. There have been “Negative Worlds” many times before, and they have all been overcome by the victory of Jesus Christ. So too, will the negative world of the Globalist American Empire.

Comedy Gold

Actor tells truth about Covid policies, media goes berserk

Writes Tom Woods (see also here):

By now you may have heard about the opening monologue that actor Woody Harrelson delivered on Saturday Night Live this past weekend.

Given the hysteria surrounding it, I assumed it had to be a full-throated attack on Big Pharma.

So I watched it, and 95 percent of it was just normal comedy.

I’m about to share with you the entirety of the portion that sent the Establishment, and those poor and pathetic souls who for some reason feel compelled to defend the Establishment, into a fit.

Harrelson tells a fanciful story about reading a movie script:

Okay, so the movie goes like this. The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs and keep taking them over and over.

I threw the script away. I mean, who is going to believe that crazy idea being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day long.

That’s it.

It’s obvious enough that the story is a reference to our Covid experience, with the lockdowns and the mandates. But note that he even softens the blow by ending it with a joke about his drug habit.

Well, this little passage — which, for heaven’s sake, obviously has the ring of truth to it — sent the media into hysterics.

Remember, Harrelson is insinuating that the media are all bought and paid for. And here’s how they reacted, as if trying to prove his point:
Note the verb choices, too — “spews,” “rambles” — intended to denigrate the speaker. And of course “conspiracy,” the ultimate dumb-guy putdown.

To my mind Harrelson is wrong about 90 percent of the time, but when he’s right, it tends to be — as in this case — about something fairly important.

But good for him, making the kind of observation that hundreds of people in public life would be making if we lived in a normal society.

Paul Joseph Watson has made a short video about this: “My God, he said what?“

Polar Wildlife Was Thriving in 2022

So says a report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation

Here is the press release in full (my emphases):

In the Polar Wildlife Report 2022, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on International Polar Bear Day, zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford explains that ice-dependent species in the Arctic and Antarctic show no sign of impending population crashes due to lack of sea ice.

Crockford’s report reveals that there were no reports in 2022 that would suggest that polar wildlife is suffering as a result of reduced sea-ice extent: no starving polar bears or walrus, no beach-cast dead seals, no marked declines in great whale numbers, no drowned penguin chicks.

While a few Antarctic penguin species and the Antarctic minke whale appear to have suffered a recent decline in abundance, these were unrelated to sea-ice cover in the Southern Ocean. Similarly, in the Arctic, a recent 27% decline in polar bear numbers in Western Hudson Bay was found to be unrelated to sea-ice conditions over the last five years.

Indeed, contrary to all expectations, critical Antarctic winter sea ice has been increasing since 1979. While sea-ice experts have long voiced concerns that computer models of future Antarctic sea ice coverage are seriously flawed, biologists concerned about the future of ice-dependent emperor penguins and Antarctic krill have continued to use them to justify alarmist predictions.

Crockford concludes: “In both the Arctic and Antarctic, less summer sea ice has meant increased primary productivity, which in turn has meant more food for all animals. This explains in part why polar wildlife continues to thrive, even in areas with much reduced summer sea-ice coverage.”

The Polar Wildlife Report 2022

Key Findings

• There were no reports in 2022 that would suggest polar wildlife is suffering as a result of reduced sea-ice extent; in both the Arctic and Antarctic, less summer sea ice and increased primary productivity over the last two decades has meant more food for all animals, which explains in part why polar wildlife has been thriving.

• Arctic sea ice in summer has declined since 1979, but has had an overall flat trend since 2007; coverage was again well below average in the Barents and Chukchi Seas in 2022, where continued high primary productivity has provided abundant food resources for wildlife; winter ice coverage in 2022 was slightly lower than 2020 but overall has shown a relatively flat trend since 2011.

• Ice-dependent polar bears worldwide probably now number about 32,000, with a wide range of potential error; a survey of Western Hudson Bay polar bears in 2021 generated a population decline of 27% since 2016, but this did not correlate with lack of sea ice. A genetically-distinct subpopulation of polar bears was discovered thriving in SE Greenland, and western Barents Sea bears (Norway) are still doing well despite the most profound summer sea-ice loss of all Arctic regions.

• Atlantic walrus numbers are still low, but recovering in the Barents Sea and eastern North America. A new population estimate of Pacific walrus in 2019 reveals more than 200,000 exist in the Chukchi/Bering Sea area. More killer whales were reported visiting the Eastern Canadian Arctic, and in Alaska and the Western Canadian Arctic, bowhead whales are thriving.

