Curt Doolittle

Theme: Religion

  • LACKING A ‘BOOK’ – YOU NEED A BOOK We benefit from the evolutionary structure of

    LACKING A ‘BOOK’ – YOU NEED A BOOK

    We benefit from the evolutionary structure of aristocracy. But we are harmed by by the loss of Druidic mythos, and the failure to articulate the necessary properties of the aristocratic egalitarian society

    EITHER THEFT IS IMMORAL OR IT ISN’T – THE MANNER OF THEFT OR THEFT?

    Is theft only wrong when it is intersubjectively verifiable? Or is theft wrong, in that it is destructive of cooperation, no matter whether it is visible or not? I think it is hard to convince people of anything but the latter.

    Is ownership determined by action? If ownership is determined by action then institutions that require respect of property are a commons that is paid for by action, in voluntary exchange.

    While I don’t want to, at this moment, write something very long to demonstrate this argument in detail, it is, as far as I know, an impenetrable criticism of rothbardian ethics, and a replacement of those ethics with propertarian ethics as the only LOGICALLY POSSIBLE definition of property rights. It is a replacement of the ethics of the ghetto with the ethics of the aristocracy.

    It is not possible to have an institution of property rights on the rothbardian model, because it is a praxeological disincentive to develop property rights.

    Aristocratic propertarianism is the replacement of rothbard’s individualistic me and my promise of violence with the egalitarian us and our promise of violence.

    It is the corporation. The corporeal-ization of property rights.

    It is not logical that individuals can create ‘possess’ property rights. One can demand them in exchange. But it takes a minimum of two people to create property rights, because they can only be obtained in exchange.

    ORIGINS

    Sitting in Church at the age of 12, I promised myself I would write that book. Yes, we have the (rather pitiful) book of Jerusalem, but Athens didn’t give us a book. Plato’s tried but his book is a catastrophe. Aristotle didn’t survive well enough for us enough to work with as “a book” – although it might be reconstructable in at least small parts. The Monarchies didn’t leave us a book. Although we could argue that Smith and Hume together made a pretty good pass at it democratizing it. Chivalry left us a book: arthurian legends. And I think the reason we don’t have a book, is that the church imposed its book – and that book wasn’t a very good one. Not as good as Aristotle’s would have been. That book, and the church, were a prohibition on writing the book of aristocratic egalitarianism. Albiet, the church is the OTHER HALF of aristocratic egalitarianism.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 02:07:00 UTC

  • TO TOM : ON THE UTOPIANISM OF LIBERTARIANISM (all) (worth reading) (insight) Rot

    TO TOM : ON THE UTOPIANISM OF LIBERTARIANISM

    (all) (worth reading) (insight)

    Rothbard’s idea is INTENTIONALLY UTOPIAN because he was, like dozens before him, creating a ‘religion’ in pre-democratic political terms, or what in democratic political terms is ‘an ideology’, using OBSCURANT LANGUAGE – the purpose of which is resist criticism, empower argumentation, and create community.

    The MI group (Lew) then took this ideology and used the internet to propagate that ideology the way the marxists used inexpensive pamphlets, newspapers, books and universities. But, Rothbard’s libertarianism is an ideology (religion) not politics (formal institutions of cooperation).

    That Rothbard used the rebellious ethics of the jewish ghetto rather than the the high trust ethics of the aristocratic egalitarian society (protestant christianity) is just because it was familiar to him. Hoppe by contrast, repaired a great deal of Rothbard’s errors, but in doing so left us with not necessarily utopian, but certainly a system of ethics dependent upon equality of ethical and moral action, under the nation states with absolute nuclear families, and therefore fully homogenized property rights. This system cannot tolerate diversity.

    However, by adding monarchies, and strict property rights, hoppe’s argument is such that it is possible to have DIVERSE COMMUNITIES each of which uses its own norms and status signals, but which trades and exchanges according to private property rights. And this is possible because under monarchy and property rights, individuals are denied access to coercive political power. So, in Hoppeian terms, groups may continue to act as extended families.

