Guest Post, Author at Outliers Academy • Page 4 of 6

Evil

Luciferianism: A Secular Look At A Destructive Globalist Belief System

By Guest Post February 14, 2019

by Brandon Smith for Alt-Market.com

Over many years of investigating the mechanics of global events and the people behind them I have become perhaps a little obsessed with one particular subject – the source and motivations of evil. This fascination does not stem from a simple morbid curiosity, but a strategic need to understand an enemy. Much like an exterminator needs to understand the behavior of cockroaches to be effective, I seek to understand the behavior and nature of organized evil.

One very important fact that must first be made clear in people’s minds is that evil does indeed exist. Establishment propaganda has spent immense time, effort and capital attempting to condition society into believing that evil is nothing more than a social construct – an opinion. Evil is supposedly in the eye of the beholder; a product of religious conditioning. This is a falsehood. Just like concepts of beauty, concepts of evil are actually inherent in our psyches from birth. The “eye of the beholder” is irrelevant.

Two particular areas of human psychology support this fact:

First, as the work of Carl Jung (and by extension anthropologists like Joseph Campbell) exposed, all human beings no matter where in the world they are born, from the most isolated tribe in the Amazon to the largest metropolis in America, carry the same archetypal symbols in their psyche. That is to say, we ALL have the same psychological elements in our minds regardless of environment.

This fact alone is so overwhelming to modern man that some people refuse to even acknowledge it as a possibility. We have been trained like lab rats to see only one path through the maze; we have been told over and over again that everything is “relative”; that each person is entirely a product of environment and that we all start out empty as “blank slates”.

The vicious attacks on Carl Jung by the establishment (including lies that he cooperated with the Nazis) tell me that Jung was very close to the mark. He had stumbled upon something very dangerous to the establishment; something that could derail their conditioning of the public.

Second, the undeniable existence of the human conscience suggests that we are born with an understanding of duality. Meaning, just as Jung discovered, our psyches contain inherent concepts of good and evil that influence our decisions and reactions. Jung referred to evil, or psychologically destructive impulses, as the ‘personal shadow’ and the ‘collective shadow’.

The vast majority of people have an intuitive relationship with good and evil. They feel anxiety when confronted with evil actions or thoughts, and they feel personal guilt when they know they have done something evil to other people. Some might call this a “moral compass”. I would refer to it as part of the soul or spirit.

In any case, there is a contingent of people in the world that do not have it – a small percentage of the population that is born without conscience, or that finds it easy to ignore conscience. We’ll get to those people in a moment, but first, we should probably define what evil is.

Evil is first and foremost any action that seeks to destroy, exploit or enslave in the name of personal gain or gratification. Unfortunately, evil actions are often misrepresented as advantageous for the group, thereby making them morally acceptable. The needs of the many supposedly outweigh the needs of the few, and thus evil is rationalized as a means to a “positive end” for the “greater good”.

In most cases, however, destructive actions do not end up serving the interests of the majority, and only end up giving more wealth and power to an elitist minority. This is not a coincidence.

Evil begins with the denial of the existence of conscience, or the denial of the existence of choice. Each person is born with a capacity or freedom to choose. We can listen to conscience, or we can ignore it. We can do good, or we can do evil. Evil tells us the choice is relative and that morality is relative; that there is no difference between a good choice and a bad choice, or, that the evil choice is the only choice.

Beyond ignoring conscience, we must also define the motivation that drives evil. Psychology would suggest that destructive self serving actions stem from an obsessive desire to obtain or control things we cannot or should not have. Interestingly, this is also what some religions teach us, but let’s stick to a secular examination.

As mentioned earlier, there is a group of people in the world who do not see good and evil the way most of us do. Their psyche functions in a completely different way, without the filter of conscience. These people exhibit the traits of narcissistic sociopaths. Full blown high level narcissistic sociopaths represent around 1% to 5% of the total human population, and most of them are born, not made by their environment. Also, 5% to 10% of people hold latent traits of either narcissism or sociopathy that generally only rise to the surface in an unstable crisis environment.

I have written extensively on narcissistic sociopaths and the globalist establishment in numerous articles. I have also outlined how such people, contrary to popular belief, are not isolated from one another. They do in fact organize into groups for mutual gain.

There is an ideology or system of belief that argues for the exact opposite of what conscience tells us is “good”, and that system is Luciferianism. In fact, luciferianism appears to be the source influence for most existing destructive “isms” in our society today (including socialism and globalism). It is my theory that luciferianism is a religion or cult designed by sociopathic narcissists for the benefit of sociopathic narcissists.

It is sometimes difficult to identify the true “sacraments” behind luciferianism because, for one, luciferians refuse to admit that the system is a religion at all. They prefer to call it a philosophy or methodology, at least in public. The system also seems to encourage active disinformation in order to dissuade or mislead non-adherents. The historic term for this religious secrecy is “occultism”. I would call it “elitism”.

There are some foundational beliefs that luciferians do openly admit to. First and foremost, the goal of luciferianism is to attain godhood. That is to say, they believe that SOME human beings have the capacity to become gods through the accumulation of knowledge.

