Category Archives: Culture

History of Chinese Inventions

Some surprising facts here

“China as a nation has the longest and by far the most vast record of inventions in the history of the world. It is now reliably estimated that more than 60% of all the knowledge existing in the world today originated in China, a fact swept under the carpet by the West.“

An article by Larry Romanoff. Excerpts:

The Chinese invented the decimal number system, decimal fractions, negative numbers, and the zero, so far in the past that the origin is lost in the mists of time. The Chinese tracked sunspots and comets with such detail and accuracy that these ancient records are still used as the basis for their prediction and observation today. The Chinese were drilling for natural gas about 2,500 years ago, wells 4,800 feet deep, with bamboo pipelines to deliver the gas to nearby cities. The Chinese pioneered the mining and use of coal long before it was known in the West. Marco Polo and Arab traders marveled at the “black stone” that the Chinese mined from the ground, that would burn slowly during an entire night.

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The Science of Evil

Michael Rectenwald's Review of "Political Ponerology"

“Political Ponerology” is the title of a book on the science of evil, written by Polish author Andrew M. Łobaczewski and first published in 1984 (!). US academic Michael Rectenwald has read it and written a review on mises.org. He starts by saying:

This strange and provocative book argues that totalitarianism is the result of the extension of psychopathology from a group of psychopaths to the entire body politic, including its political and economic systems. 

He goes on to say:

Łobaczewski made the bold claim that he’d uncovered “the general laws of the origin of evil.” If true, the book was on par with Newton’s Principia in the physical sciences, while being of greater practical importance. And he approached this domain from the disciplinary perspective of psychology. Such an “individualist” methodology had been dismissed as mere “psychologism” in my own and many other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Łobaczewski’s insistence to focus on individual psychological disorders to understand the unfolding of “macrosocial evil” seemed mistaken to me initially, but this approach accords well with Joseph Schumpeter’s methodological individualism, which became a hallmark of the Austrian school. My assumption had always been that one needed to study political ideology and economics and that political ideology and economic theory explained nearly everything one needed to know about how and why totalitarian evil comes about.

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The Naughty Boy of Evangelicalism

Offers a good, concise description of the three basic types of Christians

Doug Wilson, on his Website “Blog and Mablog” describes the condition of evangelical Christianity in today’s world, following the pattern first formulated by Gary North:

First, those believers who have a yen for power may be called friends-of-the-regime. They do not make claims of control over your life directly, but they certainly want to be on the good side of those who do. They want to be fully cooperative with them, believing that helping the tyrants forge your chains should be called something like “loving your neighbor.” These are the pastors and elders who want to assume the very best about the latest contradictory fog bank from the CDC, and who assume the very worst about the consciences of their own most faithful parishioners.

Second, those believers who are keeping their head down until the rapture are seeking a way of escape. Or, if dispensational theology is not their bag, this kind of person might retreat into pietism or confessionalism. The pietist wants to keep his own personal nose clean until God sees fit to take him out of this dirty world, and so he wants to escape unnoticed in this world until he can escape unnoticed to a better world. And the escapist confessionalist wants to sit in the red sports car of the historic Reformed tradition, fire that baby up, put the clutch all the way in, all the way to the floor, and, together with R. Scott Clark, make vroom vroom noises.

And then, third, we have those with a mind for dominion. These are the believers who seek to labor under the grace of God, seeking to have God load those labors up with what I call Deuteronomic blessings in this life, and in the life to come, all of Christ. This third group is the historic Reformed position. It was held by John Calvin, Pierre Viret, Martin Bucer, John Knox, the Westminster divines, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Kuyper, and, quite humbled to be included in such an august listing, and not quite sure how I came to be added to it, me.

He adds some thoughts about how things are going currently:

The now thoroughly discredited leadership of the evangelical movement has been our Neville Chamberlain, and our last two years of chaos have been Hitler’s invasion of Poland. I speak in a dark parable. But the coming leadership of evangelicalism will need to be Churchillian—or we perish.

