Exposing Charlatans Appropriately - Part One
What is your acquaintance with quacks?
What do you know about swindlers, shysters, clowns, conjurers, impostors, poseurs and tricksters?
What is your acquaintance with irony?
You may be aware that electoral politics is often little more than a confidence trick.
How do you prefer to inform yourself about trickery?
How do you prefer to inform yourself about quackery and other scams?
Warning the public about fraudulent practices is an important responsibility. Yet many frauds are ignored by the persons responsible for preventing and addressing them.
What do you know about medical ethics?
What do you know about legal ethics?
What do you know about sexual ethics?
What do you know about journalism ethics?
Exposing charlatans is a duty expressed through public interest journalism whenever public policy fails to do so.
Perhaps you prefer to practice your public interest duties through the artistic journalism of satire.
Perhaps you prefer to practice your public interest duties through quality political satire as philanthropy.
What do you know about Giovanni Pontano, Cerreto di Spoleto and Accademia Pontaniana?
Charlatans often attempt to close down scholarly academies. They sometimes succeed. They also occasionally succeed in killing off the scholars though they have often simply resorted to burning books and libraries.
Wonderful witches are well-informed servants of democracy. They are certainly not charlatans.
Every wonderful witch is genuinely magnanimous.
Your access to this grimoire is an expression of enlightened generosity. Indeed, your access to any sort of resource in this digital vicinity is an example of generosity towards you.
Perhaps you imagine this grimoire to be a large, old, faded, much used and musty rare book.
Perhaps you usually associate grimoires with charlatans rather than with the exposure of fraudulent practices.
Perhaps you associate unscrupulous practices with witches and/or Niccolò Machiavelli.
How do you currently assess mindsets, delusions, worldviews, ideologies, faiths, paradigms, schools of thought and political and military strategies for gaining and/or maintaining power?
Exposing charlatans is not a game. It is a highly serious, and possibly dangerous, practice. Yet, if conducted effectively, it can reflect political pleasantness very well indeed.
Charlatans are known for their treachery, particularly when under stress.
What do you know about the history of treason?
What is your acquaintance with Realpolitik?
What is your acquaintance with theories regarding international relations?
What is your acquaintance with the artistic career of Santi di Tito?
Evidence of realism in international relations exposes evidence of political charlatanism. It reveals an absence of genuine goodwill and the impossibility of experiencing trustworthiness.
Evidence of philosophical realism is mainly associated with acknowledging reality as it exists beyond the imagination of the observer, even though that reality is unlikely to be understood particularly well by the observer.
Evidence of realism in the arts reflects attempts to convey real situations as they have been observed by artists. Yet all artistic attempts to depict reality convey illusions of reality. They do not convey reality itself, except the artistic reality of the materials and techniques used.
What do you know about truth and falsehoods in relation to state-building practices?
What is your acquaintance with local appropriateness, in the public interest?
What do you know about the right of self-defence and the right to rebel?
Many significant events in history have been associated with claims regarding tyranny, betrayal, treachery, sedition and treason.
What is your acquaintance with the concept of popular sovereignty?
What is your acquaintance with The Prince and Machiavellianism?
Charlatans tend to be highly deceptive and manipulative, hence their propensity towards Machiavellian practices.
What is your acquaintance with Machiavelli's concept of virtù?
What do you know about acquiring and maintaining political power?
How do you assess, and attempt to contribute towards, political stability?
Charlatans claim to contribute to peace in the world when, in fact, they contribute to the perpetuation of failed states and political risks.
What do you know about the politics of heresy?
What do you know about the politics of hypocrisy?
What is your acquaintance with the history of resistance to various claimed authorities?
There have been many rebellions in various centuries.
What do you know about the mandrake plant?
What do you know about The Mandrake play by Machiavelli?
What is your acquaintance with the Tacuinum Sanitatis, otherwise known as Taqwīm as‑Siḥḥa?
What do you know about the career of Piero Soderini?
