"I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out."
Traudl Junge, Im toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin, 2002
"The banks engage in fraud for two reasons. First, they profit from swindling the public. Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique. They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."
Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014
“We should listen to the voice of conscience. It does not take nearly as much courage as one might think to admit to our mistakes and learn from them. Human beings are in this world to learn and to change themselves in learning.”
Traudl Junge, Bis zur letzten Stunde 1947
"Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor. Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.
Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible. The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being. The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business."
Lewis H. Lapham, Money and Class in America, 1988
"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now."
Aaron Bushnell
We had that rare risk off day in the markets.
Stocks were weak and retreated a bit from their recent highs, concentrated and overbought.
Gold and silver rallied sharply.
The Dollar rallied.
VIX rose.
Tomorrow is a quad witch stock option expiration.
I suspect quite a bit of today's action was a correction of the recent ploy to squeeze the bears.
The geopolitical strategy of the Western allies is almost incomprehensible at this point.
And that is no indication of depth of thought on their part.
Well, we are expected not to notice some notable things these days, or else risk isolation and ridicule by the cancel culture of the establishment's prevailing narrative.
Something significant, something that is going to be missed, is on its way to a hellish reckoning.
The flower of a generation of Ukrainian men, a city on the Mediterranean, a major base in Eastern Europe?
And we we dance on, creeping closer and closer to the abyss.
Madness.
And the madness serves none but itself.
Have a pleasant evening.
