Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Painting Bedlam with Blood

 

"Seneca and Burrus dithered but did not object when Nero asked their advice on how to finish his mother off.  Younger courtiers jumped into the gap, and made sure that Agrippina did not survive the night.  Seneca came out of this affair both morally tainted, and with less of the emperor's esteem.

His stature was still an asset to the regime, however, and Nero put him to work drafting a letter justifying the killing to the Senate.  He had to claim that Nero had acted in self-defense against a dangerous woman, but not by celebrating the death of a mother.  It did not impress the Senate, though only a hardcore stoic named Thrasea Paetus showed explicit disapproval of the blatant propaganda.

Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes.  On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure.  But their moral influence may also improve the regime's behavior or save the lives of its enemies.  For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul.

The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neropolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.”

James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, 2014 

"Hell for all eternity, for so little in exchange. It is true in many respects he assumed the role of the charlatan, yet how apropos, considering his willingness to follow the Father of Lies and deception. If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.”

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World, 2008 

"The end result was to be a new Imperial Order and a New World Empire run by elite, self-perpetuating oligarchies from the leading nations of the earth."

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966 

"And the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their splendour.  ‘All of this I will give to you,’ he said, ‘if you will fall down and worship me.’"

Matthew 4:8-9

“Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery.  The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the House of the Dead, 1862

"There is nothing of heaven in the words of the eloquent, or the deeds of the powerful, or the counsels of the wise, or the resolves of the lordly, or the pomp of the wealthy.  And yet the Ever-blessed Spirit of God is here; the Presence of the Eternal Son, ten times more glorious, more powerful than when He trod the earth in our flesh, is with us.  

Let us ever bear in mind this divine truth, — the more secret God's hand is, the more powerful — the more silent, the more awful."

John Henry Newman, PPS Vol 4, Sermon 17

"And Peter understood that neither Nero, nor all his legions, could overcome the living truth — that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning.  That city of pride, of crime, of wickedness, and of a lust for power, was beginning to be His city."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, 1905


Stocks rallied up to new highs.

VIX fell.

The Dollar maintains the 99 handle.

Gold and silver bounced back.

The people of this world are taken with a greed for riches, and the lust for power. 

Ideology wrings the life from their withered principles through a lens of willful deception.  

The sun rises with the awful silence of God. though they paint the walls of their Bedlam with darkness.

And so the dawn will come.   

"It is better to be a child of God, than king of the whole world." Aloyisus de Gonzaga

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Empire of Lawlesssness

 

"The ultimate purpose of crime is to establish an endless empire. It seeks a state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world thought doomed to annihilation.

When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Fritz Lang, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933

"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.

Are we still of any use?  What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years, New Year 1943

"Do you not know that to whom you give yourselves as servants, his servants you become, whether of a corruption unto death, or of a righteousness unto life?"

Romans 6:16

“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941

"To accept that guilt, to admit one's complicity in such a horrendous assault on justice, to humble oneself and ask for forgiveness, would have taken a heroic act of self-awareness, humility and repentance. And worse, for these fanatics, it would diminish their pride, which was at the foundation of the most fervent supporters of such flamboyant excess. And so they lashed out, and killed everything that held up a mirror to their darkness, and showed them their pride was based on a lie."

Jesse, Seth, the Arbiter of Chaos, 15 May 2018 

Tech stocks led the way lower today, with the SP 500 maintaining an anchor to stocks' recent gains.

Gold bounced.  Silver gave some back.

VIX continues to creep up slowly.

Non-Farm Payrolls report tomorrow, along with the usual additional data.

I have little to no confidence in the economic data coming out of Washington at this point.

What I am watching for are the incongruities that inevitably crop up when one is cooking the books clumsily.  Things like productivity, participation and inflation.

The recent murder of an innocent American woman on her way home from taking her children to school by ICE agents is very troubling.   The bold lies and smears immediately put forward by official sources and the media are troubling.

But seriously, if people will not speak out against a brutal ethnic cleansing and genocide in clear sight, what can we possibly think that they will consider sacred? 

