Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"All of the CIA’s propaganda can be turned against the agency. 9/11 was due to CIA failure, and to nothing else. Putin’s theft of the US presidential election was due to CIA failure, and to nothing else. All the bombings in France, UK, and Germany are due to intelligence failings, and to nothing else, as is the Boston Marathon bombing and every other alleged 'terror event.'
There is no reason for Trump to tolerate spurious charges against him by the CIA. At best the CIA is incompetent. At worst the agency is complicit in, or organizer of, terrorist events."
Paul Craig Roberts

"In times of war, the pack must swarm in tandem; the herd must stampede in unison. In order for a collective to work coherently and deliberately toward a single war effort, it needs not only regimentation, but leadership. So people under siege seek a leader of the pack, a shepherd of the flock. This leadership is sought in the government."
Dan Sanchez

"There is a valid reason for everything an animal does. You cannot say that for the government. Animals don’t run out and kill people over foreign policy or ideology. They haven’t got one. I would rather live amongst hundreds of wild animals than near one bureaucrat. Because it would be easier to relax."
Jack Perry

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Self-controlling individuals pursue happiness by using their own knowledge to achieve their own ends. Those who pursue happiness may not always achieve it, but when someone does, it is his or her achievement, which is something that slaves, serfs, subordinates, subjects, and those subjected to the coercive will of others cannot say."
Tom G. Palmer

"The thorny issue of immigration, rife with very real externalities and distorted by 'public property,' calls for market order. There is a market for immigration, just as there is a market for security. Open borders advocates ignore the in-group preferences of the marketplace, just as they ignore the tremendous externalities caused by sudden influxes of migrants. The real question is not whether borders are open or restricted, but rather who decides? When someone asks for the libertarian position on immigration, my response is that libertarians want as much or as little immigration as the market demands."
Jeff Deist

"There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque. No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures…. it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship pervasive…. Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."
Professor Neil Postman

"When one studies the history of money, one cannot help wondering why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to exploit and defraud them.
This can be explained only by the myth (that the government prerogative was necessary) becoming so firmly established that it did not occur even to the professional students of these matters (for a long time including the present writer!) ever to question it. But once the validity of the established doctrine is doubted its foundation is rapidly seen to be fragile."
Friedrich Hayek

"I know better ways to live among other people. I know how to improve individual safety, and thus 'public safety.' I know how to end inflation. I know how to protect property rights and end the 'immigration' conniptions. These things are NOT rocket science, and it has taken hundreds of years of ignorance on top of stubbornness on top of stupidity to make them seem hard. In other words, it has taken statism."
Kent McManigal

"Politicians are violence brokers and nothing more. There is no such thing as a statesman, a mythic fiction foisted by court historians through the ages to champion their country’s psychopaths in suit and tie."
Bill Buppert

"Does anyone seriously believe that if taxes cease to be coercively collected by a bloated statist criminal gang calling itself 'government' that everything would just simply dry up and blow away? Isn’t it eminently likely that without taxes new ways of voluntarily financing things that people actually want will be found?"
Garry Reed

"Like clockwork every eight years, America’s short-term memory forces us to relive the disillusioning nightmare of déjà vu all over again… that the new boss turns out to be same as the old boss simply because he’s never been the boss to begin with. The figurehead occupying the White House has always taken his marching orders directly from the ruling elite. Perhaps the globalist design to dumb down Americans has been so successful that we may never learn this critical history lesson, however harsh the consequences."
Joachim Hagopian

"The US is far too big; it’s actually a good idea to break it up. So the fact that these fissures are showing, I think it is telling the truth…So the people who want to live in a Communist society, more power to them, go right ahead just don’t have anything to do with me and the people I care about; the businesses and taxpayers, and so forth who are the actual producers in American society. So I think they just should go their own way. The rest of us should just ignore them to the extent we can. If they are violent, if they are breaking store windows and beating up people in a typical Communist fashion, then, of course, there has to be a defensive reaction."
Lew Rockwell

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"There is no such thing as ‘the public interest’ except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men—all rational men—is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of 'the public interest'—not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without them.
The principles of a free, non-coercive social system are the only form of 'the public interest.'"
Ayn Rand

