Dylan Miles

“It is the control group which enables the scientist to gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“They are subjected to all manner of taxes: the tithe, the hearth tax and the capitation tax. When all those are paid, they are left with a pittance, which means they spend their lives struggling to survive. I can understand their despair. And I can understand their anger when they look at the nobility and the clergy and see them enjoying lives of luxury, unburdened by any tax. What astonishes me is that they have put up with it for so long. I can only begin to imagine the suffering that has driven those people in Seurre to action.”
― Simon Scarrow, Young Bloods

“The fearful necessity of war ought only to be taken seriously and sternly. There are lies enough in the world as it is. War should be treated as a hard fact; not as a game; otherwise it becomes a mere pastime for the idle and frivolous. There is no more honourable class than the military, and yet to what extremities they are driven to gain their ends!—In fact, what is the aim and end of war?—Murder.—And its means?—Treachery and spying.—Its procedure?—Pillage and robbery for the maintenance of the men! . . . That is to say, falsehood and dishonesty in every form, under the name of the Art of War.—What, I ask you, is the rule to which military men are bound? To slavery, that is to say, to a rigorous discipline, which condones idleness, depravity, drunkenness—and yet they are universally respected, except the Emperor respected. Every monarch in the world, the man who has killed the greatest number of his fellow creatures wins the highest rewards. A million of men meet—to-morrow, for instance—to solemn thanksgivings for the massacre and maiming of the figures? Why, Te Deums are loudly boasted of, for the more men killed the more brilliant it is thought to be, and the victory is acceptable to God to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“If you take the data from the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response tracker index and plot it against health outcomes, in other words, if you look to see if there's any apparent connection between the severity of lockdowns and health outcomes, you find no connection at all. The distribution is entirely random. As future ages look back on the 21st century, our "public health" establishment will be a laughingstock, dressed in white coats and holding clipboards, but prescribing leeches and rain dances and human sacrifice and calling it "science".”
― Thomas E Woods Jr, Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During Covid Mania