If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.
We suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.
If you live, live free or die like the trees, standing up.
And you became like coffee, in the deliciousness, and the bitterness, and the addiction.
Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
Don't you see that the lion is silent and yet feared, while the dog barks constantly and is despised?
You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit
What we must eliminate are systems of representation that carry with them the authority which has become repressive because it doesn't permit or make room for interventions on the part of those represented.
I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.
Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.
I have learned that a woman can be a fighter, a freedom fighter, a political activist, and that she can fall in love, and be loved, she can be married, have children, be a mother... Revolution must mean life also; every aspect of life.
Everything in this world can be robbed and stolen, except one thing;
this one thing is the love that emanates from a human being towards a solid commitment to a conviction or cause.
We are the only people on Earth asked to guarantee the security of our occupier.
..while Israel is the only country that calls for defense from its victims.
The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.
My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller
You have something in this world, so stand for it.
My political position springs from my being a novelist.
In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.
Power, after all, is not just military strength.
It is the social power that comes from democracy, the cultural power that comes from freedom of expression and research, the personal power that entitles every Arab citizen to feel that he or she is in fact a citizen, and not just a sheep in some great shepherd's flock.
Do not believe that man grows. No: he is born suddenly-a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road.
Who planted terrorism in our area? Some came and took our land, forced us to leave, forced us to live in camps. I think this is terrorism. Using means to resist this terrorism and stop its effects - this is called struggle.
Beginning is not only a kind of action.
It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.
Now imagine one day hyperinflation strikes, and the price of your ribeye increases to one hundred dollars while your daily wage remains ten dollars. What happens to the price of your basket of goods? It cannot rise tenfold because you cannot afford the one-hundred-dollar ribeye. Instead, you make do with the chemical shitstorm that is a soy burger for ten dollars. The CPI, magically, shows zero inflation.
When the central bank manipulates the interest rate lower than the market clearing price by directing banks to create more money by lending, they are at once reducing the amount of savings available in society and increasing the quantity demanded by borrowers while also directing the borrowed capital toward projects which cannot be completed.
This world came crashing down in the catastrophic year 1914, which was not only the year of the outbreak of World War I, but the year that the world’s major economies went off of the gold standard and replaced it with unsound government money. Only Switzerland and Sweden, who remained neutral during World War I, were to remain on a gold standard into the 1930s.
The Yap Island chiefs who refused O’Keefe’s cheap Rai stones understood what most modern economists fail to grasp: a money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard-earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.
Bitcoiners and shitcoiners are not on the same team.
They couldn't be more different. Bitcoiners see a once-in-a-millennium chance for the total eradication of seigniorage & monetary parasites. Shitcoiners just see an opportunity for them to become the monetary parasites.
Two particular technological advancements would move Europe and the world away from physical coins and in turn help bring about the demise of silver's monetary role: the telegraph, first deployed commercially in 1837, and the growing network of trains, allowing transportation across Europe. With these two innovations, it became increasingly feasible for banks to communicate with each other, sending payments efficiently across space when needed and debiting accounts instead of having to send physical payments. This led to the increased use of bills, checks, and paper receipts as monetary media instead of physical gold and silver coins. More nations began to switch to a monetary standard of paper fully backed by, and instantly redeemable into, precious metals held in vaults.
The problem with government-provided money is that its hardness depends entirely on the ability of those in charge to not inflate its supply. Only political constraints provide hardness, and there are no physical, economic, or natural constraints.
See Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, p.
250, for a discussion of how uncertainty about the future is the key driver of demand for holding money. With no uncertainty of the future, humans could know all their incomes and expenditures ahead of time and plan them optimally so they never have to hold any cash. But as uncertainty is an inevitable part of life, people must continue to hold money so they have the ability to spend without having to know the future.
Mandating laws against humans’ self-interested nature does not change human nature; it reduces the incentive to behave legally and so destroys society’s respect for laws.
There is no climate crisis. There is a crisis of lack of affordable essential hydrocarbon fuels caused by the morons who believe in a climate crisis. Kindly stop being one of those morons as billions of lives depend on these fuels & you can't control the climate.
What matters in money is its purchasing power, not its quantity, and as such, any quantity of money is enough to fulfill the monetary functions, as long as it is divisible and groupable enough to satisfy holders’ transaction and storage needs.
