Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"While COVID-19 may or may not have been developed in a biowarfare laboratory, politicians and government officials have certainly found ways to weaponize it.
The mandates and edicts being handed down from the federal and state governments have divided the public like few other issues have been able to. Those who have become consciously or unconsciously skeptical of the government’s draconian measures have been vilified by those who have swallowed the party-line hook, line, and sinker. Called uncaring and unfeeling, the vilified have responded by labeling those who unquestionably comply as 'sheep.' 
Mask mandates have become a proxy war for gun rights. Small businesses fighting for survival have become proxy wars over abortion. The debate over the science behind the pandemic modeling has become a proxy war over the issue of global warming. 
Politicians have been able to pour every divisive issue that the people have argued over for decades into the COVID-19 debate. As the debate rages, governments take more power, politicians send more fundraising emails, and political parties sell face masks with their logos emblazoned across the front.
Bars, restaurants, parks, beaches, churches, and schools are no-go zones because millions could die, but if we want to gather in the thousands to protest, loot, and destroy buildings and monuments, we should be perfectly safe. We are told by the CDC that masks are not an effective means to prevent the spread of COVID-19 only to have those same guidelines revised and the wearing of masks mandated. We are the potential victims of a virus that can only travel 6 feet and no more. This is a virus that cannot infect you at a big box retail store but will absolutely kill you if you shop at a business owned by one of your neighbors or attend church services. 
In every instance, the message from the establishment political class is the same: 'Give me more power, and I will fix the problem.' All the while, they will never admit that perhaps there wasn’t a serious problem until they created it."
Daniel Miller

"Americans have gotten used to taking orders, and they’re happy to 'see something, say something.' The police, and especially the military, do what they’re told. People like a strong leader – that’s why Trump is popular. In fact, the worse conditions get, the more people absolutely demand a strong leader.
The US is well on the way to being a police state, and the people will want a strong leader to straighten things out, kiss everything and make it better. But strong leaders are poison to freedom. I’ll give odds that at least one party puts up a general in 2024, because the military is about the only institution Americans still trust. That’s really scary – the Pentagon is really just a multitrillion-dollar version of the Post Office in many ways."
Doug Casey

"Hard to keep pace with American Marxists’ changing heroes and villians, but I assume Martin Luther King still holds his place among the former. So we might suppose that the 'woke' among us would revere his best-known adage from his most famous speech: 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.'
And yet the snowflakes attack as 'racist' anyone who denounces the criminal character of BLM’s thugs, thieves, and vandals. They demand that we judge them only by the color of their skin.
Meanwhile, observe a similar hypocrisy among unions. These Marxists supposedly improve the lives of their members on the job, right? (For a hefty amount in 'union dues,' of course, as all good Marxists covet filthy lucre.) So why have we heard not a single peep from any union against compulsory wearing of masks? Governors and localities force employees to swath their faces despite summer’s heat, yet we hear diddly from any union. Could it be that unions exist to strengthen government rather than promote workers’ interests?
Is the Pope Marxist?"
Becky Akers

"We are currently living in a world that has turned all that is sane insane, and all that is insane sane. That is the essence of a backward world, and one that is self-destructive by design. This is a world where nature and natural law have been replaced by the unnatural and manmade laws that have brought about the eradication of every aspect of quality life. It is a world where the human body and soul are considered the enemy, while poisonous toxins, biological experimentation, and genetically modified organisms are considered man’s healing agents. It is a world where logic is shunned and stupidity accepted, where truth is attacked while propaganda is embraced, where self-defense is prosecuted while violent crime is worshipped, and where compassion and reality have been replaced by false emotion and intellectual unconsciousness. Arrogant confusion and mass ignorance now pass for normalcy, while the death of innocents has readily been accepted by the masses. Society’s moral standards have been abandoned, and have been replaced by hate and indifference."
Gary D. Barnett

"So, let's get real about what this holiday means for us now here in grownup land. The fourth of July is no longer for celebrating independence.
It's for seeing its loss and planning its re-take.
With every lawmaker's pen stroke...
With every government circumvention...With every redistributive measure..
The cracks grow deeper, bringing us one step closer to outright tyranny.
They tell us we can’t have our freedom back until we take the vaccine.  
They tell us we aren't allowed to think or act for ourselves, for the public good.
That we aren't allowed our liberty back until we're inoculated.
But, their plan has backfired.
But,through their overreach, they've unwittingly created a different kind of immunity.
...inoculating us against a far-worse disease: tyranny."
Bryan Ward

