- First, there will be a state of perpetual war.
- Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta.
- Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions.
- Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens.”
Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 2005
"Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime's behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul. The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neropolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.”
James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, 2014
"And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."
Martin Luther King, A Time to Break the Silence, 4 April 1967
"When we are the victims of an illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty. As soon as we do evil, the evil appears as a sort of duty. Once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder. As soon as men know they that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles."
Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce, 1947
"Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dallas cover-up. The success of the cover-up was the indispensable foundation for the subsequent murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work in our government—and in ourselves. The unspeakable is not far away."
James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, Maryknoll, 2008
I have to be somewhere in a bit, so I'll post the market data now and we catch up on any changes tomorrow.
Stocks popped and flopped today, although they are coming well off their lows.
Still, it's not much of a recovery from yesterday's decline.
Gold and silver continued their rallies, but were substantially backing off from their gains in the late afternoon.
The Dollar declined.
Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday may dominate the week's action, barring any exogenous events.
One of the biggest problems we have today is the failure of law to curb the excesses, the greed and phantasms of the pathological.
This is the very purpose of the law: to protect the majority from sociopathic behaviour and crime.
The forces of abnormal appetites are always at work trying to persuade people that they, and their children, do not need protection from predators, by the predators, in their obsessive pursuit of money, sex, land, and power over the weak and the innocent.
Have a pleasant evening.
