Paul Rand Quotes

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.

Everything is design. Everything!

You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.

Don't try to be original; just try to be good.

So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time.

The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.

Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.

Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions, there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.

92% of respondents reported that a positive recommendation from a friend, family member, or someone they trust is the biggest influence on whether they buy a product or service.

Visual communication of any kind, whether persuasive or informative, from billboards to birth announcements, should be seen as the embodiment of form and function; the integration of the beautiful and useful." – Paul Rand

All art is relationships, all art. Design is relationships. Design in a relationship between form and content... Your glasses are round. Your collar is diagonal. These are relationships. Your mouth is an oval. Your nose is a triangle - this is what design is.

In essence, it is not what it looks like but what it does that defines a symbol.

Do we fear terrorism so much that we throw out our Constitution, and are we unwilling and afraid to debate our Constitution?

It is important to use your hands, that is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.

Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.

Without aesthetic, design is either the humdrum repetition of familiar clichés or a wild scramble for novelty. Without the aesthetic, the computer is but a mindless speed machine, producing effects without substance. Form without relevant content, or content without meaningful form.

On Congress: “Nothing ever happens around here.

Design is relationships. Design is a relationship between form and content.

Today's left would have us forget that the pseudo-science of eugenics was once all the rage among socialists.

Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.

The designer does not, as a rule, begin with some preconceived idea. Rather, the idea is (or should be) the result of careful study and observation, and the design a product of that idea.

Visual communications of any kind, whether persuasive or informative, from billboards to birth announcements, should be seen as the embodiment of form and function: the integration of the beautiful and the useful.

I have allowed the president to pick his political appointees…But I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution.

Even if it is true that the average man seems most comfortable with the commonplace and familiar, it is equally true that catering to bad taste, which we so readily attribute to the average reader, merely perpetuates that mediocrity and denies the reader one of the most easily accessible means for esthetic development and eventual enjoyment.

Today’s businesses can’t just use social media; they have to become social businesses, inside and out and from top to bottom. Ultimately, that is the goal of this book: to harness the power of being a social business to become the most highly recommended organization in your industry/category/niche.

The No. 1 most credible source of [online] recommendations is YouTube,” Rand says. “But a friend liking a brand page and sharing that is now considered the second-most prominent form of recommendation, and third is online brand reviews.

On vague wording of drone strike criteria: “Are you going to just drop a hellfire missile on Jane Fonda? Are you going to drop a missile on Kent State? That’s gobbledygook.

I think its also safe to say that Barack Obama of 2007 would be right down here with me arguing against this drone-strike program if he were in the Senate.

(In response to President Obama) "For most of our history, no one dared to tell Americans, 'you don't build that.

On Obama: “He was elected by a majority, but the majority doesn’t get to decide who we execute.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

The Republican Party is an empty vessel unless we imbue it with values.

You shouldn't have one opinion when you're running and another when you're president.

Frequently, trite ideas or unimaginative translation of those ideas is the result not of poor subject matter but of poor interpretation of a problem.

Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.”-Paul Rand 6/3/17

And really, wasn’t this endless ruminating over my own likability in itself a thing only a woman would do? Did Bill—or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul—ever ponder their likability, or did they simply go after what they wanted? Did Bill ever stop to think about which of us was more qualified, did he question his own motives for entry into the race? The idea was laughable.

You can excuse these socialists all you want as "men and women of their times". But never forget that they were socialists and that they saw state planning of the family as no different than state planning of the economy or a rancher's planning for his cattle breeding.

The designer is primarily confronted with three classes of material: a) the given material: product, copy, slogan, logotype, format, media, production process; b) the formal material: space, contrast, proportion, harmony, rhythm, repetition, line, mass, shape, color, weight, volume, value, texture; c) the psychological material: visual perception and optical illusion problems, the spectators’ instincts, intuitions, and emotions as well as the designer’s own needs.

