“It's impossible that there could be a plague, because everyone knows that they have vanished from the West. We should not act as though half the town were threatened with death, because then it would be. Yes, everyone knew that, except for the dead."
Albert Camus, The Plague
"The financial asset bubbles since the turn of the 21st century have been enabled by four basic instruments of monetary policy error: Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell. Whether we will have a third major collapse and crash to follow this latest asset bubble, as a consequence of misguided monetary policy, economic priorities, and bank regulation is not the issue. The question is, shall we have a system that holds together long enough to have a fourth?"
Jesse, Malice Domestic and Endless Foreign Wars, 31 July 2018
"The banks engage in fraud for two reasons. First, they profit from swindling the public. Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique. They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions [and lucrative insider trading - Jesse]."
Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014
'What is truth?' Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
"Monetary and regulatory policy encourage asset bubbles to proliferate. Hot money seeks out the conscious mispricing of risk. Capital, in the form of both money and personal talent, increasingly flows into malinvestment and the gaming of markets. The productive economy languishes, left wanting for the lack of creative resources and attention. The bubble rises to unsustainable valuations— and fails, and a nation's capital is consumed."
Jesse, The Men Who Sold the World, 5 August 2019
'What is truth?' Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
"Against such foolishness we are defenseless. Reason falls on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental . In all this the foolish person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. Never again will we try to persuade the foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
“Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”
Otto von Bismarck
"There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise. When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Foolishness has a knack of getting its way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues."
