Thursday, April 7, 2022

Quotes of the Week

Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:

"Being antiwar or supportive of free speech or even just sort of generally chill and forgiving — all part of the liberal's basic toolkit, once — can inspire accusations of rightist treachery.

This is a tactic by a political mainstream so desperate to control what people say and think that it refuses to concede there's even a word for legitimate disagreement with its dictates. As stupid as mainstream press people are in general, this specific stratagem is clever. First, it provides a massive disincentive for left-liberal thinkers to step an inch outside conventional thinking…

No matter what, it's definitely true now that anyone who disagrees with the standard line on anything, from Russiagate to intervention in Syria or Ukraine to whether or not Anthony Fauci lied a time or five, can sooner or later expect to wake up wearing the wrongthink tag."

Matt Taibii

"Economics starts and ends with scarcity, an inescapable feature of human reality. Any conception of freedom from material and human constraints requires a posteconomics world, either an earthly utopia or a heavenly abundance. In our world, however rich relative to the past, scarcity is the starting point of economic analysis. In our world, individual human actors make 'rational' choices only within the context of constraints: time, capital, intelligence, ability, health, and location. And every choice has an opportunity cost."

Jeff Deist

"Interventionism has become a universally accepted model these days: the idea that the state should and must intervene in the market system to achieve politically desired goals is very popular. It is celebrated by the well-meaning people who believe that interventionism can tame or eliminate the undesirable consequences that they attribute to the free markets—such as financial and economic crises, too great a gap between rich and poor, poverty among the elderly, etc. But this conviction results from a wrong root cause analysis, for it is interventionism, not the free market, that is responsible for the evils that are widely lamented today, and it is self-evident that interventionism cannot eliminate the issues it causes."

Thorsten Polleit

"Consider the fact that mankind has existed throughout history in a perpetual state of war. War is essentially and purposely the slaughter of others for the benefit of the abhorrent rulers and state, little or nothing more. It requires that its participants, whether they claim to be 'patriots,' (a desired state lie and excuse for those prosecuting and participating in this evil, ) righteous protectors, or saviors of country, to become murderers of the innocent; not because they are defending themselves, their families, their fellow men, or their country, but because they are doing the bidding of the heinous ruling class and the governments that prosecute this carnage only for the sake of money, power, and control. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions, and likely over a billion lives have been lost due to war throughout history, and this is just the beginning of what is to come. Is this the best that this human species can accomplish? Is this the true essence of man? Is man so consumed by a deficiency of character and deep-rooted hate that war is eternally inevitable and desired? Are death and destruction permanent ambitions of mankind, and is mass indifference by the collective all that is necessary in order for the carnage of the ruling class to continue its quest for total domination?"

Gary D. Barnett

"Since 1630 and the arrival of the Puritans on the North American continent life has never been the same. They are the busy body 'Karens' at the grocery store, the woke willful idiots at the colleges and universities, the cancel culture bullies on Social Media, the insane hordes of bureaucratic petty tyrants throughout all levels of local, state, and the federal government. Self-righteous, abusive, and closed minded. The puritanical termites of progressivism.

These ethnocultural, ethnoreligious folkway patterns are still largely in effect today. Despite secularization, the Puritan/Yankees are still trying to dominate and control our civil society, and they are not strictly confined to New England. Their descendants migrated throughout America, especially through the Northern States, and also the West Coast."

Charles Burris

"We have come to assume that the US president is a kind of dictator. It makes all the laws, based on advisors and their opinions for which they bear no responsibility. The edicts are issued by regulatory agencies. The courts weigh in over time, provided there are challenges, which can be expensive and slow. 

So far, the courts have been moderately fine, sometimes even great. They have shot down most vaccine mandates for example. And yet the mandates continue. The White House has come to realize that the courts have no police force. They merely issue opinions. Whether and to what extent they are binding is ever less clear."

Jeffrey Tucker

"After two years of COVID lockdowns, restrictions and mandates… after two decades of Patriot Act surveillance… after racking up a $30 trillion national debt that’s hollowed out the middle class while enriching bailed-out banksters and the military-industrial complex, it seems like lashing out against foreign devils should take a back seat to tending our own garden.

At a time we sorely need a reckoning for all the damage done at home by the control freaks and power trippers during the last 24 months… how convenient that the power elite now finds an excuse to spurn the counsel of President John Quincy Adams and venture abroad 'in search of monsters to destroy'."

Dave Gonigam

"The relationship between the agenda of globalists are the agenda of the political left growing increasingly obvious and intertwined. The globalists want to dismantle traditional western structures, and so do leftists. Globalists want to dictate economic growth through carbon controls and climate change doom mongering, and so do leftists. Globalists promote a decidedly communistic approach to private property and economy, arguing in favor of the 'Sharing Economy' and a world in which 'we own nothing and are happy.' Leftist are embracing this concept 

What I see moving forward is that the political left is becoming the Cheka, or the political commissars of the globalist 'Great Reset.' They have been molded for decades for this role and their purpose is to provide an element of social force and the illusion of consensus. The interesting thing about this strategy is that it seeks to exploit people who feel as if they are 'oppressed' by the existing system, or they have been taught to feel oppressed. As with any Marxist takeover, Globalists use the 'have-nots' as a shield while they grab more power."

Brandon Smith

"War propaganda stimulates the most powerful aspects of our psyche, our subconscious, our instinctive drives. It causes us, by design, to abandon reason. It provokes a surge in tribalism, jingoism, moral righteousness and emotionalism: all powerful drives embedded through millennia of evolution. The more unity that emerges in support of an overarching moral narrative, the more difficult it becomes for anyone to critically evaluate it. The more closed the propaganda system is — either because any dissent from it is excluded by brute censorship or so effectively demonized through accusations of treason and disloyalty — the more difficult it is for anyone, all of us, even to recognize one is in the middle of it."

Glenn Greenwald

"White Americans are so demonized that they are in a worse position than Jews under Nazi Germany and are on a path to a similar fate. The situation is worse in the United States, because it is white people who are persecuting white people.  In Germany the Jews didn’t turn against themselves.

The merit system is destroyed.  Merit is declared a 'white construct' and racist.  The allegation that white people only got where they got because of racist privilege is being used to dispossess white people.  Now all is rectified.  You get where you get because of skin color, and black is the preferential color."

Paul Craig Roberts

"Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very ex­citable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called 'herd-poisoning.' Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, in­telligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness."

Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"

"People are increasingly going to form relationships based upon things which are important to them. Those things may have little or nothing to do with the government that rules over them. In fact, their 'democratic' government will likely be openly antagonistic to them.

Large groups of Americans and United Statesers will view the government as not only unimportant but an unnecessary and dangerous parasite. The average person may not recognize that right now, but the thought will eventually filter through. The same way it did when people almost everywhere started transferring their loyalties from kings and princes to nation-states, democracies, 'the people,' and the like.

I know this sounds like an outrageous thought. 'Democracy' is almost like a secular god—you aren’t supposed to blaspheme against it. But, in fact, it’s degenerated into something akin to a scam to justify the ruling class and the elite. Sometimes, it’s no better than a mob rule.

I believe people are finding that, rather than geographically defined nation-states, philosophically defined phyles make much more sense."

Doug Casey


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