I have written about the insanity of the goal of godhood in the past, outlining how quantum physics and Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Proof make total scientific and mathematical observation and understanding of the universe impossible. But mathematical reality does not stop luciferian circles from destructively chasing that which they cannot have. By extension, scientific knowledge not tempered by discipline, wisdom and a moral compass can lead to catastrophe. Material knowledge is invariably abused by those seeking godlike power.

The notion of self-worship is a core trait of sociopathic narcissists; Luciferianism just codifies it as if it is a virtue. Another problem with the idea of becoming a god is that one inevitably develops a desire for followers and worshipers. What is a savior, after all, without a flock? But how does a human being gain a flock and become more a god? Through force or through trickery?

Second, luciferians claim they seek to elevate the power of the individual in general. In the minds of many people this doesn’t sound like a negative at all. Even I have argued for the importance of individualism in the midst of societal controls. That said, any ideology can be taken to extremes.

The pursuit of individual gratification can be pushed too far, to the point that the people around us begin to suffer. Because of the elitist nature of luciferianism, they are not necessarily seeking the elevation of ALL individuals, just certain “deserving” individuals. There is a tendency to view non-adherents as “inferior”; stupid people that should be sheared like sheep by those who are chasing a superior dream of personal godhood.

This attitude can also be seen in the common actions of narcissistic sociopaths, who have no qualms about conning or exploiting people around them as resources, feeding off others like parasites.

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Creativity

Dieter Rams’s 10 Principles of Design, illustrated by his ingenious products

By Guest Post February 13, 2019

by Mark Wilson

Every designer alive has heard of Dieter Rams’s 10 Principles of Design–the legendary designer’s quick-reference rules for making products, developed in his early days at Braun. But never has the list been presented with such a strong visual thesis as it is in the documentary Rams, by Gary Hustwit. The documentary was released in select theaters in 2018 (read my story on it here) but Hustwit recently shared this intriguing new clip online. It’s a fascinating, four-minute thesis about how Rams articulated his design philosophy through consumer products.

In the documentary, the 10 Principles of Design sequence feels quite different than what comes before or after. While Hustwit films Rams himself with a locked-down tripod, creating crisp, impeccably balanced frames, the list breaks out of this stoicism, embracing multi-panel animations and a bit of whimsy.

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Business

There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

By Guest Post February 13, 2019

By Bruce Schneier for Wired.com

In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin—and everything about it.

Much has been written about blockchains and how they displace, reshape, or eliminate trust. But when you analyze both blockchain and trust, you quickly realize that there is much more hype than value. Blockchain solutions are often much worse than what they replace.

First, a caveat. By blockchain, I mean something very specific: the data structures and protocols that make up a public blockchain. These have three essential elements. The first is a distributed (as in multiple copies) but centralized (as in there’s only one) ledger, which is a way of recording what happened and in what order. This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it, and immutable, meaning that no one can change what happened in the past.

The second element is the consensus algorithm, which is a way to ensure all the copies of the ledger are the same. This is generally called mining; a critical part of the system is that anyone can participate. It is also distributed, meaning that you don’t have to trust any particular node in the consensus network. It can also be extremely expensive, both in data storage and in the energy required to maintain it. Bitcoin has the most expensive consensus algorithm the world has ever seen, by far.

Finally, the third element is the currency. This is some sort of digital token that has value and is publicly traded. Currency is a necessary element of a blockchain to align the incentives of everyone involved. Transactions involving these tokens are stored on the ledger.

Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.

All three elements of a public blockchain fit together as a single network that offers new security properties. The question is: Is it actually good for anything? It’s all a matter of trust.

Trust is essential to society. As a species, humans are wired to trust one another. Society can’t function without trust, and the fact that we mostly don’t even think about it is a measure of how well trust works.

The word “trust” is loaded with many meanings. There’s personal and intimate trust. When we say we trust a friend, we mean that we trust their intentions and know that those intentions will inform their actions. There’s also the less intimate, less personal trust—we might not know someone personally, or know their motivations, but we can trust their future actions. Blockchain enables this sort of trust: We don’t know any bitcoin miners, for example, but we trust that they will follow the mining protocol and make the whole system work.

Most blockchain enthusiasts have a unnaturally narrow definition of trust. They’re fond of catchphrases like “in code we trust,” “in math we trust,” and “in crypto we trust.” This is trust as verification. But verification isn’t the same as trust.

In 2012, I wrote a book about trust and security, Liars and Outliers. In it, I listed four very general systems our species uses to incentivize trustworthy behavior. The first two are morals and reputation. The problem is that they scale only to a certain population size. Primitive systems were good enough for small communities, but larger communities required delegation, and more formalism.

The third is institutions. Institutions have rules and laws that induce people to behave according to the group norm, imposing sanctions on those who do not. In a sense, laws formalize reputation. Finally, the fourth is security systems. These are the wide varieties of security technologies we employ: door locks and tall fences, alarm systems and guards, forensics and audit systems, and so on.

These four elements work together to enable trust. Take banking, for example. Financial institutions, merchants, and individuals are all concerned with their reputations, which prevents theft and fraud. The laws and regulations surrounding every aspect of banking keep everyone in line, including backstops that limit risks in the case of fraud. And there are lots of security systems in place, from anti-counterfeiting technologies to internet-security technologies.

