Category Archives: History

How the Bible influenced the Founding Fathers

Which political traditions and thinkers shaped the ideas and aspirations of the American founding? Late eighteenth-century Americans were influenced by diverse perspectives, including British constitutionalism, classical and civic republicanism, and Enlightenment liberalism. Among the works frequently said to have influenced the founders are John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Another, often overlooked or discounted source of influence is the Bible. Its expansive influence on the political culture of the age should not surprise us because the population was overwhelming Protestant, and it informed significant aspects of public culture, including language, letters, education, and law. No book at the time was more accessible or familiar than the English Bible, specifically the King James Bible. And the people were biblically literate.

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How the Climate Hysteria Is Lowering Your Standard of Living

Interview with Doug Casey.

Excerpts:

But perhaps the average person doesn’t think about these things or care. The standard of living has gone up for so long that we tend to think it’s automatic and divinely ordained. I’m not so sure about that. Everything tends to wind down unless there is enough outside force to counteract it.

The planet will be just fine. It’s been here for 4.5 billion years and will be here for billions more, long after humanity has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Anyway, the climate hysterics don’t really care about “saving the planet”; even they aren’t quite that stupid. What’s going on is that they actually hate humanity. And themselves. The world is suffering from an episode of mass psychosis.

One currently fashionable indication of this is the 15-minute city, which governments are trying to impose all over the world. These would penalize you if you exit your designated 15-minute zone more than X number of times per month. The idea is green. And, like most green notions, it is very retrogressive. They want to return people to the status of medieval serfs, when few ventured more than 15 minutes from their hovels.

I hate to think something so dire is in the cards. But Dark Riders are at large, and the eye of Sauron is scanning the world. The tendency towards authoritarianism or even totalitarianism worldwide is growing—not to mention the possibility of World War III.

The negative trends go way beyond carbon hysteria and appliances that don’t work very well.

New Survey: Fewer Germans feel free to express their political opinions in 2023

. . . than in any year since the early days of the Federal Republic

Article by eugyppius.

Excerpt:

The impression of a closed and stifling discourse is present across the political spectrum. Only 39% of centre-right CDU voters feel free to express their views, but for Die Linke, or the Left Party (the successors of the East German SED), that number falls to 36%, and for AfD voters it is lowest of all, a mere 11%. A clear majority (75%) of Greens alone feel that they can speak their minds, and so here we learn who feels best represented by our present discourse.

“Do you have the feeling, that you can freely express your political opinion today in Germany, or is it better to be cautious?” Blue: “I can speak freely.” Orange: “It is better to be cautious.”

No surprises lurk in the breakdown by education: 51% of those with university degrees or an Abitur feel their political expression is unhampered, while clear majorities of everybody else say they cannot speak their minds.

The historical perspective is sobering. The Federal Republic was only five years old in 1953; the Allied occupation and denazification were recent events, and even then Germans enjoyed a substantially greater subjective sense of political expression than they do today. This sense peaked under Willy Brandt during the Cold War, but has been in a state of decay since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. This would be good evidence in favour of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s thesis, that Western liberal states rapidly lose their enthusiasm for principles like free expression in the absence of competition from rival systems.

Yet it was not the end of the Cold War, but rather the chancellorship of Angela Merkel that saw the most dramatic decline in free political expression. Specifically, Merkel’s strategy of “asymmetric demobilisation,” via which she sought to disarm the leftist opposition by adopting central elements of their political programme, had a very perverse influence. German voters and hence the politicians who appeal to them have always had pronounced conservative tendencies, while the media here as everywhere else lean to the left. Before 2005, politicians provided an important counterweight to the line taken by our press, but Merkel’s triangulations created a new system of soft political enforcement sustained by establishment politicians and mainstream journalism alike.

The consequence is a system that has placed all of us in thrall to the whims of an eccentric minority. The opinions which govern German society, as I’ve written many times before, are not those of most people, but rather of an increasingly insular, university-educated urbanite class, who are relatively affluent, who vote overwhelmingly Green and who constitute no more than 15% of the population. I doubt the old socialist countries of the Warsaw Pact were any different in this respect. More and more, it feels like we defeated communism only to recreate an equivalent system, which threatens to be much worse, insofar as its informal nature and soft asymmetrical methods confuse everybody and thwart opposition.

