Greggers Quote of the Day, March 24, 2012
“When did Ron Paul become the 13th floor in a hotel?”
- Jon Stewart, asking Why Is the Media Ignoring Ron Paul?
Funny stuff! As usual, Jon uses the 3-Stooges-Poink method of getting our attention, this time poinking out the blatant blinders of the mainstream media when it comes to only mentioning the Republican candidates who fit the media definition of a Republican candidate. You know ‘em, those wacky warmongering White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (or sometimes Mormons) who want us to just keep doing what we’re doing overseas and realign the government away from Big Social Program Spending Uber Alles to something closer to Big Business Protection Program and Pentagon Spending Uber Alles. That kind of “change”, the media can report on and understand. But the idea of cutting back our war efforts, or going back to a monetary gold standard, or (heaven forbid) ending the war on drugs?!?! Well that’s just crazy talk.
My favorite bit in the clip above is the part where Ron Paul says in a debate, basically, “Let’s stop getting involved in wars… period!”, and the audience cheers madly, while the moderator rolls his eyes at this obvious coocoo-for-cocoa-puffs craziness. Seems to be Jon’s favorite part, too. Watch him poink at it!
Greggers Quote of the Day, March 10, 2012
If people needed helping, I should expend my energy to offer that help, rather than forcing others to provide it.
p.s. OK, I promise I’ll start posting more often. and I really need to fill out some more of those Hero pages. sheesh, what a lazy blogger.
Greggers Quote of the Day, January 21, 2012
“The shock of discovering that most of the power in the world is held by ignorant and greedy people can really bum you out at first; but after you’ve lived with it a few decades, it becomes, like cancer and other plagues, just another problem that we will solve eventually if we keep working at it.”
Greggers Quote of the Day, January 20, 2012
“When did we lose Congress? Not just in terms of losing our respect for just about everyone there… but in the sense that they no longer even pretend to represent our interests or act as we would act if given the chance?”
Seth spells out exactly how if ya wanna learn how to be a leader in any true sense, just do the opposite of what Congress-critters do.
P.S. Related to what inspired Seth to write the article: I’m actually proud of my president for showing leadership and smacking down the Stop Online Piracy Act like a Whac-a-Mole, and effectively stopping the real piracy in its tracks! OK, so maybe he didn’t directly Whac-a-Mole it, but he came down squarely against it, and I’ll settle for what I can get.
Greggers Quote of the Day, January 6, 2012
“I’m having a great deal of fun with the knowledge that we’re watching a near-extinct species: the command and control organization.”
Greggers Quote of the Day, December 29, 2011
As soon as you accept that just about everything in our created world is only a few generations old, it makes it a lot easier to deal with the fact that the assumptions we make about the future are generally wrong, and that the stress we have over change is completely wasted.
- Seth Godin
Greggers Quote of the Day, September 22, 2011
There are no violent gangs fighting over aspirin territories. There are no violent gangs fighting over whisky territories or computer territories or anything else that’s legal. There are only criminal gangs fighting over territories covering drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes. Making a non-violent activity a crime creates a black market, which attracts criminals and gangs, which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use and gang warfare.
I’m looking forward to the Ken Burns film on Prohibition. I wonder whether he drew a parallel with (or even mentioned) our current Prohibition, the War on Drugs. I’ll find out in a couple of weeks. The common consensus today seems to be that all the “obvious” problems with prohibition of alcohol simply don’t apply to prohibition of drugs (or gambling, or prostitution). Here’s an experiment. Watch Ken Burns’ film, or any other documentary on Prohibition, and pretend that the talking heads are “experts from the future” talking about the War on Drugs. I bet a whole lot of the conversation would still make sense… or at least it’ll be a fun new game for you non-libertarians. Some of us have already been playing it for years.
Greggers Quote of the Day: 9-11-11
Imagine there’s no countries 
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
-John Lennon
Ten years later, and it’s still hard to imagine that it happened. A network of people, just people, not imaginary monsters or devils, just people with dogmatic beliefs that converged to allow a horrible event to take place. There may be many dogmas involved, but the two overriding ones seemed to be:
- A Supreme Being exists Who is on my side, no matter what, and I will be rewarded in an afterlife for doing His will.
- People are divided up into nations defined by a centralized government, and are inherently the same as each other within these territories, and are fundamentally different from those people living in other nations.
If you wanna believe these things, fine, but if your Supreme Being starts telling you to smite thy enemy using bombs and chemicals, or to fly into buildings, you might wanna find yourself another Supreme Being, maybe one that has evolved further than we have as humans, which you’d think any decent Supreme Being would’ve done long before the bronze age.
I consider myself to be very patriotic when it comes to what this country was founded on, and what it represented to many who immigrated here over the years. But if you wanna believe that everyone living in the nation you live in is peachy-groovy and everyone on the other side of the dotted line is dazed-confused-and-possibly-evil, fine, but you may soon find that you live in a world where individual people can trade with someone on the other side of the planet just as easily as they can trade with someone across town and share info just as quickly and easily and — oh, wait, we already live in that world.
Lennon’s original vision certainly wasn’t libertarian (“imagine no possessions”), but he also wasn’t trying to say “Here, I have The Answer”. He was just imagining a world different than what he lived in: what if this, what if that, what would it be like? I feel the same way. I don’t know what the world should be like ideally, I just know what I prefer personally, and there has to be better ways of dealing with each other, ways that allow us regular people to deal with each other as individuals rather than being told by others what group “we” belong to, and what group “they” belong to. When people start talking like that, it just sounds to me like a religious dogma that we have to grow out of, in order to survive.
And when it leads to thousands of deaths in a senseless horrifying act, we should wake up and drop the dogma like it’s hot. By all means, track down the individuals responsible, not their brother-in-law, or their aunts and cousins, or someone from a neighboring village, or anyone wearing the same outfit, but the actual surviving individual dudes, and by all means punish them. Then, stop. You’re done. Justice is served. No need to go to war with Iraq, or Afghanistan, or to form Homeland Security, or to give the TSA the authority to grope your kids. Just punish the dudes, and honor your dead.
It’s ten years later. Are we done yet? Or are we still chained to our dogmas?
Speaking of honoring our dead, there were many heroes on that day, ten years ago, but I find that I’m moved most deeply by the story of the passengers of Flight 93. We still don’t know for certain what the target was for that hijacked flight. Who knows what would’ve happened if they hadn’t taken action.
Greggers Quote of the Day, September 4, 2011
“There are just two things standing in between the American people and their freedom: Democrats and Republicans.”
Greggers Quote of the Day, August 31, 2011
“To me, it doesn’t matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine.”
