While doing a deep dive into Western philosophical development and how nominalism was merely the application of legal voluntarism to the rest of philosophy, a historical observation that explains the modern divergence between Orthodoxy and Rome on how Canons work became quite obvious. The word canon, or *kanon* is a Rhomaic term, κανών. Canon means a measuring stick, like a ruler. The Eastern Fathers as well as the Church in the West pre-Schism looked at Canons as rules to use for measuring order and practice of an individual as well as a community. They were criteria for measuring spiritual health of a body, not statutes decreed by a sovereign. The word for the latter, laws, is *nomos*, νόμος in Rhomaic. The two were separate categories in the Pre-Schism era, with them continuing to be so in the Orthodox world.

The Justinian code was the Nomos of Byzantium, the only collection of nomos blessed by the Church in history. Nomos matches the Medieval concept of Law and Canon in the West. Canons were pastoral rules, Nomos laws. In the East under Symphonia Nomos was proper to the Emperor, Canons to the Church and the local Bishop who interpreted and ruled how canons were executed in his diocese. Around 1100 AD the West, cut off from the East, they rediscovered the Justinian Code in Bologna, launching a Renaissance in Western Law. Law faculties arose in universities previously focused on training priests, with the West adopting Byzantium’s entire legal technical apparatus for the first time. In the wake of ultramontanism with the Papacy securing direct control and supremacy over the Western Synods, from the Council of Burgos securing Spain in 1080 to the blessing of the Norman Conquest of William the Conqueror, Gratian launched a campaign to synthesize all local canons into one centralized list of canons that covered everything in the same manner as the Nomos of Imperial law in Byzantium. His Decretum laid out contradictory canons from different places side-by-side, then resolved the conflict through the same technical legal reasoning of Justinian’s civil code. Canons written for a specific time in a specific place for a specific people facing a specific spiritual problem, IE pastoral rulings, became jurisprudence. The rise of legal departments in the Universities cross-pollinated the legal framework to the Western Church approach to canons. This abandonment of pastoral rules for jurisprudence cemented the plenitudo potestatis of the Papacy in the time of Pope Innocent III. As the highest judge in the Church, his decisions were absolute in a way they were not before and could not be abrogated by inferior members, something that would shock the members of the Church at the times of Pope Honorius I and Pope Vigilius.

Orthodoxy never had a Gratian moment as it never had a conflation of civil and church authority like what happened in the West where the Church pursued supreme civil authority. The Patriarchates of the East never took the legal science of the civil sphere and applied it to its canons, instead producing annotated compilations that attached patristic interpretation to each Canon to reveal the pastoral goal of each. The Rudder is the most important compilation of the last three hundred years, and it is in no way a legislative code like the Decretum. This is why today the approach towards canons in the East remains therapeutic, where as in the west it is jurisprudence. In the East the idea of a Canon being self-applying is a contradiction, as a pastoral rule must be exercised by one with pastoral authority, where as in the West the canons took on a role independent of the Bishops and thus the sedevacantist argument hinging on the self-applying nature of canons. Even in the Petrine Captivity of late Tsarist Russia, the Church maintained the distinction between Nomos and Canon, a distinction that disappeared in the West within two centuries of the Great Schism. A fork in Schism one thousand years ago led to a fork in the nature of canons less than two hundred years later. For those who wonder why can’t the two just reunite, this dramatic shift in the nature of Canons is but one massive fundamental divergence between the two that all originated in just one word of difference in the Creed.

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Cash for clunkers back in the Obama era supposedly aimed to improve the efficiency of the vehicle fleet on the roads. Within two presidential terms even the most junior mechanic recognized that the true purpose of the policy was to eliminate reliable cars off the road. Today even Honda who historically made bullet proof engines has engines in commuter cars blowing up within forty thousand miles. The CAFE fuel standard requirements force ever more complexity to extract efficiency out of engines at the cost of reliability and even higher total emissions when considering the reduced lifespan of vehicles requires them to be replaced more often. Noticeably going down from two liters to one and a half liters with a turbocharger to eke out a few more mpg on a closed circuit guarantees quality degradation that reduces the car engine to mileages comparable to a Harley Davidson air-cooled motorcycle engine. Turbochargers also reduce real-world fuel efficiency even though they increase the mileage in closed circuit testing. All this while the Feds push for ever higher ethanol content in gas that further degrades engines and fleet fuel efficiency.

The Big Beautiful Bill aimed to reduce the impact of CAFE through reducing the fine for violating down to zero. In theory this should allow the return of reliable cars on the road, however it fails to do so. The NHTSA manages CAFE and had a simultaneous rule change that eliminated the effect of electric vehicles on fleet mpg targets. What this means is the existing targets in CAFE now have to be met solely by gas and diesel engines, with no offset gains from electric car sales being averaged in with mpg equivalents of 80+ miles per gallon. This makes the CAFE targets that continue to slowly rise in the future even harder to achieve, putting pressure to continue making ever-more unreliable engines. Now the fine for violation is currently zero dollars, but all it takes is one administration to simply increase the fine to whatever arbitrary number and the vehicle companies will find themselves with a tougher standard than what they had before. Given how capital expenditure cycles and return on capital works, any car company that starts building more reliable engines risks bankruptcy given the political risk from administration change.

Compare to the Swedish monarchs who grew massive forests over centuries for long-term national gain, they never had to worry about a democratic government flipping its mind every four to eight years deciding to chop down the forest for usury-fueled cheap modern development. Libertarians may object saying the forests in the end were a failure in that the Swedish crown grew the trees for its navy where by World War I steel was the basis of a strong navy. History observes that the Swedish forests had many positive externalities for the Swedish people, and even when their original purpose no longer existed, long-term plans executed over decades tend to work out far better than planning for the next quarter or the next election cycle. The unreliability of democracy and republics make long-term planning untenable, the choices firms and people make focus on risk-mitigation, not long-term optimization or antifragility. Better to guarantee you have something than risk losing everything over political whims. The only tangible changes in the auto industry is the shutdown of electric vehicle production, with tooling reused for hybrid production. For gas and diesel vehicles no one is bringing back the bulletproof engines of Toyota and Honda of the 90’s. Given what a few NHTSA rule changes or one unfriendly Congress can do, nothing will improve for the average American until CAFE is totally repealed and gone.

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Americans and the British before them are the masters of economic warfare. From sanctions to economic shock therapy to trashcanistan doctrine of war against Iran, the AngloSaxon always goes for the economic throat. Iran learned this lesson far faster than Russia, using the Straits of Hormuz and the Red Sea as its own attacks on the monetary and energy blood of the Israeli-American empire. Until now Russia never struck at Western moneyed interests, given that it has a substantial albeit waning oligarchic class that wanted to integrate Russia in to the Western Banking System. While the US fails at its attempts to blockade Iran via the sea and air, Russia successfully did so to Ukraine.

With the blockade of Odessa via air, drone and sea, Ukrainian crops rot in warehouses. The capacity for the puppet weapon platform that is Ukraine to service existing debt obligations to the West will no longer exist. Though a tame blow compared to what Iran and the US have done, it is a marked departure from previous Russian policy, indicating a weakening oligarchy in favor of autocracy, some of whom have even pivoted to being anti-West Russian Patriots. It also indicates that the Russians do indeed want Odessa, something many commentators speculated.

From this we can expect the American Agricultural industry to redirect product formerly going to China to go to nations under America’s thumb that originally bought Ukrainian food. The Regime will never let a crisis not be profitable. Likewise if anything of the Kievan Regime is permitted to endure, they will be poorer than most of Africa given the sheer unbridled corruption of the ruling class paired with a total lack of ports. Given Russia demonstrates what the US repeatedly fails to do to Iran, the question is how much will they turn up the dial if at all?

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China set as its own goal food independence in the 2030’s. For the last several decades China depended on American and Brazilian imports, especially Brazil and the United States, for feedstock corn and soy. Aware the United States was about to launch an economic war on Russia in the near future, Xi Jingping launched the Belt and Road Initiative to get around the problem of the US ruling the seas. In the wake of the sanctions on Russia and especially after the economic warfare response of the United States to the SMO in Ukraine, China sped up its efforts to not be dependent on a sea-based supply chain the United States can easily disrupt. Given the blockade of Iran the US currently implements, China’s leadership class and the Precursor of the Son of Heaven appear, in Frank Herbert’s words, prescient.

The return to tradition yet again rears its head here. In the West Joel Salatin, Greg Judy, Paul Wheaton and others work to re-establish traditional land management and agricultural techniques. One of course is simply rejecting monoculture for polyculture, where multiple crops are grown on the same piece of land with animals involved too. While in the US efforts are made outside of the governance structure and agricultural-industrial complex, China, lacking a leadership that sees themselves to be distinct from their subjects, focuses hard on fixing the problems modern agricultural practice causes, not just food insecurity but water and land pollution too. Chinese polyculture traditions go back millennia. Nearly exterminated by Mao for Western-style monoculture, these traditional principles make a strong comeback.

Historically the Chinese dug ponds with dykes around them. Fish grew in the pond, whose waste fed the crops growing in the surrounding dykes. In the West aquaculturists are huge fans of a highly technical version of this, aquaponics. While more energy intensive compared to their original Chinese counterpart, the AngloSaxon created a way for those with no real land ownership a means with just some solar panels and a batter to create a somewhat sustainable way to garden both for veggies and even complete animal protein. If you have land, doing what the Chinese did tailored to your climate is superior. While the tech version uses typically just one breed of fish, the Chinese system used at least three species if not more for maximum production at every level of the pond and maximizing fish waste production to feed the food plants. The fish themselves fed primarily on leaves, silkworm waste and plant waste from the dykes, closing the loop. In the case where they grew rice, the fields would be flooded with the fish permitted to swim among the rice, functioning both as pest control and weed control, fertilizing the rice and maximizing complete animal protein.

This production cycle produced multiple species of Carp in particular, alongside sugarcane, fruit trees, silk and veggies on the dykes, with rice, lotus, water chestnuts and taro in the flooded field. What’s nuts is you had Chinese peasants doing this on just an acre generating multiple food crops, including complete fish protein, and one cash crop to use for clothing as well as for earning money from the Global Silk trade from the Song Dynasty onwards to pay taxes.

Today though this labor-intensive system is rare and only done by the Chinese equivalent of American farm hobbyists and homesteaders, it’s industrial food production system is outright adopting all the parts of it that do scale. Cutting out the silk element, rice-shrimp and rice-fish farm production rapidly grows, and now the Chinese government actively experiments with intercropping with soy and corn production domestically. Instead of the fields of Iowa with nothing but corn or nothing but soy for miles, the Chinese actively test polyculture techniques that interlace the two feedstocks with other domestic plant and animal life.

How does this affect the US? Soybean farmers in particular are heading towards bankruptcy and they can see it today. They are not only facing demand destruction, they face losing the largest market in the world. What do the American Oligarchic farmers do? Demand that the federal government give them the equivalent of all the money that will no longer flow to them from China to grow crops no one wants in a manner that destroys the soil. Thankfully they are not demanding a 100% substitution, for they also placed pressure within the US government to eliminate bans on GMO imports in places like Pakistan as well as pushing for new markets for goyslop including Nigeria, Egypt, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Plus they have already pushed for higher ethanol content in gasoline, now with E15 and E85 sold in fuel stores. Whatever does not get absorbed by these new markets and fuel that degrades are engines causing our vehicles to go kaput far sooner, the Feds will supply.

