Showing posts with label China. Show all posts
Showing posts with label China. Show all posts

Thursday, April 25, 2024

At War with the Beast


There is supposedly an old Chinese curse that has apparently been invoked upon us: “May you live in interesting times.” Interesting. Yes, that would cover it.


Image from here

Recently I listened to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Naomi Wolf. She is a longtime leftist, feminist journalist, who has been what they call “red pilled” since the COVID-19 pandemic. I did not follow her before very recently. But a closer look shows that at least some of what she has always done was actual truth seeking. Even on that “other” side philosophically and politically, she was covering things such as women’s health—actual women’s health, the effect of modern medicine on women’s fertility, and such things, which I would find as common ground.

It must have been that earnest truth seeking that put her on common ground with many of us of this other political and philosophical persuasion, which happened because she was ostracized by “her people” when she looked at data and asked questions. Overnight she went from elite in-crowd status to pariah. Which led, fortunately, eventually, to her finding a whole lot of people she had formerly thought of as intellectual enemies with whom she could have deep and rich conversations.

Image from Amazon
In that interview with Tucker Carlson, she mentioned her recent book, Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age. I got around to reading that this week—still reading, not completely through it yet. The book is mainly about the cultural death spiral that has been happening since—and because of—the pandemic response.

There’s a particular chapter I want to cover today. In it she refers to her 2022 book, The Bodies of Others, which covers a fair amount of detailed research into the pandemic response and Big Pharma. And in looking that up, I find that she’s coming out with a new book this summer, The Pfizer Papers. In this one she and Amy Kelly bring forth the evidence found by volunteer researchers, calling themselves The WarRoom, several thousand medical experts, researchers, and statisticians who went through the FOIA-acquired Pfizer documents, identifying what was known—and hidden—by that pharmaceutical company.

She has offered, therefore, more extensive sources. But this particular chapter of Facing the Beast says some things we ought to grapple with. This is Chapter 11, titled “Facing the Beast,” for which the book is named. She begins with a story of a bear that nearly got the best of her—had her in a panic for a while—at her rural New York home. They had seen that bear as a cub and had not been concerned. They had spotted it off and on as it grew and had not seen the need to run it off. Now it was a young nearly adult bear, lean and hungry, and emboldened because it had been coming close enough and not stopped by the human inhabitants heretofore. So that is a metaphor.

The same week of the bear incident was when she finalized reporting about the Pfizer vaccines, showing, she says, “what I knew for months I would eventually find.”

I’m starting a number of longish quotes now from the chapter (and the footnotes are from her book as well):

The heart of the manufacture and distribution of millions of doses of the mRNA vaccines that have caused such a swath of death and destruction throughout North America and Western Europe is enmeshed with the plans, methods, and manufacturing infrastructure of our existential adversary.

The enemy is within our very bodies.

Since I first started reading the reports produced by the 3,250 medical and scientific experts of the WarRoom/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Volunteers team, based on the 450,000 Pfizer documents released under court order, I knew I was seeing not just medicine gone wrong, not just a greedy pharmaceutical company and a regulatory agency that was fully corrupted, but rather, or additionally, I was seeing a massive act of war.”

It's hard to know how much of this to quote in detail, but here is probably more reading than you want; still, it is only part of one chapter. This first segment itemizes some of the health outcomes—of the “vaccines,” separated from health outcomes caused by the virus itself:

When I saw the eighteen months’ worth of sudden deaths, slow deaths, encephalopathy, strokes, heart attacks, pericarditis, myocarditis, Guillain-BarrĂ©, Bell’s palsy, multiple sclerosis, blood clots, lung clots, leg clots, blue-green breast milk, spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, neonatal seizures, neonatal multiorgan system failure, liver damage, kidney damage, suppressed lactation, suppressed sperm count, disrupted menses, all detailed in the Pfizer documents; when I saw the fact that 34,000 plus of the 42,000 plus “adverse events” case reports—meaning “patients”—itemized in the first three months of the rollout of the Pfizer injections were in the US—with the next largest group being in Western Europe—and that the fifty-six countries around the world that also had Pfizer injections rolled out amounted to only a bit over 7,000 case reports total—I knew I was seeing not just medicine gone wrong on a massive scale, but rather that I was seeing an act of war.

When I saw the doubling of neonatal deaths in country after country, the rise of 34 percent above normal in stillbirths and spontaneous abortions for vaccinated versus unvaccinated mothers; when I saw that 3,816 vaccinated women in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database lot their babies—57 percent of all the neonatal deaths in all the time that VAERS records had been kept[i]; when I saw that of 32 pregnancies followed in the Pfizer documents, 28 of the unborn babies died[ii]; when I saw the rise of 40 percent in maternal death rates[iii] and the shocking rise in cases of disability in the West[iv]--I knew I was not seeing just medicine gone wrong on a massive scale, but that I was witnessing an act of war.

