Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"I would be more than a little nervous if I were the head of the CIA.
Since the U.S. government just assassinated his Iranian counterpart. The neocon chickenhawks like to pretend that they never heard of blowback, but the head of the CIA had better study up on it."
Tom Dilorenzo

"America has always demonized troublesome Mideast leaders that defied its imperil writ.  The region’s complex problems were simplified into cartoon characters that were labeled 'bad guys' or 'terrorists.'  Think of Iran’s Mossadegh, Nasser, Assad, Arafat, Khomeini, Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein, Turkey’s Erdogan and most lately Soleimani.  More are sure to emerge."
Eric Margolis

"The resulting Washington pivot to the current 'maximum pressure' aggression against Iran is fast becoming the Empire most demented and shameful hour – even as it crystalizes like rarely before the difference between homeland defense and imperial aggression.
Under the former, not one American serviceman, contractor or civilian official would be in harms’ way because the ring of hostile bases surrounding Iran would not exist nor would Washington be waging economic warfare on what would otherwise be a prosperous 5 million barrel per day oil trade with the world.
Only empires put their citizens needlessly in harms’ way and thereby trap their leader’s into a cycle of violence which feeds upon itself.
The Donald is now yet another American president ensnared in the kind of tit-for-tat trap that is the modus operandi of Empire First."
David Stockman

"In just the past few decades, this 'endless series of hobgoblins' has included Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi,  Slobodan Milosevic, Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-un, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and now Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani was that rarity; a bogeyman who literally came out of nowhere to be suddenly categorized as one of the world’s most dangerous characters. Who had even heard of him before he was assassinated by our forces? And how did he cause the 'hundreds' of deaths of Americans which are now routinely attributed to him? Hundreds of Americans were killed in Iran by this guy? Are there even hundreds of Americans in Iran presently?
And, like all modern bogeymen, Soleimani has been described as a 'bully.' Alex Jones, now a pathetic shell of what he once was, declared that we couldn’t keep letting Iran 'push us around.' Exactly how has Iran ever 'pushed us around?' And how do you describe an officer with a military that is only a fraction of ours, in size and power, as a 'bully?' That is like Mike Tyson assaulting a kindergartner, claiming they 'started it,' and thereafter castigating him as a 'bully'."
Donald Jeffries

"Climate change is a convenient horse for elites to ride in the implementation of a new world order.
Debating the science of climate change is beside the point. There are heated views on both sides; some science is settled, some not. Global elites treat the debate as settled to mask a larger project. For elites, a global problem once defined conjures a global solution. Climate change is the perfect platform for implementing a hidden agenda of world money and world taxation."
Jim Rickards

"Those who believe in the free and unhampered market economy should be especially skeptical of war and military action. War, after all, is the ultimate government program. War has it all: propaganda, censorship, spying, crony contracts, money printing, skyrocketing spending, debt creation, central planning, hubris – everything we associate with the worst interventions into the economy."
Lew Rockwell

"Capitalism is a system in which the means of production are privately owned. Private individuals allocate resources in ways they believe best suited to satisfy consumer preferences. A system of profit and loss gives further control over productive resources to proven forecasters of consumer demand, while diminishing such control by poor forecasters.
War, it should be unnecessary to point out, has precisely zero to do with capitalism. Wars are carried out by the state, which operates under principles inimical to capitalism: our relationship to it is involuntary and non-consensual."
Tom Woods

"Many Americans actually want to slow down the further degradation of government and society. They’ve pinned some hope on Trump. They actually need radically stronger aims, tools and methods. They have to be seeking to terminate governments altogether. Tinkering at the margins is a failing method of gaining and preserving liberty. Liberty means liberty from government, not liberty secured by government. The latter is a contradiction in terms, and it results in government suppressing liberty and property."
Michael Rozeff

"Modern artists have replaced craft and long hours of practice with pretentiousness, shock value, indignation, and existential angst as ways to cow audiences into appreciating their art, and often added some pretense to political ideals, usually of the puerile Marxist variety.
As government money has replaced sound money, patrons with low time preference and refined tastes have been replaced by government bureaucrats with political agendas as crude as their artistic taste."
Saifedean Ammous

"Common sense tells any sober mind that the political establishment cannot give you anything except that which it steals from you. This is clearly a fact of reality, but the mesmerized crowd has no sense of cause and effect. This can be explained only by the fact that the crowd (the people) are in a state of hypnosis and, therefore, do not possess conscious control of their minds.
Mass hypnosis is not just a state of stupor, but a well-defined system of behavior modification and absolute control. People in an altered state of consciousness will act against their best interests and dissipate their mental and physical energy on political myths and counter-myths. While in a state of hypnosis or learned behavior, obvious stupidity and self-denial becomes 'politically correct.' To the conscious mind, this is madness and confounds communication between the hypnotized and the conscious person. Most of you have experienced this breakdown in trying to communicate with people around you. What is obvious to you is invisible to those under hypnosis."
Bob Livingston

"We can’t be what we can’t imagine. And when our cultural, political and social communities are imagining bigger and badder ways to fail and writing no maps of a future we want to bring into being, then at best we will stagnate as a society, timid from fear of the future. At worst, we’ll devolve into the most palatable version of something we hate."
Amanda Kloer

"No social shifts have cause greater quakes than collectivist women’s causes in concert with the franchise at the federal level enabling the mass transfer of wealth from other people’s wallets and the curious notion of indenturing the unborn through debt without their permission. The notion of collectivism is built on the perversion that humans are nothing but economic engines and beasts of burden to fashion the vision of violence brokers. Taxpayers are the modern equivalent of Hebrew slaves building the pyramids for the Egyptian political class."
Bill Buppert

"By presenting human beings as a species as the great threat, the globalists hope to convince humanity to sublimate itself before the mother earth goddess and beg to be kept in line. And as the self-designated 'guardians' of the Earth, the elites become the high priests of the new religion of sustainability. They and they alone would determine who is a loyal servant and who is a heretic. Carbon pollution becomes the new 'original sin'; everyone is a sinner against the Earth, for everyone breathes and uses resources, and we must all do our part to appease the Earth by sacrificing as much as possible, even ourselves."
Brandon Smith

"The persecution of Julian Assange tells us about the kind of society we actually live in. We are inundated from early childhood with feel-good slogans about freedom and democracy, which we are told must be spread to everyone on earth as forcefully as necessary even if we have to kill every last one of them. 
In reality we live in a society made of lies and led by liars, who violently persecute anyone who exposes the truth. These people are your oppressors. These people are your prison wardens. Their sneering faces tell you that you are free from behind prison bars, and that they’ll end you if you disagree.
This is going to have to change."
Caitlin Johnstone

"I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. All government, of course, is against liberty."
H. L. Mencken

"Climate change has got an aura of moral righteousness about it. Marxists, socialists, and leftists are making Greenism into a new religion. Of course, it’s not designated as such; but these things are actually secular religions. They’re sold on the basis of being morally correct. They have dogmas, sins, saints, devils, clergy, heretics, crusades – the whole nine yards.
That’s a major reason why Greenism and global warmism are so popular. People always want to feel morally righteous, and that God is on their side. These things appeal to emotion, not reason. It’s all about psychology, not science."
Doug Casey

"Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else."
Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"The worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends."
Ludwig von Mises

"Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws."
Cornelius Tacitus

"Civilizations are created by individuals.  They are destroyed by collectives."
Butler Shaffer