China, with its farm system dominated by small players compared to America’s highly centralized system, also tests domestic GM crops for animal feed. Time will tell as they “cross the river by feeling for stones” experimenting with GM, historically they’ve looked at Western practice with great suspicion. The race is on, will intercropping beat out genetic modification for Chinese food independence? What is of note is China’s small-scale farmers who already do intercropping using less labor-intensive forms of what their ancestors did have shown themselves quite resistant to using GM crops. Even if China allows certain GM strains, it is an open question how many of its yeoman farmers will adopt them. What would Jefferson think if he knew America’s system of governance guaranteed industrial corporate farming while China’s system preserved the yeoman’s way of life?

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Owen’s sixth objection to Orthodox praxis in the modern day has real teeth to it, that there are parishes in the United States that charge for the Mysteries, in particular baptism. Canon 23 of Trullo clearly states “that no one, whether bishop, presbyter, or deacon, when giving the immaculate Communion, shall exact from him who communicates fees of any kind. For grace is not to be sold, nor do we give the sanctification of the Holy Spirit for money; but to those who are worthy of the gift it is to be communicated in all simplicity. But if any of those enrolled among the clergy make demands on those he communicates let him be deposed, as an imitator of the error and wickedness of Simon.” Per the canons on the books this is still enforced in ROCOR as well as the OCA and Antioch. GOARCH is the only noticeable exception where this isn’t enforced, and as the videos Owen referenced reveal, every parish engaging in this behavior was and is a GOARCH parish.

The first issue, Owen attacks Orthodoxy as a whole for one jurisdictions’ aberrant behavior. Throughout the history of the Church there have been times where one jurisdiction does something weird or wholly uncanonical and are corrected overtime by the rest of the Church. Christ Himself warns several local Churches in Revelation that their lampstands would be cast out if they didn’t return to correct practice. Given this problem is isolated to one jurisdiction, we will analyze the overall path of this jurisdiction over the last century. First, since the Truman administration the United States government actively played a hand in deciding who would be elected Patriarch. Athenagoras I was flown to Istanbul on US President Harry Truman’s personal plane. Secretary of State George Marshall oversaw his installation after the US forced the previous Patriarch Maximos V to resign. Interestingly Athenagoras I is listed as a Mason by the lodge’s own records. He was mentored by another Patriarch with Western Imperial sympathies, Patriarch Meletios, who had implemented the bungled New Calendar who successively headed three autocephalous churches.

In the geopolitical front in Ukraine, the United States supported a schismatic group calling itself the Kyiv Patriarchate which was excommunicated by everyone including Constantinople at the time. In the wake of 9/11 the parish of St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was being rebuilt, with millions of dollars going missing. By April 2018 the financial scandal broke out with investigations launched by the New York State Attorney General and the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. The Archiocese turned out to be totally cash-strapped, even despite simony, with it attempting to mortgage its headquarters to service existing debts. Interestingly, in October 11, 2018 the Patriarch of Constantinople lifted the excommunication of the US-backed Schismatics in Ukraine and recognized them as a legitimate Church despite there already being a canonical Church in Ukraine. Moscow broke communion with Constantinople on October 15, 2018, with PricewaterhouseCoopers ruling no fraud occurred on GOARCH’s part on October 16, 2018. In 2024, the Patriarch endorsed the Ukrainian law banning the Canonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine in a private phone call with Zelensky with Moscow holding him publicly responsible for endorsing the arrests and prosecution of Orthodox clergy and monastics.

The simony within GOARCH is part of a larger problem, the subservience of Constantinople to the US Empire. There are many other problems emanating from this too, from the lack of catechesis to the rise of the mother of all heresies, ecumenism. Now Constantinople is looking to unilaterally restore communion with Rome, an institution that has been under the American empire’s thumb since Vatican II. In 2025 Pope Leo XIV traveled to Istanbul and signed a joint declaration with Bartholomew affirming commitment to a path towards full communion. I do not remember the source, but someone said during the height of the Bolshevik persecution that as soon as Moscow and Constantinople are able to talk again, a schism would break out. That is where we are today.

The root of the simony is not self-enrichment, nor the missing donations from the catastrophe of St Nicholas National Shrine, the root lay in a jurisdiction that got itself into ever deeper debt with the Western banking system. All the decisions made that lead to simony and financial scandal are rooted in a desperate hierarchy trying to service its existing debts that it dug for itself over decades. The final savior they turned to was the American Government, and now we have Constantinople looking the other way as Orthodox Christians are persecuted and the Church heading for the largest schism since the Great Schism. Any parish, diocese or jurisdiction should be cautious when employing debt in the Western world, it truly is a chain that will enslave over decades.

The good news is if you desire the mysteries you can show up to literally any Orthodox parish in the United States of every jurisdiction outside of GOARCH, and even plenty of parishes within GOARCH that don’t do simony. The grand irony is Owen in his ignorance accused Jay Dyer of getting kickbacks for baptisms from Archbishop Elpidophoros, which is as true as Owen supposedly doing a land scam. Jay’s parish is part of ROCOR that openly defrocks any clergy who would do simony, and he tends to strongly recommend anything but GOARCH unless you have no other choice. Given how disliked Jay is by GOARCH’s leadership, Istanbul’s bishops would be surprised that anyone would accuse Jay of being on their payroll. Apparently many of Owen’s bears have committed to going to all the services for a year at parishes near them and not donate a single cent to see how long until they get kicked out. God truly works in mysterious ways, I look forward to many a new catechumen at my own parish from this. The one thing they will encounter that they’ve never experienced before is repeated direct encounters with the Person of Jesus Christ.

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In Owen’s live-stream 2410 Ortho Lamb Scam - Cashing In On Baptism Is It A Joke Charlie Kirk Was Eaten, Owen made six arguments against Orthodoxy as practiced in the United States. Of the six, five have simple answers, the sixth points to a serious canonical breach that gives insight to the spiritual war behind the current geopolitical struggle of World War III.

His first objection is that baptism does nothing because the infant cannot consent. This is an Anabaptist argument that originates with the idea that the age of reason must be attained for one to take part of a sacrament. The Anabaptists drew it from post-Schism Rome that delayed chrismation and first communion from infancy till after the age of reason, a consequence of faith in the West becoming more of an intellectual exercise than a communally-lived experience. Even going back to before Nicaea, the universal practice was infant baptism, infant chrismation and infant communion. No one, not even Protestant scholars contest this anymore. Baptism is the entrance into the Kingdom of God, the Old Testament practice that foreshadowed it was circumcision. Thought the boy was but eight days old, circumcision united him to the Ecclesia of Israel. His consent had nothing to do with it. The same with Baptism, God is the one acting through the sacrament, the baby does not need an intellectual understanding to participate. This emphasis on the power of reason being necessary to participate in the sacramental life shows up in other Western heretical practices, for example with Rome sometimes keeping retards from communion who are mentally incapable of differentiating the Eucharist from food. In Orthodoxy just as in the early Church the mentally deficient fully participate in the sacramental life of the Church.

His second objection is that there is nothing special about water or oil. There is no difference in substance with any other container of water or oil, ergo nothing happens. The problem with this is easily demonstrated by the Ark of the Covenant was made from wood and overlaid with gold, materially no different than other wooden objects overlaid with gold, yet a man still died when he touched it. Raw matter doesn’t make it special, consecration does, with God working through said matter. Likewise in Corinthians Paul talks about how those who ate the Eucharist unworthily experienced suffering and even death. Naaman obeyed the Prophet Elisha and bathed himself in the Jordan river and was healed, so Jesus commands us to “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Peter himself states “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.” Remission of sins is indeed something that happens.

The third objection concerns clerical vestments. He makes the position that clerical vestments and hierarchy are indefensible given the cost. No doubt he would have made the same objection at the time of Moses building the Tabernacle, where in Exodus 28 the Lord instructed Moses to make the garments of the priests: the ephod of fine linen with onyx stones engraved with the names of the twelve tribes, the breastplate of judgment with twelve precious stones, the robe of the ephod, which correlates with the cape he somewhat liked, woven with gold in it, the gold plate on the mitre worn on the Levitical priest’s head, the broidered coat, mitre and girdle all made with linen, plus simple linen breeches, IE pants worn under all said vestments. Jesus himself addresses this objection in John 12, where Mary poured costly spikenard on Jesus’ feet, when Judas objected saying it was an indefensible waste of money that could be given to the poor. Jesus replied “let her alone, against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.” The Church, being the fulfillment and continuation of the Tabernacle, preserved the wholeness of the Tabernacle pattern of worship. We worship as God wants us to, not as we want like Nadab and Abihu who offered strange fire before the Lord and were devoured by God’s fire. The grand irony is the cost today of clerical vestments are far lower than they used to be, especially compared to the early centuries of Tsarist Russia where everything was wholly done by hand without machinery.

This objection reveals another pattern of the American approach to religion, it wholly devalues beauty. This is why the typical non-denomational Church looks just like a box store or a convention center. There is no emphasis on beauty in worship, beauty is not seen as an Energy of God but rather something superfluous. God on the other hand as seen in the Old Testament and in New Testament practice values beauty in worship and wants us to offer our best of it in our worship.

The fourth objection is the that clergy avoid taxes claiming the Church is nothing more than a profitable scam. The problem with this argument is the Church, being independent of the state even going back to the Christian Roman Empire, didn’t pay taxes to the state. To do so would make the Church subservient to the state. Likewise the fact is the clergy who do earn an income, as many a ROCOR priest does not, pay income taxes to the state. There is no opportunity for personal enrichment within Orthodoxy for clergy, many barely scraping by. You can go to any parish in whatever area you are in the United States and quickly find this to be the case. An old joke describes a Greek, an Antiochian, an OCA and a ROCOR priest meeting. The Greek complains he had it better in the private sector with a company car, now he only gets a match to his 401k. The Antiochian asks “you get a match for your retirement?” The OCA priest asks, “wait, you both have a retirement plan?” The ROCOR priest then asks, “y’all get paid?” If you want to run a legal profitable scam in the US using religion, Orthodoxy is the wrong path, the right path for that lies in the business megachurch and prosperity gospel model. As can be seen with the rebuttal to Owen’s third objection, in Orthodoxy the money goes into beauty and into the congregation, the business church model siphons money directly to the preacher’s pockets.

The fifth is the argument that social pressure functions as coercion, forcing people to give money or else. I could anecdotally state I’ve never seen this at any Orthodox parish, but rather I’ll breakdown what the Orthodox view of giving is. As described in Acts, the ideal is everyone giving everything they have one to another, sharing all in common. This ideal not only existed in the first century but was lived out in the Byzantine Empire as well as the Orthodox Mirs of Russia in particular. The Old Testament model had ten percent as a baseline, the Ancient Christian Faith was one hundred percent. Given that isn’t possible in the modern day, at least until a modern society returns completely to the old faith and pre-Modern ways of life, the Church’s guidance defaults to the Apostle Paul’s simple summary: “Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.” Giving is towards the whole community, with collections for people running into hard times happening on the regular. Are there parishes where such coercion may exist? Probably. Are they the norm? Definitely not!