What do you know about the experience of exile?
What do you know about the concept of refuge?
Any person in a position of leadership for which they are incompetent is a charlatan, regardless of their hereditary claims.
What is your acquaintance with Piero the Unfortunate?
It is always unfortunate when a person is thrust into a leadership position when unsuited to the duties associated with it.
Leadership roles should always be granted on the basis of merit, not dynastic succession, nepotism, cronyism or any other corrupting influence.
Other witches do not know how to do so, whether in fact or fiction, and nor do most other persons for that matter, even when selecting individuals for jobs, marriages or other societal roles.
How do you assess merit in relation to leadership?
How do you know when people are unsuited to the roles they are meant to be filling?
And what do you do with that knowledge?
When is power behind the throne required, and how much knowledge about that power should the public be entitled to know?
What do you know about the causes of ruthless and merciless behaviours, whether blatant or more subtle?
How do you know when someone expresses a fake conscience for ulterior purposes?
How do you know when someone of relatively good taste in the arts is, in fact, a tyrant?
How do you know when someone is acting as the sycophant of a psychopath?
Sycophants are always charlatans.
How many artists, musicians and craft workers have, in sycophantic ways, accepted commissions from psychopaths?
What is your current social position and how did you acquire it?
What is your current social status and how did you acquire it?
What is your current location in various social hierarchies and why?
What is your current notability and how did you acquire it, and from whom?
What is your current notoriety and how did you acquire it, and from whom?
How, if at all, do you attempt to protect the public interest?
What do you know about the management of reputations?
How do you identify, examine and report upon evil practices, whether to the general public or to a particular individual or group?
Perhaps you regard the general public as evil or irrelevant or merely pawns in competitions and conflicts.
What is your acquaintance with the history of pawnbroking?
What is your acquaintance with money lending?
What do you know about Lombard banking and Lombard credit?
What do you know about the history of banking?
What is your acquaintance with debt slavery?
What is your acquaintance with serfdom?
What is your acquaintance with indentured servitude?
What is your acquaintance with extortion?
What is your acquaintance with ethical and unethical financial independence?
Wonderful witches are wonderful because they are not persuaded by charlatans or bullies or anyone else unworthy of respect. They can see the truth beyond propaganda. They cannot easily be coerced. They despise the unjust exploitation of labour. They despise the unjust exploitation of natural resources. They despise all aggression.
Please be aware that this is a grimoire, not a chronicle of history. It is associated entirely with enlightened magic, not unenlightened thinking. The spells it contains are mainly political.
What is your acquaintance with the political history of the world?
What is your acquaintance with the economic history of the world?
What is your acquaintance with military history?
What is your acquaintance with art history?
How do you usually attempt to interpret politics in terms of goodness and wickedness?
How do you usually attempt to interpret politics in terms of wisdom and silliness?
How do you usually attempt to interpret politics in terms of cliques, cabals, conspiracies, secrecy and delusions?
How do you usually attempt to interpret politics in terms of responsibility, including inter-generational responsibility?
What have you discovered about enlightened moderation, and how?
What have you discovered about political philanthropy, and how?
What have you discovered about invoking assistance, and how?
What have you discovered about necessary ethics, and how?
What have you discovered about the enlightened being of political kindness, and how?
What have you discovered about the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee?
How do you tell whether public figures are genuinely enlightened leaders or charlatans?
What do you know about usury and what are your views on the subject?
What do you know about ultra-low interest rates and what are your views on the subject?
What do you know about kingmakers?
What do you know about people who frequently mistake images for reality?
What do you know about people who frequently mistake popularity for empathy?
What do you know about opinion leaders?
What, if anything, does the word signoria mean to you?
What do the words civilian, civility and defence mean to you?
What does the word life mean to you?
What does authentic living mean to you?
What does ethical living mean to you?
Assessing honesty is an especially necessary skill.
Exposing charlatans is one of the best ways to prevent bullying.
What do you know about false prophets?
Have you ever voted as a shareholder?