"The modern GOP is globalist, militarist, corporatist, and anti-populist. The Right chose neoconservatism over non-interventionism, Wall Street over Main Street, city over country, and the managerial state in DC over federalism and state’s rights. They chose the Fed over gold, Lockheed Martin over Woolworth, and Goldman Sachs over your Hometown Bank and Trust. They rejoiced in the rise of the 20th century imperial presidency. They chose supply-side over laissez-faire, Milton Friedman over Mises, tax credits over constitutionalism. They embraced the welfare and regulatory states, instead of making the optimistic case for capitalism and ownership and opportunity. They’ve allowed the Left to cast them as racists and reactionaries. They blessed entitlements just to keep their cushy seats in Congress and their political perks. They chose to nationalize social issues and cede huge amounts of illegal power to the Supreme Court. They chose John McCain and Mitt Romney over Ron Paul!!!"
Jeff Deist

"War is the health of this deified herd called the State because a state of war is a state of desperation, of flight or fight, of primal terror and hate. In such a besieged frame of mind, individuals dismiss the moral principles of civilization as unaffordable luxuries. The human soul regresses to unthinking indulgence in base animal impulses, renouncing civility for the law of the jungle. Toward enemy populations, it is eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, capture or be captured, plunder or be plundered."
Dan Sanchez

"Things come into being and then pass away and become other things. This time is now here in the United States. We are simply not 'united' anymore and states are more like a collection of scorpions in a bottle, battling one another for federal funding. This cannot continue and will not continue. The reason states compete is not for federal funding, in truth. It is to recover wealth stolen by the federal government from the states via federal income tax. One day, states will wake up to that and decide to keep that wealth rather than beg the feds for it as alms."
Jack Perry

"Government is the ultimate hierarchical control structure. While it may attract well-meaning people to its lower echelons, typically based on a deep misconception of government’s true nature, it’s the upper reaches where the truly opulent wealth and unbridled power resides that attracts the worst that the human race can produce."
Garry Reed

"Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority."
Robert Anton Wilson

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Trying to reduce the role of the state by engaging in politics is like trying to put a casino out of business by playing blackjack there. Oh, I have it figured out. I’ll beat the house!' No. You won’t. They want you to think that. They want you to keep playing. Abiding by house rules is no way to protest or change them. Especially when the house gets a little richer every time you do."
Isaac M. Morehouse

"The really unanswerable objection to Prohibition was always the Prohibitionists. If, in fact, they had believed honestly that forbidding rum to man would improve the world and had offered serious arguments for it, however unconvincing, most other men would have been disposed to listen to them politely. But it was quickly manifest that improving the world was the last consideration in their minds. What moved them was simply a violent desire to satisfy their egos by harassing their fellow-men."
H.L. Mencken

"The right to liberty is not limited only to inheritors of one or another tribe or culture, or to practitioners of only one or another religion, or to speakers of one or another language. It is the right of all human beings as such, regardless of religion, color, language, nationality, or other features. It offers the choice to live one’s life as one chooses in association with others in communities one chooses. Some exercise their self-control to live in highly structured voluntary communities (monasteries and convents are the obvious examples), others in fluid urban neighborhoods; some like to live in stable and rooted communities and others prefer to roam the world and experience many ways of life. Free and self-controlling persons make such choices for themselves. They are not dictated to by others. The self-controlling individual is neither atomistic nor anomic, but creates or accepts relations based on choice and voluntary agreement."
Tom G. Palmer

"If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the declaration of independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on."
Terance McKenna

"At one point during his [Trump’s] address, the president assured Americans that 'You will never be ignored again.'
Just so. But we’d gladly go ignored by Washington if it’s all just the same. Please, ignore our bank account, the amount of cash in our possession, our purchases, our phone calls, our emails, our comings and goings. And we’d gladly leave Washington alone in turn."
Brian Maher

Tick Tock, Goes the Trump Clock

The god-Trump appears to have survived the inauguration’s swearing in ceremony. He is “officially” the new Emperor and Creator of All Things Good.

But how long will he physically survive the dissent of the National Security State, the ruling establishment and Hillary-inspired left wing terrorists?

How long before the CIA “neutralizes” Trump? Who will they blame it on? Will military stooges stage a coup and seat Pence the Hack or even Queen Killary in his place? Will the god-Trump be renditioned to Gitmo?

