"It is crudely general to suggest collective responsibility for the German populace. It is, however, fair to suggest that those who continued to defend the idea of Germanhood publicly as the war went on—when this had become synonymous with barbarity—were in fact renouncing their humanity for the sake of individual survival and peace of mind."
Panayiotis Demopoulos, Götterdämmerung: Suicide Music
"Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite? In 2007-8, when the global financial system imploded, the cry that no one could have seen this coming was heard everywhere, despite the existence of numerous analyses showing that a crisis was unavoidable.
Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface.
Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to 'Black Swans' — that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers.
Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems."
Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan of Cairo, Foreign Affairs, May 2011
Stocks rallied today, on surprisingly light volume
The VIX rose sharply.
The Dollar chopped sideways.
Gold and silver declined.
This is an interesting week.
Tomorrow we get the CPI reading.
Wednesday there will be an FOMC rate decision.
And Friday there will be the last index option expiration of the year.
Wash-rinse-repeat.
The stars of financial shenaniganza are in alignment.
"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. Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness."
Thomas Merton
"Be patient, brothers and sisters,
until the coming of the Lord.
See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth,
being patient with it
until it receives the early and the late rains.
You too must be patient. Make your hearts firm,
because the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another,
that you may not be judged."
James 5:7-9
"Strengthen the hands that are feeble,
make firm the knees that are weak. Say to those whose hearts are frightened: be strong, fear not!
Here is your God,
he comes with vindication. With divine justice
he comes to save you."
Isaiah 35:3-4
"Do all without constant arguing and complaining, so that you may be blameless and righteous as children of God, unlike those of this contentious and perverse generation, among whom you may shine like lights to the world, as you hold firmly to the word of life."
Philippians 2:14-15
"Let us rejoice while we mourn. Let us look up to our Lord and Saviour. Let us, in our penitence, not substitute the Law for the Gospel, but add the Law to the Gospel. As they must not defraud themselves of Christian privileges, neither need they give up God's temporal blessings. All the beauty of nature, the kind influences of the seasons, the gifts of sun and moon, and the fruits of the earth, the advantages of civilized life, and the presence of friends and intimates; all these good things are but one extended and wonderful type of God's benefits in the Gospel. Those who aim at perfection will not reject the gift, but add a corrective; they will add the bitter herbs to the fatted calf and the music and dancing; they will not refuse the flowers of earth, but they will toil in plucking up the weeds.
Or if they refrain from one temporal blessing, it will be to reserve another; for this is one great mercy of God, that while He allows us a discretionary use of His temporal gifts, He allows a discretionary abstinence also; and He almost enjoins upon us the use of some, lest we should forget that this earth is His creation, and not of the evil one.
May God give us grace to walk thus humbly, thus soberly, thus without censoriousness in this day of confusion; enjoying His blessings, yet taking them with fear and trembling; and disciplining ourselves without gloom, yet not judging or slandering those who are more rigid or less secular than ourselves.
John Henry Newman
“This great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, compassion, historical necessity or even social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Word, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and to action.
Only the humble believe in Him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that He does wonders where people despair, that He takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous.
And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs His wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; He loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak, and the broken.
In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.
Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"I am speaking now, more directly, to those who embrace hatred and spread thoughts of violence and repression, often in the name of God, giving scandal to His faithful on earth.
I am speaking to those who stoke the fires of hatefulness, and violent words, gossip and name calling, insults and hardness towards their brothers and sisters in this world, while cynically asking, 'Who is my neighbor? Surely not them.'
May God have mercy on any who provide provocation and false teachings to others, and scandalous examples to their brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren. Especially because of their willful selfishness, stubborn greed, and foolish pride. And you know who you are, if you are not already completely dead to the life of the Spirit."
Jesse, 19 January 2015
O Lord,help us to understand that it is not only the afflicted who are in danger, but those of us who comfortably look on and at best do nothing, and worse spread controversy, fear, mistrust and hatred. Pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our blindness, and break the chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose life.
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
George Orwell
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
US Major General S. D. Butler, War Is a Racket
“Fear and debt. The two most powerful tools of empire.”
John Perkins, The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent."
Dean Baker
“When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or the other that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has the time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.”
Yuval Noah Harari
"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."
Jimmy Carter
"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."
Thomas Clement Douglas
Stocks wobbled around today and finally finished lower.
The VIX moved sideways.
Gold and silver managed to hold on to some gains and finished slightly higher.
The Dollar edged a little higher as well.
We have some consumer inflation data coming out on Tuesday that could move markets.
There will be an FOMC rate decision on Wednesday.
And finally we will enjoy be the last index option expiration for the year on Friday.
And where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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