Have you ever voted as a citizen?
Have you ever voted as a member of an organisation, a community or a board?
Have you ever been regarded as a real prophet?
Confused persons often mistake obsessiveness for well-informed admiration. They also mistake pride for relief. They mistake arrogance for dignity. They mistake fame for credibility. They mistake control of money for leadership.
Have you ever read a book about the qualities required of a political leader?
Ignorant persons tend to equate first impressions with the truth. That is why they are incapable of assessing reality, authenticity and ethics.
It is also why they habitually vote for charlatans, become the victims of scams and make dangerous interpersonal decisions. They lack essential knowledge and prefer to form beliefs and make decisions on the basis of emotion and opinion, not reality and truth.
Most thoughtless persons lack at least one of the essential features of true intelligence.
Are you aware of each of those parts in yourself?
Thoughtless persons tend to assume that intelligence should be highly rewarded, particularly financially.
The truth, of course, is that intelligence should be regarded as a reward in itself.
Do you usually regard intelligence as a talent?
Do you usually regard perceptiveness as a talent?
Wonderful witches are highly perceptive of social and political reality.
Such people often seek attention and/or money and/or fame rather than knowledge.
Anyone advising the ignorant to part with money unwisely should be regarded as a criminal.
What do you know about investing money wisely?
Politicians often gain political power by promising to solve particular
problems. They tend to present their problem-solving proposals as
policies, promises and prophecies.
Such politicians are therefore charlatans. They have a cosy relationship with each other at the expense of everyone else.
The criminals in charge of the world, and its money supply, steal more and more at the expense of the despairing. They must be stopped and you must do it.
But how will you be able to do so unless you are a suitably good person with a highly advanced education and considerable resources to assist you?Perhaps you are a criminal, or should be treated as one.
Confronting cruelty is rarely an experience of beauty. It can often be traumatic. It can often be tragic.
What is your acquaintance with depressive realism?
What is your acquaintance with the hedonic treadmill?
What is your acquaintance with twitter and suchlike locations?
What is your acquaintance with real progress?
Which of the illustrations here have long been familiar to you, and which have not?
What are the current circumstances, in various parts of the world, reminiscent of past situations?
What are the current circumstances, in various parts of the world, entirely unlike past situations?
Who has the knowledge with which to understand the past and present with the necessary accuracy and imagination?
Charlatans claim to have knowledge they do not really possess.
Charlatans also claim to have abilities they do not really possess.
They may also claim to have money they do not really possess.
What do you know about embezzlement?
Perhaps you are quite interested in group dynamics in relation to learning skills and/or developing and maintaining affinity groups.
People with shared interests and/or beliefs are often exploited through affinity marketing, and even affinity fraud. That is often how substance abuse develops, too.
What do you know about the CRAFT method for treating addictions?
What do you know about gang-related aggression and mobbing and other unenlightened group practices?
How do you assess whether information is accurate?
How well do you know yourself?
How do you examine political history from a global perspective?
With a threat of massive retaliation ever present, there is the possibility of mutually assured destruction at any moment.
There is much brinkmanship happening, as usual.
But what purpose does it serve to anyone, including the egotists, charlatans, bullies and egomaniacs involved?
What do you know about the utterance of falsehoods to disguise incompetence and mask cruelty?
What do you know about symbols of empire?
Have you made an adequate analysis of the fraudulent Donation of Constantine?
Have you made an adequate analysis of the medieval Investiture Controversy?
Have you made an adequate analysis of the Guelphs and Ghibellines?
Have you made an adequate analysis of the Crusades?
Have you made an adequate analysis of the Renaissance and Reformation?
Thriving communities depend not only upon unanimously sharing values of peace and justice but also on mutual intelligibility.
What do you know about the politics of intimate relationships?
If you are at least slightly aware of the economic aspects of various cultures, you will know that people use the limited resources of nature, and the distorted resources of their own memories, imaginations and social interactions, to produce cultural artifacts of various sorts, and services of various sorts.
