“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our [Constitutional] Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”
Abraham Lincoln, Letter to William Herndon, 1848
"The selling of the Iraq War to the American public was an exploitation of mass gullibility. Current circumstances give little or no hope that the public response would be much different to the selling of some future untoward war."
Paul Pillar, Selling the Iraq War: Gullibility and Mass Hysteria, March 15, 2023
"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1999
“Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed — but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 1961
"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. 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, Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, 1994
Stocks found a footing and managed to stage a little rally back today.
The Dollar was trying to move higher, but fell back into the close.
Gold and silver gave up some ground, but then both came back into the close as the Dollar fell.
Silver in particularly is showing its usual feisty strength, closing again at a high.
VIX fell back a little and is still complacent.
One event away.
And Our Merry Pranksters in Washington are like twelve year olds, cranks, and sociopaths with guns.
Have a pleasant evening.