It’s hard to argue with Senator Rand Paul, who, during a lonely protest on the Senate floor, said, “If you were against President Obama’s deficits, and now you’re for the Republican deficits, isn’t that the very definition of hypocrisy?”63 But, of course, he’s a hypocrite too, having voted for the massive tax cut.

These are sentiments generally associated with women, children, and savages, according to Le Bon. It’s not an accident that when Republicans of all stripes—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Christine O’Donnell—choose an epithet for Democrats, it’s to call them women. Everyone sees it: Democrats are a mob.

She isn’t simply unafraid of a good fight, she lives for it, and will often actively go looking for a fight. This is what differentiates your run-of-the-mill fighter from a crusader. The Warrior Princess Submissive is no shrinking violet. She is that dyed-in-the-wool Republican who attends the Democratic National Convention wearing a Rand Paul t-shirt. She is the African-American woman who invites herself to a Ku Klux Klan rally without a hood... and hands out business cards to everyone there. She is the woman who invites the Jehovah's Witnesses into her home and feeds them dinner, just for the opportunity to defend Christmas - even though she may be a Pagan. When the other girls in high school or college were trying out for the pep squad or cheerleading, she set her sights on the debate team. While her friends agonize over how to “fit in” socially, she is war gaming ideas on how to change society to fit her ideals and principles. Are you someone she considers to be immoral or evil? Run. She will eviscerate you.

I have a message from the Tea Party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We've come to take our government back.

I believe we should work to end all racism in American society and staunchly defend the inherent rights of every person.

Both sides of the aisle - Republican and Democrat - have been unwilling and afraid to address the deficit, and someone's got to.

So why did I run? I tell people that I got tired of throwing things at my television, and that is at least partially true.

President Obama is on course to add more debt than all the previous presidents in history—combined.

The idea of ethnic cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century and more.

Rand Paul...said national health insurance is slavery. He said, I'm a physician, and if there's national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we're getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help.

Let’s hope today’s American socialists will realize that violence is not an aberration but a necessary tool if you want a society made “equal” by redistribution of wealth and property.

Visual communication of any kind, whether persuasive or informative, from billboards to birth announcements, should be seen as the embodiment of form and function: the integration of the beautiful and useful. Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea.

To distort the letters of the alphabet in “the style of” Chinese calligraphy (sometimes referred to as chop suey lettering), because the subject happens to deal with the Orient is to create the typographic equivalent of a corny illustration. To mimic a woodcut style of type to “go with” a woodcut; to use bold type to “harmonize with” heavy machinery, etc., is cliché-thinking. The designer is unaware of the exciting possibilities inherent in the contrast of picture and type matter. Thus, instead of combining a woodcut with a “woodcut style” of type (Neuland), a happier choice would be a more classical design (Caslon, Bodoni, or Helvetica) to achieve the element of surprise and to accentuate by contrast the form and character of both text and picture.

Conservatives point out the shortages, food lines, and outright famines in Venezuela, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China, while American socialists stubbornly cling to the only “socialist” model left that has any claim to success—Scandinavia. Unfortunately for them, the so-called socialist success of Scandinavia is, in fact, due to good old-fashioned private property and capitalism!

Our founders believed that “government is best that governs least” because the bigger government becomes, the more that control, and potentially violence, is necessary to exert government edicts.

After the settlement Jobs continued to court Esslinger until the designer decided to wind down his contract with Apple. That allowed frogdesign to work with NeXT at the end of 1986. Esslinger insisted on having free rein, just as Paul Rand had. “Sometimes you have to use a big stick with Steve,” he said. Like Rand, Esslinger was an artist, so Jobs was willing to grant him indulgences he denied other mortals. Jobs

I have a question, a question for the president (Obama): Do you hate all rich people, or just rich people who don't contribute to your campaign? Do you hate poor people or do you just hate poor people with jobs?

The point is that when we allow arguments to degenerate into emotions and platitudes we lose track of two important things. 1. Are the current regulations actually working? 2. Will the new regulations mean loss of jobs?

In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years—who sought to use science to justify their unbelief—never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation. That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H. L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).

