#or holding principles that are good or bad and then inevitably falling short at least a little

[pangaeaseas]

*takes deep breath* CHARACTERS aren't 'morally grey' their DECISIONS are

[nicklloydnow]

“In this debate, parties were blamed for encouraging a form of herd mentality in politics. George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, likened parties to “an Inquisition, where Men are under such a Discipline in carrying on the common Cause, as leaves no Liberty of private Opinion.” More fundamental was the concern that parties exacerbated division and turned neighbors into enemies. As Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator, “I am sometimes afraid that I discover the seeds of civil war in these our divisions.” What made things worse was that partisanship often seemed random. “There is a sort of Witchcraft in Party, and in Party Cries, strangely wild and irresistible,” wrote Thomas Gordon, co-author of Cato’s Letters. “One Name charms and composes; another Name, not better nor worse, fires and alarms.”

Most astute political commentators, however, realized that parties were not going away. They were a price worth paying for parliamentary politics and ultimately a sacrifice for political freedom. A state without parties was a state without liberty, as Montesquieu put it in his history of the Roman republic. A government without parties is an absolute government, since rulers without opposition are autocrats. Opposition, to be effective in a parliamentary system or in any system with an assembly, must be organized.

(…)

Rapin argued that the two parties in Britain, the Whigs and Tories, represented the two pillars of the mixed and balanced constitution – parliament on the one hand, and monarchy on the other – and that both parties were necessary for the equilibrium between them. They were likewise necessary for balance in the religious sphere, which was as important as secular matters in public life at the time. The Tories favored the Church of England, the Whigs toleration for Protestant Dissenters, and the only way to achieve a sustainable equilibrium between the two extreme positions was competition and mutual checking and balancing between the parties. These parties would alternate in government and take turns to hold each other to account when out of power.

The Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume (1711-76), who read Rapin at an early age, wrote at length about party in general and in its British guise in a series of essays published as Essays, Moral and Political in different instalments starting in 1741. Hume believed that parties – or “factions,” terms he used interchangeably – based on “principles” were particularly pernicious and unaccountable. Religious principles had the potential of making people fanatical and ready to both proselytize and persecute dissidents. Because they were more transparent and less extreme, parties based on “interests,” meaning different economic interests, were more tolerable. His early essays on party, “Of Parties in General” and “Of the Parties of Great Britain” (both 1741) treated the phenomenon as inevitable since the British parliamentary system produced to Court and Country parties, or parties of government and opposition.

In later writings, Hume suggested that party politics could be necessary and possibly salutary for political societies. In “Of a Coalition of Parties” (1758), Hume opened by arguing that it may be neither possible nor desirable to abolish parties. This essay was an apologia for his own History of England (1754-61). In this earlier work, Hume had written that “while [the Court and Country parties] oft threaten the total dissolution of the government, [they] are the real causes of its permanent life and vigour.”

(…)

In the pages of the Craftsman, Bolingbroke justified the existence of an oppositional “Country party.” In Bolingbroke’s formulation, it would function as a constitutional party, and he argued that the government of the day (Walpole’s Whigs) had betrayed the core principles of the constitution by corrupting parliament and making the legislature dependent on the executive. In A Dissertation upon Parties (1733-4), Bolingbroke separated the political landscape into three camps: 1) enemies of the government but friends of the constitution, referring to his own Country party; 2) enemies of both, meaning the Jacobites; and 3) friends of the government but enemies of the constitution, that is, the Court Whigs. Only the first category was a legitimate party, whereas the other two were factions, according to Bolingbroke. To save the nation, he argued, the enemies of the constitution had to be opposed, and opposition must be systematic and concerted.

Burke, a Whig later in the century, was not favorable towards Bolingbroke’s Country Tory politics and even less so towards his Deistic and anti-clerical religious writings. Burke continued, however, to distinguish between party and faction in even more forceful terms than Bolingbroke, as he sought to justify his party connection, the Rockingham Whigs, in the 1760s and onwards. To defeat what he viewed as the Court cabal and the abuse of the royal prerogative in the reign of George III, Burke believed that party connection was essential to restore Britain’s mixed and balanced constitution. “When bad men combine, the good must associate,” Burke wrote in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), “else they will fall, one by one.” Politics was not about having a clean conscience but about making a difference, and party was a necessary instrument that could unite power and principle. As he famously defined party: “Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” At the heart of this definition is a distinction between party and faction. Parties for Burke are devoted to promoting an understanding of the national interest, and they are united by principle, and not exclusively by interest, although that can be a supporting principle.

The core of Burke’s party was made up of major Whig aristocratic families such as Cavendish and Devonshire. In the Present Discontents, however, Burke stated that he was “no friend to aristocracy,” in the sense at least in which that word is usually understood, that is to say, as “austere and insolent domination.” What the Whig aristocrats possessed was property, rank, and quality which gave them a degree of independence, and this enabled them to stand up to both the Court and the populace. In this sense, Burke’s conception of party was indeed aristocratic, but it was not aristocracy for its own benefit but for the sake of the whole, and part of his defence of Britain’s mixed and balanced constitution.

The British party debate left an ambivalent legacy among early American political actors and thinkers. The most famous discussion of party and faction in the early American republic is found in James Madison’s Tenth Federalist. In this canonical essay, Madison argued that differences and “mutual animosities” could not be extinguished in free governments. He further agreed with Hume that parties of interest were generally more peaceful and governable than parties united and actuated by passion. His solution to party violence resembled Hume’s argument from “Of a Perfect Commonwealth” (1752): the effects of faction can be better controlled in larger states and federations than in city states. Thanks to the greater size and the scope of the United States, the impact of each faction would be mitigated.

A less philosophical but comparably historically significant party argument surfaced in the 1790s. After Madison and Alexander Hamilton had co-operated as Publius in the Federalist Papers, they became rivals as the early American republic split into two political parties: Republicans and Federalists. Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation in 1793 led to a sharp disagreement between the two on the question of executive power in the constitutional order. In short, Madison associated with his old friend and fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, to oppose Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s centralizing ambitions. In this political environment, a party argument emerged which had more in common with Bolingbroke, and to an extent Burke, than it did with Hume. This was the idea of partisan opposition. The ideal for Jefferson and other opponents of the Federalists was national unity. However, because of what they perceived as the corruption of Federalists such as Hamilton, an opposition party in the shape of the Republican Party was necessary to defeat the enemies within. Jefferson believed that the Hamiltonians and the Federalists were monarchists, and he viewed the 1790s as an ideological battle between liberty and tyranny. In this struggle, partisanship became a necessary evil.

Many eighteenth-century thinkers contended that constitutional party politics were sometimes necessary to save liberty from authoritarianism and corruption. Indeed, party politics itself was a sign of liberty, since it enabled isolated individuals to participate, and thus gave life and vigor to politics. Such politics could generate “harmonious discord” and be as close an approximation of the common good as the imperfections and diversity of human society permit. But for this to materialize, the political debate must retain a degree of civility. Admittedly, most eighteenth-century partisans fell as short as we moderns in this regard. This is the reason why Hume sought to persuade partisans “not to contend, as if they were fighting pro aris & focis,” literally for altars and hearths, or for God and country.

For Hume, it was also crucial that parties were “constitutional.” According to him, “[t]he only dangerous parties are such as entertain opposite views with regard to the essentials of government,” be it the succession to the throne as in the case of the Jacobites, or “the more considerable privileges belonging to the several members of the constitution,” as with the great parties of the seventeenth century. On such questions there should be no compromise or accommodation since that type of party strife could turn into armed conflict. Eighteenth-century politics retained a civil-war edge on both sides of the Atlantic. Recent events, and indeed the nature of party politics itself, have shown that this is a history and a debate we forget at our peril.”

[bbq-hawks-wings]

Ok, you know what? Enough moping. The ED is out and it echoed the clear message that we’ve all been talking about for years regarding Hawks’ connection to the Todoroki’s, but the connection I have yet to see ANY really concrete talk about is the old “Top 3″ paralleled to the new “Top 3″.

I’m talking about Midoriya, Deku, and Todoroki being transformed and renewed parallels to their respective predecessors in All Might, Endeavor, and Hawks. Shouto’s parallel with Hawks is almost never talked about in this very specific context, that I’ve been able to find.

Important note: the old 3 were all FAILURES. 

All Might made peace on the surface, but never penetrated the heart  (no pun intended) of the matter when it came to realizing true peace - it was always a power struggle in the end where might makes right.

Endeavor hasn’t grasped until recently what it means to be “The #1 Hero” and that a selfish perspective is fundamentally opposed to heroism in the first place and does not account for his weaknesses - leaving him vulnerable where he falls short and hamstringing his own improvement process.

Hawks as a naturally gifted prodigy has been so obsessed with freeing himself from the control and expectations of his groomers that he never embraced his individuality and principles to come into and fully realize his natural inclination and potential to help others in the special way only he can because of his suffering and experiences.

All Might has already fallen as a hero, Endeavor is close behind, and the buildup for Hawks’ fall is agonizing. None of these heroes made the cut in the end, and none of them have been or will be able to bring about a future that will render AFO’s influence impotent. It’s a battle of ideals, and the previous generation (and even the new one) hasn’t really realized that; but the new one has at least internalized it:

Midoriya is not a perfect hero by a long shot, but he’s a hero that inspires others to be their best. By knowing he isn’t anywhere near good enough to save everyone but determined to do what he can for those right in front of him, he’s a reflection of the average person’s “deku - I can’t do anything” and inspiring them to “dekiru - I can do something right here and now, however little it may be.” Every single person Midoriya has inspired experienced their inciting major character development as a result - Ochako, Bakugo, Todoroki, Aoyama, etc., and they’ve gone on to inspire others in kind. The buck doesn’t stop at Midoriya - the torch is no longer physically passing, but spiritually as well which is where it matters most.

Bakugo has recognized that being “better” does not mean being “stronger.” He no longer sees the others as competition or dead weight, but teammates. He recognizes that allowing others to make up for his weaknesses makes him stronger than he can be on his own. He pushes himself to his absolute best at every point that he can, but where he falls short, even if he complains along the way, he recognizes that even the #1 needs help once in a while and subliminally communicates that no person should be expected to stand on their own and that confidence should never be placed in one single person or group.

Todoroki has recognized that as awful as his abuse has been and that he has every right to feel hurt, betrayed, and angry at his abuser those traits do not have to define him or confine him. He has chosen to take those experiences he had no control over to pull what he can use to build himself and others up. He won’t be limited by the shortcomings of others and will be the best HE can be by continuously improving and holding steadfastly to his own principles. He recognizes the complex, morally ambiguous (or really, even just plain evil with “good results”), nature of his developmental environment, but has determined that he does not have to be in turn.

There’s a lot of “main protagonist” favoritism in the series that’s kind of just mandatory from a marketing standpoint; but the fact that it’s managed to focus on these secondary and background characters with as clear facets of this argument that “there is no perfect system to make lasting peace where everyone feels at ease - we just individually have to do what we can do when we can and pick up the pieces where we fall short” is incredible to me. We make jokes about HeroAca being “spot the main character on level 100,″ but again, that’s the point! Everyone is the main character of their own story. Nobody gets to be an NPC or crowd filler - not even “Can’t Ya See-kun.”

The moral ambiguity is there on PURPOSE. It’s not meant to be black and white, and there’s not supposed to be an easy answer for it all. Someone will always get the short end of the stick for whatever reason - from bad intentions, shirked responsibility, or even just bad luck - so it’s an individual choice what to do with the bad hand dealt out. It’s oversimplified with even an overly optimistic viewpoint, but as an adult looking around the world on fire (literally, even) that optimism is important because I can’t do the little good I can do for others’ sake if I feel like it won’t amount to anything. When I can squash down unnecessary negativity and elevate good where I can, it has a ripple effect. That’s the point. There will always be battles to be fought, but we can do more with every little bit that we can cumulatively instead of expecting and counting on some theoretical savior bigger than ourselves to do it for us, and when we can consistently count on others to do the right thing and help when we’re helpless - that does more to bring about a sense of security and unity than being disappointed in an institution and calling for its restructure when we inevitably fall through the cracks. We clearly have to build and maintain them the best we can, but just as stated before, we can’t wholly put our faith in it.

Or at least such is my interpretation.

I feel better. Ramble over.

[art-of-slither]

The Magical Energy Factor

Why Gratitude is a powerful practice? I mean, a Gratitude Practice sounds at worst as something you should be doing, you ungrateful muggle, and at best something that makes you the ultimate polite person and nothing more.

I subscribe to two theories about why this stuff works. For some, they cancel each other out, but for me they actually enhance each other.

On the one hand, Gratitude fosters the kind of attitude that enhances good stuff happening often and enables you to accept life and enjoy it as it is. This sounds like a mundnae, muggle-based explanation. A psychological one. The magic version of it deals in energies and how stuff surrounding you respond to your vibes and how you are way more powerful than you think you are.

Let's talk about the Magical One: We live in an energy-based universe.

