but once inflation goes back to normal is not a fact. The future is uncertain, ie hyperinflation is possible.
8,652 karma · joined December 7, 2009
"Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme-collectivism." -Ayn Rand
"The dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood." -Vladimir Bukovsky
"It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle." -P.J. O'Rourke
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -James Madison
"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." -George Orwell in 1984
"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell
"This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.
It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite." - Marco Rubio
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” – John F. Kennedy
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - President Ronald Reagan
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.” - Elon Musk
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." - H.L. Mencken
“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.“ -Barry Goldwater
“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.” - Christopher Browning in “Ordinary Men“
"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole." - Thomas Sowell
“It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.” - H.L. Mencken
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world". - President Calvin Coolidge
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan
"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed." -Robert A. Heinlein
"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." -George Orwell
"There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence." -Friedrich Nietzsche
"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." -Thomas Sowell
"If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." -Aristotle Onassis
"For quality of life, it is better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right." -Elon Musk
"Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity." -Charlie Munger
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." - George Orwell in 1984
“I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.” ― George Orwell
"Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume." - Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial." -Friedrich Nietzsche
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." -Paul Krugman (1998)
"But we’re very clear of our principles and our purpose, which is to be aligned with our Allies, understanding that — I mean, listen, guys, we’re talking about the potential for war in Europe." - US Vice President Kamala Harris, Munich, Germany February 20, 2022
Don't you think that children of Baltimore deserve accountability from Baltimore politicians? Who runs these schools? Republicans in Texas?
Where are the results?
Why do poor kids end up in atrocious schools that don't teach? Why do minority kids, say in Baltimore, end up in the filthiest schools that have drugs and no education? Where are the results from all these do-gooders that constantly say they are representing minorities and children?
We need a diversity of school choices and, more importantly, diversity of opinions on how to handle this crisis. Liberal left controls the educational system from the very top to all the way on the bottom. Now for many years. And education is not working for inner city schools and in the rural areas.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-dr-fauci-say-no-mask...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26359197
The truth of the matter is that this is an example of Democrat policies in action. In Baltimore, as many other major cities, you have Democrats in charge for many years. There are no Republicans in 300 miles. It is Democrats who continually insist how they care about these people and their children. And these Democratic politicians have full backing and foundational and educational support of not only teachers unions, but academic institutions, such as departments of education and other humanities, who suppose to solve these problems. Billions of dollars are spent on developing programs to improve lives of inner city kids and their parents. Imagine an analogy of doctors society responsible for the treatment of some disease, coming up with such results!
What a disgrace, what a failure of our children!
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/house-democrats-targeting-r...
Also..
“ A second constitutional question arises from the First Amendment. The companies brush this aside because they are private and the amendment prohibits only government censorship. Yet one must worry that the government has privatized censorship. If that sounds too dramatic, read Section 230(c)(2) again. It protects tech companies from liability for restricting various material “whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” Congress makes explicit that it is immunizing companies from liability for speech restrictions that would be unconstitutional if lawmakers themselves imposed them.
Seventeenth-century censorship, which the First Amendment clearly prohibited, was also imposed largely through private entities, such as universities and the Stationers’ Company, England’s printers trade guild. Whereas privatized censorship then was often mandatory, the contemporary version is voluntary. But the tech companies are protected for restricting Congress’s list of disfavored materials, and this means that the government still sets the censorship agenda.”
And just because something is well received doesn't mean that it is right, or moral, or anything, really. Countless speeches were well received before some of the most atrocious events in human history.
You know, dang, I am an old man. Born in Soviet Union, seen the scars of that brutal regime. Came here without English and money. Went to work. Went to college, then medical school in Chicago, residency in Harvard, and fellowship in NY. Started one of the first medical blogs, in 2004, that still going on. Lots of work in the hospital, big cases.
I would consider my bio full of intellectual pursuits.
Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes society makes mistakes, and these mistakes can live for hundreds of years...
Maybe I made a mistake. But maybe what you consider a failure of intellectual pursuit, is your own biases.
But point taken. I’ll limit comments.
PS Here’s an interesting idea for you (and that’s not to offend you, really): try to find and ban someone on a comment that lacks intellectual curiosity and scores political points, and has many upvotes. Surely there’s a comment like that today, somewhere?
PS I came from Soviet Union and this is not a theoretical idea.