Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"We live in a world where will people will accept almost anything as true so long as it's endorsed by an authority figure of some kind. Anything except for the idea that they don't need authority figures to save them. We didn't arrive here by mistake, but I should probably stop while I'm ahead. Otherwise, the authority figures will brand me as a conspiracy theorist and all the 'rational' people will hold hands and sing 'banish this crazy man from our sacred circles. He is a witch who dares to teach our children that they are more powerful than what our schools permit them to believe. Away with thee. Away with thine forbidden heresy.'"
T.K. Coleman

"The only way to ban markets is to beat them down with force. And since markets are abstractions, the force is used against people. So the alternative to a market-oriented society in which everyone is required to respect everyone else’s rights is a society in which those in power use force on whomever they can get away with using it on.”
David R. Henderson

“Hierarchical organizations are failing in the response to decision-making challenges. And this is true whether we’re talking about dictatorships, or communism that had very centralized control processes, and for representative democracies today. Representative democracies still focus power in one or few individuals. And that concentration of control and decision-making makes those systems ineffective.”
Yaneer Bar-Yam

"Most libertarians have a hard time remembering: the enemy is the state.  This isn’t about smoking pot or gay marriage or open borders or limited government or more efficient government.  It is about killing the beast known as the state.  It cannot be killed by physical force – they have bigger guns.  It can only be killed by ideas, and since much of the audience doesn’t really grasp (or doesn’t agree with) the ideas, the next best thing is to strip the state of any semblance of legitimacy.
Political decentralization is libertarian theory put into practice.  A great step would be 50 sovereign states; a better step would be 3000 sovereign counties; even better would be 100 million sovereign households, but I don’t want to sound greedy."
Bionic Mosquito

"If California left tomorrow, they would be a third world shithole in 24 months. They are a Federally subsidized funded debt canary that can’t sustain the pensions they promised and fairy dust welfare state they crafted on the backs of workers and the unborn progeny now mired in debt. If other Sovietized America-stans like the Northeastern hellholes and the Moscow analog in Chicago want to secede, please go, you are doing your neighbors a favor."
Bill Buppert

“The leftists who are so dismayed by Trump but who were so lenient and forgiving to Clinton have no political home except the Democratic Party. Their allegiance is to party politics, not to justice across the board. It is to a half-assed version of justice. This is a version that places enormous weight on concerns over prejudices of many kinds but very much lower weight on actual death, destruction, disability, misery, physical violence and injury that’s caused by people like Bush and Clinton. Why be so strongly concerned over prejudices and not over crimes against human beings? When the prejudices are realized in the form of crimes, then they gain some attention from the left. Why not be strongly against these crimes from all sources and especially from governments run by both Republicans and Democrats? Why the attachment to warring against prejudices and not violent crimes of the state? Which is more important, the choice of a bathroom and the feelings of a transgender person or an American bomb dropped in Afghanistan that kills 32 innocent women and children? Why focus on one but not the other?”
Michael Rozeff

“Much of the fear, violence and destruction we see in the media is a result of a parasitical force which thrives on separation, division, ignorance and hate. That parasite… the ego... lives in all of us. The media is very good at manipulating the ego’s fear, pain and anger, reframing it, and twisting it to its advantage. 
The parasitical class doesn’t need to do much more than create a toxic environment and tell a few damning stories about the ‘evil others.’ They know that the ‘blue’ side will always blame it on the ‘red’ side and vice versa. After that, they mostly just kick back and enjoy the show.”
Chris Campbell

“In failure or adversity it’s so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It’s a distraction too; we don’t do much else when we’re busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us.” 
Ryan Holiday

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

“You cannot truly have a compassionate community, without consent and choice.
Socialism cannot build community as long as it is hierarchical. Community must be neighbor to neighbor, peer to peer. Community must be chosen consensually, not coerced.”
Mike Margolies

“What’s a patriot to do? The only godly, rational response is to reject government in its entirety — its bureaucrats and politicians, whether Democrat or Republican, its wars and taxation. Much of the electorate seems to sense this as they embrace Donald Trump, the non-politician.
But Trump — or any fallen, fallible human and the conglomerates of those fallen, fallible humans we call ‘political parties’ and ‘government‘— cannot solve our problems. Only God-given liberty, i.e., freedom from the State with all its coercion and corruption, can. Americans must re-discover their heritage of freedom and autonomy, self-reliance and initiative, as well as their horror of government, even when the ‘right’ party controls it.”
Becky Akers

“Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe they have lost the consent of the governed. The disillusioned governed have not fully absorbed this epochal shift of the tides yet, either.
They are aware of their own disillusionment and their own declining financial security, but they have yet to grasp that they have, beneath the surface of everyday life, already withdrawn their consent from a self-serving, predatory, parasitic, greedy and ultimately self-destructive ruling Elite.”
Charles Hugh Smith

“As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).
In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.”
Hunter S. Thompson

“What concerns me isn't the fact that we mock politicians. It's the fact that we mock any messages that dare to tell us that we're more powerful than politicians.
What scares me isn't that my neighbor might vote for the ‘wrong’ person. What scares me is that my neighbor probably defines ‘power’ in a way that only makes his actions relevant when he's voting for someone other than himself.
The greatest conspiracy isn't some hidden agenda to get a certain crooked person into office. The greatest conspiracy is to have a world where people genuinely and heartily laugh at the idea that they have the permission and power to be the predominant creative forces in their own lives.
The greatest conspiracy isn't that you're being secretly screwed by a shadow government. The greatest conspiracy is that we've been duped into believing that our efforts to be free are a waste of time no matter what we do.
T.K. Coleman

 “From childhood you were taught that it is right and just to delegate your powers to someone else. You never questioned it because everything you are taught in school has one purpose: the glorification of your country. Somehow, though it is your country, you seem to have no part in it until the time comes to surrender your life. Your whole life is spent trying to get a hearing. You’re always on the door-step, never inside.”
Henry Miller

“It used to be a high compliment to tell someone he has a ‘discriminating’ mind; it is now an accusation. Should people learn HOW to discriminate – which used to be a major purpose of schools – we might find ourselves living in a world in which men and women engage in clear, rational, thinking. A world in which people were obsessed with answers to questions formulated by those who have a special interest in collectively-defined conclusions, might be transformed into a world in which individuals ask the kinds of questions it is politically-incorrect to ask; inquiries that the institutional question-keepers want to keep away from those who are to be ruled.”
Butler Shaffer

“Politics is of its very nature is biased in favor of intervention and planning. Even in its ‘minarchist’ or ‘night-watchman’ version, politics is based at root on the idea that some decisions must be made coercively and imposed on unwilling minorities – or even majorities, as the case may be. This is contrary to the principle we observe in private life every day: the consent of both parties is necessary for a transaction to take place.”
Lew Rockwell

“The state apparatus only exacerbates the ideological divisions that exist between people, because it imposes one system on everyone. If this election cycle proves anything, it’s that different folks should be allowed to go their separate ways.
Let the Clintonistas go be governed by Harvard Ph.D.’s.
Let the rest of us figure out what we want, and in general leave each other alone.”
Tom Woods

“The founding fathers of the U.S. designed a government that was supposed to be accountable to the people, so the tragedian fate of it becoming wholly the opposite after only a few centuries is deeply lamentable. However, this only underscores the dire need of Texans to break away from the intractable management of Washington. If we want to see a reversal of America’s self-destructive policies and foolhardy abandonment of the Constitution, sadly, we won’t find it by looking to the largely impotent government in D.C. to provide.
On November 9th we say hello to the new boss, just the ‘same as the old boss,’ understanding that the cycle of futility, this illusion of democracy, will only be broken for Texas when we ourselves break away from that fetid swamp on the Potomac, reviving the castoff idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ long since vanished in Washington. Only through self-determination, with an eye at preserving the best of our founding principles and carefully employing countermeasures to prevent our past mistakes, can Texas salvage a brighter tomorrow. Perhaps then, with discipline, providence, and a bit of luck, we won’t get fooled again.”
Ryan Thorson, Texas Nationalist Movement

“But the scream that overrode all the other screams and seared the air from coast to coast was belted out by the queen vampire, Hillary Clinton, as her bottles of blood ran dry and her dealer’s phone number was suddenly no longer in service, as she lay on the floor of a quiet room with a wooden stake through her heart, as the dawn came up, blinding her, after her final try for the White House exploded in a vaporous cloud of dead leeching insects, as a million lifetimes of inflicting suffering on others culminated in a gross indignity…
O the horror!”
Jon Rappoport

“To be honest with you, I didn’t even know yesterday [11/8/16] was Election Day. So, it was so important to me that I didn’t even know it was happening. We’re focused on other things here. I don’t really make political comments. So, if I say I like one person that means everybody who voted for the other person doesn’t like me. So, why would I do that?”
Lou Saban, Alabama head football coach