The task assigned to the RAND* researcher Paul Baran in 1964 was to develop a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. Baran suggested three possible structures for such a system. It could either be ‘centralized’, with one central hub and multiple spokes, ‘decentralized’, with multiple components linked loosely together by a number of weak ties, or ‘distributed’, like a lattice or mesh. In theory, the last option was the most resilient, in that it could withstand the destruction of numerous nodes, and that was indeed

In the United States, the top 1 percent of income earners pays nearly 40 percent of the total income tax revenue, and the top 10 percent pays almost 70 percent. Meanwhile the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers paid only 3 percent of federal income tax in 2016. When today’s socialists claim the rich aren’t paying their fair share they are ignoring the facts.

Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages of two separate files at the same time. Ken Wax turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Chris Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ann Williams sniffs slightly and turns a page. Meredith Rand does something to a cuticle. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle detaches a Memo 402-C(1) from a file. ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie looks up briefly while turning a page. David Cusk turns a page. A yawn proceeds across one Chalk’s row by unconscious influence. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Rotes Group Room 2 hushed and brightly lit, half a football field in length. Howard Cardwell shifts slightly in his chair and turns a page. Lane Dean Jr. traces his jaw’s outline with his ring finger. Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page. Jay Landauer and Ann Williams turn a page almost precisely in sync although they are in different rows and cannot see each other. Boris Kratz bobs with a slight Hassidic motion as he crosschecks a page with a column of figures. Ken Wax turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. Ambient room temperature 80° F. Sandra Pounder makes a minute adjustment to a file so that the page she is looking at is at a slightly different angle to her. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Each Tingle’s two-tiered hemisphere of boxes. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Six wigglers per Chalk, four Chalks per Team, six Teams per group. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Olive Borden turns a page. Plus administration and support. Bob McKenzie turns a page. Anand Singh turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Ken Wax turns a page. Chris ‘The Maestro’ Acquistipace turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Harriet Candelaria turns a page. Boris Kratz turns a page. Robert Atkins turns two separate pages. Anand Singh turns a page. R. Jarvis Brown uncrosses his legs and turns a page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. Ken Wax places a file on top of the stack in the Cart-Out box to his upper right. Jay Landauer turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page and then folds over the page of a computer printout that’s lined up next to the original file he just turned a page of. Ken Wax turns a page. Bob Mc-Kenzie turns a page. Ellis Ross turns a page. Joe ‘The Bastard’ Biron-Maint turns a page. Ed Shackleford opens a drawer and takes a moment to select just the right paperclip. Olive Borden turns a page. Sandra Pounder turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page and then almost instantly turns another page. Latrice Theakston turns a page. Paul Howe turns a page and then sniffs circumspectly at the green rubber sock on his pinkie’s tip. Olive Borden turns a page. Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels. Elpidia Carter and Harriet Candelaria reach up to their Cart-In boxes at exactly the same time. R. Jarvis Brown turns a page. Ryne Hobratschk turns a page. ‘Type of Thing’ Ken Hindle looks up a routing code. Some with their chin in their hand. Robert Atkins turns a page even as he’s crosschecking something on that page. Ann Williams turns a page. Ed Shackleford searches a file for a supporting document. Joe Biron-Maint turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page.

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

Die Wüste ist die Landschaft der Offenbarung. Sie ist uns sowohl genetisch als auch physiologisch fremd, sie ist karg, ästhetisch abstrakt und seit jeher feindseliges Gebiet… In Form und Gestalt ist sie kühn und von erregender Wirkung auf die Phantasie. Die Sinne werden von Licht- und Raumeindrücken überwältigt, von dem kinästhetischen Novum der Leblosigkeit, den hohen Temperaturen und dem Wind. Der Wüstenhimmel ist allumfassend, majestätisch und grauenerregend zugleich. In allen anderen Lebensräumen ist der blaue Rand über dem Horizont stets durchbrochen oder verschleiert; hier dagegen zeigt er sich in seiner ganzen unermesslichen Weite, unendlich viel weiter als in hügeligen Landschaften und bewaldeten Regionen… In einem unverstellten Himmel wirken die Wolken mächtiger, plastischer, so als spiegele sich an ihrer konkaven Unterseite die Rundung des Erdballs selbst. Die kantige Klarheit der Wüste verleiht den Wolken ebenso wie der Landschaft das Antlitz einer monumentalen Architektur… Propheten und Eremiten ziehen in die Wüste, Pilger und Verbannte ziehen durch sie. Hier haben die Gründer der großen Religionen ihr therapeutisches und spirituelles Refugium gesucht, nicht als Zuflucht vor der Wirklichkeit, sondern, im Gegenteil, um sie zu finden.

Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. It’s a political movement whose most widely read and influential texts are fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.

One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a nuclear attack. This enrages many of its architects, including Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, who insistently and repeatedly debunked this origin myth. However, like many of the innovations of the digital age, there were multiple causes and origins. Different players have different perspectives. Some who were higher in the chain of command than Taylor and Roberts, and who have more knowledge of why funding decisions were actually made, have begun to debunk the debunking. Let’s try to peel away the layers. There is no doubt that when Paul Baran proposed a packet-switched network in his RAND reports, nuclear survivability was one of his rationales. “It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind,” he explained. “The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication system.”76 That led to an unstable hair-trigger situation; a nation was more likely to launch a preemptive strike if it feared that its communications and ability to respond would not survive an attack. “The origin of packet switching is very much Cold War,” he said. “I got very interested in the subject of how the hell you build a reliable command and control system.”77 So in 1960 Baran set about devising “a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack.”78

To this point, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been the Republican flavor of the year. Events from the IRS scandal to NSA revelations to the Obamacare train wreck have corroborated libertarian suspicions of federal power. And Paul has shown serious populist skills in cultivating those fears for his political benefit. For a while, he succeeded in a difficult maneuver: Accepting the inheritance of his father's movement while distancing himself from the loonier aspects of his father's ideology. But now Rand Paul has fallen spectacularly off the tightrope. It turns out that a senior member of his Senate staff, Jack Hunter, has a history of neo-Confederate radio rants. And Paul has come to the defense of his aide. . . . This would not be the first time that Paul has heard secessionist talk in his circle of confederates--I mean, associates. His father has attacked Lincoln for causing a "senseless" war and ruling with an "iron fist." Others allied with Paulism in various think tanks and websites have accused Lincoln of mass murder and treason. For Rand Paul to categorically repudiate such views and all who hold them would be to excommunicate a good portion of his father's movement. This disdain for Lincoln is not a quirk or a coincidence. Paulism involves more than the repeal of Obamacare. It is a form of libertarianism that categorically objects to 150 years of expanding federal power. . . . Not all libertarians, of course, view Appomattox as a temporary setback. A libertarian debate on the topic: "Lincoln: Hero or Despot?" would be two-sided, lively and well attended. But Paulism is more than the political expression of the Austrian school of economics. It is a wildly ambitious ideology in which Hunter's neo-Confederate views are not uncommon. What does this mean for the GOP? It is a reminder that, however reassuring his manner, it is impossible for Rand Paul to join the Republican mainstream. The triumph of his ideas and movement would fundamentally shift the mainstream and demolish a century and a half of Republican political history. The GOP could no longer be the party of Reagan's internationalism or of Lincoln's belief in a strong union dedicated to civil rights.

I'm not in favor of any discrimination of any form.

While Trump was talking about the wall, Senator Rand Paul—one of Trump’s Republican primary challengers—had a number of smart ideas that got no traction whatsoever. Paul presented his ideas as concepts without visuals. They died on arrival.

Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble,” cried New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in 2002.8 And that’s exactly what Greenspan did. Much of the new cash that flooded into the market as a result of his policies went into real estate, where small fluctuations in interest rates have a huge impact on prices.

the masters of mankind,” the merchants and manufacturers of England, pursue their “vile maxim: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” Smith’s vile maxim should be familiar to us. It has considerable resonance today. We’ll look into its theoretical background next week. But as you should be aware, the vile maxim has become a leading idea of what’s called “libertarianism” in the United States. It was popularized by Ayn Rand. Greed is great, all for ourselves, nothing for anyone else. She was the guru of prominent figures, among them Alan Greenspan, the much-admired chair of the Federal Reserve for many years. Another acolyte is Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House, the main intellectual architect of the domestic programs of the Trump administration—which are, in fact, motivated by the vile maxim.

In Minnesota, they were seizing cars from every siding, from the Mesabi Range, from the ore mines of Paul Larkin where the cars had stood waiting for a dribble of iron. They were pouring wheat into ore cars, into coal cars, into boarded stock cars that went spilling thin gold trickles along the track as they clattered off. They were pouring wheat into passenger coaches, over seats, racks and fixtures, to send it off, to get it moving, even if it went moving into trackside ditches in the sudden crash of breaking springs, in the explosions set off by burning journal boxes. They fought for movement, for movement with no thought of destination, for movement as such, like a paralytic under a stroke, struggling in wild, stiff, incredulous jerks against the realization that movement was suddenly impossible. There were no other railroads: James Taggart had killed them; there were no boats on the Lakes: Paul Larkin had killed them. There was only the single line of rail and a net of neglected highways. The trucks and wagons of waiting farmers started trickling blindly down the roads, with no maps, no gas, no feed for horses—moving south, south toward the vision of flour mills awaiting them somewhere, with no knowledge of the distances ahead, but with the knowledge of death behind them—moving, to collapse on the roads, in the gullies, in the breaks of rotted bridges. One farmer was found, half a mile south of the wreck of his truck, lying dead in a ditch, face down, still clutching a sack of wheat on his shoulders. Then rain clouds burst over the prairies of Minnesota; the rain went eating the wheat into rot at the waiting railroad stations; it went hammering the piles spilled along the roads, washing gold kernels into the soil.

equalize

There have been Christians in Syria since St. Paul converted on the road to Damascus. Just north of Damascus is a town called Maalula, or the "land of martyrs." From there, modern-day stories of persecuted Christians filter out the world.

Most times, the accusation of blasphemy arises out of personal grudges or petty disputes-or as a cover of outright theft or property. Christians have no legal recourse in such matters. They're sent to jail, lose their homes, and often lose their lives without a single word uttered on their behalf. In the first three centuries A.D., the crime of following Christ's teachings was punishable by death. Pardons were offered to Christians who renounced their faith and offered sacrifices to the Roman gods. Too many Christians now live in the same ancient fear.

Kentucky (Republican-controlled). As Tuesday's election showed, Kentucky isn't exactly fertile ground for Democrats. But something interesting happened even as Mitch McConnell walloped Alison Lundergan Grimes: Democrats held on to their majority in the state House. That means Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) can't count on changing state law to be able to run for president and Senate at the same time. Hence, a possible open seat.

Many of those now calling themselves “conservatives” owe more to Ayn Rand than to traditional conservative thinkers. Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan admit to having been significantly influenced by Rand. Glenn Beck and other so-called Christian conservatives sound more like Ayn Rand when it comes to the poor and unfortunate than anything written in the Gospels.

Paul's off-the-cuff quip about disability insurance is really more than half wrong John Locher/Associated Press Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) implied that many disability recipients could work but aren't. Statistics suggest that isn't likely. Glenn Kessler | 1041 words "What I tell people is, if you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldn't be getting a disability check. Over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts - join the club. Who doesn't get a little anxious for work and their back hurts? Everybody over 40 has a back pain." - Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), remarks in New Hampshire, Jan. 14, 2015

Rand Paul just came out with an appeal for a new organization that will counter the efforts by Obama and Hillary Clinton to shred the last remnants of our sovereignty by allowing the United Nations to take away our guns.6 And then, of course, they will come and conquer us. The basis for this is that the UN is now debating a small arms treaty.7 Small arms doesn’t mean pistols. It means anything less than a tank. These are just slaughtering people all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of people every year are killed with small arms, and a high percentage come from the United States.8 So there is an effort to have some sort of small arms treaty to regulate their flow. In the minds of the Rand Paul libertarians, this is just another effort by this ominous, fiendish outfit, the United Nations, to take away our freedom.   Rand Paul is the Republican senator from Kentucky and son of Ron Paul.

