Quotes

[quyotes]

[A] lot of Baby-Boomers have found themselves unprecedentedly wealthy, and in buying up nursing homes, care homes, you effectively had a means by which to unlock this wealth because you sort of have got access to this money printing machine because people will sell their homes to go in to a care home. They had no real choice but to then be locked into escalating fees. And so a lot of the Baby Boomers who might have considered themselves the kind of winners of the political and economic shifts that have occurred over the last forty years, they had sort of underestimated the extent to which there where these apex predators even higher up in the food chain waiting to tap into the capital or the wealth that they had accumulated. Wealth that was for better or worse ultimately destined […] to their children and their grand-children and so on in the shape of inheritance that was instead rediverted to Wall Street firms, to private equity funds and so on.

Hettie O'Brien, on Behind the News, July 9, 2026

[quyotes]

Harris and her party settled into a somewhat conservative pitch as the party of America before Trump. Perhaps the radical thought of a black woman as president made this approach seem prudent. But for many Arab and Muslim Americans, “America before Trump” meant returning to a time when FBI informants sought to entrap them, when police agencies spied on their mosques, and calling a presidential candidate a Muslim was a slur. Seemingly blind to this trauma, the Harris campaign followed up the Democratic National Convention snub by deploying Bill Clinton to Michigan. There, in the state with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, Clinton told an audience that Israel had been forced “to kill civilians” by Hamas, and that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belonged to the Jewish people because “they were there first.” Meanwhile, Harris welcomed her endorsement by Dick Cheney, who was not a very popular vice president but was a zealous defender of torturing Muslims. The cumulative message was not “We don’t need your vote.” It was “We don’t value your life.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?

[quyotes]

[A] company called Automated Currency Instruments has attempted to bridge the separation of bank machine and gambling machine in a different way—by devising an ATM that “becomes part of the entertainment experience in the casino.” In this convergence of banking and play, “entertaining displays on the [ATM] unit keep the patron interested and entertained while he or she is waiting for the transaction to complete.” Instead of endowing gambling machines with ATM functionality, this system endows ATMs with ludic functionality, such that the very act of financial withdrawal becomes an act of play.

Natasha Schüll, Addiction by Design

[quyotes]

Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.

Deuteronomy

[quyotes]

at the maternity ward, 300 terrorists were born

Knesset member Amit Halevi, talking about the raid on the Al-Shifa hospital

Israel’s targeting and destruction of neonatal and maternity healthcare infrastructures in Gaza has had particularly severe impact on birth rates and infant health outcomes. These attacks have disrupted prenatal care, induced maternal trauma, and contributed to a systemic collapse of the neonatal healthcare system, leading to a rise in miscarriages, premature births, low birth weights, and neonatal mortality, as well as an array of congenital birth defects that has induced lifelong vulnerabilities among newborns.

Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, report on 18 June 2026

[quyotes]

There is nothing the Politically Correct fear more than open defiance, and for good reason; it is their chief vulnerability. That should lead cultural conservatives to defy cultural Marxism at every turn.

The manifesto of Anders Breivik, a mass murderer

Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.

The title of a book by Ted Cruz, a US senator

[quyotes]

Nissan earned its second-to-last spot for collecting some of the creepiest categories of data we have ever seen. It’s worth reading the review in full, but you should know it includes your “sexual activity.” Not to be out done, Kia also mentions they can collect information about your “sex life” in their privacy policy. Oh, and six car companies say they can collect your “genetic information” or “genetic characteristics.”

Mozilla Foundation, It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

[quyotes]

[The] opposition between the merchant right and the « Brahmin » left is largely artificial. It enables both nationalist and liberal elites to share power and consolidate rule over the working class, all while preventing any real popular alternative. Whatever either side claims, Trumpists also depend on hundreds of experts and academics gathered in powerful think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. The hyper-capitalist agenda they champion – a visceral defense of social hierarchies, glorification of an extreme concentration of power and wealth, and the pro-rich tax policies that support it – is hardly different from that of liberal economists. During the golden age of the liberal order, when George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, the level of military brutality was comparable to what we see today.

