Offsite Post: ‘New Threats to the Christian Family’

 

The increasingly technocratic, anti-Christian trajectory of the West and other parts of the world is making traditional family life difficult to begin and sustain.  This includes things like the LGBT cult but also newer evils that go beyond them.  Here are a few recent examples to illustrate:

--Treating pregnancy as a disease

The Journal of Medical Ethics, like a demonic oracle, opines,

We can compare pregnancy with measles. Measles is uncontroversially regarded as a disease and treated as such by public health authorities and health professionals. Measles is harmful to nearly all of those who catch it. However, most patients will survive. Very few will die, and only a small proportion will go on to experience longer term impacts on their health. So how do the risks of pregnancy compare against those of measles?

 

Like measles, pregnancy is a self-limiting condition. It follows a predictable trajectory that usually ends in the patient’s recovery. Both pregnancy and measles also involve symptoms that can impair one’s normal functional ability. Common symptoms experienced during pregnancy include: back pain, bleeding gums, headaches, heartburn and indigestion, leaking from the nipples, nosebleeds, pelvic pain, piles, stomach pain, stretch marks, swollen ankles, feet and fingers, tiredness and sleep problems, thrush, vaginal bleeding, vaginal discharge, vomiting, morning sickness and weight gain. Like many diseases, including measles, pregnancy is a condition that has distinct stages. The first stage of pregnancy commonly involves many of the symptoms described above. The second stage—labour—will usually involve extreme pain, powerful cramps, and the ripping, stretching and damaging of tissue. This second stage is far riskier than the first, in terms of long-term threats to life and health.

 

 . . . Infertility is treated as a disease not because of its objective physiological or scientific features, but because of social norms that incline us to think people should have children.

 

 . . . Pathologising pregnancy could, in fact, lead to better treatment for women. If pregnancy is construed as a disease and access to contraception and abortion as preventive medicine, it puts the provision of these interventions on a different footing. This is not about ‘family planning’ or reproductive autonomy, but about medical need.

Of course, this sick reasoning rests upon the un-Christian theory of Darwinian evolution:

We are a species that has been around for an extraordinarily short period of time in evolutionary terms. Human childbirth is significantly more painful, protracted, and lethal than delivery in other mammal species. As noted, gender equality leads to plummeting birthdates, perhaps precisely because human birth is so traumatic for the human body, and is incompatible with many other goods that humans value. We cannot infer from our existence now that we are equipped to survive indefinitely, nor that reproduction will continue as we know it.

--Creating synthetic human embryos and growing them in mechanical wombs

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/new-threats-to-the-christian-family.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘After Tucker’s Putin Interview, the Deep State Strikes Back’

 

That didn’t take long.  With Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russia’s Vladimir Putin nearing 200 million views at last count, and with the latest Ukraine funding measure facing an uncertain future in the US Congress, the swampy Deep State in DC panicked and launched a rather obvious psychological operation designed to reignite US fear of Russia through their lapdog media.  Here is CNN reporting on the newest Russian threat that the US/wider Western world are supposed to be very afraid of:

 

The US has new intelligence on Russian military capabilities related to its efforts to deploy a nuclear anti-satellite system in space, according to multiple sources familiar with the intelligence.

 

The intelligence was briefed to Congress and key US allies, and some lawmakers say it is serious enough that it should be declassified and made public. While the intelligence is concerning, multiple senior members of Congress briefed on the information on Wednesday emphasized that it does not pose an immediate threat to the US or its interests.

 

The system remains under development and is not yet in orbit, according to three US officials familiar with the intelligence. It’s not clear how far the technology has progressed, one of the officials said. A separate US official told CNN the threat does not involve a weapon that would be used to attack humans.

 

It was not immediately clear whether the intelligence referred to a nuclear-powered, anti-satellite capability or a nuclear-armed capability.

 

 . . . Earlier Wednesday, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, ignited a firestorm on Capitol Hill when he issued a cryptic statement announcing that the panel had “information concerning a serious national security threat.”

 

In a letter to lawmakers inviting them to view the intelligence in the committee’s classified spaces, he said that it related to a “destabilizing foreign military capability that should be known by all congressional policymakers.”

 

Immediately, lawmakers began tramping down to the House basement to learn what the intelligence was.

 

Some left underwhelmed. One Democratic member with deep national security experience said that they had never before received that kind of urgent summons over a national security matter during their time in Congress — and that the intelligence they saw when they arrived was not urgent enough to justify Turner’s alarm-pulling.