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“Nationalism cannot be the answer to globalism. It is not standing against the process, because it is literally the first step of it.” Thus observed Alain de Benoist. Today most of the Right see Nationalism on the contrary as the opposition to Globalism, yet any reading of history demonstrates otherwise. Nationalism at its foundation sets the nation as the sole legitimate unit of political sovereignty. Globalism merely takes that and moves the goalposts to the whole globe. This revolutionary idea, of the nation being sole legitimate political sovereign was first tried in the fires of the French Revolution.

Prior to the Revolution, sovereignty lay in the Crown and the Church. A peasant in Breton and a peasant in Burgundy both were under the King of France, but their ethnic identity was first local, Bretonian and Burgundian. They were not organized around Frenchness. The same was true of Spain, a union of multiple local kingdoms each with their own customs. The Fueros of Spain had a localness to them that was even stronger than what existed in the Kingdom of France. Rousseau’s “general will” and the American “We the People” originated sovereignty in the people rather than the Crown or the Church. Nationalism and Popular Sovereignty are effectively twins, it is impossible to have one without the other. Horizontal ground-up systems of governance replaced vertical-based identity and authority. Nationalism permits no intermediate loyalties, for all local loyalty, be it ethnic, religious or regional, threatens the loyalty to the nation-state. The horizontal abstract category, French or American, subsume all other local concrete categories that your typical peasant and yeoman interacted with in their daily lives. The particular is abandoned for the abstract, the local for the national. Globalism does the same process, the abstract national identity for the abstract global citizen identity, it is merely Nationalism scaled.

Nationalism, wherever implemented has some common behaviors regardless of the culture of the nation practicing it. It needs homogeneity to function, any local distinction threatens the very fabric of the nation-state as its sovereignty is predicated on everyone within said nation-state being a homogeneous mass. One language, one horizontal culture, one mythos or the system lacks legitimacy. Thus the French Republic systematically suppressed Breton, Occitan and Burgundian dialects for one common French, the American System suppressed Texan German, Czech, Midwest German and the Natives for one standardized English based in Yankeedom. Before the Civil War the United States were, now the United States is. Local identities like Dixie, Texan and others are suppressed for the generic American just as the Yankee Calvinists sought to suppress the Alaskan Native cultures to turn them into good Yankees. As Shelby Foote noted decades ago, even in most of the South people are essentially Yankees now.

This points to the economic reason for the rise of the nation-state, industrialism. A key necessity for industrialism is the standardization of parts and measurements. Nationalism is merely industrialism applied to people. It did not emerge because nations demanded their own popular sovereign states, rather it arose from the pursuit of industrialized empire. The interest of the nation is tacked on as a justification retroactively. The French Nation quickly became the French Empire, the United States went from being plural to being singular. Any vertical particular folk identity is a threat to the national identity, and thus the nation-state cannot tolerate their existence.

For those who make the distinction between the civic nationalist project of the French or Americans versus ethnic nationalism and claim the latter does not have the same problems, one can see the German Nationalist project that flattened the Bavarian, Prussian and Saxon identities into generic “German.” Under that system to be consistent, the Dutch and Flemish are nothing more than Swamp Germans, the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Faroese and Icelanders Arctic Germans. Not only did this ethnic nationalism project attack local loyalty, it justified potential expansionism.

Before the ideology of Nationalism, how did sovereignty work? History clearly shows pre-national states everywhere. The uniting sovereignty sourced from an individual person, not an abstract mass of people, sanctioned by heaven, be it the Orthodox Symphonia of Byzantium, the Patronato Real of Spain, or the Mandate of Heaven of China. Even a homogenous pre-national states like Imperial Japan had this, with sovereignty emanating from the Chrysanthemum Throne that even the Shoguns had to at least pay public respect. Corporate legitimacy, like the Medieval guilds, the Orthodox Mirs and Artels or the Spanish Fueros, were sources of local sovereignty. They were particular and reflected the locale that they existed in, with the sovereign king and the Church as the two uniting principles across all said estates. The game Europa Universalis captures this well with the rise of absolutism and nationalism playing hand-in-hand to eliminate estate power and concentrate all power solely within the state apparatus. The third element of sovereignty in this tripartite model is confessional. The individual nor the abstract nation was the basic organizing unit, the diocese was.

Nationalism corrupts sovereignty from the historical tripartite model in favor of an all-encompassing state that controls everything. There is no true division of power, no protection of local custom, with the idea of local custom being the most important legal principle for the masses instead of the national law being utterly foreign. Likewise it rejects legitimate authority originating from heaven above, whether it be the model of the Mandate of Heaven or the Christian Confessional Monarchy. This rise of nationalism that undid the previous model did not come from nowhere, the reason Nationalism rose in the West but not the East is because of the changes in the third leg, the confessional, that occurred post-Schism. The East preserved the model of the first one thousand years, where the Church was both local and universal. The West adopted the model of concentrating everything into the monarchy of the Papacy, ultramontanism. The systematic destruction of local liturgical practice, the elimination of the Hispanic, Gaelic and Gallican rights, and standardizing everything from canon law to liturgics to confessional practice across the entirety of the West laid the ground for the same to happen to political life. Whereas in the East each sovereign had a symphonia with a local Church that shepherded the people and thus helped maintain the state’s integrity, in the West the Papacy overrode the localness of faith resulting in the Ghibellines and the Guelphs conflicts as well as Gallicanism that weakened the relationship between state and Church, all after the Schism. The end result? The Monarchs seeking to retain sovereignty fought with the Papacy to the point several walked away including King Henry VIII and the Nordic sovereigns. Even staunchly Catholic monarchies fought for a level of independence of Rome that can be seen with the Patronato Real that Spain and Portugal established in the century after the Council of Constance. This continuing centralization that kicked off with the Great Schism that culminated in Vatican I had natural consequences in the sphere of the state because religion is the cult that roots culture.

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Part 1

Part 2

In the course of the Indian wars that followed the Civil War, the Federals sought to fully tame the expansive plains of the Midwest, destroying the buffalo herds the natives depended on as well as rapid rail expansion to connect all the continental parts of the rising empire. Richard Henry Pratt bears the dual honor of being remembered in history for both the first use of the word racism, a practice he condemned, as well as the line “Kill the Indian...save the man.” This apparent contradiction to the modern man is nothing of the sort.

Ending the Civil War as a captain, he established the Americanization of American Indians. Besides conversion to American styles of Christianity, he sought to break their ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods and reservations to spread them out among the masses of American Imperial subjects. This is why the federals in his view must “kill the Indian...to save the man.” Among others he lead the Friends of the Indian movement that sought to deracinate and deculturate the natives. Natives who wanted to hand down their language, their way of life, their religious practices and culture to their children were deemed “racists” and even a kind of racial supremacist who must see their own culture as supreme over Anglo-American culture. Why else would the reject the great civilization that was America?

The Northern Anglo-American mind could not fathom that it is natural and good for a people to pass down what they have to their children instead of jumping ship to the “best” culture, which obviously was their own. Pratt solved this racism problem with the American Indian boarding school system that raised Indian children wholly independent of their parents. While most debate the extent of abuse in said school system, the overlooked result was the destruction of the Indian family. It’s almost as if children are best off with their respective parents rather than in an industrial-style school every day all-year round.

The Puritan mindset ties its view of religion with its culture, and thus in their missionary work sought to replace the culture of every group they evangelized, to turn them into good Puritan cosmopolitans. In comparison the Orthodox missionaries in Alaska baptized the culture of the natives preserving everything good that they had and only correcting that which was erroneous. The American Calvinist missionaries, in the vein of Greater Yankee Puritanism, launched immense persecution of the natives in Alaska to a degree far greater than Pratt, seeking to exterminate the “wrong” Christianity that preserved native culture. They of course also targeted the pagan tribes harshly, resulting in one tribe, the Tlingit, concluding that their paganism couldn’t preserve their culture in the face of American pressure, but Orthodoxy could. They stand out as a tribe that embraced Orthodoxy after the American purchase of Alaska. The American attempt to stamp out Orthodoxy in Alaska paralleled the Bolshevik attempt in Russia, with the Presbytirian Dr Sheldon Jackson declaring “twenty-five years from now, there will not be any Orthodox church members in Alaska.” The American Federals, like their Bolshevik counterparts ultimately failed.

This reveals why the Natives in Alaska managed to hold better than their counterparts in the continental United States, they had a faith that valued and reinforced their culture. Likewise for the Orthodox natives their family structures were preserved, enabling them to pass down their ways, culture and faith in a way that the other tribes had totally disrupted. The Orthodox Russians saw each linguistic tribe as its own group, with worship in their language, whereas the US Feds viewed the natives more of a single mass rather than different peoples. This relates to the contrast in how religious life is played out in Orthodoxy vs non-Conformist Protestantism. In Orthodox practice, each local Church or diocese, IE the Bishop, the priests, deacons and laity are a complete whole, IE Catholic. Religious practice is centered around that intimate community that naturally draws lines by language, culture and custom. The American practice is wholly individualist, with religion an individual affair of what the individual believes. All that is needed from such a worldview to convert the natives is to form each individual to be an “American.” The Orthodox missionaries on the other hand evangelized the whole cultural group, reflected in the Orthodox idea of “we are saved together, but damned alone.”

This carries over into a fundamental contrast in the nature of identity between the Orthodox Phronema and Americanism. In the Americanism that won the Civil War, one’s cultural identity is first America, the Empire. In Orthodox nations and civilizational states, one’s racial, cultural identity is far more specific and local. A man of Dixie is distinct from a Yankee, who in turn is distinct from the partially Hispanicized Texan, who differs from the New Germans of the Midwest. The treatment of the natives occurred to the various Anglo-Saxon ethnicities making up the American Empire, just see Reconstruction. Even here in Texas during the Wilson administration Federal agents were deployed to Texan German and Texan Czech Churches to make sure no homily was given in German or Czech. Federal policy promotes mass internal migration that further destroys the bonds Imperial subjects have with their locale. The project of Nationalism born in the American and French Revolutions systematically destroys local vertical folk identity for a horizontal popular national identity.

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For his second argument on the practice of Iconography Owen made an internal critique, and built it out correctly. If Jesus is one Person, IE we are not using the condemned Nestorian escape of two hypostasis, then any icon made of Jesus is definitionally an icon of a Divine Person. Owen further builds out that Orthodox Iconographic Canons forbid images of the Father, who is also a Divine Person. Thus in Owen’s argument, it is incoherent to forbid one and while promoting the other if Divinity cannot be portrayed. This relates to his first argument, specifically the idea of restricting the ban to images of divine things only. In the rebuttal to his first argument, we broke down the textual histories of Exodus and Deuteronomy and find that the ban is more accurately a ban of idols, not images, whether divine or not.

