Ahh, I don't know CC.  The Left goes up and down here in America.  Our country DID, after all, elect and re-elect Obama.  The Left will rise again, but I hope they do not in 2018 and 2020.

My *guess* is that we do avoid a full-blown civil war.  But real problems, and real rioting and other bad stuff is likely to happen when the .gov runs out of money and/or a real repression starts.

"The Empire will strike back."

Even The Huffington Post cannot let the down-ballot gutting of the Democrats go unnoticed. Senior politics editor Sam Stein was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday, where he said that while Obama was re-elected twice proving himself to be an excellent candidate—his party has suffered catastrophic losses during his presidency. In all, the Democrats have lost 1,030 seats at the state and federal level, a wipeout of at least a generation of Democratic talent. Stein added that with such a political butcher’s bill, you have to ask whether this man was good for Democrats (via The Hill):

Leah wrote how Charles Krauthammer called the Democratic losses under Obama “incalculable.”


The state and local elections is where the new talent is found. Democrats are nowhere near that pool (right now). If Democrats are serious about walking out of the wilderness, then re-connect with white working class voters that number in the tens of millions. These people voted Trump, but they can shift back. Yet, the Democrats are now a coastal and urban-based party, where snobby elites will not take too kindly about reaching out to white voters. These areas are bastions for black lives matter, transgender bathroom rights, notions that all police officers are racists, trigger warnings, and safe spaces. These people are not interested in anyone who isn’t from where they live, who are not college educated, and who don’t speak with learned diction. Right now, Democrats don’t seem to be keen on changing their tune; they’ve just picked San Francisco and New York-based liberals (Pelosi and Schumer) to helm the ship in Congress. Democrats can fix this, but I have a feeling they won't anytime soon. We shouldn't be complaining about that.

heard this from a little birdie:

The American Left – which never had a sterling record to begin with – is rapidly deteriorating. In one sense it may seem surprising how expediently the Left has turned to violent, repressive censorship and destruction as a reaction against the populist wave of 2016. However, given the history of Progressive thought, it makes perfect sense. The Left is not really changing tactics; it is actually doing what the Left has always designed to do....

(Full article at link above)

Call me crazy or dumb...but I am starting to have a desire of shorting BTC at these levels...

No, it isn't. Bitcoin is not just money. Bitcoin is the first digital world created by humans. Like the analog world we live in you can't change the past but by action or inaction now you can change the future.

By using the blockchain to pay things you just "move" things in this digital world and use this movement to account for payment settlement. It is just like moving physical gold from one place to another. Sooner or later moving gold or whatever becomes too expensive to be used as a payment method and we must move onto transferring the ownership not the "thing" itself. It'll be much cheaper.

Defining the so called tx fee is very difficult, because it is actually the energy we need to move things in this digital world. We must define what is speed and what is mass in this digital world to calculate the proper energy needed for every "transaction".

How We Got Pill-Induced Abortions
Abortion reversal refers to halting a chemical abortion, an abortion caused by ingesting a drug. The abortion pill first made headlines when the French government approved RU-486 for sale in 1988. In September 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the abortion pill to terminate pregnancies up to seven weeks old. Then in 2016, the FDA expanded the label to include terminating pregnancies up to ten weeks.

Sold in the United States under the brand name Mifeprex and generically known as mifepristone, the abortion pill, as the FDA explained, “is used, together with another medication called misoprostol, to end an early pregnancy.” Mifeprex, which is taken first, binds to a woman’s progesterone receptors, blocking progesterone from the uterine lining. Progesterone deficiency causes the uterine lining to break down, depriving the embryo of the nutrients necessary to live.

Twenty-four to forty-eight hours later, the woman takes the second drug, misoprostol. This drug induces uterine contractions, which expel the now-dead embryo (or fetus, depending on the stage of human development, as Mifeprex is also used off-label for second-trimester abortions). While French pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf developed Mifeprex to cause abortions, first testing its chemical actions in vitro (in labs) and later running clinical trials, the abortion reversal protocol developed by happenstance, necessity—and prayer.

