"The truly savage and frenetic part of New York, the terrible, cold, cruel part, is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills this street believes that the world will always be the same, that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.
I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several billion dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness. I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings."
Federico Garcia Lorca, A Poet In New York, October 1929
"The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv'd them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas'd them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it.
Samuel Adams, Essay in the Boston Gazette, October 14, 1771
"Intellectual freedom is essential — freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship."
Andrei Sakharov, Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, July 22, 1968
"The barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
Hilaire Belloc, This That and The Other, 1912
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few, as we have learned to our sorrow."
Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, 21 May 1944
Wall Street took advantage of the light, pre-holiday trade to run the stock indices up to new highs.
How could they not? It's what they do.
The bigger banksters are covering themselves by warning of a stock market crash.
It would not be surprising to see a thorough rinse follow such a ham-handed wash.
Gold and silver rebounded strongly from their recent price suppression for the Comex option expiration.
VIX is allowing in blissful ignorance.
US markets are closed until Friday in observance of its national holiday.
The rest of the world will have to carry on until then without our financial supervision.
You have to wonder what is going on in the minds of those who are setting the US foreign policy these days.
From a strategic standpoint they appear to be incredibly foolish and self-destructive.
It's unlikely that the Babbler-in-chief is involved on more than a superficial level.
So ulterior and very selfish, short term motives given free rein without appropriate adult supervision, is the most likely explanation.
How else could you characterize the squandering of 8 trillion dollars and millions of human lives in pursuit of an endless series of discretionary wars in pursuit of power and money.
This is hardly a US phenomenon. It is a good description for far too many figures among the powers of the world. It's the natural outcome of society organized around personal gratification and savagery.
As always, I remember you in my prayers, as you remember me.
Have a pleasant 4th of July.