In his 2018 book, Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust, Kevin Werbach outlines four different “trust architectures.” The first is peer-to-peer trust. This basically corresponds to my morals and reputational systems: pairs of people who come to trust each other. His second is leviathan trust, which corresponds to institutional trust. You can see this working in our system of contracts, which allows parties that don’t trust each other to enter into an agreement because they both trust that a government system will help resolve disputes. His third is intermediary trust. A good example is the credit card system, which allows untrusting buyers and sellers to engage in commerce. His fourth trust architecture is distributed trust. This is emergent trust in the particular security system that is blockchain.

What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?

Blockchain enthusiasts point to more traditional forms of trust—bank processing fees, for example—as expensive. But blockchain trust is also costly; the cost is just hidden. For bitcoin, that’s the cost of the additional bitcoin mined, the transaction fees, and the enormous environmental waste.

Blockchain doesn’t eliminate the need to trust human institutions. There will always be a big gap that can’t be addressed by technology alone. People still need to be in charge, and there is always a need for governance outside the system. This is obvious in the ongoing debate about changing the bitcoin block size, or in fixing the DAO attack against Ethereum. There’s always a need to override the rules, and there’s always a need for the ability to make permanent rules changes. As long as hard forks are a possibility—that’s when the people in charge of a blockchain step outside the system to change it—people will need to be in charge.

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Accounting

Why Marx Loved Central Banks

By Guest Post February 12, 2019

by Thorsten Polleit for Mises.org

In his “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), published together with Frederick Engels, Karl Marx calls for “measures” — by which he means “despotic inroads on the rights of property” –, which would be “unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production,” that is, bringing about socialism-communism. Marx’s measure number five reads: “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.” This is a rather perspicacious postulation, especially as at the time when Marx formulated it, precious metals — gold and silver in particular — served as money.

As is well known, the quantity of gold and silver cannot be increased at will. As a result, the quantity of credit (in terms of lending and borrowing money balances) cannot easily be expanded according to political expediency. However, Marx might have fantasized already, what would be possible once the state is put in a position where it can create money through credit expansion; where it has usurped and monopolized the production of money. Long before Marx, the English churchman and historian Thomas Fuller had elaborately expressed the power of money: “Money is the sinew of love as well as war.”

The Origins of Modern Central Banking

The idea of central banking has a long history. For instance, the Swedish central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, was founded in 1668, and the English central bank, the Bank of England, was formed in 1694. The fraudulent operations of such institutions came to light soon, at the latest with the writing of the British economist David Ricardo. In his 1809 essay “The High Price of Bullion” he pointed out that it was the increase in the quantity of money — in the form of banknotes not backed by gold — that caused a general rise in prices, an effect we know as (price) inflation.

Unfortunately, however, the political-economic insight that central banks holding the money production monopoly would misuse their power time and again, engage in cronyism, and cause an anti-social debasement of the currency has not — to this very day — sufficed to discredit the monstrous idea of central banking. It seems that as far as monetary affairs are concerned, Marx’s concept of Dialectical Materialism has made quite an impression: What is appears to form peoples’ consciousness (not vice versa). This has certainly helped in creating central bank Marxism on a world-wide scale.

Cutting the Last Ties with Commodity Money

On 15 August 1971 Marx’s vision became true: The US administration single-handedly terminated the redeemability of the US dollar into physical gold – and so gold, the currency of the civilized world, was officially demonetized. Through this coup de main, in the United States of America, as well as all other countries in this world, an unbacked paper money — or fiat money system was established. Since then, all currencies around the globe represent fiat currencies: representing money creation by circulation credit expansion, not backed by real savings or deposits, monopolized by central banks.

The fiat money system, the creation of money through circulation credit expansion, has brought about a new kind of debt slavery on a grand scale. Consumers, corporations and, of course, governments, too, have become highly dependent on central banks continuously churning out ever greater amounts of credit and money, provided at ever lower interest rates. In numerous countries, central banks have de facto become the real centers of power: Their monetary policy decisions effectively determine the weal and woe of economies and whole societies.

By issuing fiat currencies, created out of thin air, a rather small clique of central bankers, together with their staffers, causes — to borrow from Friedrich Nietzsche — a “revaluation of values.” Chronic monetary inflation, for instance, discourages savings; running into ever greater amounts of debt gets cultivated; by central banks’ downward manipulation of the interest rate, the future needs get debased compared to present needs; the favoring of a sort of monetary “Deep State” comes at the expense of demolishing civil and entrepreneurial liberties.

A Supranational Central Bank

In Europe, central bank Marxism has accomplished a rather astounding feat: 19 nation states with a total of around 337 million people have given up their right to self-determination in monetary affairs, submitting to the monetary policy dictate of a supra-national central bank entirely beyond effective Parliamentary control that issues a single fiat currency, the euro. While central bank Marxism has been reasonably successful in Europe, however, its true spearhead has always been the US central bank: The Federal Reserve (Fed).