You will see in this blog that I often talk about our Practiced Vibe. What I mean by that is the usual vibrations we put out.

As Pam Grout, Lynn Grabhorn, Rhonda Byrne and Abraham-Hicks tell the world through their books, our thoughts change the world, but they do so by changing our energetic patterns or vibes. To that end they often cite quantum physics, normal physics and scientific experiments and observations to hint at the nature and truth of what they teach us.

Indeed, the quantum realm acts in a frightening way that is contrary to everything we have thought about the universe. We may seem solid, but we are energy first and foremost, vibrating at various levels. Consciousness vibrates as well, our thoughts vibrate so our feelings vibrate.

It's precisely what our dominant thoughts are what colors our Practiced Vibes. Our Expectations, our Beliefs, our Personal Karma, etc, are colored by our predominant thoughts. We then mingle with stuff that matches up with our Practiced Vibe. The good with the good, the bad with the bad. So, in short, there is Law that states that that which is like unto itself is drawn. The Law of Attraction.

I find this an intriguing notion, one that in my opinion explains why certain things happensto us in a certain way daily and, at the same time, it seems it doesn't explain everything. We all know even bad stuff happens to good people, right? Well, yes and no. Yes because life can be unpredictable, and no because it's not about morality but about predominant energy-patterns. We all know bad people that seem to be touched by a magic wand. They expect that to continue happening, so they have a predominant practiced thought-pattern, thus they vibrate success, so that is what it shows up for them.

The best explanation I have found about why bad stuff happens regardless of actual vibe is because we, as spirits having a physical experience, have decided to exist in a material plane where contrast abounds. It is inevitable bumping into things that we don't like, but we need that contrast to form our personal preferences, which become our dreams and goals, which makes us experience happiness. After all, we all know that the Lumos Charm loses its appeal as a spell when there is no darkness to iluminate, right? We cannot experience joy without sadness.

It is a universe of contrast. You cannot experience something without its opposite. And I challenge anyone to think about a situation where you win something without losing something else at the same time in order to win that something. Having a significant other makes you lose some freedom. Having a child does that. Entering a new school makes you lose the old one. Even winning a game requires you to lose time and energy in order to achieve it.

The problem is, then, that we vibrate in response to the bad stuff (as expected) but then we stay stuck in those vibes. Our Practiced Vibe, in short.

So how we change outcomes and attract better stuff?

You can do it by focusing upon your objectives until you begin attracting them. If you read Napoleon Hill, you will learn about this. I even suspect rhis is the reason why witchcraft work in the first place.

Many people jump up at the opportunity for material things, which is not bad per se, but it hints at a deeper problem. You see, each and every one of the people that focus first on material things do so because they expect those material things bring them a happiness they really crave. No one wants things of they will make them feel miserable, right?

Again, nothing wrong with wanting material things, but when applying these magical principles many fall in a trap: we fill ourselves with anxiety. The sudden feel of dread and doubt debilitates anyone that attempts to attract good stuff, and ultimately defeats them. The problem are not the principles, but the general vibe we initially offer then. If we are not happy now, joyous now, and we will only feel positive when we get the stuff we want, then we shoot ourselves wirh our personal wand. Focusing on the abscence of something and focusing on the anxiety we feel because of the process defeats the purpose, that ensures we keep stuck. Is backwards thinking. We feel bad now, we feel bad about the abscence of something, so we will keep feeling bad and we will keep getting the same out of life as a result.

A Gratitude Attitude (A Grattitude?) colors our Practiced Vibe in a way that allow us to match easily with the things we want. The universe knows how to elicit more gratefulness from us: by giving us stuff that naturally elicits gratitude from us (aka, your dreams, wishes, objectives, etc).

Pam Grout, in her marvelous books E-squared and Thank & Grow Rich, vouches for a universe that is way more accomodating and generous and benign than what many have thought (myself included) if you know where to look, how to look and how to vibrate.

If all of those assertions hold water, and the only thing stopping the Universe/God/All-That-Is/Nature from giving us wonderful things is us creating meddlesome static with our worries and negativity, then a Gra-ttitude surely will clear the air for us and open the door to better days, even amazing days.

So, all the spells you will find in this blog are intended to help you and me achieve a better Practiced Vibe. This Magic Universe theory (or stated fact) explains why Gratitude give us our dreams (at least, an improved life).

The funny part is that I know I have lived once by these universal principles. I did so years before I ever read any of these books on that topic. While doing so, I always knew something deeper was going on, but I never understood what it was.

I will share my story in a series of posts entitled: Touched By Magic. Those post are going to be accompanied by new Gratitude Spells to add to our Self-Help Spellbook. After those posts I will share the other worldview about why Gratitude works, the mundane muggle-based one (Those post will be called the Felix Felicis Factor).

Thanks for reading!

[talabib]

Don’t Be Intimidated By Your Finances – Own them!

When in your twenties, it’s easy to feel like you’re doing a good job with money and finances if you’re able to keep a roof over your head, feed yourself and pay your bills. But what if you want to do more than just survive?

You probably won’t be able to scrape together a living from juggling part-time gigs forever – nor will you want to. So what can you do to ensure that you can afford to buy a house, send your children to college and enjoy a comfortable retirement? Even if these concerns seem far away, it’d be wise to start saving and investing a little bit right now. Your future you will thank you.

Compound interest means it’s never too early to invest.

Financial markets can seem so complex and intimidating that one forever balks at the thought of making an investment. So let’s first look at some basic aspects that will make investing more approachable.

To navigate the markets, it’s important to learn to recognize patterns. Humans have an innate ability to pick up on patterns and time their actions accordingly. Long ago we recognized the regular change in seasons, which allowed us to successfully plant the right crops at the right times.

A financial market is similar: through observations, you can recognize patterns and find the right time to make an investment.

One basic pattern has to do with compound interest, the money that gets added to the initial sum of your savings and which, over time, continues to add value to an investment. Because of compound

interest, you should start taking a portion of your paycheck and investing it as soon as you can; the more years that go by, the bigger the value will be.

For example, let’s say that every year since your nineteenth birthday you’ve taken a total of $3,600 from your earnings and invested it. According to the average return of the US stock market for the past century, that means your investment will grow by 10 percent each year. So, by your thirty-fifth birthday, you’ll be looking at an investment that’s worth $106,782.

Now, let’s say you decide to wait until you’re 27 to make this investment; by the time you’re 35, that amount will only add up to $53,775.

That’s almost exactly half of what you would have had by starting eight years earlier. Clearly, it’s worth getting started as soon as possible.

Focus on avoiding losses rather than earning big gains, and know that the market is unpredictable.

So it’s good to start early, but how do you recognize a good investment from a bad one? To help them in this task, expert investors have what they call the Core Four principles.

The first is to focus on how not to lose money, rather than on how to make it. Obviously, no one wants to lose money. But if you’re going to invest, you’re going to have to risk a loss – and that means you have to understand how difficult it can be to earn back money that’s been lost on an investment.

Let’s say you invest $1,000 and lose 50 percent, leaving you with $500. You might think that turning around and making a 50-percent gain will get you back to where you started. But that 50 percent will actually only get you halfway there, since a 50-percent gain on your remaining $500 will earn you $250, giving you a total of $750.

To get back to where you started, you’ll have to earn 100 percent of your remaining investment. This is why you should prefer safer investment options that have a limited downside.

Another guideline for avoiding losses is remembering that no one can predict the financial markets. Even the most experienced and celebrated investors make mistakes.

Ray Dalio, the creator of the renowned investment firm Bridgewater Associates, is considered a superstar of the stock market. But, back in 1971, he learned that no one can know for certain what the future holds.

That year, President Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard, a move that resulted in the value of the dollar plummeting. Everyone, including Dalio, expected the stock market to take a tumble as well – but it didn’t. It soared. And from that moment on, Dalio knew that it was impossible to ever predict anything with absolute certainty.

This is why all the experts know that to avoid losses, they also need to make investments that are robust in the face of unexpected market events.

When investing, find a balance between low risk and high reward and use falling prices to your advantage.

In any movie about Wall Street, there’s usually a character who says something like, “If you want to make big money, you gotta take big risks.” Well, this is a big lie.

In order to focus on not losing money, it’s best to follow the second core principle and look for investments that are relatively low risk and offer relatively high rewards. This relationship is known as an asymmetric risk/reward and it’s what a lot of good investors look for.

One such investor is the highly respected trader Paul Tudor Jones. To help make decisions, he uses a five-to-one rule. That is, he only invests if he can expect to earn at least five times his initial investment. So if he puts in $100, he’ll expect to earn $500. By following this rule, Jones can fail 80 percent of the time and still come out even.

If he makes five investments of $1,000, he only needs one investment to meet his expectations and earn him that $5,000 to be back where he started. However, if he is right about three of his five-to-one investments, he’ll earn $15,000, and only lose $2,000.

As we can see, Jones finds success by following the first and second core principles. He’s taking into consideration the unpredictable market and earning rewards without taking major risks.

Another way of safely increasing your chances of rewards is to invest in undervalued assets, especially after the market has taken a downward turn and is reflecting people’s pessimistic attitude about the future.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the market was in bad shape, which is why it was the perfect time to invest in the many reliable assets that had dropped in value.

Take the Citigroup banking corporation. In March of 2009, their stock had fallen from $57 to 97 cents per share. Yet, within just five months, the price was back up to $5 – that’s a 500-percent increase!

A smart investor uses knowledge of taxes to make better decisions.

If you’re interested in making investments, it pays to be smart about your taxes, since they can eat up a huge portion of your earnings. That’s why the third principle of the Core Four is to know your taxes!

For example, the tax on short-term and long-term capital gains, which is, respectively, income earned from investments less than or more than a year old, varies from state to state. So it’s worth knowing what your state charges and whether you might save money by cashing out an investment before one year has elapsed.

It’s also good to know about mutual funds, a type of investment vehicle made up of stocks, bonds and other assets, combining investments from multiple investors.

If you’re thinking of investing in a mutual fund, you should know that, for tax purposes, all such investors are considered owners and are liable to be taxed on short-term gains. And because mutual funds trade their shares frequently, these gains will almost always be taxed at the higher short-term gains tax rate.

Being smart about taxes also means knowing the difference between net and gross sums. If someone tells you that a certain investment has provided a high return, you can confidently ask whether that amount is the net sum, which is the total after taxes and fees, or the gross sum – the amount before those deductions have been made. Obviously, the former is a better indicator of the true quality of the investment.

It’s also smart to search for investment options that will result in the least amount of investment fees and taxes. This may lead you to look at index funds over mutual funds.

Index funds don’t have managers who charge expensive investment fees. Instead, they’re composed of stocks from an index such as the S&P 500, which includes successful companies like Apple and Microsoft. These stocks are only traded to reflect changes in the composition of the S&P 500, meaning that the shares are held for longer, thereby enabling you to avoid the higher short-term tax rate on gains. Clearly, having a good sense of what taxes and fees you face will help you make better investment decisions.

A diverse portfolio will help protect you against changing trends and market crashes.

Now we come to the fourth principle of the Core Four, which is perhaps the most familiar – diversify!

This is an important and well-known rule since diversifying your portfolio is a traditional and reliable way of protecting your investment. It’s the financial equivalent of not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Essentially, by having a diverse portfolio, you can ensure that you’ll still have healthy investments, even when trends change and those inevitable yet unpredictable shifts in the market occur.

So don’t put all your money in one asset class, such as real estate. If you do, you may find out just how quickly it can all vanish when the market comes crashing down, as it did in 2008.

There are four ways you can diversify: across different asset classes; within asset classes; across different markets, countries and currencies; and across time.

Different asset classes include stocks, which are shares of a company; real estate; or bonds, which allow you to invest in an interest-bearing loan between two parties.

Adding more than one asset class to your portfolio is a great way to diversify, as is making multiple investments in the same asset class. So rather than investing only in Microsoft stock, you could also buy some shares of Apple and Hewlett-Packard as well, just in case Microsoft runs into a crisis.

Also, remember that the financial markets are global and you should feel free to look beyond your country's borders.

Finally, diversifying your portfolio across time means that you should always be adding capital to your portfolio, whether you do this monthly or yearly. The market is always fluctuating, and you can improve your chances of latching on to a new trend by adding new assets on a regular basis.

Following your instincts can lead to bad decisions, so stay disciplined and use a checklist.

One of the reasons we need rules and principles to help guide our financial decisions is because of the way our brains are wired.

The human brain hinders our ability to make rational investment decisions because we instinctively respond to losing money the same way we respond to life-threatening situations.

The way your ancient ancestors reacted to the sight of an approaching saber-toothed tiger is the same way your brain reacts to the stock market crashing and taking all of your money with it. Both of these events are processed as being dangerous threats to your livelihood, and the natural response is to immediately withdraw and escape.

When it comes to your finances, this is an unfortunate reaction since often the best response to plummeting stock prices is to invest more. Remember, when prices are low, it’s the perfect time to invest in an undervalued stock that is sure to rebound in no time at all.