When I saw that you could boost the lethality or the damage caused by the injection by simply changing how dilute the solution is, or simply by reassigning which brand you use—with Moderna (100 mcg) far more damaging than Pfizer (30 mcg)—I knew that I was seeing not just medicine gone wrong on massive scale, but an act of war.

When I saw a study out of Hong Kong in 2021—a study that, of course, was answerable to the CCP—that revealed that a second dose (a “booster”) into the bloodstreams of mice resulted in visibly enlarged hearts with white patches that could be seen by the naked eye, as well as cytokine storms and liver damage, I realized that the two-dose regime and then the “boosters” were slow but progressive ways to damage and then destroy the health of Western patients. The study concluded: “Post-vaccination myopericarditis is reported after immunization with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.”[v]

And yet with this CCP-overseen finding, that by injecting mammals with the mRNA vaccine, their hearts were visibly damaged, the worldwide injection program kept going—I knew that I was seeing not just medicine gone wrong on massive scale, but an act of war.

You will have noticed by now the repetition of realizing this is an act of war. Wars tend to be geopolitical. This one included:

We were told that Pfizer/BioNTech is a German collaboration. But it is actually a German-Chinese company. Since I first found that Pfizer/BioNTech had an MOU (memorandum of understanding) with Fosun Pharmaceuticals, a major CCP-linked pharmaceutical company based in Shanghai, to make the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccines,[vi] I knew that with a bit more digging I would find China at the heart of these acts of war.

As Wolf found, Fosun is not separate from the CCP; it is the CCP; Fosun acquired almost half of Sinopharm.[vii] Sinopharm is owned by the Chinese state and reports directly to the CCP. All BioNTech/Fosun joint ventures’ activity is in China or thereabouts or in regions closely aligned with China. But they are not limited there; Fosun Pharmaceuticals USA is located in Boston and Princeton, and sends out products throughout the US and around the world. This includes PCR tests.

Wolf comments:

This is crucial. Fosun Pharmaceuticals does not just partner with Pfizer/BioNTech to make the COVID-19 vaccines; they make, as noted, the PCR tests that are the one primary metric that determines the scale of the pandemic in North America and Western Europe and thus the lockdowns of whole countries, whole industrial sectors.

A CCP-run company, and CCP-created product, thus, decides—who can go to work or school, who must close his or her shop, who can or cannot travel—in Europe and the US. A CCP-run company decides the formulation of the PCR and antigen tests that have gone deep into the nasopharyngeal cavities of Westerners who were forced, week after week, to test and test and test with these products.

This CCP-owned hybrid entity is creating the diagnostic instruments that determine the scale of pandemics in the West. The CCP can thus dial it up or down.

It also makes millions of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA injections, the Merck COVID-19 pill Molnupiravir, the Pfizer COVID-19 pill Paxlovid—for which Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla signed a contract with the US government to provide 10 million doses for $5.29 billion in 2022—all this for the US and for ten other countries including those in the EU.[viii]

These are all formulated and distributed by a company leading directly to the Chinese Communist Party.

Now the tie-in to the treason of our erstwhile president:

When President Biden does a deal with Pfizer/BioNTech in the millions of dollars, with our tax money, he is giving a substantial portion of the funds to China. When he spends tax dollars via omnibus bills for PPE, including millions for PCR and antigen tests, he is writing checks to—China….

BioNTech’s SEC filing reports as, 100 percent achieved, a tech transfer to—China. Not to a “Chinese company” or a “Chinese individual” but to the country of—China.[ix]

She doesn’t condemn Biden enough, in my opinion; although I’d say he and his family crime enterprise are bit players in this worldwide criminal enterprise. But there is enough evidence to hold them accountable for their role—if we had a justice system inclined to do so.

Wolf spends some time detailing drops in birth rates around the world—in the wake of the vaccine (again, separated from damage caused by the virus itself. Birth rates in the West have declined 13 to 20 percent.

·        Germany’s live births dropped 9.5% for one month.

·        Sweden’s live births dropped 13% for the month of October 2022.

·        UK’s live births dropped 15.3% (through June 2022, at which point they quit counting).

·        California’s live births dropped 5% over the year of 2022.[x]

She had earlier pointed out the cruelty of forcing healthy young people to get vaccinated, people in the military and in healthcare, and students in college who were very unlikely to be at risk from the virus. Now there is this loss of reproduction. She says,

How better to cripple the world’s other superpower than by destroying our American front lines and our American next generation, with tainted, murderous vaccines, flowed easily enough into the West via (not even that many) shell companies and cutouts? How easy to do the same to Western Europe, to Canada and Australia, as a whole?

Take all of the above and consider that the virus originated in China; and now all of the testing apparatuses, as well as millions of the vaccines, the catastrophically damaging or lethal “solutions” to the virus, also all originate from the same folks—the same leadership cadre that brought the world forced abortions, citizens welded into their homes, Uighur concentration camps, and organ harvesting.

