Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, 'well-balanced,' unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system.
The' sanity' of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless."
Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people."
Theodor Adorno
And so we say goodbye to July.
Non-Farm Payrolls next week.
Gold and silver rebounded strongly from the recent battering they took from a gauntlet of gameable events.
Stocks have rebound sharply from oversold, and may be completing a bear market rally.
Or perhaps we have reached a bottom of sorts.
I doubt it, but I could be wrong.
The Dollar continued to slide on expectations of the grand pivot.
A few videos at the bottom.
Old and new, hot and cool.
Have a pleasant weekend.
