Friday, February 28, 2014

Paralyzes

"War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder."
--Alexander Berkman, "What Is Communist Anarchism?"

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Ride

"Ride your horse along the edge of a sword; hide yourself in the middle of flames"
--Zen saying.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Guarantee II

"As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and terror of the doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but the most likely visitor in the early hours will be the milkman."
--Adam Michnik

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Partially

"The current state of the news media is partially to blame for the public's general lack of information vital for responsible citizenship in a democracy. The news media has become an aspect of show business, offering merely infotainment. It has evolved into an entity that tends to function as a public relations agency for wealthy and powerful multinational corporations, members of Congress, the current Presidential Administration including the administrations that preceded it. The news media is being utilized as a political tool of suppression and propaganda by those in power, and propaganda is psychological in nature. Full of half-truths and utter misinformation, its an arrogant and very commercial strategy that is implemented because it appeals to emotions, fear being the main one relentless talk of national security, personal and community safety, can trigger childhood insecurities and indoctrinated views of authority."
--Teresa Stover

Monday, February 24, 2014

Twelve

"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world;
and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding
twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
--Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Fortune

"Show me the prison,
Show me the jail,
Show me the prisoner
whose life has gone stale.
And I'll show you a young man
with so many reasons why
And there, but for fortune,
go you or I."
--Phil Ochs
(1940-1976) Singer and lyricist
Source: song, There But For Fortune, 1968

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Unsettling

"The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea."
--Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980),
U. S. Supreme Court Justice
Source: Terminello v. Chicago, 1949

Friday, February 21, 2014

Cruelty

"Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is--whether its victim is human or animal--we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity."
--Rachel Carson

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Recover

"It is unfortunate that the efforts of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been so long deprived will be accompanied with violence, with errors, and even with crimes. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Monsieur D'Ivernois, February 6, 1795

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Poets

"If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live."
--Sen. John F. Kennedy
Address at Harvard University, 1956

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Divinely

"The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed."
--Gil Bailie
College Fellow at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology,
author, lecturer

Monday, February 17, 2014

Grasped

"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living."
--General Omar Bradley (1893-1981)
Five Star General of the US Army,
headed the Veterans Administration,
Chief of Staff of the United States Army,
first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Training

"If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn to do it?"
--Joan Baez (attributed)

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Sacrifices

"In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the Sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order."
--Idi Amin

Friday, February 14, 2014

Indefinitely

"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."
--James Madison (1751-1836),
Father of the Constitution for the USA, 4th US President
Source: referring to a bill to subsidize cod fisherman introduced in the first year of the new Congress

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Romana

"We are taxed in our bread and our wine, in our incomes and our investments, on our land and on our property not only for base creatures who do not deserve the name of men, but for foreign nations, complaisant nations who will bow to us and accept our largesse and promise us to assist in the keeping of the peace - these mendicant nations who will destroy us when we show a moment of weakness or our treasury is bare, and surely it is becoming bare! We are taxed to maintain legions on their soil, in the name of law and order and the Pax Romana, a document which will fall into dust when it pleases our allies and our vassals. We keep them in precarious balance only with our gold. Is the heartblood of our nation worth these? Were they bound to us with ties of love, they would not ask our gold. They take our very flesh, and they hate and despise us. And who shall say we are worthy of more? ... When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself."
--Cicero 54 B.C.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Calamity

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."
--Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Examples

"Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms."
--Neal Knox
Source: quoted by Jeff Cooper in Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries, Vol. 4, No. 7.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Dangerous III

"I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery."
--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Sunday, February 09, 2014

Radical

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
--H.L. Mencken

Saturday, February 08, 2014

Yourself

"Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck. Then don't be yourself, be someone else who does not suck."
--Joss Whedon

Friday, February 07, 2014

Juries

The right of juries to decide questions of law was widely accepted in the colonies, especially in criminal cases. Prior to 1850, the judge and jury were viewed as partners in many jurisdictions. The jury could decide questions of both law and fact, and the judge helped guide the decision-making process by comments on the witnesses and the evidence. Legal theory and political philosophy emphasized the importance of the Jury in divining natural law, which was thought to be a better source for decision than the "authority of black letter maxim." Since natural law was accessible to lay people, it was held to be the duty of each juror to determine for himself whether a particular rule of law embodied the principles of the higher natural law. Indeed, it was argued that the United States Constitution embodied a codification of natural rights so that "the reliance by the jury on a higher law was usually viewed as a constitutional judgment."
--Kane & Miller Friedenthal
Source: Civil Procedure, p 476-77, chapter 11, Jury Trial; 2 The Judge Jury Relationship (West Publishing Company 1985).