The answer is quite straightforward: the Son incarnated into human flesh and has a circumscribed human body, while the Father did not incarnate and thus does not have a circumscribed material body like the Son. To make a material image of the Father who has no material body is inherently idolatrous because one is literally imagining a material body for Him that does not exist, whereas an icon of Jesus is an image of the human body He actually possesses. There is no legitimate image that can be made of the Father, the only legitimate image of the Father is the Son Himself: “he who has seen Me has seen the Father.” Besides the Gospel of John, the Apostle Paul in Colossians and Hebrews doubles down on this Apostolic teaching: “He is the image (εἰκὼν, icon) of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” The invisible God is the one without a material body, the Father. In Hebrews: “God who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.” In the Greek that last line concerning image is χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως (hypostaseōs) αὐτοῦ. The significance is that it not only means image like εἰκόνα, icon, but in first-century Koine Greek usage it means substance or essence, IE the Son is of the same substance of the Father, not just an Icon of the Father, reinforcing the Trinity doctrine’s teaching that the Son is cosubstantial with the Father, of the same Divine Essence as He. So per Christian iconographic practice going back to the birth of the Church, an icon of Jesus Christ portrays the human body of the Divine Person who Incarnated, Jesus.

Owen’s third argument is historical, saying that Iconography as an art form predates Christianity with halos for example used in Hindu practice as well as Greco-Roman traditions with depictions of the Emperor. He claims this means it is an inherited pagan visual habit, not something intrinsic to Christianity. The problem with this argument is also simple: we agree iconography predates Christ’s incarnation, Jewish synagogues were covered in iconography as Orthodoxy uses today. Visual worship via iconography was all over the Tabernacle and the temple with woven images and even statues of the Cherubim. Post-Christ’s death and resurrection and the Harrowing of Hades, now heaven is filled with the redeemed who are depicted in iconography alongside the angels who were already there prior to the Incarnation. There is no point in the pattern of Tabernacle Worship where the visual was not employed. That is the tradition solely Orthodoxy maintains, as all others who claim to descend from the Temple tradition are either iconoclasts like American Protestants, abandoned the ancient canons concerning iconographic style like Rome, or the Rabbinical and Talmudic traditions that abandoned their own iconographic traditions.

On Halos, that even is rooted in the books Moses wrote. In Exodus 34 “when Moses came down from Mount Sinai and the two tablets were in Moses’ hand when he came down from the mountain, he did not know the skin of his face was glorified while God talked with Him. So when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses and the glorified appearance of the skin of his face, they were afraid to come near him...when Moses finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face...so the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that it was glorified, and Moses put the veil on his face again until he went in to speak with Him.” Moses’ face more than three thousand years ago shone with God’s glory merely from him talking face-to-face with the visible God, Jesus, for a time on Mount Sinai. Those in heaven are in His presence eternally outside time. That is what the Halo depicts. The Orthodox Iconographic tradition is the continuation of Exodus. As to paganism, all heresy is simply the Truth disassembled and reassembled incorrectly. All are descended from Noah, Hinduism to Hellenism to Nordic paganism are corruptions of the true religious practice of Noah that decayed over time. It is not surprising that the various pagan traditions have elements rooted in Truth. For more on that, read Saint Justin Martyr on the Logos Spermatikos.

Owen’s final argument is that only man is the true image of God, ergo venerating physical images risks inverting the proper order of value by people treating the image as more precious than the person the image depicts. It is true that man is created in God’s image, and are literally icons of Him, but the latter does not logically follow. The objects in the Tabernacle were set apart, IE sanctified and made holy for the purposes of worship. That does not mean that the Images of the Cherubim were valued more than the Cherubim themselves. Likewise valuing a human being and honoring an icon of a saint are not competing claims any more than a man on the front lines of battle kissing a picture of his wife and children back home competes with him loving his actual wife and children. If he were captured in combat and his captors asked him while holding the picture “who are they,” he would not be lying to say his wife and children even though the image is not literally his wife and children but rather an image pointing to them. In no way would the captured soldier valuing the picture of his family be devaluing his family.

For more rebuttals against many other arguments made against iconography, see On the Divine Images by St John Damascene and On the Holy Icons by Saint Theodore the Studite.

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In the wake of the newly minted Masonic Mexican Republic’s breaking of the treaty with the Comanche kicking off the Mexican-Comanche war, Mexico City opened up Texas to be settled by Americans in the hope of establishing a barrier between themselves and the Comanche. The Scotch-Irish in particular when settling and building Austin quickly adopted the style of dress and even food of the Tejanos they settled among. Texas has the most extreme weather swings in the Americas, not just summer heat, clothing that made it livable regardless of origin quickly found adoption, even among the newly established Texas Rangers. The Americans even adopted Tejano holsters that were on the hip rather than on the thigh for draw on horseback:

From the broadbrimmed sombreros to the Ten-Gallon hat, an Anglicization of both Tan Galon, “so flashy” and a term for a braided hat-band, the wear of the Charro Tejano got wholesale adopted by the Americans, who even designed their own felt cowboy hat the Stetson, now made by Tejanos and Texans in Garland, Texas. The Ten-Gallon hat itself was a status symbol among the land-owning Charros, quickly adopted by American movie stars in the early Hollywood era cementing it in the American cowboy’s mythical appearance. Castile soap made its way into the American Empire for leather care in particular. Besides the Stetson the Americans improved upon what they found, making the high-pommels of Western Saddle Horns out of metal rather than wood.

José Cisneros is the El Paso artist I mentioned who illustrated the traditional costumes and life of Charros, vaqueros, Texas Rangers and cowboys. He illustrated more than 300 books. Besides the imagery, American English did its traditional practice of mugging another language for new vocabulary, with vaquero becoming buckaroo, corral, lasso, rodeo, remuda and bronco wholly adopted, la reata becoming lariat, chaparreras to chaps, mesteño to mustang. The one odd ball is wrangler, the man in charge of a remuda. Wrangler came from Low German used by the Texas Germans, wrangeln.

Thanks to the commenter who corrected that modern rodeo is not holding on as long as one can but rather a set time where judges score. Legalizing a return to tradition of breaking one bull then fighting another is still on my to do list!

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Recently Owen in his Down the Drain live-stream he made four arguments against iconography. Each deserve their own breakdown and response one at a time. The first is that the second commandment in Exodus bans images of anything in heaven or on earth, and that the Orthodox of the first century Jewified the text to restrict the ban to divine things only. From there images of Christ were thus permissible since he had a human form. In his understanding that is a post hoc carve-out using Talmudic logic applied to scripture. The fundamental problem with this argument is it was not the Christians of the first century who Jewified the text, for they used the pre-Rabbinic Scriptures of the Septuagint of the second temple. Owen’s argument wholly depends on the Rabbis of the tenth century who compiled the Masoretic text and their reading tradition of that text that all American Protestantism holds to as the authoritative version of the Old Testament.

In the Masoretic, the second commandment is rendered as “you shall not make for yourselves any graven images(פֶּסֶל (pesel)), nor any kind of likeness (תְּמוּנָה (temunah)) of anything that is in the heavens above, or on the Earth beneath, or in the water under the Earth.” The Septugiant, the Scriptures as used in the Second Temple before Christ’s birth and used by the Orthodox Church from its birth on the first Pentecost described in Acts 2, has more specific wording than the Rabbinical textual tradition finalized nine centuries after Christ: “you shall not make for yourself an idol (εἴδωλον, idolon) or a likeness (παντὸς ὁμοιώματος, pantòs homoiṓmatos) of anything in heaven above or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.” The older text by over one thousand years and the standard text used in the Second Temple and quoted by the Apostles in the New Testament as well as all the pre-Nicene Church Fathers is itself a much more narrow ban than what iconoclasts claim. The ban is on the making of idols with a likeness of that which is created.

Now, merely cross-checking the text with other parts of the Scriptures clearly indicate the Septuagint wording coheres with the rest of Scripture while the Masoretic does not. God commands in Exodus 25:18 to “make two cherubim of gold,” three-dimensional gold sculptures. He further commanded in Exodus 26:1 “you shall make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine woven linen...with artistic designs of cherubim you shall weave them.” He further orders concerning the veil in Exodus 26:31 to weave images of Cherubim into it. In the building of the Temple Cherubim of olive-wood ten cubits high were carved. Carvings of palm trees and flowers in the doors in 1 kings 6:32, with lions, oxen and cherubim on the bronze stands in 1 Kings 7:29 and 7:36. Then of course you have the case where in Numbers 21 God ordered Moses to build and lift a bronze serpent. In later centuries when people began worshiping it by offering sacrifices to it at the time of Hezekiah, it was destroyed.

A pattern clearly emerges, God commands the use of the visual in worship of Him, and He does not contradict Himself. The ban is not no images, the ban is on any idol that substitutes and takes God’s place. When an image is treated as an idol, it is destroyed like with the Bronze Serpent. If Moses wanted to ban images, he could have as in Genesis 1:26 he wrote God’s spoken words “let us make man in our image (εἰκόνα, icon), according to our likeness (ομοίωσιν).” Yet the command in both Exodus and Deuteronomy does not ban εἰκόνα, icons, but bans εἴδωλον, idols. Given God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply,” every child you procreate is an icon, an image of God that you literally generated. A ban on εἰκόνα taken literally would require banning procreation, again violating God’s commandments.

The grand irony of Owen’s first argument is that in order to accuse the Orthodox of Jewifying the Scriptures with Talmudic twisting, he has to stand on the Talmudic Rabbinical Textual Tradition as his authority.

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In the American Mind no nation is seen more as a police state than China, with the possible exception of North Korea. Yet in terms of surveillance, the United States is more expansive than the Chinese, with a total of fifteen point three cameras per one hundred people versus fourteen point four cameras per one hundred in China. The key differences between the two come down to architecture, implementation and purpose.

The US model follows the pattern of private companies doing the desired activity for public institutions. The most blatant example would be how private corporations like Amazon, Google and Facebook all received immense funding from the CIA. It’s totally legal for Facebook to dragnet data on the masses, officially it is not the intelligence apparatus doing so. Plus there is the opportunity to make money. The US did the same with physical mass surveillance, with cameras watching the public overwhelmingly belonging to Flock and Ring plus business CCTV firms. Technically it’s all private, the data just happens to be easily recoverable by governing authorities as well as directly by the oligarchic class who own said firms as well as various think-tanks that compress immense quantities of data for analysis.

China on the other hand is far more direct and honest. The state architected a three-fold system of Skynet in cities, Sharp Eyes in rural areas, both feeding into the Ministry of Public Security’s Police Cloud. The entire thing is built on an air-gapped intranet compared to America’s surveillance network that runs on the open internet. In theory Beijing should be able to access everything in their system, however their goal of having a network impervious to external attack prevents this in practice. Stopgaps and internal defensive infrastructure choices in case part of the system gets compromised means barriers to data-sharing exist at various levels of their segmented surveillance system. No one has a functioning universal panopticon within China, not even the Politburo or Xi Jingping himself. So if China is the true police state, why would they hamper their own surveillance system in a way the United States does not?

Simple: war-fighting implications.

In the Ukraine SMO-now-war, Russia accessed Western camera systems in Ukraine connected to the open internet to identify targets for missile and airstrikes. They also used it to accurately map out in real-time Ukraine troops, supply and military production. They even accessed cameras in NATO nations to observe supply lines heading towards Ukraine. The panopticon the American Empire built assisted their enemy. The Chinese expect war with the United States and have no interest in handing out such data freely to foreign aggressors. Because of this strategic course of action the US cannot gain the granular level of detail within China as the US has in its own borders or Russia and the US have in Ukraine. The only one who sees in China at that level of detail is China, and even then imperfectly because of the security measures taken to prevent such information leaking into the hands of an invader.

