"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
"There are recurring cycles, ups and downs, but the course of events is essentially the same, with small variations. It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes."
Theodor Reik, The Unreachables, 1965
History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends."
Mark Twain, The Gilded Age, 1874
“History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.”
Max Beerbohm, 1896
I have included the CrashTrak plot in the aftermath but originally I was posting it when the signal was given in June 2008.
I have stopped including 1987 in the historical reference because although it fits the pattern it was in fact a hellacious flash crash noted for it brief intensity, quickly addressed with a flood of liquidity by Alan Greenspan.
"You either belong wholly to the world or wholly to God. If people would do for God what they do for the world, what a great number would go to Heaven. Our greatest cross is the fear of crosses.
Envy follows pride; whoever is envious is proud. Envy comes to us from Hell; the devils having sinned through pride, sinned also through envy, envying our glory, our happiness. Why do we envy the happiness and the goods of others? Because we are proud; we should like to be the sole possessors of talents, riches, of the esteem and love of all the world!
Everything is good and precious in God’s sight when we act from the motives of adoration and of love. Christ tells us that even offering someone a glass of water would not go unrewarded. You see, my children, that although we may be poor, we can still easily give alms.
How good is our God! When we are no longer able to come to Him, He comes to us. We are each of us like a small mirror, in which God searches for His reflection.
If you pray and love, that is where happiness lies. It is always springtime in the heart that loves God."
John Vianney, Curé of Ars
"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu' il a été proprement fait."
(The secret of great returns which are difficult to explain is a crime that has not yet been discovered because it has been carefully executed.)
Honoré de Balzac, Pere Goriot
"The real collapse of our currency began when it became evident that certain industrial circles were more powerful than the government."
Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse
The VIX and Dollar dumped, and gold and silver shot higher.
Gold is now up to some serious resistance in the short term.
Stocks had another ranging day, finishing slightly higher to unchanged.
The markets are waffling ahead of tomorrow's Non-Farm Payrolls report.
And that is just another indication of what a Fed-driven mispriced market we have.
I could not find enough conviction to take any serious position ahead of the report, so we'll just have to see what happen.
Daisy is responding remarkably well to treatments and is settling in to her new environment.
"You might think that parking your money in a big bank like JP Morgan Chase would insulate you from fraud. It’s just the opposite. The big banks are the biggest perpetrators of financial fraud – fraud that affects millions of us, either directly or indirectly, on an ongoing basis. While they are wrist slaps when properly scaled, you can see the list of 'settlements' made between the government and the big banks here. These 'settlements,' the aftermath of Wall Street's near production of a second Great Depression, entailed not a single criminal indictment. The top two repositories of banksters, based on the number of settlements, are Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.
The banks engage in fraud for two reasons. First, they profit from swindling the public. Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique. They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."
"It’s bad enough that two trial lawyers have written a book [cited above] comparing Dimon’s leadership of the bank to the Gambino crime family, and Bloomberg News spilling the secrets coming out of the Chicago precious metals trial, but now Dimon is likely to see new headlines linking his name to questionable payments to Tony Blair and unknown others."
“Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years, and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.”
Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir: March Violets
“We'll always have Paris.”
Howard Koch, screenwriter, Casablanca
Stocks were in risk on mode today, for whatever reason one wishes to imagine in order to rationalize its irrationality.
The Dollar was up marginally.
Gold and silver were hit lower again as is customary ahead of a non-farm payrolls report.
The amount of criminality and corruption in the US financial system should never be underestimated.
Why the American people allow themselves to be so easily distracted by divisive social controversies while being robbed blind by the kleptocracy is almost amazing.
But there is historical precedent. We know it, but we just cannot see it in ourselves, yet.
We are canning tomatoes tonight, and I did the blanching and peeling on eight quarts of San Marzanos.
Even with all the lack of rain, a proper drought in the past month, the garden is doing very well.
I have a huge pot of green beans that I am making 'West Virginia style.' My wife's maternal grandmother was from there and she always called them that.
Basically you fry bacon and saute an onion in a big pot and then steam the green beans down into them all, cooking out the liquid so that the beans are sauteed as well. Its very good especially if you have more mature beans that are not suitable for steaming. Try to pull off the strings before cooking.
My mind kept returning to Paris today. The last time I was there was in 1992, when I was attending a graduate business seminar at ESSEC concerning the proposed European Union. I think the slogan at the time was 'EU 92.'
The queen was tagging along on this trip and had a grand time, although she never went on a business trip again with me, as leaving the newly born young man with her parents was jarring for her.
Daisy gave the young man his first face licks today He was beaming.
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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