Remember

Remember the lies........




........and liars.........





......that killed them.



ALL of them.

Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“Attention Deficit Democracy begets Leviathan because rulers exploit people’s ignorance to seize more power over them. The contract between rulers and ruled is replaced by a blank check. And regardless of how many secrets the government keeps, the rulers still act like the people are liable for all the government’s abuses.”
James Bovard

“The American political tradition, beginning with that instrument of sedition called the Declaration of Independence, clearly distinguishes between government and lawful authority, making the former subordinate to the latter, which itself is vested in the people. That same literary product of irrational anti-government fanaticism also states unambiguously that there are times when defense of lawful authority requires that the people 'alter or abolish' the government ruling them.”
Will Grigg

“Grow up into the inherent depth of your own existence. After all, you are a ‘child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars, you have a right be here.’ There is no viable, universally inscribed law that compels you to do as you are told to do by the multitude of dysfunctional and destructive authority figures that would demand your compliance, if you acquiesce.”
Dana Visalli

“I think that people who feel ‘we need government’ have a mistaken notion of reality. They seem to feel that individuals are prone to be selfish, brutal, dishonest, and base, but putting a lot of these same individuals together into a group cancels out these bad traits and makes them to do the right thing. They seem to think that the evil is canceled out by the large numbers of people involved.
Bad people will always exist. It is foolish to allow them to establish, impose, and enforce rules on the rest of us. It is suicidal to allow them to claim legitimacy as they do so.”
Kent McManigal

“Libertarianism generally, and property rights specifically, are ‘about’ not infringing upon others. Politics is based directly and inexorably upon majority-based infringement! One cannot change this moral fact by becoming conversant in the writings of Aristotle or Ayn Rand or expert in every facet of Austrian economics. Government is force, ipso facto controlling it orthogonal to libertarian law.”
Wilt Alston

"The anarchist approach to politics is oblique to either left or right wing statism and to minarchist/statist libertarianism. Within the context of the state, the anarchist may prefer one set of policies to another for various reasons, but always with the understanding that something fundamentally unjust (the state is based in violence) and also nonsensical (the state is a social fiction) is going on."
Anna O. Morgenstern

“Wannabe-rulers and petty authoritarians who attack civilians to further their political goals are exhibiting the same behavior, operating from the same premises. Modern terrorism is just small-scale statecraft. Osama Bin Laden is just Hillary Clinton with a different set of resources to work with.”
Darian Worden

“In assigning human ethics and human empathy to the inhuman bureaucratic state, we the people are faced with a choice. We may either believe the ruling-class fantasy being foisted upon us daily, willfully ignoring ample evidence to the contrary, or we may honestly reject anthropomorphism of the state, and understand it simply as a prescient American President once did, as fire and force.”
Karen Kwiatkowski and Walter Block

“If one can successfully illustrate the absurdity of an ‘occasional’ or strictly historical right to secede, a rational person must then either approve of the right of secession for people at the current moment or should begin clamoring for world government. They cannot reasonably believe in the right of historical actors to secede but not of people now living, or those who will live in the future. They will then become secessionists or join their statist brethren in true and consistent form and openly embrace the philosophy of world government which they have been unknowingly espousing.”
Ross Kenyon

“What the man on the street seems to want is cheaper gasoline, free health care, food stamps, Social Security, wars and boondoggles. At least, that's what the evidence suggests. He wants protection from everything and a free lunch too.”
Bill Bonner

“What the state has done by increasingly insinuating its tentacles into every aspect of life is to completely corrupt society. Both the intended and unintended consequences are going to be ugly, because it blurs the morality of daily life. It's entirely perverse that defaulting on debts can even be considered as a good thing, and inversions like this are proliferating.”
Doug Casey

“….Individuals are either free to do anything peaceful or they are not. If politicians decide, we have arbitrary government. But government is force, and force is moral only in response to force.”
Sheldon Richman

"Statism is the national religion that causes neighbors to kill each other. A violent institution used by those in power to further centralize and concentrate their power justified through massive misinformation campaigns and scare tactics in public schools and the talking heads in the mainstream media. Statism turns the only rational species on earth into unthinking sheep."
Pete Eyre

“The pentagon uses twice as much oil as the entire nation of Ireland. It sends soldiers in oil-burning airplanes to places of no apparent importance where they drive around in oil-burning machines for no apparent reason.”
Bill Bonner

“It's a dog and pony show. What can he really do? If he wants to do something, let him get out there and pump some mud and cement into that hole.”
Billy Ward, homeowner, commenting on Obama’s photo-op on Louisiana’s oil soaked coast.

