Quotes of note:

[Crafty_Dog]

 “We do not want a deterioration of international relations, we want to be respected. We want our people, our values to be respected. We have always been a peace-loving state. Practically there is not a single occasion in the history of the Russian or Soviet state when we first started military actions. We have not attacked anyone, we only secured the rights and dignity of people as peacekeepers.” —Russia president Dimitry Medvedev

“I could care less about the color of Barack Obama’s skin, but the thinness of it is starting to wear on me.” —Dennis Miller

[JDN]

In today's L.A. Times there was a good article on Sen. Biden; good and bad was pointed out.
But I did like the quote, "Respected, but not always popular".

Not bad for one's epitaph

[Crafty_Dog]

“Not only is [Sarah Palin] young, they’re saying she’s the prettiest candidate for vice president since John Edwards.” —Jimmy Kimmel

[Crafty_Dog]

“A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?” —Marcus Tullius Cicero
 

[Crafty_Dog]

There comes a point when every society advances enough to eliminate natural selection.Then you get liberals.

[Crafty_Dog]

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
-- Frederic Bastiat, "The Law," 1850

[Crafty_Dog]

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

-- Woodrow Wilson, after signing the legislation that created the Federal Reserve

[Crafty_Dog]

"Separation of economics and State"  Ayn Rand

[Crafty_Dog]

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, page 413

[Crafty_Dog]

a) The price of freedom is infernal vigilantes

b) I'll keep my money, freedom, and guns. You keep the change.

c) Democracy has no convictions for which people would be willing to stake their lives."
Dr. Ernst Hanfstaengl

d) "Military power wins battles, but spiritual power wins wars."
Gen G.C. Marshall
       
e) "We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a
symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other."
Gen G.C. Marshall

[Crafty_Dog]

"Unsustainable developments usually have a longer life than is good for the reputation of the prophet."

internet friend Bob Polhausen

[Crafty_Dog]

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. —Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

[Crafty_Dog]

Friedrich Hayek in "The Constitution of Liberty," 1960:


Not only is liberty a system under which all government action is guided by principles, but it is an ideal that will not be preserved unless it is itself accepted as an overriding principle governing all particular acts of legislation.

Where no such fundamental rule is stubbornly adhered to as an ultimate ideal about which there must be no compromise for the sake of material advantages—as an ideal which, even though it may have to be temporarily infringed during a passing emergency, must form the basis of all permanent arrangements—freedom is almost certain to be destroyed by piecemeal encroachments. For in each particular instance it will be possible to promise concrete and tangible advantages as the result of a curtailment of freedom, while the benefits sacrificed will in their nature always be unknown and uncertain.

If freedom were not treated as the supreme principle, the fact that the promises which a free society has to offer can always be only chances and not certainties, only opportunities and not definite gifts to particular individuals, would inevitably prove a fatal weakness and lead to its slow erosion.

[prentice crawford]

  "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
                   Friedrich Nietzsche

[prentice crawford]

 "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
                                     Henry David Thoreau
 

[Crafty_Dog]

'We should not expect the state to appear in the guise of an extravagant good fairy at every christening, a loquacious companion at every stage of life's journey, and the unknown mourner at every funeral.'

[Crafty_Dog]

For some reason, this strikes me as profound:

"I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bat, and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn't my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?"

[Crafty_Dog]

"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation." --C.S. Lewis*

[Crafty_Dog]

"Liberals will always be against the right to self-defense because it gives them cover for their personal cowardice."

Cold War Scout

[G M]

"Liberals will always be against the right to self-defense because it gives them cover for their personal cowardice."

Cold War Scout

Brilliant ! CWS for the win!

[Crafty_Dog]

“I have never understood why it is greed to keep the money you’ve earned, but not greed to want to take someone else’s money”  Thomas Sowell

[Crafty_Dog]

You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society."

-- Václav Havel

[Crafty_Dog]

Confucius:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

[Crafty_Dog]

There is a fact that stares us in the face but which we refuse to see; the inverse relation between grievance and protest. The less justified the grievance the more violent the protest. When the wrong is tangible and obvious the protest will be limited and specific. It is when the wrong is vague or even fictitious that the protest is likely to become revolutionary, to be directed against the Establishment, the power structure, and the whole way of life of a society.

- Eric Hoffer, The Destructive Rush for Happiness, column, 1968

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/hermann_goering.html

[Crafty_Dog]

Pro tip: don't be the second person to recognize that things have escalated.

Rob Crowley

[Crafty_Dog]

Not exactly a quote, but quite pithy:

Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.

[DougMacG]

Not exactly a quote, but quite pithy:

Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.

Poor people have poor ways.