This is why rules and checklists come in so handy. Before you make a mistake by being reactionary, you should refer to a list of criteria and thus identify the most rational decision.

It’s sort of like flying a plane. During takeoffs, landings and emergencies, pilots have long and detailed checklists to go through before making any important decision. And this is precisely what any great investor will do.

A good checklist is a way of protecting you from yourself; it turns your decision-making process into a strict and reliable discipline.

Remember the esteemed Paul Tudor Jones and his five-to-one rule? He would never make an investment or trade without first referring to his checklist, which includes questions such as, “Does the investment have a favorable risk-to-reward balance?” And, “Can I expect this investment to have a five-to-one return ratio, or only a four-to-one ratio?”

Okay, now that you know some of the basic questions to ask, and some of the basic potholes to look out for, it’s time to stop procrastinating, and start investing!

Financial success and security are within your reach – no matter what job you have or how small your paycheck is. With the right knowledge and an action plan in place, anyone can make good, lucrative investments. And with a little experience and smarts, you can prosper through even the most volatile and uncertain of times.

Action plan: Look out for investment fees.

Investment fees can be treacherous. In fact, if you’re not careful, they can end up eating up two-thirds of your earnings. Take an average investment fund, for instance, which charges its clients a 2-percent yearly fee. Now, say that on average the fund delivers a 7-percent return on your investment over 50 years. This means that, after 50 years, every dollar will be worth nearly 30 dollars. With a yearly fee of 2 percent, however, your return is not 7 percent, but 5, and fifty years down the line, each dollar will only be worth just over 10 dollars, instead of 30. This illustrates how disproportionate the impact of investment fees can be!

[nyangibun]

GoT S07E05 Thoughts

Fuck me. 

This might have been my least favourite episode to date and we had Gendry!!! Okay, in all fairness, it wasn’t a bad episode. There was just one particular conflict that I am not looking forward to seeing continue. 

And no, it’s not Jon3rys. I couldn’t give two shits about that right now. 

But let’s begin, shall we? 

For anyone who still believes Dany to be a good person, I honestly suggest going to an optometrist or retaking high school English because how much more obvious can this show get? I didn’t get to write down her full speech, but following this:

“I’m not here to murder...”

With this: 

“Bend the knee and join me or refuse and die”

You’re kind of a hypocrite and a really obvious one at that. War is horrible, I get it, and good people do atrocious things in war, but that’s why we, as modern somewhat enlightened (although questionable) human beings, have war trials. People may die in war, as that is inevitable, but there are certain acts that no decent human should perform even in the midst of war. 

I know I’m quoting Wikipedia here, but whatever: 

Examples of war crimes include intentionally killing civilians or prisoners, torture, destroying civilian property, taking hostages, perfidy, rape, using child soldiers, pillaging, declaring that no quarter will be given, and serious violations of the principles of distinction and proportionality, such as strategic bombing of civilian populations.

Do you think a man as concerned with portraying war as a clusterfuck of morally grey characters would place an entitled figure with weapons of mass destruction which she uses indiscriminately, who commits war crimes, as the main protagonist? Do you think that is a good conclusion? And this is simply going by this episode and not the mess Dany made in previous seasons. 

She had Randyll and Dickon Tarly as her prisoners. There was no need to execute them, or at least no need to execute both of them. If she wanted to make an example, she could do so with Randyll, but fine, let’s concede the fact it had to be done. She burned them. A slow, horrible, agonising death. She could have beheaded them, as was customary in Westeros, but no, she chose to burn them because you know why? She likes it. She’s done it before. Burning her enemies gives her great satisfaction of her power, but also it spreads fear into the hearts of everyone there because she knows it’s the only way to get them to submit. 

If she allowed them the third option of becoming a prisoner of war, she knows they’d choose that over her. She even says so to Tyrion, because guess what? The people of Westeros doesn’t like or want Dany as their queen. Cersei may be a Grade A Bitch, but she’s the bitch they know. She doesn’t have dragons to burn those who defy her at her will. Yes, she’s powerful and could still easily execute people at a moment’s notice, but they’ve seen her humiliated and frightfully human when she was made to walk naked in shame through the streets of King’s Landing. She is human and she can fall. To them, Dany wields her power like a god and not the kind they worship out of love but out of fear. What kind of ruler is that?

And let’s talk about execution in general here. We’ve seen a lot of it over the seasons, and what we always come back to as a code of honour and true morality in this grey world is this quote from Mr Honour himself, Ned Stark: 

“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”

Mr Honour Jr aka Jon Snow lives by this rule like a life motto. If he must sentence a man to die, he will swing the sword himself, and throughout the show, we’ve seen Jon do this and we’ve seen how this weighs upon him, though the culprits may be deserving. Yes, people die in war and Jon has killed on the battlefield for survival, but executing someone is a deliberate act. It’s taking the life of a human while they are powerless to stop you. Jon doesn’t take any pleasure in it. 

But Dany... She’s executed people left, right and center. Burning them in the most unnecessarily cruel way because she can and because it instills fear. Feeding them to her dragons which is even worse. That’s not at her hand. That’s cowardly and sadistic. 

You know who else rules through fear? 

“The only way to keep your people loyal is to make certain they fear you more than they do the enemy.” 

Cersei bloody Lannister. 

Yeah, let that sink in. And let’s move on. 

Jon meeting Drogon. I hated this scene, although I see how it’s important in establishing Jon as a Targaryen. I didn’t like it mostly because I was still reeling Drogon burning the Tarly’s alive, and yet right after, they have Jon bonding with Drogon like some special moment. But do you think Jon would even touch that dragon if he knew the horrors Dany had made Drogon do? Or the fact that she just executed Jon’s best friend’s family in the worst way possible? Yeah, Sam hated his father, but he didn’t hate his brother. And no matter what animosity there was between them, Sam is a good person and he would still be devastated by this. Not to mention we weren’t given all those Dickon scenes where the man acted with honour, kindness and bravery, just to dismiss him as another faceless enemy of Dany’s. He was Sam’s brother and so much like Sam in a way. I think that’s what made his death in spite only knowing him for 2 episodes so heartbreaking. Also, why this meeting between Jon and Drogon made me angry and disgusted. 

Of course, it also establishes some Jon3rys bonding, although more so on Dany’s side. Let’s face it, the Dragon Queen wants familial Dragon D. Her heart eyes for Jon throughout this episode was at least 100x more convincing than previous episodes between them. Jon, on the other hand, has moments where he does seem to think Dany is alright, but I still don’t see the same level of affection on his end at all. As always, he has a one-track mind and that’s the war up North. 

And I’m sorry but Dany’s attraction towards Jon seems to predicate on her notion that he’s as heroic and powerful as her. I get that he is and that’s a wonderful reason to fall in love with him, but it’s still falling in love with the idea of him and not who he is, because who Jon is, isn’t that person. He doesn’t want to be a hero or to be powerful. I know Show Jon doesn’t go into this, but Book Jon wants a family, to settle in Winterfell and live peacefully and honourably like his pseudo father. But Dany will never know that about him because she doesn’t know him. Take her asking Jon about whether he got a knife to the heart, the wonder and awe in her eyes as she asks him. She wants him to be just like her (or her delusional perception of herself as some kind of prophesised princess that was promised). Jon is who she thinks she is and she’s attracted to that, which is basically some Game of Thrones version of Narcissus. When she realises he’s a Targaryen, she’ll feel threatened more than relieved she’s not alone, because if she thinks he’s her then she’ll think he wants the Iron Throne and he’s a threat to her ambitions. 

There’s a reason why after all that Gilly discovers the Rhaegar and Elia annulment (which btw is such bullshit but whatever). Jon has more right to the Iron Throne than she does. 

What’s funny about this episode that even Dany’s Second Biggest Fan struggles to support her. Yes, he still will, but that entire conversation he has with Varys just sounds a lot like he’s trying to convince himself that ‘yes, all rulers burn their prisoners like a sadistic pyroqueen, and yes, Dany is so not like her father’. And the fact that her own loyal subjects are questioning her? Yeah, tell me again how she’s a hero. 

Now onto the main reason why I hate this episode: StarkBowl. But oh ho, not Jon and Sansa StarkBowl but Sansa and Arya. 

I’ve always loved Arya. She was my favourite character for so many seasons, until I fell madly in love with Sansa, although Arya remains in my Number 2 spot. But this episode, I felt such a burning anger towards her. After all they’ve been through, everything Sansa’s endured, Arya would still hold her accountable for the beliefs Sansa held as a young child. She’s changed and grown so much on account of her experiences yet she will not lend her own sister the same courtesy. It pisses me off because what Arya is doing (judging and accusing Sansa of things she didn’t do or for who she was when she was a child) is exactly what Anti-Sansa’s have been doing for years. And her own short-sighted, ignorant inability to grasp that this woman before her is not the same Sansa she once knew has now led her to being manipulated and conned by Littlefinger. 

What I can only hope is that Sansa is smarter than Littlefinger. Bran wouldn’t give Arya the dagger if he foresaw Arya using it on Sansa. And I feel like it is so uncharacteristic of Arya, who has longed for so long to be reunited with her pack, to suddenly break down by childish prejudice at the first miscommunication. Sansa is far more cunning than anyone gives her credit for and I feel that this could all be a long orchestrated con on Littlefinger himself. Arya’s not that stupid. I refuse to believe she’s stupid enough to underestimate LF that way and let herself be manipulated so easily. I feel like perhaps that fight between Sansa and Arya was for LF’s benefit because it felt so contrived, so out of nowhere. I know this speculation is also heavily biased by my refusal to believe that the Starks would fight amongst themselves after all they went through, but I do believe that LF will die this season. It won’t be at Sansa’s hand but it will be because of Sansa’s machinations. 

Now, onto Gendry!!!!!

The happiest part about this hell episode because fuck, he’s so hot still. That cropped hair, those muscles, that smile... Yeah, swoon. He’s also hilariously bullheaded (very like a Baratheon) when he ignores Davos, hits those soldiers with his hammer and immediately tells Jon who he is. 

In fact, there was this instant spark of chemistry between Gendry and Jon in their first meeting. 

“You’re a lot leaner.”

“You’re a lot shorter.”

The gentle ribbing of two strangers is adorable, but it also reminds me of Ned and Robert’s first scene together:

"Your Grace.” "You’ve got fat.”

Now the parallels of Jon as Ned is nothing we haven’t seen before. Gendry as Robert is newer, and Jon and Gendry together as Ned and Robert is so satisfying to watch. It also makes me, a trash shipper, so happy because you know if Jon is being paralleled as Ned in this episode, you know who is being paralleled as Cat? 

Yes, that’s right. Strong, confident Sansa, who was called only Lady Stark in the Great Hall meeting. 

I know I’m crazy but I’m still not worried about Jonsa. That scene in the Great Hall just kept making me think of Sansa as Penelope. She’s there holding onto Winterfell for Jon’s return as he gallivants off on his many missions and overcomes his many trials. She’s there, always loyal and true to him, and maintains his kingdom for him. 

Boatbang may happen (likely), but Odysseus also slept with Calypso, before ultimately returning to his lady love. I believe the same will happen for Jonsa. 

Also, who thinks Cersei’s not actually pregnant? I think she’s beginning to question Jaime’s loyalty and needs to firmly hold him in place. And I think when he finds out she’s not after all he’s done for, all the sinful things he did, it might make him plunge that sword into her heart prophecy-style. Or not a sword. I don’t know. 

But that’s it for me. My head hurts. My heart hurts. And I maintain that I hate this episode because fuck StarkBowl. And fuck disrespecting Sansa like that. 

[amandaisnotwriting]

I will never let you fall

a/n: This is my gift to my best friend @eroticgropefest​​. Hope you appreciate my first (and maybe only) attempt at a snowbaz fic just for you, bruh! o// I figured since I’m helping turn you into as much of an h/c hoe as myself, you’d enjoy reading some of that as well (also I’m all out of ideas SORRY I TRIED). Enjoy your 26th aging up <3 :P

Baz

Snow is infuriating. I’m certain I’m not the only one who sees it: the way he shrugs at most questions, considering it to be enough of an answer; how he gets flustered and fumbles around looking for his words; how he has absolutely no control over his own immense powers; the way he follows the Mage around, like some kind of stray dog on a very short leash, awaiting his commands.

The most powerful magician alive.

I look at him across the room, once again failing at a spell. Bunce looks at him, exasperated, saying something I don’t care to hear. I glare some more at Snow’s ineptitude, feeling a fire deep inside me, something that tells me to shake some sense into him. How stupidly vulnerable he is! The dangers he puts himself in by his complete lack of control. How easy he’ll be to break under my hands when we inevitably have to face each other.

I can imagine myself marching over to him, pushing him up against a wall. I’d hold on to his neck and look right into those eyes, Snow’s unremarkable eyes, so ordinary and plain looking. I’d stare right at him (and I might choke him a little.) (Not too much, just a little. Just enough). He’d growl at me and it would smell of smoke and get unbearably warm. He’d be so close and alive and warm, I might have a taste. Bite a chunk right out of his neck in front of everyone. (or I might just snog the fuck out of him. Either one).

