Quote of the Day

Perhaps, the most surreal conversation I had was not hearing a Chavista president singing capitalism’s praise, or friends who have been out of the country for eight years finally looking for a flight to Caracas; but a European diplomat who, after a long pause, told me: “At least for now, we’ve got to admit that Trump got this one right.”

Stefano Pozzebon
CNN
February 17, 2026
I’ve covered Venezuela for a decade. But this US visit was like nothing I’ve seen before

CNN (AKA Clinton News Network and Communist News Network) saying “Trump got this one right?”

Wow! I wonder how many responses they got from their main body of readers demanding Pozzebon’s head on a platter. That had to have really hurt.

While I reluctantly acknowledge it was probably (let’s see how things are a year from now) the right thing to do, I’m uncomfortable with the U.S. being the world’s policeman. There is also the whole, other than might makes right, lack of authorization to use violence to affect the internal affairs of another country. Then there is the issue that while success is good, failures can really, really bad. This turned out well but a future attempt at a similar action (my bet is Iran would be the next target) could result in a catastrophe such as, or even worse than, what happened with Operation Eagle Claw in April of 1980.

Quote of the Day

A distinctive mark of fascism is its conception of politics, best captured by Carl Schmitt, an early-20th-century German political theorist whose doctrines legitimized Nazism. Schmitt rejected the Madisonian view of politics as a social negotiation in which different factions, interests, and ideology come to agreement, the core idea of our Constitution. Rather, he saw politics as a state of war between enemies, neither of which can understand the other and both of which feel existentially threatened—and only one of which can win. The aim of Schmittian politics is not to share the country but to dominate or destroy the other side.

Jonathan Rauch*
January 25, 2026
Yes, It’s Fascism – The Atlantic

Via email from a reader.

Most of the body of the article is behind a paywall so I only have the part quoted in the email.

As many of you will point out, there is no compromise or coming to agreement with those who want you dead. There is no compromise with those who want a cradle to grave welfare state for everyone. But there is a better way to go about opposing them without risking a death spiral into your own purity test driven genocide of killing all the communists.

There is a fair amount of truth to what I could read in the quote above about the definition of fascism. And I prefer to use the oldest definition I can find. It is from an unabridged dictionary copyrighted in various years from 1927 through1946. In part, the Fascisti were:

… organized in connection with a repressive movement directed against the socialists and communists and the disturbances excited by them during 1919 and the years following, which regarded the government as criminally negligent in failing to deal with these disturbances, and took measure on its own account, often violent ones, to combat them…

Hence, one could say people opposed to socialists and communists meet part of the definition of Fascist. Aside from the increased ease of which the dirty label sticks there are other reasons to not defining yourself as opposed, especially violently opposed, to communists and socialists.

Remember the poem from a couple days ago: Laugh, and the World Laughs with You? If you are an unhappy, angry person you will have fewer people who wish to be around you and join your political bandwagon. Be for something good. Be for freedom. Be for liberty. Be for a booming economy. Be for a wealthy society.

Let the communists and socialist be against that.

* Rauch is not a new name to this blog:

• Quote of the day—Jonathan Rauch
• Another article by Jonathan Rauch

Quote of the Day

Children. I’d rather live in a low-income trailer park in the US than in a luxury high rise in Europe. Much of the same problems, but in the US there would be a pathway up and out and fairly easy if you stay off drugs, are willing to work your ass off and don’t disdain those trying to help you up.

While in Europe there simply isn’t a way up. They’re bound up with self-righteousness that demands they commit suicide. And their media lies about the US so much they have no idea there is an alternative to their suicide by socialism.

It’s like talking to people who say “Well, of course we drink a little bit of poison at every meal. What would you want us to do? Guzzle the whole bottle at once?” And they can’t hear you when you shout “JUST STOP TAKING THE POISON.” Because they heard that over here where we don’t take the poison — or to be fair, take less poison than they do — we’re dying like flies. AND THEY NEVER CHECK.

Sarah A. Hoyt
December 26, 2025
Europe And Other Lost civilizations – According To Hoyt

I am reminded of people who go into hysterics when it is suggested that the government not be involved in healthcare/education/housing/etc. They can not imagine any sane person could believe that was a good idea and demand, “What would replace it?!!!” Of course, the answer is, “When a fireman puts out the fire consuming your house, what do you replace the fire with?”

