On Dogs and Tea

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/china-s-dog-meat-festival-opens-despite-ban-rumours-8964726

***Li Yongwei, a Yulin resident in his 40s, said dog was the same as any other meat. “You shouldn’t force people to make choices they don’t want to make, the way you wouldn’t force someone to be a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim,” he said.***

Li, a budding Lockean seems not to notice that the People’s Republic Of China has no qualms about forbidding Christianity other than under the auspices of the Party-sanctioned Church.

Only a people brainwashed that they have no national culture would defend dog meat as no different than say pork . All Cultures Are Equally Arbitrary is the motto of our “multicultural youth”.
Multiculturalism cannot exist within an individual, other than in multiple personality disorders. (And even then, I wonder if there has ever been a case of such?)

Pigs are supposedly intelligent. But pigs have not evolved like dogs. Dogs have evolved extreme sensitivity to humans’ emotional cues. And their facial muscles (especially Goldens) very much express their thoughts and feelings.
So, the “west eats pork and therefore cannot protest East Asian dog-eating” is not valid.
But what if it were valid. Does the fact that cultures are comprised of arbitrary symbols, signs and ethics mean they are equally as good? “Oh”, the intilecktchuel responds “‘good’ and ‘bad’ themselves are *mere* arbitrary constructions.”
And so is language. But intilecktchuels blather on endlessly spewing syllables like birdsong never perceiving that their every utterance is *merely* an arbitrary sound, or group of squiggles on a page!

WHY DO WE ALLOW CHINESE PRODUCTS TO POUR INTO AMERICA? The Miseans (neo-confederates) argue that Free Trade is based on libertarian principles. Clearly, these are principles the Framers of the Constitution knew not. Congress is given the authority to develop trade policies viz. foreign nations.
The Free Traders then try Utilitarian argument: that if each country specializes in producing that which it does well and efficiently and trades with other countries all will benefit.
But this breaks down completely when some nations keep their workers’ wages to a bare minimum. It allows the production of nearly everything to be offered for less money.
“The choice is in our hands” i.e. we can choose to not purchase Chinese products. This is not a valid argument. The Tea in the ships at the Boston wharves were taxed minisculey. The British East India Company had created a tea glut. The taxed British tea was less expensive than the smuggled product. Human nature being what it is, and not what it’s not, will only rarely forgo immediate self interest in the interests of a better future or out of morality.
The Sons of Liberty unlike the future Sans Coulottes of the French Revolution and then the Reds of the Russian Revolution did not claim the right to “remold the world closer to the heart’s desire”. The American Revolution did not attempt to change human nature.
Taxed Tea was intolerable. Even if it were cheaper than smuggled untaxed tea. Human nature was not going to be changed by the Sons, but the temptation of the tea would be removed.
Same with claiming that Americans vote for cheap Chinese imports with their dollars. Perhaps so. But we have no qualms about outlawing various drugs because they are addictive. The product of coolie labor is addictive.
Boycott it, yes. But that is not sufficient. Destroy it at the docks is the Sons of Liberty’s way. The American way!

The Conditional Covenant of America

In the past few months we have had a greater than normal number of weather related disasters in the United States of America.  Heavy and frequent snowfalls in the northeast this winter strained municipal snow-removal budgets and my back.  Flooding in the Southeast, then in the Mississippi Valley, drought and wildfire in Texas, and the most destructive series of spring tornadoes in memory.  Keep you pants on Algore.  This is not due to man-made climate change, or at least the way you mean it.  The LORD Adenoi Elohim brings the rain at the right times when it is needed, and not too much nor when it is not needed.  Unless of course He is not taking an interest in the nation.  Lack of interest compared to a protective interest feels like a curse.  But it is not. It is only nature reasserting itself without God’s active Blessings.  But the next step may be on its way.  It may be even in effect already.  This is the reversal of Blessings into active Curses.  Once this begins we will mourn for the good old days when we were only ignored.  But if we repented and prayed and understood the awesome blessing America had been blessed with, we would recognize in retrospect that which we scorned. We would then be suitably contrite and perhaps we would change our ways and restore the Blessings.  But not if we allow the Algores and the others invested in carbonism whether for money or power convince us the changes are due to our fuel use and have zero moral component.
Does this mean I blame the victims of the recent disasters?  The poor victims of the tornadoes?  No! Absolutely not.  Nations are judged as whole units.  Indeed the God of the Bible has frequently promised blessings and curses to various nations.   The individuals who suffer who are good and decent people add to the general misery of the whole.  Yet whether in life or later, the good and blessed will be rewarded.  Just as most self-centered controlling cut throat businessmen and women do not seem to suffer in this world, and those who seem to suffer in this world have not necessarily done anything worse than the Beemer drivers in their charmed (seeming) lives.
AMERICA IS BEING judged!  We are in the scales right now, and are being found wanting!  We were blessed with much and much was expected.  But now we will discover how much of what we took for granted was due to our own diligence independently of Divine intervention .
Deut. 28 :15 And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant:

16I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.

