Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:
"It isn’t time for red flag laws. It isn’t time for raising the age to buy a weapon. The time has come for you to purchase a weapon and start taking responsibility for your own life.
The American government is not your babysitter. It’s not your mommy. The American government exists to protect your liberty. Outside of creating a police state, it lacks the ability to protect from the actions of a sick individual with murder on his mind.
Nobody is coming to save you. Nobody is coming to help you. Even those who aren’t trying to gain power and legitimately are trying to help can’t. You are responsible to protect yourself and your loved ones.
The hatred that lies in the hearts of men is not destroyed in the halls of Congress. Evil comes in many forms, and far too often we search for answers in places they can never be found. A new government 'war on hate' won’t change a single person’s heart. Whether evil uses white supremacy or Antifa to justify its need for blood, the need remains just the same.
Killers are still out there. They’re everywhere. Take responsibility for your own protection. If you truly desire to be safe, then pick up a weapon, train with it, and make yourself so."
Jesse Kelly
"I have no easy answers for America’s mass shooting epidemic, and as an Australian I see the gun control debate as outside my sovereign territory. I will simply suggest, as I so often do, that if Americans really want to address the problem then the best place to start is to do the first ever honest and in-depth study on the effects of domestic propaganda on the American mind, particularly war propaganda. There are only so many times a certain type of mind can be told violence-glorifying lies before it snaps; if anyone researches mass shootings in the light of the constant psychological abuse that Americans suffer at the hands of their mass media, I guarantee they’ll find a connection. Americans are the most propagandized people on earth because of their proximity to the most strategically crucial part of the empire; it’s not a coincidence that they’re also by far the most prone to mass shootings."
Caitlin Johnstone
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Capitol Hill has become one vast congressional clip-joint, where members 'service' their constituents the way a second-story man 'services' a luxury condo. This lies at the root of every economic ill plaguing the country — Wall Street big bank bailouts, crony corporatism, Obamacare malfeasance, the eminent bankruptcy of Social Security and other entitlements, massive foreign trade imbalance and domestic sovereign national debt, Pentagon plunder — the list could go on and on.
Because of this thievery, your income is 60 percent of what it should be. The other 40 percent is forcibly taken by politicians and given to tax-consuming special interests. The parasitical profiteers return some of the ill-gotten gains to their benefactors in the form of campaign contributions, gifts or fees.
Here is how the ruse works in detail: Politicians allocate (steal) taxpayer funds for programs under the guise of alleviating the plight of the poor, the homeless, the sick, the elderly and the unemployed, and serving the 'public interest' or 'national security.' Yet it is not the mother’s milk of human kindness and compassion which lubricates the intricate gears of political machinery. It is the snake oil of expediency.
The bureaucrats who administer this flim-flam provide taxpayer funds to political advocacy groups through massive grants and contracts, ostensibly intended to fulfill program objectives. However, much of the money received by the special interests is used to lobby, campaign and organize support for the mandarins to manage, additional funding for existing programs, and the re-election of their shills who favor the appropriations which play politics with human misery."
Charles Burris
"In these dizzying days of political correctness a company can get embroiled in a cultural imbroglio without even trying. In 2012, for example, Jack Phillips, the proud owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood Colorado, refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple over his religious convictions. The couple sued and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Phillips was eventually found within his rights to refuse the request on the basis of the freedom of expression. That is a far cry, however, from a Fortune 500 company that actively dumps its 'personal beliefs' on the political landscape.
For better or for worse, corporations today have come to dominate nearly every aspect of our waking hours, to the point that it is nearly impossible to imagine performing the simplest tasks without them. Now it seems these monstrosities have become confident enough in their economic and political power that they can lecture consumers on modern issues now dividing the nation. That approach seems to have very little in common with the spirit of capitalism, itself a complicated and controversial project, without the need for gratuitous virtue signaling that exasperates so many people.
Considering everything that is at stake, it would seem far more expedient for corporations to stick to the capitalist credo of making a profit and distance themselves from the cultural battles now raging across the land. Nothing less than the very survival of American democracy, which provides the groundwork for free markets and capitalism, is at stake."
Robert Bridge
"Today the principle purpose of the US criminal justice (sic) system is to cut down our rights in order to secure convictions. The practice has been so corrupting that today the US government routinely violates law, both its own and international, in pursuit of material interests. It is inconceivable to the neoconservatives that mere law should stand in the way of American hegemony or in the way of torture that can produce a false confession that serves some government purpose. It is no longer possible to speak of American diplomacy as Washington relies entirely on threats, coercion, and controlled explanations."