    What I have tried to do is empirically demonstrate that both genetics of gender, and family structure (the structure of reproduction) determine moral codes. And that the Absolute Nuclear Family is the ultimate compromise between male and female reproductive strategies. But that the evolution of democracy combined with feminism,and the destruction of the nuclear family by feminists in alliance with socialists, has led to a circumstance where women can now ‘marry the state’ for financial support and obtain support from males without exchange of care and sex. This is not unnatural. Humans are naturally serially monogamous and women in history seize both the best male fertility, and the best male support in exchange for sex, that they can – but not from the same person, from many men.

    Property is not natural. It allowed men to control reproduction, and women resent this because it places a greater burden on them to make a choice of husband, and they are stuck with what they get. And they can no longer control group behavior by trading sex and affection. It is this choice, plus the need to create a home and property to support a family that created the compromise that was the protestant ANF.

    For this reason, both Rothbard and Hoppe make the mistake that was made by classical liberals: once included in the voting and work pool, women have sought to restore control over their reproduction and independence from the compromise with males.

    If you want to understand the drive to socialism, there are two axis of cause. This is the first, the second is that small homogenous groups that are out-bred are in fact, family members and as such socialism (in the nordic model) makes sense. There is no ‘belief’ system here. it is all justificationary language. The fact is that the structure of production at any given time can be optimized by a particular structure of reproduction (the family). And that freedom (liberty) is only possible in small, homogenous, out-bred, groups formally forbidden to intermarry as a means of obtaining insurance, and instead, forced to outbreed, and therefore seek insurance from ‘the tribe’ with the state as the insurance broker. This situation cannot change, because it is against the reproductive interests of humans to change. It is suicide to change. Small homogenous outbred families are in fact, highly redistributive, healthy organizations that eliminate near proximity competition and force all competition into the market for goods and services – there is no outlet left. NONE. That is why it works. The ANF, is the genetic institution that creates a compromise. It is, in fact, SOCIALISM. (Let that sink in a bit and it will alter your world.)

    THIS IS, IN NO SMALL PART, THE FIRST SECTION OF MY BOOK. It explains the diversity and immutability of moral codes, and therefore the political expression of morality informal institutions, as relationships between the structure of production and the structure of the family; And it is illogical to expect humans to act otherwise – against their reproductive and experiential interests. It is NOT PRAXEOLOGICALLY RATIONAL to ask people to act against their interests.

    SO ROTHBARD, HOPPE, AND ….

    1) Rothbard (tribal religion of non-landholders)

    2) Hoppe (private nation state of land holders)

    3) Doolittle (private federation of states of land holders)

    With these three models we complete libertarianism in all its possible forms. This is the corpus of solutions from the most ideological and religious (rothbard) to the most practical and moral (hoppe) to the ratio-scientific (doolittle). All of which are founded on property rights – although I have used DESCRIPTIVE property rights across ALL family structures where hoppe and rothbard have use PRESCRIPTIVE property rights and ASSUMED the nuclear family as the unit of reproduction.

    (That’s what I’m up to. ‘Completing’ libertarianism. )

    UTOPIAN?

    Rothbard’s fantasy is clearly utopian. It hasn’t worked very well for the jews, that’s for sure. Except for the postwar period, the entire world has been killing them by the hundreds, thousands and millions for millennia. Comparisons to India’s Gypsies is pretty common, except that gypsies are anti-intellectual at the bottom and jews hyper intellectual at the top. But, what rothbard DID, was reduce all rights to property rights, and give us the answer to human cooperation in doing so.

    Hoppe’s solution is ABSOLUTE GENIUS and so deeply engrained in political discourse by now that everyone’s forgotten it’s his idea already. While Argumentation is an analogy, not a cause, (and so I’m critical of it), he used it to deduce the solution to the problem of monopoly bureaucracy and the state by reducing the state to a contract on property rights, and using insurance companies, which is the states’s actual function, to form a competitive bureaucracy.

