We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.  -Eric Hoffer

Homicide rates per 100,000 in 2020:

Chicago 18

Houston 14.8

Phoenix 6.2

Austin 4.6

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.  –Edmund Burke

"Passion, Romance and Capitalism all sit in the same place on my tongue. And they taste very sweet." - Jonathan Hoenig

"The rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60 percent between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labor force.

The average annual wage per industrial worker (including men, women, and children) rose from $380 in 1880 to $564 in 1890, a gain of 48 percent."  -

courses.lumenlearning.com

“Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.”  -Pericles

“Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.”  -Thomas Sowell

"If you live in San Francisco, you've probably witnessed a so-called "organized retail theft." That's when a person or several people come into a store prepared to shoplift openly, without regard to who's watching."  -ABC7

"I feel like I'm on the brink of being red-pilled. How can I not, when our policies are so aligned with the radical left?"  -@michelletandler

"Every liberal prescription worsened the problem that it was ostensibly designed to solve." -Theodore Dalrymple

https://abc7news.com/walgreens-san-francisco-sf-robbery-hayes-valley/10794886/

https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1411362359734542343

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire. -Eric Hoffer

The frog in the boiling pot is exactly backwards. It is absolutely ideal for disasters to happen slowly. Because then they're usually not disasters at all.

A biologist at Harvard University said, "If you put a frog in boiling water, it won't jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don't sit still for you."

Here's an account Re: Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940):

"On November 7, high winds buffeted the area and the bridge swayed considerably. The first failure came at about 11 a.m., when concrete dropped from the road surface. Just minutes later, a 600-foot section of the bridge broke free. By this time, the bridge was being tossed back and forth wildly. At one time, the elevation of the sidewalk on one side of the bridge was 28 feet above that of the sidewalk on the other side."

The article says "just minutes later," but if the people in the condo in Florida had had "just minutes" of violent swaying we wouldn't have 150 dead people. We'd have maybe 5.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words. –Edmund Burke

"Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous." -Eric Hoffer

It's bizarre that we call anything "playing god" when most of us have children.

Being hilarious in delivery is not always a great move.

I don't like the imperiousness of hospital staff.  Not all, not even most.  But some of these nurses say, "We like to keep your baby for three days after birth."  I bet you do.  Everyone with customers likes when their customers buy more of their product or service.  Nevertheless, my policy is I have to be convinced to spend thousands of dollars, not told.

The condo collapse in FL is unspeakably tragic.  I can't wait to see the results, though I've got my money on "corroded rebar."

"No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs." –H. L. Mencken

I often wonder if God recognizes his own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine.  -Ray Bradbury

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.  -Voltaire

A BLM activist has been shot in the head not by police or white people, but by a young black man.  Which is not a surprising culprit, except... why are we all supposed to pretend police and white people are the biggest threats to black lives?  I suggest the reason:  To disempower whites and police.  It's a fraud.

White privilege is real.  It's a thing and everything.  But I have two problems with it, as told by the left:

1) It ignores black privilege and asian privilege.  But every unchosen characteristic has some advantage and some disadvantage, depending on who's around.

2) It emphasizes race privilege over, and to the exclusion of, an infinite number of other similar privileges.  Why?  Because it, unlike counless others, taps into and amplifies feelings of white guilt and black victimhood.  It plays into the left's favorite moral melodrama.

“History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.” -Joseph Schumpeter

To speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue.  –Edmund Burke

It's been said stop and frisk was racist.  Well when Giuliani took over in 1994 the previous year had 1946 murders.  When he left in 2001, it had 649.

In 1993, Chicago had 850 murders.  When Giuliani left in 2001, it had 665.

So you have the with and without uber-racist Giuliani to compare.  Who loves black people:  The man who saves them or the man who waxes endlessly about slavery and Jim Crow as they're massacred in the street? 

Once you hate evil you can’t hate anything else.  -Dennis Prager

Fools need advice most, but wise men only are the better for it. –Ben Franklin

There is a world of difference between racism and racial profiling.  We should all know it.

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his. -Eric Hoffer

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate. -Eric Hoffer

I was insufficiently overjoyed at the new holiday Juneteenth.  Uh oh.

Try camelcamelcamel.com.

“Imagine that a ship is sinking in the ocean with 300 passengers on board and only 200 life-preservers.  The only just solution is that everyone drown.”  -Thomas Sowell

Many death-penalty opponents say, "It's not going to bring your loved one back."  Google it -- tons of them say this.  To which I now respond, "WHAT?!  It doesn't reincarnate them like Lazarus?!"

Leftist-anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKinley who died on September 14, 1901.  Czolgosz was convicted and was sitting in the electric chair on October 29, 1901.

And yet Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 17 at Parkland, has not even begun his trial 1,217 days later.  The search for perfect justice in our system has created terrific injustice elsewhere -- for the families who have to wait 30 years for the sentence to be meted out, for the taxpayers who have to pay millions to convict a man who OBVIOUSLY DID IT, and so on.

Most of us look back on the old days of shaming out-of-wedlock children and fat people with disgust.  But yet -- what if that did untold good?  It's a genuinely unresolved question for me.

It takes a great man to be a good listener.  -Calvin Coolidge

"What 'social justice' seeks to do is to eliminate undeserved disadvantages for selected groups... This is often done in disregard of the costs of this to other individuals or groups -- or even to the requirements of society as a whole."  -Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice

"Insulin was developed over 100 years ago. Retail cost of insulin is less than. Two. Quarters. Companies try to sell insulin shots at 300 dollars a pop. Some are 'Nice' and sell it at 100 dollars a pop."  -Lady on Twitter

Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.  -Eric Hoffer

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.  -Eric Hoffer