‘There’s Nothing You Can Do’
The story begins in North Carolina in 2007, in the family practice of Dr. Matthew Harrison. A patient sought Harrison’s help in stopping the abortive effects of Mifeprex. Harrison said that at the abortion clinic, “they gave her no hope. They said, ‘There’s nothing you can do; you have to complete this procedure.’”

As Harrison later recounted, he stepped out of the exam room then “said a prayer and started looking through books and thinking about how RU-486 works…It essentially just blocks the progesterone receptors and starves the baby. Harrison then immediately took some progesterone he had on hand for fertility treatments and, after informing the mother that the treatment might not work, injected her with the hormone.”

The unborn baby survived, and half-a-dozen months later the first known woman treated with the abortion reversal protocol gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

Two years later, on the other side of the country, Dr. George Delgado made the same deduction after receiving an urgent request for help from a friend. The friend had fielded a desperate call on a pregnancy helpline from a woman who had begun the chemical abortion process by ingesting Mifeprex, but now wished to carry her baby to term.

As the Indianapolis Star explained: “Delgado had frequently prescribed progesterone to women at risk of miscarrying. Knowing of mifepristone’s progesterone-blocking properties, Delgado calculated that adding progesterone into the system could counteract the drug’s effect. From his southern California offices, he located a doctor in El Paso who agreed to treat the woman. Her child is now about 7 years old …Word got out, and Delgado started receiving more calls about the procedure.”

The Abortion Pill Reversal Program Is Born
With interest in the abortion reversal protocol growing, doctors Delgado, Harrison, and Mary Davenport established the Abortion Pill Reversal program in 2012, operating within the Culture of Life Family Services, a nonprofit organization in San Diego, California. The Abortion Pill Reversal program maintains a website and a 24/7 hotline. When women call, a medical professional answers and, if the caller chooses, Delgado’s team helps connect her with a local doctor for treatment.

In 2012, Delgado and Davenport published a paper in the Annals of Pharmacotherapy, a peer-reviewed journal. It reported the results of Delgado’s protocol, noting that four out of six women who had undergone treatment with progesterone after ingesting mifepristone successfully carried their babies to term.

With the publication of their article and establishment of the webpage, the abortion pill reversal protocol began receiving growing attention within the pro-life medical community. As the IndyStar reported, while originally a small operation, the program now connects women worldwide to a network of more than 350 physicians. These doctors have treated more than 300 women and the abortion reversal protocol boasts a 60-70 percent success rate.
...
While state lawmakers continue to grapple with the issue, scientific knowledge will continue to advance. A follow-up journal article by Delgado detailing the continued success of the abortion reversal protocol is expected soon. While critics denounced his initial case study, given the limited number of patients treated off-label with progesterone, this article will include more than 300 patients and report a success rate in the 60-70 percent range.
...
abortion advocates have painted the abortion-reversal protocol as dangerous and doctors prescribing progesterone as conducting unethical studies on human subjects with no oversight
...
How abortion activists respond to further scientific evidence supporting the reversal protocol will be telling. Will they continue to deprive women who choose no longer to abort of information indicating that progesterone improves the chance their babies will survive? If so, it will continue to show the Left is not just anti-science but anti-choice and anti-life.

Medical abortions done at home with online help and pills sent in the mail appear to be just as safe as those done at a clinic, according to a new study.

The research tracked the outcomes of 1,000 women in Ireland and Northern Ireland, who used a website run by a group called Women on Web to get abortion pills.


A drone feerying abortion pills

The Netherlands-based nonprofit provides advice and pills to women seeking an early abortion in more than 140 countries where access to abortion is restricted. Ireland and Northern Ireland have some of the world's strictest laws, often only granting approval when a woman's life is at risk.

To use the service, women complete an online form, which is reviewed by a doctor. They are sent two drugs in the mail — mifepristone and misoprostol — and given instructions on how to take the pills, which have been used since 1988 to induce early abortions. They are later asked to fill out an evaluation form.

