Thought for the Day
 

“What I was looking at was a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich. As judged by the standards of a civilised society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalised privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.”



Alfred Jay Nock - Memoirs Of A Superfluous Man - 1943

I'm not small and rich or large and poor but what I am is sick of paying for those who choose not to work/ game the system. My wife was at the store and came home to tell me the "person" in front of her in line payed for it's grocery's with a Link card (IL. food stamps), This person bought the Motts brand apple juice while my wife had store brand to save us money. This so angers me that a food stamp program does not require you to shop bargains like we do. One very small example on how the system pays you to be a piece of crap! The poor "seize wealth" by way of apathetic voters here in the state of IL.

Been a lot of this as of late
 

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.

Mark Twain


Ally

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."

Edward R. Murrow



Ally

apropos of nothing
 

“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”


“Who?”


“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”


She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”


Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

WW

We are entering a golden age of rediscovery, we are going to rediscover that accounting trumps ideology.

If some measure constitutes a "fair share" for half of us, why isn't it fair for the other half?

We hang our petty thieves and make our great thieves leaders.- Aesop


Department of Education:

"Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state." —Hitler, while speaking about the schools and their indoctrination of the Hitler Youth Corps (Hilterjugend)

"Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a Socialist state." —Vladimir Lenin

"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." —Joseph Stalin

"We destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social." —Communist Manifesto

"Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.” “He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past." —George Orwell


Why do we spend so much time arguing about which of us can produce the best set of lies?

"Be it sight, sound, smell, or touch, There’s something inside that we need so much. The sight of a touch or the scent of a sound, Or the strength of an oak with roots deep in the ground. The wonder of flowers to be covered and then To burst up through tarmac to the sun again. Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing - To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing. To have all these things in our memories hall And to use them to help us to find… Ha ha ha!

The Moody Blues :)

“Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibnum, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim — for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives — is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.”

- Geroge Orwell (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.
Alexis de Tocqueville


Ally