Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back."
Al Swearengen, character on “Deadwood”

"The untruth or false idea believed and propagated by socialists is that businesses screw everyone in sight. They are accused of exploiting labor and consumers. This is the senseless idea that Karl Marx thought up, and today’s socialists still believe it. Even some successful businessmen believe it! Based upon this false idea, socialists recommend all sorts of government controls, laws and regulations over business. You need only read the published recommendations of one politician after another to see that they believe the idea that businesses screw people. This is also the idea pushed by very many journalists, talking heads, media figures, professors, teachers, clergy, and others.
Nonetheless, no matter how many people believe this idea, it’s still false. Without the business, you and I could not make anything but the rudest clothing and shoes, the most primitive dwellings and grow the crudest kinds of foods. We’d be reduced in many cases to foraging, hunting and starving unless we traveled to new hunting grounds or stole from our neighbors."
Michael Rozeff

"Doubtless, violence is ugly and should be used only when necessary. But not only is there nothing intrinsically immoral about violence; it is a moral good when it is the means by which the prey becomes the predator and the predator the prey.
Violence is or would be a moral good if and when an unassuming Trump supporter—an elderly man, say, a slender woman, or a teenage boy—knocked the lights out of a bike lock and chain-wielding Antifa or Black Lives Matter thug who was determined to assault a 'Nazi' or 'white supremacist'."
Jack Kerwick

"Many Americans are concluding that the Supreme Court wants to make sure that illegal aliens are as represented in elected legislatures as US citizens. Identity Politics has produced a Supreme Court that regards achieving diversity more important than citizenship. The precedent is being established that citizenship is established by mere presence.  If a person can place a foot on US territory, the person becomes a citizen. President Trump’s attempt to enforce US borders is regarded as a racist act."
Paul Craig Roberts

"What should be evident is that the U.S. and its military have been responsible for tens of millions of deaths due to its wars, its violent aggressions, and its sanctions. No other nation on earth has ever been responsible for such carnage, and no other nation has caused such widespread suffering. How many have really been wounded, disfigured, or harmed by war, chemical weapons, sanctions, and total destruction of infrastructures at the hands of the United States? How many have been displaced, and lost their families? How many continue to live with the horrors of war? And considering that more people are being killed every single day by U.S. forces, and that more war seems inevitable, how many more millions will die before Americans wake up to the horror of this aggression?"
Gary D. Barnett

"Today, companies like Nike, Google, Microsoft and others don’t need a communist party to impose their own totalitarian-like discipline upon workers. These companies are Woke and want to make sure everyone else knows it, and if someone wishes to be hired and remain employed at one of these firms, then uttering or declaring politically-incorrect thoughts either at work, on social media, or somewhere else is going to lead to being on the unemployment line. Thus, one can be sure that the ranks of these tech firms are honeycombed with informers and outright spies who are examining their colleagues and employees to see who among them might not be sufficiently pro-LGBTQ+ or pro-choice, and who should be cast out into the outer darkness for wrong thinking."
William L. Anderson

"Society’s devils and demons are born by following the instinct to avoid and isolate the things that trouble us -- by not facing them head-on. 
Without facing them head-on, however, true progress is impossible.
We’re only left celebrating faux, superficial progress. 
Progress that lacks any soul or wisdom. 
Progress that lacks any wholeness, richness, or depth. 
Only freedom -- especially the freedom to bring the festering darkness into the light -- will offer us such an opportunity. 
When freedom as an inalienable right becomes a moot point… 
That’s when the real work will begin. 
Until then, we’ll invest our time, energy in continuing to plant the seeds."
Chris Campbell

"Throughout human history, the minds of intelligent men and women have contributed to the well-being of our species by creating, inventing, and discovering systems, truths, and works of both art and technology that enhance the qualities that help transform us from knuckle-dragging beasts to civil beings. Such improvements were possible only so long as persons were free to think, speculate, and pursue questions teased from their active curiosities."
Butler Shaffer

"The cultural left has captured the bureaucracies at American corporations. One thing we hear a lot from our friends on the left is that Big Business is conservative, and would never do anything that would hurt its bottom line. Wrong! I have seen personally how companies will do politically correct things that actually hurt their business model, but that win its management pats on the back among their social cohort. These documents I looked at today assert — assert, do not argue — that the total politicization of the company’s culture is critical to its business success … and then go on to describe a program that is almost certainly going to cause major problems with teamwork, cohesiveness, and conflict. These documents are a recipe for creating intense anxiety and suspicion within the company. It’s as clear as day. You cannot imagine why any sensible company would embrace these principles and techniques, which can only hurt its ability to compete. But there it is, in black and white."
Rod Dreher

"The Deep State is destructive, but it’s great for the people in it. And, like any living organism, its prime directive is: Survive! It survives by indoctrinating the fiction that it’s both good and necessary. However, it’s a parasite that promotes the ridiculous notion that everyone can live at the expense of society.
Is it a conspiracy, headed by a man stroking a white cat? I think not. I find it’s hard enough to get a bunch of friends to agree on what movie to see, much less a bunch of power-hungry miscreants bent on running everyone’s lives. But, on the other hand, the top dogs all know each other, went to the same schools, belong to the same clubs, socialize, and, most important, have common interests, values, and philosophies.
The American Deep State rotates around the Washington Beltway. It imports America’s wealth as tax revenue. A lot of that wealth is consumed there by useless mouths. And then, it exports things that reinforce the Deep State, including wars, fiat currency, and destructive policies. This is unsustainable simply because nothing of value comes out of the city."
Doug Casey

"Throughout history, people have been forced to live under regimes that wield the power to control trade. It’s time for one nation to lead the rest of the world out of this statist morass. I say that that nation should be America. Here is what I propose: A constitutional amendment stating the following: 'No law shall be enacted, by either the federal government or the state governments, respecting the regulation of trade, or abridging the free exercise thereof.'
The advantage of a constitutional amendment, as compared to simply repealing, ending, abolishing, and dismantling Trump’s sanctions, embargoes, trade restrictions, tariffs, and trade wars is that the American people would no longer have to concern themselves with some president or Congress imposing, willy-nilly, some new restriction on their freedom to travel and their freedom to trade. If Trump, for example, wakes up some morning and suddenly and impulsively decides to start a wage war against China, someone can quickly file suit in federal court to get his trade war enjoined as a violation of the free-trade clause in the Constitution."
Jacob Hornberger

"It would be the mark of success, if, in the third millennium, people managed to convert all states into benevolent service companies."
Hans Adam II

"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds."
Bob Marley