About 95 percent of the women in the study reported successfully ending their pregnancy; nearly all were less than nine weeks pregnant at the time of the online consultation. The researchers said less than 10 percent reported symptoms of a potentially serious complication like very heavy bleeding, fever or persistent pain, comparable to the rates for women who seek medical abortions at clinics where abortion is legal.

Seven women needed a blood transfusion and 26 received antibiotics. No deaths were reported. Follow-up information was missing for about one-third of the 1,636 women who were sent pills over three years, so some complications may have been missed.
...
"Women are very capable of managing their own abortions and they're able to determine themselves when they need to seek medical attention."

Other experts agreed the study shows how women might be able to safely sidestep restrictive abortion laws.

"This undermines the efficacy of these laws and leaves them unenforceable," said Bernard Dickens, a professor emeritus of health law and policy at the University of Toronto, who co-wrote an accompanying commentary. He cited a number of legal loopholes that would make it difficult to prosecute people helping women have an abortion at home.

Aiken said the website does not operate in the U.S. but that a telemedicine study of the abortion pill is underway.

Linda Kavanath, a spokeswoman for the Abortion Rights Campaign in Ireland, said women should be reassured about the safety of doing a medical abortion on their own

Metaphysics

The great need for me, for everyone, is first to know our metaphysical assumptions and then to reflect on them. Nobody is exempt in modern times; because there are so many forces at work to poison our metaphysics. And a poisoned metaphysic will run life, and beyond life.

For many years I didn’t believe in either the importance or even the reality of metaphysical assumptions; I had the idea that we could and should stick to matters of evidence that were applicable to the business of life. For example, science obviously ‘worked’ – so why not just get on with it? It was perhaps when I realised that science no longer worked, and that people were not getting on with it – but doing something almost entirely different and just calling it science – that I began to realise the importance of metaphysics. When it was too late.

But it is at the personal level that assumptions matter most personally. Life has no Meaning when our basic assumption is that Life has no Meaning (but Just Is – and might not have been) – and Life has no Purpose when it is assumed that everything which happens is either passively caused or else random. 

On the other hand; Life feels very different when our metaphysical assumption is that Life is created, and for a reason.



God

I have to start with God. We live in God’s universe; and that is the source of all meaning and purpose; and the reason why its meaning and purpose can be known. God is also our Father and we his children: more, he is our loving Father. That is why there is a place for us, it is why we can understand, it is why God made us so that we can understand.

This kind of basis is much more essential that most people realise. We don’t just need an idea of how things are, but how it is that we are able to know how things are. At bottom; we need at least two things: a description of the ultimate realities – and we need assurance that this description is true.

First we formulate the description of ultimates… then what? Then we seek validation by means of what counts at the ultimate validation. What is that? – and is it the same for everybody? We have to stop questioning somewhere and accept  that It Just Is; but how do we know when we could or should stop?

Well, any answer to this question of validation falls into an infinite regress of validation; because it can be (will be) asked why the validation method is itself valid; and any answer to that is subject to the same question… The point is, do we actually want an answer, or do we want to ‘prove’ that an answer is impossible? Because there is an answer, implicit in our behaviour – implicit in our questioning. All questions proceed from assumptions; what are these assumptions?

This is the need for ‘faith’, which is trust. If there is no trust, there are no answers – and there can be no life. The question ‘but who can I trust’ may be answered by the counter-question: ‘who do you trust already?’ Once that is known, then its adequacy may be apparent; we may learn that we are trusting somebody whom we actually – now we think about it – do not trust. (Like when we repeat a story that everybody knows, and argue against an experienced and knowledgeable friend who asserts something else; then realise that our information came originally from a newspaper. Knowing the basis of our assumption, we can then ask: do we trust the friend or the newspaper. But we can only ask this question when we know the nature and source of our assumption.)

There is a cynical pose (most people have adopted it at some time) which effects to doubt all and everything. In practice, when assumptions are exposed and traced, cynicism is either the grossest credulity or more often a false argument used to demolish only that which the cynic wishes to deny (such as a limitation on his desired behaviour).