Today’s world depends on the fiat US dollar issued by the Fed more than ever. Effectively all other major currencies are built upon the Greenback, and it is the Fed that determines the credit and liquidity conditions in international financial markets. It effectively presides over a world central bank cartel which, if it is allowed to continue unimpededly, will eventually steer and control the world economy through its unassailable money production monopoly, effectively removing one of the most critical roadblocks against unrestricted state tyranny.

Ideas Have Consequences

So those favoring a free society can only hope that something will get in the way of central bank Marxism. This is by no means impossible. Socialism-communism is not the inevitable destiny of social life and historical evolution, as Marxists would like to make us believe. What truly matters are ideas or theories, if you will, as ideas — whatever their specific content, wherever they come from, whether they are right or wrong — underlie and drive human action.1Ludwig von Mises was acutely aware of this indisputable insight:

Human society is an issue of the mind. Social co-operation must first be conceived, then willed, then realized in action. It is ideas that make history, not the “material productive forces”, those nebulous and mystical schemata of the materialist conception of history. If we could overcome the idea of Socialism, if humanity could be brought to recognize the social necessity of private ownership of the means of production, then Socialism would have to leave the stage. That is the only thing that counts.2

Against the backdrop of Mises’s words one may add: Once people understand that Marxism (and all its particular forms of socialism) does not guarantee a higher living standard and that it does make a better or more just and reasonable world, it would usher in the end of central banking and fiat money. In other words: whether or not central bank Marxism and fiat money will prevail or be thrown out of the window (or flushed down the drain) will be determined by the outcome of the “battle of ideas.” So there remains reason for hope!

1. For a detailed explanation see Mises, L. v. (1957), Theory and History, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, US Alabama, Part Two, esp. Chapter 7, pp. 102 – 158.
2. Mises, L. v. (1981), Socialism. An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, p. 461.

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Apprenticeship

Mentorships and Kids

By Guest Post February 11, 2019

by Joanne Foster, EdD

Synopsis

Here’s an overview of why mentorships are increasingly popular, including benefits, structuring guidelines, and lots of helpful information for parents, teachers, and kids.

“The term ‘mentor’ comes from Greek mythology: Odysseus’ son Telemachus was entrusted to the care of Mentor, a wise advisor. History and literature from classical times to the present abound with examples of mentorships in politics, business, science, the arts, and education. Aristotle benefited from his mentorship under Plato, as Mickey Mouse benefitted from his in Fantasia’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’”

~ Excerpt from p. 160 of Being Smart about Gifted Education

WHAT, EXACTLY, IS A MENTORSHIP?

A mentorship is a supportive relationship established between a learner and someone who is more experienced in a particular domain. (For example, sciences, business, creative arts, technology, and so on.) The mentor offers guidance, knowledge, and understanding. Mentoring requires an investment of time and patience, and a willingness to support and encourage the learner. Typically, the “mentee” is deemed to be the learner, but in truth all strong mentorships are mutually rewarding experiences wherein both parties interact meaningfully and respectfully with one another, learn, and derive benefits.

WHAT KINDS OF BENEFITS?

Here’s a list of ways mentorships can strengthen a child’s or teen’s learning:

Enriched perspectives relating to an area of interest, including useful information, skill sets, creative and critical thinking opportunities, and practical applications
Transmission of values and attitudes
Enjoyment
Enhanced and authentic connections to important domains of competence, and to others within the “real world” (This includes exposure to fields of interest—leading to greater career path awareness, preparation for taking on roles, and appreciation of accomplishment in the chosen area.)Emotional support
Discovery of resources beyond the classroom
Intellectual challenge and increased competence, including perhaps the creation of a possible portfolio of acquired learning achievements
Encouragement and guidance for self-directed learning
Expansion of understandings of diversity and possibility (For example, non-traditional minority professionals can challenge gender and cultural stereotypes, and mentorships can be particularly beneficial for students from culturally diverse or economically disadvantaged backgrounds.)
Respect for expertise
Relationship-building experiences
Positive role models, including helping kids better understand pathways to high achievement
Potential for academic credit

Here’s a list of benefits for mentors:

Ongoing learning
Rejuvenation of spirit
Sense of fulfillment
Sense of respect and of being valued
Fresh perspectives—seeing things anew from the point of view of mentees
Involvement and enjoyment
Contribution to the skills and expertise of young people interested in possibly entering the field of interest
Vicarious satisfaction through accomplishment of the protégé
Connections to the educational system
Inter-generational friendship
Community engagement

HOW TO STRUCTURE A MENTORSHIP?

In any mentorship arrangement, it’s important to clarify expectations. These should be agreed upon by both the mentor and the mentee, with parents and teachers overseeing the process, and with their approval. It’s a good idea to draw up a written agreement outlining intents and responsibilities. This includes the right of withdrawal from an arrangement if it does not seem to be working out well. Periodic review of this “contract” will help to ensure that everyone’s expectations are being met.

A mentorship can be a one-on-one program between two people, or it may take the form of more a complex arrangement with others involved. Either way, it should be part of an individual student’s overall educational plan, and it should also be valued as an integral component of it.

Heads up—any program involving kids requires careful supervision and consistent monitoring by adults. With that caveat uppermost, here are a few possible “models” for mentorships.