[Crafty_Dog]

"Let’s set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace–and you can have it in the next second–surrender.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face–that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand–the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he would rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin–just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said that “the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits–not animals.” And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

[Body-by-Guinness]

Nicholas A. Christakis
@NAChristakis

Here is a problem I have with so many of the statements by university presidents, including the recent one from Harvard: How and why did Harvard (and Penn, Cornell, etc.) become such an easy place for such anti-semitism to be expressed in the first place?

These university leaders profess to be shocked -- shocked! -- to discover all this sloppy and illiberal thinking on their campuses. But they do not seriously ask what the *source* of all this anti-semitic (and not anti-Israel per se) expression is.

[Crafty_Dog]

Exactly so. 

[Body-by-Guinness]

Lynn Chu

The Obama-Biden foreign policy is pure socialist leveling. Average the entire region out ignoring all reality. Pretend the Middle East is a statistic rather than nations, cultures and religions. Weaken America. Strengthen her worst enemies. This is literally their “policy.”
It’s an Obama policy since Biden has no ideas of his own.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Second post, perhaps an ego driven one. While chatting elsewhere with someone regarding the recently released en toto surveillance video, I typed the following, which I feel succinctly captures WHY doubt is so easy to embrace where they current narrative is involved:

Oh there were folks that acted wretchedly—on both sides (say her name: Ashli Babbit)—many of whom arrived on busses, that were working for federal “law” enforcement in various capacities, some of whom have since been shown to have ANTIFA affiliations (wait, what, our rulers and moral superiors would not launch false flag or entrapment operations on American soil, other than the ones where the’ve already been caught doing so, would they?), but for the most part the vast majority of the video captured during the event does not support the narrative foisted by the MSM, Democrats, and sundry federal factotums deeply invested in the status quo, distinctions without a difference though they be.

[Crafty_Dog]

Thread Nazi here

This would be better in the Insurrection thread 

[Body-by-Guinness]

Eli Steele
@Hebro_Steele

Leftist blacks and their allies have spent the last several decades gaslighting us that our nation is systemically racist. They created articles, books, TV shows and films to overwhelm us with poetic truths. When we objected, they denied us straight answers and instead subjected us to racial trainings of every kind. They lied to us that this was the difficult work, the difficult conversations that was needed to be done in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion. New allies that agreed to put race before humanity were rewarded with cheap lawn signs that virtue signaled their goodness to their neighbors. In the meanwhile, these Leftists leaders rode their grift along with the exploitation of white guilt to dizzying heights, including the presidencies of Harvard, MIT, and Penn. Why then would we expect them to react with integrity and morals when the true and undeniable evil of antisemitism emerged before their very eyes? After all, they long ago met the devil at the crossroads and sacrificed their humanity for racial essentialism and that is the moral rot that we saw on full display yesterday.

[Body-by-Guinness]

2nd Post:

Legal scholar Eugene Volokh in an interview with Politico, Dec. 5:

To the extent that people do conclude, “Yes, this speech is beyond the pale, we have to suppress this kind of speech,” and that it’s legitimate for the government to suppress this kind of speech or for private universities that have before endorsed broad free speech rights . . . I think it would be very dangerous.

There’s a phenomenon I call “censorship envy,” which I think we’re seeing a lot of here. It’s just a reflection of what I think is human nature. If somebody says things that I find really offensive, but everybody else has to deal with things that they find offensive, I can say, OK, fine, I’m just going to try to ignore this person or argue against them or just have to deal with it, because everybody has to deal with it.
But if I see that other groups have gotten speech that they dislike suppressed, then I think what kind of chump am I if I tolerate speech I dislike. I should get at least the kind of protection against offensive speech that other groups are getting. And I think we’re seeing that in a lot of arguments for suppressing the anti-Israel speech.

[Body-by-Guinness]

3rd post:

@hughhewitt
Bravo Governor Shapiro. To repeat: The Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers must retire President Gay today. They must also exit every administrator and faculty member complicit in the building over years of a hard left tower or ideological conformity and anti-Semitism. Throw them all out at every level and from every school and department. (Pay them off from the $50 billion dollar endowment if necessary.) Start over and really commit to free speech and intellectual diversity. Dismantle the DEI bureaucracy and the oppressor-oppressed idiocy and return to merit. This is not hard. It will require courage. It existed in Cambridge for hundreds of years. Go and get it back.

[Body-by-Guinness]

“Few phrases are as reliable as ‘my truth’ for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk. Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun. If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths. ‘My truth’ is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the ‘truth’ for a narrow ideological cause.”

– Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal ($). He was writing about the views of the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay. As of the time of writing, Gay is still in a job, but for how long?