Thomas Piketty - Trump, a Warrior without Brahmin

[quyotes]

The world and we already know Ahmadinejad. If the reformist candidate Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally arena as a moderate element...

Meir Dagan, director of the Mossad, on hardliner Ahmadinejad winning the Iranian presidential election.

[quyotes]

In March, 2000, as the merger was under way, Musk was driving his new McLaren, with Thiel in the passenger seat. The two were on Sand Hill Road, an artery that cuts through Silicon Valley. Thiel asked Musk, “So what can this do?” Musk replied, “Watch this,” then floored the gas pedal, hit an embankment, and sent the car airborne and spinning before it slammed back onto the pavement, blowing out its suspension and its windows.

Elon Musk's Shadow Rule

[quyotes]

After the 11 September attack, [...] amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame ‘the CIA’ or ‘a secret rogue operation.’ But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line—who knows, maybe even the CIA’s scared of them.

Thomas Pynchon, "Bleeding Edge"

[quyotes]

The amount of Afghan land under poppy cultivation more than tripled from 2003 to 2004. By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased a mind-blowing 7,514 percent. [...] The superabundance of highly potent product inundated Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, all of Europe, Australia, and the whole world. In the United States, street prices went down, purity went up, and opioid addiction took hold in a population primed for it by a decade of loose prescribing practices around pharmaceutical painkillers. “Heroin from Afghanistan is our biggest rising threat,” the Orange County Sheriff’s Office told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. [...] Yet curiously, in 2008, after years of reporting that heroin from southwest Asia was increasingly available in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and Boston at lower prices than ever before, the DEA began asserting in its annual National Drug Threat Assessment that Mexico was to blame.

Seth Harp, The Fort Bragg Cartel

[quyotes]

President Obama expressed concern over the release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.

Readout of the President's Call with President Saleh of Yemen, February 03, 2011.

Abdulelah Haider Shaye was jailed for covering the aftermath of a secret US air strike that killed 41 civilians, including 5 pregnant women and 21 children.

[quyotes]

As counterinsurgency is domesticated, it is our hearts and minds that are daily being assuaged, numbed, pacified—and blissfully satisfied. We, the vast majority of us, are reassured daily: there are threats everywhere and color-coded terror alerts, but counterinsurgency strategies are protecting us. We are made to feel that everything’s under control, that the threat is exterior, that we can continue with our daily existence. Even more, that these counterinsurgency strategies will prevail. That our government is stronger and better equipped, prepared to do everything necessary to win, and will win. That the guardians are protecting us.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

we have not simply created an internal colony, we have turned the nation itself into a colony. We govern ourselves through modern counterinsurgency warfare as if the entire United States was now a colonial dominion like Algeria, Malaya, or Vietnam.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

This is perhaps the greatest paradox of the brutality of counterinsurgency: to be civilized is to torture judiciously.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

The United States spent $113 billion in Afghanistan between 2001 and early 2016 for reconstruction, which represented far more than the Marshall Plan in postwar Europe. [...] The result was a dizzying distribution of cash, marked by extreme corruption. With very little oversight of procurement bidding and with the strategic need to rely on apparent friends and allies, contracts were dished out in ways that created instant fortunes for the lucky and the connected. From 2007 to 2014 alone, the United States gave out $89 billion in contracted moneys in Afghanistan. [...] The Center for Public Integrity published a study in May 2015 that found that “at least a hundred and fifteen US service members who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been convicted of bribery, theft, and contract-rigging charges since 2005.” [...] A forensic audit conducted in 2010 by the military, Task Force 2010, discovered for instance that, of about $31 billion in contracts inspected, about $360 million ended up in the hands of the Taliban, corrupt officials, or criminals; and that was only what could be directly accounted for.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution