"A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it?  And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure.” 

Fyodor Dostoevsky 

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” 

Garry Kasparov 

 “The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. the official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought.  For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not.”

Alexandre Koyré 

Stocks took a fairly convincing swoon this morning, falling straight down to underlying support.

But mirabile dictu, equities regained most of their losses in the late afternoon and finished with a small loss.

The Dollar rallied up to just short of the 93 handle.

Gold and silver were whacked pretty convincingly along with most of the associated miners'

There will be a quad witch stock options expiration on Friday, the third of this year.

The banks must be restrained, the financial system reformed, and the economy brought back into balance before there can be any sustained recovery. 

Given the extent of the corruption of the major monopolized industries and the political system by big money, I am not optimistic about when it will happen. 

But as Hermann Hesse once wrote, 'When the suffering because acute enough, one goes forward.'

Have a pleasant evening.