China however can easily access the entire surveillance system the US built as it is all on the open internet. China, despite potentially not having Space ISR at the same level as the US, can see everything the US sees within America, as well as all America’s puppet states that are part of Five Eyes. Despite both systems being domestic surveillance, one is primarily architected for war-fighting against foreign threats with domestic surveillance a secondary objective, the other for detailing everything possible about subjects under their rule regardless of how vulnerable it makes their Empire to foreign adversaries and jeopardizes their war-fighting capability.

This strongly indicates the difference in the worldviews of the Chinese and American elite. The American elite prioritize those under their rule as the greatest threat to their power, the Chinese elite perceive foreign aggressive adversaries who continually make wars of choice out of all but sixteen years of their entire state’s existence as the greatest threat to their own hold on power. Besides this stark difference in each Empire’s perceived role of the state and state priorities, the difference in quality of the two elites cannot be more drastic. The United states has a horrifically bad codebase and bad deployment topology with no consideration given to strategic implications. The Chinese, who make a lot of these cameras for export and put backdoors in them to make them even easier to access, prevent any kind of similar vulnerability by putting effort into strategic infrastructure wholly independent of the public private-sector internet. They gave up their own potential ability to know absolutely everything about the Chinese masses in their adherence to their State strategy of securing the nation from outside threats. One wonders what the US would be like if it were ruled by an elite who saw their greatest enemies as those outside their empire rather than their next door neighbors.

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JimBob’s take on the Garden of Gethsemane frustrated Owen the most, and frankly the issue is not one of a paradigm as the two went on to discuss, but at best an incorrect understanding of the Patristic paradigm on JimBob’s part:

Owen: “Who is Jesus praying to?”
Jim Bob: “He’s not praying He’s fulfilling a priestly role”
Owen: “So He is not praying. So He did not pray in the garden”
Jim Bob: “He’s not praying to...He is not praying to God like ‘let me say a prayer to the Father.”
Owen: “So He didn’t pray.”
Jim Bob: “Everything He says is a reference, like someone who is reading the Psalms, its a reference back to the Psalms, right? He is announcing the fulfillment of something. It’s an announcement. He wouldn’t need to pray, right? It’s for a function.”
Owen: “So He didn’t pray, that’s your answer.”
Jim Bob: “It’s not like how we pray to God, right?”
Owen: “...He either did or did not pray in the Garden. Who did He pray to? And people are gonna say I’m being rhetorical but I’m being insanely logical. And the answer is He is fulfilling and acting out Psalms. What? So, he didn’t pray. No, no, he prayed, but not like we pray. He prayed prayed. It’s like, no. And I, I’m not the type to fall into these little traps. And that is a trap because I can tell you’re not answering it.”
Jim Bob: “No, it’s just that, I’m, it’s to my point is that your paradigm influences what you’re interpreting. That’s all I’m saying.”
Owen: “My paradigm that someone praying to God is praying to God. That’s my paradigm. Yes, that is my paradigm. My paradigm is if someone is on their knees praying to God, they’re not God, cause that doesn’t make any sense.”
Jim Bob: “Your paradigm is whatever Owen interprets the reading as, is the truth.”

This gets into Owen’s paradigm not having any distinction between what and who, his critical error covered in part 1 of my review, which JimBob follows-up with critiquing Owen’s supposed attempt at an internal critique which wasn’t an internal critique but simply a simple question. This is where giving a simple answer that is wrong is worse than simply admitting one doesn’t know. Andrew went on to simplify the prior back-and-forth between JimBob and Owen, and did so well:

Owen: “So Jesus is not praying in the Bible. That’s what you’re saying.”
Andrew: “Well, no, he’s Yes, that’s correct. He’s he’s fulfilling instead. He did not pray in the Bible.”
Owen: “Not — not in this section that you’re talking about.”
Andrew: “Yes.”
Owen: “So when Jesus was in the garden, he wasn’t praying.”
Andrew: “Yes, that’s correct.”
Owen: “Okay. I don’t accept that.”

On Andrew’s part, he merely restated and simplified what stance JimBob took on the passages of the Garden of Gethsemane. The problem is JimBob gravely erred and took a position anathematized at the Sixth Ecumenical Council, contradicting what was laid down by the Fathers in the Third Council of Constantinople, an error that leads to the heresy of monothelitism.

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First, none of the Fathers nor any council takes the position that Jesus did not pray to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane. Going back to St Paul in his letter to the Hebrews:

So also Christ did not glorify Himself to become High Priest, but it was He who said to Him:

“You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.”

As He also says in another place:

“You are a priest forever
According to the order of Melchizedek”;

who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. And having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him, called by God as High Priest “according to the order of Melchizedek.”¹

On top of the New Testament explicitly teaching that Jesus prayed to the Father, Jesus Himself addressed the Father in the Garden: “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”⁵ Jesus quite literally in the Gospel petitions the Father, petition being a form of prayer. St Maximus defends this in his sixth Oposcula:

It follows then having become like us for our sake, He was calling on His God and Father in a human manner when He said ‘Let not what I will, but what you will prevail,’ inasmuch as, being God by nature, He also in His humanity has, as His human volition, the fulfillment of the will of the Father. This is why, considering both of the natures from which, in which and of which His Person was, he is acknowledged as able both to will and to effect our salvation.²

Jesus called on His Father in a human manner, critical for its implications on the doctrine of salvation, Theosis. If Christ didn’t pray to the Father and simply did a theatrical performance as the Monothelites claimed, then Theosis would be impossible as “what has not been assumed has not been healed” per St Gregory of Nazianzus. Now it’s one thing to look at individual Fathers, another to look at what was dogmatized and laid down in the Ecumenical Council. At Constantinople they dogmatized St Maximus’ teaching. Starting with the First Session, they read the letter of Pope St Agatho which uses St Maximus’s, St Ambrose’s, St Leo’s, St Gregory’s and Blessed Augustine’s interpretation of the passage:

St. Luke the Evangelist likewise bears witness to the same thing, telling how the same our Lord Jesus Christ prayed according to his humanity to his Father, and said, Father, if it be possible let the cup pass from me; nevertheless not my will but yours be done,— which passage Athanasius, the Confessor of Christ, and Archbishop of the Church of Alexandria, in his book against Apollinaris the heretic, concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation, also understanding the wills to be two, thus explains: And when he says, Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless not my will but yours be done, and again, The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak; he shows that there are two wills, the one human which is the will of the flesh, but the other divine. For his human will, out of the weakness of the flesh was fleeing away from the passion, but his divine will was ready for it. What truer explanation could be found? For how is it possible not to acknowledge in him two wills, to wit, a human and a divine, when in him, even after the inseparable union, there are two natures according to the definitions of the synods?³

The Synod in The Definition of Faith declares:

We likewise declare that in him are two natural wills and two natural operations indivisibly, inconvertibly, inseparably, inconfusedly, according to the teaching of the holy Fathers. And these two natural wills are not contrary the one to the other (God forbid!) as the impious heretics assert, but his human will follows and that not as resisting and reluctant, but rather as subject to his divine and omnipotent will. For it was right that the flesh should be moved but subject to the divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius. For as his flesh is called and is the flesh of God the Word, so also the natural will of his flesh is called and is the proper will of God the Word, as he himself says: I came down from heaven, not that I might do my own will but the will of the Father which sent me! where he calls his own will the will of his flesh, inasmuch as his flesh was also his own. For as his most holy and immaculate animated flesh was not destroyed because it was deified but continued in its own state and nature (ὄρῳ τε καὶ λόγῳ), so also his human will, although deified, was not suppressed, but was rather preserved according to the saying of Gregory Theologus: His will [i.e., the Saviour’s] is not contrary to God but altogether deified.⁴

The Definition of Faith builds its entire case on the Fathers and Pope St Agatho’s interpretation of the Garden of Gethsemane with Jesus’ prayer in Luke 22:42 “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done” being one of the core linchpins defending dyothelitism. The Garden of Gethsemane is the most leaned-on Scripture in the entire Sixth Ecumenical Council, if Jesus did not actually pray and submit His human will to the Divine Will and just did a theater act, or as Owen put it, lying, salvation, Theosis, per St Maximus and St Gregory Nazianzus, is itself not possible. The defense against the Monothelites decreed in the Sixth Ecumenical Council likewise would fail.

I have not found a single Father nor a single Saint who taught that Jesus did not “pray pray” in the Garden. Even if there is one, they would simply be wrong given what the Church received in the Sixth Ecumenical Council, the Church in whole outweighing the opinion of one Saint or Father. Given the transcript of the exchange, best case scenario JimBob confused the reference to the Psalms Jesus made on the cross “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” the first line of Psalm 21, Psalm 22 for those Judaizers using the Rabbinical text, with the prayer in the Garden which is definitely not a Psalmic reference but a “prayer prayer.”

To be Orthodox one must affirm Jesus prayed in the Garden to His Father and submitted His human will to His Divine Will that He shares with His Father and the Holy Spirit, will being proper to nature. In short, if you are a catachumen, don’t go arguing it with others, as odds are you have no intellectual idea of what you are talking about let alone direct experiential knowledge of God, the knowledge that truly matters in the Christian walk. Two, if you don’t know something or are unsure if your grasp on a subject is correct, just say you don’t know, you simply say you submit to what the Church taught on the matter and will learn about it later. Three, if you think God is calling you to take down someone whom you perceive to be a cult leader, you probably have serious prelest and should take that to your father confessor in confession so that he can tell you you are crazy. If you struck the one-in-a-million chance he tells you you are not crazy, then you wouldn’t be in the position of not knowing what you are arguing about and most likely already possess the Orthodox Phronema and possibly be one of the few people in any generation who has had direct experiential face-to-face time with the Uncreated God putting you in the same saintly category as St Paisios, Elder Ephraim and St Joseph the Hesychast.

Finally, saying “I don’t know” and shutting up makes you look far smarter than you are. This is true of biological and spiritual youth alike. If one makes an error, admitting it is the wise path, doubling-down nothing but foolishness. This foolish half-a-decade personal cat-fight on the internet between a high-IQ illiterate know-nothing who struggles with the idea that who and what are different categories and a spiritually young sophomore whose confidence outran his actual knowledge of his own Church’s position was wholly avoidable and unnecessary. Like a high school fight things went from both talking in ignorance to attacking each other’s families except without the part where the two male parties physically fight it out, the loser admits error, restoring the high school’s internal male hierarchy. Without the physical resolution layer, all that is left is effeminate cat-fighting. To any who paid attention five years ago and had the proper taxonomy of male behavioral patterns, nothing was nor is a surprise.

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1 Hebrews 5:5-10 NKJV

2 Maximus the Confessor, Opusculum 6, “On the Two Wills of Christ in the Agony of Gethsemane,” trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken, in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press), p. 176

3 “The Letter of Agatho, Pope of Old Rome, to the Emperor, and the Letter of Agatho and of 125 Bishops of the Roman Synod, Addressed to the Sixth Council,” New Advent

4 “The Definition of Faith, Third Council of Constantinople,” New Advent

5 Matthew 26:39 NKJV

Part 1

Part 2

Given Owen’s nine objections, this would’ve gone down far better as a discussion where the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity could be spelled out simply with simple answers dumb down to a child’s level for the various objections. The Faith is one that is accessible to both the 160 IQ Data Architect and the 60 IQ slow-boy. Now there is far more to the Doctrine of the Trinity I mentioned so far here, the goal was simply to lay out simple answers to the questions Owen had that multiple former bears repeated to me over the years. I’m not qualified to give a comprehensive explanation of the Trinity in all of it’s points, but simply knowing the Creed and understanding it gives a huge leg-up for those who are even less read on the subject than me.

