“In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
C.S. Lewis
“If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.”
G.K. Chesterton
"The barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
Hilaire Belloc
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
Hannah Arendt
Stocks were largely unchanged, gripped in the uncertainty of macroeconomic news and geopolitical developments.
The dollar continued drifting lower. Gold and silver were also largely unchanged.
Non-Farm payrolls report tomorrow.
The financial elite of the US are in a deep denial. A reckoning will be coming sooner rather than later.
A surprise, if not a shock, for those who have placed their faith and trust in unworthy temporal things is also coming. And unfortunately, that is most of us. We have a system that is badly in need of new leadership and reform.
And the face of change is regrettably not to be found in Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi, or most of the politicians and business models that this system has raised and nurtured, so that they belong to it body and soul.
There is great promise, but also risks, in change.
Events will make the words from history which you have read, and understood on the most superficial level or in dismissive of ways, come to life, and impose their meaning on your hearts and minds.
And you will think that you are the first to experience such things— and that the dangers of this age— are new and insurmountable. But in reality we are just trodding the familiar path in the unending struggle, with our eyes now opened, and being called to resist forces that are as old as Babylon, and evil as sin.
Have a pleasant evening.