I don’t do any of that. Instead, I shake my head and then glare at him across the room, while Bunce continues to tell the absolute idiot what to do. Soon he seems to feel my stare and looks up at me. At first he seems confused, but his slow brain finally catches up. and he glares right back, closing his fist more strongly around his wand.

Simon Snow never stops driving me fucking crazy.

There are definitely some things people don’t tell you about sharing a room with the chosen one.

One of them is how once he’s put something on his mind, he’ll never drop it. Crowley, Snow might have won an award for most stubborn person ever if it existed (I’m convinced they should create one just for him at this point). He’s incredibly persistent about his moronic ideas, like his obsession with keeping the windows open. No matter how many times I close them, he’ll open them back up. I suspect he’s doing it out of principle at this point, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it.

There’s an infinite number of frustrating things about living with Snow (besides the irony of living with someone you’re supposed to kill, but instead stupidly caught feelings for) (I may be biased on that one though). From the pointless arguments to the loud nightmares he seems to have convinced himself I don’t know about (a good match to my own relentless night terrors). Or even the way he’s completely oblivious to every single redeeming quality I (debatably) possess. Or even the most cruel ones, like the way looks after he falls asleep, all soft angles and relaxed jaw. Or the unyielding sexual frustration of having him so close to the touch and so hopelessly unreachable.

Yet, no matter how bad those things are, they still feel like they’re almost worth the amount of private wanking I have to do in an attempt to get him off my mind (it never works) (why would it?) It still feels more than I deserve, to have him this close to me. It’s almost comforting (almost, when it isn’t absolutely infuriating).

The truly bad thing about sharing a room with the Chosen One that no one tells you about isn’t even the arguing and all the times he loses his patience and grabs me, manhandling me while I cooly remind him of the anathema. It isn’t even the fact that, while he does that, I just want to push him against the wall and kiss him hard.

The worst thing of all is when he just isn’t there. (and you don’t know where he is or what happened or if he’s safe.) (Why would you when he hates you?)

Another one of those nights, alone in the room, I try not to watch the door. Why should I care? We all know how the story ends: with either his body, dead at my feet, or mine, burnt to ashes. I play with the fire right above my palm, staring intently at my biggest weakness (I am tragically in love with the things that will most likely end me) (like Snow’s stupid face, his grip on my arms when our frustrations turn into something physical, the way I imagine his lips will feel on mine) (and, of course, open flames).

I end up going out to the catacombs, intent on draining as many rats as possible. Because I’m angry, frustrated, and want to feel something satisfying. I can maybe pretend the warmth that washes over me is anything but the confirmation of the monster I truly am.

 Simon

Exhaustion is all I can think about.

I feel like the world is narrowing down right in front of my eyes. Like putting one foot in front of the other is just too much effort. I’m holding my right side, feeling something warm coat my fingers that I honestly don’t even stop to question at this point. What’s the point in questioning anything anyway?

My only priority is getting to bed and falling into blissful thoughtless sleep.

That bloody goblin had to try and ambush me. He caught me off-guard too, the handsome mortherfucker. He was no match for my Sword of Mages, of course, but he banged me up pretty badly before I could get the incantation in. Thank magic for that, cause other spells fail me a lot of time and I don’t really enjoy going off and feeling spent afterwards. I might not have been able to drag myself back to Mummers House if I had done that.

In the end I did get back to my bed. And, most importantly, I could finally lie down and just lose consciousness for a while. As I started to drift off to sleep,, I faintly noticed that Baz wasn’t in the room, which I was thankful for. I didn’t have the energy to deal with him anyway. Plus, there was a small part of me that worried the smell of blood might make me look really tasty. Like a delicious meaty sandwich.

Okay that line of thought might make me too hungry. And I might have been loopier than I first thought I was. Also a little dizzy. It would be fine, though, I was determined to just pass out for a few hours and think about anything else tomorrow.

It could wait anyway.

Baz

As soon as I enter our room, I’m hit by a strong smell of blood.

Snow’s blood.

My first reaction is to freeze in the doorway, watching him breathe. He looks beautiful as ever, illuminated only by the moonlight, which makes his face look softer. His brow is a little furrowed and his arm seems to still be cradling his injured right side. The smell of blood hits me again, making him look all the more enticing. I hold my breath for a second, calming down my hammering heart. Thank Merlin I just drank so many rats, or else this would be unbearable.

I decide I must look absolutely ridiculous just standing there with the door open, so I close it behind me and sit in my own bed, staring intently at my roomate. He didn’t hear me come in, so I assume he must already be in deep sleep. The idiot didn’t even change out of his clothes or bother to get under the covers: just spread himself on his bed and fell asleep.

I want to wake him up and sneer at him. I want to threaten him for being so vulnerable. I want to know what happened and how he got hurt. I want them to pay for hurting him.

I do none of these things.

What I really do is start to remove Snow’s ratty shoes to help him get more comfortable. He doesn’t react to my touch, so I keep going. If he were to wake up I might hit him just to distract him from what I’m doing. To keep up the image he carefully constructed about me. The villain to his heroism. The soulless vampire who will drink him dry on his sleep. The monster I truly am.

Instead I find myself holding my wand over his injuries, murmuring healing spells over Snow’s fitfully sleeping body. I watch as his wounds start to heal, saying a few more just in case he has any internal injuries I’m not aware about. He looks more comfortable in his sleep now, his mouth opening to release a soft snore.

I carefully pull the covers from under him and still he sleeps like the dead. I throw them over him, almost angrily, trying to rationalize all of this to myself. Why do I keep doing this? Snow never asked for my help. He’d be repulsed to know I helped him in the first place! What am I thinking? (but obviously I know why.) (I’m fucking whipped that’s why.)

And then I run my fingers through his hair. Very softly, feeling the curls as I push them away from his face. (because I’m a constant disappointment to myself, my family and the entire world of mages.) (And because I just want to know what it feels like, one time in my life, to tenderly touch Simon Snow before I die on his hands.)

Lying back on my own bed, I decide not to dwell on this moment of tenderness any longer. It’s no use.

Snow will never feel the same and our destinies will never change.

Simon

Sometimes I miss watford and magick and all the excitement that came with that.

At least that’s what I tell myself as I sit on the couch in the apartment Penny and I share, applying pressure to the massive cut I managed to make in my own hand while chopping vegetables carelessly. I should have known cooking wouldn’t be a talent of mine. Another one to cross off that list, I guess. Lesson learned.

One-handed texting is also not a great talent of mine, I come to realize. But, in the end, I manage to text Baz, who would be more likely to come running back home than Penny. To be fair on her, it’s not like I really need the hand holding anyway. I could probably just go to the A&E and get some stitches (maybe?), but it feels like a waste of time when your flatmate and your boyfriend can just spell it better (if I wasn’t just a Normal now I’d be able to do it myself.) (Well, not really, I was never good at that sort of stuff anyway, I guess.)

It doesn’t take long for me to hear Baz’s spare key on the front door. He strides in, wearing jeans and a simple shirt, which he pulls off as wonderfully as ever. He takes a look at me, applying pressure to my cut with a piece of cloth (probably looking pretty miserable), and I can see his sneer as he raises his eyebrows at me.

“Really, Snow?” he asks me, and I can feel myself get annoyed. He can always get a rise out of me, whether I like it or not.

“It’s not like I meant to!” I reply, huffing. I can see him shake his head from the corners of my vision, but I don’t wanna look at his mocking face.

“So,” he starts, sitting down next to me and grabbing my hand to examine it. I can see the way he has to steady his breath at the sight of blood and it occurs to me that maybe I should have called Penny after all, “you cut your hand open and then you decide that calling your neighborhood vampire would be the best course of action? Crowley, Snow, you’re thick!”

“Like you’d turn around and eat me,” I mumble, slightly embarrassed by the fact that Baz’s vampirism didn’t even occur to me in this moment. I just wanted my boyfriend to make it better, is that too much to ask?

I watch his eyebrows raise even more, before he surrenders and grabs the cloth from my other hand and presses it harder against the wound, making me hiss in pain and surprise.

He’s probably just doing it to watch me squirm. Baz has always loved that. Back in Watford, he used to it with this predatory look on his face that led me to believe he wanted me dead (okay maybe I was bad at judging it and he just wanted to snog me.) (How would I know the difference?) Now I can definitely see the softness there, and the gentle side of him he tries so hard to hide to this day.

“Are you going to heal me or just stare at me all day?” I tease, and he huffs, letting go of my hand.

“Why should I do that exactly?” he replies, and for a second I almost believe him, out of habit. Until my brain fills in the fact that Baz hates to see me hurting even more than being in pain himself.

Just as that thought crosses my mind, I see him reach for his wand and I have to conceal a smile as he grabs hold of my arm again, casting a healing spell.

Something about it feels oddly familiar. It feels comfortable, in a way I can’t place, like falling asleep and waking up with his comforting presence entangled with me. But it also feels like it juggles something in my memory I can’t quite place. I frown, trying to figure out why Baz’s healing magic feels so much like a fond memory.

“Simon, did I hurt you?” he asks, softly, probably worried about my frown. I shake my head, and his tone grows more aggressive again, “then what?”

I resist the urge to point out how he called me Simon again (I still enjoy doing that from time to time, just as much as he enjoys pretending it doesn’t happen), and just shrug. Why would it matter how his magic felt like anyway? I’m sure I’m just making this up.

It isn’t until a moment later, when I feel his hand run through my curls, lightly pulling them away from my face, that I realize it means a big deal actually. I recognize the feeling his healing magic because of the late nights where he’s done exactly that, far before I had even figured out what he meant to me. Far before we were on the same side together. In all those times I was afraid the smell of my blood would actually mean he’d drink me dry in my sleep.

It means that all the mysterious times I assumed my magic healed myself in my sleep somehow, he’s been watching over me without ever taking credit for it (and I really do feel like a moron for never figuring it out.)

“All better,” he says, letting go of me.

“Baz…. I…” I stutter under his gaze, “thank you.”

“Just be more careful next time, will you?” he sounds annoyed, but I know he isn’t. I know him enough to see the little smile peeking through. “Do you need adult supervision to finish that lunch you were making before you tried to chop your own hand off?”

I pretend to be annoyed at him as I get up and go back to the kitchen. I also don’t comment on him following me, or on the fact that he also grabs a knife of his own and starts cutting up ingredients alongside me wordlessly.

I guess Baz looking after me has always gone without saying, I think to myself, giggling at the ridiculousness of me, now a mere Normal, having a vampire who can do spells as my guardian angel. I guess my life never stops being pretty unbelievable, with or without magic. He rolls his eyes at my giggling, correcting the positioning of my hands, and probably stopping me from another future injury.

Man, I really do suck at cooking.

I appreciate nice comments ^__^ Also happy 26th, Katie! Always here for you if you need as your designated beta and friend <3

[danielmrose]

On Parenting: Their Sin is Not Your Sin

Part 2 of 11 of Parenting Principles

When you have your first kid, everyone, and I mean everyone, gives you advice. You get advice from the lady in the grocery store and the man behind you in line at the movie theater. Wherever you go, advice rolls in. 

One day my wife, Amy, was at an office store running an errand for our ministry team at Illinois State and baby Ethan was hungry and tired. He was doing what little ones do when they get hungry and tired, crying, melting down, he was absolutely losing it. The well meaning lady behind the register looked at Amy and handed her a brochure about raising a child with autism, "You may find this helpful."

Some advice is better than others. You have to learn quickly what advice to hold onto and what advice to let go of. I think that one of the most important pieces of advice, one that became a core principle for us, was "your child's sin is not your sin." 

Some time later Amy and I are were at Panera trying to have a little lunch. Ethan had just found his running legs. As young parents we made the mistake of taking him out of the high chair and then began putting on our coats. In an instant he was gone! My dude was running laps around Panera. It was one of the moments that you have to decide if you're going to chase him or try to out smart him. We attempted to use our superior intellects by trying to corner him from two different directions. He stopped, giggling, looked to the left and then to the right. Before we could grab him, he took off into the kitchen! Thankfully, one of our friends was the manager and scooped him up, "Did you lose something guys?" 

Every person who parents a child has stories they could tell where they wanted to crawl up under a rock somewhere because of the ridiculous actions taken by their child. The Panera story is cute now, but in the moment we were absolutely mortified. Amy and I experienced shame.  Why? Why did we experience shame from the actions of our little boy? It's because our identities were too deeply connected to him. Whatever Ethan did, we saw it as an extension of ourselves. I think if we are honest this is why obedience is such a significant benchmark for parents in their evaluation of their parenting. The thinking goes, "if my kids are obedient then I am a good parent." Similarly, "If my child is a good person then I am a good person. If they are a bad person then I must be a bad person."

This is dangerous thinking. 

When we link our identities to another person, whether it's a child entrusted to us or another adult, what happens is that we begin to lose our sense of self. 