It is telling that CNN is hedging their bets here.  Perhaps they are not willing to go all in on another bonanza of CIA lies about foreign countries in the wake of - Saddam’s got WMD, everything’s fine in Afghanistan, Qaddafi’s a madman, etc.  Whatever the case, folks in the West should be ready for more psyops about Russia in the coming weeks and months to keep them from having any feelings of friendliness towards Russia.

More on that in minute.  But first, a little more on what’s going in the Ukraine and with the latest funding measure.  Scott McKay is correct; it isn’t about helping the Ukraine:

 

But it’s very obvious that the interests of the Ukrainians and the interests of their kleptocratic government – and more to the point, the interests of the corrupt Washington elite who are openly telling us that “aid” to Ukraine is really more about funding for the U.S. defense industry, while behind the scenes that “aid” is little more than a money laundry for D.C.-connected nonprofits – are not the same.

And it is worse than Mr McKay lets on.  Globalist totalitarian groups like BlackRock are poised to profit immensely from a prolonged destructive conflict in the Ukraine while regular folks there (and here) fall into penury:

 

War is Good for Business. The greater the destruction, the greater the stranglehold on Ukraine by “private investors”:

 

“BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are helping the Ukrainian government set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital into rebuilding projects that can attract hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment.” (FT, op cit)

 

The Privatization of Ukraine was launched in November 2022 in liaison  with BlackRock’s  consulting company  McKinsey, a public relations firm which has largely been responsible for co-opting corrupt politicians and officials Worldwide not to mention scientists and intellectuals on behalf of powerful financial interests. 

 

“The Kyiv government engaged BlackRock’s consulting arm in November to determine how best to attract that kind of capital, and then added JPMorgan in February. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced last month that the country was working with the two financial groups and consultants at McKinsey.

 

BlackRock and Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy signed a Memorandum of Understanding in November 2022.

 

In late December 2022, president Zelensky and BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink agreed on an investment strategy.

 

 . . . The privatization plan enunciated in December entitled “Development of SMB 2023: opportunities, sustainability and recovery” is now being implemented.

 

According to Vitaliy Koval, in 2024 the Fund plans to put up:

 

… for privatization about a thousand objects that open up new opportunities for business. These assets will be auctioned, ensuring a fair and transparent process.

 

Vitaliy Koval, Chairman of the State Property Fund of Ukraine, presented the 2024 SPFU plan. He emphasized that small and medium-sized business will be main beneficiary of this process.

 

The small and medium sized businesses including agricultural and industrial SME will be wiped out. Many of these assets will be purchased at a negative price. 

 

 . . . Ukraine is in the stranglehold of Big Money. BlackRock and JPMorgan.

 

Ukraine’s Privatization Initiative sets a precedent. Entire countries can be privatized.

 

Wars are money-making operations for the Military Industrial Complex (MIC).

 

There have been 3 peace initiatives since 2014 including Minsk 1 and 2 agreements, and Istanbul (March-April 2022) of which the draft was signed by representatives of Ukraine and Russia. The implementation of these Peace initiatives was the object of sabotage.

 

Peace as well as “Cease Fires” are not “Good for Business”.

 

“Ukraine’s people desperately need a future based on welfare and peace, but in reality Ukraine is being driven towards the kind of huge indebtedness that leads to subservience and dominance.” (Bharat Dogra, Global Research, June 28, 2023)

 

The outcome is mass poverty and social devastation of an entire country, under the guise of “reconstruction”. 

This asset-stripping of the Ukraine is, by the way, precisely what the West had in mind for Russia post-communism, and which she largely got in the immediate aftermath in the 1990s.  One of the main reasons Western leaders loathe Vladimir Putin (and try so hard to make all of us hate him, too) is because he put a stop to it:

 . . .

The rest is at https://identitydixie.com/2024/02/23/after-tuckers-putin-interview-the-deep-state-strikes-back/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘The Answer to the Riddle of Modern Despair: We Live in Babylon’

 

Long as I remember

The rain been comin' down

Clouds of mystery pourin'

Confusion on the ground

Good men through the ages

Tryin' to find the sun

And I wonder

Still, I wonder

Who'll stop the rain

--Creedence Clearwater Revival

The disillusioned conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez recently gave voice to the despair that is crushing the souls of so many today like a massive spiritual boulder.  He writes,

Eliza is a young girl with icy blue eyes and light blonde hair. She says she lives paycheck to paycheck and only has a little money left over at the end of the month, mainly for bills. What free time she has on weekends goes to errands for which there is no time in the week.

 

Eliza disclosed these details about her life in a teary TikTok video. “I’m not made for this,” she said. “I don’t have the money, time, or energy to enjoy my life outside of work, and I don’t know what to do about it anymore.”

 

She’s right about not being “made for this” because humans aren’t. What Eliza described is not a life in the true sense but living and dying as an automaton. And that, unfortunately, is the reality shouldered by most people today. . . .

