Out of the crooked timber of man, no straight thing was ever made.  -Immanuel Kant

A Welsh slave was once given a direct order by his captor and notorious butcher of men, sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco.  He refused it and lived.

This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.  –Stephen Kotkin

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings - no matter what color or creed any of them are.  –Thomas Sowell

"How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint."  –Robert Frost

"One woman died and more than 20 others were injured when gunfire erupted at the Kansas City parade."  -BBC

What I hate about Bill Maher - no retractions.

“Where courage is not, no other virtue can survive except by accident.”  -Dr Johnson

Nikki Haley:  "I am going to beat President Trump." 

"In the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us most dread for our own species - the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective." -CS Lewis

"It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear."  –Ayn Rand

Jim Jordan has revealed leaked Amazon emails.  One of which says:

"Starting March 9—the same day as its meeting with the White House—Amazon enabled “Do Not Promote” for books that expressed the view that vaccines were not effective."

I have two things to say.

The first is:  With government as limitlessly large and therefore limitlessly powerful as it is at present, it can do immense harm to your company or your life out of pure spite.  You will pay far more for thumbing your nose at the state than you would have in, say, 1880.

The second thing I have to say is:  These are among the biggest scandals in our history.  They will not be treated as such by our media because our media agree with infringing our First Amendment.

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”  -James Madison