    His solution is not empirically derived, it is rationally derived, and he still makes (unfortunately) moral arguments in the rothbardian model, but in fact, he DID SOLVE THE PROBLEM that has been the ‘problem of politics’ for 5000 years. And as far as I know, no other thinker has done this – based on (ack) argumentation or not.

    I won’t go into why argumentation worked despite the fact that it’s a bit silly. That would take me too long. But it allowed Hoppe to deduce the correct answers in almost all cases. IN particular, to immigration. Which again, the migratory, non-property owning, progressive jewish wing of libertarians find understandably uncomfortable.

    END RESULT : A RESEARCH

    There is nothing utopian about a RESEARCH PROGRAM, which is what I see hoppe, rothbard and Hayek pursuing. Hayek did not have information theory. Hoppe did not have the empirical evidence we have today. Rothbard either didn’t understand or din’t want to understand his moral code’s implications. Mises got praxeology backwards. But it was all there. It was all there. We just needed a little more time. And as far as I can tell it is the most valuable political research program since the enlightenment and not matched in creativity since athens.

    Calculation is necessary. Reproduction is necessary. Cooperation is necessary.

    Everything else is preference.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 05:23:00 UTC

  • I love the holidays! (silly)(fun) October 31: Halloween (Pagan New Year’s Eve).

    I love the holidays!

    (silly)(fun)

    October 31: Halloween (Pagan New Year’s Eve).

    The 5th Of November: Guy Fawkes (‘anti-Popery’, anti-politician)

    Thanksgiving Day : Harvest Feast – celebration of the family.

    Friday the 13th of any month: Templar’s Remembrance Day, Finance and Banking Day.

    December 21’s – Solstice Festival Begins!

    December 25th – The Birthday of Pacifist Philosopher. Day of gifts.

    December 31 – Solstice Festival Ends

    January 1st – First day of rest, and beginning of the Commercial year.

    February 2nd : The Festival of Light (Candlemas/Imbolic)

    February 14th: Feast of Lovers (Valentine’s day)

    March 15th – Spring Equinox. Cleaning of home, heart, and soul.

    May 1st: May Day. The ‘High Holiday’ of the Pagan Calendar.

    June 20th: Aristotle’s Birthday

    June 21st: The Summer Solstice

    June 22nd: The River and Water Festival (Kupala Day)

    July 20th: Alexander’s Birthday: Celebration of Soldiers and Warriors.

    First three weeks of August: The holidays and Rest.

    First Monday in September: End of Summer Celebration.

    September 21: Fall Equinox: (Michaelmas) Farmer, Tradesman Year end, and Scholar’s Year Beginning.

    I’d rather be celebrating the wonder of the earth, and our relationship with it, than the worship of false gods, the worst of which is the state.

    “A STATE HOLIDAY IS A CELEBRATION OF THE STATE”

    I’d rather celebrate family, heroes, seasons, and the earth, than the state.

    DEMOCRACY : THE OTHER GOD THAT FAILED.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 03:40:00 UTC

  • 1) ON THE PURPOSE OF SCRIPTURAL VERSUS RATIONAL AND RATIO-SCIENTIFIC IDEOLOGIES.

    1) ON THE PURPOSE OF SCRIPTURAL VERSUS RATIONAL AND RATIO-SCIENTIFIC IDEOLOGIES. 2) ON THE SOURCE OF PROPERTY RIGHTS AND LIBERTY.

    (good read)

    (Quotable)

    “I don’t like package deals. That’s mainly the reason I don’t identify with a particular political position. If I end up looking like a libertarian, it’s only because they happen to be where I’m going anyway. I reserve the right to do my own thinking.” – Kenneth Allen Hopf

    COMMENT

    Ideologies can be as rigid as scripture to which you must adhere (totalitarianism), or mere boundary conditions that describe similar sentiments (freedom). They are both means of obtaining political power. The first is a means of coercion into dogma by threat of ostracization. The second a means of affiliation by promise of opportunity.