"We now live in a world where the entirety of all the ideas and learning that has sustained and guided us as humans for the past 200,000 years is being destroyed. Modern civilization as we know it has been around for about 6,000 years, but during these current times, the governing forces are intent on the destruction of all that has been, and all that has been gained throughout history concerning humanity and morality. In order to gain control of current and future generations, all truths of the past must be altered or eliminated, so that the only 'knowledge' allowed is that which has been artificially created in the present. This is necessary in order to bring about a new paradigm of collective sameness and non-human existence, a world governed by the few claimed 'elitists' at the top of the power pyramid. This will require a loss of emotion, sympathy, individuality, intellect, and spirituality. There is a distinct advantage for those that seek to gain power and control to eliminate or alter any real knowledge of our history, so that future generations have access only to information allowed by the ruling element of society. With the loss of our history and heritage comes the loss of any freethinking people."
Gary D. Barnett

"On a continuing basis, Americans are being exposed to a mass experiment in diversity training. It revolves around charges of systemic racism, white supremacy, and racial oppression. White people are accused of being complicit in a mass crime; they are being told that they must be held accountable to 'Black, Indigenous, and People of Color'. They are being told that capitalism is wrong and socialism is right, that the family is wrong, that policing is wrong, and that America is wrong. Some of this sounds like Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
But if people’s preferences are rather impervious to such hectoring, this experiment is going to fail. There will be chaos, but it will fail just as CHAZ/CHOP failed. Americans are not going to change their preferences, attitudes and beliefs in the directions that BLM and antifa want or insist upon or demand. People do not change under such pressures. Pulling down statues will prove to be futile. If anything, as in diversity training, these efforts and methods will backfire.
BLM’s and antifa’s methods won’t work, but they also are building their activities on an untenable foundation. The American system is not built upon oppression by race, as they suppose. America was not built upon slavery, as they suppose. America was not built upon patriarchal oppression, as they suppose. There is therefore nothing in the first place to dismantle or uproot from these distorted perspectives."
Michael Rozeff

"Americans are the world’s most gullible people. They have fallen for every transparent lie of the 21st century from 9/11 through alleged Russian bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops.  Each time the truth eventually comes out. Controlled demolition brought down World Trade Center Building Seven. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had no al-Qaeda connections. There were no Iranian nukes. Assad did not use chemical weapons. Russia did not invade Ukraine.  Yet the knowledge that they have been lied to and deceived does not shield Americans from falling for the next lie.
A people unable to catch on to their constant manipulation has no future."
Paul Craig Roberts

"I do not need power-drunk pseudo monarchs, little mini tyrants in my supposedly conservative county sending out ridiculous childlike amateur hour edicts demanding people wear masks in situations where the risk of transmission is somewhat close to zero. You can take your mask mandate and shove it right up your ass, you understand? Because I will not comply.
I will use my own adult mature 45-year-old judgment to determine when and where to wear a mask so that I do not infect someone else and that I do not make people uncomfortable. We are all big boys and we will figure it out."
Dan Bongino

"I’d always attributed the Left’s violence against historical monuments to rabid rage.
Sure, they claim to hate whoever it is they tear down.
But that’s nonsense, of course, as proven by the destruction of the statues of those they supposedly revere: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Matthias Baldwin, etc.
Clearly, these people are piranhas. Sure, they love to attack an enemy, but they’ll settle for whatever is in front of them (even an innocent elk).
This understanding served, until I just now realized there’s something else to it as well:
They target statues because they are statues. They are inanimate: they cannot fight back.
They target statues because they are utter cowards."
Adam di Angeli

"This is NOT the Black Plague and the wholesale destruction of the world economy will bankrupt another 20%+ of all small businesses and further their agenda to NATIONALIZE companies. They are using this virus, that they may have planted, to achieve this dramatic Marxist Revolution. They have divided people into groups and furthered the hatred to the point that they will be turning violent against each other. This is how even the Nazis succeeded in gaining power — divide and conquer to the point they will seek government and surrender all liberty to restore safety.
Welcome to the NEW REAL MARXIST WORLD ORDER."
Martin Armstrong

"If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught is to fear is his victim."
Jeff Cooper