Here is the truth of the matter, we are our own and the children entrusted to us are their own. 

We must teach the children entrusted to us that they are responsible for their actions. This means that when they do well, we praise them for doing well. It's not our success, it is theirs. When they fall short and make mistakes, we help them understand that they must own those mistakes. It's not our failure, it is theirs. 

This is infinitely more difficult when children are young. Why? Because they don't have the capacity for complex thinking. Yet, they will learn from how you respond and how you carry yourself through the ups and downs of life together. So much of this is caught by the children in your home as opposed to taught. 

Two tangible ways that Amy and I have practiced this principle is to remind one another that the actions of our children are their own. We also avoid manipulative language like, "You make me feel…" As adults, we have the responsibility to be wise and measured in our responses to children's behavior. This is easier said than done. It requires significant attention and intentionality. Caring for a child is all the time. Parenting a child never ends. The vigilance required to avoid this kind of language is exhausting but critically important. 

One of the important things that comes as a result of embracing this principle is that you, as the parent, are able to truly speak truth in love and extend grace. Why? When we are able to differentiate ourselves from the children entrusted to us we can actually see them as individuals and not simply an extension of ourselves. This means that we can, with authenticity, hold the tension of truth, love, and grace. We can do so without adding shame and guilt into the equation. 

As children grow older they inevitably sin, like everyone else. When they do, Amy and I, can speak grace, truth, and love. We are able to hold them accountable without experiencing shame or guilt ourselves. In some sense, we can dispassionately hold them accountable. 

In the next paragraph I'm going to write briefly about the Christian perspective about why this is principle is important. If that's not your bag, you can skip the paragraph, it's OK. I hope you won't, it's of central importance in my life and I hope at the very least it will help you know me better.

For those of you reading this that are followers of Jesus this principle also lays the groundwork for the reality that you are not the savior. Our jobs as parents is not to try and take the sin of the children entrusted to us as our own. Jesus did that completely and perfectly on the cross. Our job is to point to Jesus and to remind the children and ourselves who the savior is. When we fail, when they fail, there is only one means by which the effects and consequences of sin have been done away with, the cross of Christ. Sin's curse is the breaking of relationship with one another and God. Christ has redeemed and reconciled those relationships through his work on the cross. It is up to us to now experience that forgiveness by faith. 

"Their sin is not your sin." This principle frees us to love the children entrusted to us well. It allows us to speak truth, grace, and love with authenticity apart from guilt and shame.

[newslegion-blog1]

POST-MODERNISM IS A SELF-SERVING ICONOCLASM WHOSE END-GAME IS DEATH BY OBSOLESCENCE

Why has post-modernism taken hold so successfully, where did it come from and why does it continue to spread - despite the push-back and the warnings - a culture of mediocrity and reductive relativism that’s threatening to pervert centuries of Western thought and culture?

"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable."  -- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

The seeds of what’s become the global post modernist juggernaut were sewn in an unusual way for a cultural movement. It is rooted in a rejection of truth and an antipathy towards individual genius. It's has evolved into much more than just an academic school of Western thought. Today it has conflated itself through media (social media included) with a perverted democratisation of excellence that’s taken hold of vast swathes of “respectable” society and culture. In recent years the degraded redefinition of excellence has spread like a disease to erode truth and fact, disdaining expertise by somehow reducing it to an abusive power dynamic. This is a disastrous choice for us to be making as a society and if the trend isn’t reversed, we’re going to bankrupt Western thought and culture without hope of reprieve. This bankruptcy ends only one way: in our inevitable obsolescence, as the torch passes East and the West cannibalises itself on a banal descent into permanent irrelevance.

From its innocuous roots in late 1940s post-modernism has spread like a steady but relentless virus. It has become a formalised absolution from personal challenge, mobilising a kind of anti-ambition that’s kept virulent by successive generations of mediocre academics motivated by a seemingly bottomless well of intellectual vanity and tenured self-interest.

"Great spirits have always encountered the most violent opposition from mediocre minds."  -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

A hundred individuals aspiring to creative genius will mostly fall short of the standard and most will have the intelligence to see the shortcomings are their own, be it cowardice or fear or insurmountable absence of virtuousity. How can intelligent academcs used to success reconcile falling short of genius they themselves worship more than any other human characteristic? Post-modernism has become the answer. It is the means to an end and it has served successive generations of post-war career academics - and their students. Just as the Nazis had bastardised Nietzsche to justify Aryan eugenics, the early post-modernists corrupted Heidegger’s rollback of temporal ontology (as the defining way to think about the world) to legitimise a rejection of the significance of all individual human beings in the creative process. The poison had entered the veins of post-war culture.

POST-MODERNISM AS A SICKNESS

In the years after the second world war, across societies in great flux with a demobilised but changed citizen spirit, post modernism was not at first a pervasive dogma. It was a convergence of genuinely blue sky sociology studying conditions in the immediate aftermath of war with philosophy chasing meaning in a mechanised relativistic universe. Philosophy and sociology might have kept themselves uncorrupted were it not for the arts - far more numerous and influential in an everyday sense - having been caught between a Joycean rock and a Woolfish hard place. Vladimir Nabokov, most famous emigre after Einstein, warned us what was going to happen in his greatest work, Pale Fire.

"Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye."  -- Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

Career academics, their fragile conceits needing a system of protection against the genius of modernism, were driven to post-modernist ideas which they quickly and self-servingly appropriated. Beat poetry was a first response to these trends, born in Columbia University but dispossessed almost immediately as the colleges closed ranks rapidly. Some version of this dichotomy played out in a hundred academies: tenured professors in the halls, modernist genius in portraits on the walls, the vitality and individuality worthy of their natural successors shut out, excluded, forced outside the institutions.

The battle lines were rapidly arranged. Post-modernism was the armor chosen by the academy.

It didn't take long for it to spread. The benefits to conceited mediocrity and fearful conservatives and entrenched comfortable nepotism and lazy hubristic intellectuals was soon obvious. Post-modernism calcified into a cross-faculty movement that's been consolidating power ever since. Generations later it dominates in universities, converges with democratised consumerism and infiltrates all facets of 21st century society. POST-MODERNISM AS NEOLIBERAL FREEMASONRY

Post-modernism, having taken over the arts faculties, cross-pollenated into the outside world to colonise much of the mainstream media. Its spread and tenacity is testimony to its lasting appeal and the temptation to succumb to those worst instincts will follow a person's whole career, readily at hand should an academic or artist or media hold-out go through moments of doubt or crises of confidence or face a choice between principled independent hardship and acceptance plenty and security in joining the club. Neoliberalism is the post-modernist economics heart of this choice and this is as good a definiton as any for the pressures exerted on non-members. It needs no guns and cudgels to achieve its ends.

But why is this particular club so bad? Isn’t neoliberalism better than totalitarian communism? Couldn’t post-modernist principles be liberating for young minds stifled by the straightjacket canon of past generations? This could have been argued until the 1980s though even then the post-modernist exponents were already the children of diminished progenitors. The nature of the temptation post-modernism offers is too strong for most to resist. The early post-moderns began as pale fire apologists cowed by the challenge of modernist genius.

The post-war academics were indeed a mixed bunch, elder statesmen increasingly marginalised by: well-organised successors greedy for authority but unable to use sheer talent to justify their positions, professional iconoclasts in pursuit of misguided but sincere notions of democratising the academy, hostile to received wisdom and suspicious of outlier excellence, career academics increasingly threatened by the ongoing intellectual diaspora from broken Europe closing ranks to formalise systems that levelled the playing field, etc. With a few exceptions, it was left to America to carry the torch of academic continuity for at least a generation 1950s until as late as the 1970s. Europe and now East Asia are no longer behind North America but the parochial professionalism of the baby boomer period has injected itself deeply on the institutions, post-modernism the mechanism of delivery, neoliberalism lubricating the ambitions of its moving parts.

Post-modernism is particularly pernicious, once sufficiently widespread, because it gives faithful advocates a multipurpose toolkit designed perfectly for its continued spread and consolidation. The toolkit is subtle and subject specific, cynical and utilitarian, honed - ironically - by thousands of extremely clever engineers of corporate academia. It covers jargon and linguistics, provides litmus tests to gauge friends and enemies, dividing and conquer transformation of safe zones promising academic enquiry and widespread publicity so long as there’s no gainsay of post-modernism's unwritten rules. Like in a masonic lodge, would-be exponents of their contemporary post-modernist doctrines (and goals) receive informal schooling in identifying one another.

Half a century later the network is well established throughout the world, organised like Islam and its cooperative imam-led cells, it has the academy locked in a stranglehold. Outsiders, outliers and would-be rebels can be pinpointed and delegitimised with remarkable precision, without compromising any individual mason (or, in most cases, committing any single institution). There’s no need to instruct how to exculpate rebels at the time of rebellion. Everyone in the lodge has the toolkit and already knows how to use it against objectionable targets.

TRUTH IS LIES - LOVE IS HATE - PEACE IS WAR - PLENTY IS STARVATION

What might've started as a complex of motivations driving numerous schools of thought soon became comfortable and entrenched, conformism aligning with conservativism to appropriate tradition, especially in the face of counter culture having mobilised opposing forces that might’ve risen to the challenge of modernist luminaries with genius of its own e.g. Jack Kerouac and the beats, Tennessee Williams and the Southern renaissance, James Baldwin and the civil rights movement. These individuals were pushed out onto the front line dismissing academia as unwelcoming or careers in journalism as unworthy. The post-modernist arsenal had its first wave of targets. An insidious schism between the academy and the individual had been transposed onto a global narrative of culture versus counter culture that’s been polarising ever since.

"The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly"  -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The battle for the hearts and minds of the many academic institutions and plethora of media outlets, print, radio, television, film was irreparably divisive by the end of the 1960s. Vietnam, hippy counter culture anti-nationalism and the Situationists student revolts against corporate consumerism brought the power of the state into direct conflict with the individual. The timing was fortuitous and the ideological conflict already well developed within the universities made post modernists natural bedfellows with those pushing the agenda of state authority. Both saw their chance: to marginalise dissenters, including untrustworthy writers and auteurs and non-conformists professors. And, worst of all, anyone cheating the median by presuming to exhibit genius out of context becomes a threat to the mainstream social order, subject to a takedown by every means available in the formidable post-modernist playbook.

DEATH OF THE AUTHOR GONE MAINSTREAM

The breakthrough of post-modernism into mainstream culture can be marked into two distinct phases: the silent expansionist war and the loud entrenched victory.

Roland Barthes, French philosopher and literary critic, provided the seminal concept that allowed post-modernism's craven iconoclasm to market itself into mainstream culture. His 1962 work Le Mort d'Auteur "Death of the Author" gave credibility to the academy's anti-individual disdain of virtuosity in art, claiming the hard won life works of artist and scientist alike without having to acknowledge the standards as an implicit challenge. Celebrity was permissible, even desirable, but would be no democracy of equal participants trying to establish an influential off-narrative platform if it boiled down to a meritocracy 'won' by genius and hard work. Personal nuance was to be aggregated into group identity, rules by the academy, propaganda by Barthes and other misrepresented thinkers.

All this contributes to make post-modernism a toolkit for appropriaton, aggregation, subjugation of the individual to the aim of the groups. Recently #metoo is the latest diseased manifestation, born of feminism and the wholly authentic attacking on misogyny as endemic patriarchy, turned into a way to bring down experts and excellence unwilling to confirm to the post-modern dictates of entrenched groupthink - in this case selected by gender.

"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."  -- Roland Barthes Mythologies (1957)

The details of post-modernism evolution from movement to all-encompassing modus operandi needn't be repeated here. There are islands of resistance dotted around the academy and schools with sincere useful ideas not seeking to feed the growing monolith like structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction. These more authentic strains in philosophy and literary theory went through their own smaller conflicts, the leading lights like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Noam Chomsky marginalized in plain site, separated from the mainstream of the academy in special departments - a standard measure in the post-modernist manual when dealing with intransigent voices grown too noisy to gag or too marketable to deplatform into insignificance.

The most expedient aspects of post-structuralism and, increasingly, any new idea cropping up in academic circles, came to be identified fast then, notwithstanding the stubborn individuals whose future had to be isolation or exculpation, brought into the post-modernist mainstream. Post-structuralism was cannibalised into one of the most insidious movements of the latter culture war years: identity politics.

Feminism, civil rights, the fight against homophobia, legitimate movements all but in the hands of post-modern spin doctors were twisted to serve different goals and increase the firepower of the academy, the ambitious arbiters of culture. This has been one of the most criminal abuses of the post-modernist cabal.