 

Those facts are important because they show that what Eliza described is not something that exclusively or even primarily applies to young people who are “starting out” and have not yet acclimated to adulthood. Eliza is not the point; the point is millions of people feel this way and live Damoclean lives of financial precarity. But the fact Eliza is young and, based on her social media, typically liberal, did help to drop some masks. See Phillip Buchanan, who goes by “Catturd” online.

 

Buchanan has amassed a Twitter following of 2.3 million. I’m sorry to say he is a fixture of the new right commentariat. Newsweek dubbed him the “King of MAGA Twitter.”

 

Buchanan retweeted Eliza’s video with a seven-word caption: “Stop whining and make me a sandwich.”

 

 . . . The left wants you deprived of property as a permanently plugged-in and soulless widget, interchangeable with border crossers who beat cops in New York City and flip the bird at America after the fact. And the new right, well, I don’t know what it wants anymore. I don’t think it knows better than a dog chasing a car does. Neither has any real notion of eudaimonia, a Greek word generally translated as “happiness,” but it carries a profoundly richer meaning than the English suggests.

 

The late Daniel N. Robinson, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University, drew a connection between the “pursuit of happiness” clause in the Declaration of Independence and eudaimonia. The authors, after all, were classically informed and did not have in mind the pursuit of pleasure with that line, in which case living in an entertainment pod with an AI robot girlfriend would be ideal.

 

“It’s much better translated as a kind of ‘flourishing,’” Robinson said in a lecture. Drawing on Aristotle's account of eudaimonia, he continued:

 

In modern parlance, you’d say it’s very akin to being in the flow; it’s a full form of life that’s being lived in a certain way. The concert pianist from the point at which the pianist begins to play scales to the point at which the seasoned pianist serves up a perfect rendering of “Moonlight” Sonata. Do you see? This activity . . . of a lifetime, it’s a flourishing kind of lifetime, many, many bumps in the road, many things that have to be overcome. But it’s the attempted realization of a perfectionist ideal. That’s what the “pursuit of happiness” should be understood as referring to.

 

Not everyone is cut out to be a concert pianist or an astronaut or you name it. That’s not what Robinson meant. It’s not what I mean.

 

Humans are the only creatures on earth capable of this kind of flourishing, but flourishing is hard under economic conditions designed to keep people working and ultimately living like animals, cattle incapable even of starting families or owning homes.

 

The left thinks the solution is treating slightly better-off Americans like kulaks. The right seems to just want to sh*tpost. Whoever can figure out how to address this in a compelling way could hold power for a hundred years.

Mr Gonzalex places the problem mainly in the economic sphere, but by his raising the issue of eudaimonia/happiness, he has shown that is actually the spiritual dimension where the problem mainly lies.

To give an adequate answer to the issues he raises, we must begin by trying to understand the world in which we live.  We do not live in Paradise.  We do not live in utopia.  We do not live in fantasy fairie land.  We do not live in the political philosophers’ state of nature.  We do not live in a rationalistic, scientistic, non-theistic neutral ground called the saeculum (the secular).

We live in Babylon.

The renowned priest-monk Father Athanasius Mitilianaios, commenting on Revelation 14:8, defines Babylon for us thusly (via this video by Fr Peter Heers):

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-answer-to-the-riddle-of-modern-despair-we-live-in-babylon/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘Pagan American Rome and Christian Russian Rome’

 

When most folks look at a map, they will see only a single Rome, the one in Italy.  But there are actually two more, neither of them in Italy:  one is identified with Washington, D.C., in the United States and the other with Moscow in Russia, each quite different from the other as they represent two different stages of Roman history.  In the American Rome one will see a continuation of pagan, pre-Christian Rome, while in the Russian Rome one will see a continuation of Orthodox Constantinople/New Rome.

Let us look first at American Rome.  From her earliest days, the leaders of the US identified closely with the pre-Christian Roman Republic:

‘Throughout the course of history, the ancient civilization of Rome has been widely discussed, praised, and emulated by writers, statesmen, and philosophers alike. Rome has no shortage of admirers, and arguably some of its most enthusiastic supporters were the American Founding Fathers who were enamoured of the Roman past largely because of Rome’s unique form of government, which had supposedly preserved liberty for hundreds of years. The Founders lavished praise upon the Roman republican heroes who defended their government from tyranny in the turbulent final days of the Republic.

‘ . . . The American Revolution further intensified interest in the Roman world. By anchoring those arguments for freedom to ancient precedent, Revolutionary American authors aimed to demonstrate that their arguments were timeless and firmly embedded in history. Historians such as Plutarch, Livy, and Tacitus successfully encapsulated in writing the eternal and unavoidable struggle between liberty and power.^[4] Parallels between Rome and America were made frequently by Revolutionary writers and orators. Josiah Quincy compared the tyrant Caesar to King George, asking “is not Britain to America what Caesar was to Rome?”^[5] One of the most dramatic and obvious examples of reference to Rome was Joseph Warren’s oration on the Boston Massacre in 1775, during which he wore a Roman toga.^[6] It would be difficult to find any public figure of the Revolutionary period who did not quote a classical author in their pamphlets, orations or letters.^[7]

‘ . . . The founding generation admired Cicero as a steadfast defender of liberty and a deeply philosophical thinker on the ways in which government can best preserve our naturally endowed rights and freedoms. He was referred to as a constant source of wisdom on the topic of political philosophy as well as a guide to civic virtue and was described by Josiah Quincy as “the best of men and the first of patriots.”^[15] Cicero’s oratorical prowess was emulated by many early American lawyers and statesmen who wished to be as eloquent and impassioned as the man who defied tyrants.^[16]

‘ . . . Historical figures such as Cicero and Cato were considered fitting role models not only due to their character, but because of the similarity between their predicament and that of the Founders. Cicero and Cato, faced a power far greater than themselves, but were steeled by the cause of liberty. Regardless of how history played out, the Founders viewed Cicero and Cato as heroes of freedom and enemies of tyranny.’

The preoccupation in US thinking vis-à-vis Rome, as with nearly everything else, is the idea of a religiously agnostic individual liberty.  This will contrast with Russia, as we shall see.  But to begin with, we must see what it is that Russia, the Third Rome, inherited from the second Rome, Constantinople:

‘As the historical, lawful descendants of ancient Rome, which was destroyed by barbarians in the fifth century, the inhabitants of Byzantium called themselves Romans. In a vast empire divided into many nationalities there was one faith—Orthodox Christianity. The Byzantines literally fulfilled the Christian teaching of a new humanity living in a Divine spirit, where “there is neither Greek, nor Jew, nor Scythe,” as the Apostle Paul wrote. This hope preserved the country from the destructive storm of ethnic conflict. It was enough for any pagan or foreigner to accept the Orthodox Faith, and confirm it in deed, in order to become a full member of society. On the Byzantine throne, for example, were almost as many Armenians as there were Greeks; there were also citizens of Syrian, Arabian, Slavic, and Germanic origin. Amongst the higher ranks of government were representatives of all peoples in the Empire—the main requirements were their competence and dedication to the Orthodox Faith. This provided Byzantine civilization with incomparable cultural wealth.

 . . .

The rest may be read here:

https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/pagan-american-rome-and-christian-russian-rome

Or here:

https://katehon.com/en/article/pagan-american-rome-and-christian-russian-rome

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘One Nation or Many Nations?’

 

It is not very often that we would say something good came of the Super Bowl, but this year is a little different thanks to the dustup over the response (or lack thereof) to the Black National Anthem:  ‘White Tennessee Democrat Congressman Steve Cohen was incensed that Super Bowl fans did not stand in respect for what he called the “Negro National Anthem” during Sunday night’s big game.’

Those who disagree with Rep. Cohen have generally stuck to some form of the argument that because the United States is one nation, it should and does have only one national anthem.  It is precisely here that a helpful opportunity presents itself, an opportunity to remind one and all that the United States are not one country, but many countries.  This may be done via two ways.

First, politically.  Fifty States make up the federation called the United States.  Each one is a sovereign, independent country.  This truth has been expressed since the earliest days of their independence from the British Empire.  One important example:  The Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the war between Great Britain and the States, says explicitly that each State is a nation in her own right:  ‘His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States; that he treats with them as such . . . .’

It has generally been the authoritarian centralizers in the US who have tried to spin out a different version of reality – that the 50 States are one country – folks like Alexander Hamilton and Justice Joseph Story.  Abraham Lincoln took their theory and put into practice by force of arms in an illegal, unjust war, but delusions will last only so long before falling apart.  The Soviet Union affirms that:  Fifteen very different countries forcefully united under the rule of Godless communists in Moscow broke apart in 1991.  The European Union is constantly in danger of falling apart because it is similarly trying to amalgamate 27 independent countries into one giant supernation; Charlemagne’s earlier version of a European superstate fell apart for similar reasons.

The United States are not immune from these political dynamics.  Dissatisfaction with an all-powerful government in DC continues to manifest in the States.  . . .

The rest may be read here:

https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/one-nation-or-many-nations

Or here:

https://thehayride.com/2024/02/garlington-one-nation-or-many-nations/

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!