Paul Craig Roberts
"Americans don’t need to ask what they can do for their country because they don’t owe their government anything. How could Americans possibly owe anything to a government that robs them of their income and wealth, fines and imprisons them for committing victimless crimes, spies on them, regulates every area of their lives, and violates their natural rights and civil liberties?"
Laurence Vance
"Government is the problem. Too much, too unrestrained, too greedy for war, too self-interested and stupid to be taken seriously. This simple timeless truth is the sad flaw in the progressive and socialist movement. The very government they’d like to be bigger, more involved in just distribution of whatever people deserve, desire and demand, more maternal, paternal and dominant – isn’t holding up its end of the bargain. It’s not proving itself capable of actually killing and eating the 'rich' and it is constantly proving its capability to kill and consume the poor.
The news reporting on all of this – even as it leans 95% towards the socialist and progressive left – still can’t avoid all the facts, and reality doesn’t bode well for American socialism. Be it pop, plastic, planetary propaganda, prenatal policy or petroleum – our American socialist mouthpieces are like adorable little fluffy puppies – yipping and squealing, digging pointless holes, and chasing their tails."
Karen Kwiatkowski
"Worried about monopoly and being shut out of access to everyone on the internet? Don’t be! Think of the profit opportunity in running a free speech platform. It doesn’t cost that much to build up such a business and to attract customers who’ve been taken off of the Big Tech platforms. The right to start such a business is the flip side of the right of Facebook to turn away users and regulate its content. The government has no business in censoring us. Its only proper business is protecting our property rights, those of Facebook and those of entrepreneurs building new platforms."
Michael Rozeff
"When it comes to Washington’s never-ending war on terror, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that, in the past, the present, and the future, the one phrase you’re not likely to find in such media coverage will be 'American aggression.'
So here’s the strange thing, on a planet on which, in 2017, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to 149 countries, or approximately 75% of all nations; on which the U.S. has perhaps 800 military garrisons outside its own territory; on which the U.S. Navy patrols most of its oceans and seas; on which U.S. unmanned aerial drones conduct assassination strikes across a surprising range of countries; and on which the U.S. has been fighting wars, as well as more minor conflicts, for years on end from Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Niger in a century in which it chose to launch full-scale invasions of two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), is it truly reasonable never to identify the U.S. as an ‘aggressor’ anywhere?"
Tom Engelhardt
"As a weapons owner in America, you are a negro living in the politically violent Democrat-dominated south at the turn of the twentieth century and that is quickly metastasizing into a variant of the Jew [Slav, homosexual, gypsy, on and on] in National Socialist Germany or a Ukrainian farmer in the 1930s USSR. You are being targeted for wishing to peacefully practice the most fundamental right in human volition, armed self defense."
Bill Buppert
"Antifa is a savage bash. Nothing deeper. Rage against 'fascism' is just an excuse. The media gives them coverage, foams at the mouth, and that makes it even more fun. They watch themselves on TV and feel accomplishment: 'Hey, that’s us!'
Is Antifa dangerous to society? Yes. Because behind the scenes, unknown to the Antifa protesters, are the organizers. The operatives, who put up the Antifa web pages. Who schedule events. Create slogans. Show up at protests with a van full of black masks and printed banners and signs.
They are hard core socialists, and they don’t want the party goers to understand what fascism is. In fact, the more ignorant they are, the better. It keeps things malleable. The organizers can change what 'fascism' means, whenever they want. The fascist can be Joe Biden. Or Trump. Or the idea of America, itself."
Chas Holloway
"New slanders and name-calling emerge on a daily basis from the collectivist thesaurus: to the charge of 'white supremacist' has been added 'white privilege,' 'toxic masculinity,' 'toxic whiteness,' and 'individualism;' the latter presumably arising from a preference for the power-hungry to divide the human species into separate ego-identity groupings. Those who desire to protect themselves, their children, and grandchildren from the collective insanity of the modern culture, can walk away from the collective mindset and rediscover the only setting in which peaceful, creative thinking – and with it, civilized society – can ever occur: the energized individual mind!"
Butler Shaffer
"You know what kind of people want you to focus on emotion? Salesmen, con artists, cult leaders, and demagogues."
Jim Geraghty
"To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
Voltaire