"...for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word."  -- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

The appropriation of feminism, sexuality and race should be a practical warning of the ultimate bankruptcy of post-modern ideology. Great women or great gay artists or non-white virtuosos aren't freed from the shackles of traditional homophobic white male-privilege, to aspire to whatever greatness might be attained by their individual unfettered potential. Instead this potential is cut away just as it is with any other presumption of genius. The method is different but the post-modern iconoclast has a diverse toolkit. Women are demeaned into ciphers, gays into icons all face no substance, black writers forced to be poster boys and poster girls ringfenced into representing only a narrow group identity that's as racially segregated as any pre-war ghetto. At best the new oppression is coercive rather than violent but great art is often inspired by oppression. It's certainly always born from distinction by individual outliers and to be deprived of this is to make mediocre currency of great potential. It's ironic that the casualties of this particular battle are the very people the identity political advocates pay lip service to free and defend.

WHERE DOES “DEATH OF THE AUTEUR” END?

From innocent beginnings in the late 1940s, the movement known as post-modernism has evolved into a freemasonry of entrenched anti-intellectual mob legitimacy. It is positioned in the mainstream, confident and on the attack. It has appropriated a dozen counter-cultures, rebranding and often inverting their original good, turning them into cultural sticks to beat society into submission: feminism into gender politics, anti-misogyny into #metoo, anti-homophobia into queer theory, the civil rights movement into affirmitive action, free speech constrained by political correctness. Post-modernism has become ubiquitous, unarguably legitimate stamped with academy credibilty, spread from the institutions through society by brigades well-taught graduates. These days there’s only one line of defence against the self-serving end-game post-modernism continues to drive towards: the independent individual.

Disorganised, unusual, independent, mostly atomised and often contrarian, the individual presents a disunited self-centred front - easy target for patient groupthinkers - but it’s the only other game in town. Complete victory for the post-modernist cabal will mean a society without genius, truth subjugated to expediency, a safe zone so widespread no-one notices it looks the same as obsolescence.

"The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning."  -- Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

The first post-modernist generation passed the latest literary, linguistic and philosophical theory - especially schools of thought coming out of France and Germany - through the prism of democratised merit and everyman relativism to construct an extremely effective popular legitimacy serving the conceits of the tenured academy. The career academic had an arsenal fit for the destruction of reputations and the exculpation of non-conforming genius. The success of this “death of the author” spin, cloaked in the complex language of post-structuralism and other extant obfuscating theory gave the post-modernists a commanding position by the end of the 1960s. This hegemony expressed itself into mainstream culture through successive waves of graduates.

The post-modernist academy bound itself hand in glove with state authority, underpinned by an intellectual neoliberalism sold to the public as responding to the vocational demands of the free market. Anything of substance seeking to thwart the academy or the increasingly polarising state narrative was tarred with the ‘counter culture’ brush, ornery youth the first victims (e.g. the beat generation) but soon anything off-narrative was subjected to the same process of marginalisation (in the case of individuals) and appropriation (in the case of movements).

What little resistance remained in the arts faculties was picked off over the post-Vietnam decades, neoliberalism and consumer capitalism natural bedfellows with post-modernism in a way that solidified in the 80s, integrated branding in the 90s and had become received wisdom - unquestioned, presumed part of the natural order - by the millennium. Small wonder this entrenched cultural regulation adapted quickly to take hold of the internet and, in particular, ringfence social media, turning the latter into a vehicle for population control and echo chamber isolation of contrarian thinkers.

There was no way the post-modernist culture would allow itself to be challenged by changes to the dynamics of society. Vigilant, pro-active and anti-individual to the marrow, the mainstream must remain committed to post-modernisms proven methodology. No genius could be allowed to turn a platform into a pedestal. No expert could be given credible authority over truth, however many facts might be marshalled in support.

"The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself."  -- Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)

There’s something incredibly human about the early motivations of the academics, humiliated by the challenge of modernist achievements, occupying positions of authority but incapable (or unwilling) to go to the same lengths to justify their cultural power. It was wrong but it wasn’t an incomprehensible show of weakness. Perhaps if it had been able to admit a little nuance - like humility - the future would have been different. It wasn’t, however. Committed to a reductive perversion of intellectual relativism, quick to define the opposition in counter cultural terms, increasingly partnered with state expediency, things only got worse and more widespread and more difficult to dislodge in the decades to come.

"I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect."  -- Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

The rotten core of the post-modern movement remains throughout, though, and as it’s forced to greater lengths to prosecute an absolute authority, so much the reality and the impact on culture grow more extreme. Today it weaponises such awful characteristics as toxic envy and endemic narcissism. Mediocrity has become synonymous with common sense, conformity means to follow dogma and deny individual free thought. Power dynamics are abused daily, inverting expertise to a sin, traditions of excellence as oppressive patriarchy and individuality subsumed - whether you like it or not - into identity politics where transgression brings the most dire of consequences.

The post-modernist end-game is, by default, a mix of populism and passive aggression. There can be leaders, in the post-modern paradigm state, but these must be celebrities or accidents of ethnicity. Meritocracy becomes lottery - and lottery is an easier sell to a public convinced of its own self-worth but conditioned never to be examined, except for compelled social function. Death of the author and exclusion of individual genius makes life into a reality show - authenticity at arms length - an easy fit with slogans of democracy and universal median values. Equality itself is a twisted principle: not so much equality of outcome as equality of process. The whole system is delivered through the worst of human traits: vanity, egoism, outrage and opinion over complex nuance. It’s a recipe for mediocrity, at best, a disconnection with centuries of intellectual and cultural tradition that may not be restored. In a multifarious world, if we accept the broad sweep of history as led by the enlightenment West and the utilitarian East, it’s the former at risk of becoming obsolete.

We’re quick to spot the nightmare dystopian East when we hear about China and its surveillance social media scorecards for a billion citizens but the West is heading for worse. Mediocrity is a creeping death and will increasingly fall behind as the world moves forward. The Western traditions that have nurtured individual freedom and - quite rightly - arranged a natural order of achievement around encouraging and nurturing genius and original thought: all of this is at risk if the post-modernist social order achieves complete victory. Soon enough the voices of protest and their cries of “Shakespeare” “Newton” “Einstein” “Tesla” “Feinstein” “Goethe” “Nietschze” “Kerouac” “Dante” “Michelangelo” “Freud” “Jung” “Chomsky” “Orwell” will die away. What remains will be the echoing hubbub of an outraged mob that amounts to nothing more than an irrelevant cultural silence.

"There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah"  -- Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

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It’s widely believed that the beginning of the Hippocratic Oath—history’s most famous medical document—states “First, do no harm.”

It actually doesn’t. Nevertheless, this sentiment is the driving principle behind philosophy professor David Benatar’s argument that “people should never, under any circumstance, procreate.”

Benatar—the head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa—first laid out his case for “anti-natalism” in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been, and provides a reiteration of it in a recently published essay on Aeon titled “Kids? Just say no.”

There’s a widespread assumption among “breeders” that those couples who elect not to have children today usually do so out of selfishness. After all, toddlers and trendy happy hours down the street from loft apartments tend not to mix well. But interestingly, Benatar’s anti-natalism presents opting out of procreation as the height of magnanimity.

Benatar’s case for anti-natalism boils down to two categories of arguments: “philanthropic” and “misanthropic”.

The philanthropic argument for anti-natalism is that procreation is wrong because of the harm that will be experienced by one’s children. When people procreate, they’re basically sentencing their spawn to an existence in which they will have to endure pain, illness, anxiety, desires not realized, and in one hundred percent of cases, death.

The most common objection to this point is that life is also filled with much good, which makes the pain and suffering worth enduring. Benatar’s rejoinder to this point is that the bad clearly outweighs the good; that “life is simply much worse than most people think,” and always falls short of the ideal.

The misanthropic argument is that it’s wrong to procreate because of the harm that your children will cause. “Homo sapiens is the most destructive species, and vast amounts of this destruction are wreaked on other humans,” writes Benatar.

This destruction includes not only the physical harm people cause to their fellow man, but the psychological harm, as well. And, of course, there’s also the harm that human beings do to animals and the environment.

Because of the harm that human beings both experience and cause, Benatar echoes the chorus from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus: “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best.”

As you might suspect, there are some weak spots (or, at least, some points needing further clarification) in Benatar’s anti-natalist argument.

For one, Benatar acknowledges that people usually dismiss anti-natalism because they reject the idea of they themselves no longer existing (presumably, Benatar would include himself in this category, as he is still alive), rather than focusing on the pertinent point of never having existed. Yet, he chalks up this fact to a mere biological “life drive”, failing to consider that people’s belief in the overall good of life might be the result of a rational reflection based on experience, and thus, a justification for procreation. It’s a reductionistic leap that is unjustified.

Secondly, Benatar’s argument seems to rely upon an identification of “good” with “pleasure,” as when he tries to prove that the bad in one’s life outweighs the good through a consideration of pain:

“The worst pains, for instance, are worse than the best pleasures are good. If you doubt this, ask yourself—honestly—whether you would accept a minute of the worst tortures in exchange for a minute or two of the greatest delights.”

Yes, it’s true, most people wouldn’t undergo horrific torture or all the turmoil in life for a fleeting pleasure… but they might, and many do, for an enduring good such as love.

Benatar also clarifies that he isn’t advocating murder or the mass genocide of the entire human race. From an intellectual standpoint, I don’t know why. His argument relies on a model of utilitarianism, which holds that those actions are right that maximize the good for the greatest number. If, as Benatar holds, life’s harms outweigh its goods, why wouldn’t ending people’s lives now—so that they avoid all future harms—be a merciful and praiseworthy action?

And finally, as with all utilitarian arguments, there’s the difficulty of knowing whether one’s attempt to maximize the good will actually maximize the good. The movies It’s a Wonderful Life and Idiocracy offer fictional examples of the additional and unpredictable harms that can be inflicted on others as a result of someone’s non-existence. And then there are the predictable harms that come from not having children. Many European and Asian countries are facing a “perfect demographic storm” as a result of decades of low fertility, which has resulted in a rapidly aging population with not enough working-age people to support them.

That said, I also find Benatar’s anti-natalism strangely refreshing—not because I agree with it, but because it represents an attempt to take suffering seriously. Benatar’s realism about the human condition would find more sympathy among men of the past than the sanguine, soma-induced optimism that’s become so familiar in the first world today.

It also constitutes a shared first principle with the major world religions. One of Buddhism’s three marks of existence is dukkha, the acknowledgement that human life itself is suffering. The Bible, also, is replete with recognitions of the tragedy of human existence. As the Psalmist laments, “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow.”

Indeed, for Christians, being able to see the Gospel as “good news” is predicated upon their ability to recognize, to feel, the tragedy of human life. To be able to rejoice in the doctrine that “Christ has conquered death,” one must first have a real sense that death is a pretty awful thing.

But Christianity, like most of the other world religions, has a belief in the afterlife. Yes, they concede, human beings have to endure harm in this life, but it gives way to an eternity without harm.

But if there is no afterlife, is Benatar right? Would it be better to not bring children into the world? Would it be better to have never existed than to be subjected to the harms that inevitably accompany human existence?

This post Philosopher: ‘Having Children is Immoral’ was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Daniel Lattier.

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The post Philosopher: ‘Having Children is Immoral’ appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

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The Walking Dead guide to surviving as a new business

Image: Gene Page/AMC

[Editor’s note: Spoilers for The Walking dead throughout.]

Its bleak and we both know it the kind of soul-crushing downer that goes way beyond horror and into something more existential and emotionally haunting.

The twists are exciting, sure, but its not so much the unexpected that scares us; its the stuff we saw coming or (in retrospect) the stuff we should have seen coming. Theres happiness from time to time bright triumphs of human spirit and social ingenuity but if were honest, those moments, just like everything else, are short lived.

According to the Startup Genome Report, the survival rate for startups is a mere 10%. Put more starkly: 90% of all startups die within their first three years. (Oh, did you think we were talking about something else?)

As Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and Veniam told Foundr Magazine: Startups are really hard. Every successful one had terrible hurdles and setbacks that they had to overcome. These challenges are the norm and not unique to you and your startup.

Its bloody, sweaty, tear-filled work but once youre hooked, good luck turning away.

The question is: What do startups have to do with a pop-culture phenomenon like The Walking Dead?

Turns out, everything.

In fact, there are at least four lessons everybodys favorite post-apocalyptic horror-scape can teach you about surviving as a startup. Here they are in all their unsettling glory.

Never fall into a coma (or get caught sleepin)

Image: AMC

Rick Grimes nightmare like most zombieland protagonists begins with a wake up. Hes alone, disoriented, and (as usual) oily. The world has changed, and not for the good.

The lesson here is obvious, but many startup founders still ignore it. Whether your niche is B2C, B2B, SaaS, or old-fashioned ecommerce doesnt really matter the world changes fast. Everyday a new technological evolution emerges: Drones, self-driving cars, holograms, dynamic online personalization, VR, AR, AI, and a host of other acronyms. And that doesnt even factor in trends in the wider culture.

Daniel Marlin from Entrepreneur and the Huffington Post puts it like this: The same rings true for the changing landscape of start-ups. Consumers evolve, corporate hierarchies adjust and sometimes cease to exist altogether in favour of a more dynamic structure.

