“If a leader allows weariness to so grip the mind that its strength is sapped and reason gives up the reins, if a leader is so overcome by heavy-hearted sleep that he neglects to do what the duty of his office requires— like the cowardly ship’s captain who is so disheartened by the furious din of the storm that he deserts the helm, hides away cowering in some cranny, and abandons the ship to the waves—if a leader does this, I would certainly not hesitate to juxtapose and compare his sadness with the sadness that leads, as Paul says, to hell."
Thomas More, The Sadness of Christ and Final Prayers
“I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside a human being, inside every human being. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within ourselves.
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Stocks attempted to rally today, but fell off from much of their gains into the close.
Silver held its ground, while gold gave up a little.
The US Dollar finished higher.
The hysteria continues to spread, infecting both with blindness and hatred. It will find its culmination.
No one will have asked for it, or even seen it coming. Again.
If anything might tend to discourage my outlook it is the lack of financial reform, and the reassertion of deregulation as a good for its own sake.
Without financial and political reform there will be no change in the long term trends to inequality. And that condition may not cohere into longer term sustainability.
Defy the world with love, and a light will come into your life. And so you may save the best in yourselves.
Have a pleasant evening.