But, as well as the cynic, there is the despairing doubter – who lives on the verge of paralysis due t uncertainties concerning the validity of… everything. The despairing doubter is transfixed by the possibility that life may really, behind everything – and whether or not this could ever be known, have no meaning or purpose or relevance to us. The despairing doubter is not, fundamentally concerned with the status of knowledge claims or the validity of ultimate descriptions; he is simply unsure about everything – lacks any inner sense of reality.

Whether the despairing doubter actually exists in a full and coherent form is doubtful, but a tinge or tendency of this is characteristic. Yet how seldom is this taken seriously – least of all by its sufferers! The doubts extend to doubting the doubts – such that nothing is done about them, nothing is done about trying to settle the doubts…

Clearly a pathological state; yet common, mainstream, almost universal as at least a fleeting experience. It was the problem that CG Jungs wealthy and leisured private patients often consulted him about, and which he tried to solve by going back to childhood or dream instincts, and building upon them; finding something – some activity, like playing with mud, or sketching pictures - that was apparently self-validating, and using this as a foundation to build upon.

But in the end Jung came back to God; and late in his life he was clearly religious, a kind of Christian; and said that he ‘knew’ the truth of God (did not ‘believe’, but knew). His earlier and more therapeutic answers had proven insufficient, or else his later knowledge rendered them unnecessary.

At any rate, I think we need to know of the reality of God, and of his nature; and we need to know this for ourselves – it is not something that can be learned from others, or taken on trust. We need to know – and what that means, what that implies, is individual and indefensible because it is the basis of other knowledge.  But that is what we need to do, and we therefore need to keep working on it – making it our priority – until it is achieved and we know the reality of God.

Even small changes in solar activity can impact Earth's climate in significant and surprisingly complex ways, researchers say.

The sun is a constant star when compared with many others in the galaxy. Some stars pulsate dramatically, varying wildly in size and brightness and even exploding. In comparison, the sun varies in the amount of light it emits by only 0.1 percent over the course of a relatively stable 11-year-long pattern known as the solar cycle.

Still, "the light reaching the top of the Earth's atmosphere provides about 2,500 times as much energy as the total of all other sources combined," solar physicist Greg Kopp at the University of Colorado told SPACE.com. As such, even 0.1 percent of the amount of light the sun emits exceeds all other energy sources the Earth's atmosphere sees combined, such as the radioactivity naturally emitted from Earth's core, Kopp explained.

To learn more about how such tiny variations in solar energy might impact terrestrial climate, the National Research Council (NRC) convened dozens of experts in many fields, such as plasma physics, solar activity, atmospheric chemistry, fluid dynamics and energetic particle physics.

Many of the ways the scientists proposed these fluctuations in solar activity could influence Earth were complicated in nature. For instance, solar energetic particles and cosmic rays could reduce ozone levels in the stratosphere. This in turn alters the behavior of the atmosphere below it, perhaps even pushing storms on the surface off course.

"In the lower stratosphere, the presence of ozone causes a local warming because of the breakup of ozone molecules by ultraviolet light," climate scientist Jerry North at Texas A&M University told SPACE.com.

When the ozone is removed, "the stratosphere there becomes cooler, increasing the temperature contrast between the tropics and the polar region. The contrast in temperatures in the stratosphere and the upper troposphere leads to instabilities in the atmospheric flow west to east. The instabilities make for eddies or irregular motions."

These eddies feed the strength of jet streams, ultimately altering flows in the upper troposphere, the layer of atmosphere closest to Earth's surface. "The geographical positioning of the jets aloft can alter the distribution of storms over the middle latitudes," North said. "So the sun might have a role to play in this kind of process. I would have to say this would be a very difficult mechanism to prove in climate models. That does not mean it may not exist — just hard to prove."

In addition, climate scientist Gerald Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and his colleagues suggest that solar variability is leaving a definite imprint on climate, especially in the Pacific Ocean.

