The MalaCast

“Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give.  Yet one cannot give that which has not been created.  Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute.  The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary.  Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.  We praise an act of charity.  We shrug at an act of achievement.”  -Ayn Rand

War destroys.  But peace does not build.

“This type of reasoning would mean that a ‘big’ genius, like Edison, and a ‘big’ gangster, like Stalin, were equal malefactors:  one flooded the world with immeasurable values and the other with incalculable slaughter, but both did it on a very big scale.  I doubt whether anyone would care to equate these two—yet this is the precise difference between big business and big government.”  Ayn Rand

"Some of the most passionate opponents of the... Vietnam war... were not nearly as concerned about the fate of these peoples after the Americans left." -Thomas Sowell

We lost Afghanistan. Which was certain to happen one day since 99% of them want Sharia according to a poll. But why in the world did it happen like this?

The Ayatollah and Taliban's spokesman are both on Twitter, but Donald Trump and Alex Jones are not.  Why?  The left does not hate evil.

"…victory over bacterial infection is only temporary, not final and probably never to be final, given the genetic flexibility of bacteria; medicine is thus an aspect of Man’s Promethean bargain. But temporary victory is to be preferred to perpetual defeat."  -Theodore Dalrymple

“Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.” -Mark Twain

Ryan Reilly doesn't know what ear plugs are.

Mara Gay and Brian Williams Can't do Math.

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” -Abraham Lincoln

"I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things. He is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fit the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact."  -Henry Ford

"Like, 9/10ths of the way to being a Nazi himself."  -Glau from Twitter

"This is your dog whistle for white supremacists."  -Chris from Twitter

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."  -Teddy Roosevelt

“One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” –Nikole Hannah-Jones

"Virginia’s many appeals to end slave importations brought nothing but rejections from the three Georges who mounted the British throne in succession." -Unger

Stop blaming people (or nations) you don't like for things they didn't do.

“Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.” -Shakespeare

"'Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body and if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death is unendurably as before it.”  -C. S. Lewis

"He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong."  -Auden

"Disarmament and complete pacifism is indisputably the wisest policy." -Bertrand Russel, 1936

Pacifists and other "give peace a chance" types have never really been discredited in popular culture.  But they have gotten millions killed.

It's said that society is judged by how it treats the least of its citizens, but it's just as good to judge it by how it treats the most.  For example, you won't believe how often China murders one of its billionaires.

"There never was a war in all history easier to prevent." -Winston Churchill, postwar

https://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont-let-friends-become-chinese-billionaires/?sh=15d67cec2dda

"What is called 'social justice' might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society."  -Thomas Sowell

It is no more acceptable to make me a therapist than to make me a roofer. It's not my job to make strangers healthier nor to make their homes more waterproof.

"In a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s, various restrictions were placed on the police in their arrest and interrogation of suspects in criminal cases, and in the search of their property."  -Thomas Sowell

A reporter has to lie a little, of course, or they would discharge him. That is the only drawback to the profession. That is why I left it. [Laughter] I am different from Washington; I have a higher and grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won’t.  -Mark Twain, 1871

It's possible to deceive without lying and it's possible to lie without deceiving.

I am not more or less violently opposed to child abuse and murder than before I had kids.  But I do understand it better.

We know black Americans support Democrats and have since at least FDR.  One of the reasons is probably:  At least on one important question on affirmative action, 95% of them are factually, simply, wrong.  Garbage in, garbage out.

"The Tenth Commandment sends a message to all the jerks who want redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, more government programs, more government regulation, more government, less free enterprise, and less freedom. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell."  –PJ O’Rourke

There is a thread of hysteria, and its brother-emotion ingratitude, running through libertarianism.  America IS a free country in which one can't select his water pressure.

“Whether we should wish that more of the good things of this world should go to some racial elite, the Nordic men, or the members of a party or an aristocracy, the methods which we shall have to employ are the same as those which could insure an equalitarian distribution.”  -F. A. Hayek