Sunday, November 24, 2019

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"The only time that you should despair is when you are personally powerless to make a difference. As Texans, we should always remember the lessons from our past. Gonzales teaches us that we should stand. The Alamo teaches us what might happen when we refuse to stand down. Goliad teaches us what happens when we do stand down. San Jacinto teaches us what can happen if we never give up."
Daniel Miller

"Slogans masquerade as ideas.  The media is devoid of integrity.  Fantasies such as Russiagate,  Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, Russian invasions, Venezuela represented as 'a threat to American national security,' Western Democracy in which voters decide nothing, self-regulating financial markets—really the fantasies are endless, and they leave America as the blind man of the world."
Paul Craig Roberts

"History of all government is the history of power, violence and slavery.
'Politician' is a deceptive colloquialism for violence brokers. The brokerage is the potential and actual dispensation of state violence through taxation, regulation, fining, kidnapping, caging, maiming and killing in the tried and proven continuum of government compliance. The notion that a single man is incapable of self government but a single psychopath and his connected minions and apparatchiks is the key to a peaceful and just society lording over millions.
It is no more complex than that, all government outside of self-government demands violence to see its project in train and complete. Left or right is simply misdirection, it is always the choice between individualism and collectivism, the choice between non-intervention and intervention. In North America, there is no single political party that doesn’t want the reigns of government so it can take its collectivist vision and enforce it at gun point.
Politicians are the enemy of all free-range humankind.
Have you noticed a trend in the US? No matter what wing of the Uniparty gets in office, government gets bigger at the Federal levels and the state subsidiaries continue to expand their portfolio of zookeepers instructions to the zoo animals?"
Bill Buppert

"Trade wars rarely produce any benefits for either side.  They are the equivalent of sending tens of thousands of soldiers to be mowed down by machine guns on the blood-soaked Somme battlefield in WWI.  Glory for the stupid generals; death and misery for the common soldiers."
Eric Margolis

"War is inseparable from propaganda, lies, hatred, impoverishment, cultural degradation, and moral corruption. It is the most horrific outcome of the moral and political legitimacy people are taught to grant the state. Wrapped in the trappings of patriotism, home, songs, and flags, the state deludes people into despising a leader and a country that until that point they had barely even heard of, much less had an informed opinion about, and it teaches its subjects to cheer the maiming and death of fellow human beings who have never done them any harm."
Lew Rockwall

"Because it is therefore taken for granted that states must exist, a startling blindness to or denial of the necessary costs of creating and maintaining states has existed.  This is true both with respect to existing states and to proto-states, that is, movements that wish to become states.  More often, when proto-states clash with each other or with existing states, anarchy is ironically often blamed for the resulting violence and chaos.  This is an error as the primary cause of the ensuing violence is the perceived need for each entity to completely vanquish its opponents and drive them out of existence entirely.  If any such disputant in modern times has been anarcho-capitalist in its goals and methods, that is the best kept secret of all time. All known disputants have sought to achieve monopoly state power by defeating all competitors.  The sum total of the resulting violence, murder, mayhem, destruction and chaos has been incalculable."
James and Michael Ostrowski

"The truth about economic sanctions is that they are abhorrent. It is the intentional use of power and control by governments to purposely brutalize an entire population of innocent men, women, and children, in order to advance a political agenda. This is the definition of terrorism. It is done without compassion or caring for the mass suffering that will always result. It is a knowingly planned destruction of entire societies, which can only lead to the mass suffering of innocent people. It is unholy."
Gary D Barnett

"Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other."
John Locke

"So many of us are looking forward to some escape route coming from outside of us to rescue us from ourselves; some are looking forward to the second coming of Jesus, some are looking forward to the aliens coming in to save the day, some are looking forward to the Democrats or the Republicans finally capturing the whole entire government and setting things right with the world, and some are looking forward to billionaires setting up a space colonization program so we can get off this accursed blue orb before we destroy it. But there is no deus ex machina here. No one’s going to save us from ourselves. Even if we do succeed in running away from home, we’ll inevitably bring the same inner demons with us that got us into this mess in the first place.
We’ve got to turn inward and evolve beyond our self-destructive impulses. The only way out is through. The mind virus of celestial escapism stops us from doing this, because it offers us yet another false promise of deus ex machina. It lets us run away from doing the hard but necessary real inner work, just like doing drugs or binging on Netflix or any other kind of escapism."
Caitlin Johnstone

"Once we accept that protecting citizens and their property is the central function of government, we must ask what makes it so important. The answer is that we all gain immeasurably from the reliable performance of that function — stable, enforced property rights lower the transactions costs of voluntary, mutually-beneficial arrangements (especially complex arrangements) at almost uncountable margins of choice; they deny others (including government itself) the ability to force involuntary arrangements on others at those same margins. Increasing the former and decreasing the latter as much as possible allows us to become unimaginably more productive and better off, peacefully, without sacrificing any of our liberties."
Gary Galles

"The word democracy is an agenda quite different from its innocent sound. It is a euphemism for despotic government. Democracy is a term that conceals a system of manipulating people by manipulating their thought processes. The word democracy is the most politically correct word in America and in the entire world. Every politician uses the word democracy repeatedly to numb the people and disguise authoritarianism.
Democracy means disarmament of the mass mind into a state of apathy, resembling deep sleep. Change agents cleverly transferred the word republic into democracy for the purpose of the numbing of the senses. The word democracy and all that it implies destroys in our minds the relationship of cause and effect so that our own thoughts betray us. It has made us a pablum society wherein we unknowingly love evil and hate good.
To attempt to defend democracy and gun ownership at the same time is a masterpiece of cynicism and an illusion of the possible. It can’t be done. We have to love one and hate the other. But we must first know the difference."
Bob Livingston

"Men of incalculable stupidity and likely sexual inadequacy talk about nuclear war as winnable. Dream on. Reflect: American cities cannot feed themselves. Three days without food shipments and New Yorkers would clear the supermarket shelves. A week and they would kill for cans of tuna fish. Two weeks and they would be eating each other. A very few nuclear bombs on transportation hubs would prevent distribution of food for months. Even fewer cobalt bombs, designed to produce a maximum of lingering radiation, would make the farm belts lethally radioactive for a decade.
'Defense Intellectuals,' usually stupid enough that they ought to live in trees, chatter about escalation dominance and the intimidation factor and airtight missile defense. They are nuts. What they really need is a codpiece and a subscription to Pornhub Premium.
This is why it is a really, really, bad idea to have a psychopathic cockatoo, two loon Christians, and a pathologically aggressive momma’s boy in a position to start a war."
Fred Reed

"In two words, properly understood and defined, our strength is INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM. This is our basic principle. It’s INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM, not more and not less.
But if the wrong definition of freedom is used, this principle is subverted. Freedom must be understood as the absence of the initiation of violence by other people against you. Freedom does not mean power, ability, security, or the possession of goods. Freedom in the social-political sense means that the person with freedom is not the object of aggression initiated by others, including especially government itself."
Michael Rozeff

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