Feeding the Fires of Moloch

"Power will achieve its murderous potential.  It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel


"A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”

Chris Hedges


"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people. What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."

Theodor Adorno


The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.  The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help.  They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps."

Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin

The Aktion T4 Programme provided the expertise, the administrative practices, and the bureaucratic rationales required to build the mass extermination facilities and the camps for designated victims.

The beginning of social Darwinism is financial Darwinism, the unjust and willful allocation of means and opportunity.  This enriches the favored, and permits the oppressed to be more easily labeled as inferior, useless eaters, life unworthy of life. 

Thinning their ranks at a distance becomes easy to rationalize, and after a time a purely practical routine, like cutting the grass.

The root of it all is greed, pride, and the will to power, the desire of a select few to determine the value of all life, and to define both good and evil.  And they see themselves as the ultimate good. 

Their handiwork is not life, but a profound emptiness, the abomination of desolation.

They never have enough. Not enough money, not enough power, not enough killing. They cannot give life, so they will bring death.  They fear weakness and death, so they attempt to be its master.

They would be as gods.  And in their pride they make themselves, and all those around them, not masters but monsters.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Flight to Sound Money - Fed Attempts Rescue, Leadership Shameless

"Good and bad coin cannot circulate together... and because of this unexampled state of badness all the fine gold was conveyed out of your realm."

Thomas Gresham, Letter to Queen Elizabeth, 1558


“Now, as he [Thomas Gresham] was the first [he wasn't] to perceive that a bad and debased currency is the cause of the disappearance of the good money, we are only doing what is just in calling this great fundamental law of the currency by his name.  We may call it Gresham's law of the currency.   Bad coin invariably and necessarily drives out good coin from circulation.”

Henry Dunning Macleod, The Elements of Political Economy, 1858


"Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.

Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate."

The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich 1942

No elected body with a fiduciary responsibility, and any remnant of a conscience, should ever hand over a sum like $500 billion for disbursement to corporations to any presidential administration without clear conditions, transparency, and oversight. Especially after the abuses uncovered from the bailouts of the last financial crisis.  But needs must for those with no shame.

The Modern Moloch

Stock futures went limit down shortly after they opened on Sunday night. The Fed threw the kitchen sink at the markets this morning, and managed to hold stocks from falling out of bed completely.

Gold and silver caught a definite bid, as the whiff of monetary mischief permeated the markets.

I read an opinion piece from one of the usual suspects which blames our current state of affairs on the working public for their dissolution and extravagance in wanting to have such things as phones.

These are the same jokers who are still saying that this pandemic is all media hype, and that losing a few hundred thousand people dead would be well worth it, if we could only maintain the financial status quo of plunder capitalism.  They should do some field research in northern Italy.

It always seems unreal until it hits closer to home, as it did in our little town today.

This reaction to the collapsing bubble is like a replay of 2008. Or 2002. Well, you get the idea.  Just another round of shenanigans from our sociopathic elite.

There will be a Comex precious metals option expiration on Thursday the 26^th.

This is not over yet, not by a long shot.

The world does not love you, as God loves you, and the madness serves none but itself.

Have a pleasant evening.

US Futures Sunday Evening

Stocks slumped badly on the open at 6 PM Eastern time.

Limit down, right from the open.

They have since bounced a little off the lows. But I expect this to be another rough start for the week.

I decided that I needed to expand the charts a bit, and pick up some of the prior lows from the past.

The hit on the NDX chart support level was gratifying when I sketched it out.

Pictures From Crashes Past

"The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929


"The fact that these foolish people are often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that they are not independent. In conversation with them, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with them as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of them.  They are under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in their very being.

Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.  This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy the human soul.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

Each financial bubble and collapse has common characteristics, while having their own peculiar character.

This that we are experiencing now is the third in a series of bubbles that started at the turn of the century.

I suspect it may prove to be the most severe, as compared to the last two.

The crash of 1987 was more of a trading anomaly and glitch in the financial system, similar to the panic of 1907.

I think we are in more of a Crash of 1929 scenario.

Let's take this one as it comes.

And be wary of the power of the well phrased lie, the same lies of the moneyed interests and their enablers and apologists, so often repeated in various forms, that have brought us to where we are today.