"The normalization of war can be just as detrimental to a republic as war itself. The barbarians are not at the gates, folks. War is not a foregone conclusion or a national necessity. Each successive occupant of the White House only needs you to believe that in order to centralize the power of an increasingly imperial presidency, stifle dissent, and chip away at what remains of civil liberties.
Seen in its proper context, Pence’s speech would have raised alarm bells in a healthy, functioning republic. But America in 2019 is far from that. Instead, the VP’s staggeringly absurd speech registered as barely a blip on the media’s 24-hour news cycle.
After eighteen years of perpetual conflict, members of the military, and the populace at large, have grown immune to the inertia of war. As such, the republic’s bleeding is internal, as American Democracy dies a slow, opaque death from the inside out. It may be too late to reverse course, and one wonders if a distracted and apathetic public even notices."
Danny Surjen, Mike Pence's West Point Address Should Keep Us Awake at Night
"As prophet, Reinhold Niebuhr warned that what he called 'our dreams of managing history' — dreams borne out of a peculiar combination of arrogance, hypocrisy, and self-delusion — posed a large and potentially mortal threat to the United States. Today we ignore that warning at our peril.
Such humility is in particularly short supply in present-day Washington. There, especially among neoconservatives and neoliberals, the conviction persists that Americans are called up on to serve, in Niebuhr's most memorable phrase, 'as tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection.'"
Andrew J. Bacevich, 15 August 2008
"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people."
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman
“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”
Edward W. Said
"Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers."
Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, 2003 essay
"A [military] transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
Project for a New American Century, September 2000
Stocks came in weakly this morning, and went out with a loss despite an attempt at a bounce in the late afternoon.
Gold and silver were up slightly along with a stronger dollar.
Have a pleasant evening.