Co-creation of an individualized program by the mentor and the student, always under the guidance of parents or teachers

School visits by vetted community experts who can help to increase the depth of programming that classroom teachers are able to provide

Job-shadowing programs, whereby students prepare for the mentorship phase in school, and then spend time in the pre-approved career setting of their mentor

Online or virtual mentorship programs—especially good for children and teens who want to investigate a field or learn about something that is not otherwise readily accessible to them (Note: Online options demand attentive supervision.)

Creative approaches, whereby a mix of the above might be contemplated, or an innovative mentorship format is designed for specific purposes. For example, mentorships are a frequently recommended practice in gifted education. Unique or differentiated learning experiences can provide gifted learners with targeted and enriching educational opportunities and challenges in areas of heightened advancement. (Click here for an article with additional information about fostering giftedness.)

WHERE TO FIND A MENTOR?

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Accounting

Netflix paid NO federal or state taxes in 2018 despite record profits

By Guest Post February 9, 2019

by Lauren Fruen

Netflix paid NOTHING in federal or state taxes in 2018 despite posting record profits of $845million – and even got a $22million rebate

Netflix didn’t pay a cent in state or federal income taxes last year, despite posting its largest-ever U.S. profit in 2018 of $845million, according to a new report.

In addition, the streaming giant reported a $22 million federal tax rebate, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).

Senior fellow at ITEP Matthew Gardner said corporations like Netflix, which has its headquarters in Los Gatos, California, are still ‘exploiting loopholes’ and called the figures ‘troubling’.

Netflix says they paid $131 million in taxes in 2018 and this is declared in financial documents. But Gardner says this figure relates to taxes paid abroad, according to a separate part of their statements.

He told DailyMail.com: ‘It is pretty clearly true that Netflix’s cash payment of worldwide income taxes in 2018 was $131 million. But that is a worldwide number—the amount Netflix actually paid to national, state and local governments worldwide in 2018. This tells us precisely nothing about the amount Netflix paid to any specific government, including the U.S.’

Gardner added: ‘Fortunately, however, there is another, more complete geographic disclosure of income tax payments.

‘The notes to the financial statements have a detailed section on income taxes. And what this tells us is that all of the income taxes Netflix paid in 2018 were foreign taxes. Zero federal income taxes, zero state income taxes in the US.’

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Accounting

Hamilton on Steroids

By Guest Post February 9, 2019

By John Devanny

“The revenue of the state is the state.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution

Washington D. C. finds itself in the midst of an entertaining, nay consuming, Kabuki theatre. The federal government has “shut down” its non-essential functions, re-opened the same, and promised to do it all over again in a few weeks, raising the question as to why it has non-essential functions at all. Mr. Mueller’s fishing expedition continues sailing along through Mr. Trump’s tweetstorms, as Democrats await the landing of the big tuna complete with waterside fish fry and impeachment. Meanwhile, the Trumpites patiently fantasize about their man turning the tables on the evil deep state by purging the temples and draining good ol’ foggy bottom. T’is all sound and fury underscoring Henry Kissinger’s view that the smaller the stakes, the more vicious the politics.

What is currently at stake is the survival of the last vestiges, really the tatters and shreds, of the old republic, and no one, neither leftists identity politics ideologues or MAGA hat wearing Trumpites are lifting even a whimper of protest, minus a few notable exceptions such as journalist Greg Hunter. What matters is 21 trillion dollars of unaccounted for spending. The story takes us back to the eve of the 9/11 attacks. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, disclosed a particularly embarrassing piece of news that the Defense Department spent 2.3 trillion dollars and could not account for it. Conveniently for Rumsfeld and the DoD, some folks decided to pilot passenger jetliners into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, so the issue of the “missing money” fell to the wayside. Until, Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing during Daddy Bush’s reign, claimed that around 6 trillion dollars of spending could not be accounted for in the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget. One Dr. Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics and the holder of the Morris Chair of State and Local Government Finance and Policy at Michigan State University, was sure Fitts and her researchers were incorrect. So he and a team of graduate students combed through the publicly available financial records and found that Fitts was correct. So, just for kicks, they took a look at the spending records of the DoD and found another 15 trillion of unaccounted spending. As Skidmore and his intrepid team dug deeper into the bowels of federal agencies with information requests, the Office of the Inspector General pulled the plug on all the internet links to the key documents that showed the unaccounted for spending. Eventually, the links came back up, and with a promise of an audit of spending by the DoD. Clearly, Dr. Skidmore had hit a nerve.

Various and sundry debunkers have gone into overdrive to assure us that all is well. The leading court newspaper, the Washington Post, is quite certain that this is a case of double counting or perhaps lost receipts. Other sober-minded folks have compared this to someone forgetting about the twenty-five bucks you paid an enterprising teenager to mow your lawn, or perhaps it’s like when you forget to report a meal on your expense account, or you double booked the latte at Starbucks. A few lawns, some lattes, some double booked F-35s, some uncounted $300.00 toilet seats and pretty soon we have 21 trillion dollars of unaccounted spending. The Post never produced any evidence of plugging or double booking of accounts, bless their hearts, they just took the federal government at its word.