When researchers look at sea surface temperature data during sunspot peak years, the tropical Pacific showed a pattern very much like that expected with La Niña, a cyclical cooling of the Pacific Ocean that regularly affects climate worldwide, with sunspot peak years leading to a cooling of almost 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the equatorial eastern Pacific. In addition, peaks in the sunspot cycle were linked with increased precipitation in a number of areas across the globe, as well as above-normal sea-level pressure in the mid-latitude North and South Pacific.
...

Seventy-five years ago, on 18–19 September 1941, the Earth experienced a great magnetic storm, one of the most intense ever recorded. It arrived at a poignant moment in history, when radio and electrical technology was emerging as a central part of daily life and when much of the world was embroiled in World War II, which the United States had not yet officially entered.

The illuminated night sky exposed an Allied convoy to German attack.Auroras danced across the night sky as voltage surged in power grid lines. A radio blackout interrupted fan enjoyment of a baseball game, while another radio program was interrupted by private phone conversations. Citizens, already on edge, wondered if neon lights were some sort of antiaircraft signal. And far away in the North Atlantic, the illuminated night sky exposed an Allied convoy to German attack.

These effects raised awareness within the scientific community and among the public of the societal significance of the effects that the Sun and outer space can have on the Earth—what we now call space weather.

Solar-Terrestrial Interaction
On 10 September 1941, during the declining phase of solar cycle 17, astronomers saw an unusually large, low-latitude group of sunspots on the eastern limb of the Sun. The spots had formed, as they all do, with the buoyant emergence of a concentrated bundle of magnetic field lines from the Sun’s interior through the photosphere. Over the course of the next week the spots grew, and the Sun’s rotation brought them near the center of the solar disk as viewed from Earth [e.g., Richardson, 1941]. The sunspot group was large enough to be seen with the naked eye.

At 08:38 universal time (UT) on 17 September 1941, the Greenwich Observatory spectrohelioscope recorded a solar flare above this sunspot group [Newton, 1941]. The emitted ultraviolet and X-ray radiation abruptly enhanced the ionization of the Earth’s atmosphere, causing a sharp perturbation known as a “crochet” in dayside ground-based recordings of the geomagnetic field and temporarily interfering with high-frequency radio communication. Subsequently, scientists at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California observed another solar flare at 16:26 UT

On the basis of daily sunspot reports supplied by the U.S. Naval Observatory, the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington formally issued a warning to radio operators that they could expect significant disturbances to ionospheric and geomagnetic conditions beginning on about 18 September [McNish, 1941a]. This prediction, which turned out to be accurate, is a noteworthy development in the historical development of methods for reliably forecasting space weather.

Less than 20 hours after the flare was reported by Greenwich, a magnetic storm commenced at 0412 UT on 18 September with the arrival at Earth of a coronal mass ejection. This mass ejection abruptly compressed the magnetopause and generated a magnetic impulse that was recorded by observatories around the world [Newton, 1941]. The magnetic superstorm that followed was complex, intense, and of long duration.

A magnetic observatory in Cheltenham, Md., operated by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, registered six separate occurrences of geomagnetic storms with a K index of 9 (the most intense value possible). Five of these occurred consecutively over a 24-hour period. In terms of a related global index , the level of geomagnetic activity over a 24-hour period has not since been matched
...
The popular press provided vivid accounts of the auroras. The Brooklyn Eagle [1941] described celestial “neon lights.” The Chicago Tribune [1941a] reported that a “cosmic brush painted the Chicago sky with light” and that motorists parked on the highways had caused a traffic jam as they sought a clear view of the celestial spectacle.

According to the Washington Post [1941a], some people wondered if the celestial events had something to do with national defense: “Was it an antiaircraft search battery?” These were, after all, difficult times. The United States was already being drawn into World War II [e.g., Heinrichs, 1988], and many citizens anticipated even greater involvement.

Auroras were also seen in Europe, but not surprisingly, most newspaper articles focused on wartime events. Newspapers, for example, succinctly reported that the British Royal Air Force carried out a raid on a German supply base on the Baltic Sea [Washington Post, 1941b] and that the Germans bombarded Leningrad [Chicago Tribune, 1941b], each under the lights of the aurora borealis.