    However, both scriptural threat and sentimental promise, are predicated on the absence of ratio-scientific knowledge. In the face of evidence of what man REALLY DOES with democracy, what he does with his economy, with his social order, with his freedom, with his laws, then we no longer are faced with an era of IDEOLOGY.

    We are faced with the outcome of the era of ideology. And the outcome of that era is that the SUCCESS of rich democratic countries had nothing to do with their democracy. Democracy is a luxury good that was ALSO made possible wealth.

    THE SOURCE OF THE WEST’S WEALTH AND PROSPERITY

    But that wealth had nothing to do with democracy. It had to do with:

    1) The aristocratic egalitarian ethics of cattle raiding, land holders, bronze, the horse, the wheel, and chariot, who used inferior numbers, and voluntary, organized, cavalry tactics that required high personal and familial investment, as well as voluntary cooperation in tactics for shared risk and gain. The tendency to adopt disruption in the form of new technology, new members, and new leaders – because enfranchisement meant rights to private property and elected leaders rather than community property and static leaders.

    2) Small homogenous countries – first Pagan, but the more protestant and german the better, operating as extended families, with the high trust of extended families.

    3) The prohibition on cousin-marriage out to six or ten generations, and the Absolute Nuclear Family (ANF) as the organizational unit of production AND reproduction.

    4) Common law, individual property rights, and rule of law. money, accounting, interest, credit and banking.

    5) The manorial system that suppressed the fertility of the underclasses, and created the ‘protestant ethic’ in all of society, by requiring conformity to good practice in order to obtain access to rented land, and reproduction.

    6) The evolution of credit backed by ‘the extended family’ represented by the state.

    7) Plagues that suppressed and reversed the fertility of the underclasses, and which forced the upper classes to spread into the work force.

    8) An ’empirical bias’: a preferential bias toward, and continuous development of, technical, scientific, practical solutions. We cannot tell if this bias genetic or not yet but in part, it is beginning to look like a) minority status, b) competitive value of technology to compensate for small numbers, c) balance between verbal and spatial intelligence d) habituation.

    9) The discovery and conquest of the New World and the subsequent trade, at a time when a plague had wiped out vast portions of north american indians.

    10) The weakness of the Ottoman empire, Indian continent and the Chinese empire, from institutional decay. (In China, the failure to develop institutions of ‘calculation’ at scale and reliance on moral rather than empirical arguments. In Arabia, the persistent problem of ignorance, tribalism, low IQ, and inbreeding.) The weakness of the colonies, and the relative disparity in technological, calculative, and social development of the rest of the world meant the easy imposition of trade. And the re-adoption of ratio-scientism as a competitive advantage in the west while the other states had either fought it off intentionally (Islamic Civilization, Chinese Civilization), or who could not for a variety of reasons make use of it (Hindu civilization).

    ON CALCULATION

    The importance of calculation was I think, discovered or at least elucidated by Weber. But calculation is important, because it is NECESSARY. Without means of calculation, as the society becomes increasingly complex,

    SCALE AND DYNAMISM – ADAPTATION – EVOLUTION

    The state is often credited with the origin of calculative technologies. But this is to overstate the ‘state’ in its primitive origins in the fertile crescent. However, these small city states had all the properties of western city states, but earlier. THey created their innovation when they were small. They LOST their innovation when they became states and empires.

    THE STATE CALCIFIES – EVERYTHING. PRIVATE PROPERTY DOES THE OPPOSITE. IT MAKES EVERYTHING DYNAMIC, ITERATIVE, ADAPTIVE.

    The state makes fragility. It trades certainty for stagnation.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-03 11:56:00 UTC

  • Is there something to the fact that less intelligent people are more likely to c

    Is there something to the fact that less intelligent people are more likely to consistently believe in magic (intentional causes)? That smart but ignorant people overestimate our capacity. And more intelligent people who are knowledgeable are afraid of HUBRIS?