But we really can’t take the federal government at its word. Consider Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) Statement 56. According to Michele Ferri and Jonathan Luire, Statement 56 is fraught with perils for the republic.

In the absolute most simple terms, Standard 56 allows federal entities to shift amounts from line item to line item and sometimes even omit spending altogether when reporting their financials in order to avoid the potential of revealing classified information.1 However, as with all laws, nearly every word in that sentence is a complicated concept to unpack. Who counts as a federal reporting entity? When and how can these entities conceal or remove financial information from their reports? What information can be removed? When does something count as confidential, and who makes that determination? . . .

The simplest place to start with understanding Standard 56 is its scope. It applies to federal entities that issue unclassified general purpose federal financial reports (GPFFR), including where one entity is consolidated with another. This means it only applies to otherwise unclassified financial reports where there is a risk of revealing classified information; classified financial reports are their own can of worms. (see generally FASAB Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56, available at http://files.fasab.gov/pdffiles/handbook_sffas_56.pdf) Standard 56 also doesn’t remove the actual requirement to report, it just allows these entities to change their reports in ways that don’t reflect their actual spending.

Simply put, a broad interpretation of Statement 56 (When has the federal government not chosen the broad interpretation?), books can be cooked if an entity, public or private, is spending money or fiscally involved in operations that are related to national security. This renders the balance sheets and accounts of both the federal government and the corporations that do business with the government, deeply suspect at best, completely untrustworthy at worst. Most ominous, it effectively removes public spending from any meaningful oversight by the people or the representatives of the people and the states in the Congress. What is in place now is the legal architecture to support legitimize financial fraud.

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Entrepreneurship

Reasons Working Too Hard at Your Business is a Waste of Time

By Guest Post February 8, 2019

by Victor G. Snyder

As the leader of a small business, you’re bent on driving growth. You are willing to put in the work that’s needed to achieve that, but paradoxically, working too hard could create unexpected obstacles to your business growth.

If you’re working hard and putting in long hours but your business has hit a plateau, it’s possible that your hard work is the problem.

Here are some of the ways that working too hard could be holding your business back from realizing its growth potential.

Working Too Hard Stops You from Delegating Effectively

When you work too hard, you end up micromanaging your own employees. This undermines their dedication to the business and sends a silent message that you don’t trust them to meet your expectations. That can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, generating resentment and an unhealthy work atmosphere.

“As a CEO and Entrepreneur, your success will directly correlate to how well you can assemble the best team and then bring out the best in those people,” notes Mark Moses, the CEO of CEO Coaching International. “Micromanagers should never be CEOs of large or growing companies. This is because they are simply too complex to micromanage. Being involved at every level and not delegating to your team creates a bottleneck that essentially strangles an organization.”

Indeed, in order for your business to really scale, you need talented employees who are experts in their areas of specialty. If you’re working too hard, you are probably carrying out tasks which don’t draw on your real strengths. When you hire experts, they can carry out the work in less time, thanks to their training and experience, and you can free yourself up to focus on those strategic tasks which no one else can do.

Working Too Hard Stops You From Building Scalable Business Systems

No matter how hard you work, there is a limit to what a single person can achieve. For a business to scale successfully, it needs to be based on smart systems that can expand beyond your own capabilities. When you focus on completing task after task at all costs, instead of building a scalable business process that will do it for you, you’re stunting your business growth.

“Yes, your talents and skills were the reason that it was able to get up and running, but they will not be the tools that allow it to reach future success,” says Ken Marshall, founder of Doorbell Digital Marketing. “Now don’t get me wrong, working hard and getting things done is not an inherently bad thing. In fact, when your company is in its infancy, you’re going to be doing most of the work. But at some point, you’re going to have to figure out ways to remove yourself from all of the repetitive or non-essential tasks, take a step back, and look at where the ship is headed.”

Working too hard can create an overdependence on you. If your employees are constantly interrupting you to ask for decisions that they should be capable of reaching on their own, it prevents you from focusing on your more important core responsibilities and holds them back from potential growth in their own roles.

Working Too Hard Prevents You from Thinking Creatively

For your business to scale, you need to feel passionate about it. But when you work too hard, your drive and passion get drowned out by petty tasks that should be delegated to someone else.

You could end up focusing too narrowly on the minutiae of the business, making it difficult to see the big picture and create an effective business strategy. At the same time, rushing so fast from one task to the next prevents you from focusing fully on any one aspect of the business, which will also prevent you from maintaining perspective with a holistic growth plan.

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History

Why is ‘separation of church and state’ so misquoted?

By Guest Post February 6, 2019

After King Henry VIII broke from Rome in 1534, England began enforcing Anglican religious uniformity. Some wanted to purify the Anglican Church from the inside, being given the name “Puritans.” Others separated themselves completely from the Anglican Church as dissenters. Of those were Thomas Helwys, John Murton and John Smyth, who founded the Baptist faith in England.

Thomas Helwys wrote “A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity,” 1612, considered the first English book defending the principle of religious liberty: “Queen Mary … had no power over her subjects consciences … neither hath our Lord the King … power over his subjects consciences. … The King is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual Lords over them. …”

He continued: “If the King’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all humane laws made by the King, our Lord the King can require no more: for men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer for it, neither may the King be judge between God and man.”