The Ukraine War: Arguments for Non-Intervention

While humanitarian aid is called for, intervening to support one side against another would be wrong

Alan Bickley has written about the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine from a UK perspective. Here are some quotes:

A nation is a partnership across generations. Where the use or possible use of armed force is concerned, those now alive in a nation, and particularly those governing the nation, have no business acting as they feel personally right. They are not the whole nation. They are not the agents of the nation. They are its trustees. Their duty is to act in a manner that does not endanger the nation now, or harm the interests of the following generations. We can regret that our ancestors did not consult our interests when they acted as they did in 1914 and 1939. This does not lessen our obligation to avoid acts or courses of action that will bring similar harm to our descendants. Risking the hostility of a great power because it is doing things we dislike inside its own sphere of influence is no part of any legitimate agenda for those who sit above us as our trustees.

On the matter, though, of democracy. The Ukraine strikes me as just another post-Soviet mafia state. In February this year, its President banned three opposition television stations. Last May, he had one of the opposition leaders put under house arrest. In 2016, The Huffington Post described the country as “a known hub for human trafficking,” and reported how its orphanages were doubling as brothels. I could supply a mass of further detail. I think this will do, however, to raise doubts of its propriety in the present case, even if we accept the generality of the claim that we have some duty to defend those countries that are democracies against countries that are not.

Ukraine and the Global American Empire

International "System" versus National "Politics"

Blogger eugyppius has posted a very insightful analysis of the unfolding drama and tragedy in Ukraine.

He quotes Rolf Peter Sieferle from his book “Finis Germania”.

Rolf Peter Sieferle, one of my favourite thinkers, wrote about the fundamental conflict, between the globalists on one hand, and the unaligned people like me and unaligned countries like Russia, in more abstract terms. For him, the clash is between “politics” and “system”:

Politics belongs to an older stratum of existence, ordered in terms of the state and of history, crystallised in statesmen, leaders and ideologues. It has programmes, values and goals. What is required are virtues and commitments directed towards a super-ordinate whole. The last resort of politics is war – the willingness of the individual to sacrifice himself for a higher cause, for his community.

System characterises newly emerging orders of higher complexity, which successively displace politics. Systems organise themselves without focus, without values, goals or programmes. Their only maxim is freedom and emancipation for individuals. Virtue and sacrifice are anachronisms. Wars are nothing but catastrophic conflicts that must be prevented through skilful management. Order is created by objective, autonomous constraints, not by a normative orientation. The structures of systems are as inescapable for individuals as a magnetic field is for iron filings. They do not “know” anything about it, but they conform to their predefined paths. The most important processes are not controlled and can hardly be grasped theoretically.

System has largely prevailed in advanced “western” countries. Yet the rest of the world in many ways still thinks politically. This strikes the West as anachronistic fundamentalism. …

Lovely People

A short graphic novel about bunnies living in a social credit system

~Note from the artist/author: In 2020 I gave my life into the hands of Jesus and it pressed my [sic!] to stop being a coward and create this comic. The comic is meant to illustrate, in an easy to comprehend way, how social credit systems function so that more people can be mentally prepared. It’s written from a Christian worldview (as a fresh convert at the time) but is made for both Christians and non-Christians. Hopefully it gives you something. ~

It basically is a lighter version of George Orwell’s “1984”. It took me about 30 minutes to read.

Here it is.

The Bible is a Textbook on Life

Seeing life from God's perspective

You’ve heard people claim that the Bible is not a textbook on particular topics. While that’s generally true, the Bible is a book about all of life. Everything that it speaks of is useful and true for all times and all people. Humanity needs special revelation in order to see life from God’s perspective, rather than through our own sinful perspective. In this final part of the interview between Gary North and Cal Beisner, they discuss Christian education and how we move forward.

It contains these words, spoken by Cal Beisner, which he says he occasionally asks people in Q&A sessions after one of his talks (scroll to 14:15 min):

“Who in his right mind ever thought it made any sense whatsoever to entrust to the government the shaping of the minds of the people by whose consent it is supposed to govern? [. . .] What does consent mean, if the government determines what we thing? [. . .] Government education and liberty are incompatible in the long term.”

(Interview part 1)

(Interview part 2)