Who destroyed Western Civilization?

Asks Paul Craig Roberts.

His answer:

I once offered this explanation:

The liberals’ stress on social purification flows from an inconsistency in the intellectual foundation of Western civilization.  The Enlightenment had two results that combined to produce a destructive formula.  On the one hand, Christian moral fervor was secularized, which produced demands for the moral perfection of society.  On the other hand, modern science hammered epistemology into a critical philosophical positivism that is skeptical of the reality of moral motives.  From the one we get moral indignation and from the other, moral skepticism.  How can two such disparate tendencies be reconciled?

The answer seems to be that this inconsistent combination is held together by their joint attack on existing society.  One pre-empts existing society’s defense, while the other focuses moral indignation against it.  Together, they support a social and political dynamism that seeks to achieve progress by remaking society.

Affirmations of society’s achievements run into this dynamism, which mows them down with skepticism and indignation.  People who are motivated by moral purposes  find that they have a safe outlet only in accusations of immorality against existing society, and the West’s morality becomes immanent in attacks on itself.

Others, such as Richard Knight, believe Western civilization was destroyed by German Jewish cultural marxists whose march through the institutions discredited every institution of Western civilization. I don’t disagree that this has occurred, but I think Cultural Marxism is itself a product of the inconsistency in the Western intellectual foundation that I described. 

It seems unlikely that the West’s intellectuals can escape the destructive dynamism of moral indignation and moral skepticism.  When civilization is destroyed, nirvana is not standing ready to take its place.  The replacement is barbarism into which we are already descending.

How Inflation Poisoned Our Food

Video interview (54 min) that Tom Woods conducts with Matthew Lysiak.

Description:

Matthew Lysiak discusses the various interests that combined to substitute cheap, fake food for the real food Americans used to eat. A key driving force: trying to conceal the effects of inflation on food prices by persuading Americans to consume cheap — and, it turns out, unhealthy — alternatives.

Government and Science: A Dreadful Mix

Tom Woods interviews Terence Kealey

“In one of the strongest episodes of this show ever (see also here), Terence Kealey, professor emeritus at Buckingham University and a research fellow of the Cato Institute, makes a stunningly powerful case for the separation of science and state.”

Here is an article by Kealey on the same subject:

Governments Need Not Fund Science (at Least, Not for Economic Reasons)

From the conclusion of the above:

The evidence that governments need not fund science for economic reasons is overwhelming, and it is ignored only because of self‐​interest: the scientists like public funding because it frees them to follow their own interests, companies like it because it provides them with corporate welfare, and politicians like it because it promotes them as patrons of the public good (witness Bill Clinton’s leading the celebrations over the mapping of the human genome.) So the empirical evidence is ignored in favo r of abstract theories.

There are, of course, non‐​economic reasons, such as defense or the study of pollution, why a government might want to fund science (and a democratic polity, moreover, might not wish to be dependent only on private entities for its expertise in science) but in this document I cannot pronounce on these non‐​economic justifications for the government funding of research: only democratically‐​elected representatives have that competence. Here I can make only the technical argument that there is no credible evidence that governments need fund science for economic reasons.

But we can nonetheless note that in his own farewell address (known for its regrets for the “industrial‐​military” complex and for the “three and half million men and women directly engaged in the defense establishment”) Truman’s immediate successor as President lamented the effects of the federal government’s funding for science. He lamented the effects on the universities:

In the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery … a government contact becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment … is gravely to be regarded.

And he also lamented the effects on the federal government itself:

We should be alert to the … danger that public policy could itself become captive of a scientific‐​technological elite.

And here is another:

Don’t Be like China: Why the U.S. Government Should Cut Its Science Budget

“The Western World Is Now a Tyranny”

Writes Paul Craig Roberts (emphasis in the original):

America’s reputation as “the land of the free” is rooted in the Anglo-Saxon legal and political tradition, not in diversity and multiculturalism.  Law as a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of rulers is a British achievement that Britain’s American colonies inherited.  It was the accomplishment of a specific ethnicity known as Anglo-Saxon. Bringing rulers to the same accountability to law as the lowest peasant was a centuries-long process beginning with Alfred the Great in the 9th century and culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1680.

