"It is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, and justice nothing."
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture for Literature, 1970
"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
George Orwell, Freedom of the Press
"Do not be surprised, brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love one another. Anyone who does not love is in thrall to death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer. And you know that no murderer has life eternal residing in him.
Little children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and truth."
1 John 3:13-18
"Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."
John 8:43-44
"The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God. The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen."
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
Stocks managed to hold a bounce today.
VIX fell, of course.
The Dollar chopped around, but finished mostly unchanged.
Gold and silver are hanging in there.
Gold seems to be in an ascending triangle, which is developing along the lines of a potential continuation pattern.
Tomorrow we get the CPI and PPI the day after.
This may help to resolve a number of things on the charts.
I have seen our leadership perpetrate nasty and undesirable things in my life.
Most of the time they were truly awful, but hidden with some sense of shame.
Their boldness is growing, and the facades are falling away.
And they delight with the skill in their lying.
"As soon as men know they that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers, with approving smiles."
Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce, 1947
Have a pleasant evening.