I made the case in my book The Bodies of Others that a transnational group of bad actors—including the WEF, the WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, tech companies, and the CCP—used the pandemic to crush humanity and to destroy the West.

With the provenance of the vaccines and tests, you can see yet another mechanism, yet another core methodology of this warfare.

Mapping these points of evidence, I think you may start to see what I see.

You decide.

Meanwhile, we need to turn and face the ravening beast.

The beast isn’t just China, then. It is also the Biden family, and Fauci, and the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization, Bill Gates, tech and pharmaceutical companies. AND ALL OF THE PEOPLE WHO WENT ALONG WITH THEM.

There’s a chapter where Wolf talks about a visit to Yale, her alma mater. They sold, for money, bodies that weren’t theirs. Wolf calls them out for human trafficking. There were young, healthy people there, being forced to take something into their body that could do them permanent harm. It occurred to her that, in trafficking cases, you follow the money.

It turns out, Yale took in more money from HHS than from tuition. Billions over several years. In 2022 Yale received $607 million from HHS, versus $475 from tuition. “So Yale is trafficking the bodies of its students to please HHS and to keep that spigot open.[xi]” And Yale also took from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others. Oh, and there was the building of a $35 million facility—from Pfizer, for Pfizer’s benefit, to do drug trials. Hmm.

She ends that chapter with this summary of that formerly honorable institution of learning:

Yale was a raddled old madam, after all.

Addicted to the money.

And buying and selling, with an icy heart, the bodies of her young.

I’m somewhat puzzled still to be among those that saw through the lies almost from the very beginning. Many good, well-meaning people did not. Some still do not.

I have had bad reactions to vaccines in the past, and a number of other chemicals and substances that are harmless to most people. So I knew I would never take a vaccine, and I was highly motivated to look for other ways to avoid the illness. I also wasn’t coerced because of work, which I do from home. So I don’t blame everyone who gave in. But, as Wolf laments in her book, it was traumatizing to be put through the ostracizing and shaming of people who failed to see what we saw. It was also traumatizing for people who woke up later—maybe after damage was done to them or their loved ones. But there are others, calmly returning to life as before, who still don’t know what we know.

We still do not know the long-term effects on everyone who took the injections. While percentages of adverse reactions are high, that doesn’t mean everyone gets them. Most do not, at least so far. I hope their bodies continue to function well despite the injection of this poison. But I really hope they wake up and don’t risk yet another booster.

As an aside, for members of my faith, there was a recent scolding of us who have resisted the coercion for more than two years so far, which made its way around social media (discussions here, here, and here); this came from people (in another state) who were clearly wrong according to facts, and also wrong on the doctrine. That happens with humans, unfortunately. There’s a good discussion that I’m in agreement with from Christian Fire Poppy, here. In short, we're never asked to follow blindly; we are each entitled to confirmation, direction, and inspiration for ourselves from the Holy Spirit. OK, back to our post.


three responses of church members, screenshot from here
 

In a later chapter, Wolf refers to Jonathan Cahn’s Return of the Gods as an explanation of the evil we are facing. Wolf has become more religious (she is Jewish, married to an Irish Catholic) as a result of facing the beast.

I have been religious all along. I also find Cahn’s explanation useful. This much evil is hard to explain in mere mortal terms.

I’ve talked about “the beasts” of Revelation before. The sea beast of Revelation 13 is a worldwide cabal, a combination of nations and other entities of power— “a transnational group of bad actors,” as Wolf said earlier. In my faith we have additional terms: the whore of all the earth, secret combinations, Gadianton robbers, the great and abominable church. All these, I believe, are the “sea beast” of Revelation 13. This beast is upheld and given voice by a second beast, the land beast, or false speaker. I call this one the “propaganda beast.” It is the PR assistant of the sea beast. Both together are controlled by a third beast, the dragon, a designation for Satan himself.


La BĂȘte de la Mer, a medieval tapestry depicting John the Revelator
seeing the dragon and the sea beast from Rev. 13

If you need to think of these things as metaphors, symbolically, you do that. They are presented symbolically. But symbols are intended to help us quickly understand complex things with many layers of meaning.

So, the beast we are facing is purely evil. There is no better description for an “entity,” or combination of evil players, who would purposely murder hundreds of millions of people, injure the health of possibly billions more people, and decline and put at risk any upcoming generation. Those who would do that are doing more evil than was done in Nazi Germany, or in the USSR, or Communist China over time. In just a year or two, there are more deaths and more lives injured—and not because they didn’t know better. They knew. They hid the information. They coerced. They prevented use of easily available and inexpensive solutions.

This “entity” hates humanity.