When the magnetic storm finally subsided and the aurora faded, a New York Times [1941c] article described the events, in war terms that were common at the time, as an “ethereal blitz.” Some readers even optimistically saw the auroral displays as a representation of hope for victory [New York Times, 1941d].

CC, congratulations on getting 95% the way there.  I believe they used to call 95% an "A" in school, who knows nowadays...  

I am not sure what my longer-term strategy will be re increasing BTC holdings.  I have just let some BTC trickle in from my Signature Campaign, but have not bought for a while.

iamnotback encouraged us to look at Alts, something not feasible for me now (learning curve looks steep, and I am now on a trip and moving, yes both, ugh).  For the moment it is much harder for me to get any, but that's OK.

Yep

...

tabnloz

Thank you for mentioning Armstrong's latest piece on Bitcoin.  I think that Armstrong might be wrong here, as we have seen the .govs of the world (so far anyway) unable to catch the WannaCry hackers.  Meaning that BTC may catch on a little faster than he wrote.

That BTC can cross boundaries so easily is a HUGE matter.

In the future the only currency is potatoes, stock up now!

South Korea is awash with evangelical Christianity.

This once resolutely shamanistic and Confucian country now seems to have more churches than corner stores. From miniscule, storefront chapels to the biggest church in the world, the skyline of every major city is ablaze with neon crosses. Evangelical Christians proselyte house to house, distribute pamphlets and church-emblazoned tissue packets on street corners, and cycle through town blaring sermons and homilies through bullhorns, urging you to either accept Jesus, or be prepared for the Devil’s wrath below. It is very rare to spend more than a few days in Korea without being preached to.

“We think of Korea as the Second Jerusalem,” says Hong Su Myeon, an older volunteer at Somang Presbyterian, a megachurch in Gangnam. He says Korea is leading a wave of evangelization around the world.

At the same time, Hong says, “It’s true that [a lot of] Christianity is corrupt. But there are a lot of hidden true pastors working hard, and their passion for God is why we are so successful in Korea.”

What can be most surprising to a visitor to Korea is that only 29 percent of the population actually identifies as Christian – about three-quarters Protestant, one quarter Catholic. But their zeal is so enormous that it overshadows the 23 percent who are Buddhist, and the 46 percent who say they have no religion at all.

“It is kind of amazing” how zealous Korean Christians are, says Dr. Hwang Moon-kyung, Professor of History at the University of Southern California. “They give you the impression that South Korea is a very religious country when in fact it isn’t. But the ones who are religious tend to be very fervently religious.”

Up From Persecution

It is one of East Asia’s greatest historical riddles – how did this small, divided country go from being a place where Christianity was just a footnote – barely one percent of the population in 1900 – to one that produces more missionaries than any other country in the world, bar the U.S.

No one would have predicted Christianity’s success in Korea 200 years ago. Catholicism was first introduced in the 18th century by returning Confucian scholars from China, but they saw it more as an academic interest. It was the direct arrival of French and Chinese Catholic missionaries in the early 19th century that set off the first round of missionizing. But Korea’s rulers were having none of it.

“For its first 75 years [the Catholic church] underwent the most horrendous persecution, comparable really to the history of the early church,” says Dr. James Grayson, professor of Modern Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield. Murder, torture, and massacre were all directed at early Christians by the Joseon Kings, who saw the church’s teachings of equality before God as a direct threat to their power.

At least 8000 Catholics were killed, and many have since been canonized, giving Korea the fourth largest number of saints of any nation. In 1984, John Paul II canonized 103 all at once.

Explaining and Resisting a Tumultuous World

It was the arrival of Protestantism in the 19th century that changed everything. By this point the Joseon kings were fast losing power, their Chinese protectors were in decline, and an ascendant Japan, America and Russia were all eyeing the Korean peninsula. The country needed whatever grace God could give it.

Protestantism arrived mostly from American missionaries, like Horace Allen and the Underwood family (famous for their typewriters), who built the schools, hospitals, and universities the kings didn’t. Christians were reputed to treat peasants with respect, as opposed to the scorn poured on them by the traditional nobility. The Bible was translated into Hangul, the simple phonetic writing system, rather than only into Chinese characters, which most people couldn’t read.

