Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"We are now experiencing the consequences of decades of teaching black Americans to hate white Americans and of teaching white Americans to accept guilt for the black slave trade that originated in the black Kingdom of Dahomey in 1600.  A black labor force was inherited by the United States and by the Confederate States of America. It was the gift of history.  But in the history that is mistaught, the inherited institution of slavery was imposed on black people by white supremacy."
Paul Craig Roberts

"How many black churches have been oppressed by authoritarians under recent orders to close or to limit their Christian services?
Thousands? Tens of thousands? Too many, by my count.
If the murder of multiple black men by police, at random intervals over the course of a few years, is systemic racism worthy of revolt and a re-do of government, then how about the forced simultaneous closure of every single black church in the country? …
OK, maybe you could argue that more white churches than black churches were closed. But hold on. … The same argument exists that more white people than black people are unjustifiably murdered by armed government workers. …"
Anonymous

"While endless media op-eds tell us how dangerous a phrase like 'all lives matter' is, it is not a concern for the majority of people. A vocal minority has hijacked a cultural moment and is now using it to simply spread divisiveness by labeling everything from television shows to phrases they don’t like as racist. This progresses no serious conversation and merely opens the door for easy villainization, a favorite hobby of virtue signalers looking to 'belong' and ‘be part of’ what they see as a definitive movement in history. 
But a moment cannot be definitive if we, as a culture, are putting too much stock in what the loudest and most extreme among us say. And as this movement to bully people into toeing the line and only expressing themselves through approved language like 'black lives matter' grows — but we see it does not match up to practical reality — it’s time we reevaluate whose outrage exactly we should be listening to."
Zachary Leeman

"Because the State can use violence to suppress people’s choices but it cannot suppress their desire to make that choice. Remove the violence and the behavior returns.
But at some point there is a limit to what level of violence and pettiness by the State the people will endure. And when that limit is reached, it explodes.
Place that explosion in the context of cultural degradation and ennui where basic definitions of culture, economics and biology are inverted and you get what’s happening across America and Europe right now.
Seattle is getting a first hand lesson on how this plays out."
Thomas Luongo

"The socialists never propose market solutions because they think profits are bad and employers exploit workers. BLM, if it has not already, is going to come out for some sort of community control over police or policing, and this will be a socialist structure. It will lead to internal divisions and dissension. It will lead to a deterioration in services. If BLM intends to build up its own police, it will discover that there are significant costs of training that it has taken for granted, as well as a wide range of other costs. What it wants is for someone else to foot the bills."
Michael Rozeff

"The fact is that there is no institutional or systemic discrimination against black people in American society. Contrary to the assertions we hear today, in the last half a century America has gone into untold lengths to support and assist its black community. During this time, American society has launched countless programs and initiatives and spent hundreds of billions of dollars aimed specifically at uplifting the African American demographic. The support that the black community receives from American society comes in every form conceivable: legislative, financial, educational, commercial, human, material."
Vasko Kohlmayer

"The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is."
Anonymous history professor at UC Berkeley

"Liberals will fight for the right of Marxist radicals to burn the American flag to show their hatred of it but cannot tolerate working folks flying the battle flag of the Confederacy to show their love of it."
Pat Buchanan

"When the rioting and looting in US cities was at its height, Bernie Sanders declared that business owners have been 'looting' the poor for forty years which would seem to be a backhanded endorsement of the violence and theft taking place, or, at the very least, a justification for the looting and burning. Again, because Sanders and his followers view business activity as violent theft and government action as either peaceful or promoting peace, there would be no reason in their minds to have police protect private property or its owners, since 'property is theft.' (One doubts that Sanders believes that about his own three houses and his other personal property, but socialists have lived with that disconnect for years and always get away with it)."
William Anderson

"Federal troops clearing out six city blocks of the Woke Taliban is exactly what the Woke Taliban want. These are domestic terrorists, not criminals. Criminals would flee. Terrorists will want to make a statement, and the arrival of federal troops will certainly result in catastrophe, in martyrs, in dead and wounded innocents, in everything being lit on fire.
Besides, this is a local problem, a local crime… And I can’t even begin to articulate how little I care about what happens in Seattle, or in any Democrat-run city…
You get what you vote for, and the idiots of Seattle have been voting Democrat, by a wide margin, for decades. In 2017, they made this lunatic Jenny Durkan their mayor, and now the citizens of Seattle are reaping that whirlwind — and that’s not Trump’s problem, that’s not my problem, that’s not your problem… Let Seattle voters lie in the bed they made, and anyone who needs me will find me over here eating caramel corn, giggling, and enjoying life in Leavemethefuckaloneistan."
John Nolte