    I mean, does the ‘smart fraction’ theory simply mean that liberals are ignorant, and willfully ignorant, and libertarians are not? Or are liberals less intelligent (probably).

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-25 15:15:00 UTC

  • “THE CULTURE OF PREVENTION” : WESTERN POSITIVISM : THE SIX RULES OF PREVENTION :

    “THE CULTURE OF PREVENTION” : WESTERN POSITIVISM : THE SIX RULES OF PREVENTION : THE SYSTEMATIC WESTERN ADOPTION OF JEWISH OBSCURANTISM

    (insight)

    The interesting thing about western culture, is the underlying assumption that we can CHANGE THE WORLD to suit our desires. It’s a POSITIVE outlook on life. Life isn’t suffering or difficult. Its an opportunity for heroisim and GLORY. “The purpose of life is to bend nature to our will, such that we leave the world better for having lived in it.”

    Think about the rest of the world’s “golden rule” and the anglo saxon “silver rule”. While they say “do unto others” we say “do not do unto others, that which you would not have done unto you.” The implied sovereignty in the Anglo Silver Rule is quite different from the slavish peasantry implied in the Golden Rule.

    WESTERN CIV is the culture of PREVENTION, under the ASSUMPTION that we can achieve our desires if no external entity PREVENTS IT. So our goal is to let everyone pursue their desires, and for us to pursue our mutual desires, and to PREVENT anyone from impeding that process. Nature is beautiful for this reason, as is man, as is life. Because it is not a struggle for the opportunity to pursue one’s fancy, it is a struggle only to prevent those from preventing us from pursuing our fancies.

    This is much more English a vision than the German vision of accomplishing the same thru duty.

    THE MAGIC LAWS OF THE CULTURE OF PREVENTION

    1) PREVENT THE USE OF POWER : DECENTRALIZATION, BALANCE OF FORCES, COMPETITION, MILITIA, SOVEREIGNTY

    2) PREVENT VIOLENCE THEFT AND FREE RIDING : PRIVATE PROPERTY AND COMMON LAW, RIGOROUS NORMS

    3) PREVENT LOSS OF CAPITAL : FORCE ALL CONFLICT INTO THE MARKET WHERE IT PRODUCES CAPITAL RATHER THAN DESTROYS IT

    4) PREVENT THE IMMORAL SOCIETY OF THE EXTENDED FAMILY : NUCLEAR FAMILY AND PRIVATE PROPERTY

    5) PREVENT CONQUEST BY SUPERIOR FORCES : RELY ON TECHNOLOGY, PROFESSIONAL WARRIORS, AND THE MILITIA, TO MAKE USE OF INFERIOR NUMBERS AND WEALTH.

    6) PREVENT FRAUD BY OBSCURANTISM : TRUTH, SCIENCE, AND OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE

    THE CULTURE THAT DECRIES HUBRIS

    Greek mythology would only be created by a people who had such confidence that their warning would be a universal caution against any incidence of hubris. It is the mythology of a cautious, conservative, but confident people. The same is true for Germanic mythology. Albeit Christianity tries desperately to tame it by directing it to positive uses. The church could not defend against the Normans so they directed them to fighting the crusades. Not that the crusades were not a good use of men. But that it gave vent to the warrior ethos. Chivalric codes did the rest by allowing warriors, or those who could not afford to be, or those not able to be, to demonstrate heroism through service.

    ON THE WESTERN ADOPTION OF JEWISH OBSCURANTISM

    Unfortunately Jewish culture has mastered the art of obscurantism, pseudo-rationality and pseudo-science, as a means of undermining land-holder moral and social codes, and we have failed to convert them to our aristocratic doctrine. Or we had succeeded prior to the second world war, when American Jewry and Scotts Presbyterians were indistinguishable from one another, and both doing our civilization justice. Since them, we have legions of westerners in university settings doing the same, since Freud, Marx, Cantor gave birth to the Bolsheviks, the Frankfurt School and the Postmodernists took control of the university in an effort to claim for themselves what had previously been the social power of the church.