"America still has all the symbols of liberty and all the trappings of human freedom. It is what I term benevolent totalitarianism. It is totalitarianism made palatable with a democratic aura. Benevolent totalitarianism does not kill with the firing squad. Instead, it kills with things like the 'healthcare' System, vaccines, fluoride in the water, cancer-causing cancer tests and treatments, and every other kind of medical test and procedure you don't need.
Benevolent totalitarianism evolves into the breakdown of law and order through a synthetic and secretly directed make-believe democratic process."
Bob Livingston

"[Self-defense is] justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the laws of society."
Sir William Blackstone

"Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food, and the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.
But to think is an act of choice . . . Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.'
Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think – not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment . . . Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality."
Ayn Rand

"Jefferson Davis, like Robert E. Lee, and so many others from Southern states spent their life in service to the United States. They rallied to the Confederacy only because Lincoln invaded their states.  People are so ignorant today, especially those who go around shouting 'racist,' that they are unaware that in those days people regarded their home state as their country.  The US Constitution gave governing power to the states, reserving to the states all powers not ennumerated to the federal government.  All of this was changed by Lincoln’s war which consolidated power in Washington and eventually turned largely independent states into vassals of Washington."
Paul Craig Roberts

"The American Red Guards are after Christianity now, like their comrades in previous communist revolutions.
Conservatives will lament this, but they make a weak case for Christianity because they only seem to hear half of Jesus’ message.
Yes, Jesus told us we are wicked, sinners, and hypocrites. And he was right.
But he also said we are the light of the world and the salt of the earth. And he was right about that, too.
The whole conservative philosophy is based on the first half of Jesus’ message alone. It assumes human beings are so wicked that all their natural inclinations must be crushed by authoritarian rule. Hobbes said it and Burke agreed with him.
Libertarians – even the atheists – implicitly agree with all of Jesus’ view of humanity. Every one of us has the capacity to be both a murderer, thief, or liar and a hero, philanthropist, or good neighbor.
The non-aggression principle proceeds directly from this view of humanity, allowing force only in defense of legitimate property rights (property being our lives, liberties, and 'stuff') and otherwise leaving each other free to allow the light of the world to shine.
In addition to overreaching government, the conservative view also results in conservatives tending to separate the world into good and bad people, rather than good and bad actions. This makes Christianity a tough sell, especially since it contradicts another key plank of Jesus’ message: that sincere repentance will be rewarded with the forgiveness of sins.
If conservatives truly want to preserve Western Civilization, previously known as 'Christendom,' they ought to consider viewing humanity the way Jesus did and libertarians do and let that guide their policies."
Tom Mullen

"It's been said that the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones. And the same is going to be true about the oil age. These things are what you call non-problems. The real danger is the types who use these things to create hysteria, which they transform into political power."
Doug Casey

"What you are seeing this summer is a culmination of over a century of shaping the conditions for the creation of a prison planet. The combination of many factors to include the government indoctrination of the young in K-PhD in the vast indoctrination complex yielded entire generations of humans whose critical thinking skills were negligible and were innumerate and illiterate on an industrial scale making for perfect fodder for political manipulation as enthusiastic if not willing serfs so sensitive a stray word could send them to the fainting couches."
Bill Buppert

"To make the charge that governments cause distortions in a wide and broad sense is to charge them with routinely causing motions away from 'true, natural or original state[s]'. This charge assumes that such a condition as true, natural and original exists. It assumes that without the government interventions, a system comes to a state that is natural or original. The idea is that government does not allow a natural reality to occur. That would demand a matrix of freedoms that the government undercuts. The government-distorted result is no less a reality, but it is a false and distorted reality. It is false against the standard of freedom, of our being a free country, of our activities being done freely, of our having free markets."
Michael Rozeff

"The unseen government behind the curtain represents the Deep State. This hybrid association of key players from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, mega-corporations, the corporate media, Madison Avenue, the Federal Reserve, shadowy billionaires, and bought off politician hacks, effectively governs the United States with little or no consent of the governed. It's they who pull the wires directing the public mind. It's they who choose your leaders. It's they who reap the economic benefits of financial, trade, and tax legislation.
It's they who are saved by their puppets at the Federal Reserve when one of their financial fraud schemes blows up the world. It's they who control the currency, using it to pillage the wealth of the nation and subjugating the peasants to debt, inflation and squalor. These demagogues promote nonsensical economic policies and solutions designed to mislead an intellectually lazy, iGadget distracted populace into voting for their hand-picked candidate."
Jim Quinn