Johnson asked a federal bureaucrat to concoct a fraudulent health scare around perfectly nutritious food for reasons that had nothing to do with science.
In the twentieth century, government control of money has meant a new and very important criterion being added to salability, and that is the salability of money according to the will of its holder and not some other party.
This is a historical lesson of immense significance, and should be kept in mind by anyone who thinks his refusal of bitcoin means he doesn’t have to deal with it. History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours.
You do not get a job or funding in this system by producing important scholarship that is productive and useful to the real world, but by furthering the agenda of the funders.
With government-issued money with negligible value as a commodity, salability can be compromised by the governments that issued it, declaring it no longer suitable as legal tender. Indians who woke up on November 8, 2016, to hear that their government had suspended the legal tender status of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes can certainly relate. In the blink of an eye, what was highly salable money lost its value and had to be exchanged at banks with very long lines.
Civilization no longer means capital accumulation per se;
rather, it means what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, flourishing and the freedom to seek greater meaning in life when their basic needs are assured and the most immediate dangers are under control.
As an economics professor, I make it a point to teach the marshmallow experiment in every course I teach, as I believe this is the most important lesson that economics can teach individuals, and I am amazed that this lesson is ignored as part of the university curriculum in economics, to the point where many academic economists are completely unfamiliar with the term time preference or its importance.
Canadians pay half their income in taxes, wait 2 years to see a specialist, and bleed for 18 hours in an ER next to a dozen addicts looking for free drugs, and then rave about how awesome it is that they have free healthcare.
In 1899, when American writer Nellie Bly set out on her record-breaking journey around the world in seventy-two days, she carried British gold coins and Bank of England notes with her. It was possible to circumnavigate the globe and use one form of money everywhere Nellie went.
History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation to inflate the money supply. Whether because of outright corruption, a 'national emergency' or an infestation of inflationary schools of economics, the government will always find a reason and a way to print more money, expanding the government's power and reducing the wealth of currency holders.
But money’s marginal utility declines far slower than any other good, because it declines along with the utility of wanting any good, not one particular good.
Bitcoin effectively combines gold’s salability across time with fiat’s salability across space in one apolitical, immutable, open-source package.
Under the reign of Caracalla, the gold content was further reduced to 6.
5 grams, and under Diocletian it was further reduced to 5.5g, before he introduced a replacement coin called the solidus, with only 4.5 grams of gold. On Diocletian's watch, the denarius only had traces of silver to cover its bronze core, and the silver would disappear quite quickly with wear and tear, ending the denarius as a silver coin.
The operation of a market economy is dependent on prices, and prices, to be accurate, are dependent on a common medium of exchange, which reflects the relative scarcity of different goods. If this is easy money, the ability of its issuer to constantly increase its quantity will prevent it from accurately reflecting opportunity costs. Every unpredictable change in the quantity of money would distort its role as a measure of interpersonal value and a conduit for economic information.
One bitcoin block is expected to be produced around every ten minutes.
Every 210,000 blocks, or roughly four years, the protocol halves the number of coins produced with each block. This means that the daily bitcoin production on any given day is half of what it was four years earlier. Four more years of successful operation will likely increase people’s awareness of bitcoin and increase the chances they place on its continued survival, thus increasing their subjective valuation and demand for it. So as long as bitcoin continues to operate, and its supply drops by half every four years, it is highly likely that marginal demand for it will be higher, and the marginal supply lower, than four years previously. This monetary time bomb keeps clicking with each new block, and it is time for economists to begin to seriously contemplate what its continued clicking means for the world’s monetary and financial system.
Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties. In other words, Bitcoin automates the functions of a modern central bank and makes them predictable and virtually immutable by programming them into code decentralized among thousands of network members, none of whom can alter the code without the consent of the rest. This makes Bitcoin the first demonstrably reliable operational example of digital cash and digital hard money.
The criminal part of fiat money is that you have to earn it twice.
Fiat removes the ability to save and forces everybody to become an investor, or more accurately, a gambler.
Austrian economists are rarely dogmatic or objectivist in their definition of sound money. They define it not as a specific good or commodity, but as whichever money emerges on the market, freely chosen by the people who transact with it.