Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all failure and weakness — Christianity."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
"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, Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942
"All of Hell, which seemed so immense to the narrator, would fit into a practically microscopic space in Heaven. Lewis [The Great Divorce] is illustrating here the Augustinian principle that sin is the state of being incurvatus in se (curved in around oneself). It is the reduction of reality to the infinitely small space of the ego’s concerns and preoccupations."
Robert Barron, Self-Obsession and Hell, 2016
"Wherever you are going this morning, my friends, show the world that you're going with truth. You are going with justice, you are going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship. And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow. But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."
Martin Luther King, Ebenezer Baptist Church, 5 November 1967
“I have been to many countries and seen much poverty and suffering. Everywhere I go people tell me of their hardships and struggles, and ask for help, and I give what I can. But of all the countries I have been to, the poorest one I have been to is America. America suffers most from the poverty of loneliness."
Teresa of Calcutta
"This is not capitalism. Capitalism does not demand that we destroy human lives for the sake of maximizing profits using any and all means which that end justifies. The Market is not an end to itself. The Market is not God. This is beyond capitalism. This is tyranny. It is a pernicious form of selfishness and self-indulgence, a privileged arrogance.
To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, 'The modern economist is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior justification for selfishness.'
And this is not a choice between poverty for the sake of truth and a very comfortable living, but the overwhelming need for a fabulous, ostentatious wealth and power that seems to have become the god of this generation. And it is a sickness, a sickness unto death."
Jesse, The Careerists and the Banality of Evil, 24 July 2012
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You who murder the prophets, and abuse those whom God has sent to you. How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings. But you were not willing. So your house is now yours to command— but is made desolate.”
Matthew 23:37-38
The markets were well positioned by the week's action for today's relatively quiet quad witch option expiration.
Stocks were off a bit.
The VIX declined, again to the lows.
Gold and silver held their ground.
The Dollar was up a bit.
The cafe has always enjoyed a wide international clientele, but for the first time another country has edged out the US in readership over a sustained period of time. It is the city-state of Singapore.
This has been going on for a month or so and I have no idea what may be driving it. I have considered a few scenarios but since I don't use any analytics or tracking except the very basic macro traffic counts that are included with Blogger it is only speculation.
US markets will be closed on Monday for the 'Juneteenth' national holiday which commemorates the end of slavery.
Need little, want less, love more.
For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
Have a pleasant weekend.