Thursday, February 06, 2014

Lasting

"The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. "
--John Adams (1735-1826)
Founding Father, 2nd US President
Source: John Adams, letter to Zabdiel Adams, June 21, 1776

Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Husband

Shopping for a Husband

A store selling new husbands just opened where you can go to choose a husband from among many men. The store has six floors and the men increase in positive attributes as the shopper ascends the flights.

But there is a catch. As you open the door to any floor you may choose a man from that floor, but if you go up a floor you cannot go back down except to leave the building. And so one day a woman goes to the shopping center to find a husband.

On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 - These men have jobs.

The woman reads the sign and says to herself, "Well, that's better than my last boyfriend, but I wonder what's further up?" So up she goes.

The second floor sign reads:

Floor 2 - These men have jobs and love kids.

The woman remarks to herself, "That's great, but I wonder what's further up?"

The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love kids, and are extremely handsome.

"Much better," she comments, "but I wonder what's upstairs?"

The fourth floor sign reads:

Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking and help with the housework.

"Wow!" exclaims the woman, "very tempting. BUT, there must be more further up!" And again she heads up another flight.

The fifth floor sign reads:

Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking, help with the housework, and have a strong romantic streak.

"Wow!" she exclaims with delight. "But I wonder what must be awaiting me further on?" So up to the sixth floor she goes.

The sixth floor sign reads:

Floor 6 - You are visitor 26,875,953,012 to this floor.
There are no men on this floor.
This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please.
Have a nice day.

Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Aggressive

In the seventies, for example, a group of Indian Health Service physicians implemented an aggressive program of Native American sterilization. According to a U.S. General Accounting Office study, hospitals in just four cities sterilized 3,406 women and 142 men between 1972 and 1976. The women widely reported being threatened with the loss of welfare benefits or custody of their children unless they submitted to sterilization. A federal court ordered that all future Indian Health Service sterilizations employ the proper safeguards of legitimate therapeutic procedures, and that "individuals seeking sterilization be orally informed at the outset that no Federal benefits can be withdrawn because of failure to accept sterilization." During the same four-year period, one Oklahoma hospital alone sterilized nearly 8 percent of its fertile female patients. No one will ever know the full scope of Indian sterilization in the postwar period because medical records were either not kept or were incomplete.

--Edwin Black, "War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race", p. 400

[Note: The "Indian Health Service" is bankrolled by the US government, which, oddly, Black doesn't mention in his book--TLC]

Monday, February 03, 2014

Coercively

Although the ERO ["Eugenics Records Office", much more than the title suggests] stopped functioning in 1939, America's eugenic laws did not. Tens of thousands of Americans continued to be forcibly sterilized, institutionalized and legally prevented from marriage on the basis of racial and eugenic laws. During the 1940s, some 15,000 Americans were coercively sterilized, almost a third of them in California. In the fifties, about ten thousand were sterilized. In the sixties, thousands more were sterilized. All told, an estimated 70,000 were eugenically sterilized in the first seven decades of the twentieth century; the majority were women. California consistently outdistanced every other state.

--Edwin Black, "War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race", p. 398

Sunday, February 02, 2014

Coverage

Nor was coverage of German race hygienists and their work limited to the eugenic press. They were reported as legitimate medical news in almost every issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, chiefly by the journal's German correspondent. For example, in May of 1924, Erwin Baur's latest lecture to Berlin's local eugenics society was covered in great detail in a two-column story. JAMA repeated, without comment or qualification, Baur's race politics. "A person of moderate gifts may be educated to be very efficient," the article read, "but he will never transmit other than moderate gifts to his own offspring. The attempts to elevate the negroes of the United States by giving them the same educational advantages the white population receives have necessarily failed." The article also regurgitated Baur's contention that the Jukes family was proof positive of eugenically damaged ancestry. "Race suicide," JAMA continued from Baur's speech, "brought about the downfall of Greece and Rome, and Germany is confronted by the same peril." JAMA used no quotation marks and presented the statements as unredacted medical knowledge.

--Edwin Black, "War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race", p. 281

Saturday, February 01, 2014

Intensely

Most of all, American raceologists were intensely proud to have inspired the purely eugenic state the Nazis were constructing. In those early years of the Third Reich, Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modeled on laws already introduced across America, upheld by the Supreme Court and routinely enforced. Nazi doctors and even Hitler himself regularly communicated with American eugenicists from New York to California, ensuring that Germany would scrupulously follow the path blazed by the United States.  American eugenicists were eager to assist. As they followed the day-to-day progress of the Third Reich, American eugenicists clearly understood their continuing role. This was particularly true of California's eugenicists, who led the nation in sterilization and provided the most scientific support for Hitler's regime.
--Edwin Black, "War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race", p. 277