The best way to stay awake is to combine two approaches. First, take advantage of social-listening and online alert tools to systematize paying attention, both to your industry and pop-culture trends. Barring this automated approach, new developments will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Second, regardless of your niche, service, or product, do whatever you can to move towards an agile workflow. First used in car manufacturing and then applied to technological development, agile prioritizes iterative testing, runs on tight feedback loops that include real users, and puts decision making in the hands of the people who are closest to the problem being solved.

In truth, these two steps are the only way to ensure you dont wake up to a future thats passed you by or one thats stalking your death.

Never hesitate to murder your darlings (even if its your mom)

Image: AMC

In a show full of heart-wrenching scenes, few stand out like the death of Lori Grimes. Matricide is a bold move for any plot, but immediately after giving birth well, brutal doesnt really do it justice.

And yet, however brutal it may have been, one of the keys to surviving The Walking Dead is to do whatevers necessary, when its necessary, sometimes to even those we hold most dear.

The same is true for startups.

Part of what fuels startups is the belief in an idea. Such belief is crucial when it comes to enduring the inevitable ups and downs that confront all founders. The trouble is that belief especially dogmatic, hard-headed, despite what everyone says I know its brilliant has a darkside you might not expect: Love.

When we come to love our ideas themselves, not the solutions they aim to offer, we become blind. We lost sight of what really matters: not products, not promotions, not methods outcomes. In his 1913-1914 Cambridge lectures, On the Art of Writing, Arthur Quiller-Couch was the first to coin the phrase murder your darlings, and Stephen King took it one step further, Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

As hard as it is to watch on the small screen, following that advice is even more difficult in the real world. Brittany Berger head of content and PR at Mention offers this advice as an antidote: You need to remember that you do not matter. Separating myself from my work has been key in helping me make decisions based on business instead of emotion.

Case in point, one of Brittanys darlings was Mentions weekly Twitter chat. As a social media startup, that makes perfect sense. The only problem was, it didnt deliver any bottomline results. Popularity can fuel our egos and certainly has a role to play in marketing and PR but if it doesnt deliver, its time to break out the machete.

37Signals founder Jason Fried nails this fundamental principle: Start getting into the habit of saying noeven to many of your best ideas. Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes.

In other words, be ruthless with the ideas you love. The more you love them, the more dangerous they can become.

Never make a bad situation worse (and it can always get worse)

Image: AMC

As disturbing as Carl Grimes’s matricide was, Season 7s premiere The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be took it to a whole new level. After the long-awaited arrival of Negan, Abrahams folksie, profanity-laced wisdom was the first to fall victim to Lucielle.

Bad situation? Yes. But does it gets worse? Indeed.

In a fit of justified outrage, everybodys favorite unfortunate son, Daryl Dixon, rises up. He cant help himself, and we get it. Unfortunately all the righteous indignation in the world wont help when youre outnumbered and outgunned. Driven back to the gravel, we wait for the hammer or, more accurately, the bat to drop.

However, in lieu of Daryl, Glenn is the second to go (complete with some serious eye-bulging and character-breaking guilt for Daryl).

The lesson? No matter how bad a situation is, our tempers, resentments, fears, and especially our mouths can always make it far worse. Whats more, the stress levels inherent to startups makes this an even more pressing concern.

Lively discussion is one thing. And fostering a culture of disagreement is essential. But those two ingredients only take shape in the shadow of another: Safety. Combining two unlikely sources the first cast of Saturday Night Live and Google Charles Duhigg calls attention to the crying need of safety in successful organizations: [M]ost important, teams need psychological safety. To create psychological safety team leaders needed to model the right behaviors.

These behaviors include deceptively subtle habits like not interrupting team members, ensuring everyone has equal time to participate, and especially calling out intergroup conflicts and resolving them through open discussion. Notice that each is about what leaders dont say, biting their tongues and pushing back against their own knee-jerk reactions.

Its obvious you dont want to be a Negan-style leader, but the Daryls inside all of us are far more likely to make things go from bad to worse within a startup.

Never go in alone (ever)

Image: AMC

While the previous lessons all come from some specific high points in The Walking Dead, we could easily locate this one in every episode ever. Dodging zombies might get you out a sticky situation now and then, but finding food, fire, shelter, weapons, medicine, and transportation is not a single player sport. And that doesnt even include the threat that comes from other people.

Simply put: If you go in alone youre not coming out.

As with zombies, so with startups. Launching a successful product or service is just the first fight. You also have to develop sales, marketing, and public relations as well as run bookkeeping, accounting and finance. Theres funding, operations, hiring and firing, building and then maintaining QA on a website, customer service, and most daunting scaling. The list goes on and on and on.

In the words of Leonard Kim, one of Inc. Magazines top digital and youth marketers: If you’re thinking of doing a startup yourself, then you have absolutely no clue what you’re in store for. I’ve spent most my adult life doing startups and and if I can admit I don’t know how to do so many of these things, then it’s okay for you to do the same.

Admitting our ignorance doesnt just apply to teams, it also applies to partners. After getting burnt early on in his career by a bad choice, Mashable contributor Josh Steimle took a hardline and decided to go it alone in his own agency. As he explains: I struggled for the next 10 years, never really getting anywhere. Finally, in 2013 I relented and brought in a partner. A year later revenue was three times larger than it had ever been before because I invested in the right person that excelled where I couldnt.

More than just surviving

Of course, at the end of the day, you want your startup to do more than just outlast the 90% who dont make it. You also want to thrive.

How? By paying close attention to what might at first appear to be an unlikely source: The Walking Dead. First, stay awake to trends and innovations. Second, say no even to your most-loved ideas. Third, cultivate safety instead of making bad situations worse. And fourth, surround yourself with people who can address your own weakness.

Theres no denying its bloody, sweaty, tear-filled work. Robin Chase was right: Challenges are the norm. But if Maggie Rhee can bring new life into an all but dead world so can you.

Aaron Orendorff is the founder of iconiContent and a regular contributor at Entrepreneur, Lifehacker, Fast Company, Business Insider and more. Connect with him about content marketing (and bunnies) on Facebook or Twitter.

BONUS: This plant-based gel stops bleeding in seconds.

Read more: http://on.mash.to/2ilCUUT

from The Walking Dead guide to surviving as a new business

[talabib]

How To Invest Your Money Wisely

When in your twenties, it’s easy to feel like you’re doing a good job with money and finances if you’re able to keep a roof over your head, feed yourself and pay your bills. But what if you want to do more than just survive?

You probably won’t be able to scrape together a living from juggling part-time gigs forever – nor will you want to. So what can you do to ensure that you can afford to buy a house, send your children to college and enjoy a comfortable retirement? Even if these concerns seem far away, it’d be wise to start saving and investing a little bit right now. Your future you will thank you.

Compound interest means it’s never too early to invest.

Financial markets can seem so complex and intimidating that one forever balks at the thought of making an investment. So let’s first look at some basic aspects that will make investing more approachable.

To navigate the markets, it’s important to learn to recognize patterns. Humans have an innate ability to pick up on patterns and time their actions accordingly. Long ago we recognized the regular change in seasons, which allowed us to successfully plant the right crops at the right times.

A financial market is similar: through observations, you can recognize patterns and find the right time to make an investment.

One basic pattern has to do with compound interest, the money that gets added to the initial sum of your savings and which, over time, continues to add value to an investment. Because of compound interest, you should start taking a portion of your paycheck and investing it as soon as you can; the more years that go by, the bigger the value will be.

For example, let’s say that every year since your nineteenth birthday you’ve taken a total of $3,600 from your earnings and invested it. According to the average return of the US stock market for the past century, that means your investment will grow by 10 percent each year. So, by your thirty-fifth birthday, you’ll be looking at an investment that’s worth $106,782.

Now, let’s say you decide to wait until you’re 27 to make this investment; by the time you’re 35, that amount will only add up to $53,775.

That’s almost exactly half of what you would have had by starting eight years earlier. Clearly, it’s worth getting started as soon as possible.

Focus on avoiding losses rather than earning big gains, and know that the market is unpredictable.

So it’s good to start early, but how do you recognize a good investment from a bad one? To help them in this task, expert investors have what they call the Core Four principles.

The first is to focus on how not to lose money, rather than on how to make it.

Obviously, no one wants to lose money. But if you’re going to invest, you’re going to have to risk a loss – and that means you have to understand how difficult it can be to earn back money that’s been lost on an investment.

Let’s say you invest $1,000 and lose 50 percent, leaving you with $500. You might think that turning around and making a 50-percent gain will get you back to where you started. But that 50 percent will actually only get you halfway there, since a 50-percent gain on your remaining $500 will earn you $250, giving you a total of $750.

To get back to where you started, you’ll have to earn 100 percent of your remaining investment. This is why you should prefer safer investment options that have a limited downside.

Another guideline for avoiding losses is remembering that no one can predict the financial markets. Even the most experienced and celebrated investors make mistakes.

Ray Dalio, the creator of the renowned investment firm Bridgewater Associates, is considered a superstar of the stock market. But, back in 1971, he learned that no one can know for certain what the future holds.

That year, President Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard, a move that resulted in the value of the dollar plummeting. Everyone, including Dalio, expected the stock market to take a tumble as well – but it didn’t. It soared. And from that moment on, Dalio knew that it was impossible to ever predict anything with absolute certainty.

This is why all the experts know that to avoid losses, they also need to make investments that are robust in the face of unexpected market events.

When investing, find a balance between low risk and high reward and use falling prices to your advantage.

In any movie about Wall Street, there’s usually a character who says something like, “If you want to make big money, you gotta take big risks.” Well, this is a big lie.

In order to focus on not losing money, it’s best to follow the second core principle and look for investments that are relatively low risk and offer relatively high rewards.

This relationship is known as an asymmetric risk/reward and it’s what a lot of good investors look for.

One such investor is the highly respected trader Paul Tudor Jones. To help make decisions, he uses a five-to-one rule. That is, he only invests if he can expect to earn at least five times his initial investment. So if he puts in $100, he’ll expect to earn $500.

By following this rule, Jones can fail 80 percent of the time and still come out even.

If he makes five investments of $1,000, he only needs one investment to meet his expectations and earn him that $5,000 to be back where he started. However, if he is right about three of his five-to-one investments, he’ll earn $15,000, and only lose $2,000.

As we can see, Jones finds success by following the first and second core principles. He’s taking into consideration the unpredictable market and earning rewards without taking major risks.

Another way of safely increasing your chances of rewards is to invest in undervalued assets, especially after the market has taken a downward turn and is reflecting people’s pessimistic attitude about the future.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the market was in bad shape, which is why it was the perfect time to invest in the many reliable assets that had dropped in value.

Take the Citigroup banking corporation. In March of 2009, their stock had fallen from $57 to 97 cents per share. Yet, within just five months, the price was back up to $5 – that’s a 500-percent increase!

A smart investor uses knowledge of taxes to make better decisions.

If you’re interested in making investments, it pays to be smart about your taxes, since they can eat up a huge portion of your earnings. That’s why the third principle of the Core Four is to know your taxes!

For example, the tax on short-term and long-term capital gains, which is, respectively, income earned from investments less than or more than a year old, varies from state to state. So it’s worth knowing what your state charges and whether you might save money by cashing out an investment before one year has elapsed.

It’s also good to know about mutual funds, a type of investment vehicle made up of stocks, bonds and other assets, combining investments from multiple investors.

If you’re thinking of investing in a mutual fund, you should know that, for tax purposes, all such investors are considered owners and are liable to be taxed on short-term gains. And because mutual funds trade their shares frequently, these gains will almost always be taxed at the higher short-term gains tax rate.

Being smart about taxes also means knowing the difference between net and gross sums.

If someone tells you that a certain investment has provided a high return, you can confidently ask whether that amount is the net sum, which is the total after taxes and fees, or the gross sum – the amount before those deductions have been made. Obviously, the former is a better indicator of the true quality of the investment.

It’s also smart to search for investment options that will result in the least amount of investment fees and taxes. This may lead you to look at index funds over mutual funds.

Index funds don’t have managers who charge expensive investment fees. Instead, they’re composed of stocks from an index such as the S&P 500, which includes successful companies like Apple and Microsoft. These stocks are only traded to reflect changes in the composition of the S&P 500, meaning that the shares are held for longer, thereby enabling you to avoid the higher short-term tax rate on gains.

Clearly, having a good sense of what taxes and fees you face will help you make better investment decisions.

A diverse portfolio will help protect you against changing trends and market crashes.

Now we come to the fourth principle of the Core Four, which is perhaps the most familiar – diversify!

This is an important and well-known rule since diversifying your portfolio is a traditional and reliable way of protecting your investment. It’s the financial equivalent of not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Essentially, by having a diverse portfolio, you can ensure that you’ll still have healthy investments, even when trends change and those inevitable yet unpredictable shifts in the market occur.

So don’t put all your money in one asset class, such as real estate. If you do, you may find out just how quickly it can all vanish when the market comes crashing down, as it did in 2008.