The pandemic and the vaccines and their associated damage are only one aspect of the damage done by the Revelation beasts. The loss of our God-given freedoms, here and around the world, are part of it. The forced taxation to promote and continue wars and killings are part of it. The hatred of all that is good. The lies. The deceptions.

While we’re better off facing this beast—always by standing firm on the truth—than we would be giving in, we are going to need divine intervention to win this war. The good news is: God wins.

 



[i] Art Moore, “CDC Database Shows Death Risk for Babies of Vaccinated Mothers,” Clark County Today, June 11, 2022.

[iii] Maternal mortality rates almost doubled from prior years’ rates, in 2021: Laura Santhanam, “US Maternal Mortality Spiked During the Worst Days of COVID, NewData Shows,” PBS.org, March 16, 2023.

[iv] Rajesh Taylor, “Further Disturbing Rates of Disability and Mortality in Life Insurance Data Since Dovid Vaccine Rollout,Rajesh Taylor Journal, February 5, 2022, updated September 14, 2022.

[v] Can Li et al., “Intravenous Injection of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (V=COVID-19) mRNA Vaccine Can Induce Acute Myopericarditis in Mouse Model,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 74., no. 11 (June 2022): 1933-50.

[vi] BioNTech’s SEC filing shows that the memorandum of understanding with Fosun Pharmaceuticals includes an equity investment by Fosun in BioNTech. In other words, the CCP is an equity investor in BioNTech: “As part of the strategic alliance with Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical (Group) Co., Ltd (“Fosun Pharma”; Stock Symbol: 600196.SH, 02196.HK) whereby the two companies will work together on the development of BNT162 in China, Fosun agreed to make an equity investment which was received in mid-April 2020 The issuance of 1,580,777 ordinary shares with the nominal amount of k€ 1,581 was registered within the commercial register (Handelsregister) as of April 23, 2020.” Not only that but: “Ai-Min Hui, President of Global R&D, and Chief Medical Officer of Fosun Pharma said: “We are closely working with BioNTech and regulatory authorities to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the vaccine candidate, in order to synchronize the development process in China with other countries, and to bring the vaccine to public as soon as possible, if the vaccine succeeds.” BioNTech and Fosun Pharma, “BioNTech and Fosun Pharma Announce Start of Conical Trial of mRNA-based COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate in China” (press release), United States Securities and Exchange Commission, August 5, 2020.

[vii] In 2003 Fosun Pharmaceutical acquired 49% stake of Sinopharm Group… In 2008, a year before the initial public offering of Sinopharm Group Fosun Pharmaceutical owned the direct parent company of Sinopharm Group, Sinopharm Industrial Investment instead; the majority owner of the joint venture was state-owned China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm).” [2003 Annual Report] (PDS). Fosun Industrial, April 24, 2004; retrieved 5 August 5, 2018, via Shanghai Stock Exchange website August 4, 2014; retrieved August 5, 2018, via Sina; 2009 [2009 Annual Report]. Fosun Pharmaceutical, March 25, 2010; retrieved August 5, 2018, via Shanghai Stok Exchange website. “Connection Transaction” (press release). Shanghai: Fosun International, June 29, 2008.

[ix] BioNTech, “Performance Targets 2021 Financial Year,” BioNTech United States Securities and Exchange Commission Form 6-K, April 2022.

[x] Igor Chudov, “Dramatic Decline in Births in Germany,” Igor’s Newsletter, June 25, 2022.

[xi] Harvey Oxenhorn, “Body and Soul at Yale,” Malwords Weekly, December 11, 2022.



Tuesday, August 4, 2020

About China

Maybe we ought to take a day and look at China. It’s far away, but around 20% of the world’s population are ethnically Chinese. As of today, China itself has a population of 1,439,843,350.   or 18.47% of the world’s population. More people speak Chinese than any other language. More people use the internet in Chinese than any other language. And lately they’ve been affecting the world.

Did you know, besides the pandemic, which started there, they’re also suffering floods, famine, and locusts? [See The Epoch Times, July 8, 2020, pp. 1, 11, “Natural Disasters Rage Across China, Affecting Tens of Millions”] It sounds biblical.

As of nearly a month ago, they had already had weeks of torrential rainfall, flooding 26 provinces across central and southern China, affecting 19 million people. Particularly hard hit with rain was Hubei province, where Wuhan is the capital—ground zero of the virus outbreak.

It’s China's monsoon season, and they’ve been having what are called 100-year floods, although the rainfall was similarly heavy as recent as the 1980s. But here in Houston, we know how that goes. A 500-year flood can come the year after a 100-year flood. And probably will.

They have built a series of dams along the Yangtze River intended to control flooding. But currently the overcapacity at some upstream dams is overwhelming the huge Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant. There are cracks. Things are so dire that the government—which tightly controls any news to its people—put out a video illustrating the flooding that could happen if the Three Gorges Dam should break. I believe one town was already wiped out; the people are thanked for their sacrifice, but they are not compensated or helped to start over. Hundreds of towns and cities could be wiped out, if the dam breaks. [You can read more here, and here.] 

