"Your adversary, the devil, prowls the earth like a roaring lion, seeking those whom he may devour. Resist, and stand firmly in the faith, and know that your fellow believers throughout the world are also standing against the same temptations."
1 Peter 5:8-9
"Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan. Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament.
Certainly, he has no choice. He has chosen to have no choice. He has wished to ‘be himself’, and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted. The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom. To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."
C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942
“If we go as far as we can into the darkness, regardless of the consequences, I believe a midnight truth will free us from our bondage to violence and bring us to the light of peace.”
James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 2008
“What we would like to do is change the world— make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute— the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words— we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world."
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 1952
"And Peter understood that neither Nero, nor all his legions, could overcome the living truth — that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning. He understood as well why the Lord had turned him back on the road. That city of pride, of crime, of wickedness, and of a lust for power, was beginning to be His."
Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, 1896
Why does 'power' so often turn to self-destruction and cynical brutality?
I think it is because the soul incapable of loving and being loved becomes addicted to feeling - something.
It is like there is a great hole in their being that torments them. And so they try to fill it with things, and powerful emotions like hate and hanger, and the misery of other people. Anything.
The 'shutdown' was resolved in the Senate last night, according to the media.
Now this amended bill must be returned to the House, which must come back into session to deliberate it.
And if this happens, then Speaker Johnson would hopefully be under quite a bit of pressure to swear in the new member of the House, who has vowed to support the release of the 'Epstein files.'
We all now that, for whatever mysterious reason, the Trump administration had a remarkable change of mind in the release of the files, which they had whinged about for years when they were out of power.
And having pledged to release them, AG Bondi and her cohorts suddenly decided they were irrelevant, we didn't have to see them, and Trump himself dismissed them as a hoax, fake news, and unimportant.
Do you need to buy a vowel?
So stocks rallied, bubbling back up.
Gold and silver just rocketed higher, having been pressed down into the phantom Non-Farm Payrolls report last week.
You see, it's not really the report that drives prices. Its the unregulated power of the moneyed interests of Wall Street and their Banks.
There is going to be a significant amount of fraud and ugliness that may some day may tumble out into view. Both of the corporate parties will not wish this to happen. For every Trump there is a Clinton, so to speak.
But the current system is failing, and the more it abuses the public, the more the resistance to this dirty, rotten system will build.
In his recollections, Bill Moyers said that one night in a Tennessee hotel Lyndon Johnson described the dynamics of Southern politics like this:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
And so the band plays on.
Have a pleasant evening.