[Body-by-Guinness]

Samizdata quote of the day – end of easy corporate choices edition

Johnathan Pearce (London) · Economics, Business & Globalization · Slogans & Quotations

“In recent years, businesses have been shaped by the beguiling mantra of ‘win-win’. When confronted with any difficult choice – sustainability or efficiency? excellence or equity? stakeholders or shareholders? – their chieftains have kidded themselves into thinking that you can have both. Sustainability leads to efficiency in the long term; equity is the best way of securing excellence; pleasing all the stakeholders leads to higher share prices. This will be the year that finally brings an end to the idea that you can have your cake and eat it. Companies will have to make tough decisions that they’ve been putting off as long as possible. Consumers will no longer wear the idea that, say, the green transition is cost free.

“Win-win was an affordable luxury in an era of free money and rampant virtue signalling. But higher interest rates will make both companies and consumers more cost conscious. And virtue signalling is far from cost free, as several chief executive officers have discovered. Companies will tell their young recruits to put their noses to the grindstone rather than working from home. The yoga classes and pizza parties will be cancelled. The Business Roundtable will soft pedal the talk of stakeholder capitalism.”

– Adrian Wooldridge. He is writing in Bloomberg ($), a business news and information service that at times seems to have bought into sometimes fashionable ideas, but the need to make a profit tends to keep that in check.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Never embrace the ideals of socialism. Never allow yourselves to be seduced by the siren song of social justice. . . At the same time, we have to raise awareness among the business sector, that the masses are necessary—Milton Friedman used to say that the social role of an entrepreneur is to make money. But that’s not enough. Part of their investment must include investing in those who defend the ideals of freedom, so socialists can make no further advances. And if they don’t do it, they [the socialists] will get into the State, and use the State to impose a long term agenda that will destroy everything it touches. So we need a commitment from all of those who create wealth, to fight against socialism, to fight against statism, and to understand that if they fail to do so, the socialists will keep coming.

Argentina’s Javier Milei

[Body-by-Guinness]

Every now and again they reveal themselves directly, warts and all:

“The era of free will is over.” – Yuval Harari, a lecturer at the World Economic Forum (WEF)

https://survivalblog.com/2024/02/01/the-editors-quote-of-the-day-33/

[Body-by-Guinness]

"As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, 'I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman  and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.'"

[DougMacG]

"I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman  and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man."

 - Who do you suppose paid for it? Those are not choices you make with your own money. 

[Crafty_Dog]

"I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman  and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man."

In its own way, there is a lot of insight there pithily condensed into one sentence.

[Body-by-Guinness]

"I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman  and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man."

In its own way, there is a lot of insight there pithily condensed into one sentence.

Adults can play make believe too! On someone else’s dime, better yet!

[Body-by-Guinness]

I’ve my share of issues with Mitch, but he does have a habit of cutting to the meat of the matter now and then:

@KanekoaTheGreat

Mitch McConnell Rips Schumer’s Call for ‘New Elections’ in Israel: ‘This Is Unprecedented’

“It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of the democratically elected leader of Israel. This is unprecedented. We should not treat fellow democracies this way at all. Things that upset left-wing activists are not a prime minister's policies."

"There is Israel's policies. Make no mistake, the Democratic Party doesn't have an anti-Bibi problem, it has an anti Israel problem. Israel is not a colony of America whose leaders serve at the pleasure of the party in power in Washington. Only Israeli citizens should have a say in who runs their government. This is the very definition of democracy and sovereignty. Either we respect their decisions, or we disrespect their democracy.”

Why is Senator Chuck Schumer publicly advocating for the ousting of the democratically elected leader of a U.S. ally?

[Crafty_Dog]

ZANG.

[Body-by-Guinness]

How did American capitalism mutate into American corporatism?

Samizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Slogans & Quotations

In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.

What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.

This used to go by the name “crony capitalism” which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.

The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system –have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream. We hardly know anymore for whom to cheer or boo in the great struggles of our time.

– Jeffrey Tucker

[Body-by-Guinness]

Shipwreckedcrew

@shipwreckedcrew

Amazing how the septuagenarians and octogenarians in the Democrat party are willing to break faith on a decades-long commitment to the security of Israel because a bunch of know-nothing college kids and chuckleheaded academics have joined with a small foreign contingent in the party -- many of whom can't even vote -- to mau-mau them into obedience.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Second post:

Imagine going back in time, a decade or so, and telling anti-fascists that one day they’ll be doing the bidding of fascists. Imagine telling anti-racists that they would soon become propagandists for racists. Imagine telling those woke campus feminists, the sort who thought that being propositioned at the student bar was ‘rape culture’, that in the not-too-distant future they’d be making excuses for literal rape. They’d have thought you mad. And yet it’s happened. Many of yesteryear’s self-righteous haters of bigotry have morphed into the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas – one of the most bigoted movements on Earth.

– Brendan O’Neill