Why should we care about an individual, their risings and fallings, their perplexity and concerns, their fears and sorrows?  Because when the ocean's dry up, and the earth grows cold and dies, as the stars flicker and grow dim in the sky, and creation turns back into dust, their soul will continue, vibrantly alive, and their tears will have long been wiped away, by kindly hands.  And the secret of love is to care for something, someone, some divine goodness, more than you care for yourself.

"Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love.  And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”   Maximilian Kolbe

Have a care for your souls, for that is what this struggle is all about.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Emptiness: The Agony of Mammon

 

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Stephen Miller, CNN Interview, 6 January 2026

"The dazzling and consuming act of pride that transformed the angel of light into an angel and prince of darkness condemned him to an insatiable, and therefore desperate, need to acquire.  The loss of the wellspring of life gives rise to an essentially inextinguishable thirst.  The entire world can not fill the emptiness which the awareness of having left their rightful place in the world forms in the heart of a creature.

Having fallen from the eternal, Satan's desires are endless and insatiable.  Having fallen from pure Being, he seeks to possess.  But the problem is forever insoluble.  For in order to have and possess, it would be necessary to have life, to Be, and he is connected to life no longer.  All he takes into himself he destroys.

And to be sure, he can have it, since he is called Prince of this World in Scripture— but he will never have anything but the things of this world. He will never regain Heaven, which is properly the soul of this world, and the essence of existence... 

He knows this full well.  This is why his desire and his rabid jealousy fasten on our individual souls. He prowls around like a roaring lion in quest of his prey, says the Bible.  He prowls around us, like a criminal, obsessed by kidnapping.  But his victories will always be sterile.

One does not become a father by stealing a child.  One can steal the child, but not the paternity.  One can steal power, but not authority.  Satan can steal this world, but not its divine essence. And yet we humans can lose all of these things, which are our heritage as children of God.  It is the Devil's only chance.  He does not intend to miss it."

Denis de Rougemont, La Part du Diable, Switzerland, 1944

"The Unspeakable.  It is the void, the emptiness of the end.  Not the end of the world, but a climax of absolute finality in refusal, in equivocation, in disorder, in absurdity, which can be open again to truth only by miracle, by the coming of God."

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, New Directions, 1966

"Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor. The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business. The feasts of consumption sustain the economy, keep up the volume in the stock markets, employ the unemployable, excite the fevers of speculation, and stimulate the passion for political and sexual novelty."

Lewis H. Lapham, The Agony of Mammon, 1999

"Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness."

Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, 1947

 

Stocks rallied up to new highs, and then fell, badly.

This foolish and baseless ascent followed by a horrific decline will be the theme for 2026.

 VIX stopped again at its exponential 20 day moving average

Gold and silver were pushed lower in this attempt to reassert the defiance of risk. 

 It will not work.

"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”  Czeslaw Milosz

The wages of sin are death.  And they will be paid. 

Have a pleasant evening.  

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Empires, Behaving Badly

 

"Structural deep events are events which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve lawbreaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics, 1993

"Each time banks fail, by bailing the system out again, we teach our finance sector a lesson: you can safely take too much risk because, when you lose, the taxpayer will pick up the bill.  Such a system is destined to fail, but the party can run for a long time."

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone, Economic Donkeys, 19 September 2009

"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mobilization for Human Needs, October 13, 1940

"Empires in decline tend to behave badly.  The twilight years of imperialism often brought brutal repression of subjects abroad, the suppression of civil liberties at home and general varieties of brutality toward foreigners, be they refugees or migrants.

Aggressive wars abroad pollute the domestic political discourse and breed hypernationalism, racism and xenophobia.  Aggressive wars of choice have ushered in rampant torture, atrocities in prisons, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the citizenry.  It’s all connected. The empire — all empires — eventually come home."

Major Danny Sjursen, An American Tragedy: Empire at Home and Abroad, July 23, 2019

"If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.”

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World, 2010


Stocks rallied up to highs, with the tech giants lagging a bit.

The Dollar bounced.

Gold and silver continued to rally back from their end of year beatdown.

VIX remains below its moving averages.  

When the reckoning comes, it will appear like a thief in the night.

But there is nothing one can say that will restrain a people who desire to be rich.

At the end of the year, when we take account of the dead and the fallen, we may obtain a better idea of how God's judgement has fallen.

All we can be sure of now is that it will.

Have a pleasant evening.