"This is what Whites have done for many years now; apologize for any 'insensitive' remarks. But only if they are made about Black people. And that is the crux of the problem here; these public acts of contrition never work. In most cases, the hapless 'racist' is still fired. They are still considered 'racist.' So why do they continue to apologize for expressing their constitutional right to free speech?"
Donald Jeffries

"So far, as near as I can tell, the great virus hysteria has gone from being the next black plague to basically a big nothing. It’s not nearly as bad as the Asian Flu from the 50s or the Hong Kong Flu from the 60s. Forget about the Spanish Flu—there’s no comparison whatsoever. The main effect of COVID isn’t medical; it’s the hysteria that’s destroyed the economy. And political actions are even more insane than those after 9/11."
Doug Casey

"Facts no longer matter in the US or in the Western World. Factual accounts that do not satisfy the woke emotions are dismissed as racist or sexist or some other form of sin. In other words, truth in America has lost its power.  It is no longer possible to combat destructive ideologies with truth. You can test this yourself. Try to convince CNN, New York Times, NPR, a white liberal professor, a member of Antifa, or a black protester that George Floyd killed himself by over-dosing on a dangerous opioid.  They will dismiss the toxicology report as a coverup of racist police violence against blacks, and they will dismiss you as a racist white supremacist."  
Paul Craig Roberts

"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…”
The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of 'significance' pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…"
Dr. Richard Horton

"China Derangement Syndrome (CDS) is a terrible affliction where someone who has overdosed on mainstream narratives suddenly starts believing a nation on the other side of the planet is a very big problem that 'we' need to 'do something about'.
Trump supporters are exactly as moronic, brainwashed and hysterical about China as Democrats are about Russia. They’ve forever forfeited all legitimacy in criticizing Russiagate."
Caitlin Johnstone

"In the distant past, fooling the general population was a more difficult task. People for the most part were more skeptical than today, and could not be bombarded with lies and trickery via a controlling media source. While politicians have always been suspect throughout every period of history, scrutiny of their behavior and policy decisions was more evident in the past than in current times. This is of course due to modern technology and the ability to reach all immediately, but it is also partially due to the massive growth of the welfare state, where most everyone believes they can benefit at the expense of their neighbor, and will ignore the truth for self-greed and agenda consideration. This dynamic has caused a tremendous difference in the attitudes of the masses, which naturally seek the easiest way to gain favor, regardless of the underlying consequences. This has happened because of laziness and apathy, but more importantly to a more recent lack of morality and a collective lessening of intellect."
Gary D. Barnett

"Private medicine is profit driven, which makes it susceptible to fraud.  In long ago days fraud was restrained by the moral character of doctors and the respect for truth of researchers.  These restraints, never perfect, have eroded as greed turned everything, integrity itself, into a commodity that is bought and sold."
Paul Craig Roberts

"Progressivism is the virus. It is the cause. It is not the cure. Its modifying of our semi-capitalistic system means making further attempts to eliminate the last vestiges of free, competitive and open markets and the uncontrolled and untrammeled pursuit of happiness by each of us. The result aimed at is actually the further enhanced peonage of most Americans under the controlling chains of the reigning wielders of political power, educational content and media propaganda. Absolutely no re-imagining from democratic socialists, from social democrats, from progressives, from socialists, and all such fountains of anti-capitalism will bring about the nirvana of a society that matches their blueprint. They are unable to identify their own responsibility for the problems our society faces. They revere the very policies and institutions that are so oppressive and so damaging. Their re-imagining is nothing but more of the same and worse."
Michael Rozeff