Quote of the Day

How much knowledge there is in a given society, and how it is distributed, depends crucially on how knowledge is conceived and defined. When a social justice advocate like Professor John Rawls of Harvard referred to how ‘society’ should ‘arrange’ certain outcomes, he was clearly referring to collective decisions of a kind that government makes, using knowledge available to surrogate decision-makers, more so than the kind of knowledge known and used by individuals in the population at large, when making their own decisions about their own lives. As an old saying expressed it: ‘A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him.’

Thomas Sowell
2023
Social Justice Fallacies

Emphasis added.

Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, expressed the same sentiment spending probably an entire chapter on it. He described it as an information problem. People close to the problem are in the best position to solve the problem. Free markets and free minds outperform highly regulated markets and constrained minds.

The correctness of this should be obvious to almost everyone. The implications are broad and damning against central planners and big government in general.

Sowell does not claim credit for it. And as I don’t read Dutch or German, I cannot vouch for the correctness of Grok who has this to say about the origin:

The proverb “A fool may put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him” (or close variants) is a traditional Dutch proverb, first recorded in the 16th–17th century.

The earliest known printed source is in the 1621 edition of Carolus Tuinman’s “De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden” (later editions more famous), but the saying already appears earlier in Dutch and Low German proverb collections.

The closest early attestation is in Jan Gruter’s “Florilegium ethicopoliticum” (1610–1612) and other 17th-century Dutch sources, where it is presented as an already established saying:

Original Dutch form (c. 1620s–1630s): “Een dwaas kan zijn jas beter aantrekken dan een wijs man hem die aantrekken kan.”

A very similar version also appears in German collections around the same time (e.g., Lehmann’s 1639 florilegium).

So, there is no single named individual who is the “first” to say it. It is an anonymous folk proverb that crystallized in the Netherlands/low German-speaking areas in the late 1500s or early 1600s, with the earliest surviving written records appearing around 1610–1630.

No evidence attributes it to any famous writer or philosopher before it appears in these printed proverb collections. Variants later spread into English in the 18th–19th centuries (sometimes misattributed to figures like Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain, but those attributions are false).

Copilot is adamant that Grok is wrong:

That claim is false. Let me break it down carefully:

Carolus Tuinman: Tuinman was a Dutch scholar who indeed published De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden (The Origin and Explanation of Daily Used Proverbs), but not in 1621. His works appeared in the early 18th century (1710s–1720s). So the date 1621 is anachronistic.

Jan Gruter’s Florilegium ethicopoliticum: Gruter (1560–1627) did publish collections of sayings and moral excerpts in the early 17th century, but no attestation of the “coat” proverb exists in his florilegium. Searches of digitized editions show many proverbial contrasts of fools and wise men, but not this wording.

German collections (Lehmann 1639): Lehmann’s Florilegium politicum (1639) is a real work, but again, the coat proverb does not appear in it. German proverb collections of the 17th century contain many fool/wise man contrasts, but not this specific imagery.

Quote of the Day

It’s baffling that Americans are falling for such a dangerous ideology. But they are.

A recent poll of likely voters from The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports showed that 51% of young Americans, ages 18-39, would like to see a democratic socialist in the White House.

Mamdani and Wilson have put a shiny bow on their socialist ideas, and voters bought it.

Beware what comes next.

Ingrid Jacques,
December 1, 2025
NYC, Seattle just chose socialist mayors. Wake up, America. | Opinion

Perhaps she is unaware of the state of government schools. How else could she be baffled?

Everyone with half a functioning brain knows what comes next. Hence, I do not believe the “beware” warning is needed for the Second Amendment people. This is more appropriately a warning to the socialists.

You can vote your country into socialism. You have to shoot your way out.

Quote of the Day

Burning your own fuel in your own house is about far more than the “aesthetic of it”, no matter how hard the papers try to tag it with that superficial label. A wood burner offers energy independence, and for that reason, like everything else that offers any kind of independence, they are considered a threat.

The existence of anyone or anything outside of the system, even in token or vestigial ways, threatens the idea that the system is even necessary. Therefore they must be attacked.

It’s an autoimmune response, a reflex; they can’t help it.

They need to know everything you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and why.

And, more importantly, they need you to be OK with that, to welcome it, even thank them for it.

They need you to know that is the safe; the normal; the only way the world works.

So, expect this messaging to continue until the ban is in place, or licenses are required, or they manage to wire a smart meter to a wood axe.

Kit Knightly
October 22, 2025
They’re Coming for Your Wood-Burning Stove. Again. – OffGuardian

While the article is referring to potential U.K. regulations it would only take an administration change in D.C, for the U.K. craziness to be imported with similar motivation.