17And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.

18And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.

19And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:

Am I accusing the victims of these natural disasters of conducting themselves immorally? No.

I am accusing our, my, Nation, of spurning the due recognition of YHVH in our bounty and power. To even mention God in public is to cause embarrassment in all those with whom one is conversing.

Is it possible that no complex native civilization ever arose in the high plains, because of the frequency of this kind of massive storm cell? That our short occupancy has been due to a “fluke”, or better, a blessing that is now being withdrawn?

Evidence for advanced Indian polities is found all the way down the Atlantic Coast. But Florida, seems to have been only sparsely populated by simple societies. Were Hurricanes the norm, and not the exception? Our very brief intimacy with Florida may have allowed a fluke to be interpreted as normal. Or, again, a blessing has been unappreciated, perhaps.

Sophisticated Indian civilizations existed in the Ohio-Mississippi River Valley. Desoto reported seeing thriving cities surrounding massive mounds. From the mound of one city, he was able to see the next city up and down the river.
A century later LaSalle explored the same region, descending the rivers from French Canada.  He found the land uninhabited!   Huge herds of buffalo grazed happily to the edge of the riverbanks.  How did such a change occur?

Desoto’s pigs carried the entire plethora of viruses and bacteria that Eurasia had to offer.  Europeans’ immunity evolved in tandem with their domestication over tens of thousands of years.   Not so the Indians!
Unbeknownst and unplanned by Desoto, his expedition was like a scythe cutting down the entire Mississippian civilization. The vast buffalo herds were not natural, nor were the vast sun-blotting flocks of doves and passenger pigeons. These were resources that the Indians had used, and modified the landscape in order to maximize them. But with the cataclysm of HaTzirah, the pestilences, which wiped out the Indian population, they multiplied into the unnatural numbers seen by LaSalle and later explorers.

But, the interesting thing that occurred to me is that the Mississippi Civilization was centered upon massive Mounds. Why? We have simply presumed that like the pyramids of Egypt, or Mexico they served a purely religious purpose. And so they may have. But, they may also have been the only way to prosper in the Mississippi Valley. The flooding we are seeing was perhaps the rule and not the exception. Another blessing we were not even aware of is being removed.  What we blithely call a “hundred year flood” might have been a mere five year flood.  Our limited experience may have been atypical.  If we had been unknowingly reaping a blessing of diminished flooding the removal of the blessing would restore the natural flood cycles.

Another region where Indian civilization had once been advanced, but has since become ruins and the source of modern Indian tribes’ mythology is the Southwest.  The Hopi mythologies indicate that they are most likely the descendents of an advanced Civilization with towns and cities that speak for a greater level of organization and specialization than remains now.  The size of this ancient civilization pales before the current population of Greater Phoenix and Las Vegas.  Droughts, severe and long lasting may indeed be the rule and not the exception.  The precariousness of rain in that region has been perhaps underappreciated by us, the latest population to migrate into that region.  Our very brief experience there has yet again given us a false sense of its viability.  What was an unappreciated blessing is now being withdrawn.
California, despite its uniquely productive central valley, had the least organized Indian societies encountered by Europeans.  The Spanish found essentially impoverished hunter-gatherers.  Why had they not irrigated the central valley, as the Incas and Mexicans were able to do?  Earthquakes, perhaps were much more powerful and frequent then they have been for our brief period of occupancy.  Another exception to the rule?  Another unnoticed blessing?

The Pacific Northwest is an exception to the most basic understandings of Anthropology.  It was the sight of one of the only advanced societies that developed without agriculture.  The ease of gathering salmon, seafood, and forest products made agriculture superfluous.  The rain catching mountains and fertile soil are the result of active mountain building and vulcanism.  Could the mild climate of the Pacific Northwest be one that is more regularly punctuated by Mount St. Helen-like or larger events?

The Gulf Coast might also have been as bountiful as the Northwest.  But, it was only sparsely inhabited.  Perhaps the hot humid conditions were too unhealthy, too mosquito infested and too prone to hurricanes to allow any complex society from developing.  A return to a more normal hurricane frequency and severity may be on the way.  And the Accepted Wisdom will glibly blame CO2.

Out of the entire continental United States only the original Thirteen Colonies are set in climate and geology that seems to be in the norm, and not just an exceptionally benign period.  It is here, in New England, where the Pilgrims stepped ashore into a post-apocalyptic Indian civilization.  It was this that God had referred to when He said He would proceed ahead and clear the land with His swarms, HaTzirah.  In the Greater Chesapeake, Virginia and in the greater Carolina coastal areas of Charleston and Savannah, other factors including disease drove the natives out.  Unlike the Pilgrims who literally “ate food they had not planted” as God promised the Israelites, God’s Hand is seen though less dramatically in the other Colonies.

So, it appears that the original USA, in its Thirteen States (out of which three new states were carved: Maine, West Virginia, and Vermont, and the District of Columbia) has been given to us more unconditionally than the rest.  But even this portion will be taken from us unless we repent!