Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:
"Is Iran really the aggressive one? When you unilaterally pull out of an agreement that was reducing tensions and boosting trade; when you begin applying sanctions designed to completely destroy another country’s economy; when you position military assets right offshore of that country; when you threaten to destroy that country on a regular basis, calling it a campaign of 'maximum pressure,' to me it seems a stretch to play the victim when that country retaliates by shooting a spy plane that is likely looking for the best way to attack."
Ron Paul"If we are capable of burying the hatchet with Vietnam, China, Japan, Italy, and Germany within 20 years of fighting them or less, and if we could have normal relations with the Soviet Union and its communist allies throughout the Cold War, we can certainly have normal relations with Iran after all this time."
Daniel Larison
"Folks, which country is sending
spy drones and Raptor attack drones into another country’s airspace, Iran or
America? Which country is sailing military ships into another country’s
territorial waters, Iran or America? Which country is flying military attack
aircraft into another country’s airspace, Iran or America? Which country has built dozens of military bases within a few
miles of another nation’s borders, Iran or America? Which country is
sending covert armies into another sovereign nation to disrupt communications
and cyber security and blow up facilities and assassinate government officials
and scientists? You know the answer: the United States (and Israel, of course)."
Chuck Baldwin
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
H.L. Mencken
"Because there is only little and fickle market demand for words rather than things, intellectuals are always desperate for any help they can get to stay afloat, and the State, in permanent need of ideological support for its relentless onslaught against natural law and justice, is only too willing to offer such help and employ them as public educators in exchange for the appropriate propaganda."
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
"It’s too bad the word 'evil' has been so compromised, so discredited, by the people who use it all the time – bible-thumpers, hysterics, and religious fanatics. Evil shouldn’t be associated with horned demons and eternal perdition. It just means something destructive, or recklessly injurious."
Doug Casey
"Asking a philosophical non-voter to vote is like inviting a vegan out to a steakhouse. The vote police do not appear to really care about non-voters and their welfare and why they don’t vote. Rather, they are pursuing their own agenda and hiding it from the non-voters. That is why they urge people to vote even though many of these people oppose the agenda of any candidate likely to win. Hence, they are being manipulated to provide a faux consent to policies and candidates they explicitly oppose. The non-voter is being conned by the vote police."
James Ostrowski
"Whether one chooses to become or remain subservient to collectivized systems depends upon individual thinking, whose nature tends to be destabilizing. Thinking produces questions which, in turn, generate a myriad of answers and variations on existing systems and practices. Most dangerous to the established order, questions can create an endless flow of more questions. As my favorite professor of anything, Malcolm Sharp, constantly reminded us, knowledge of any subject matter – be it law, economics, history, or even flower arranging – requires an ever deeper and sophisticated exploration of questions rather than answers to superficial questions. As Milton Mayer so well expressed the point, 'the questions that can be answered aren’t worth asking'."
Butler Shaffer
"The United States suffers from a long-term addiction, since at least the end of World War 2, to trying to run the world.
That addiction has cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars.
It’s cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of citizens of other countries.
It’s empowered evil regimes to suppress human rights both at home and abroad.
And it has never, ever 'worked' in the sense of bringing about lasting peace, any more than booze saves marriages or methamphetamine repairs mental anguish.
In fact, just like booze or methamphetamine, the US addiction to world 'leadership' wrecks the lives of everyone around the addict too. Which means that if the US gets its act together, everyone else, not just Americans, will be better off.
Cold turkey withdrawal may be out of the question, but the US can and should wean itself off the damaging drug of foreign interventionism."
Thomas L. Knapp
"Marxism, including democratic socialism, means that one works for everyone else and they work for you. That’s the theory. That’s one big reason it fails. People are not motivated to work for the good and happiness of others in any system where one is not credited with what one produces. Group voting and consensus procedures replace current methods of organizing ourselves to produce wealth. In our existing systems, we have pervasive methods of responsibility, accounting, prices, incentives not to shirk and freeload, control over waste, attribution of efforts, and rewards for productivity. Democratic socialism or any form of Marxism erases all this and replaces it with 'democratically' made decisions, or basically a communism that’s supposed to be viable and work. It doesn’t, because abolishing prices and markets destroys a raft of incentives that properly connect production to what consumers want and need. This is the price system. This is free markets. Unless consumers are satisfied, they do not buy the goods."
Michael Rozeff
"It seems that we've come to a time where only leftwing 'journalists' are allowed to have 'partisan motives.' Posting satirical memes and videos that mock the leftist power elites is prohibited behavior and doing so will bring the weight of powerful media organizations down on you, even if you're just a down-on-your-luck common citizen making snide comments on social media. Wrongthink is not allowed."
Jay Baker
"Anything that can be created to infinity cannot be 'spent' or 'wasted.' To spend or to waste implies to exhaust or use up. These money symbols (numbers) that we think of every day as money have no substance in reality. We as individuals do 'spend' numbers, but ours are limited. Therefore, we can use the term spend or debt as it relates to anything except the federal government and their symbiotic partners, the banks."
Bob Livingston
"It’s easy to dismiss a problem if its costs seem a distant consequence, like ignoring the fact that the Earth will one day crash into the sun. However, we’re talking about maybe a period of 5-10 years before the U.S. could begin suffering from a debt Armageddon. Everything we know from history and economic analysis says this could be the worst crisis ever faced by the Union. And, since our politicians refuse to do anything about it, the only option for Texas to avoid this doom is to quit the United States. And while saving the U.S. would be great if it could be achieved, since there is no political will left in D.C. to change things significantly, the only thing remaining is to do it ourselves as our own country, as is our right under the Texas and U.S. constitutions."
Texas Nationalist Movement
"Today’s Democratic communists share Marx’s utopian aspiration of creating a perfectly secure society in which everyone is insured against any contingency. They take abundance of goods as a given, just as Marx imagined abundance leading into a glorious communist future. They imagine no one of any favored group denied their rights, except unborn human beings and capitalists, just as Marx imagined an end of all 'exploitation', profits, private property and capitalism.
Today’s Democratic communists have adapted their anti-capitalism and totalitarian aspirations for control to make them current and seemingly relevant to 'issues' like the environment, health, hate speech, gun ownership, and income distribution, etc. They’ve adopted progressivism as a road to their communist heaven on earth. It’s a ruse. Today’s progressives are communists-in-waiting. The Democratic candidates are communists in disguise."
Michael Rozeff
"Calm down with your political conversations. Whoever is running the country, nobody else's life changes. We still gotta go out there and make a living. Enjoy your family, enjoy your friends, bang your chicks and make your money."
Andrew Dice Clay