    Thought leadership in obscurantism has, since then, become a western profession thanks to Kant, Heidegger, Rorty, Adorno, Foucault. Rawls tried to resurrect it with his Victorian parlor trick, and Hayek alone could not hold them back, because he confused psychology with the necessity of calculation and did not yet have the analogy of computer science to help him solve the problem as we propertarians have.

    Mises and Rothbard took us again, into another Jewish pseudo-science, which Hoppe partly rescued us from, and which I’m trying to rescue us from entirely.

    But the real heavy lifting has been done, as always in the west, by empirical scientists in the Anglo tradition, leaving the rationalists in the continental tradition, once again, searching for some form of obscurantism to justify their tyrannical appropriation from the masses, and the meritocratic natural aristocracy that would arise without their predation on them by means of force of government, and various modes of obscurantist language.

    Meanwhile at home, as means of resisting the state, the religious right uses a time honored form of obscurantism themselves to save their society from conquest by the predatory state bureaucracy.

    OBSCURANT LANGUAGE IS IMMORAL BECAUSE IT IS FRAUD. IF YOU CANNOT DESCRIBE IT IN THE LANGUAGE OF ACTION (AS OPERATIONS) THEN YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT. IF YOU USE OBSCURANT LANGUAGE YOU ARE LYING, WHETHER YOU UNDERSTAND IT OPERATIONALLY OR NOT.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-20 08:39:00 UTC

  • SCIENCE AS RELIGION : THE CIVIC SOCIETY : THE CONTRAST OF BUDDHISM Science helps

    SCIENCE AS RELIGION : THE CIVIC SOCIETY : THE CONTRAST OF BUDDHISM

    Science helps us understand causality:

    (a) incentives.

    (b) repetition.

    (c) emergent behavior

    (d) unintended consequences.

    I complain about most mystical religions for the same reason. Buddhism is the least bad of the bad.

    A friend just posted excerpts from the Dali Lama’s book. And while I find practitioners non-threatening, the argument troubles me. The argument that we should unite science and religion. Because the tradition in buddhist thought is that we explore the self. But, it is much less the process of exploration than it is the process of manufacture. The mind is emergent, not existent.

    If we look at the incentives it is a less political religion, because it is a more personal philosophy. We tend to attribute to buddhism less harm, because it is a personal, rather than political philosophy: a reformation of hinduism from the political to the personal.

    But there is no need to reconcile religion and science. We have. History as mythology. Heroes as gods. Politics as ritual. Science as personal philosophy. The participatory civil society so unique to the west. The civil society that our government, like the Chinese government, has actively destroyed by exporting responsibility for society to the bureaucracy.

    Now, it may be that this pagan religion of history, science and reason is focused on the group rather than the self. And it may be that this pagan religion is non-platonic. And it may be that this pagan religion is less INTUITIVE, but equally EMERGENT, and produces superior EXTERNALITIES by focusing human thought on cooperation, rather than introspection.

    It may be that this pagan religion is an aristocratic religion and that the buddhism, like most other religions, must be allegorical because it is not possible for all humans to grasp science and reason.

    It may be that the aristocratic political, and the commoner-introspective, are compatible. But I do not think that the civil society can tolerate it. And I this one of the reasons that buddhism feels more acceptable today to us – we have surrendered the civil society to the state, and become subjects, and can NO LONGER FIND SATISFACTION by participating in the civil society.

    Buddhism is escapism. Powerlessness. Acceptance of the world as it is. It masks the ease of intuitive internal obsession as the excuse not to engage in the difficulty of unintuitive, contemplation. It is so because the individual is indeed POWERLESS in the imperial bureaucratic society. Just as he is POWERFUL in the civil, participatory, society.

    Western man seeks to transform the world to his will. Eastern to accept and conform to the world. This is the fundamental difference between our cultures. They submit. We participate.

