“Americans had built themselves a world of speculative pipe dreams. That world was inhabited, not by people who had to be convinced, but by people who sought excuses for believing.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 1967
“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be with the coming of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given away in marriage, up until the very day that Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came, and swept them all away. And they said to him, 'Where will this happen, Lord?' And He said to them, 'Where death is, there a gathering of vultures will be.'”
Luke 17:26-27, 37
"One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding. These are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it.
Quite a lot of what passes itself off as dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own (selfish) choices. Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective."
Timothy Kreider, We Learn Nothing, June 2012
"‘Woe to you, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. On the outside you appear righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. You snakes, you brood of vipers.'"
Matthew 23:23-33
"Financial Predators, on the other hand, are usually narcissistic and audacious criminals. They regularly have an extreme sense of entitlement coupled with high self-efficacy. Many of them have a charismatic quality and are preternaturally persuasive. Financial Predators are commonly shameless and quite adept serial liars. They perceive themselves having near unlimited guile and resourcefulness to extricate themselves out of any compromising situations."
Russ Alan Prince, Unmasking Financial Predators, Forbes 2017
"There are so many ways of escaping from that which one fears, and not the least of these is hatred.”
Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir
The American oligarchy of money and power is becoming increasingly audacious.
By audacious is meant that it operates more openly, more brazenly, and more lawlessly, using force and fraud, bribery and blackmail, to achieve its own selfish objectives.
They are able to bend US foreign and domestic policy of the country to their will in ways that seem almost baffling and self-destructive to the casual, non-partisan observer.
These are the ways of the madness possessing the minds of those who serve it.
Stocks rolled higher today since the Fed did not do or say anything untoward to spoil the party.
VIX of course fell.
Gold soared as the reality of the opera buffa in the halls of power and money is increasingly exposed for the farce without a sustainable foundation that it is becoming.
Silver took it on the chin for whatever reason, probably related to the goon squad of financial interests that run the US markets and the lack of international challengers in the markets that gold seems to energize.
This is going to end badly. And they do not care.
I have had an abiding feeling that an object lesson in consequence is forthcoming. How we will react to it will determine our near term future.
Many other nations have stood in such situations before, and not so long ago that we cannot remember.
Have a pleasant evening.