*****************************************************

From the Darkness:

“I have always rejected anarchism, not because I'm deaf to its objections to states - not at all - but because I am too pessimistic about human conduct to believe in the prospects for non-states.”
Michael Neumann, author of The Case Against Israel [And yet you will allow a few of those same, poor behaving humans rule you?]

“Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas.”
From the US State Department’s America.gov web site.

“The increasing global population would put an intolerable strain on the world’s resources and the gulf between developing countries and westerners living a bountiful ‘pie-in-the-sky’ existence must be addressed.
One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it’s unsustainable. I think we have to find ways where we’re not having to scrap our effluent junk and are a really sustainable planet.”
Jeremy Irons

“You want to respond forcefully enough so that North Korea is deterred from doing it again, but you also don’t want to start a war.”
Victor Cha, senior adviser and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, speaking about an appropriate “response” to North Korea’s alleged sinking of a South Korean ship. [You mean kick a hornet’s nest without getting stung? Instead, why not mind your own freaking business?]

“Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must — must — redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate.
The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
Donald Berwick, Obama’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Rand Paul believes in a strong national defense, opposes closing Guantanamo Bay, and believes that Iran is a serious threat….”

Text of Rand Paul campaign ad, March 2010

“Foreign terrorists do not deserve the protections of our Constitution. These thugs should stand before military tribunals and be kept off American soil.”
Rand Paul in a Nov. 19 release.

“No ideology survives the collision with real-world politics perfectly intact. General principles have to bend to accommodate the complexities of history, and justice is sometimes better served by compromise than by zealous consistency.”
Ross Douthat

“Libertarianism itself is what's stupid here, not just [Rand] Paul. We should stop tip-toeing around this belief system like its adherents are the noble last remnants of a dying breed, still clinging to their ancient, proud ways. The libertarian who insists that the state has no place beyond basic night-watchman duties is like a teenager who, having been given a car, promptly starts demanding the right to stay out all night. Sometimes, someone else really is looking out for your best interests by saying no.”
Gabriel Winant

"We desperately need Congress to act -- to recognize the emergency for what it is. We have to keep hundreds of thousands of teachers teaching."
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, supporting Obama’s plan to spend $23 billion to avert an estimated 100,000 or more school layoffs. [Hey, Teach- welcome to the real world!]

“This was an unacceptable provocation by North Korea and the international community has a responsibility and a duty to respond.”
Hillary the War Wench, foaming at the mouth over the prospect of war.

"It has in recent years been essential for the federal deficit to increase as the economy has gone into recession and has been severely constrained by demand. And I cannot agree with those who suggest that it somehow threatens the future to provide truly temporary, high-bang-for-the-buck jobs and growth measures."
Larry Summers, President Obama's top economic policy moron.

"The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues (the United States is), whether it's individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are."
Queen Hillary [So, I guess it follows that 100% taxation of everyone will create heaven on earth?]

“Because ultimately, if nations do not believe that what the United States is trying to ask them to do or making the case for them to do is in their interest, that’s a nonstarter. Some nations have expanded the definition of what’s in their interest.”

Hillary, the Bully Bitch [My, my- Her Highness seems to be feeling a bit bloody this week, is she not?]

Freedom is Color Blind……..

Most assuredly, it is. But, according to the composer of the song and video below, freedom also requires you obtain and possess all state required paper work:

“And I raise my glass to Arizona, enforce the law cuz the Feds don’t wanna. But illegal’s not a race.
If you’re legal come and stand with me, we’ll share the cup of liberty……."