Christianity became a source of resistance, especially to Japanese colonial rule, which began in 1910 and was famously brutal. Though not all churches were anti-Japanese, many were.

“There was no other hope for Koreans at that time,” says Dr. Andrew Park, professor of Theology and Ethics at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. “They couldn’t depend on China, Russia, Americans, any other country. There was no help. Only God alone, they were so desperate.”

Grayson says that annexation provided a link between nationalism and Christianity. “The Korean church has never had to answer questions about association with Western imperialism, because imperialism in Korea was Japanese.”

American Religion, American Protection

When the Japanese left in 1945, the church was in high standing. The first South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, was a U.S.-educated Protestant. Even Kim Il-sung, first ruler of North Korea, had been a Presbyterian as a child.

Following the Korean War, South Koreans came to view the Americans as saviors, and the Americans’ religion, Christianity, as a source of strength and wealth. Protestant leaders in South Korea “became very much familiar with the so-called American-style Protestant religion, sort of an American religion,” says Dr. Song Jae-Ryong, professor of Sociology at Kyunghee University, and President of the Korean Association for the Sociology of Religion. They adapted American evangelical themes and worked hard at turning South Korea into a Christian nation.

“In some sense, America became a substitute for the traditional role taken by China,” Grayson says, that of a protective big brother. This affected how Christians saw themselves, and made America out as “a model of a Christian state.”

The 1950s through 1980s saw South Korea governed by a series of murderous strongmen and generals. Some were Christian, some weren’t, but all were fanatical anticommunists, which proved nicely compatible with evangelical Protestantism.

Many Christian preachers were from the north – Pyongyang had been a hotbed of Christianity before the Korean War – and when they fled south they brought with them a virulent hatred of communism.

...

Kim Jong Un arrives for a military parade in Pyongyang marking the 105th anniversary of the birth of late leader Kim Il Sung. The day is treated as a holiday in North Korea and referred to as the “Day of Sun.”
 
On Tuesday, the highly insular North Korea conducted a massive artillery drill to mark the foundation of its military as tensions with the United States continued to escalate.

Like many aspects of North Korea’s political and economic systems, its military came into being under the late president Kim Il Sung. Born into a Christian family during a time of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, Kim rose to power with a vision of an isolated, almost hermit-like independence for his fledgling country.

It was under Kim that the political ideology of “juche” ― a guiding philosophy that places commitment to the state above all else ― took hold in the 1950s and solidified in subsequent decades.

Juche’s pervading influence on civic life explains why freedoms of any sort, including religion, are scarce in a nation that treats its current and past leaders as heroes of mythic proportion.

Kim Il Sung, the “eternal president” of North Korea, died in 1994.

Juche literally means self-reliance. As a political philosophy, it entails utter independence to the exclusion of any kind of outside influence. Kim described the ideology in a 1955 speech in the aftermath of the Korean War by saying: “All
 ideological
 work
 must
 be
 subordinated
 to
 the
 interests
 of
 the
 Korean
 revolution.” In other words, the state, its leaders and its political vision come before the interests and identities of individuals.

In practice, said Korean history scholar Donald Baker, juche ― and the unconditional loyalty it demands of the citizens ― has “evolved into a functional equivalent of religion.”

As a result, organized religion is tolerated at best and viewed as secondary to juche, which operates to maintain North Koreans’ faith in the government and in the Kim family. “Juche serves as an ideological tool for unifying the country,” Baker, a professor of Korean history and civilization at the University of British Columbia, told HuffPost. “It says, ‘We don’t need God. Instead, we rely on the leader.’”

Immortality comes about in that if your body dies, as long as your community survives you’ll have some sort of continued existence.”
Like religion might, juche even promises North Koreans a kind of immortality through their dedication to the state.

“In juche human beings are defined as members of a sociopolitical community,” Baker said. “There’s no individual apart from the community. Immortality comes about in that if your body dies, as long as your community survives you’ll have some sort of continued existence.”