If/when the dam breaks, besides the towns and cities built along the river, hundreds of miles of farmland would be wiped out. That area produces, for example, 20% of the world’s corn. Food shortages are already a concern, and some of the corn they had stored has become rotten.

Beyond the pandemic and flooding, additional disasters have caused suffering to 50 million, with several hundred dead or missing.

Among the additional disasters, swarms of locusts are attacking crops in various places across the country. It was early June when a locust invasion hit Hunan Province. Quanzhou, an agricultural area in the south of the country had ten days of this particular plague, which consumed corn, grain, and orange trees, and also willow trees intended to prevent flooding along riverbanks.

And did I mention, China’s hog population was hit with African swine fever, which can, according to the National Academy of Sciences, spread among humans. See H1N1, the flu pandemic of 2009, which seems to live on in thousands of some 30,000 hogs.

Here’s another thing: they just had snow. In July. During the middle of summer. It’s not a heavy snow, about 0.4 inches accumulating. And it melts quickly. But still, we think that’s a rare occurrence in Houston in December. It’s hard to imagine in July. 


Summer snow in China
screenshot from here

It’s not the first time it has ever happened, although it’s rare. They have an ancient Chinese tradition that when it snows in summer, it is a sign of injustice that even the heavens are aware of. You might say they have plenty of injustices to attribute it to. First of all, causing a worldwide pandemic. But there's plenty more.

China was recently forced to close their consulate in Houston, for spying. There is probably international espionage involved as well, but most of the stories related to trying to gain technology and intellectual knowledge, particularly medical knowledge most immediately. And there was an organization used to spy on Chinese citizens who are studying here. Their movements and speech, including their online presence, are monitored and controlled, and they are expected to do the CCP's (Chinese Communist Party’s) bidding.

Here are a handful of recent stories related to China’s spying:

·       FBI Looking into Possible Chinese Spying onUT’s COVID Research

·       Chinese Consulate in San Francisco Is Harboringa Military-Linked Researcher Wanted for Visa Fraud, FBI Says”  

·       Warning: American Communist Groups Join Forces toUndermine Trump Administration Policy on China through Front Group ‘Pivot To Peace’”

·      "Democrat Traitors Stand by China’s Spy Consulates"

·       In Pushing Back against China, U.S. Finds FewAllies,” which goes on to say, “Too many freedom-loving nations fear economic retaliation.”

There are big concerns for people in Hong Kong, since the CCP has reneged on the two-systems policy it promised as the UK returned Hong Kong to China. People who were used to freedom to do business and express themselves and have a reliable rule of law are not succumbing willingly to corrupt communist tyranny.

There’s the addition of particular animus against religion. The Uyghurs have been imprisoned and enslaved in the northwest of the country. And all over Christians have been persecuted. Organ harvesting is one of the ghoulish practices the CCP inflicts on the non-compliant. [See The Epoch Times, 7-15-2020, p. 16 “The Legacy of a Failing Campaign of Evil”]


From The Epoch Times, July 15, 2020, p. 16


Just recently the CCP has been using the coronavirus as an excuse for additional crackdowns against Christian house churches. They have required both Mao’s and current President Xi Jinping’s pictures to be placed on the pulpit, and for the CCP anthem to be sung. They pressure the poor to abandon their religion in order to receive aid.

You can read more here (“China’s Repression of Religion GetsWorse”) and here (“Religious Freedom in China: The Case of BishopJames Su Zhimin”). 

I’m no expert on China. But I’m observing and wondering. What if the anomalies that look biblical actually are a wake-up call for Chinese people to turn away from their dictatorial government and toward a benevolent God who is waiting and wanting their return to Him?

Return? But they’ve never been a Christian country, right? Well…

Some years ago I came across a video that was talking about the biblical meanings of Chinese characters—that the stories are depicted in the very words they write all the time. I went looking for that video. I’m not sure I found it, but if it wasn’t this one, it was a very similar presentation.  The YouTube post dates it at 2011, but the speaker, Kong Hee, a pastor in Singapore, mentions the year as 2009.

There’s a bit of history at the beginning. The three major religions in China are Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. These all three appeared near the same time period, around 600-700 BC. But written Chinese history goes back to about 2500 BC. What did people believe for those previous almost 2000 years?

They believed in one supreme God, whom they called Shang Di. The written word for Shang Di shows, big, with more on top, or highest above all—the one Supreme God.

Shang Di, the name for the Most High God,
if formed as big, with bigger on top.
Screenshot from here


Other words tell more stories from Genesis. One example he gives is the word for Create,  zao. There was speaking, words. Then, when words were spoken, movement happened. In the character for create, then, is the concept that when God spoke the words, living things began to move—to have life.