How can a human being, born free on the earth (if you agree with your sacred “founding documents”) ever be considered “illegal?” Since when is “liberty,” a default, human condition experienced by sovereign individuals, only to be shared among those that have been inspected and approved by state gangsters? How can any rational person’s concept of “freedom” not include freedom of movement? If a ruling state can declare one class of humans “illegal” based on their location of birth, can it not also expand its list of definitions to determine just who is “legal” to include race, religious and political affiliation and philosophy, ancestry, occupation, etc.? And if not- what’s to stop them? A piece of paper called a "Constitution?"

The sentiment behind this video is a great example of trying to define “freedom” within the omnipotent state’s construct of state granted privilege. What a great example of statist distortion and hypocrisy.

Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“People have got to stop looking for clever men who will do the "right things" to make everything better. The government can't solve the problem because the government is the problem. It needs to… go away.”
Doug Casey

“When everything becomes a non-coercive, non-fraudulent, individual choice rather than a government collective mandate there's no such thing as illegal or legal immigration. It will be your choice whom to hire, whom to help, whom to associate with.
Individual choice makes every human being legal.”
Garry Reed

"Who thinks taxation is different than milking or shearing? Who thinks that military service is not very often tantamount to being sent to slaughter? Who thinks that borrowing vast sums of money against the national debt and/or the tax base is functionally or effectively different than selling the citizenry into debt slavery?
At least in Animal Farm the animals wanted to be people. It now appears that some Americans are content to be livestock.”
Wilt Alston

“Chaos is not the friend, but the enemy of anarchism. It does not lead to liberty, any more than anarchism leads to chaos.”
Jim Davies

“Warfare conducted for any purpose other than defending the borders of the nation does not make Americans freer. On the contrary, it destroys freedom without exception. More of Americans' property is confiscated in taxes to support warfare. Freedom of speech is curtailed. Opponents of the war are rounded up and imprisoned or exiled. Privacy is destroyed by the government in search of enemy spies or saboteurs. These destructions of freedom have occurred during every war that the United States has ever fought, including all of the wars of the past 60 years.”
Tom Mullen

“If the United States only fought wars against the kind of ‘aggression’ that involved the actual threat of military attack on American territory, we wouldn’t get to have any wars to ‘defend our freedom’ at all!”
Kevin Carson

“It really is the case that every new Terrorist incident reflexively produces a single-minded focus on one question: which rights should we take away now/which new powers should we give the Government? We never reach the point where we decide that we have already retracted enough rights. Further restrictions on rights seems to be the only reaction of which our political and media class is capable in the face of a new attack. The premise seems to be that if we keep limiting rights further and further, we'll eventually reach the magical point of Absolute Safety where there will be no more Terrorism. For so many reasons, that is an obvious myth, one that ensures that we'll reduce rights infinitely and with no discernible benefit. We're not the target of Terrorist attacks because we have too many rights; we're the target because of our own actions, ones that we never reconsider in light of new attacks because we're too busy figuring out which rights to erode next.”
Glen Greenwald

“Militarism distorts the development of civilization, deforming the natural evolution of culture and even science the end result is the birth of misshapen monsters, such as nuclear technology, the love child of war and the Leviathan.”
Justin Raimondo

“’A little government’ is like ‘a little cancer.’ Once the state establishes a foothold in the body politic it invariably metastasizes, shutting down vital cultural organs and devouring every living thing in its path. The speed and directions of its spread varies from society to society, but the end result is never in doubt: If the cancer is not cut out, it will eventually kill its host.”
Thomas L. Knapp

''Karl Marx is probably dancing somewhere. Because, in America right now, the government owns the automobile industry, the insurance industry, the mortgage industry and the banking industry. The government suddenly owns huge parts of the American economy – that's what Karl Marx said he wanted, and he didn't have to fire a shot.''
Jim Rogers

*****************************************************

From the Darkness:

“If you love your constitutional rights, if you love your freedom, then what we do is we remember to thank a vet.”
Sarah Palin

"It's good that Israel did not allow one of its accusers to enter its territory. I recommend [Chomsky] try one of the tunnels connecting Gaza and Egypt."
Kadima MK, Otniel Schneller, commenting on author Noam Chomsky being denied entry into Israel and the West Bank.