Reisman explains that “what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.

Chavez and later Maduro instituted widespread price controls that José Niño describes as the “main culprit in Venezuela’s economic tragedy.

History should judge Anthony Fauci as a deficient person who made one of the worst decisions in public health history — in the entire history of the world.

I would say that an understanding of man's intrinsic needs, and of the necessity to search for a climate in which those needs could be realized, is fundamental to the education of the designer.

Money changes everything. In Billionaires, a book by political scientist Darrell West, one member of the three-comma club brought up his “get-a-senator” strategy—a handy tactic, given that a lone senator can block objectionable legislation or pull strings on a favored donor’s behalf. West recalls how Senator Rand Paul held up Senate action for years on a treaty that would have forced Swiss banks to reveal the names of twenty-two thousand wealthy Americans who had assets stashed in overseas accounts, presumably to evade taxes. (An invasion of privacy, Paul insisted.) In another case, a billionaire hedge fund manager persuaded Democratic senator Edward Markey to write a letter to the SEC calling for an investigation of Herbalife, a multilevel marketing company the financier suspected of fraud, and whose stock he also happened to be short-selling. The effort paid off. After Markey’s letter was made public, Herbalife’s share price plummeted 14 percent.

Yes. I suppose it did. So did Benjamin Franklin. And Rand Paul. And Ayn Rand.

what makes America unique is that for the first time an entire country based its economy on merit, not heredity.

The only way to combat falling into the opinion trap is to follow Rand’s lead: think before you answer—if you even answer.

Just a few months ago, the comedian Tom Arnold tweeted: “Imagine being Rand Paul’s neighbor and having to deal with @RandPaul lying cowardly circular whiny bullcrap about lawn clippings. No wonder he ripped his toupee off.” Within seconds, Representative Ilhan Omar had retweeted it, obviously gleeful that the attack had taken place. Nice, right? And they say Donald Trump is the one who’s vulgar, but they won’t say anything about Omar allegedly marrying her brother to enter the country illegally. Or, having an affair with a married paid staffer, or as someone hilariously commented on my Instagram feed, “She puts the infidel in infidelity.” Whether it’s true or not, she’s not exactly the moral authority the media makes her out to be.

These days, anyone who supports my father is a target. Just as the anti-Trump revolution was beginning, Senator Rand Paul, one of my father’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, was brutally attacked by his neighbor, an avowed lefty. The man ran down a steep hill to gain momentum and then blindsided Senator Paul, who had headphones on and his back turned. He never knew the man was coming. The senator had six broken ribs and blood in his lungs. Doctors who examined him said that the injuries sustained were more consistent with a car accident than a sucker punch. As he was recovering, the left celebrated. The celebration continues among some of the most callous and idiotic people on the left.

Chomsky refers to right-wing libertarianism as “an aberration” nearly unique to this country, a theory of “a world built on hatred” that “would self-destruct in three seconds.” Yet the vitality of this once- or twice-removed cousin of anarchism becomes evident with every election cycle, when libertarian candidate Ron Paul squeezes his way into the Republican debates thanks to the impressively determined and youthful “army” fighting for his “rEVOLution.” (The capitalized words spell “LOVE” backward.) This is anarchism with corporate funding and misplaced nostalgia, its solidarity cleaved off by the willful protagonists in Ayn Rand’s novels. Yet

It is no secret that the real world in which the designer functions is not the world of art, but the world of buying and selling.

