Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce, 1947
"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."
R. J. Rummel, Death by Government: A History of Mass Murder and Genocide Since 1900
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people."
Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz, 1966
“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Power is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the latter it crushes, the former it intoxicates. The truth is, no one really possesses it."
Simone Weil, L'Iliade ou le poème de la force, 1939
Stocks were on a yo-yo today, losing ground early, gaining much of it back, and then doing a dipsy-doodle down and up in the last hour of trade.
I suspect marketeers who are not connected with the ruling elite are wondering what the Donald is going to say to the joint session of Congress tonight.
The Dollar continued to slide.
Gold and silver went higher.
Stocks fell to near a 'must hold' area on the charts at their low points. I have marked those with bolder lines in red on their charts.
VIX climbed a bit.
So let's see what Trump and His Merry Pranksters have in store for us tonight.
I am hoping his mercurial decision-making will cause at least a few in Congress to reconsider the encroachment of the imperial Presidency which they have been abetting these past 25 years or so.
And do their jobs and fulfill their oaths instead of trying to please the donor class and line their pockets.
Complicit as enablers of the erosion of freedoms and war crimes, crimes against humanity.
Hyporcrites. How can they avoid going to hell?
Have a pleasant evening.