What could be more insulting and humiliating than a monster mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Center buildings that were brought down by an Islamic jihad attack? Any decent American, Muslim or otherwise, wouldn't dream of such an insult. It's a stab in the eye of America."
Pamela Geller, Executive director of Stop Islamicization of America, complaining about plans to build a large mosque near “Ground Zero.”

"I would never think the city should not get more funding."
Nyc Mayor Michael Bloomberg, commenting on the department of Homeland Secuirty’s plans to cut his city’s security funding by 26%. [Heck, yeah! In the fantasy world of government, funding ALWAYS increases.]

“I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him. "It would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly."
Woody Allen

"The looming threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, and the persistent threat posed by Iran's allies Hamas and Hezbollah, only serve to reinforce our longstanding commitment to Israel's security."
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, after the House of Representatives voted 410-4 to give Israel 205 million dollars for its production of a short-range rocket defense system. [How can a government be “nuclear armed” when it doesn’t even have a program to develop such weapons?]

“Economic conspiracy theories are often based on the false, but popular, idea that powerful individuals are motivated overwhelmingly by their desire for wealth, rather than the wide variety of human motivations we all experience.”
From the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs website.

"I'm Andrew Cuomo, and I work for you. Together, we can make New York great again. Let's get to work."
Andrew Cuomo, in an ad promoting his campaign for NY governor.

"The [al-Qaeda] threat will not go away soon."
Barry Obama [You should know, B.O.- you’re their number one recruiter.]

“America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of cooperation, we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice – so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”
B Obama, explaining why he bullies and murders people around the world.

“I‘m not in favor of any discrimination of any form.”
Rand Paul

Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“Perhaps it is useful here to consider freedom as a concept, not an institution or a political or geographical location. Certainly one cannot point to freedom on a map, nor is it defined - regardless of laws attempting to render it otherwise - by the color of one's passport or skin. It resides neither in the wooden speeches of politicians nor in the empty promises of their sophistry, where it is prone to being debased, corrupted and molested. Instead, it lives and thrives in the impenetrable safekeeping of those who seek to achieve it. As such, it is only natural that the torchbearers of mankind's greatest attribute should seek a home in which they can live their lives unencumbered by the coercion of others.”
Joel Bowman

“When someone claims to be for ‘smaller government’ while simultaneously clamoring for “border security” and against “amnesty” for peaceful people whose only ‘crime’ is crossing an imaginary line drawn on the ground by a street gang on steroids, they’re contradicting themselves.”
Thomas L. Knapp

“It’s a sick and cynical thing, this monster known as government. By its very nature it distorts and obfuscates the truth in order to accrue supporters to itself, and ever grow and expand its brutal powers. Polar opposite the mythology, humanity cannot long survive – certainly not in any meaningful or agreeable condition – if governments are permitted to continue to exist.”
Alex R. Knight III

“From ancient Sumer to the present, all governments have been composed of elites. All states originate in conquest and exploitation, and as elite oligarchies, exercise a monopoly of crime over their subjects through war and taxation, indoctrination and propaganda, and the conscription of resources and persons.”
Charles Burris

“In short, government ‘law’ is not, never was, and never will be the cornerstone of anything except tyranny and injustice of the most repugnant order. ‘Our’ cornerstone, the cornerstone of a free and equitable society, is an unfettered marketplace absent of all political government. And nothing whatsoever besides.”
Alex R Knight III

“The Department of Defense couldn’t even defend its own headquarters on September 11th. It was too busy occupying, defending, and building golf courses in other countries.”
Laurence Vance

"‘Law,’ as something created and enforced by the state, is a product of nothing more than the preferences of those who control the machinery of the state.”
Butler Shaffer