Thomas Helwys was arrested and thrown into London’s notorious Newgate Prison, where he died in 1616.

Another Baptist dissenter, John Murton, was locked in Newgate Prison as punishment for spreading politically incorrect religious views. Prisoners were not fed, but instead relied on charity of friends to bring them food, such as bread or bottles of milk.

Roger Williams referred to John Murton in his work, “The Bloody Tenet (Practice) of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience,” 1644: “The author of these arguments against persecution … being committed (a) prisoner to Newgate for the witness of some truths of Jesus … and having not use of pen and ink, wrote these arguments in milk, in sheets of paper brought to him by the woman, his keeper, from a friend in London as the stopples (corks) of his milk bottle. … In such paper, written with milk, nothing will appear; but the way of reading by fire being known to this friend who received the papers, he transcribed and kept together the papers, although the author himself could not correct nor view what himself had written. … It was in milk, tending to soul nourishment, even for babes and sucklings in Christ … the word of truth … testify against … slaughtering each other for their several respective religions and consciences.”

Williams wrote: “Persecution for cause of conscience is most contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus the Prince of Peace. … Enforced uniformity is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants.”

Roger Williams was a contemporary of John Bunyan, who wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress” while in prison for conscience sake. When the government sought to arrest Roger Williams for preaching religious liberty, he fled to Boston, Massachusetts, on Feb. 5, 1631.

To his dismay, Puritans in Massachusetts had begun enforcing Puritan religious uniformity. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in Engel v. Vitale, 1962: “When some of the very groups which had most strenuously opposed the established Church of England found themselves sufficiently in control of colonial governments … they passed laws making their own religion the official religion of their respective colonies.”

A controversy raged among inhabitants of Massachusetts, between “a covenant of grace” versus “a covenant of works.” The “covenant of grace” leaders were Sir Henry Vane, Rev. John Cotton, Rev. John Wheelwright, and his sister-in-law, Anne Hutchinson.

Rev. John Wheelwright fled Puritan uniformity in Massachusetts in 1637 and founded Exeter, New Hampshire. Roger Williams was briefly the pastor a church till “notorious disagreements” caused the Massachusetts General Court to censor his religious speech. Upon hearing the sheriff was on his way to arrest him and send him back to England, Williams fled again, in freezing weather, January of 1636. For weeks he traveled alone till he was befriended by the Indians of Narragansett. He founded Providence Plantation, Rhode Island – the first place where the church was not controlled by state.

Roger Williams wrote in 1661: “I having made covenant of peaceable neighborhood with all the Sachems (Chiefs) and natives round about us, and having in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress called the place Providence … a shelter for persons distressed of conscience.”

A historical plaque reads: “To the memory of Roger Williams, the Apostle of Soul Liberty, Founder of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation.”

The reverse of the plaque reads: “Below this spot then at the water’s edge stood the rock on which according to tradition Roger Williams, an exile for the devotion to the freedom of conscience, landed. 1636.”

In 1638, Roger Williams organized the first Baptist Church in America.

A plaque reads: “The First Baptist Church, Founded by Roger Williams, AD 1638, The Oldest Baptist Church in America, The Oldest Church in this State.”

Physician John Clarke came to Rhode Island and founded another Baptist Church in Newport. Other dissenters arrived in Williams’ Rhode Island Colony, such as William Coddington, Philip Sherman, and Anne Hutchinson. Anne soon left again to settle in the Dutch settlement of the Bronx in New York City, where all her family was scalped and beheaded by raiding Indians in 1643. There was only one survivor, Anne’s nine-year-old daughter Susanna, who was taken captive. After several years, she escaped and married an innkeeper, Samuel Cole. Their descendants included three U.S. presidents.

The Governor of Massachusetts from 1636 to 1637 was Sir Henry Vane, who helped found Harvard. He supported the efforts of Roger Williams. Due to the “covenant of grace” versus “covenant of works” controversy, Governor Sir Henry Vane was not reelected, being replaced by John Winthrop.

In 1639, Sir Henry Vane returned to England where he backed the Puritan Revolution, led by Oliver Cromwell, though he did not support the Rump Parliament which beheaded Charles I.

During the brief English Commonwealth, Vane helped draft for Roger Williams the Patent for Providence Plantation, which was unique in that it did not acknowledge a king, and it guaranteed freedom of religion and conscience. Vane later defended the Patent on behalf of Roger Williams against a competing charter.

Roger William wrote of Vane in April of 1664: “Under God, the great anchor of our ship is Sir Henry Vane … an instrument in the hand of God for procuring this island.”

A statue of Sir Henry Vane is in the Boston Public Library with a plaque that reads: “Sir Henry Vane … An ardent defender of civil liberty and advocate of free thought in religion. He maintained that God, Law, and Parliament were superior to the King.”

The Plantation Agreement at Providence, Sept. 6, 1640, stated: “We agree, as formerly hath been the liberties of the town, so still, to hold forth liberty of conscience.”

The Government of Rhode Island, March 19, 1641, stated: “The Government … in this Island … is a Democracy, or Popular Government; that is to say, It is in the Power of the Body of Freemen orderly assembled.”