"The purpose of all the propaganda is to diminish the individual, vilify independent thinkers and glorify the collectivist mind (mentality) which can be esoterically swayed, directed and channeled against the best interests of the individual.
The virtue and sanctity of the individual person and ego are anathemas to the state. You must realize this in order to wake up and realize you are on the Animal Farm — and effect your escape.
What does the propaganda on today's American Animal farm all mean? It means developing a state of mind that gives ones' self and production to the state. Each individual, in order to be a good citizen of the state, must contribute most of his means and be grateful for the services the state returns — whether they are necessary or useful or not."
Bob Livingston

"The same sensitizing dynamic works for history, literature, film, statues, and even words. Like Red Guards with a hair-trigger sensitivity for sniffing out the bourgeois, today’s left-modernist offense archaeologists outdo each other in trying to reframe the world as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and so on. Turning the principle of charity on its head, they insist on the most suspicious interpretation of a person’s motives when the subject matter is associated with their canonical totems of race, gender, sexuality. A Hispanic man flicking his fingers outside his truck window gets fired because this was photographed, tweeted, and spun as the 'OK' white power sign. The result is an atmosphere where inter-personal trust is as low as humanly possible while discursive power flows to the accuser. The new cultural revolutionaries have constructed our emotional and conceptual reality."
Eric Kaufmann

"War is madness, but it is madness that is purposely planned and designed. It is not random, it is not legitimate; it is simply an elaborate plot meant to achieve a desired end for those holding the strings. Those are the very rich ruling elites, the banking magnates and powerful corporate heads that control the money and the politicians. They have self-motivated objectives that are never in the interest of the people at large. Due to their powerful influence of the Federal Reserve Banks, they hold a monopoly on all money production, and therefore have control of the entire monetary policy of the U.S. They also control the political class, those pawns elected under the guise of democracy who falsely claim to represent the common man. In reality, they are no more than puppets in this game of power."
Gary D. Barnett

"We must be mindful that the left will impose a Communistic-style state in Europe. People will not be allowed to freely move as was the case in East Germany. You will need permission to work and they are already imposing Basic Guarantee Income in Spain, assuming they are destroying your job, so you will be content with a minimal living standard while sitting home watching TV. They have seriously underestimated humanity and this is NOT going to end peacefully. The last time they tried this over 200 million people lost their lives fighting for freedom. Well, they’re back! Just look at the World Economic Forum which supports Gates’ vaccines, sponsored Event 201, supports Thomas Piketty’s 400% increase in taxation, and does not believe that corporations owe anything to their shareholders. One of their trustees is Al Gore and they support the entire destruction of fossil fuels and the zero CO2 agenda."
Martin Armstrong

"The only truly meaningful question is not 'What is human nature' but 'What is YOUR nature as a human?'
Ultimately all 'human nature' is individual. A collective is just a concept that encompasses two or more individuals. A conceptual group cannot have a human nature. It’s why libertarians get it and collectivists don’t."
Garry Reed

"What about the 'procedural rights' of the alleged criminals? As someone who is devoted to the natural rights of each person, I would reply that such rights—to person and property—are only substantive and never procedural. No one can derive from John Locke anyone's 'right' to bail, or to put off punishment for three months. Procedures of the criminal law can only be decided on the basis of utility and effectiveness, and we have seen that there is no point to procedures that delay swift and immediate punishment. It is grotesque to worry about the 'rights' of criminals when the persons and property of all of us are at risk every day in a rising tide of crime. It is almost as if the current procedures of criminal law are designed deliberately to encourage street criminals and to weaken defenses against crime. But to make such an assertion would be to lay oneself open to the gravest charge in the lexicon of the modern academic: of falling prey to the 'conspiracy theory of history.'
Once disposed of the bogey of 'procedural rights,' other methods of swift punishment, of 'taking the law into one's own hands,' that have had a strong tradition in American history but have had bad press in recent years, can be disinterred and resurrected. 'Vigilante justice' worked far better, and far more smoothly, than has been credited by modern propaganda. But whether justice be done by the armed citizenry or by the police, let it be done, and done swiftly."
Murray Rothbard

"The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments."
Ludwig Von Mises

"As for the Redskins name, I would suggest they change the name to the 'Foreskins' to better represent their community, paying tribute to the dick heads in Washington DC."
Part of an e-mail sent to Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
H.L. Mencken