“Go back and look over that list of things that you're expected to give your loyalty to and even sacrifice your life for. Over the centuries, they've learned to make it all sound wonderful and noble. However when you begin to see these institutions as nothing more than bunches of individuals, each with no more rights in the natural world than you have (and no extra, or bonus rights miraculously obtained by claiming to be something other than what they are, nothing more than a bunch of individuals), they start to look like tribes of cannibals or vampires, eagerly anticipating the tasty sacrifice of another deluded victim.”
L. Neil Smith

“The systemic defects inherent in government bureaucracy cannot be overcome, as they are due (mostly) to the absence of a profit motive. The government simply cannot provide quality services at market prices; often, the government cannot provide quality service at any price. What the government can do, however, is provide brutality very cheaply, for a while.”
Mike Barnett

“On the surface, it [democracy] seems like a marketplace of consumers buying products, albeit political ones. The reality is that nothing checks out. We don't get what we buy. What don't know what we are buying. We don't know what the thing we are buying is supposed to do. What are we really buying? We are expending no real resources on the purchase other than our time.”
Jeffrey Tucker

“Real freedom isn’t about doing the kind of stuff government wants us to do. Real freedom is about doing stuff the government doesn’t like, without being wiretapped or herded into a ‘free speech zone.’’
Kevin Carson

*******************************************************

From the Darkness:

“You know Arizona has been under terrorist attacks, if you will, with all of this illegal immigration that has been taking place on our very porous border. The whole issue comes back, that we do not and will not tolerate illegal immigration bringing with it very much so the implications of crime and terrorism into our state.”
Arizona Governor Brewer.

“If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that, somebody who’s homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something, it could be anything.”
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomburg, guessing the motivations of the Times Square bomber.

“Miranda warnings are counterproductive in my view.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham

“Don’t give this guy [the Times Square bomber] his Miranda rights until we find out what it’s all about."

John McCain

“Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.”
Elena Kagan

“I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.”

Elena Kagan in 1993

“Complete the danged fence.”
John McCain, speaking of the border fence between the US and Mexico.

DVD Reviews

Off the Grid- Life on the Mesa:
Very interesting documentary about people who live on a mesa in an isolated area of New Mexico and live off the grid- socially and politically. What results is a very anarchistic community where individuals help one another and settle disputes peacefully.
Recommended

The Bicycle Thief:
This 1949 Italian movie follows a man looking for his stolen bicycle in post-war depression Italy- a bicycle necessary for the work to feed his family. A starkly told and filmed tale of desperation.
Recommended

Dirty Country:
This documentary explores the life and “talent” of a songwriter in Indiana whose specialty is composing bawdy, dirty country music. Though his songwriting shows some cleverness it amazes me how people can spend an entire evening being entertained by potty talk.
Not recommended

War Dance:
A very powerful, moving documentary that tells the story of a tribe in northern Uganda that has spent years being persecuted by anti-government rebels. Children tell their own stories of watching their parents being murdered and being kidnapped themselves and even being forced to kill. As therapy for their suffering, the children that managed to survive and escape become involved in their school’s song and dance program and travel to Kampala to compete in its prestigious music festival. A very uplifting story that illustrates the power of beauty to defeat evil.
Recommended

Soul Power:
A recently released documentary of the three day music festival that preceded the Mohammed Ali-George Frazier fight in Zaire in 1974. James Brown leads the long cast of artists. The music is great but too little is shown of it. We see too much of the behind the scenes preparation, including discussions that the viewer would not understand or even care about. It’s inexcusable that we see only one number each from giants like Bill Withers and B.B. King. Despite the weakness in editing, the disc is still worth viewing.
Recommended

The Informant!:
Based on a true story, Matt Damon stars as an executive at Archer Daniels Midland that turns FBI informant to expose the company’s illegal price fixing scheme. The trouble is, Damon’s character has a few honesty issues of his own.
Recommended

Pete Seeger- The Power of Song:
An enjoyable and uplifting documentary about the life of one of America’s premier folk musicians. The film’s title is appropriate. Seeger has used that power to inform, motivate, and organize people to improve their world and appreciate the inherent value of other individuals. Even if you don’t always agree with Seeger’s objectives, you have to admire the peaceful tenacity with which he pursues them.
Recommended