As scholar Grace Lee wrote in an article on juche published in the Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs: “When Kim Il Sung unilaterally declared juche to be the governing principle of all aspects of North Korean life, as well as the ideological basis of all state policies, the philosophy gained the full authority of Kim Il Sung’s godlike status.”

There are an estimated 40,000 statues of the late president throughout the country. Every home in North Korea is required to have portraits of Kim and his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011, displayed. The portraits are treated like sacred objects and must be kept clean and well-maintained.

The bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are embalmed and on display at Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Memorial Palace, a site known at the “palace of the sun” and treated like a shrine. Like his father, Kim Jong Il is also revered with an immortal status and carries the title “eternal leader.”

Kim Il Sung’s grandson and the current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, is often referred to as having “a sacred bloodline,” Baker explained. As long as he and his descendants survive, the juche community lives on.

Some say juche builds upon Marxist ideals, which governed the country for the first half of the 20th century, but Baker argues the ideology has more to do with Korea’s history of Confucianism than with communism.

“Confucianism has a focus on the family and on community,” Baker said. “There’s the idea that your identity comes from your family and your community. You’re alive as long as your descendants remember you.”

Confucianism, a spiritual philosophy that developed in China some 2,500 years ago, was a guiding ideology in Korea for centuries and dictated an antagonism toward organized religion long before Kim ever came into power.

Under Confucianism, citizens were required to observe certain rituals, including funeral rites. When someone died, their children were required to honor the deceased by commemorating a tablet with their name on it and bowing before it during rituals. In Catholicism, this treatment of a sacred object was considered to be idolatry. Paul Yun Ji-Chung, a Korean Catholic man alive in the late 18th century, angered the government by failing to perform the tablet duty after his mother died. He was executed in 1791.

In trying to gather these threads together, there seems to be no centre, no guiding
principle, except an overwhelming desire for secrecy and to preserve the status quo.

For those that like science fiction I recently read the Doom Star Series by Vaughn Hepner. It is interesting social commentary underneath a good story.
https://www.amazon.com/Star-Soldier-Doom-Book-ebook/dp/B003SNJVH4

It envisions a dystopian future where humanity has terraformed and spread throughout the solar system and traditional religion appears to have has died out or been suppressed.

Humanity has splintered into various ideological factions. Earth is under the control of a stifling planet wide socialism. Mars and Venus are under the control of genetically engineered super humans who believe their superiority gives them the right to rule. Jupiter is controlled by philosopher kings who value only logic. Total laissez-faire capitalism dominates the outer planets and on the edges of the solar system a group seeks to create the ultimate controllable soldier by mixing man and machine.

As the story progress the various groups compete for dominance committing ever more horrific acts of evil that are completely justified by their various philosophies. It is quite clear that in this future humanity is in danger of extinction as the self-inflected horrors worsen and billions start to die.

The series is subtle social commentary the reader slowly realizes that while some ideological groups are better then others they are all pretty bad.

It is a vision of a future without God where religion in the form of various ideological and political constructs is very much alive and well.

Religious/ideological wars certainly have the potential to destroy the world. These conflicts are unavoidable. The question is what can save us? I do not pretend to know the answer with any certainty but here is an answer provided earlier by Miscreanity. I have yet to hear a better one.

1 - Explain how it provides freedom from capital controls any more than cold hard cash does? I have BTC and I have travelled pretty extensively, my BTC has been pretty much useless to me abroad. "Dirty fiat" i.e. USD cash money is accepted pretty much everywhere. This is not a criticism of BTC, it just illustrates that we are early in the game.

2 - I'm not a debt slave so I wouldn't know. I own my house and owe nothing to the bank or anyone else, so I guess I'm struggling to understand your point? You say that BTC provides freedom to the user, then say the avg debt slave doesn't care about freedom? I'm confused....
I'm sure any slave, debt or otherwise, has freedom at the front of mind.

The key here is to realise that everyone is stupid, including you.  If you can't trust anyone else at all to be right no matter what their experience is, you should never trust yourself either.

LOL best answer ever