JIAJU, China - In 2005, the National Geographic China magazine named this ethnic Tibetan village in western Sichuan province, sprawled over a valley amid snow-capped mountains, China’s most beautiful. Depending on how you look at it, that distinction was either a blessing or a curse…

“These cultures are unique, and an invasion of different cultures will destroy them. Furthermore, with an increasing number of tourists pouring into minority regions, the local governments commercialize the cultures, and even religious practices are changed.”

As everyone knows, Bono’s second passion, after music, is saving the world — and making you feel like a complete douche if you’re not willing to donate all your hard-earned cash to do the same…

But U2 singer Bono has now raised eyebrows after he and his wife’s ethical fashion house moved production to an undisclosed location in China.

Present-day admirers of G.K. Chesterton (The Outline of Sanity) and E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) are sometimes accused of wanting to return to the Middle Ages, and can be easily mocked for wanting to do so with full access to modern medicine and laptops.

But neither Chesterton nor Schumacher were so naïve. They were calling for a particular kind of progress – towards a more human-centered, though still technologically sophisticated and creatively developing, society. They both realized that there are particular concepts and ideas that were prevalent in medieval Christendom that we might indeed learn from, precisely to make that progress possible. In fact great cultural movements are often brought about by importing ideas from the past into a new social context – the Renaissance is one example.

Enormous, massively destructive engagements may again be on the horizon… so says neocon/classicist/farmer Victor Davis Hanson. I tend to agree but what happened to all that happy neocon talk about a Groundhog Day-like “end of history”— the endlessly drab mopping-up for empire and democracy, exemplified by the US/NATO doctrine of “counterinsurgency”?

Van Rompuy and the secret Belgian plot to rule Britain: ”Make no mistake, the EU is an empire with global ambitions. In his acceptance speech, President Van Rompuy extolled ‘global governance’. Legions of bureaucrats will rule the British from Brussels, the Belgian capital. Being proud of your Britishness will be criminalised, just as Brussels has always punished Flemings who put Flanders first.”