Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:
"I’m beginning to feel like a broken record. I’ve had to say this after the mass shootings in Santa Fe, Sutherland Springs, El Paso, and now Odessa. We appreciate your sympathy, but if you aren’t from Texas or don’t live in Texas, then shut up about gun issues in Texas.
Every time Texans face a tragedy or catastrophic event, non-Texans seek to insinuate themselves into our lives. It’s as though you feel entitled to dictate how we govern ourselves and how we live our lives. I get why you feel your opinion is somehow equal or superior to ours. You’ve been conditioned to think that way by our continued voluntary participation in your federal system. Allow me to disabuse you of that wrong-headed notion now.
We do not want your policy demands nor are they welcome. The reasons are simple. They are ridiculous, hypocritical, and show that you have no idea who Texans really are.
If your policy demands, that would restrict lawful ownership and carrying of guns, were worth a damn then Chicago and other major metropolitan areas outside of Texas would be gun-free islands of peace and stability. They aren’t. Instead, they are slaughterhouses for the poor who have been deprived of the basic right to defend themselves using the same tools as the aggressors.
This fact alone shouts to the world your hypocrisy and your latent racism."
Daniel Miller
"The War for American Independence was fought to secure the natural right to be governed by a system to which the people have consented. Thanks to the indoctrination of future lawyers by Institutions staffed with individuals who have no excuse for their continued ignorance, the people and the States continue to defer to a system in which our fundamental, God-given, natural rights are determined, qualified, and restricted by a national government which no longer cares about the consent of the governed. We have come full circle, back to a system of Parliamentary Sovereignty; we have surrendered our revolutionary legacy."
Suzanne Sherman
"The realities of the universe are unforgiving. Our failure to understand their inconstant complexities imposes costs of varying degrees that make our lives less rewarding. Having few instincts to direct us, we must rely upon our mind’s search for truth to distinguish fact from fantasy, and to evaluate the likely consequences of the options before us as we contemplate our actions. As many historians have advised us, our continuing disregard of the basic facts of existence have brought down prior civilizations, and help to explain the current demise of Western Civilization."
Butler Shaffer
"I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."
John Taylor Gatto
"Capitalism, the private ownership and therefore private handling and management of property, competes with states, which involve taking property, pooling it and using it as the politicians, interest groups and bureaucrats see fit. Capitalism is in direct conflict with states. The economic means of capitalism compete directly with the political means of power of states.
Capitalism competes with socialism, and states are socialist in nature, in their very construction by which they absorb, pool and distribute money. That is why states must be strongly limited in scope and power. Otherwise they cause the people they rule to stagnate, go backwards or fail to progress as they might have done."
Michael Rozeff
"In the same way that some battered wives cling to their abusive husbands, the more debacles the government causes, the more some voters cling to rulers. The craving for a protector drops an iron curtain around the mind, preventing a person from accepting evidence that would shred his political security blanket. In the days after the 9/11 attacks polls showed a doubling in the number of people who trusted government to 'do the right thing.' The media fanned this blind faith—as if trust in government was the high road to public safety. The Bush administration exploited the trust to unleash itself at home and abroad, and the nation is still paying the costs of its post-9/11 infatuation with government."
James Bovard
"Obama was the perfect front man for a cruel empire. Being partly black, he could be presented as humanitarian and considerate of the dark-skinned peoples the George W. Bush regime had ground under the American boot. Being a one-term senator from Illinois, he had no following and no independent political base, and thus had no ability to stand up to powerful organized interest groups. Installed in office, he delivered the violence and mayhem that the ruling oligarchs wanted as they destroyed independent governments, controlled oil flows, and sought to establish Washington’s and Israel’s hegemony over the Middle East."
Paul Craig Roberts
"The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation."
Frank H. Knight
"When I tell you that you are an American tax slave, I become one of the few who question the tax system and are labeled 'tax protesters' and as 'unpatriotic.' The propaganda machine has successfully persuaded the American people to think of themselves as 'taxpayers.' After all, you won't think bad thoughts about something you are.
People are tricked by phrases like, 'paying our fair share.' This is altruistic nonsense because no one can pay taxes with debt money, which are those fiat IOUs that are our greenbacks.
The income tax is a people control and information system. There is no better description of the income tax system than organized crime. It's payola to the machine."
Bob Livingston
"If all human nature be corrupt, it is needless to strengthen the corruption by establishing a succession of kings, who be they ever so base, are still to be obeyed. NO man since the fall hath ever been equal to the trust of being given power over all."
Thomas Paine
"Few are truly naive enough to think we can just sweep conflict under the rug (by banning it) and it’ll disappear.
That if we close our eyes tightly enough the baddies will go away.
I don’t think we need less conflict -- one of the main causes of polarization is people are opting out of conflict, opting for fake, superficial, posturing forms of conflict…
I think we need more conflict.
But the healthy stuff.
The raw, heavy, sweaty, inescapable, cathartic conflict.
Where truths come to light and are sat with and digested.
This will mean, of course, sometimes, things we don’t like could very well rise to the top. But rather than repressing, suppressing, or depressing-- responses that, psychologically speaking, only serve to turn ideas into fixations, obsessions, and ideological possessions (AKA demons) -- the mature society would face it and see it for what it is: part and parcel of the human condition…"
Chris Campbell
"Americans are implicitly taught that history began yesterday. If any people anywhere behave contrary to 'American interests' -- how that phrase makes my skin crawl -- they must be incorrigibly wicked, and motivated only by envy at our sheer awesomeness.
Meanwhile, diplomacy has all but disappeared from the foreign-policy elite's repertoire.
Negotiation, if we can call it that, begins with a set of preconditions to discussion that the elite surely know the target country cannot and will not meet.
When that country inevitably objects, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment uses the refusal as evidence that only war can solve the problem. War, they assure us, is an option they pursue only reluctantly and as a last resort."
Tom Woods
"I would have never guessed I would be fighting against the mass appeal of communism again in my lifetime [I am in my late fifties]. Mind you, my definitional standard for what makes a communist may be more broad than the accepted constructs by 'polite society'. I suggest that every government supremacist no matter their perceived affiliation along the cleverly manipulative falsehoods of the bidirectional nonsense of left and right ends up in the same continuum as the aspiring communist sympathizer. There are individualists and collectivists but nothing in between, all collectivists are naturally interventionists and through their simpleton conceptions of employing violence to form society, they set the conditions for leviathan states that snuff out every aspect of liberty and freedom informed by atomized moral volition."
Bill Buppert
"America has become a nation controlled by men who seek
ever-increasing power. Justice is whatever they want to happen.
Truth is whatever they announce has occurred."
Jim Garrison
"No action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen."
Murray Rothbard
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