Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:
"So why are people exaggerating this coronavirus? Good question! People have been feeling like the world is ending for thousands of years. Aethelred II took his portrait off the coinage for the year 1000 believing the world was coming to an end and Christ would make his second coming. When that did not happen, he promptly put his portrait back on the coinage."
Martin Armstrong
"Any attempt at decentralization, nullification, or secession is said to be invalid because 'that was decided by the Civil War.' There is no doubt, of course, that the Civil War settled the matter for a generation or two. But to claim any war 'settled things' forever, is clearly nonsense.
It is true, however, that if the idea of a legally, culturally, and politically unified United States wins the day, Americans may be looking toward a future of ever greater political repression marked by increasingly common episodes of bloodshed. This is simply the logical outcome of any system where it is assumed the ruling party has a right and a duty to force the ways of the one group upon another. That is the endgame of a unified America."
Ryan McMaken
"Some may object – when I say everyone should pay his own way and the state should have absolutely no involvement in healthcare – that I’m putting a price on a human life. They say that a life has 'infinite' value. But like most of what you hear in this ridiculous debate, that’s a lie, told by the duplicitous and believed by the unthinking. There are lots of ways to figure out what a life is worth. How much can be negotiated for ransom on a kidnapping? How much is a thug paid for a 'hit'? How much is the annual premium for life insurance? How much is the present value of someone’s estimated lifetime earnings?
But what we’re talking about here, in the context of national medical insurance, is how much you’re willing to pay to keep a complete stranger alive."
Doug Casey
"Our founders never intended for America to have a standing army. They certainly never envisioned a monstrosity like the military industrial complex and its nefarious intelligence agencies. But the public doesn’t seem to mind. Give them the pomp of a good flyover or cannon blast. Watch them tear up at staged reunions between soldiers and their young children. They used to call it bread and circuses."
Donald Jeffries
"It is in the supreme interest of government that the people be systematically and gradually dumbed down. People who still have the mental capacity to question 'public policy' do not think in 'the public interest.' 'Public policy' and 'the public interest' are establishment concepts of conformity. 'Public policy' and 'the public interest' refers to the interest of the state, not the interest of the people.
The suppression of human liberty is always created upon or out of distorted reality. Any political system built upon self-sacrifice (and all are) is an illusion and can only maintain authority at your expense. Distorted reality is any ploy that seeks to persuade you to share what you have with nonproducers or to seek guidance from external authority. Politics is such an ingrained system that few realize that politics is a system of reliance on external authority which perpetuates itself on illusions and distortions."
Bob Livingston
"The standard explanations and justifications for politics are breaking down. Democratic consensus and needful compromise and good governance were always empty bromides, but today our political overlords understand and pander to an altogether different mood. The Trump presidency, like the Brexit vote, was never accepted by the same elites who spent the early 21st century gushing about the sanctity of democracy. The entire pretense for democratic politics, ostensibly the peaceful transfer of political power and the consensual organization of human affairs, now gives way to new and uncomfortable questions. What if we cannot vote our way out of this? What if the structural problems of debt and entitlements and central banking and foreign policy cannot be solved politically? What if the culture wars are unwinnable? What if we have reached the end of politics as an instrument for keeping American society together?
Democracy and politics will not alleviate our problems; only committed individuals working in the intermediary institutions of civil society can. Democratic elections can work locally, and in small countries or communities; Switzerland's system of express subsidiarity comes to mind. And clearly the best hope for America's survival will come through an aggressive form of federalism or subsidiarity, one that dramatically reduces the winner-take-all stakes of national elections. But mass democracy, in a country as large as America, is a recipe for strife, bitterness, endless division, and much worse."
Jeff Deist
"The monopoly of power that is held by the few over the rest of society is all consuming, and the ultimate control sought by these elites is getting ever closer to fruition. It has been affected over long periods of time through incremental measures. It did not happen overnight, but over centuries, and at this point, the final objectives desired are within sight.
This is the most dangerous time for man as I see it, as the elite design for future economic decision-making for all is to be placed in the hands of so-called chosen experts, with power over the entire world economy. All economic decisions are to be based on a controlled allocation for society, which is simply centrally planned socialism, with a top-down hierarchy of control by the few. This ruling system is known as Technocracy, and when implemented, it will be the end of liberty."
Gary D. Barnett
"[A]fter the 2020 elections ordinary Americans will have to deal with the same dreadful question we faced in 2016: How do we secure and perhaps restore our fast-diminishing freedom to live as Americans? And while we may wish for help from Trump, we have to look to ourselves and to other leaders for how we may counter the ruling class’s manifold assaults now, and especially in the long term...
The logical recourse is to conserve what can be conserved, and for it to be done by, of, and for those who wish to conserve it. However much force of what kind may be required to accomplish that, the objective has to be conservation of the people and ways that wish to be conserved.
That means some kind of separation."
Angelo Codevilla
"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The State has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love."
Frederic Bastiat
"The US has been undergoing what amounts to a cultural revolution, because the universities, media, and entertainment have been captured by the memes of cultural Marxism. The last cultural revolution was in the ’60s. This one will be much more serious, with broader participation. In fact, the US is on the ragged edge of a civil war between the Red counties and the Blue counties. They don’t like each other and don’t share the same values. The best solution is separation."
Doug Casey
"This global warming seems to have risen to a religion and it is being used by the Communists/Socialists to kill the Industrial Revolution and redistribute the wealth. Raising all the taxes in the world is only pure punishment – there is no program to reverse climate change – no fantastic machine. Anyone who was really a scientist just has to look at the historic data on temperature and you will discover that civilization thrives when it gets warm, and it contracts when it gets cold. But above all else, it has always changed."
Martin Armstrong
"Assimilation is required if a country of diverse ethnicities is not to become a Tower of Babel. In the US an English population was able to assimilate Irish, Italians, and Polish peoples by having periods of no immigration. Moreover, all were from a Christian European culture. Today the situation is much more challenging. Somalis and Muslims are culturally different from Western populations, and assimilation is considered racist white superiority. The result is separate populations with the recent arrivals claiming to be victims of the white population. It is a sign of insanity that everywhere in the Western world governments are trying to marry unassimilable ethnicities, many of whom are victims of the West’s bombing and invasion of their home countries, with Identity Politics. This is a recipe for the destruction of Western countries."
Paul Craig Roberts
"The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'… Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top."
Edward Abbey
"You know what I haven’t seen yet? A woman who identifies as a man competing in a male athletic competition.
Must only be bigotry keeping them out…."
David Burns
"Never bet on the end of the world. If you are wrong you will be in trouble, if you are right it won’t matter."
Bill Buppert
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