Spiritual pride leads to a lingering spiritual death. It turns the living being into a tomb, bright and polished on the outside, proudly ornamented with scrupulous attention to detail, and ostentatious adherence to the letter of the law — but inside full of corruption, and festering foulness. They love the rituals and the worldly forms of religion, but want nothing to do with mercy and love. It is a sickening romance with the self, unto death.
Jesse, Essere Umano, 20 August 2017
On its own, Shanghai is taking a big chunk of total world gold production by itself as shown in the third chart.
Gold continues to move from West to East.
I could not happen to notice this evening when someone mentioned the US' current issues with Russia, Turkey, and China, that all of these countries have been major accumulators of physical gold.
The other big major is India, the government of which has been engaging in all sorts of gimmicks to attempt to dampen the private gold demand driven by the people who use gold jewelry as a means of savings.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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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