"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, 27 January 1838
"There is no calamity greater than lavish desires, there is no greater guilt than discontentment, and there is no greater disaster than greed.
He who is contented with contentment is always contented."
Lao tzu, Tao Te Ching, 1,46 trans by Wing Tsit Chan, 1963
"Why did we, scholars and writers in America, in this time, we who had been warned of our danger not only by explicit threats but by explicit action, why did we not fight this danger while the weapons we used best - the weapons of ideas and words - could still be used against it?"
Archibald Macleish, The Irresponsibles, 1940
"Greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned."
Emile Durkheim, Suicide, 1897
"An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of
nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past,
incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing
right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore
cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must
strike it dead."
Carl Jung, Collected Works V 12, Swiss Edition, 1943
"History is a vast early warning system."
Norman Cousins, Saturday Review Magazine p 12, 28 August 1973
"Wars do not usually result from just causes but from pretexts. There probably never was a just cause why men should slaughter each other by wholesale, but there are such things as ambition, selfishness, folly, madness, in communities as in individuals, which become blind and bloodthirsty, not to be appeased save by havoc, and generally by the killing of somebody else than themselves."
William Tecumseh Sherman, address to the Michigan Military Academy, 19 June 1879
Joltin' Jay Powell made some dovish sounds from Jackson Hole this morning, as he appeared to have hitched a ride on the Cheeto Express.
So stocks and all the rate cut sensitive assets rallied strongly.
Gold and silver rocketed higher as the Dollar plunged.
Bitcoin rallied.
VIX plunged.
The seeds of disaster are being sown, in an almost fatalistic, mechanical manner.
I hate to sound cynical, but the public, led by the media, is really out there in the k-hole now.
We don't believe in painful wars and plagues. Or false flags and tipping points.
Have a pleasant weekend.
