“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1943
"If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to
be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media. Important
recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-
Contra, and now 9/11. All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that
part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which
will not be approved by a public examination. The CIA (with its on-going relationships to
drug-traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not
even the dirtiest.
The difference between 1963 and 2001 was in the White House. Eisenhower,
Kennedy and Johnson successfully contained the desires of their hawks to defeat and
destroy the Soviet Union. But Bush and Cheney have maneuvered America into a war on
terrorism. That war threatens to become a permanent justification for curtailing the U.S.
constitution’s elaborate checks and balances, and its guarantees of America’s traditional
liberties. "
Peter Dale Scott, 9/11, JFK, and War: Recurring Patterns
"The ultimate purpose of crime is to establish an endless empire. It seeks a state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world thought doomed to annihilation.
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, 1933
“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. 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.
Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference
between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who
decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the
tyrant.
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. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. The fascist style depends upon endless repetition, designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. The final mode is misplaced faith. At the end of the war a worker told Victor Klemperer that 'understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.'
Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of
shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our
natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our
institutions. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017
Stocks were hit by a steady selling today, and went out near the lows.
The VIX rose.
The Dollar rallied.
Gold finished unchanged from the open.
Silver was off a bit.
Waves of warm air were emanating out of Wyoming, as the Fed's annual meeting there staggered into the close.
I must have forgotten to watch the first Republican Presidential candidates debate last night.
Darn.
Have a pleasant evening.
