Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:
"'Our boys' are not noble warriors protecting democracy, rescuing maidens, and righting wrongs. They are, like all soldiers, obedient and amoral killers. Pilots bombing Iraq or Syria know they are killing civilians. They do not care. If ordered to bomb Switzerland, they would do it. This is the nature of all armies. Glamorizing this most reprehensible trades is just a means of usefully stimulating the pack instinct which we often call patriotism."
Fred Reed
"Texans need to recognize that the Constitution no longer exists as a compact between the people and their government: Washington has long since outgrown any real check on its power. The Union as envisioned by the founders is effectively dead, and the thing that’s supplanted it is just as illegitimate as if it were the government from a coup d’etat. What loyalty Texas owed to the Union has been nullified. It’s time Texas unchain itself from this continental corpse and revive the principles of spirit of ’76 in our own republic. Let Washington pursue its folly alone."
Jeff Thomason
"The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite. With blacks screaming at whites, women screaming at men, and homosexuals screaming at heterosexuals, there is no one left to scream at the rulers."
Paul Craig Roberts
"People see in Trump what their hopes are. They see him as the comic book Based Stick Man on Pennsylvania Avenue taking out those damned commies one at a time. But really he is just more proof of 'Woods’ Law.' No matter whom you elect, you always get John McCain. That is, horrific centrism, log rolling and continual diminishment of liberty that characterizes every administration since Lincoln. The next is always worse than the last. At this point we are just on Bush’s 5th term."
John Meyer
"If men were like ants, there would be no interest in human freedom. If individual men, like ants, were uniform, interchangeable, devoid of specific personality traits of their own, then who would care whether they were free or not? Who, indeed, would care if they lived or died? The glory of the human race is the uniqueness of each individual, the fact that every person, though similar in many ways to others, possesses a completely individuated personality of his own. It is the fact of each person's uniqueness — the fact that no two people can be wholly interchangeable — that makes each and every man irreplaceable and that makes us care whether he lives or dies, whether he is happy or oppressed. And, finally, it is the fact that these unique personalities need freedom for their full development that constitutes one of the major arguments for a free society."
Murray Rothbard
"The bottom line here is this. The U.S. doesn’t abide by fixed principles or laws relating to statehood, new or established states, their independence, or their sovereignty. It also doesn’t abide by fixed principles relating to rebellions and revolutions within a given territory. Since its inception, the U.S. acts on its interests, conceived or misconceived. When convenient, it upholds law; when inconvenient, it breaks law. The resulting behavior it exhibits is inconsistent with respect to principle, but it does consistently serve one main goal: the expedient preservation and expansion of its Empire. The U.S. is often a lawbreaker; but because it invariably poses as the upholder of law, it also is a hypocrite."
Michael Rozeff
"Critics often dismiss North Korea as a 'rogue regime.' But it isn’t. Rather, it carries communism in particular and the State in general to their logical conclusions. Kim’s brutality, greed, murder and lies are characteristic of all political governments, in kind if not degree."
Becky Akers
"In all things, remember to not think conventional thoughts. They are not your own. Conventional thoughts and wisdom come from the news media, public schools, the medical establishment, organized church and the government. It's a lifetime programming process that builds parameters of thought from which few escape. And there are precious few who do escape their bread and circus."
Bob Livingston
"There is no secret formula or cocktail of laws to bring about your conception of freedom. Imagine if all the time, effort and money put into gun rights protests and political action was put into yourselves, advancing your own infrastructure and skills and declaring your own independence? Imagine if when the empire actually does conclude its slow decline there were systems in place that made it irrelevant. What if you forever seek dissolution of the mechanisms that oppress and carve out your own enclaves rendering the system insignificant in your daily lives? What if we nurture the allergy to authority present in previous generations of Americans back to its full glory?"
John Myers
"The idea of a political group managing free trade is a contradiction, idiotic actually. You only need each individual government to drop its barriers, duties, and quotas—unilaterally. The US, and any other country, should have zero of these things, for its own benefit. Otherwise it’s like putting yourself under embargo."
Doug Casey