Roger Williams responded to Puritan leader John Cotton’s accusations by publishing “The Bloody Tenet (Practice) of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience and Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered in 1644.” In this, Williams first mentioned his now famous phrase, “wall of separation”: “Mr. Cotton … hath not duly considered these following particulars. First, the faithful labors of many witnesses of Jesus Christ, existing in the world, abundantly proving, that the Church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type and the Church of the Christians under the New Testament in the anti-type, were both separate from the world; and that when they have opened a gap in the hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broken down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, &c. and made his garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and that all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the world and added unto His Church or garden … a separation of Holy from unHoly, penitent from impenitent, Godly from unGodly.”

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europe

The Southern Critique of Centralization

By Guest Post February 5, 2019

By Donald Livingston

The Southern political tradition, in practice and theory, is one of its most valuable contributions to America and the world. The one constant theme of that tradition from 1776–through Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, St George Tucker, Abel Upshur, John C. Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians, Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, down to the scholars of the Abbeville Institute–is a systematic critique of centralization. Nothing comparable to it exists elsewhere in America or in Europe.

A criticism of centralization presupposes that decentralization is a good thing. But why is that? The answer is complex and requires viewing what was happened in 1776 from a trans Atlantic perspective. The Declaration of Independence is merely the American version of a conflict that had been going on in Europe since at least the 17th century between the emerging centralized modern state and a revived interest in the classical republican tradition which goes back to the ancient Greeks.

There are four principles to this republican tradition: First, republican government is one in which the people make the laws they live under. But, second, they cannot make just any law. The laws they make must be in accord with a more fundamental law which they do not make but is known by tradition. Third, the task of the republic is to preserve and perfect the character of that inherited tradition. And finally, the republic must be small. It must be small because self-government and rule of law is not possible unless citizens know the character of their rulers directly or through those they trust.

The Greeks created a brilliant civilization that was entirely decentralized. It was composed of 1,500 tiny independent republics strung out from Naples to the Black Sea. Most were under 10,000. One of the largest was Athens with around 200 thousand people. For over two thousand years, up to the French Revolution, republics seldom went beyond 200-300 thousand people, and the great majority were considerably smaller.

In contrast, a modern state is supposed to be large. Thomas Hobbess, published in 1651 the first systematic theory of the modern state. He titled the book “Leviathan,’ a large sea monster. It contains a central government endowed with irresistible and indivisible power over individuals in a territory. Unlike republicanism, it does not require, self-government or tradition. Nor does it require the rule of law since the central authority itself can make law. Its purpose is to contain anarchy by enabling autonomous individuals to pursue their own ends in a condition of enlightened self-interest called “civil association.” Such a regime is compatible with an association of strangers, as in a regime of traffic regulations.

Since the only goal of the modern state is “civil association,” there is no internal limit to its size. In fact, the larger the better because outside the realm of civil association lies anarchy or its ever present threat. The logical extension of this is global government or as close an approximation as possible. Although a modern state may expand in size indefinitely, its territory cannot be divided by secession because if one set of individuals could lawfully secede, so could any other set, and so on within each set, to the unraveling of all government.

Here we have two incompatible models of government. The small classical republic and the indefinitely large modern state. But there is a third model to consider. Medieval civilization was also decentralized, and it was vast in scale. It was a mosaic of thousands of independent and quasi-independent political units: kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, bishoprics, papal states, republics, free cities, and tens of thousands of titled manors.

The medieval contribution to politics is the idea of a federated polity where various independent political units are held together in a larger realm by compacts and traditional hierarchies. As we will see shortly, it is through the logic of the medieval federation that the Southern tradition sought to bring together the best aspects of the small republic with those of the large modern state.

The modern state system begins in the 17th century with the rise of “absolute monarchies”–‘absolute,’ meaning irresistible and indivisible centralized power. Modern monarchs sought to crush the medieval mosaic of independent social authorities they had inherited into larger and more centralized states. And they were successful.

In the mid-1850s Tocqueville left us a melancholy description of what two centuries of monarchical centralization had done: “The old localized authorities disappear without either revival or replacement, and everywhere the central government succeeds them in the direction of affairs. The whole of Germany, even the whole of Europe … presents the same picture. Everywhere men are leaving behind the liberty of the Middle Ages, not to enter into a modern brand of liberty but to return to the ancient despotism; for centralization is nothing else than an up-to-date version of the administration seen in the Roman Empire.”

But just as absolute monarchy was emerging in the 17th century, demanding a large scale state, there was also a revived interest in classical republicanism which demanded small scale. This latter sparked a Cato-like resistance to modern state consolidation which ran throughout the centralized monarchies of Europe. But one thinker requires special mention, namely Johannes Althusius (1563-1638). He was a German Calvinist philosopher who proposed a federation of small polities in a state larger than the classical republic, but smaller than a European monarchy. He called it a federation of “medium” size–about the size of Switzerland which is half the territory of South Carolina.

To prevent the central government from consolidating the smaller polities into a unitary modern state, Althusius introduces a constitutional right of secession from the federation. If a federation grew too large, it could always be brought back to a republican scale by secession.

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