Create, zao, character
composite of screenshots from here


Another example is Garden, yuan.  In this one, there’s the character for clay, and an open mouth to show God breathed. And then there was a man, and from his side a woman, and He put them in a garden. The word garden contains the story of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden.

Garden, yuan, character
composite screenshots from here


The presentation goes on, with many more examples. Sometimes he is using ancient traditional characters; I don’t know how those may differ from what is currently used. But it’s a fascinating look at something unexpected.

It does corroborate a theory I have, as a believer. I believe the ancient people started with the same religion. The true religion, of Adam and Eve, and on down to Noah, and beyond—that is the ancestor religion for all people. That is why so many stories from so many cultures include creation stories, and stories of a great deluge, and others we would find versions of in the Old Testament, particularly Genesis.

I do not think Jesus Christ invented a new religion; I think all true religion leads to Christ, and always has.

If that is so, then is it possible that the current upheaval in China could be a call to the righteous there to turn to Christ? They haven’t had much opportunity, and yet Christianity thrives there, in the hearts of the people who find it. If their brutal, corrupt dictatorship should fall, because of so many plagues and disasters and uncontrollable events, could that lead to an opening up that could make space for a return, if you will, to a former truth and peace?

I don’t know how things will play out. But my optimism tells me to watch, and pray for those people. Among that fifth of the world’s population must be many good-hearted people who would enjoy freedom,prosperity, and civilization—what we might call gospel peace—if only they had the opportunity to choose those things.


