[mountainlion]

History channel or someone said that the “cake” was pigeon dung. Eat it yourself congress.

[DarthVader]

Time to sharpen the guillotine.

[DarthVader]

Time to sharpen the guillotine.

[Kartographer]

[sauropod]

read

[all the best]

Although it is traditionally attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette of France from 1789, it is now doubted that she actually said it, as it is also attributed to the earlier Queen, Marie-Thérèse - about 100 years earlier in a different crisis. And it appears that what she actually said was “let them eat pastry”. In 1766, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that he was quoting the famous saying of “a great princess”, which was incorrectly attributed to Marie Antoinette. She couldn’t have made the statement because, in 1766, she was only 11 years old.

[Texas Fossil]

Adversity employs great talents; prosperity renders them useless and carries the inept, the corrupted wealthy and the wicked to the top

May they bear in mind that virtue often contains the seeds of tyranny

May they bear in mind that it is neither gold nor even a multitude of arms that sustains a state but its morals

May each of them keep in his house, in a corner of this field, next to his workbench, next to his plow, his gun, his sword, and his bayonet

May they all be soldiers

May they bear in mind that in circumstances where deliberation is possible, the advice of old men is good but that in moments of crisis youth is generally better informed that its elders

Denis Diderot

Apostrophe to the Insurgents, 1782

--

The results of the French Revolution were not like the American Revolution

The arrogant arristocrats were removed in both, but responsible people prevailed in the U.S. unlike France.

[Noumenon]

This quote from Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels" written in 1981 fits today's situation to a T. Everything that's happening today has been a work in progress, and it's been a long time coming. Ideas matter. Ideas matter because they provide the substrate that nourishes the impulses that motivate men and nations. Most of the very bad ideas that animate the communists in the White House have their origin in certain 17th and 18th century French philosophes and German thinkers. Kant, Rousseau, Neitzsche, Marx and Freud - all contributors to, and generators of, the ideas that have animated the last century's most monstrous mass murderers - Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Castro. Those same very bad ideas now have a happy home in the White House. And if that seems extreme, then you might want to investigate the pedigrees of the 'czars' that the Obamination has put into positions of unaccountable power.

History tells us all too clearly of the nature of the road these monsters follow; the signposts to its final destination are written in blood.

History also tells us what we must do to rid ourselves of these monsters. And now, Mr. Peikoff:

The American people may oppose the nation’s present course, but by themselves the people cannot change it. They may oppose the taxes and the bureaucrats, but these are merely consequences, which cannot be significantly cut back so long as their source is untouched.

The people may curse “big government” in general – but to no avail if the pressure groups among them, following the logic of a mixed economy, continue to be fruitful and to multiply.

The people may “swing to the right,” but it is futile, if the leaders of the right are swinging to their own brand of statism.

The country may throw the rascals out, but it means nothing if the next administration is made of neo-rascals from the other party.

To change a nation’s basic course requires more than a mood of popular discontent. It requires the definition of new direction for the country to take. Above all, it requires a theoretical justification for this direction, one which would convince people that the course being urged is practical and moral.

Moral considerations alone might not be sufficient to move men, if they believe the course being urged is impractical; practical considerations alone will not move men, if they believe the course is immoral. The union of the two, however, is irresistible.

By its nature, changing the course of a nation is a task that can be achieved only by men who deal with the field of ideas. In the long run the people of a country have no alternative: they end up following the lead of the intellectuals.

The intellectuals cannot escape ideas, either. They may become anti-ideological skeptics, who offer the country for guidance only subjective feelings and short-range pragmatism but it is the ideas – ultimately, the basic ideas – they still accept, explicitly or otherwise, which determine the content of their feelings and of their pragmatism.

In the long run, intellectuals, too, have no alternative: they end up following the lead of the philosophers.

If there is no new philosophy to guide and rally the better men among them, the intellectuals will follow one that is old and bankrupt. If there are no living ideas, they will follow dying ones and take the country with them…

In the absence of any principled opposition, the Kantian ideas by default will continue to rule, and to move us further down the road on which, for so many years, we have been traveling.

From “Convulsion and Paralysis”
Leonard Peikoff – The Ominous Parallels - 1993