"Their tongues are devious weapons, bent like drawn bows. With lies rather than truth they have gained power in the land. They commit one crime after another. They do not accept me."
Jeremiah 9:3
"When one knows it is possible to kill without risking either punishment or blame, one kills; or at least one surrounds those who kill with encouraging smiles. If one feels a little disgust, one keeps quiet about it, and before long one extinguishes it, for fear of seeming to lack manliness. One is swept up; it is an intoxication impossible to resist without a strength of soul I am obliged to consider exceptional, since I have never encountered it anywhere.
In contrast, I have encountered peaceable French persons, whom I did not despise up to this point, who would not have had themselves the idea of killing, but who bathed in this atmosphere soaking in blood with visible pleasure. For the latter I can never have any esteem in the future."
Simone Weil, Letter to George Bernanos on the War in Spain, Paris, 1938
"We shed blood for high-sounding words spelled out in capital letters. We seek to impart content to them by destroying other men who believe in enemy-words, also in capital letters. … The nothingness of national, class, or racial myth must receive an apparent substance, not from intelligible content but from the will to destroy and be destroyed."
Thomas Merton, The Answer of Minerva: Pacifism and Resistance in Simone Weil, 1968
"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined. Suddenly it all comes to be, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done. For that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, 1955
Stocks managed to shake off a mountain of awful news to rally again, led by the tech bubble.
The Dollar rallied.
Bitcoin pulled back.
Gold stumbled, but silver powered higher, most likely on Chinese stockpiling and the bubble enthusiasm for the economy.
We live in times that try men, that weigh their souls.
God will determine by our actions who will be judged righteous, and not.
And for many, they are weighed, and will be found wanting.
This will not be a trial, with testimony and response. It will be a perfect exposition.
The light of truth will show you what you are, with no need for explanation or excuses or negotiation.
Evil, when we are in the presence of its power, seems attractive, and even an obligation.
Do not be deceived, for God is not mocked. What a man sows, so shall he reap.
And that will be that, the only thing that matters, in the end.
Have a pleasant evening.
