"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.
We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
George Orwell, 1984
"What happens to a society fed a diet of rushed, re-purposed, thinly reported content? Or branded content that is really merchandising — propaganda — posing as journalism? And what happens when PR turns a profit and the truth goes penniless?"
Bill Moyers, Journalism in the Pressure Cooker of Plutocracy, May 26, 2015
"Early on in the gospel traditions the power elite in Jesus’ society, who were colluding with the Roman Empire, recognized him as a threat and began to conspire to kill him. Jesus became a reference point for much of the hostility and resistance to the power of the empire because he refused to accommodate it, and told another story of reality that the empire could not co-opt."
Jonathan Merritt, Walter Brueggemann On How to Speak Truth to Power, June 26, 2014
Gold and silver were the big story today, as they both had a 'snapback rally' from the market manipulation of last week with their option expiration on the Comex.
There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on this Friday the 6th. Shenanigans are to be expected.
Some think that markets are 'efficient,' that is the assumption that prices are set by supply and demand, on a fairly even and steady course.
And this has proven to be discredited nonsense. Prices in lightly regulated markets in the short term are set at the margins, as larger players with more knowledge and leverage and a bigger stack of chips can push the price of things around with relative ease.
Longer term manipulation is possible with a great application of force and fraud.
The efficient market hypothesis is a such an implausible canard that I doubt anyone who was not talking their book or plagued by commercial or ideologically induced naïveté could have said it.
“Some economists, when thinking about long memory, are concerned that it undercuts the Efficient Market Hypothesis that prices fully reflect all relevant information; that the random walk is the best metaphor to describe such markets; and that you cannot beat such an unpredictable market. Well, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is no more than that, a hypothesis. Many a grand theory has died under the onslaught of real data.”
Benoît B. Mandelbrot, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, 1997
Stocks managed to creep up today.
VIX continued to fall.
Uncle Buck took it on the chin a bit, back down to the 98 handle.
I suspect that things are not going to be going well in general over the next few month, despite what the media of our free nations will be saying and the burning need that some cultist sorts may feel to believe in false idols, until their bitter end.
Have a pleasant evening.
