“All tyrannies are virtuoso displays over many years of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control. Tyrants are the greatest of all actor-managers — omnipotent impresarios.
For a dictatorship to last long, it has to ensure a degree of economic prosperity and justice. When these are no longer assured, their fall is inevitable. A dictator meticulously collects around himself, people who feed him with 'facts' and 'assessments' he likes to hear rather than truth. He shuts himself from the harsh reality outside and indulges in actions that only increase the wrath of the masses."
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Dictators Get the Deaths They Deserve, October 26, 2011
"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it. People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it. Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status."
Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class, April 4, 2016
"Most people do not realize that it was Adam Smith who wrote in The Wealth of Nations the famous characterization of England as a 'nation of shopkeepers.' He was writing about narrowly mercantile nature of the British Empire and its colonial markets strategy. The exploitation of the Empire's resources and peoples by a few legendary companies is well known.
If one substitutes 'crony capitalists' or 'financiers' for 'shopkeepers' it might well be a decent fit for these latter years of the American Century, which is based on a regime of guns and dollars. Why is the American moment running out of steam?
It is probably the failure to move to a non-military based economy after the cold war, and invest the peace dividend into domestic infrastructure and basic technology development for peaceful purposes and the improvement of life, instead of financial legerdemain, economic hoaxes and frauds. Having fed so well for many years on war, the crony capitalists have had to expand their operations at home again, and create new wars, to maintain their exorbitant privilege."
Jesse, A Nation of Financiers, 12 August 2011
“It could be argued that we are now in the midst of a coup d’état in slow motion. Democracy is weakening; few people would disagree. Corporatism is strengthening; you only have to look around you. Yet none of us has chosen this route for our society, in spite of which our elites quite happily continue down it. Certainly corporatism is creating a conformist society. It is a modern form of feudalism.”
John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, 1995
"Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true."
Søren Kierkegaard, Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, SKS vol.9, 1847
"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. Millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable."
Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010
Stocks flopped this morning on the news that the US and Iran are once again engaged in active warfare, with missiles flying in both directions.
Oil rallied on this news.
VIX took some notice but then went back to sleep.
Stocks rallied in to the close to take back much of their losses.
The Dollar chopped sideways.
Gold and silver took some light selling that dwindled a bit in the afternoon.
To me things now seem somewhat inevitable.
Not that one can ever become complacent in trading markets.
But at the end of the day, what a man sows so shall he reap.
I don't think most people have really internalized what it means that our president, JFK, was assassinated in public by a coalition of the deep state, the CIA, and law enforcement because he opposed the expansion of war in southeast Asia, an escalating confrontation with the Soviet Union, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Israel.
We were witness to a coup d'état that was covered up brazenly with a heavy hand. And we have been living with the results of this, being overwhelmed by the subversion of our liberties in the face of a growing and parasitical oligarchy.
We in the West are being inundated with 'information' and distractions, cleverly mixed in with force and fraud, so that most average people just their minds spinning with trying to determine what is true and just.
We seem to be reaching a pivot point, where the lies that have been laid on heavily are being exposed with almost embarrassing regularity, to be met by stubborn reinforcement by pathological liars and their bully boys.
This is going to end, and the reaction could be energetic.
But at the end of the day, we are going to be asked what WE have done, how WE have responded to his command to love one another as he has loved us.
It's almost funny how most simply do not 'get this.' It could not have been made more clear.
It is easier to judge and to look down upon others, than to think and to serve with our actions.
This is all that matters. And we lose sight of it with reckless abandon.
Have a pleasant evening.