They may do so in an attempt to meet various sorts of needs and/or to practice various forms of extravagance, possibly to meet the superficial expectations of state leaders and/or tourists.
What do you know about the history of diplomacy?
How do you assess perceptions of possible intentions?
Many people make the mistake of regarding perceived authenticity and perceived enthusiasm as equating with good faith.
How do you distinguish between real wealth and fake wealth?
How do you usually identify wisdom?
Children are not enlightened beings. They may or may not have the chance to become enlightened as they grow older, yet they sometimes express snippets of wisdom.
How do you usually think about wealth in relation to knowledge and freedom?
Perhaps you mainly associate wealth with private property rather than interpersonal propriety.
What is your acquaintance with principalities and other property portfolios?
There are usually varying interpretations of situations, depending on the emotional states, socioeconomic status, cultural backgrounds and social expectations of the interpreters.
How do you try to re-interpret a situation when everyone else appears to you to have been interpreting it inaccurately?
Wonderful witches interpret situations and documents with wonderful accuracy. That is why they are hated by charlatans.
What have you been wondering about books, including The Prince?
Who and/or what usually guides your investigations and investments, and why?
What do you know about brokers, agents and other intermediaries?
If you are truly wonderful and kind, you will know that well-informed investing is a form of well-informed kindness.
Excessive complexity is often the cause of corruption. Well-informed investments are incompatible with all forms of corruption.
All good investors ask many questions. They do so appropriately. They also answer questions appropriately.
Perhaps you are frightened by every question requesting an account of your reasoning.
Perhaps you are worried that you may be regarded as a charlatan.
What are you currently wondering about the way you are possibly perceived, and why?
Any deliberately acquired or traditionally acquired public profile, whether using a legal name, a nickname, or any other name, is an expression of attempted leadership, regardless of whether the associated influence is small or substantial, conscious or relatively unconscious, inappropriate or wonderful.
What do you know about security of title to land?
What do you know about security of entitlement to live in peace?All questioning involves a search for certainty, at least when the
process is honest and respectful and the intentions of the investigators
are likewise.
Lazy people may complain about an injustice yet they show an unwillingness to address its underlying causes.
Unwell
people, and otherwise vulnerable individuals, may frequently experience
injustices yet lack the power to address the associated problems effectively.
If you have been treated rudely or otherwise abusively when attempting to address injustices, and/or when attempting to prevent injustices, how have you felt as a consequence?
Have you ever felt yourself to be on the margins of society?
If not, have you ever tried to understand what it is like for people who do feel that way?
A draft of the text was completed in 1513.
Machiavelli was born in 1469. What do you know about the 1460s?
Who values the achievement of glory, and why?
What has the patience to achieve anything worthwhile in an appropriate time frame?
How do you usually reflect on the consequences of coercion?
Only sensible people act in good faith.
Perhaps you do not act in good faith either philosophically or legally.
Everyone has a right to develop and express their true selves, their independent thoughts and their own direction in life, either alone or with one or more compatible people, in accordance with good faith.
Propaganda is not good public policy. It is not good government. It is not journalism. It is anti-democratic, utterly corrupt, psychologically abusive and indicative of bullying.
What does propaganda of the faith mean to you?
If you have dependents, how do you prevent them from being excessively dependent upon you?
If you have lazy friends, how do you prevent them from turning you into a crony?
If someone deliberately attempts to make you feel guilty for expressing your true self, why do they do so?
Is such a person trying to make you feel dependent or obligated or ashamed or anxious?
How do you distinguish between genuine dependency and psychological manipulation?
How do you usually compare artists with craft workers and factory workers and office workers and other workers?
What have you discovered about artistry in relation to liminality?
What have you discovered about liminality in relation to artistry?
What does authentic living currently mean to you in relation to art and life and good faith?Incompetence is often a consequence of muddled minds, particularly in terms of definitions.
How do you currently distinguish between the public, the communal and the private aspects of your cultural leadership?