"Society is a collective concept and nothing else; it is a convenience for designating a number of people. So, too, is family or crowd or gang, or any other name we give to an agglomeration of persons. Society . . . is not an extra 'person'; if the census totals a hundred million, that’s all there are, not one more, for there cannot be any accretion to Society except by procreation. The concept of Society as a metaphysical person falls flat when we observe that Society disappears when the component parts disperse; as in the case of a 'ghost town' or of a civilization we learn about by the artifacts they left behind. When the individuals disappear so does the whole. The whole has no separate existence. Using the collective noun with a singular verb leads us into a trap of the imagination; we are prone to personalize the collectivity and to think of it as having a body and a psyche of its own."
Frank Chodorov

"In the real world, wealth is produced by someone and belongs to somebody. We’re not ants or bees working for the hive. The whole idea of a GDP just allows the 'authorities' to bamboozle people into believing they can actually control 'the economy,' as if it were some giant machine.
The officials pretend to be the Wizard of Oz, and Boobus americanus is trained to think they’re omniscient. Thus whenever the rate of growth slips 'too low,' officials are expected to give 'the economy' a suitable push. Conversely, whenever 'the economy' is growing too fast, the officials are supposed to step in to 'cool' it.
It’s all an embarrassing and destructive charade."
Doug Casey

"I have no need to choose between the dying liberal order and the Mango Emperor, as I have no need to choose between Lucifer and Baphomet. Both major parties in the US are mere complements of one another. One, the Democrats is nothing more than an asylum structure to house the Bolsheviks while the scolding and invertebrate Mensheviks of the Grand Old Politburo are embarrassed that the gibbering of the Democrats says out loud what they are thinking.
Both parties want nothing more than your chained obedience."
Bill Buppert

"If you want to know where the notion came from that the constitution can (and should) be suspended whenever there is an 'emergency,' look no farther than the Lincoln Memorial and who and what it represents.  If you want to know why governors, mayors, and other pipsqueak local politicians think that they will actually be praised by acting like dictatorial tyrants, shutting down businesses on a whim, destroying the livelihoods of their citizens, and enforcing their petty 'orders' with heavily-armed and militarized local police, look no farther than the symbolic meaning of the Lincoln Memorial and the man who it has helped to deify.  Even foreign despots invoke 'Saint Lincoln' to 'justify' their tyranny.  When the former Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf imposed martial law on his country he 'justified' it by saying that Abraham Lincoln had done the same thing in his day."
Tom Di Lorenzo

"We are guaranteed certain freedoms by way of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on one hand and brainwashed into servitude on the other. How else would you describe the inured who claim to love democracy and their 'freedom' and yet advocate for their own slavery by demanding government authority in all parts of their lives?
Such a thought process creates what I call a 'double-minded' person. By definition, double-mindedness is the mental state of believing or attempting to believe two opposing thoughts at the same time.
Double-mindedness is a recognizable psychological phenomenon and it is used to neutralize human thought and action. It is very subtle because it almost defies description. Herein lies its power to deceive and control human emotions.
There is both collective and individual double-mindedness. Almost all politicians are aware of this phenomenon and use it to deceive the electorate."
Bob Livingston

"Journalism has lost any degree of modesty about the likelihood of any comprehensive moral and political view triumphing so decisively that competing views vanish or shrink to the furthest margins of a free society. Indeed, journalism has become just personal propaganda. Once upon a time, journalism was a noble cause for it was about a practical and functional form of truth that may not be even absolute or philosophical, but it was the pursuit of the truths that impacted our society. It was once perhaps a lofty goal that began with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts as was the case with the legal and political professions.
But journalists, have succumbed to bias and no longer try to convey a fair and reliable account of their events. FAKE NEWS has simply become a platform for personal bias warranting no further investigation. Journalism has digressed to nothing more than standing on a soap-box at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London. Journalists are no longer transparent about sources or methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information."
Martin Armstrong

"Without popular fear, no government could endure more than twenty-four hours. The warrior element of government puts the people in fear for their lives, and the priestly element puts them in fear for their eternal souls. These two fears compose a powerful compound—sufficient to prop up governments everywhere on earth for several millennia."
Robert Higgs

"All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.
We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will."
Gustave Le Bon

"Today we have the subordination of church to state.  One recalls the exchange between the Jewish priests and Pilate regarding Jesus’ fate.  Pilate asked: 'Shall I crucify your king?' and in reply, the priests shouted 'We have no king but Caesar.'  Sounds like a typical Sunday morning in America."
Daniel Ajamian