    The emergent mind in the practice of science produces the Flynn effect of making us all constantly smarter. And wealthier. And more healthy.

    The reason we are in conflict is that we are both scientifically AND we have surrendered the CIVIL SOCIETY to the BUREAUCRATIC STATE, and as such we seek a new religion, because our real religion CIVIC PARTICIPATION has been taken from us, in order to create worship of the state.

    The state did not kill christianity. Christianity was just ritual. The state killed our civic society.

    If you grasp this the will understand the interrelatedness of our mental models of the world, and the trivial simplicity of the organized religions compared to the CIVIL SOCIETY of the west, which, operating as city states of extended families, created the high trust society, and all the prosperity that came from it.

    – Curt Doolittle. Kiev.

    NOTE

    Allegorical language is the language of deception. It may be the language of self-deception. It may be the language of political deception. But it is the vehicle for deception. Science speaks in operational language so that we cannot so easily engage in deception under the guise of inarticulate language.

    Operational language

    Historical Language

    Allegorical Langauge

    Mystical Language

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-18 04:25:00 UTC

  • THE NEW HOLIDAY: FRIDAY THE 13TH : TEMPLARS DAY : BANKING AND LIBERTY (idea) I t

    THE NEW HOLIDAY: FRIDAY THE 13TH : TEMPLARS DAY : BANKING AND LIBERTY

    (idea)

    I think I’m going to celebrate every Friday the 13th as Templar Day! A ‘High Holiday’. 🙂

    Friday, 13 December 2013

    Friday, 13 June 2014

    Friday, 13 February 2015

    Friday, 13 March 2015

    Friday, 13 November 2015

    Friday, 13 May 2016

    Friday, 13 January 2016

    Friday, 13 October 2016

    COMMENT: FREEDOM AND BANKING

    If you have a bank, and you have weapons, you can form a state within a state. The mormons use an unpleasantly ridiculous doctrine to achieve this state within a state. But there is no need for a ridiculous doctrine. History is a sufficient mythology, and credit, and community, a sufficient incentive. People, money, and guns control geography.

    Banks are necessary for us to cooperate anonymously with one another: without understanding what each of us does. Money and credit are information systems, and a bank is a market for cooperation.

    TEMPLAR BANKERS

    “Though initially an Order of poor monks, the official papal sanction made the Knights Templar a charity across Europe. Further resources came in when members joined the Order, as they had to take oaths of poverty, and therefore often donated large amounts of their original cash or property to the Order. Additional revenue came from business dealings. Since the monks themselves were sworn to poverty, but had the strength of a large and trusted international infrastructure behind them, nobles would occasionally use them as a kind of bank or power of attorney. If a noble wished to join the Crusades, this might entail an absence of years from their home. So some nobles would place all of their wealth and businesses under the control of Templars, to safeguard it for them until their return. The Order’s financial power became substantial, and the majority of the Order’s infrastructure was devoted not to combat, but to economic pursuits.

    “By 1150, the Order’s original mission of guarding pilgrims had changed into a mission of guarding their valuables through an innovative way of issuing letters of credit, an early precursor of modern banking. Pilgrims would visit a Templar house in their home country, depositing their deeds and valuables. The Templars would then give them a letter which would describe their holdings. Modern scholars have stated that the letters were encrypted with a cipher alphabet based on a Maltese Cross; however there is some disagreement on this, and it is possible that the code system was introduced later, and not something used by the medieval Templars themselves.[5][6][7] While traveling, the pilgrims could present the letter to other Templars along the way, to “withdraw” funds from their accounts. This kept the pilgrims safe since they were not carrying valuables, and further increased the power of the Templars.

    “The Knights’ involvement in banking grew over time into a new basis for money, as Templars became increasingly involved in banking activities. One indication of their powerful political connections is that the Templars’ involvement in usury did not lead to more controversy within the Order and the church at large. Officially the idea of lending money in return for interest was forbidden by the church, but the Order sidestepped this with clever loopholes, such as a stipulation that the Templars retained the rights to the production of mortgaged property. Or as one Templar researcher put it, “Since they weren’t allowed to charge interest, they charged rent instead.”