The typical pol: all the politicians out there who need the job to validate their insecurities. They’re not inherently against accomplishments and they’re not unwilling to do actual work—it’s just secondary to their need for attention.* The ideologue: the true believer like the Green Party on the left or the Tea Party on the right. People like Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul are in this category. The “I’m just happy to be here”: These are the backbenchers who do little or the people who only see their job as winning office, enjoying the perks and attention, and not actually governing. The corrupt pol: people constantly engaging in pay-to-play politics, trading donations for favors, and sometimes even taking outright bribes.

There was a brief moment, in the run-up to the 2016 election, when many prominent Republicans stood firmly opposed to Trump. Ezra Klein writes: Ted Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” Rick Perry said Trump’s candidacy was “a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.” Rand Paul said Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag. A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president.” Marco Rubio called him “dangerous” and warned that we should not hand “the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.” 63 But once it was clear the tide was turning, nearly all major Republicans—including Cruz, Perry, Paul, and Rubio—pulled a 180 and backed Trump.

Ik dacht: dit is het gelach in de schaduw van de galg, zo klinken mensen die weten dat ze ten dode zijn opgeschreven, zo ziet een stad eruit die naar de verdommenis gaat. Diezelfde hysterie tref je aan in de beschrijving die Thucydides geeft wanneer de pest uitbreekt in Athene: 'Overweldigd door de hevigheid van de rampspoed, en niet wetend wat hen te doen stond, werden de mannen onverschillig [...] en de grote losbandigheid begon.' Net als de inwoners van Athene deden de Angolezen uit de musseque alsof het einde der tijden was aangebroken: een schreeuwerige, chaotische, bandeloze samenleving die op de rand van uitsterven verkeerde. Geen wanhopige mensen, maar mensen die dansten, die de kiduru en de kizomba deden, zoals Kalunga me uitlegde toen de meisjes in de sloppenwijk in het rond stonden te draaien en soms wat danspasjes invoegden onder het lopen. Het wemelde van de prostituees in de stad, veelal vluchtelingen uit Congo, die mannen oppikten in de Pub Royal en de Zanzibar. De meeste mensen giechelden als gekken omdat ze beseften dat hun dagen geteld waren. Zo klonk dat Angolese gelach mij in de oren: als geraaskal dat getuigde van groot lijden, als versterkt doodsgereutel. Net als de inwoners van Athene hing hen rampspoed of de dood boven het hoofd en 'besloten ze te genieten van een klein deel van hun leven'. Kalunga stapte op zijn motorfiets, maar startte hem niet. Hij zat uit te kijken over de stad en zei: 'Zo zal de wereld eruitzien wanneer het einde der tijden is aangebroken.

Substitute the word “fairness” for “the common interest” and you have a talking point for many of today’s new democratic socialists in the United States.

Like all attempts at government-enforced equality, the need for the truncheon arose. In China, sticks served the purpose of truncheons.

The most common tool in this arsenal of horror was food, which was used as a weapon: entire groups of people considered to be too old, too weak, or too sick to work were deliberately banned from the canteen and starved to death.11

He describes another horror story where a father was forced to bury his son alive for the crime of stealing a handful of rice.

The toxic Soviet European Marxist genie had been let out of the bottle to poison what had been a peaceful and prosperous Southeast Asian land. All the beautiful traditions of Cambodia’s national life soon gave way to the horrors committed by those students who went to France.”15

Mao led the country to ruin and is responsible for more deaths than either Hitler or Stalin,

But you’re wrong, Paul, you’re so wrong! What would happen to Henry’s vanity if he didn’t have us to throw alms to? What would become of his strength if he didn’t have weaker people to dominate? What would he do with himself if he didn’t keep us around as dependents? It’s quite all right, really, I’m not criticizing him, it’s just a law of human nature.

To build a domestic energy industry, the Norwegian government created a partially private company that is run by wealthy oil industry executives. This company is publicly traded, operates on the profit motive, and deposits its surplus revenues into a trillion-dollar wealth fund that mostly invests abroad, including in the largest of American corporations. . . . [U]nlike in Venezuela, where the government used taxes on oil to fund social programs, the Norwegians use their sovereign wealth to accumulate more capital and cut taxes. Which of the two sounds more socialist to you?