There are four ways you can diversify: across different asset classes; within asset classes; across different markets, countries and currencies; and across time.

Different asset classes include stocks, which are shares of a company; real estate; or bonds, which allow you to invest in an interest-bearing loan between two parties.

Adding more than one asset class to your portfolio is a great way to diversify, as is making multiple investments in the same asset class. So rather than investing only in Microsoft stock, you could also buy some shares of Apple and Hewlett-Packard as well, just in case Microsoft runs into a crisis.

Also, remember that the financial markets are global and you should feel free to look beyond your country's borders.

Finally, diversifying your portfolio across time means that you should always be adding capital to your portfolio, whether you do this monthly or yearly. The market is always fluctuating, and you can improve your chances of latching on to a new trend by adding new assets on a regular basis.

Following your instincts can lead to bad decisions, so stay disciplined and use a checklist.

One of the reasons we need rules and principles to help guide our financial decisions is because of the way our brains are wired.

The human brain hinders our ability to make rational investment decisions because we instinctively respond to losing money the same way we respond to life-threatening situations.

The way your ancient ancestors reacted to the sight of an approaching saber-toothed tiger is the same way your brain reacts to the stock market crashing and taking all of your money with it. Both of these events are processed as being dangerous threats to your livelihood, and the natural response is to immediately withdraw and escape.

When it comes to your finances, this is an unfortunate reaction since often the best response to plummeting stock prices is to invest more. Remember, when prices are low, it’s the perfect time to invest in an undervalued stock that is sure to rebound in no time at all.

This is why rules and checklists come in so handy. Before you make a mistake by being reactionary, you should refer to a list of criteria and thus identify the most rational decision.

It’s sort of like flying a plane. During takeoffs, landings and emergencies, pilots have long and detailed checklists to go through before making any important decision. And this is precisely what any great investor will do.

A good checklist is a way of protecting you from yourself; it turns your decision-making process into a strict and reliable discipline.

Remember the esteemed Paul Tudor Jones and his five-to-one rule? He would never make an investment or trade without first referring to his checklist, which includes questions such as, “Does the investment have a favorable risk-to-reward balance?” And, “Can I expect this investment to have a five-to-one return ratio, or only a four-to-one ratio?”

Okay, now that you know some of the basic questions to ask, and some of the basic potholes to look out for, it’s time to stop procrastinating, and start investing!

Financial success and security are within your reach – no matter what job you have or how small your paycheck is. With the right knowledge and an action plan in place, anyone can make good, lucrative investments. And with a little experience and smarts, you can prosper through even the most volatile and uncertain of times.

 Action Plan: Look out for investment fees.

 Investment fees can be treacherous. In fact, if you’re not careful, they can end up eating up two-thirds of your earnings. Take an average investment fund, for instance, which charges its clients a 2-percent yearly fee. Now, say that on average the fund delivers a 7-percent return on your investment over 50 years. This means that, after 50 years, every dollar will be worth nearly 30 dollars. With a yearly fee of 2 percent, however, your return is not 7 percent, but 5, and fifty years down the line, each dollar will only be worth just over 10 dollars, instead of 30. This illustrates how disproportionate the impact of investment fees can be! 

[talabib]

How To Invest Your Money Wisely

When in your twenties, it’s easy to feel like you’re doing a good job with money and finances if you’re able to keep a roof over your head, feed yourself and pay your bills. But what if you want to do more than just survive?

You probably won’t be able to scrape together a living from juggling part-time gigs forever – nor will you want to. So what can you do to ensure that you can afford to buy a house, send your children to college and enjoy a comfortable retirement? Even if these concerns seem far away, it’d be wise to start saving and investing a little bit right now. Your future you will thank you.

Compound interest means it’s never too early to invest.

Financial markets can seem so complex and intimidating that one forever balks at the thought of making an investment. So let’s first look at some basic aspects that will make investing more approachable.

To navigate the markets, it’s important to learn to recognize patterns. Humans have an innate ability to pick up on patterns and time their actions accordingly. Long ago we recognized the regular change in seasons, which allowed us to successfully plant the right crops at the right times.

A financial market is similar: through observations, you can recognize patterns and find the right time to make an investment.

One basic pattern has to do with compound interest, the money that gets added to the initial sum of your savings and which, over time, continues to add value to an investment. Because of compound interest, you should start taking a portion of your paycheck and investing it as soon as you can; the more years that go by, the bigger the value will be.

For example, let’s say that every year since your nineteenth birthday you’ve taken a total of $3,600 from your earnings and invested it. According to the average return of the US stock market for the past century, that means your investment will grow by 10 percent each year. So, by your thirty-fifth birthday, you’ll be looking at an investment that’s worth $106,782.

Now, let’s say you decide to wait until you’re 27 to make this investment; by the time you’re 35, that amount will only add up to $53,775.

That’s almost exactly half of what you would have had by starting eight years earlier. Clearly, it’s worth getting started as soon as possible.

Focus on avoiding losses rather than earning big gains, and know that the market is unpredictable.

So it’s good to start early, but how do you recognize a good investment from a bad one? To help them in this task, expert investors have what they call the Core Four principles.

The first is to focus on how not to lose money, rather than on how to make it.

Obviously, no one wants to lose money. But if you’re going to invest, you’re going to have to risk a loss – and that means you have to understand how difficult it can be to earn back money that’s been lost on an investment.

Let’s say you invest $1,000 and lose 50 percent, leaving you with $500. You might think that turning around and making a 50-percent gain will get you back to where you started. But that 50 percent will actually only get you halfway there, since a 50-percent gain on your remaining $500 will earn you $250, giving you a total of $750.

To get back to where you started, you’ll have to earn 100 percent of your remaining investment. This is why you should prefer safer investment options that have a limited downside.

Another guideline for avoiding losses is remembering that no one can predict the financial markets. Even the most experienced and celebrated investors make mistakes.

Ray Dalio, the creator of the renowned investment firm Bridgewater Associates, is considered a superstar of the stock market. But, back in 1971, he learned that no one can know for certain what the future holds.

That year, President Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard, a move that resulted in the value of the dollar plummeting. Everyone, including Dalio, expected the stock market to take a tumble as well – but it didn’t. It soared. And from that moment on, Dalio knew that it was impossible to ever predict anything with absolute certainty.

This is why all the experts know that to avoid losses, they also need to make investments that are robust in the face of unexpected market events.

When investing, find a balance between low risk and high reward and use falling prices to your advantage.

In any movie about Wall Street, there’s usually a character who says something like, “If you want to make big money, you gotta take big risks.” Well, this is a big lie.

In order to focus on not losing money, it’s best to follow the second core principle and look for investments that are relatively low risk and offer relatively high rewards.

This relationship is known as an asymmetric risk/reward and it’s what a lot of good investors look for.

One such investor is the highly respected trader Paul Tudor Jones. To help make decisions, he uses a five-to-one rule. That is, he only invests if he can expect to earn at least five times his initial investment. So if he puts in $100, he’ll expect to earn $500.

By following this rule, Jones can fail 80 percent of the time and still come out even.

If he makes five investments of $1,000, he only needs one investment to meet his expectations and earn him that $5,000 to be back where he started. However, if he is right about three of his five-to-one investments, he’ll earn $15,000, and only lose $2,000.

As we can see, Jones finds success by following the first and second core principles. He’s taking into consideration the unpredictable market and earning rewards without taking major risks.

Another way of safely increasing your chances of rewards is to invest in undervalued assets, especially after the market has taken a downward turn and is reflecting people’s pessimistic attitude about the future.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the market was in bad shape, which is why it was the perfect time to invest in the many reliable assets that had dropped in value.

Take the Citigroup banking corporation. In March of 2009, their stock had fallen from $57 to 97 cents per share. Yet, within just five months, the price was back up to $5 – that’s a 500-percent increase!

A smart investor uses knowledge of taxes to make better decisions.

If you’re interested in making investments, it pays to be smart about your taxes, since they can eat up a huge portion of your earnings. That’s why the third principle of the Core Four is to know your taxes!

For example, the tax on short-term and long-term capital gains, which is, respectively, income earned from investments less than or more than a year old, varies from state to state. So it’s worth knowing what your state charges and whether you might save money by cashing out an investment before one year has elapsed.

It’s also good to know about mutual funds, a type of investment vehicle made up of stocks, bonds and other assets, combining investments from multiple investors.

If you’re thinking of investing in a mutual fund, you should know that, for tax purposes, all such investors are considered owners and are liable to be taxed on short-term gains. And because mutual funds trade their shares frequently, these gains will almost always be taxed at the higher short-term gains tax rate.

Being smart about taxes also means knowing the difference between net and gross sums.

If someone tells you that a certain investment has provided a high return, you can confidently ask whether that amount is the net sum, which is the total after taxes and fees, or the gross sum – the amount before those deductions have been made. Obviously, the former is a better indicator of the true quality of the investment.

It’s also smart to search for investment options that will result in the least amount of investment fees and taxes. This may lead you to look at index funds over mutual funds.

Index funds don’t have managers who charge expensive investment fees. Instead, they’re composed of stocks from an index such as the S&P 500, which includes successful companies like Apple and Microsoft. These stocks are only traded to reflect changes in the composition of the S&P 500, meaning that the shares are held for longer, thereby enabling you to avoid the higher short-term tax rate on gains.

Clearly, having a good sense of what taxes and fees you face will help you make better investment decisions.

A diverse portfolio will help protect you against changing trends and market crashes.

Now we come to the fourth principle of the Core Four, which is perhaps the most familiar – diversify!

This is an important and well-known rule since diversifying your portfolio is a traditional and reliable way of protecting your investment. It’s the financial equivalent of not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Essentially, by having a diverse portfolio, you can ensure that you’ll still have healthy investments, even when trends change and those inevitable yet unpredictable shifts in the market occur.

So don’t put all your money in one asset class, such as real estate. If you do, you may find out just how quickly it can all vanish when the market comes crashing down, as it did in 2008.

There are four ways you can diversify: across different asset classes; within asset classes; across different markets, countries and currencies; and across time.

Different asset classes include stocks, which are shares of a company; real estate; or bonds, which allow you to invest in an interest-bearing loan between two parties.

Adding more than one asset class to your portfolio is a great way to diversify, as is making multiple investments in the same asset class. So rather than investing only in Microsoft stock, you could also buy some shares of Apple and Hewlett-Packard as well, just in case Microsoft runs into a crisis.

Also, remember that the financial markets are global and you should feel free to look beyond your country's borders.

Finally, diversifying your portfolio across time means that you should always be adding capital to your portfolio, whether you do this monthly or yearly. The market is always fluctuating, and you can improve your chances of latching on to a new trend by adding new assets on a regular basis.

Following your instincts can lead to bad decisions, so stay disciplined and use a checklist.

One of the reasons we need rules and principles to help guide our financial decisions is because of the way our brains are wired.

The human brain hinders our ability to make rational investment decisions because we instinctively respond to losing money the same way we respond to life-threatening situations.

The way your ancient ancestors reacted to the sight of an approaching saber-toothed tiger is the same way your brain reacts to the stock market crashing and taking all of your money with it. Both of these events are processed as being dangerous threats to your livelihood, and the natural response is to immediately withdraw and escape.

When it comes to your finances, this is an unfortunate reaction since often the best response to plummeting stock prices is to invest more. Remember, when prices are low, it’s the perfect time to invest in an undervalued stock that is sure to rebound in no time at all.

This is why rules and checklists come in so handy. Before you make a mistake by being reactionary, you should refer to a list of criteria and thus identify the most rational decision.

It’s sort of like flying a plane. During takeoffs, landings and emergencies, pilots have long and detailed checklists to go through before making any important decision. And this is precisely what any great investor will do.

A good checklist is a way of protecting you from yourself; it turns your decision-making process into a strict and reliable discipline.

Remember the esteemed Paul Tudor Jones and his five-to-one rule? He would never make an investment or trade without first referring to his checklist, which includes questions such as, “Does the investment have a favorable risk-to-reward balance?” And, “Can I expect this investment to have a five-to-one return ratio, or only a four-to-one ratio?”

Okay, now that you know some of the basic questions to ask, and some of the basic potholes to look out for, it’s time to stop procrastinating, and start investing!

Financial success and security are within your reach – no matter what job you have or how small your paycheck is. With the right knowledge and an action plan in place, anyone can make good, lucrative investments. And with a little experience and smarts, you can prosper through even the most volatile and uncertain of times.

 Action Plan: Look out for investment fees.

 Investment fees can be treacherous. In fact, if you’re not careful, they can end up eating up two-thirds of your earnings. Take an average investment fund, for instance, which charges its clients a 2-percent yearly fee. Now, say that on average the fund delivers a 7-percent return on your investment over 50 years. This means that, after 50 years, every dollar will be worth nearly 30 dollars. With a yearly fee of 2 percent, however, your return is not 7 percent, but 5, and fifty years down the line, each dollar will only be worth just over 10 dollars, instead of 30. This illustrates how disproportionate the impact of investment fees can be!