The questions I would have for Owen would be does he recognize the existence of natures and universals? Is the question what distinct from the question who? If so, then he is closer to the Patristic definition of the Trinity than he realizes. If not, then he is entering the realm of Nominalism where the necessary conditions for the existence of knowledge as well as the laws of logic do not exist. From there with that clarification if he was receptive, like several bears and former bears I’ve talked to over the years, I’d let him know to send any other follow-up questions my way if he ever wanted to know more. If I don’t know the answer, I can point him to those who do or ask them myself.

Owen made some valid applicable statements recently, specifically how the US was founded by non-Trinitarians. He lists Jefferson, a Luciferian fan of the founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt, and Benjamin Franklin, a card-carrying member of the Satanist Hellfire club, as examples. He could have also included the Unitarian John Adams. For brevity, given the Thomistic model of the Trinity and the Calvinist model of the Trinity both contradict the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity laid down by the Church Fathers, none of the Puritan “trinitarians” who signed the Declaration of Independence held to the Church Father’s Monarchical Trinity doctrine, so the Fathers wouldn’t even consider them Christian. Owen points out rightly that is the cultural heritage he comes from. To quote him on the potential correctness of that cultural heritage, “that might be true, I don’t know.”

The key thing for the reader to take in here, American Christianity was always Nominal in the original philosophical sense of the word, it was not Confessional. Formal debate, while great with confessional Lutherans, Calvinists, Thomists or Scotists, is simply the wrong tool here. The AngloSaxon ethnicities of America: Yankee, Appalachia and Dixie, were founded overwhelmingly by anti-Creedal non-Conformist Protestants. There was no set of dogmas one had to hold to to be considered Christian in the American usage of the word, one simply had to say “I’m Christian” and you simply were so. American Christianity applies epistemological nominalism to the sociological level: “Christian” is but a label anyone can claim, it has no shared nature, IE doctrine, praxis or sacramental life uniting Americans who claim the nominal label. There is no unity there, only particulars. This gives insight as to why individualism spread like wildfire in the American psyche. Without a defined vocabulary, the words “salvation,” “God,” “Church,” and even “Word” are assigned a wide variety of meanings across American Christians, leading to all debate being nothing more than talking past each other. One sees the Bible as the Word, the other Jesus as the Word. One sees salvation as something ordained before the foundation of the word Calvin-style, the other salvation as something worked out Methodist-style. One sees Jesus as two Nestorian Subjects like John Macarthur, the other sees Jesus as lacking a human mind like William Lane Craig. One gathers on Sunday, the other on Saturday and condemns gathering on Sunday as evil. All are “Christian” in the American Nominal Tradition.

When you interact with anyone who grew up in American Christianity, odds are they have zero theological positions on anything that they have put any thought into with near-zero catechesis. To quote a bear of my acquaintance whose vocal talent I admire, “nobody talked about the Trinity when I was growing up. It was mentioned here and there, like in church names, but not as a doctrine. Sometimes people referred to God and Jesus as the Godhead.” That is the norm across American Christianity as it was the norm in English non-Conformism that fathered it. As stated in that horrifically evil film Forrest Gump, American Christians, even from the same denomination, same parish and same Bible Study, “was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” There is no point in debating theology with someone who is wholly unlearned in the subject who holds to no theological commitments. If someone from that background asks a question, if you have the simple answer, give it. If you don’t just say you don’t know. Given the abysmal literacy rates in the United States, the only faiths that will be left standing are ones that can teach their faith orally and visually, and that leaves Holy Orthodoxy.

And Hinduism, but there lies utter madness.

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Part 1

The fourth objection is far more interesting, “only the Father knows the hour, not even the Son.” Owen held that given that God is omniscient, either God is withholding from Himself or Jesus isn’t identical to the Father. The answer to the latter is simple: Jesus isn’t identical to the Father. The Trinity doctrine teaches this. The former is a different topic from the Trinity, but I’ll give brief detail on Mark 13:32:

The Fathers overwhelmingly teach in Greek “kenosis.” Jesus, being a Divine Person who incarnated and united Human nature to Himself has both a Divine Mind proper to His Divinity and a Human mind proper to His humanity. Just as our human minds are limited, so Jesus’ Human mind was limited, just like how Jesus’ human body is in one place and not everywhere, just like how our own bodies are in a fixed place in space. St Gregory of Nazianzus and St Gregory of Nyssa taught that Christ’s human mind having limitations indicates He truly incarnated as a Human embracing the limits of our nature. What makes Jesus distinct from us is though He possess Human nature He is also Divine, that omniscience being a Divine Energy. The Arians on the contrary argued that Jesus only had one mind thus that passage meant Jesus could not be Divine. That counterargument would come up again in the Monophysite, Monothelite and Monergist controversies in the following centuries. Saint Athanasius, who first proposed the list of books we now call the New Testament, taught Jesus spoke in His capacity as a Man, not as God in that passage. For more on that, I personally recommend starting with St Athanasius’ On the Incarnation to understand that first before tackling the topic of Divine Energies like Omniscience.

Owen’s fifth argument was the commonly repeated Sunni argument “1+1+1=1.” The problem with the Sunni position, besides originating from Arabian inbreds who lost their empire to Turks and Iranians and have repeatedly been unable to defeat a small hyper-aggressive country in the Middle East for the last 80 years as well as unable to retake Iran since the Buyid dynasty drove them out more than one thousand years ago, is that it again denies the distinction between what and who. The claim is if there are three things, then in no sense can there be one thing. This is easily demonstrated to be false. If there are five oranges in a basket all from the same tree, how many types of orange are in the basket?

One.

1+1+1+1+1= 1. Five oranges, one kind of orange. One can apply this with every other category that exists. Four brothers are in a room. Who are in the room? Four men: James, Joses, Simon and Jude. What nature is in that specific room? One Human nature, equally possessed by James, Joses, Simon and Jude. To the counterargument “those are made up words,” to deny the real existence of natures is to deny the existence of any answer to the question of what things are.

An important note here, as JimBob pointed out, God transcends the one and the many, the universal and the particular. Universals and Particulars exist because the Father exists. Divinity is not a mere Universal in the Aristotlean sense, Divinity is infinitely beyond.

The Sixth argument simply is ‘the word “Trinity” isn’t in the Bible.’ The problem with this is it assumes a thing cannot be named before it exists. Even in Genesis God created the animals, which happened to exist, then instructed Adam to name them. Horses existed before the name Horse existed. So the Doctrine of the Trinity existed before the term Trinity, Trinitas, was coined. The Gospel of John spell out Jesus as begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father, Genesis explicitly details multiplicity in God with “let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness,” and Deuteronomy proclaims God’s unity with “The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” From the Theophanies in the Old Testament where a Divine Person interacted directly with humans to a Divine Person who told the Prophet Moses “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live,” distinct Divine Persons are there from the beginning. In the Second Temple Literature the topic of the day concerned “Two Powers in Heaven,” the debate prior to Jesus’s Incarnation was whether there were just two Divine Persons or Three.

The seventh objection is the “God dying” problem, which isn’t on the topic of the doctrine of the Trinity but rather on the Incarnation. To paraphrase Owen: if Jesus is fully God, and God cannot die, then “God dying” on the cross isn’t a real sacrifice and His death isn’t a real death and thus accomplishes nothing. As we’ve covered before, what and who are distinct, as well as the three Divine Persons being distinct. Of the Three, only Jesus Christ incarnated, adopting Human nature. Death is the separation of soul and body. Jesus is the only Divine Person to have a Human Soul and a Human Body. He truly experienced death, the separation of His Human Soul and His Human Body, just as we do at our own death. The Father and the Holy Spirit, both not having neither a Human Soul nor a Human Body, cannot experience death as Jesus did. Now in terms of models of salvation, I have no interest in defending the post-Schsim innovations of Satisfaction theory or Penal Substitution, the only ones that apply in this case are the Orthodox models of Christus Victor and Recapitulation. To keep it short, both require Jesus to have really died to be the case. Given Jesus’ Human Soul and Body separated, and His Soul went down to Hades, where He plundered it in the event known as the Harrowing of Hades, the conditions for both atonement models are thus met by Christ’s death on the cross.

Owen’s eighth objection that comes up is the Paul objection. He takes the position that Saint Paul altered Jesus’ teaching. If the Apostle Paul changed the faith, then he’d be a “prophet after Jesus.” This is also separate from the Trinity question. Historically speaking Paul was one of many apostles, the twelve and the seventy, who met in council as can be seen in Acts 15. How one man could successfully rewrite the faith independent of every other apostle who founded most of the historical churches from England to Ethiopia to India that still stand today is unexplained. The Orthodox and historical answer is quite simple: the Apostle Paul didn’t rewrite the faith, he wrote what he himself was taught after he was baptized by Ananias in Damascus on Straight Street.

The ninth objection is a soteriological one, claiming that he objects to the view “you believe in the Trinity or you go to hell.” Per the Scriptures even the demons believe and tremble and are going to hell so obviously belief in correct doctrine alone does not prevent one from going to hell. Per the Orthodox Phronema the problem with incorrect belief is that it leads to incorrect practice leading to ever more error which if unchecked leads to delusion and damnation. Having incorrect belief alone is insufficient to damn a soul, having incorrect belief that one knows is erroneous and choosing it anyway in rejection of that which is true is what damns. That is why though Blessed Augustine got some things wrong theologically, some of which he even retracts in his Retractions, he is still a saint because he submitted to the Church all that he wrote and taught, he did not hold to incorrect belief out of pride. He was just wrong on some things. Origen on the other hand was anathematized repeatedly because he decided to make up a whole theological system distinct and contrary to what the Church taught and, unlike Blessed Augustine, never admitted error out of pride. Incorrect belief in and of itself doesn’t damn, pride does. Humility saves, like with Blessed Augustine or a recently reposed Babushka who didn’t have a precise understanding of God’s perichoresis that would get her a D on a theology exam. When you die God doesn’t hand you a theology quiz to determine where you go, how you live your life and whether you grew into God’s likeness, mentioned earlier in Genesis, determines where you go. That is the teaching of the Church for the last two thousand years.

to be continued…

Part 3

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Years ago Owen Benjamin announced in one of his streams he did not understand the doctrine of the Trinity. This lead to a series of debates both with bears who didn’t know what they were talking about, to Milo Yiannopolous doing an “ambush” stream where E Michael Jones tried to ram through the Thomistic version of the Trinity, to a debate with JimBob that Owen originally perceived was going to be more of a fun entertainment show than a proper debate. As I have gone over the questions Owen had with several former Bears who are now Orthodox, I’ll use this as a case study as why debate should not be the default for most discussion, from matters of faith to geopolitics with most Americans.