Leave your predictions here. Please include not only the date but the actual action committed.

Inconvenient Truths Regarding ‘I Have a Dream’

"Dr. King’s I Have A Dream Speech was not a solution, but a set up."
Stefan Molyneux explains:

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Most of our lives are about mutual choice. We download the app and rate it highly if we like it. We spend our money to get what we want. But government? They take and take and take and offer only excuses and inept monopoly services in return. After a while, you begin to feel used, like a chump. We can’t just cut them off and do our own thing, because government forces it all down our throats."
Jeffrey Tucker

"A weak federal government would produce little divisiveness because there is little to be divided over. A strong Federal government would produce significant divisiveness since there is much to be divided over. It also goes to say that an absolute government would create absolute division while the absence of government would not produce a division because there isn’t any risk of having your life dictated by distant populations. When we add in factors of geographic distance and cultural diversity, we end up with a horrible mud-slinging process where people actively dislike both candidates and the electorate openly attacks one another over the political process, completing the division process. These issues won’t go away with vague calls of being civil, coming together or getting along. One group or another will always feel put out and ignored since those in office only truly represent those that got them elected."
Justin Murray

"From its very inception the state has had too much power. The moment that agents of the state are allowed to do things that, if we attempted, would put us in a prison cell, it has too much power. When the state has power to confiscate and threaten to accomplish its ends—i.e. to tax, set tariffs, and prevent other governments from attempting to form within its territory—it has gone too far. Indeed, all the most basic characteristics that define the modern nation state extend well beyond anything that could be called legitimate power."
Ryan Miller

"A mixed economy is ruled by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e., by force."
Ayn Rand

"The State is a make-believe entity to which over-awed believers ascribe preferences, will, and agency: essentially, a god. True believers in this god slavishly adhere to its preferences. They swallow the confused, incoherent notion that the State exists as a manifestation of their own collective will that works for their own collective benefit. The church and its god are one. This superstition that, in some vague sense, they are only enslaved to themselves makes such bondage easier to accept.
In other words, the State is a herd mentality: an inclination in a person to renounce his individuality and subsume himself into a herd, a pack, a tribe, a horde, a gang, a cult, a collective. The believers revere and defer to their own 'togetherness' as if it were a god. Deutschland uber alles."
Dan Sanchez

"Let’s face it: Today’s conservatives don’t conserve anything, except political jobs. And the GOP is a party that never stood for much of anything, except war and banks."
Jeff Deist

"Grave injury has been done to the concept of democracy by those who, exaggerating the natural law notion of sovereignty, conceived it as a limitless rule of the volonté générale. There is really no essential difference between the unlimited power of the democratic state and the unlimited power of the autocrat. The idea that carries away our demagogues and their supporters, the idea that the state can do whatever it wishes, and that nothing should resist the will of the sovereign people, has done more evil perhaps than the caesar-mania of degenerate princelings."
Ludwig Von Mises

"If 2016 has taught us anything, it’s that boring politics are the best politics. A staid political culture is a sign of a healthy society, as it allows humanity’s passions to flourish outside of the coercive and violent realm of political power. Those who say we should look to our leaders to inspire us, or that politics should be the engine of 'progress,' are unwittingly calling for the destruction of civil society."
J. Andrew Zalucky

"Fascism rested not on the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered person creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination."
Robert O. Paxton

"For it is only in an essentially free society that certain trends have the possibility of prevailing: self-responsibility, improved morals, a passionate striving for intellectual excellence, a will to overcome obstacles, an energetic enthusiasm turned toward self-improvement, and abounding entrepreneurial spirit, competition, and free pricing." 
Leonard Reed

"Government is the ultimate hierarchical control structure. While it may attract well-meaning people to its lower echelons, typically based on a deep misconception of government’s true nature, it’s the upper reaches where the truly opulent wealth and unbridled power resides that attracts the worst that the human race can produce."
Garry Reed

"Politics is prone to corruption, no matter how detailed the legislation, no matter how noble the public official. If you want politics to be less corrupt, the solution isn’t to shrink corruption. The solution is to shrink the state."
TJ Brown

"Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a kind titles on their business cards."
Kevin Kelly

