Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:
"The American people at large — content to deferentially dwell within the United States of Amnesia — still do not get it. The deep state, driven by the imperial presidency, an acquiescent congress and a complacent federal judiciary, has destroyed the American Republic. The parasitic welfare-warfare state, enabled by the Fed, fosters and promotes the profligacy and dependency which is at the root of this destructive process.
Criminal aggression, ruthlessness, and duplicity are not aberrations or breakdowns of the American State, but are absolutely endemic to it."
Charles Burris
"Anyone seeking human liberty, privacy and private property under the mental deception of democracy is under the greatest illusion. Let us purge our minds of this seductive appeal, this spiritual despotism. It has stolen our conscience, our soul and our honor. It is our legacy to future generations to whom we are passing on our slavery. Shame could have no greater victory.
Democracy is a faith, a state religion, a state of mind. It is the progressive destruction of the person — the individual. It is covered and masked with benevolence, philanthropy and brotherhood. Democracy is the opposite of the common belief. It is 'democratic' tyranny, a camouflage for despotism. Its goal is nothing less than universal slavery."
Bob Livingston
"If measured by the standards of natural law and justice, all politicians, of all parties and virtually without any exception, are guilty, whether directly or indirectly, of murder, homicide, trespass, invasion, expropriation, theft, fraud, and the fencing of stolen goods on a massive and ongoing scale. And every new generation of politicians and parties appears to be worse, and piles even more atrocities and perversions on top of the already existing mountain, so that one feels almost nostalgic about the past. They all should be hung, or put in jail to rot, or set to making compensation."
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
"It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they are used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meathooks deep in the base of our brains… The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made. Through it, man now has the power to destroy God’s creation."
Arundhati Roy
"So let’s disabuse one important point; corporations never pay taxes and not in the righteously indignant social protest nostrums of the economic illiterates in SJW circles or the other socialist apologist organs scattered across the fetid plain. They can’t pay them because they sell goods and services to consumers so every time you hear someone in the Keystone Keynesian moronathon talk about corporations paying their fair share, it is economically impossible. The consumer pays the income taxes in higher prices for goods and services."
Bill Buppert
"Most men and women who couple up for life are looking to make a family with their own children. That's not something they can do if one is normal and the other is 'gender confused.' Or, to get down to where the goats graze, a man can't produce children with a man who pretends to be a woman. And a woman can't produce children with a woman who pretends to be a man... no matter how much the mainstream media would pretend otherwise.
Regardless of what transgenders want to believe, biology remains biology and always will."
Jay Baker
"What remains of Western Civilization cannot withstand either the search for answers or the reciting of questions that are grounded in the same assumptions whose destructive, dehumanizing consequences continue to be played out. When thinking is not informed by reason, science-based validation, and spiritual and emotional standards, people are able to believe in anything."
Butler Shaffer
"True, such discrimination may be based on based on stereotypes, prejudice, racism, sexism, or bigotry. And yes, such discrimination may be unfair, illogical, irrational, nonsensical, or unreasonable. But since discrimination is not aggression, force, coercion, or threat, it shouldn’t matter, insofar as the law is concerned, on what basis the discrimination takes place or the reason why the discrimination occurs. Discrimination is a crime in search of a victim.
By their very nature, the natural rights of freedom of assembly, freedom of association, free enterprise, and freedom of contract include the right to discriminate. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent federal anti-discrimination and public accommodations laws are an illegitimate function of government and an unconstitutional expansion of federal power."
Laurence Vance
"The abject failure of the current order, big picture, is a failing not of the culture, government, economy, or biology -- but of individual self-awareness.
We can’t demand for ourselves that which we have not taken the time to understand -- which is, of course, ourselves.
If we did understand, after all, we would simply stop participating in those things which do us harm…
We would stop trodding down the unsustainable path with the rest of the lemmings… until there are no lemmings left for the blood-and-guts-stained pit beyond the cliff.
So, with little self-awareness as to who we truly are, we, too, assume we can be molded for the Perfect Society.
As we beg and plead, with our sticks and our placards and our witty slogans, for the busybodies to do what they must, at all costs, to make us whole.
If we are to have a happy, healthy society, it must be harmonious with the requirements of this inherent nature.
And, ultimately, if we can whittle this nature down to its barest of bones, the closest we can come to touching it is this:
To the extent that an individual is not free to live his or her life peacefully…
According to his or her own standards…
To make good, life-affirming, generative choices and be rewarded for them and then, as a result, to feel good and in harmony with life…
And to make bad, life-negating, degenerative choices and be punished for them and then, as a result, to suffer and fully feel at dis-ease with life...
To think, feel, intuit, sense, and act freely in accordance to one’s own individual nature, in pursuit of reaching one’s full potential and maturation…
And to fully own what one honestly earns by the sweat of one’s own brow…
Unless these things are not in place…
Try as one might to convince oneself otherwise…
Such an individual is still a slave.
But not a slave to a master… not a slave to some tyrant in some large building who signs his name willy-nilly on piles of papers.
Rather, a slave to one’s own ignorance about who he or she truly is as an individual with an inherent nature…"
Chris Campbell
"The State always works in its own favour. The political class will always seek out greater power and wealth for themselves. Although the electorate may see politicians as elected representatives, politicians rarely see themselves in this light. They regard themselves as the keepers of the cookie jar and it’s a rare keeper indeed who doesn’t (eventually) decide to start taking cookies for himself, without the approval of the electorate. Collectivism maximizes the opportunities for raiding the cookie jar, since it places the State in charge of commerce and the holding of wealth
Whether the State calls itself capitalist, socialist, communist or fascist, its aim will be collectivist – central control of commerce and wealth by the State."
Jeff Thomas
"I think you should be able to call yourself what you want, do what you want, say what you want, this is all fine. And let people judge you by how you identify yourself. Say that you’re a hermaphrodite dinosaur who was born on Mars, if you want. I don’t care; it’s your problem. But these PC types want to legislate that people have to treat the psychologically aberrated as if they were normal. They want laws and punishments governing what you can and can’t do and say and even feel. They want to force you to respect, and pay for, the fantasies of a minority. And change – overturn actually – the whole social culture of the country. It’s a very disturbing trend. It’s likely to end in violence."
Doug Casey