Thursday, August 14, 2014

Chinese Food for Thought


This past week a colleague of Mr. Spherical Model was in town from China. He is a Chinese native, but an employee of the same US-based company Mr. Spherical Model works for. Whenever he comes to town, we try to go to dinner. Usually we go to a Chinese restaurant, but this time we went Texan and had steak. (He had lobster, which we also had last time at an Asian restaurant.)
Chinese dragon medallion;
our Chinese friends always bring a gift
Much of the conversation was work related, which was necessary. But we also had enough time to learn quite a lot about China.
Many of the Chinese who come here adopt an American name, to make pronunciation easier for the rest of us, so for our purposes here, we’ll call our friend Lee. He is forty-ish, married, I’m unaware of any child. Unlike most Chinese, he is Christian. Or at least his wife is Christian. She works for an international Christian non-profit. One of the things she works to accomplish is the rescue of children with relatively small deformities, such as cleft palate, who would otherwise be disposed of (put to death). I don’t know how that works, but there must be some secretly working with hospital nurses to smuggle such children out. They send them to the US or elsewhere, where they get the surgery they need. And he didn’t spell it out, but I think they are then put up for adoption—although I suppose it’s possible their parents want them and wanted the disallowed surgery for them, and somehow arrange to get them back.
He told us about religion in China. And here I’m not certain whether all of it applies to Buddhism and Confucianism, or just to Christianity and other non-standard religions or philosophies. Anyway, most churches are public churches. The government does the hiring of clergy. The government determines much of the doctrine. Mainly, the order of priorities is loyalty first to the government, and then to God and family and community. In other words, it is dogma that government is the greatest force in the universe, but as long as you acknowledge that, then you can be allowed to believe in God if you want to.
This is an improvement, certainly, over Mao’s cultural revolution, which did away with religion entirely. And it is also a huge improvement over just a couple of decades ago when bringing a Bible into the country was illegal.
The non-public option is the family church. Technically they’re not legal. There’s no freedom of assembly, so if you have more than, say, seven people gathered, you have to report all the names and the purpose of the meeting. You might be able to call it a training meeting, but then, after not too long, the government will start interrogating all the attendees, asking why they need so much training. So it’s better to limit to just a few friends. If too many show up, you might get away with separating into two groups in separate rooms, if you’re lucky.
The difficulty with these family churches is that you can’t determine truth, or doctrine. It’s just the opinions of whoever happens to show up a specific week. It will be someone different, putting forth different opinions, the next time. Lee went with this option for a while but got frustrated with it.
He mentioned one man, a Christian, who had a practice every Friday of inviting a friend in (not someone he worked with) to come to his office and study scriptures—from 11:00 till 2:00. If you’re a good Christian, that’s not the way to show devotion; you have promised those hours to your employer, and if you do something other than work during work hours, you’re not meeting your commitment to your employer. That is clearly wrong; you should do your study on your own time, Lee said.
We talked a bit about the one-child policy. It is very real. I asked how that would affect a Chinese person who lives in the US. Lee would very much like to have that opportunity. And it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. It also seems quite possible for Chinese workers at American countries, who come to work in the US, to become US citizens. For those of us who lived through the Cold War with the USSR and the stricter communist years of China past, this still seems surprising.
Lee mentioned one famous actor (not by name), who made his fame in movies in the US and in China. While in the US he had a long-time live-in girlfriend whom he eventually married, and they had three children together. But he decided not to renounce his Chinese citizenship, and to move back—Lee was still surprised by this, the only person in such a position that he knew of who chose to stay Chinese rather than choose the freedom of the US. But once he and family got back to China, he became subject to the one-child law. He was forced to pay about a million dollars per child for breaking the law. Only because he was a famous actor could he have that option.
At one point, Lee was talking about the differences between government over-control—which is frustrating but often manageable if you don’t fight it—and the chaos of lack of government control. I can’t remember the examples now, of where they were even allowed to have chaos. Maybe it was just the threat of chaos if there wasn’t enough control. Mr. Spherical Model tried suggesting that I write about such things, but I didn’t see a way to suddenly explain the northern hemisphere of freedom without taking over the conversation, so I didn't introduce him to the Spherical Model.
After dinner we brought Lee back to our house, to visit a bit longer. He said, “I love American houses!” And he said a house like ours would cost $2 million in China. For perspective, the median home price in Houston, as of a year ago, was about $185,000. Our home value is well below that. It’s the nicest house I’ve ever lived in, but there are plenty that are bigger and nicer. He was also amazed at the size of our back yard—which, we were shocked to learn when moving here, is measured in square feet, rather than portions of an acre. I think it’s around an 8th of an acre—so, a postage stamp-sized lot. But we have a few trees, a shed, and a garden.
Chinese knot,
a gift from another Chinese friend
Mr. Spherical Model pointed out that a house like this would cost nearly a couple million in downtown San Francisco as well, so location matters. But here in the US, generally a relatively successful middle-class worker can live in a comfortable house like this. In China (or the people’s republic of San Francisco) a two-bedroom apartment is about all you have to look forward to.
A couple of days after the dinner, I was flipping through channels while fixing dinner and watched a portion of the 1982 movie Night Crossing [with John Hurt and Beau Bridges], about a family that escapes from East Germany in a homemade hot air balloon. The wife of the escaping family has a conversation with her mother, whom they have not informed of their plans. She asks, “Have you ever thought about applying to emigrate?” The mother’s answer was no, not unless things got a lot worse than they were then.
There was no freedom to move about the country, nor to travel elsewhere. There was little choice about where to work, and a lot of explaining about any use of free time, or use of resources. Things we take for granted, still, were significant difficulties for the East Germans. But there was enough food to avoid starvation, there was shelter, there was work. It was hard on the human spirit, but not impossible to live through.
Most of the people in the world through history have lived in such times—dependent on the limited tyranny of the potentate.
Last week we also talked with our son stationed in South Korea, and he talked a bit about North Korea. The people there are the most isolated in the world. They are told their country is the best in the world, and no evidence to the contrary is allowed in. But people are starving and struggling in significant ways. Occasionally someone tries to escape. But if they escape into China, they get picked up and returned. If they escape to South Korea, they will probably be assumed to be a spy and summarily shot. They’re on a peninsula; there aren’t a lot of escape options. So they continue trapped by their tyrannical government.
Eventually world pressure (such as Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” speech) caused the German wall to crumble. Korea’s “wall” has held firm for almost sixty years, and the people get very little opportunity to even dream of better. I don’t know what will happen in China's future. For the sake of its economy—because no socialist state can continue economically after it uses up the capital built up during freer markets—China has allowed more free trade, better education, and therefore more exposure to the amazing (by comparison) wealth of the free world. And their people want it.
I think it is true that human nature yearns for freedom, and wants to pursue personal dreams and work of our choosing. I hope China is able to peacefully gain more and more freedom—in a violence-free revolution against tyranny. The people themselves are not our enemies; they want much of what we want, as they become familiar with what we have.
I also hope that we do not let our freedoms further erode, just because too many of us tolerate sinking into the southern tyranny sphere just because things aren’t impossible to tolerate yet.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Distortions


