Tag: Jack London

The Online Meanderings of an American Nobody & the Genuine Wisdom of an Imaginary Character

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

– C. S. Lewis (1942), “The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil”, p.8, HarperCollins UK, 2009

 

While having breakfast with a friend the other day, they commented on an article they had recently read online.  The article was about the discouragement of free speech at Ivy League colleges, and Harvard in particular.  I told them I saw the headline but never read the actual findings.   In any event, I said I wasn’t surprised… but what did surprise me was that the article showed up on their particular newsfeed; and, for them, I would have expected the online algorithmic process to have distilled the findings into another headline such as:  “Harvard Leads Ivy League in Prohibiting Hate Speech”.

Continue reading “The Online Meanderings of an American Nobody & the Genuine Wisdom of an Imaginary Character”

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“In the history of every great catastrophe, you will find that some masterly bit of stupidity sets fire to the oil-soaked rags.”

Edwin Lefèvre

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

“The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel

“I recognize that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point, and I agree with Governor Lindsey that this is a problem that we should keep an eye on. We do have the possibility of raising major concerns by increasing margin requirements. I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.”

Alan Greenspan, FOMC Minutes, September 24, 1996

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair

“We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put up a façade to prevent ourselves from seeing it.”

Blaise Pascal

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it.

It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K.”

Sir Eddie George, Governor Bank of England in conversation with Nicholas J. Morrell, chief executive of Lonmin Plc, 1999

“I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel

And they said to him, ‘Where will this happen, Lord?’ And He said to them, ‘Where death is, there will be a gathering of vultures.’”

Luke 17:37

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“I know nothing that I may say can influence you.  You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things.  You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats.   There is no Republican Party.   There is no Democratic Party.  There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House.  You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel

“‘Let not the wise boast of their wisdom
or the strong boast of their strength
or the wealthy boast of their riches,
but let the one who boasts boast about this:
that they have the understanding to know my ways.'”

Jeremiah 9:23-24

“Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us.”

Thomas Nashe, A Litany In Time of Plague

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor. As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.”

Grover Cleveland, State of the Union, December 3, 1888

“You do not know the working class. But you are not to be blamed for this. How can you know anything about the working class? You do not live in the same locality with the working class. You herd with the capitalist class in another locality. And why not? It is the capitalist class that pays you, that feeds you, that puts the very clothes on your backs that you are wearing to-night. And in return you preach to your employers the brands of metaphysics that are especially acceptable to them; and the especially acceptable brands are acceptable because they do not menace the established order of society.

Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel

Continue reading “QUOTES OF THE DAY”

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”

Jack London

“To be able to forget means sanity.”

Jack London

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

Jack London

“But I am I. And I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind”

Jack London


QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words— Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


QUOTE OF THE DAY

“You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy. You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


QUOTE OF THE DAY

“We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words— Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The Oligarchy wanted the war for a dozen reasons. In the juggling of events such a war would cause, in the reshuffling of the international cards and the making of new treaties and alliances, the Oligarchy had much to gain. And, furthermore, the war would consume many national surpluses, reduce the armies of unemployed that menaced all countries, and give the Oligarchy a breathing space in which to perfect its plans and carry them out.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”

Thomas Jefferson

“When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul maw of Hell, and his power is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the Nazi terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this struggle.”

The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich 1942


The Children of the Abyss

Guest Post by Jesse

“He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.”

J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist

People do not wake up one day and suddenly decide to become monsters, giving birth to unspeakable horrors.

And yet throughout history, different peoples have done truly monstrous things. The Americans were pioneers in forced sterilization and state propaganda. The British invented concentration camps, and were masters of predatory colonization. They even turned a large portion of the capital of their Empire into a festering ghetto through the Darwinian economics of neglect.

None have clean hands. No one is exceptional.

What do they have in common? They all take a walk down a long and twisted path, one cold-hearted and ‘expedient’ decision at a time, shifting responsibility by deflecting the choice for their actions on their leaders.

There is always some crackpot theory. some law of nature, from scientists or economists to support it. What else could they do? It is always difficult, but necessary.

They cope with their actions by making their victims the other, objectified, different, marginalized. And what they marginalize they cannot see. What they cannot see, by choice, is easily ignored.

And so they destroy and they kill, first by neglect and then by more efficient and decisive actions.

They walk slowly, but almost determinedly, into an abyss of their own creation.

But they all seem to have one thing in common. First they come for the old, the weak, the disabled, and the different, in a widening circle of scapegoats for their plunder.

Continue reading “The Children of the Abyss”