Up In the Air:
George Clooney is a man whose job is traveling the country firing people on behalf of companies. He also enjoys his life of constant travel and casual relationships. All is well until he develops an emotional attachment to a woman- BIG mistake! Excellent, intelligent dialogue throughout.
Recommended

A Man Named Pearl:
An inspiring documentary about a man in a small town in South Carolina that has excelled in the art of topiary. Over the years he has created a magnificent, multi-acre garden on his property, despite no formal training in the art and a bit of racial resistance from neighbors (at least in the beginning). His garden becomes a popular destination for tourists and a source of personal motivation for people of all ages.
Recommended

Brothers:
An American soldier, traumatized and presumed dead while fighting in Afghanistan, returns to his family. All sorts of conflicts ensue. A great dramatization of how war screws up people’s heads and relationships to create havoc “back home.” Excellent acting from the entire cast, particularly the two young girls who play Toby Maguire’s daughters.
Recommended

Make it Funky!
A very entertaining, informative, and detailed documentary describing the history of New Orleans music. A multitude of racial and ethnic musical influences combined over the years have evolved into that distinct “New Orleans sound.” Lots of great music throughout.
Recommended

Amargosa:
This documentary is a narrative of the life of Marta Becket, a talented dancer and artist who moves from New York to Death Valley Junction to rehabilitate an abandoned theater and perform her one woman dance routines. A great story about following your dreams, inspired by imagination, no matter how eccentric they appear.
Recommended

The Endless Summer:
One of the early great surf films created in 1964. The film also doubles as a travelogue as it follows two California surfers as they travel around the world following the summer season and searching for the best waves- some in places that, up to that time, no one had surfed before.
Recommended

Punishment Park:
British director Peter Watkins filmed this documentary style feature in 1970 and couldn’t find anyone that would play it. It was too controversial. In order to fight radicalism among the young people, the government creates civilian tribunals that cast sentences on those found guilty of attempting to overthrow the government. They’re given a choice to serve their prison time or take their chances playing “capture the flag” in the California desert while being hunted by police and national guardsmen. Very interesting.
Recommended

Pirate Radio:
It’s 1966 and a motley, entertaining group of DJ’s are operating a pirate radio station on a ship, just off the coast of Britain, where rock and roll has been banned from the airwaves. The state’s powers that be work relentlessly to end the fun and find a way to shut down their broadcasting. The film includes several very funny individual performances. Lots of great 60’s rock and roll music (the best kind) is played throughout.
Recommended
　

Why Suffer Tyrants?

"But O, good Lord! What strange phenomenon is this? What name shall we give it? What is the nature of this misfortune? What vice is it, or, rather, what degradation? To see an endless multitude of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility? Not ruled, but tyrannized over? These wretches have no wealth, no kin, nor wife nor children, not even life itself that they can call their own.
They suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man — not from a Hercules nor from a Samson, but from a single little man.

Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? Shall we say that those who serve him are cowardly and fainthearted? If two, if three, if four do not defend themselves from the one, we might call that circumstance surprising but nevertheless conceivable. In such a case one might be justified in suspecting a lack of courage. But if a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice?

……………….Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude.

……………….the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy — the more one yields to them, and obeys them — by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.

……………….Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces."

Étienne de La Boétie, from The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“If space is to be more than a government jobs program, a source of prestige for politicians, a playground for the ultra-rich, or a new domain of drudgery and exploitation, then the values of liberty and discovery must be cultivated on Earth with the desire to carry them into the heavens where they will be shaped anew.”
Darian Worden

“Just as rap songs about killing cops scared conservatives out of their wits in the 1990s, the ravings of some marginal Americans in the woods who had been infiltrated by the FBI are the new social epidemic worrying the left, worthy of censorship and a stern government response. The government is now the most persecuted victim group – worthy of far more advocates in journalism than the Muslim children being liquidated by U.S. remote-control robots every day.”
Anthony Gregory