First from Owen’s position, he had nine fundamental arguments underlying the rhetoric of the show, practically all mostly elementary questions to be expected of someone who has no knowledge of the topic as he himself has repeatedly stated publicly for at least six years. The first, his most repeated question was “if Jesus is God, who is He praying to in the garden of Gethsemane?” This question underlies the core lack of knowledge needing rectification for any understanding to happen. The direct answer is quite simple: the Person Jesus prayed to the Person the Father. JimBob’s answer of Jesus operating in a priestly role in the Garden passage is correct in the sense that Christ did lead them in a vigil prayer service, something still kept today in the Orthodox Church, but it doesn’t answer the question of who. With that answer supplied Owen’s core argument’s response is if Jesus is praying to another Person, in this case the Father, as Jesus prayed “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will,” then He cannot be God if the Person he prayed to is God.

That gets to the core of the flaw in Owen’s understanding, offering a genuine teaching moment for those with interest as to what the Historical and Orthodox Trinitarian doctrine is. Owen’s follow-up argument only holds if the noun “God” only refers to a particular subject, IE a person. Per the Fathers, the Scriptures and Praxis, it does not. The term God can answer the questions of both what and who. In short, in the Garden you have one Divine Person, Jesus incarnate, praying to another Divine Person by name, the Father. Both share and possess the same Uncreated Divine Nature, what They both are. One Nature, and including the Holy Spirit Three Uncreated Persons who instantiate that Nature.

An analogy to this is how there is one human nature, all humans inheriting their nature from Adam, yet there are multiple particular humans. If there are seven humans in a room, in that room are seven distinct persons, yet only one human nature is present. This is the One and the Many that JimBob refers to broken down in a manner for a seven-year-old. Nowhere in the Trinitarian doctrine and nowhere among the Saints or the Fathers is it taught the Father and the Son are the same person, they in fact condemned such a claim as Modalism. There is a world religion that teaches that the Father and the Son are the same Person, but that is not Orthodox Christianity, that would be Hinduism going back to the Rig Veda. Owen’s simple argument does hold water, not against the historical Trinitarian doctrine, but against Hinduism. Under any Monistic framework, Hinduism being the largest one by population, distinction in particulars, IE persons, do not exist. To consistently hold to a Monist framework, if Charlie asked Owen to hold his grape juice while he runs to kick a football, Charlie being Human and Owen being Human, Charlie is asking himself to hold his grape juice and is in fact talking to himself. Most Hindu traditions as well as all other strict Monist positions go farther and state there is no real distinction between grape juice, footballs and humans, so strictly speaking in reality Charlie is asking himself to hold himself while he kicks himself.

To the typical Western mind, as well as most people outside of India, that is absolute madness that may explain why the Indian Ocean leads all the world oceans in human fecal matter contamination. The Fathers epistemologically fall under a category of moderate Realism known as Holenmerism, something that I’ll leave to more studied in philosophy like Father Deacon Ananias Sorem, not Monism. All that is needed here is that the Trinity is not monistic, it holds to distinction between what and who, as well as distinction between Persons. Charlie and Owen are distinct persons, IE who’s, sharing the same human nature, IE what. That humanity they share in common is distinct from grape juice and footballs that are both two different what’s. The Father and Jesus are likewise two different who’s who are the same what, IE Divine Nature. Therefore there is no argument against the Trinity in the Garden of Gethsemane as three of the Gospels detail.

An important note at this point, much of the Christian debates with pagans was over the existence of only one Uncreated Divine Nature. Most Pagan positions held to multiple kinds of Uncreated things. The Norse creation myth had three Uncreated things, Ginnungagap, Muspelheim and Niflheim. Zoroastrianism held to Good and Evil being both co-eternal and Uncreated Natures. The Christians who evangelized in the first four centuries and beyond consistently taught there is only One Uncreated Nature, not multiples, and consistently taught that the Begotten Son inherited the Uncreated Nature from His Uncreated Father, just as Charlie inherited his humanity from Owen. Like begets like, kinds only produce their own kind. This is the Trinitarian doctrine’s stand on Divine Nature and Divine Persons.

The second argument Owen held to relates to objections to co-equality, as Jesus said in John 14 “ If you loved Me, you would rejoice because I said, ‘I am going to the Father,’ for My Father is greater than I.” How can the Father and the Son be equal if one is greater than the other? He does make the case one cannot be greater than oneself. That part of his statement is addressed in the breakdown of his first argument, nowhere in that passage or anywhere else in Scripture, the Fathers or the Liturgy is it taught that the Two are the same Person. Here there is another simple answer to Owen’s question, again one I’d expect from someone who doesn’t know anything on the topic and doesn’t read in general. The simple answer: two individuals can be equal in one sense or category but not in another. Owen and Charlie are equally human, one is not more human than the other. However Owen is taller than Charlie, so though they are equal in nature they are not equal in height. Likewise Owen is father, Charlie son, ergo though they are both equal in humanity Owen is greater in authority compared to Charlie. In terms of value, though Owen and Charlie are both equally human, Owen no doubt as a father places greater value on Charlie’s life than his own. As we went over in the answer to the first question and objection, the Father and Son both are equal in nature. This does not mean they are equal in everything else. As Jesus said in John 5 “For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man.” What the Son has He received from the Father. The Father alone is arche or anarchos, IE uncaused. The Father causes the existence of the Son and Holy Spirit, no one causes the Father to exist, He is the reason existence exists. That indeed makes Him greater even as they are equal in Nature.

The third objection Owen gives is the “sit at the right hand of God” problem. If Jesus is God, how can he sit at the right hand of Himself? Again, simple answer: God in that passage refers to the Person of the Father, the Person Jesus sits at the right hand of the Person Father. No where is the idea that there is no such thing as distinction in person, again Modalism and Monism. This is perfectly in line with the Doctrine of the Trinity.

to be continued…

Part 2

Part 3

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Part 1

Colonel Stand Watie found himself in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek near Springfield Missouri, the first major battle West of the Mississippi. Victory gave Watie recognition by Confederate high command for being a capable field commander. Next came the Battle of Chusto-Talasah near Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Confederate forces drove the pro-Union native forces of the Creek and Seminole out of Indian Territory. Then came the Battle of Chustenahlah right after Christmas in 1861, driving the remaining pro-Union forces into Kansas.

Three months later at the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern Watie fought under Brigadier General Albert Pike, a name that some of my more learned leadership in the history of secret societies of the US empire may recognize. Like the experience of General Lee in the East, the Confederacy had tactical successes leading to a strategic loss on the battlefield, with Colonel Watie screening the retreat. At the Battle of Cowskin Prairie, the Union seized Watie’s main point of supply. The lead mines and the scrap yards for recycling waste into bullets, while not needed by the Union, struck a blow at Cherokee force-projection. Then came the Battle of Old Fort Wayne where Union victory lead to mass desertion of Colonel John Drew’s regiment, the first 1^st Cherokee Mounted Rifles. The few who did not joined the 2^nd Cherokee which became the new 1^st Cherokee Mounted Rifles, which deployed to Missouri and victoriously fought in the Battle of Newtonia.

This led to the set-piece Battle of Prairie Grove, though a stalemate it was a stalemate the South couldn’t afford and had to retreat, surrendering part of Arkansas to the Union as well as cutting off the Indian Territory from the Confederacy. Months later Watie fought in the Battle of Webber’s Falls, the culmination of the guerrilla warfare between the Cherokee loyal to him versus those loyal to Ross. After being chased out his loss in the First Battle of Cabin Creek lead to the largest battle in Indian Territory, the Battle of Elk Creek. Watie’s Cherokee stood alongside other Native Tribe forces and the Texans against the Union forces including Black Regiments and pro-Union Home Guard units. Texans were quite open to fighting alongside natives if it meant for opportunities to scalp Yankees. Watie himself lead a diversion twenty-five miles east, keeping him out of the heart of that battle. The Confederate loss ended their ability to do offensive operations for the rest of the war.

Watie’s focus became hit-and-run rather than pitched battle, targeting Union troops guarding supply. The Battle of Mazzard Prairie and the Ambush of steamboat F.R. Williams, now Brigadier General Stand Watie secured Union supplies for depleted Confederate forces. At the Battle of Gunter’s Prairie all the 11^th United States Colored Troops proved their effectiveness in combat beating Watie back and saving the cattle and hay operations feeding Union forces. Though setback Watie fought again in the Second Battle of Cabin Creek, damaging the Union’s Western logistics and seizing hoards of supplies for Confederate use in the West that was completely cutoff from the rest of the Confederacy. At the Battle of Fort Smith, though Generals Watie, Cooper and Gano couldn’t take the fort, they did manage to capture substantial amounts of food.

After the war officially ended, fighting raged on in the West till the Battle of Doaksville in June 1865. Watie surrendered his army of now Cherokee, Creek, Seminole and Osage troops, being the last Confederate general to surrender with the full knowledge that the war’s end doomed his people. The final terms for the Cherokee dictated by the Feds who merged the pro-Union and pro-Confederate sides together included surrendering their territory in Kansas, granting the railroads the right to seize any remaining territory as they willed, amnesty for Watie’s forces and freeing slaves owned by Cherokee who were granted Cherokee nationality, something causing racial conflict to this day. The US did this with all of the Five Tribes.

In 2007 and 2017 the conflict between Cherokee being a nation tied by blood versus the Federal Government’s position that Cherokee is merely a nominal grouping of arbitrary people lit up, as the Cherokee actively purged descendants of Freedman who had no native blood in them from their rolls. The US threatened to take away recognition of the Cherokee Nation over it in 2007 over this nominal vs realist conflict over the definition of Nation. As the Federal Government for its entire existence utilizes racial conflict as one of the primary means of centralizing and retaining power, the Indian wars are yet to be resolved.

Tip Jar

Modernity considers pigeons rats of the air, and the rapid delivery of messages only possible with modern technology. While this was true over the seas, where normally boats made transportation of goods far, far faster than land transport, over land messages could move far faster than a boat. From China to Spain and everywhere these pigeons carried messages at rapid speed. Bred by Egyptians first soon after the time of Moses, the homing pigeon could not only find its original nest over absurd distances, they objectively wanted to all the time. Part of Egyptian domination on the battle-field was the extensive use of war pigeons to coordinate extensive battlefield forces and multiple armies across war theaters in a manner no one else could. From the Ancient Olympics to Ghenghis Khan, if you needed to send orders quick, the humble homing pigeon did the work.

What was the cost? We have more details about Medieval Europe than Ancient Egypt on that front, the cost in today’s money to send a same-day message to Paris from Madrid cost about one quarter per word. During sieges like the siege of Pairs, the price skyrocketed ten-fold. Assuming the next door duke or Genghis Khan isn’t ramming the front gate, rapid communications were surprisingly doable for the common man. An individual bird carried messages of up to twenty words. One could write more across several pigeons but that was typically the domain of the wealthy and the military. Though Russia as it settled Siberia didn’t have the luxury of speed of goods delivery like the English and Spanish Empires with their ships, a pioneer who settled near Yekaterinburg, east of the Urals could message his peasant grandfather about furs heading his way for trade and have it delivered reliably within two days. Cross-Uralic business thrived after the Russians bred cold-hardy strains from the English and Belgian breeds. Not bad for an eleven hundred and fifty mile journey across mountains!

