Quotes of the Week

From the Light:
“Everybody must deal with stress and everybody makes mistakes. A hero is not someone without weakness. A hero is someone who manages to do the right thing in spite of his weaknesses.”
Darian Worden

“Libertarianism has indeed been a single-cultural movement - the culture of individual non-coercive freedom. Within that single cultural ideal all other non-coercive cultural pursuits are possible, and that makes libertarianism truly multi-cultural as opposed to the left's fake multi-culturalism, which champions a mono-cultured coercively established statist collective.
There are, of course, no rights other than individual rights, making ‘the common good’ just another one of those nonexistent lefty feel-good locutions like ‘social justice’ and ‘collective consciousness’ that have no actual meaning in the real world. ‘Common’ and ‘social’ and ‘collective’ are groupthink words while ‘good’ and ‘justice’ and ‘consciousness’ describe individual values and attributes.”
Garry Reed

“The guilt/envy dynamic has been institutionalized in America by the government, and when the government gets involved with something, you can be sure the consequences will be awful at the best and fatal at the worst.”
Bob Wallace

"The U.S. Empire is discovering what the British and the Soviet empires discovered — that while some Afghanis will inevitably cooperate with a foreign occupying force, a certain percentage of them remain committed to doing their best to uphold their long national tradition of making their country the graveyard of empires."
Jacob Hornberger

“'God and Country’ is at best an ambiguous phrase – the best thing anyone can do for their fellow countrymen is to have no other allegiance than to God. Those who choose otherwise will soon see no wrong in murdering for their country.”
Paul Green

“If one obeys a law because the guiding principle is just then morality and our community are well-served. People who behave in this manner do our communities a great service. However, if one obeys a law for no better reason than that it is law, all one is doing is respecting power, and disappointingly, not virtue.”
Ross Kenyon

“Establishment views rarely stray from that narrow range separating war liberals’ 'muscular internationalism' from neocons’ 'full spectrum dominance.' Liberals cheer on their peace president’s humanitarian bombing campaign—even as it succeeds not so much in liberating its presumed beneficiaries from their burqas as from their lives and limbs. Conservatives scoff at the notion government can run a daycare center—even as they insist it is fully qualified to run a global empire.”
Tony Pivetta

“Socialism relies on violence. It must. The only way you could get every person in society to behave the same way, consume the same things, and work and live the way state central planners want is to use force. Even then, it probably won’t work for very long if at all.”
Mike P.

“The government cannot explain why the [Afghanistan] war is necessary, because it is not necessary to the American people. Any necessary reason for the war has to do with the enrichment of narrow private interests and with undeclared agendas. If the agendas were declared and the private interests being served identified, even the American sheeple might revolt.”
Paul Craig Roberts

“In recent decades the military has almost achieved its wettest dream, the separation of wars from the American population. The fielding of a small volunteer army prevents the riots on campus that helped to end the adventure in Asia long ago. ‘Embedding’ reporters with combat units pretty much prevents coverage that might upset people. The media for whatever reasons are now complicit, declining to air what really happens on the ground. All of this allows ghastly behavior, which is what wars always produce, to go forward with little opposition.”
Fred Reed

“We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that passes for U.S foreign policy.”
Robert Scheer

“The law is not some Platonic Form plucked from the skies by the Pure in Heart. Laws are written by men, men who have particular interests, particular constituencies, particular donors, and particular friends. ... Laws are the particular means by which the state implements and executes its vast powers. When an increasingly authoritarian state passes a certain critical point in its development, the law is no longer the protector of individual rights and individual liberty. The law becomes the weapon of the state itself -- to protect, not you, but the state from threats to its own powers. We passed that critical point some decades ago. The law is the means by which the state corrals its subjects, keeps them under control, and forbids them from acting in ways that the overlords might perceive as threatening. In brief, today, in these glorious United States, the law is not your friend.”
Arthur Silber

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From the Darkness:

"We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us."
White House statement, whining about Wikilieak’s release of 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the Afghanistan War.

“If I were Netanyahu, I would say to Obama, ‘Why don’t you take out the Iranian nukes? Or else we will and we will not do it by trying to fly planes across Turkey and Syria or Jordan or Saudi Arabia. We will do it from submarine-based, tactical nuclear weapons. You don’t want that; we don’t want that; but that’s the way we can do this job for sure. You do it your way so we don’t have to escalate to that.’”
Daniel Pipes

“Libertarianism has never been much of a multi-cultural movement. Need I say that racism - overt, implied, or even subtle - is not a Christian virtue.
Emphasizing individual rights at the expense of others violates the common good."
Jim Wallis

“Always a couple of anarchists who want to kill all of us in public office.”
US Representative John Boehner, describing what he sees at Tea Party rallies.

You know, there are over a hundred mosques in New York City. I favor religious freedom. I'm quite happy if they'd come in and said, 'We want to build a community center near Central Park, we'd like to build a community center near Columbia University.' But they didn't. They said right at the edge of a place where, let's be clear, thousands of Americans were killed in an attack by radical Islamists."

Newt Gingrich, finding a new subject to blather about- the proposed mosque near Ground Zero.

"A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record."
From the annual State of the Climate report. [Keep the scam alive!]

" [WikiLeaks founder] Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [Talk about the pot calling the kettle black….]

“The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world.”
Defense Secretary Rober Gates, whining about the latest WikiLeaks disclosure. [Great! Maybe they’ll finally kick out your sorry ass.]

“We must eliminate the inherent conflict between public purpose and private ownership that was destabilizing to the GSEs [government sponsored enterprises]. Congress could eliminate that tension by restructuring Fannie and Freddie to create one or two private-sector entities that would purchase and securitize mortgages with a credit guarantee explicitly backed by the federal government and paid for by the new entity. These privately owned entities would be set up like public utilities and governed by a rate-setting commission that would establish a targeted rate of return.”
Hank Paulson [Typical statist solution- solve the problem by repeating the same actions that caused the problem.]

“If Hollywood were ever to make a film about a nihilistic leaker-hacker dude, a rootless subverter of international public order, they couldn’t do better than to cast Julian Assange as himself.”
Tunku Varadarajan

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational. Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”
Abraham Foxman