Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"[Time] magazine has stooped to a new low by participating in the use of a sixteen-year-old girl [Greta Thunberg] with disabilities as the Marxist Left’s political prop of the moment.  She has been programmed to spout all  the favorite platitudes of the hard Marxist Left, after which their comrades in the 'media' scream at and denounce anyone who would dare to question or criticize the poor mentally-disabled child.  She is being used as a human shield, in other words, to deflect criticisms of their totalitarian socialist agenda.  She is only sixteen, but years of intense communist indoctrination by her parents, which is always filled with hyper-hateful denunciations of existing society, is probably why she has deep, dark bags under her eyes, a permanent scowl on her face, and every word to come out of her mouth drips with hatred, resentment, sanctimony, and arrogance. She has been constructed in the image of the editors of Time magazine, in other words."
Tom DiLorenzo

"The truth has become a lie, and lies have become truth. This could only happen in a land where logic and reason have been replaced by emotion and ignorance. This is a classic result in any society where the individual thinker is shunned in favor of the common collective. Since intelligence does not exist collectively, the masses are left with little more than confusion, gullibility, and indifference.
The only way to reach a full understanding of our political predicament, especially regarding government as a whole, and the government controlled media, is to believe nothing and question everything. This advice should be taken literally, as anything less can lead only to confusion and a detachment from reality. Those who fail to question will be left in a state of bondage, and relegated to a life consumed by ignorance."
Gary D. Barnett

"Political demagoguery is a valuable and effective weapon in the arsenal of the establishment elites. As long as there is a wide ideological division between groups in society, biases and desires can be tapped into and manipulated, allowing those in power to direct vast portions of the public down one path or another. When fear of an enemy and the drive to 'win' become more important than truth and evidence, the population has attached its own puppet strings and handed them over to the spin doctors.
This is why the false Left/Right paradigm has been so useful to the establishment for so long. Anytime the populace starts to wake up to the web of control, all the elites have to do is push one or both sides of the political spectrum toward extremism and let the people rage at each other instead of picking up their torches and pitchforks and tearing down the oligarchy. This method of division and diversion keeps the masses occupied and feeling as though they are accomplishing something while actually accomplishing nothing."
Brandon Smith

"War and terrorism are mutually reinforcing.  War sparks terrorism which encourages an intensified military response which in turn stimulates an intensification of terrorist attacks.  It is an arms race of violence between the forces of archism–states and would be-states–with civilians the biggest losers."
James and Michael Ostrowski

"There is no reason whatsoever for Russia to be so afraid of the United States, a bankrupt, socially degenerating country that after two decades has proved unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban in Afghanistan, just as the cowardly Israeli army, good only for killing women and children, has been chased out of Lebanon twice by a small Hezbollah militia."  
Paul Craig Roberts

"Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as 'conservatism.' Objectivists are not 'conservatives.' We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish."
Ayn Rand

"Does peaceful trade require government power to be effected? Government power in this country is supposed to rest on the consent of the people as a body. Does that body have any right to control trade of its members? Perhaps in wartime, there might be such a power, but in peacetime such a right cannot be justified. Citizens of the U.S.A. should not have their government controlling their trade with Mexico and Canada or any other country with which we are not at war. Trade is a matter of property rights, of which the freedom to exchange is included.
People acting as a body comes down to majority rule implemented by government power, and that’s fraught with immense infringements of rights unless its objects are heavily proscribed so that they do not suppress rights. In our system, the government has gained the power to act upon every area of life of everyone, and it’s all a massive infringement of property rights. It’s wrong, and we pay a heavy price for allowing this power to prevail and control us. Trade is such an object of personal scope and personal property right that should be strictly off limits for government action or the action of the people as a body. Unfortunately, it is not, and the government routinely passes trade laws."
Michael Rozeff

"The socialist doctrine based on superior morality has steadily penetrated governments, academia, media, and international institutions over the years. Socialism was being injected in small doses by invoking ethical arguments of the highest degree for the benefit of some groups or individuals or human society as a whole. The key to the success of evolutionary socialism has been its gradualism and steadiness. It has helped to mask socialist transformations as continuous improvements to human society due to the acceptance of ever-higher moral qualities and the defense of noble causes. For example, the contemporary left utilizes a desire to 'save the planet' as a pretext to inject even more socialism into the body of free societies."
Allen Gindler

"However good their intentions are, progressives cannot be trusted with unchecked power, for the simple reason that no human beings can be trusted with unchecked power. It is precisely because their behavior is so well explained by power maximization that we should do everything we can to keep them from it."
Bill Buppert

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."
H.L.Mencken

"The essential thrust of psychological warfare is to build group consciousness that supports 'the system' against individualism and creative survival.
Political power is built upon group consciousness, not individualism. Politicians appeal to the individual and human liberty, but their careers are built upon helping more and more power flow to the state.
When the American politicians talk about 'human liberty,' they certainly are not talking about our or your personal and individual liberty. 'Human liberty' is a code word for groupism (the crowd). Politicians and bureaucrats never remotely consider personal or individual liberty.
Government under any name or label is all about making and passing laws for the people. Where there are many laws, there is no individual freedom. Where there is no individual freedom, there is no freedom at all."
Bob Livingston

"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.
Climate change is a real phenomenon. I lived for 10 years on Long Island Sound. It has a rocky coast because it used to be a glacier, frozen solid from Orient Point to New York City It melted. That’s climate change. The problem is that this happened 20,000 years ago and took thousands of years to play out.
And that’s the point. Climate change is real, but it’s slow, complex and unpredictable."
Jim Rickards

"The military mindset believes that a just war is a war justified by the U.S. government."
Laurence Vance

"It’s really not that complicated. People with concealed carry permits carry a gun because they’re too weak to tote a cop."
Michael Shannon