In this legal tradition law is based in the customs and mores of the people, not on edicts issued from rulers,  government bureaucrats, regulatory agencies, and activist judges.  Obviously, this conveys an ethnic basis to law.  A Tower of Babel–the fate of all diminishing white countries today–has no common customs and mores and no basis for law other than rulers’ edicts enforced by power.

Throughout the Western World today the people have lost the protection of  law as a shield and suffer under rulers who wield law as a weapon. In the United States today demonstrators and rally attendees are turned into “insurrectionists” and sentenced to prison.  Even US President Donald Trump is being subjected to four fake felony prosecutions in order to prevent him from being elected president.

[. . .]

In my book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions published 23 years ago, I pointed out that “law and order conservatives” enabled government to set aside protective aspects of law in order to easier and more certainly convict the Mafia, drug users, child abusers–whoever the target was at the specific time.  I said that the law that is set aside in the interest of easier conviction is also set aside for the rest of us who are not Mafia, drug and child abusers, and that this conversion of law into a weapon would destroy nine centuries of Anglo-Saxon accomplishment in shielding people from arbitrary prosecution by rulers.

This has now happened.  The British who created civil liberty and the Americans who inherited it have lost the protection of law.  

“Law and order conservatives” determined to incarcerate criminals,  “patriotic conservatives” anxious to protect “national security” from “the Muslim threat,” and  woke ideologues determined to demonize and even criminalize white people as racists, while overrunning the ethnic basis of their countries with  immigrant-invaders, together brought about the destruction of law as a shield of the people.

[. . .]

You can see the lawlessness everywhere in the US and its Western puppet states.  A British journalist was arrested for exposing the despicable Trudeau applauding a member of the Nazi SS.

American parents are arrested, even beaten, for protesting at school board meetings that their kids are being brainwashed that they are racists and their daughters are being sexually assaulted in rest rooms by males claiming to be transgendered females despite still having the male sexual apparatus and lusts. 

[. . .]

William Blackstone wrote that weaponized law is tyranny and that when executive power weaponizes law, it is incumbent upon Parliament to impeach and punish the conduct of the government’s “evil and pernicious counselors.”  The US Congress has taken no such steps, which means the legislature has abdicated its responsibility and assented  to the establishment of tyranny.

The Empire of Lies has deep-sixed William Blackstone’s “rights of Englishmen” embodied in the US Constitution as the Bill of Rights.

[. . .]

In the framework of Identity Politics imposed on us by liberals and the Democrat Party, the inculcation of hate is the most important element.  Hate is inconsistent with objective law.  There can be no hope for a rule of law until Identity Politics is purged and unity among the people restored.

Interesting quote from Charles Darwin

In his "Journal of a Voyage Round the World", he praised Christian culture and the work of missionaries.

In his book “The Mission of God” (Wilberforce Publications, London 2016), the author Joseph Boot quotes Darwin. On page 381 of that book, he introduces the quote thus:

On his world voyage on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin, despite his growing agnosticism and deistic religious confusion, found himself unable to overlook the profound impact of Christian missionaries in Tahiti and the Pacific Islands. In the first work he ever wrote, before the implications of his theory gripped and ruled him, Darwin’s Christianized background caused him to rain praise on the evangelical missionary.

There follows this quote, which, according to the endnote, is from

Charles Darwin: Journal of a voyage round the world (London: T. Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1890), 496-947.

This is it:

It appears to me that the morality and religion of the inhabitants are highly creditable. There are many who attack … both the missionaries, their system, and the effects produced by it. Such reasoners never compare the present state with that of the Island only twenty years ago, nor even with that of Europe at this day; but they compare it with the high standard of gospel perfection … [T]hey forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifices, and the power of an idolatrous priesthood – a system of profligacy unparalleled in any other part of the world – infanticide, a consequence of that system – bloody wars, where the conquerors spared neither women nor children – that all these have been abolished, and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly reduced, by the introduction of Christianity. In a voyager to forget these things is base ingratitude; for should he chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far … [T]hose who are most severe should consider how much of the morality of the women in Europe is owing to the system early impressed by mothers on their daughters, and how much in each individual case to the precepts of religion. But it is useless to argue against such reasoners; – I believe that, disappointed in not finding the field of licentiousness quite so open as formally, they will not give credit to a morality which they do not wish to practice, or to a religion which they undervalue, if not despise.