“Given that the democratic State is already in place this means that there are enough armed men to enforce the State's dictates. The masses do not participate in the actual violence that must be committed to compel compliance. Thus, it is easier for the masses to tolerate and advocate aggressive policies because they themselves do not have to engage in the actual violence. The masses do not break into the houses of drug suspects and shoot their pets. The masses do not arrest tax resisters. The masses do not fight wars in foreign countries. Rather armed men who either ingest a much, much stronger cocktail of statist ideology or are thugs by nature enforce these laws and fights these wars. This means that the typical liberal or conservative can advocate his policies without the guilt of actually having to beat or jail or kill someone who disobeys a dictum of the State.”
Brutus

“All that the ‘United States’ is comprised of is an arbitrary geographical region over which a variety of governments arrogantly proclaim jurisdiction, under the ridiculously lame excuse that someone’s “right to vote” makes such an arrangement legitimate. No one, under any guise whatsoever, can claim control over another’s life, liberty, or property with any degree of righteousness.”
Alex R. Knight III

“The seminal error is to insist on exceptions to the principle that government -- assuming, of course, that one should be permitted to exist -- must be strictly limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of every individual.When that error is coupled with a fertile topic of public concern -- such as terrorism, drug addiction, child abuse, or illegal immigration -- politics becomes pregnant with large-scale abuses of individual rights.”
Will Grigg

“America needs real champions of freedom – not poorly informed Republican accomplices. Either tea partyers should become more principled or they should ditch their Gadsden flags and wear T-shirts of the lobbying group that organizes the rally they attend.”
James Bovard

“Americans are unused to being the prey in war and so essentially incapable of imagining what that actually means, day in, day out, year after year. We prefer to think of their deaths as so many accidents or mistakes – ‘collateral damage’ – when they are the norm, not the exception, not what's collateral in such wars. We prefer to imagine ourselves bringing the best (of values and intentions) to a backward, ignorant world and so invariably make ourselves sound far kindlier than we are. Like the gods of Olympus, we have a tendency to flatter ourselves, even as we continually remake the "rules of engagement," those ROEs, to suit our changing tastes and needs, while creating a language of war that suits our tender sensibilities about ourselves.”
Tom Engelhardt

"A free and responsible people can manage its affairs without the platitudes and paternal custodianship of a Great Leader, and exhibits no superstitious reverence toward the occupants of political office. Once a society begins to absorb this revolutionary discovery, it has already embraced the culture of enterprise."
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

“Why do we become enchanted with the belief that our ruler-governors are just and benevolent, when we experience evidence otherwise every day, everywhere? Why do we allow so many abuses of liberty and property, if the power the rulers possess is only that which we bestow onto them? Why do we let them treat us like beasts?
Tyranny ends when we cease to support voluntarily our own serfdom.”
Helio Beltrão

“Security is an illusion. If you seek it you will end up being hurt and enslaved. You are better off taking your chances in the real world, knowing there are no guarantees, than handing over your liberty to someone who has only your subjugation in mind.”
Kent McManigal

“From what we can tell, immigrants from across the border are doing the country a big service. And illegal immigrants are the best kind. They work cheap. They stay out of trouble. They use few public services. And they don't vote. What's more, they know how to dance. If we were all illegal immigrants, the country would have a much healthier economy. Labor rates would fall to levels where we could compete with other exporters. Social costs - food stamps, unemployment compensation, social security, medicare/aid - would drop. And non- voters couldn't demand more bread and circuses from the legislature”
Bill Bonner

“States have successfully managed to persuade their subject populations that they themselves are the state, and therefore that any insult to the honor of the state is an insult to them as well, any questioning of its behavior or intentions a slap in their very own faces. It becomes second nature for many people to root for their state in a way that does violence to reason and fact.”
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

“When it comes to understanding economics, liberals have a blind spot. They honestly believe that all that is needed to end poverty in the world is passing laws.”
Jacob Hornberger

“An obsession with the truth, by the way, is a trait I’ve noticed in all decent people. They want to know the truth. People who don’t care about the truth, or who are happy to believe lies because it is more convenient, are usually people I try to avoid.”
Ryan McMaken

