"He drew near and saw the city, and he wept for it saying, 'If you had only recognized the things that make for peace. But now you are blinded to them. Truly, the days will come when your enemies will set up barriers to surround you, and hem you in on every side. Then they will crush you into the earth, you and your children. And they will not leave one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the way to your salvation.'”
Luke 19:41-44
"You hypocrites! You build monuments for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of His messengers.’"
Matthew 23:29-30
Stocks were on a tear today on the hopes for a better turn of events with the government budgetary squabbles, optimism on a China trade deal, and the results of the Senate GOP finding no evidence of 'collusion' with Russia by the Trump Administration to influence the results of the presidential election..
This last item is not surprising, because this entire Russian collusion meme seems as though it is an hysterical reaction to the spin put out by the Clinton political faction and their neoliberal enablers after their shocking loss in the 2016 Presidential election.
Too bad though, because the financial corruption and private pilfering using public power, money laundering and the kind of soft corruption that is rampant amongst our new elite is all there. And by there we mean on both sides of the fence— which is why it had to take a back seat to a manufactured boogeyman.
Gold and silver were still marking time and the Dollar backed off a bit.
There is a long road ahead before we see anything like a resolution to this troubling period in American political history.
We look back at other troubled periods and places, and either see them as discrete and fictional, a very different world apart, or through some rosy lenses of good old times which were largely benign and peaceful. We fail to see the continuity, the similarity, and the commonality of a dangerous path with ourselves. As did they with their own times gone by. Madness blinds its acolytes because they wish it.
We are reassured and misled by the same kinds of voices that have always served the status quo and the monied interests, the think tanks, so-called 'institutes,' and the web sites and former con men who offer a constant streams of thinly disguised propaganda and misstatements of principle and history.
People want to hear reassuring words of comfort and formal 'religion,' but do not wish to draw the conclusions that these principles certainly suggest (dare we say
command in this day and age) in their daily lives. They blind themselves by adopting a kind of a schizoid approach to life, where 'religion' occupies a disrete, rarefied space, and 'political or economic philosophy' dictates another set of everyday 'practical' behaviours which are more pliable and pleasing to our hardened hearts.
We wish to strike a deal with the Lord, and a deal with the Devil— to serve both God and Mammon as it suits us. It really is that cliché, so finely woven into the fabric of the day that we cannot see it; we cannot see that it is happening to us and around us.
We trot on into the abyss, one exception and excuse and rationalization for ourselves at a time. And we blind ourselves with false prophets and their profane theories and philosophies. We would intertrupt the sermon on the mount, saying that this sentiment was all very well and good, but what stocks should we buy for our portfolio, and what horse is going to win the fifth at Belmont? Tell us something useful,
practical! Oh, and can you please fix this twinge in my left shoulder? It is ruining my golf game.
"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; they cannot understand destitution. Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves bare, they will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them. They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat."
Léon Bloy
No surprise there. It has always been so, especially at times of such vanity and greed as these. Then is now. There is nothing new under the sun.
Have a pleasant evening.
