“The never ending alarms, the never ending phrases, the never ending hanging out of flags, now in triumph, now in mourning—it all produces apathy. And everyone feels helpless, and everyone knows he is being lied to, and everyone is told what he has to believe. The dominant feeling is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us.”
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933-41
"When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."
Friedrich Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse
"As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.
You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. What is truth? Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.
Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
"The impulse to evil is not the domain of any particular people or time, but a recurrent problem that must be confronted by each generation, and each individual person, in their own way and calling.
There is always the temptation to look upon injustice as insurmountable, and to simply turn away and to wash our hands with the thought that there is no use of trying.
That is the fate of those who have given themselves over to self-absorption, addictions, or despair, who are dying inside, and who when the time comes will make beasts of themselves, to escape the painful fragility of their own insubstantial being."
Jesse, The Age of Spectacle, 8 November 2012
There is a growing class of politicians and journalists who are at heart insincere performers, cynically seeking wealth and power as magnets for hysterical nincompoops.
As old as Babylon, and evil as sin.
Rally follows selloff as wash follows rinse.
A lackluster set of economic data this morning cheered the markets that the Fed will soon be done with their interest rate increases.
And the hopes that corporate America at least will muddle through somehhow and continue to provide the one percent with outsized, largely unproductive, gains.
The Dollar chopped sideways.
Gold and silver were hit early and then recovered to flat.
Looks like some post-option expiration 'technical trading.'
Have a pleasant evening.
