Sunday, March 28, 2021

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Knowledge is a bottom-up manifestation of the fruits of experiment, testing, and enterprise conducted freely under the inexorable pressure of the passage of time

In information theory, money is tokenized time. It regulates the tests and experiments of enterprise, and making the ultimate scarcity of time fungible and expressible in all the transactions of an economy. 

Under capitalism, knowledge consists of true understandings, honed by experiments called enterprises. Karl Popper expounded the crucial principle of falsifiability. Unless a theory (or a business plan) is framed in terms that can be disproven it is meaningless. Academic theories do not constitute knowledge or wealth unless they are tested in processes that can falsify them.

Similarly, businesses with governmental guarantees cannot generate growth since they cannot be falsified by bankruptcy. 

For that reason, as Thomas Kuhn, explained in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientific theories themselves are not knowledge. Theories are cyclical and replaceable by new theories or paradigms in the rotating history of thought. 

Only when embodied in technologies that have to work to be used, do theories gain traction and become cumulative as wealth."

George Gilder

"People the world over have lined up to get their vaccines, believing them to be essential to the recovery of their freedom, even though the vaccines have been declared by the experts to be ineffective in controlling transmission, curing the virus, eliminating the need for masks and social distancing, or making it possible to return to the normal freedoms of travel, sports, work, religious gatherings, schools or even a meal out.

So, if we accept the obvious – that the reason for all the hoopla was not to protect the public from a killer virus – then what could possibly have been the purpose of all the Machiavellian controls?

Well, we might want to consider that the controls themselves were the object."

Jeff Thomas

"Socialism in America today is seen as desirable, especially by these younger people, because people blame 'capitalism' for their problems, never realizing that the former capitalist free-market economy of the United States has been operating under national socialism for a century now. Oh no, it's never described as such. There are only code words used to deceive. Things may not be nice just because they have a pretty face.

The only escape from tyranny is mental freedom — a transition from the unconscious to the conscious mind. Mental freedom precedes physical freedom. Mental freedom is not a figment of idealism or philosophy. It delivers peace of mind and unlimited prosperity to the individual right under the nose of oppressive government.

To escape oppressive government is to escape the thought system into which we are born."

Bob Livingston

"Whenever humans attempt to engineer the 'perfect' system -- politically, economically, and socially -- everyone forced into this system suffer the consequences.

History’s attempts at utopia have a long, dark shadow -- typically ending in tyranny, delusion, and, oftentimes, genocide. 

The biggest problem with utopia, however, isn’t just that it strips the individual of his or her agency.

The biggest problem is that utopias tend to attempt to make the individual unnecessary."

Chris Campbell

"Few political follies are more hazardous than presuming that one’s liberties are forever safe. None of the arguments on why liberty is inevitable can explain why it has not yet arrived. Most of the human race existed with little or no freedom for 95+ percent of recorded history. If liberty is God’s gift to humanity, then why were most people who ever lived on Earth denied this divine bequest?"

James Bovard

"Dedicated people who truly want to solve a problem will look for evidence their analysis is wrong, or their policies aren't working, and make adjustments as quickly as possible, no matter the cost or embarrassment to themselves. This is humility.

Crisis religions are arrogant. They reject criticism, insist their Beautiful Theories must be right because they're ideologically pure - they fit snugly into a worldview that must not be challenged. Their plans only fail because their commands were disobeyed or sabotaged.

The high priests of a crisis religion see devils everywhere, leering at them from the rubble of every failure. Only sin can explain why their Beautiful Theories are tarnished. Failure is never their fault, so it must be yours. They find your lack of faith disturbing.

And you know what? A lot of people want to see the world that way, including a great many self-described atheists. They hunger for the comfort of faith and the vibrant energy of militancy. They want to be right, and they want the wrong to suffer for their folly."

John Hayward

"There is a great deal of power and money behind the rise of hard-left ideology and there are certain people that benefit from its expansion. Leftists like to view themselves as the 'underdogs' or revolutionaries fighting against 'the man.' However, every resource of global power brokers has been offered in support of the political left. The 'Man' is the ally of the leftists; in some ways, he is even the creator of the leftist movement.

They aren't revolutionaries at all; they are the jackboots of the new world order. All the evil people are on their side."

Brandon Smith

"We have teenagers committing suicide because they see no future. Over 90% of the deaths are all in nursing homes which the mainstream press refuses to publish. They say 'trust the science' but the truth is science is political. Anyone who disagrees with the narrative is canceled. Even doctors who testified before Congress have been removed by YouTube. That is not science.

We are in the midst of a major political coup and Big Tech is working feverishly against the people, our future, and destroying every hope that our children will ever be left anything better. The total number of deaths of children under 17 by COVID nationwide is 42. Yet schools are closed and in LA they must be tested every day to go to school. Children are to grow up assuming everyone is a threat? Is this to reduce the population by keeping the next generation skeptical about others?"

Martin Armstrong

"When the ruling class desires a war, they simply tell the voting public that those in other lands should be killed because it is a patriotic duty to do so. So all those that do the actual killing can excuse their murderous behavior by claiming duty and honor. Duty to country (government) is always a sign of ignorance and excuses for tyranny, while duty to self, which requires personal responsibility, compels intelligent thought, caring, reasoning, and courage."

Gary D. Barnett

"One thing about freedom is, freedom doesn’t have to be practical or have a study to say why you should have to have freedom. They need to have a study and a scientific proof to show us why we shouldn’t have freedom. I shouldn’t have to prove that I want to be free and I want to be left alone and I want to breathe the air."

Rand Paul

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists."

Hannah Arendt


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