Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:"Here’s how the game really works. The government doesn’t tax people in order to provide services; they provide services so that the taxing doesn’t look so much like robbery. We are told that the services are the ends, and the taxes are the means. But the reality is the inverse of that — The taxes ARE the end goal.
The Feds tax the people as much as they possibly can without completely suffocating them. Then they haul all the plunder back to Washington DC, where it gets divided up. Naturally, there is a line of people a mile long wanting a piece of this plunder-pie. The people with the best sounding excuse get to go to the front of the line, and get a bigger piece.
The Justice System is custom built around getting to the front of that plunder-pie-line. The cops get a slice of pie to go capture the boogeyman. The prosecutors get a slice to shame and vilify the boogeyman. The public defenders get a slice to limp the boogeyman through the process. The judges get a slice to keep up the pretense of due process. The prison guards get a slice to house the boogeyman. The probation department gets a slice to supervise the boogeyman after everyone else is done with him. The slice itself is the objective. At best, the boogeyman is incidental."
Schaeffer Cox
"Progress towards a condition of social health—a condition, that is, in which the remedial measures of legislation will no longer be needed—is progress towards a condition in which those remedial measures will be cast aside, and the authority prescribing them disregarded.
The two changes are of necessity coordinate. That moral sense whose supremacy will make society harmonious and government unnecessary, is the same moral sense which will then make each man assert his freedom even to the extent of ignoring the state—is the same moral sense which, by deterring the majority from coercing the minority, will eventually render government impossible. And as what are merely different manifestations of the same sentiment must bear a constant ratio to each other, the tendency to repudiate governments will increase only at the same rate that governments become needless.
Let not any be alarmed, therefore, at the promulgation of the foregoing doctrine. There are many changes yet to be passed through before it can begin to exercise much influence. Probably a long time will elapse before the right to ignore the state will be generally admitted, even in theory. It will be still longer before it receives legislative recognition. And even then there will be plenty of checks upon the premature exercise of it. A sharp experience will sufficiently instruct those who may too soon abandon legal protection. Whilst, in the majority of men, there is such a love of tried arrangements, and so great a dread of experiments, that they will probably not act upon this right until long after it is safe to do so."
Herbert Spencer
"Freedom is like a precious commodity to be mined from life. The politicians and global elite deceive the masses into believing that freedom exists mystically and ethereally, to be breathed in like air or enjoyed at one's leisure. They want us to think of freedom like that, as some nebulous, pretty thing to be unwrapped from pretty packages, tangible only when it is a meager privilege bestowed by other men playing God.
Freedom is a black-or-white, yes-or-no, either/or, zero-sum proposition. There are no gray areas or lukewarmness when it comes to freedom.
But the concept of freedom of the individual, or individual liberty, has been shoved down the memory hole and replaced by a popular mentality of diminishing the individual and independent thinker to a collectivist mind (mentality) which can be esoterically swayed, directed and channeled against his own best interest. The virtue and sanctity of the individual person and ego is no more, and anathema to the state."
Bob Livingston
"Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population."
Jeffrey Tucker
"The powerful bask in the warm glow of socialism: The Federal Reserve protects them from the market cost of money — financiers and the super-wealthy get their money for virtually nothing from the Fed, in virtually unlimited quantities — and the Treasury, Congress and the Executive branch protect them from any losses.
Their gains are private, but their losses are transferred to the public.
The Supreme Court ensures the super-rich maintain this cozy crony-socialism by ensuring they can buy political power via lobbying and campaign contributions.
Cronies get the best political system money can buy and you — well, you get to carry a sign on the street corner, just before you're hauled off to jail for disturbing the peace (and you're banned by social media/search Big Tech, i.e. privatized totalitarianism, for good measure).
The Federal Reserve is America's financial Politburo…
Charles Hugh Smith
"Human nature is on trial today, and for very good reason. It is the human that controls his own fate. It is the human that allows others to control his thought and actions. It is the human that cowers in the face of adversity. It is the human that worships the state as God. It is the human that acquiesces to the demands of tyrants. It is the human that fails to protect the innocent. It is the human that applauds war. It is the human that causes his own and all other’s misery."
Gary D. Barnett
"There are two types of people in the world: people who are interested in controlling physical reality—manipulating the material universe, which means creating things—and people who are interested in controlling other people. It’s inevitable that this type always goes into politics. They’re social engineers—basically, criminal personalities.
Unfortunately for those of us who value liberty, the average person likes being told what to do. It gives them a sense of certainty and order, however artificial. Types like Anthony Fauci, a lifelong obscure backbench bureaucrat, saw Covid as an opportunity to become rich and famous.
Now that the Covid scam has changed the nature of the world itself, it’s going to be very hard to evict these people from the positions of enhanced power in which they’ve put themselves."
Doug Casey
"The establishment is now faced with a massive conundrum; by pressing their agenda within the military they are by default creating a separate and opposing military, one that could erase them from existence. Who would you put your money on? An army of diversity obsessed progressives with velvet glove training? Or an army of battle-hardened conservatives who walked through the pyre and came out the other side?
Even if the objective is to debase the U.S. military until it breaks apart, this does not mean America will go undefended. We would reorganize, perhaps as an unofficial militia system outside of federal control. In the end, a woke military cannot survive nor would it thrive; it would only inspire the revitalization of a liberty-minded and free military force that would act as a counterpoint to the globalist agenda."
Brandon Smith
"Bear in mind that this administration’s recent actions are just the tip of the iceberg. In the next few years, you can expect all kinds of policies designed to make gun ownership as restricted, difficult, and expensive as possible. If the Democrats succeed in giving citizenship to the 14.5 million illegal aliens in the United States, including the 2 million in Texas, they will turn nearly every State blue, including Texas. At that point, it will be too late to stop them. Our golden window of opportunity, in which we might have saved ourselves, will be gone forever.
The only security that the Texan people can realistically hope for is in political separation from the Union. The Founders intended the Union to be one of mutual affection and loyalty, not one of coercion. It is abundantly clear that the federal government is both abusing the powers that the States have vested in it, and pretending to possess powers which the States never vested in it. Texans have been in this situation before when Santa Ana’s regime proved unfaithful and abusive. That generation of Texans had the fortitude to make a stand for their freedoms, their families, and their futures. May this generation of Texans prove worthy of their mighty forebears.
Scott Dragland
"As I have explained for decades, a Tower of Babel has no common ground. There are no shared values, no shared culture, no shared holidays, no shared history. In their place is the cultivated hatred taught in public schools with critical race theory, the NY Times 1619 Project, and reinforced with sensitivity training in corporations, universities, and the US military. This means there is no basis for law. Whatever law exists is seen as a tool of the ruling race, not as something to respect.
One consequence is that the public interest disappears because there is no public interest—only the interests of the races, genders, classes. As has been clear throughout history, the lack of ethnic homogenuity means multicultural states are dysfunctional. They have no common basis.
White liberals will dispute this even as they live in an increasingly dysfunctional multicultural state that is thoroughly disunited and themselves spread disunity with their screams for death to Trump supporters.
The American people had a good thing going, and they stupidly let it be taken from them."
Paul Craig Roberts