    “Their holdings were necessary to support their campaigns; in 1180, a Burgundian noble required 3 square kilometres of estate to support himself as a knight, and by 1260 this had risen to 15.6 km². The Order potentially supported up to 4,000 horses and pack animals at any given time, if provisions of the rule were followed; these horses had extremely high maintenance costs due to the heat in Outremer (Crusader states at the Eastern Mediterranean), and had high mortality rates due to both disease and the Turkish bowmen strategy of aiming at a knight’s horse rather than the knight himself. In addition, the high mortality rates of the knights in the East (regularly ninety percent in battle, not including wounded) resulted in extremely high campaign costs due to the need to recruit and train more knights. In 1244, at the battle of La Forbie, where only thirty-three of 300 knights survived, it is estimated the financial loss was equivalent to one-ninth of the entire Capetian yearly revenue.

    “The Templars’ political connections and awareness of the essentially urban and commercial nature of the Outremer communities led the Order to a position of significant power, both in Europe and the Holy Land.[citation needed] They owned large tracts of land both in Europe and the Middle East, built churches and castles, bought farms and vineyards, were involved in manufacturing and import/export, had their own fleet of ships, and for a time even “owned” the entire island of Cyprus.”

    “The Templars were already a “state within a state”, were institutionally wealthy, paid no taxes, and had a large standing army which by papal decree could move freely through all European borders. However, this army no longer had a presence in the Holy Land, leaving it with no battlefield. These factors, plus the fact that Philip had inherited an impoverished kingdom from his father and was already deeply in debt to the Templars, were probably what led to his actions. However, recent studies emphasize the political and religious motivations of the french king. It seems that, with the “discovery” and repression of the “Templars’ heresy,” the Capetian monarchy claimed for itself the mystic foundations of the papal theocracy. The Temple case was the last step of a process of appropriating these foundations, which had begun with the Franco-papal rift at the time of Boniface VIII. Being the ultimate defender of the Catholic faith, the Capetian king was invested with a Christlike function that put him above the pope : what was at stake in the Templars’ trial, then, was the establishment of a “royal theocracy”.

    “At dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307, scores of French Templars were simultaneously arrested by agents of King Philip, later to be tortured in locations such as the tower at Chinon, into admitting heresy and other sacrilegious offenses in the Order. then they were put to death.”

    MANY MANY LIBERTARIAN LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-17 04:29:00 UTC

  • THE MASCULINE SPECTRUM OF TRIBAL ORDERS Adding Orthodox to the spectrum consisti

    THE MASCULINE SPECTRUM OF TRIBAL ORDERS

    Adding Orthodox to the spectrum consisting of:

    Orthodox->Conservative->Libertarian->Anarcho Capitalist yields:

    BIAS MODE MEANS JUSTIFICATION

    Orthodoxy: Rules, External Constraint, ‘Duty’

    Conservative: Reason, Moral Capital (behavioral capital), ‘Harmony’.

    Libertarian: Reason, Economic Capital, ‘Prosperity’

    AnCapitalist: Reason, Personal Capital, ‘Liberty’

    Different visions of the nature of man. Possibly, probably just reflections of class. And if that is true, we can get or use the data to prove it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-17 03:39:00 UTC

  • PUTIN SCHOOL OF NATURAL LAW “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to se

    PUTIN SCHOOL OF NATURAL LAW

    “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.” (This was not only an ideological, but theological contradistinction)

    — Vladimir Putin.

    COMMENT

    This is an appeal to natural law. There is a law higher than our hubris may construct. It is required for the rule of law. And it is by consequence the language of statesmen.

    Its absence is the language of politicians.

    The west is exceptional for its natural law and balance of powers. For its private property rights. For science and reason.

    It is interesting that Obama should need to be schooled in such important matters by Putin.

    Terrifying.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-10 03:33:00 UTC