2 Timothy 3:3-5
"The same pride which makes a man treat those of less powerful standing arrogantly, makes him cringe servilely to those above him. It is the very nature of this vice, which is neither based on personal merit nor on virtue, but on riches, posts, influence, and useless knowledge, to render a man a snob to those who are below him as to faown upon those who are above."
Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, 1688
"All the nations which appear in history are necessarily a mixture, for us inextricable, of City of Good and City of Evil. But what theology, history and common sense have also taught me is that the civilizations which allow the gap to widen between the ideal to which they claim and the realizations which they propose of it, these civilizations are dying of their hypocrisy.“
Henri-Irénée Marrou, France ma patrie,Le Monde, 5 avril 1956
“Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.”
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1873
Children may not be deceived so easily, because they see what is there, through innocent eyes.
They have not yet learned to blind themselves, and to twist themselves into beasts.
It is hard to appraise the depths to which our high and mighty will descend, and contort themselves like madcaps for money.
Such august personages of state, telling clumsy lies, and creatures of high office, bouncing up and down like 'useful idiots', in a heart-rending opera buffa of decline.
These are our times, and our generation, whose hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Stocks popped and flopped once again today.
At some point they are just going to collapse and hide from embarrassment.
Gold and silver were under a bit of pressure.
The Dollar rose slightly.
There won't be much economic data until we see the PPI and CPI inflation data next week.
Have a pleasant evening.