Besides carrying military orders from St Petersburg to the Far East in the Russo-Japanese War, microfilms, originally invented as a toy, were rapidly used amplifying pigeon bandwidth, which has its own humorous designation in communications engineering: IpoAC, or “IP over Avian Carriers.” Suddenly the twenty word limit became a twenty page limit. From Ancient Egypt to Medieval Europe, Tsarist Russia to Imperial China, couriers routinely took homing pigeons that made it to their original nests back to the various places for them to make future deliveries once again. Ancient, medieval and early modern hackers even made man-in-the-middle attacks to either remove messages and replace them with false ones for military deception or to gain stock market edge in the Dutch Republic’s and the London Stock Exchanges. This business lasted just over three thousand years, till the telephone, the airplane and radio communications replaced the homing pigeon. Nations all around the world simply dumped their homing pigeons, wholly domesticated animals like dogs, out of their homes and places of business to fend for themselves. The next time you see a flock of pigeons approaching you, remember the service their ancestors performed for yours for thousands of years. That’s why they don’t fear humans the way most animals do, they were bred and domesticated to want to serve us.

But the pigeon is making a comeback. Just as the microfilm boosted bandwidth for IpoAC, the USB and flash memory came along. Rafting photographers used homing pigeons as a sneakernet to move tens of gigabytes of images in an hour even including for lost drives. Telecom infrastructure tested against pigeons is not unheard of, with the most famous being when Telstra, Australia’s largest telecom, lost in a bandwidth war to the humble homing pigeon by nearly an order of magnitude in 2009. The most interesting use, just as their used to be many bike couriers before the rise of email, today in New York City there are still a few bike couriers who transport sensitive information offline at the speed of a bike carrying encrypted flash memory for data-intensive businesses. The homing pigeon has been used instead of bike carriers for distances beyond what is reasonable for a human peddling. The birds also happen to be faster, with real-world data being delivered at eighteen Gigabits per second. Few have that level of service from their broadband provider. IpoAC enthusiasts continue to pursue the efficiency of ever-newer memory construction that improves the throughput of these ancient birds faster than broadband can develop, now with a theoretical limit of one hundred and forty-five Gigabits per second.

For those who want to build there own independent networks, look into what is needed to have your own local sneakernet. If EMP’s get used in a modern war, the humble pigeon will still move data reliably even with a defunct grid.

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Recently in my circles people cited Matt Walsh on how the US federal government did not genocide Indians. I am amazed they didn’t follow up and claim the US federal government has no policy of replacement migration for the last sixty years. Given what even was done to Heritage American officers who opposed the Federal practice of exterminating natives who submitted, the time has come for a deeper look into this topic, starting with how it is impossible to properly understand the American Civil War without understanding the Natives in the War’s Western Theater.

Stand Watie of the Cherokee nation was born in their old territory in Georgia. Along with the rest of his family, he converted to Christianity, specifically the Moravian Brethren. The Cherokee, considered one of the five civilized tribes, faced immense political and military pressure to abandon their territory and be forced west of the Mississippi. Besides gold found in Cherokee territory, mass migration of White settlers in numbers comparable to Hindus, Muslims and Mexicans today flooded into Cherokee lands. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, making it state policy to push them out from all territory east of the Mississippi. Interestingly they would then flood it, not just with White settlers, but enormous quantities of Black slaves. The State of Georgia actively confiscated land on its own, leading to a Supreme Court Case in 1832 where in Worcester v. Georgia the Court ruled that the federals alone had power to deal with natives, not the state. Georgia prior to this already threatened nullification concerning treaties, went ahead with nullification to keep seizing territory. We will refer to this in the future on the issue of States Rights in future Civil War articles, in the meantime we shall look at a short history of Washington’s agreement-incapability.

The Cherokee first signed the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785, establishing hard boundaries and making them a protectorate of the federals. Six years later the US broke it and established the Treaty of Holston, seizing Cherokee territory and formally making them a direct vassal. This lead to the Treaty of Tellico where the US strong-armed the Cherokee into ceding ever more land. After this the Treaty of 1817 further setup a voluntary exchange system where Cherokee could trade their land in Georgia for land in Arkansas. Cherokee who believed that removal was inevitable and took this option were known as Old Settlers. The US further rewrote the treaty with the Treaty of Washington in 1819 that unilaterally seized more Cherokee territory, promising they’d get to keep the little they had left. The next treaty of Washington 1828 made with the Old Settlers further let them trade their land in Arkansas for land in Oklahoma.

And people wonder why China, Iran and Russia today expect the Americans to always lie! It’s not like the American Imperial elite treats treaties as nothing more than a break to regroup for the next offensive for two and a half centuries.

Georgia ran through with nullification forbidding the existence of the Cherokee’s government, claiming state law reigned supreme over their territory, and forbade missionaries and those married to Cherokee from living in Cherokee country without a permit. This led to the Supreme Court Case where the Feds “attempted” to reign in the Georgian State Government, not over disagreement of policy but over disagreement on the line between State and Federal authority. In the course of renegotiation, the Cherokee split between the National Party advocating forceful resistance and the Treaty Party made up of a minority of leaders, including Stand Watie, who believed that expropriation was inevitable and the best shot the Cherokee had was to get as far from Americans as they could to build a society that could potentially stand on its own two feet independent of foreign interference. Though the Cherokee national council and its Chief John Ross refused to sign the treaty, the Senate approved it with some financial compensation for the land seized.

Stand Watie, who already saw resistance in the East as futile, went to modern-day Oklahoma to try to rebuild something that could survive the American Empire. Of the minority of the Treaty Party that agreed to the terms, only Stand Watie avoided execution by the Cherokee nation for treason. The Cherokee underwent a low-key Civil War, even after the Cherokee East were forced out to Oklahoma following the trail Stand Watie laid down. With the kickoff of the American Civil War, the Choctaw, Chickasaw and the Creek allied with the Confederacy hoping a split American Empire would stop the losses they continually faced since the American Revolution. Chief Ross, a man who at that point had immense sympathy with the Union despite previous history, initially allied with the Confederacy as most of the Cherokee were of the same mind as their three bordering tribes and hoped to avoid a repeat of the 1830’s-40’s Cherokee Civil War. He proceeded to allow himself to be captured, switching sides and serving as the Cherokee-Nation-Government-In-Exile as Stand Watie rallied the tribe to do as much damage to the Union as possible.

Stand Watie, being highly pragmatic and decisive, already had focused on building up the Nation as much as he could the prior two and a half decades in Oklahoma. He believed the US would form a State out of Oklahoma and repeat what happened in Georgia. Popular with the Cherokee who agreed they had no threat greater than the Union to their children’s future, he got elected primary Chief, not hard to do when the primary Chief fled to Washington DC and openly offered to be a puppet. This lead to open warfare among the Cherokee between pro-Union and pro-Confederacy forces that broke down along clan allegiance to the Ross and the Watie clans respectively. The pro-Confederate faction won out and established the 2^nd Cherokee Mounted Rifles. Watie launched the last attempt for a free Cherokee nation.

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Part 2

Before getting married I commuted everywhere by bicycle, something the innumerate informed me was quite dangerous in an American city. A fundamental error the average subject of the American Empire routinely makes is looking only at the most catastrophic outcome of a course of action, not the actual risk of death increase or overall life expectancy impact when judging two activities. The first is to go over some terms, a micromort is a one in a million chance in dying in a given year. To measure the true impact of any course of action, be it transportation, housing or medical treatment, what matters is both how many micromorts one gains or loses from the activity as well as total life expectancy impact. Nearly all “preventative medicine” that the medical establishment pushes today, though they may reduce your cancer risk, they at best do not decrease your life expectancy, but most of the time usually do.

Concerning the bike commute, I had a twelve and a half mile drive or ride to get to work. The time it took to go by car or by bike was exactly the same. As this was before Texas banned lane filtering and lane splitting, I did both on a bicycle to get through stand-still traffic. A decade and a half ago I estimated for each hour of commuting by car, taking into account both accident risk and health impacts, my life expectancy would decrease by a minute. For every hour of riding a bike, though the injury and death risk were greater than driving a car, my life expectancy would go up twelve minutes and twenty-four seconds from the health benefits outweighing the increased micromorts from crash risk. Concerning that latter number however it only applies to the first two hours riding a bike in a day, more than that does not increase life expectancy. Given my commute was just under forty-four minutes that wasn’t a problem. Recently I found out per Spiegelhalter’s measurements of the impact of sedentary time, driving the car per hour reduces life expectancy by fifteen minutes alone from the health impact, not including the risk of death by car crash, so my earliest calculations were possibly too generous to the car.

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Recently I decided to apply the same mathematics to motorcycles as I found out from a friend that he burns about five hundred calories each hour he rides his motorbike off-road. For the sake of calculation I decided to estimate a few commutes, each of the same riding time of about an hour, from where I live to another rural Texas location across the rural backroads and highways. Expected calorie burn per hour ranges two hundred to two hundred and fifty calories an hour. Besides the twisties being moderate exercise as one has to maneuver the bike with your body, your muscles are always firing actively despite you sitting on your butt to maintain the bike’s balance even on straight highway, making it definitely not a sedentary activity. Given my demographic data to get a more accurate determination of death and injury risks on a motorcycle vs a sub-compact car like a Mazda 3 or Honda Civic, the crash risk for the bike is thirteen times that of the car, with an odds of death across my lifetime of one one-in-twenty die roll. That translates into about fourteen days of life-expectancy lost per year compared to the cars just over one day per year. The health impacts are where things get interesting, with the car I’d lose one point eight days per year from the negative health impact, while with the bike I would gain twenty-one and a half days of life expectancy. Not as great as riding a bike, but more than great enough to overwhelm the negative impact of the crash and death expectancy for a net loss of nearly three days a year per car commuting compared to a seven-and-a-half day life expectancy gain from doing the same commute by motorcycle.

Now to put in a caveat, this was calculating specific rural routes assuming motorcycle gear including helmet, armor, boots, gloves and wearable airbags, specifically the Helite Turtle and the biker jeans that have Helite airbags in them too. Also the bike would be a Honda Rebel 1100 cruiser, not a sportbike let alone a superbike. Different routes, especially urban, as well as different gear and different bikes will have vastly different risk metrics. The impact on your insurance costs confirm this. The data says the biggest cause of death by overwhelming majority for that one-in-twenty for my test cases is not getting hit by other vehicles or even spinning out or crashing from user error, but hitting or being hit by a deer. Interestingly, it is the same with car deaths for sub-compacts, so I will definitely be getting deer tags in the name of pro-active self-defense. Having conferred with local EMS and firefighters who’ve responded to bike crashes out here, they confirmed this to be the case for metric bikes. Non-deer deaths overwhelmingly are those who ride drunk, those who ride Harley’s, and those riding sports-bikes. Apparently almost all the fatal non-alcoholic wrecks involving Japanese cruisers involved deer. Their consistent dislike of all things Japanese frankly makes them racial bigots who all deserve to be eaten.

The lesson is short, to get a true risk estimate of any activity, you have to take into account the other factors besides the worst-case scenario. Thus don’t bubble-wrap your kids! Some people look at me like I’m crazy letting my three-year-old jump into the deep end. Sure, drowning risk is real, but I’m right there to get her out if things go south, she learns to swim both reducing future drowning risk and greatly increasing her health and overall life expectancy. She enjoys it too, both of us gaining positive memories she’ll remember at my future funeral. Death comes for us all, there is no upside without risk, God wrote this into the very fabric of the universe. One error of modernity is avoiding risk at all cost, the pre-Modern correction is to be strong and courageous.

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