Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Visitors Abounding - Surprised by Joy

Van der Heyden, Pride and the Seven Deadly Sins

"A family develops with a loving woman at its center (as its heart)."

Karl Friedrich Schlegel


"Caesar was swimming in blood. Rome and the whole pagan world had gone mad.

But those who had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were full of misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of a God who, out of love for them, had offered Himself up to be crucified, for the forgiveness of their sins."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: In the Time of Nero

And true life develops around a central core of grace with its two great gifts: repentance and forgiveness.

The deadliest of the seven sins is pride, the royal sin of the hierarchy of the fallen angels. Pride will never admit to a mistake, and thereby willingly ask for forgiveness.  A proud man is too busy looking down on everyone else to see own his true self, and his relationship with the rest of creation.

I have family arriving from out of town, Maryland and Ohio, some now and the rest later tonight, running ahead of the incoming storms.  lol.

I spent the afternoon getting things ready for them.

A big pot of chicken gumbo soup and a loaf of hearty bread is a fine way to greet a traveler.

Here are the updated charts and information for today.

There is nothing better than a house full of family.

Defy the world with love, and a light will come into your life.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Hybrid Warfare: US Imposes Harsh New Sanctions On Russia, Ramping Up the New Cold War

Here is another interesting interview by The Real News network.

"The US has imposed a new round of sanctions on Russia over the Skripal poisoning in Britain, despite the absence to date of evidence. This follows the reimposition of Iran sanctions following Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. The sanctions will further bleed the targeted countries, but could they backfire? We speak to journalist and best-selling author Max Blumenthal."

I am certainly no diplomat.  But it's pretty clear when one guy is trying his darnedest to pick a fight with another guy.  Or guys. Anyone who does not fall into line.

Nothing brings a people into line, and distracts them from other issues, and opens opportunities for silencing dissent, like the threat of war.

You may find this interview at The Real News here.

Thomas Frank: Rendezvous With Oblivion - A Time of Cascading Collapse

John Alexander, Ship of Fools

"This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn that the structure beneath them is crumbling. And this is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover that there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate."

Thomas Frank

The title of this book by Thomas Frank is an obvious play on the prescient quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech to the Democratic Convention in 1936:

"There is a mysterious cycle in human events.  To some generations much is given.  Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

In the past I often speculated that the US was extraordinarily fortunate, a high-toned way of saying damned lucky, that in the mix of leadership that came out of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression the US had its Roosevelt—  while Italy had Mussolini, Germany had its Hitler, Russia was in the hands of Stalin, Japan with Tojo, and Span with Franco.

This time around the American voters were shortchanged when they thought  they had chosen their new FDR, the great reformer and bringer of Hope and Change in Obama.

And having failed in that, they next turned to an alternative choice, a new breed of populist, similar to Huey Long in rhetoric and common appeal, but without Huey's long years of practical experience in government.

The failure to make the necessary changes and reforms that follows on these political hoaxes reverberates, with the adherents of either 'great reformer' clinging to their dashed hopes and expectation like survivors stubbornly clinging to their favorite wreckage of a ship of fools, shutting their eyes in determined denial, drifting towards some yet to be realized rendezvous with oblivion.






Thom Hartmann reads a short excerpt from Thomas Frank's new collection of essays, Rendezvous With Oblivion.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Where Sin Abounds, Grace Abounds More

“If a leader allows weariness to so grip the mind that its strength is sapped and reason gives up the reins, if a leader is so overcome by heavy-hearted sleep that he neglects to do what the duty of his office requires— like the cowardly ship’s captain who is so disheartened by the furious din of the storm that he deserts the helm, hides away cowering in some cranny, and abandons the ship to the waves—if a leader does this, I would certainly not hesitate to juxtapose and compare his sadness with the sadness that leads, as Paul says, to hell."

Thomas More, The Sadness of Christ and Final Prayers


“I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside a human being, inside every human being. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within ourselves.

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Stocks attempted to rally today, but fell off from much of their gains into the close.

Silver held its ground, while gold gave up a little.

The US Dollar finished higher.

The hysteria continues to spread, infecting both with blindness and hatred.   It will find its culmination.

No one will have asked for it, or even seen it coming.  Again.

If anything might tend to discourage my outlook it is the lack of financial reform, and the reassertion of deregulation as a good for its own sake.

Without financial and political reform there will be no change in the long term trends to inequality. And that condition may not cohere into longer term sustainability.

Defy the world with love, and a light will come into your life.   And so you may save the best in yourselves.

Have a pleasant evening.