• Antarctic sea ice extent has barely changed since 1979: vital winter ice has slightly increased overall while summer ice has slightly declined (with its lowest extent in December 2022), all while overall primary productivity has increased. A new sea ice predictive model acknowledges previous flaws and does not predict a future decline until 2050 at the earliest.

• Krill are crucial prey for many species of wildlife (especially huge numbers of great whales and penguins) that live or feed in the Southern Ocean. Future intensification of commercial fishing of krill (largely to feed farmed fish) is likely the largest conservation threat to local wildlife, given recent geopolitical tensions over effective fisheries management.

• Numbers of fin, blue, humpback, and southern right whales feeding in Antarctic waters in summer have increased in recent years, and while minke whale numbers appear to have declined, an estimated 500,000 individuals still frequent the region.

• Killer whales (orcas) are the top predator in the Southern Ocean and most populations appear to be thriving. The IUCN lists all ice-dependent seals in Antarctica as ‘least concern’.

• Several albatross and large petrel species are considered ‘vulnerable’ by the IUCN due to deadly interactions with long-line trawlers fishing for Antarctic toothfish (Patagonian sea bass), while over-fishing of this cod-like species and the herring-like Antarctic silverfish is also a concern.

• Emperor penguins, the largest and most ice-dependent penguin species, were classified as ‘Threatened’ on the US Endangered Species List in 2022 but remain ‘Near Threatened’ according to the IUCN Red List because of the large size of their breeding population and the acknowledged uncertainty of future sea-ice predictions.

The Polar Wildlife Report 2022 (pdf)

Salvation through politics

How and why this false notion keeps getting enacted

Gary North often wrote that the prevailing faith in Western societies nowadays is in “salvation through politics” or “salvation through the state”.

Nearly 30 years ago, economist Thomas Sowell laid out in his book “The Vision of the Anointed” how this falsehood works in practice. Wikipedia has an entry about that book. It says that in it, Sowell “brands the anointed as promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy impervious to any real-world considerations.”

In an interview from 1995 (10 minutes of excerpts from it – the full 25-minute version is here) he outlines his observations.

First, he explains who the “anointed” are: The elites in leading media, universities, law and politics. One could add nowadays: in entertainment. These people believe they know better than most what needs to be done. And thus think themselves entitled to use government force to get these things done.

If an assertion is made that fits the ideas and vision of these people, they demand no evidence. They simply assume it is true and use their many and powerful channels to plant this assertion in the public’s mind.

Regarding the implementation by these people of measures to fight a perceived societal ills Sowell outlines a four-stage pattern – which we could see very clearly in action during the Covid crisis.

1. Crisis: We’re hyped to believe that something is a terrible crisis for which Something Must Be Done. Very often, the thing we are told is causing a crisis has been “getting better for years on end”. But that gets ignored.

2. A solution for this supposed crisis is suggested. The protagonists say: This will lead to beneficial results A. Critics disagree and say it will lead to detrimental results Z.

3. The suggested solution is implemented and almost immediately we get detrimental results Z.

4. Denial phase: The protagonists of the enacted measures deny that they caused Z. Because, they say, there are many factors, there’s complexities, it’s simplistic to blame it on this.

This is what we will see down the line once the media thinks it is safe to no longer suppress the evidence that lockdowns, masks and vaccines did much more harm than good.

This is what we will hear now that “saving the climate” and “supporting Ukraine” is leading to poverty and destitution.

This is what we have been hearing when discussing soaring crime rates.

And so on.

Economists tend to see through this because they are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analysis and what is called “opportunity cost”: The cost of any action/decision is that it closes the door to other opportunities. What are they, and can we afford to lose them?

Our current elites don’t like that sort of thinking because it questions their beliefs.

Asked whether these people just don’t think their solutions might be detrimental, Sowell says there’s more to it: The solutions always gives these people more power and influence.

That is also something we see time and time again.

China Declares War On The United States

In cool, calm terms, the ancient country has thrown down the gauntlet to the big bully

Gonzalo Lira points out in a 10-minute video how China, four days ago, basically declared war on the USA.

Today, practically all the Western media was rah-rahing for more and deadlier weapons for the perfectly pure and saintly Ukrainians (whose government’s corruption rank prior to the invasion one year ago was hardly better than Russia’s) in order to defeat the perfectly and purely evil Russians.