Many artists, whether associated with the visual arts, literature, performing arts, or political arts, never really 'emerge' much further than an occasional commission or grant or sale or gig or headline or vote. They do not act in good faith for the greater good, whether through the intrinsic expression of enlightened being or in any other way.
And even established artists do very little long-term and widespread good in the world. They merely encourage mindless tourism and the greedy speculation of construction, destruction, buying and selling.
How have you already placed your leadership in the service of those efforts, and with what results?
How do you now your are investing in good faith to expose charlatans and improve the world?
Most emerging cultures are not ones of stability. They are shaped and
reshaped by instability. They frequently become fragmented, and
perhaps even stay that way.
For thousands of years, many persons acting in good faith have been
harmed and even killed by evildoers, including those pretending to be faithful to the
good.
Do you have faith in governments?
Do you have faith in legal systems?
Do you have faith in public policy?
Do you have faith in science?
Do you have faith in quality journalism?
If you attempt to separate quality journalism from propaganda and advertising, how easy or difficult to you regard that task to be?
How do you compare the 17th century with the 14th century?
How do you compare the trials of the Knights Templar with the later witch trials?
How do you compare the Hundred Years' War with the later wars of religion?
How do you compare the Wars of the Roses with the English Civil War?
You may have compared Pope Gregory XV with earlier and later popes in relation to their views on witchcraft and other matters.
What is your acquaintance with cardinal-nephews?
What is your acquaintance with bishops of Rome, such as Pope Clement VII, Pope Leo X, Pope Julius II, Pope Sixtus IV, and Pope Alexander VI?
What is your acquaintance with Holy Roman emperors such as Frederick III and Maximilian I?
What do you know about papal tiaras and imperial crowns?
What do you know about dogi, such as Leonardo Loredan?
What do you know about creative accounting?
What do you know about unjust enrichment?
How carefully do you consider the public interest?
How do you compare mirrors for princes with the power of women?
Perhaps you know little about anyone's family history.
Relationships are emotional experiences and all writing is about relationships of one sort or another.
What has your education taught you about relationships of various types?
What do you know about Leonello d'Este?
How have you examined the history of good policies?
You may, for example, be acquainted with the history of Beatrice Cenci.
What do you know about good research?
What do you know about good advice?
What do you know about good editing?
What do you know about good philanthropy?
What do you know about good journalists?
What is your acquaintance with Francis I of France?
What is your acquaintance with the Sword of Damocles?
What is your acquaintance with Croesus?
How do you compare monarchies and republics?
How do you compare The Prince with the Republic?
How do you assess such concepts as vulnerability, prosperity and sustainability?
What have already been your experiences in that regard?
Perhaps you will always have difficulty distinguishing between the authentic and the inauthentic.
Perhaps you regard all summit meetings and international conferences as ridiculous extravagances.
What is your acquaintance with the Field of the Cloth of Gold?
Perhaps you regard general elections in much the same way as medieval tournaments, particularly if you mainly observe such occasions through the mass media.
How do you compare the history of the British monarchy with the history of the monarchy of France, and other historical monarchies?
How do you compare the Florentine Republic with the Venetian Republic?
What is your acquaintance with ideas concerning civil and political rights?
What is your acquaintance with ideas concerning the denial of those rights?
Charlatans are more likely to display false piety publicly rather than blatant decadence. Their immorality is often hidden until exposed through the reporting of scandals.
Yet many scandals would be reported upon if there were suitable investigators and reporters with the ability to do so.
Unfortunately, most journalists work for organisations involved in hiding scandals, and contributing to them, rather than reporting upon them. That is why the gullible become obsessed with fake scandals known as conspiracy theories. They are unaware that they have been duped by charlatans into believing fiction is fact.
How do you usually interpret power struggles?
Charlatans often seek to attain and maintain dominance. Yet they are, by definition, incompetent in any position of authority. They cause much suffering. They are rarely, if ever, genuinely contrite.
