"Structural deep events are events which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve lawbreaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics, 1993
"Each time banks fail, by bailing the system out again, we teach our finance sector a lesson: you can safely take too much risk because, when you lose, the taxpayer will pick up the bill. Such a system is destined to fail, but the party can run for a long time."
Simon Johnson and Peter Boone, Economic Donkeys, 19 September 2009
"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mobilization for Human Needs, October 13, 1940
"Empires in decline tend to behave badly. The twilight years of imperialism often brought brutal repression of subjects abroad, the suppression of civil liberties at home and general varieties of brutality toward foreigners, be they refugees or migrants.
Aggressive wars abroad pollute the domestic political discourse and breed hypernationalism, racism and xenophobia. Aggressive wars of choice have ushered in rampant torture, atrocities in prisons, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the citizenry. It’s all connected. The empire — all empires — eventually come home."
Major Danny Sjursen, An American Tragedy: Empire at Home and Abroad, July 23, 2019
"If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.”
E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World, 2010
Stocks rallied up to highs, with the tech giants lagging a bit.
The Dollar bounced.
Gold and silver continued to rally back from their end of year beatdown.
VIX remains below its moving averages.
When the reckoning comes, it will appear like a thief in the night.
But there is nothing one can say that will restrain a people who desire to be rich.
At the end of the year, when we take account of the dead and the fallen, we may obtain a better idea of how God's judgement has fallen.
All we can be sure of now is that it will.
Have a pleasant evening.