Consequently, the Abbey of the city I live in hoisted the Ukrainian flag today on its tower (for the first time since some weeks after the invasion). Rendering to Caesar . . .

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Eurasian landmass, the second largest boy in the classroom, who himself is no angel, has now decided to properly stand up to the biggest bully of all. And the above mentioned media has basically ignored this momentous event.

In a paper titled “US Hegemony and Its Perils” the Chinese government, on the website of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, details with ice-cold precision what everyone with a brain knows to be true, but what most prefer not to talk about.

China, a country conscious of its 5,000-year-old culture, is throwing down the gauntlet. Let’s hope the heirs of Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War will heed the famous general’s advice: “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

The Chinese are about to prove whether they are worthy of their ancestral sage. We will see.

Covid 19 Mandates: Silencing the Opposition

Jordan Peterson speaks with Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya

From the video description:

Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya discuss the complete failure of the covid 19 response, the danger of handing the reins to Fauci, the proven blacklisting of Dr. Bhattacharya and others across social media (Revealed via the Twitter Files), and the continued corruption across the board regarding the pandemic.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford University Medical School, where he researches the health & well-being of vulnerable populations. He co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, a focused protection alternative to lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya has published over 160 peer-reviewed papers on medicine, epidemiology, health policy, and public health. He holds an M.D. and Ph.D. in economics, earned at Stanford University.

– Chapters – (0:00) Coming Up (1:18) Intro (3:09) The lie in trusting the “consensus” (6:48) Solzhenitsyn, Lenin, Stalin (8:01) The enviro-cartel: motivations (9:35) Naming names, Fauci (14:04) Presidential reminders: do you love your child? (15:05) The revolving door for regulators (18:14) Disgust as a driving factor, sins of the infected (22:09) Communal understandings (24:15) Throwing out the pandemic template (25:42) The Somerville Youth Study (27:40) Fear, propaganda, ignorance (30:22) Serious attempts to follow China’s lead (31:30) The risks that were ignored (32:50) The detriment of Covid-era schooling (35:47) First concerns over the lockdown approach (38:05) The continuing catastrophe unleashed on the poor (38:50) Swine Flu, seroprevalence studies (41:50) Serious factors and the importance of highlighting them (43:37) You can’t monetize vitamin D (44:02) Shaming the healthy and saving grandma (46:10) Refuting Jayenta’s findings, abysmal treatment, and accusations (49:50) Despite innocence, Stanford demands silence (52:28) Trauma inflicted by the forces of the mob (54:40) Nothing saves but the truth (58:11) The Great Barrington Declaration (1:04:17) Being labeled a “fringe epidemiologist” (1:07:40) Limiting the reach of the GBD (1:08:30) Protecting the public in fascist Germany (1:11:40) Silenced by intimidation, living past the risk (1:15:55) The Twitter Files: blacklisting the truth (1:19:50) Visiting Elon Musk and the Twitter headquarters (1:22:03) Zuckerberg’s offer to Fauci (1:23:00) Deposing Fauci and the vast censorship enterprise (1:25:14) Trudeau, lying to the public about MAGA conspiracies (1:27:01) The ridiculous notion that information can be harmful (1:29:30) STEM, rejecting students over their DEI stats (1:30:53) The attraction of egalitarianism, be a communist at home (1:32:55) Destruction of community and the rise of individualism (1:33:40) To the 15 leftists listening… (1:37:00) Why demonetization is such a detriment to science (1:39:50) Bhattacharya now: the Norfolk Group Document

ONS Data: 25% Excess Mortality Among the Boosted is Obscured by Undercounting of the Unvaccinated

Oops, the unvaxed were 50% undercounted

Says Igor Chudov here.

Excerpts:

I am very sorry that the ONS used incorrect counts of unvaccinated people. Fortunately, we can correct them using publicly available, official UK data.

Such corrected counts of unvaccinated people lead to a much more realistic comparison of mortality between boosted and unvaccinated people, consistent with our observations of overall excess mortality in the UK.

This is NOT a harmless mistake. Undercounting unvaccinated people will distract the public from looking at the real cause of excess mortality because ONS numbers falsely suggest that the boosted people experience lower excess mortality than the unvaccinated.

The opposite is likely true: as I have shown, the boosted people have higher excess mortality. Furthermore, corrected mortality explains the 20% or so excess mortality the UK experienced in December.