"The mainstream press continues to maintain that the CIA, the Pentagon, and the CIA are necessary to 'keep us safe.' It’s the exact opposite. They are the ones who stir up the enemies and produce the crises which they then use as the excuse to 'keep us safe.'"
Jacob G. Hornberger

"Fire the CIA. And sell the Pentagon to a laser-tag arcade. These people couldn’t flip burgers and they’re out there flipping governments."
Jack Perry

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"The State is a fiction that exists only in the minds of its believers. It is a superstition, an incoherent concept, because the many cannot act as one. Only individuals act. Individuals act similarly when they obey the same commandments. But it is still the individuals who are choosing such obedience."
Dan Sanchez

"Let the hoi polloi cast a meaningless vote, so they have the illusion of being in control. Instead of seeing themselves as subjects, they’ll think they’re 'we the people,' who actually have some say in what happens. That way they’ll pay their taxes willingly, enthusiastically sign on to aggressive wars on the other side of the world against people they know nothing about, and generally do as they’re told. Because it’s supposed to be patriotic. 'Democracy' is a much more effective scam for controlling the plebs than kingship or dictatorship."
Doug Casey

"This is who progressives are today: religious enforcers of an approved worldview based on an ever-shifting PC code. One thing is certain, and this is where so many libertarians go wrong: the overwhelming threat to liberty today is from the Left, not the Right. It’s frankly silly to pretend otherwise, much as we correctly insist that we are not conservatives. The existential threat to liberty is not posed by 5 skinhead idiots running around in the woods somewhere wearing bedsheets, it’s posed by millions of progressive authoritarians who are everywhere — like the one teaching civics at your kid’s school."
Jeff Deist

"The kind of 'freedom' that elections give us is the 'freedom' to determine who gets to plunder us: Plunderer A, or Plunderer B.  It is as though someone told the slaves in the mid 19th century that they would be 'free' if they were allowed to vote for who would have the job of slave plantation overseer: Overseer A, or Overseer B.  It would not matter, of course; they would still be slaves to their 'masters just as we taxpayers are still slaves to the state from January 1 until at least the end of April."
Tom Dilorenzo

"All men are created equal: it all sounded good on paper.  I have spent much of my life almost in the worship of the phrase; even at this moment, I struggle with questioning it.  Like many political theories, good on paper does not mean good in the real world."
Bionic Mosquito

"The net result of the Savior State dominating society and the economy is the rise of a pathological mindset of entitlement and resentment--the two are simply two sides of the same coin. You cannot separate them. Once self-reliance has been lost, so too has self-confidence been lost, and the Savior State dependent--individual and corporation alike--soon distrusts their ability to function in an open market. This is a truly sad, self-destructive state of affairs, and deeply, tragically ironic. The calls for 'help' quickly lead to dependence on the Savior State, and that dependence quickly breeds complicity and silence in the face of repression and predation by the State and its corporate partners. In a very real sense, citizens relinquish their citizenship along with their self-reliance and self-worth once they accept dependence on the State."
Charles Hugh Smith

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
Voltaire

"Someone shooting at you can be an innocent person. If a U.S. soldier travels halfway around the world to a country he has no business going to in the first place and invades, occupies, bombs, or takes sides in a civil war, then the natives who shoot at him are innocent. They may be guilty of many crimes, but aggressing against Americans or America is not one of them. In this case it is the U.S. soldier who is the aggressor."
Laurence Vance

"Libertarianism serves everyone equally except for one class of soulless humans: Those who want to use, control, manipulate, victimize, oppress and coerce others. Anyone who is not libertarian is authoritarian. There is no in-between."
Garry Reed

"The lesson liberals need to learn is that despite their arrogance, they do not have the power to alter reality."
Walter Williams

"Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it. All constraint
Except what wisdom lays on evil men
Is evil."
William Cowper

"To hear the Democrats talking, you’d think it wasn’t them who continually badgered Reagan over his military spending. Which he allegedly did to counter the 'Soviet threat.' But here go the Democrats blathering on about 'the Russian threat' and Vladimir Putin. As if Putin went up to the UN, pounded his shoe on the podium, and swore to bury the United States under a heap of radioactive ash. All because their candidate lost the election. People used to say they weren’t willing to die in a nuclear war just because Reagan didn’t like the Soviets. Yeah? Well, I’m not willing to die in one because Hillary lost the election."
Jack Perry