I’ve been traveling, for a niece’s wedding, so I appreciate my son Political Sphere filling in for me last week. (I’d like him to write more here, but it’s not that easy to fit writing time into a busy law-student life, so we appreciate what we can get.)
It’s been a week since I finished reading the latest book club book, but it’s still on my mind. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a novel by Lisa See, about the life of women in pre-modern China. Her writing is well done, and her research is thorough. Still, it takes something of a strong stomach to read this. I kept having two competing thoughts: I thought ancient China was always held up as one of the world’s great civilizations. But this is not civilization.
The Spherical Model description of civilization is different from the usual. You’ll probably see large cities, great art and architecture, and books and learning. But there’s more. Here’s a review of what civilization looks like:
In the northern circle that is the goal—Civilization—families typically remain intact, and children are raised in loving homes, with caring parents who guide their education and training, dedicating somewhere between 18 and 25 years for that child to reach adulthood, and who then remain interested in their children’s success for the rest of their lives.
Civilized people live peaceably among their neighbors, helping rather than taking advantage of one another, abiding by laws enacted to protect property and safety—with honesty and honor. Civilized people live in peace with other civilized people; countries and cultures coexist in appreciation, without fear.
There is a thriving free-enterprise economy. Poverty is meaningless; even though there will always be a lowest earning 10% defined as poor, in a civilized society these lowest earners have comfortable shelter and adequate food and clothing—and there’s the possibility of rising, or at least for future generations to rise.
Creativity abounds; enlightening arts and literature exceed expectations. Architecture and infrastructure improve; innovation and invention are the rule.
People feel free to choose their work, their home, their family practices, their friendships and associations. And they generally self-restrain before they infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. Where there are questions about those limits, laws are in place to help clarify boundaries of civilized behavior. When someone willingly infringes on the rights or safety of another, the law functions to protect that victim as well as society from further uncivilized behavior from the offender.
What we see in the world Lisa See shows us has a lot of poverty, even among the more well off. There is some possibility of rising from a lower class to one a little higher, but it takes a lot of luck and favoritism. Most disturbing, among many cruelties, is the disdain for women. Everyone accepts this, including the women. They all know that only boy babies have value. A woman’s only value is accrued by birthing boy babies. And her only hope is to get the opportunity to marry up and provide sons—and then there is some respect for her in her old age, which is likely to end around age 40 (but in this novel, the storyteller lives to an unusually ancient 80-something).
How does a woman gain the interest of a husband who might be a step up? (Rather, she gains the interest of the families and matchmakers who arrange the whole thing; the husband won't know her before the marriage.) She must be trained to serve and meet his every need—while moving around on tiny feet. Very tiny. The size of a thumb. Which is, of course, not physiologically possible. So the way they get to this goal is to take young girls, starting around age 6, and binding their feet, breaking the bones and distorting them to fold under themselves into a grotesque and unusable stubbiness. A woman can, if lucky, sway “gracefully” to get slowly from spot to spot. But walking distances is made undoable. So, even though poverty-stricken, she cannot travel without bearers carrying her on a palanquin, or with some man being willing to give her a piggyback ride. She spends her days either in the kitchen, doing her drudgery while handicapped, or in an upstairs room, doing hand-sewing and looking out on the world she hasn’t been able to experience since early childhood.
The author gives a fair amount of detail about that binding process—the pain inflicted by the elder women, with a distorted combination of passing on the pain they experienced and fear that if they don’t do it, they condemn the daughter to a life of enslavement. Infection and death are relatively common, but considered worth the risk. The pain would probably be less if feet were simply amputated.
One insight from the book is that, despite their efforts to the contrary, parents do have caring feelings for their daughters; they can’t help themselves. Even in these often unhealthy family situations, love for family is practically unconquerable.
The distortion, however, got me thinking. There were, of course, some signs of civilization in China. Those could only appear where the laws of civilization are followed. But the decay tends to accompany and tear down. The foot-binding had to be such a decay, a distortion of what is beauty.
Do we have distortions in our world? I think we do.
Stratification is always a problem: the belief that one level of people is more innately valuable than others, by virtue of birth circumstances, rather than character. Blind justice, and the American Dream of being able to work hard and move up—those are civilized ideas most of the world, now and historically, has failed to experience.
Then there’s the decay-inducing problem of objectifying people. Whether it is women who are objectified, or people of a race or other group, it’s wrong. And yet we have signs of it increasing around us. The idea that a woman is only lovable/valuable if she looks like a sex object (a standard even Victoria's Secret models don’t meet without photo editing) is a distortion. Real women don’t typically look like that. Real women have all kinds of varieties of shapes and sizes that can all be beautiful. The belief that only those who fit the model deserve love—and the accompanying wealth and happiness that are supposed to come from marrying up—leads to bodily distortions: anorexia and other eating disorders, obsession with exercise to earn worth rather than to improve health, botox, breast implants and other body-and-face-reshaping plastic surgery…. There may be healthy reasons for some of those things (recovery from scars of accident or cancer surgery, for example), but earning worthiness to be loved is not one of them.
Another distortion of womanhood is the idea that being less like a woman and more like a man leads to greater value. Running the business, being ruthlessly dedicated to the job, instead of tied down to family—as if that makes a woman more valuable than making the choice to be a mother who raises children. If a woman has to choose against her nature, in order to “earn” her worth, is that any less distorting than foot-binding?
If I spent more time on this reflection, I’m sure I’d find more distress signals of decay in our civilization. But this is enough for one post.
It continues to be true that civilization—growth into thriving civilization, and keeping it—requires living the laws of civilization. The formula always includes honoring and obeying God, who provides us with our inalienable rights—and worth; and protecting and preserving family as the basic unit of society, in order to teach the love for one another (and ourselves) that God wants us to enjoy. Whatever “foot-binding” we come upon, let’s stop it, and love each other instead, as innately valuable children of God.