“The state, as Obama implies, feels itself weakened by the reaction to its mass murder, mass looting, mass redistribution, and mass counterfeiting and subsequent economic depression. There has never been a state so big and so rapacious as the US, and the more people who begin to see through its propaganda, the more silly speeches to government audiences the government leader will try to give. The supremely rich taxing-killing machine is “us”? What blithering nonsense. The government is a separate, leech-like entity that lives by lies and aggression off the rest of us, and impoverishes us in the process, not to mention taking our freedom and destroying all that is good in human society.”
Lew Rockwell

“It’s important to emphasize again and again and again that this notion that we, the people, are in any way the government is fraudulent. The government is not us. It cannot ever be us. If it were, there’d be no need for signs that say 'Property of the United States Government' with warnings to trespassers because how can citizens — who are sovereign — trespass on the property over which they are sovereign? It’s the problem of socialist property writ large, and it’s why popular sovereignty is bunkum. All human societies become societies in which a relatively tiny elite rule a majority, and democracy (along with ideology) is just modernity’s method of legitimizing that elite rule. I have compared democratic rituals to religious rituals before, and I do believe that elections are the central sacrament of democracy. A pointless sacrament of an idolatrous religion.”
Charles Featherstone

****************************************************

From the Darkness:

“Although President Bush has left the White House, he remains a living symbol of individual freedom; a symbol that must be defended at all costs. If we don’t correct the historical record about President Bush and the war in Iraq, his legacy of supporting democracy around the world will suffer.”
From the “Honor Freedom” website.

“I don’t think there’s much doubt that there will be a bank tax.”

Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee Chairman

“The Middle East is unstable. This will help stabilize it."
Harry Reid, voicing support for sactions against Iran.

“I think we should catch ’em, we should document ’em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I microchip an illegal? That’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s a lot cheaper than building a fence they can tunnel under.”
Pat Bertroche, Iowa Republican congressional candidate, offering his solution to “illegal” immigration.

“Make the border airtight. In short, start using the resources of the federal government to carry out its one-and-only legitimate function: securing and protecting our borders.”
Justin Raimondo, offering his solution to “illegal” immigration.

“If you see this page rather then what you were expecting, then access to the site or network you were trying to reach has been blocked due to information security concerns.”
What appears on the computer monitor when attempting to access LewRockwell.com from a DOD computer in Europe.

“The biometric identification card is a critical element here, For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification. People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification. We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going to help us in this debate on immigration.”
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, promoting a Democratic leader’s proposal requiring every worker in the US to carry a national identification card with biometric information.

“It troubles me when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad. For when our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it conveniently ignores the fact in our democracy, government is us.”
B. Obama, while receiving an honorary degree for loving government. [See Lew Rockwell’s and Charles Featherstone’s quotes above.]

Got the Smoke. Where Are the Mirrors?

This photo recording the lovely chaos underway in the Ukrainian parliament illustrates more than the obvious.

The state is a deceptive enterprise which makes use of the magician’s smoke and mirrors method of deception, using various tricks of the trade to create a false reality. The “smoke” is used to obscure the truth, while “mirrors" refers to the propaganda, political discourse, and spin used to embellish the state’s version of the truth. Politics is nothing more than a theatrical veneer, artfully hiding or disguising the underlying chicanery of a predatory beast.

Journalist Jimmy Breslin, in his Notes from Impeachment Summer, 1975, writes:

"All political power is primarily an illusion... Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors... If somebody tells you how to look, there can be seen in the smoke great, magnificent shapes, castles and kingdoms, and maybe they can be yours."

"The ability to create the illusion of power, to use mirrors and blue smoke, is one found in unusual people."

Unusual people, indeed. Political operatives more than make up for their lack of knowledge and common sense with a keen ability to deceive and manipulate. If you can’t rationally explain your thoughts, ideology, or agenda, you can at least bluff your way to acceptance. Tell the people what they want to hear and promise to deliver. The politician’s credibility is considered strong, merely due to the fact that he/she has been “elected.” The smoke eventually clears to reveal that once again, you, the individual, has been had.

But, a new wave of performers awaits just off stage promising “change” and “new ideas.” Certainly, they must be worthy of a listen.

And the band played on…………