While absolute monarchies and any associated empires may rapidly descend into tyranny at the slightest hint of opposition, political repression has long been common in purported republics, too.
How does the work of various commentators and historians inform your views of political history, political science and political philosophy?
Constitutional monarchies and republics have usually been run by charlatans pretending to be aristocrats. Indeed, most claims of aristocratic privilege are actually expressions of charlatanism.
A worthy author is one whose works, or most worthy works, continue to be worthwhile reading.
Worthy leaders are always adequately informed by the most worthy works of the most worthy authors.
Worthiness is the measure of reasonable attention in the minds of enlightened beings.
Although wonderful witches are often modest, and therefore unlikely to regard themselves as enlightened beings, they seek to experience enlightened being through the experience of worthwhile contextual reading. They know that enlightened leaders are the true aristocrats, unlike charlatans, bullies and overly privileged fools.
All legitimate power is based on reasonableness, including proportionality.
Do any claims of royalty ever have legitimacy, even when associated with constitutions?
Are any claims of kingship compatible with ideas of democracy, or even aristocracy?
Have petty kingdoms always caused petty squabbles, terrible battles and the poverty of the populace?
Are principalities always elitist and therefore unjust?
Are republics and constitutional monarchies always run by oligarchic elites?
Are chiefdoms always under the tyranny of selfish tribal chiefs?
Have city-states really always been run by manipulative power elites rather than through adequate popular sovereignty?
What, if anything, did Henry VIII of England and Matilda of Tuscany have in common?
What, if anything, did feudalism in Europe have in common with the feudatory states of the Indian subcontinent?
What, if anything, did the city-states and principalities of South-East Asia, Southern China and North-East India. and those further east and south, have in common with pre-colonial African kingdoms?
How do you know when local power has more influence and importance than central leadership?
You may or may not know anything about Farinata degli Uberti, Brunetto Latini and the Battle of Montaperti.
You may or may not know anything about territorial marches and territorial mandalas.
You may have read little, if anything, about the March of Tuscany.
You may not even have compared examples of feudalism, vassal states, internal colonialism and neocolonialism.
You may or may not know much about Germanic fragmentation, Balkanisation, and factionalism within the political spectrum.
What is your acquaintance with coronations, enthronements, investitures and the practice of anointing?
Perhaps you are aware that charlatans often love ceremonies, pomp and other extravagant displays, particularly when they themselves are the centre of attention.
What do you know about regimes, power structures and the development and maintenance of a ruling class?
What is your political agenda, and who shares it, and why?
What is your connection, if any, with a plutocracy?
You may be aware that the difference between a witch and a saint relates entirely to the political influence.
You may also be aware that wealth tends to disappear in the chaos of war and disease.
How do you prefer to interpret history when exposing charlatans of the past and present?
How do you prefer to express empathy?
How do you prefer to interpret gender?
Perhaps you are concerned you are not enough of a polymath and/or witch to be ready within the next few years.
Distinguishing between a culture of political magic and a culture of political madness is particularly important.
How have you already contributed to a culture of civility?
- The Ghost of Queen Adelaide
- The Civility Journalism Circle
- Floating Like a Real Witch
- Matter and Imaginings
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Are you acquainted with Ginevra de' Benci and her portrait by Leonardo da Vinci?
Are you acquainted with Florence Cathedral?
What is the purpose of art, literature and architecture in a world of many wars?
In The Prince, Machiavelli expressed the view that most men are evil.
Perhaps you regard that view as true, particularly when observing the actions of overly powerful persons.
Perhaps you regard most people as charlatans.
The rich gamble with the lives of the poor, as usual.
What did Pietro Longhi know about Il Ridotto?
What did Machiavelli know about political gambles?
What do you know about the subject?
Who has been gambling with your life, and why?
If most people prefer to fill their minds with triviality, are their lives trivial?
Machiavelli wrote that it is better for a political leader to be feared than loved.
Witches have always been feared.
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