“Do not become angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.”
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by
many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence;
experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being
truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made
us cynical.
If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1943-1945
“He opened the book of nature before me, and I saw that every flower He has created has a beauty of its own, that the splendor of the rose and the lily’s whiteness do not deprive the violet of its scent nor make less ravishing the daisy’s charm. I saw that if every little flower wished to be a rose, Nature would lose her spring adornments, and the fields would be no longer enameled with their varied flowers. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden. What delights Him is the simplicity of these flowers of the field, and by stooping so low to them, He shows how infinitely great He is.
Just as the sun shines equally on the cedar and the little flower, so the Divine Sun shines equally on everyone, great and small. Holiness consists simply in doing God's will, and being just what God wants us to be.”
Thérèse de Lisieux
I don't know if it is in fact true, but for many years now I have had an abiding suspicion that the, or at least 'an', antichrist has walked the earth since at least 1948.
What first brought this to my attention was the reading of a privately printed transcript of an exorcism that had been conducted in the 1940s, shared by a professor acquaintance at university. There is a phase of the ritual during which the possessing spirit can be compelled to answer questions. How deceptive those answers might be is another thing.
Stocks wallowed around again, with the usual wash and rinse action, finishing about unchanged with tech lagging again.
The VIX fell.
Gold and silver finished about unchanged, even though the Dollar rallied.
The Fed conference at Jackson Hole is on August 24-26.
There will be a stock index option expiration on Friday.
Have a pleasant weekend.
