Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Large and Awful Faces From Beyond

 

"The Hitler Party likes to emphasize its uniqueness, and it really should not be measured against conventional yardsticks.   Even if it were to explode into smithereens today, the fact would remain that it recently won fifteen million voters.  Its brutality, loud-mouthedness and brainlessness have acted not as a deterrent but rather as an attraction, and have generated unconditional and subservient followers."

Carl von Ossietzky, Die Weltbühne, January, 1933

"The quiet words of the wise are worth more than the shouts of a ruler of fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinful man can destroy much that is good."

Ecclesiastes 9:17-18

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who murder the prophets and abuse those whom God has sent to you as messengers. As you have willed it, so your house is now yours to command— but it is made desolate.”

Matthew 23:37-38

"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.  Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers. 

In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

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 and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh.  But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last.  The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish.  He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom."

Hillaire Belloc, This That and the Other, 1912

“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 Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914


The US will be observing Memorial Day this coming Monday.  The markets will be closed.

Stocks were weak on fresh tariff threats from Trump.

Gold and silver rallied as the Dollar swooned back down to the bottom of the 99 handle again.

There will be a precious metals futures option expiration this coming Tuesday. 

VIX ticked up a bit, but still remains relatively subdued.

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them. 

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Great Blasphemies and Their Bitter Fruit

 

"The humanitarians and civilians should never be paying the consequences of war.  This is a basic principle of humanity.  At the time, this looks like it’s not a war against terrorism anymore.  It seems this is a war against humanity itself.  You cannot be destroying every building.  You cannot be destroying every hospital, every school.   You cannot be targeting humanitarians.  You cannot be targeting children."

Charlie Nash, Aid Workers Were ‘Targeted Deliberately’, Mediaite, 4 April 2024

"All the world marveled at this, and gave their allegiance to the Beast.  And they worshiped the Serpent for giving such power to him.  'Who is as great as the Beast?' they exclaimed.  'And who is able to resist him?'  And the Beast was allowed to commit great blasphemies against God."

Revelation 13:3-5

"Foolishness is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.  One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force.  Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own downfall in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against foolishness we are defenseless.  Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.   In all this the foolish person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent.  In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him.  He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.  

Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.  This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome foolishness.  Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it.   Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the foolish person.  The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome foolishness."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1945

"Therefore they shall eat the bitter fruit of their ways, and be gutted by their own schemes. For the foolish turn away from me—to death. For fools are destroyed by their pride and self-satisfaction.”

Proverbs 1:31-33


The hour grows late, and the awful hand of God is moving, slowly but inexorably. 

People will not believe it, until they see.   And then they will be amazed.

Stocks rallied from an early weakness once again, but fell off sharply towards unchanged at the closing hour.

Gold and silver took some selling early on, but held most of their recent gains.

The Dollar bounced back to the top of the 99 handle.

VIX did very little.

As Simone Weil well noted, 'Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.'

We might wish to think hard about the direction in which we are facing, and the darkness that is overtaking us while we are looking the other way.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - An Illness of the Mind and of the Spirit

 

“Do not weep for me — weep instead for yourselves and your children.”

Luke 23:28

"The present war crisis is something we have made entirely for and by ourselves.  There is in reality not the slightest logical reason for war, and yet the whole world is plunging headlong into frightful destruction.  This is a true war-madness, an illness of the mind and the spirit that is spreading with a furious and subtle contagion all over the world."

Thomas Merton, The Root of War, The Catholic Worker, October 1961

"Right now the US is on the path to a devaluation and a selective default on its debt and currency.  No one can say 'how and when' with certainty.  But surely it seems probable that there is a stop and a stumble in the growth of this mother of credit bubbles somewhere ahead.

Some suggest that devaluation of a sovereign currency no longer has any significance and meaning. Why? Because what would one devalue such a currency against, as it is tied to no external standard?  And so they say that the Dollar is its own standard as the reserve currency of the world.

It is always a mistake to assume that there are no external standards, no dissenting views, that things are merely what we say they are and should be, for everyone. 

The dollar standard is in fact the 'full faith and credit of the United States.'  And if that confidence is broken, the reversion to fundamental 'external' values may be impressive.   Unthinkable?  Every fiat currency that has ever existed has eventually been destroyed, or undergone an significant transformation.  Even the US dollar has undergone evolution and reincarnation in its brief history, and will continue to do so.

The world may choose to create a one world currency, under the control of the Fed and the Central Banks, which is a prelude to One World Government.   This would be one way to extend the existence of a fiat regime.  Kill off all the alternatives, by force.  A regime of the will to last a thousand years, forged in blood, betrayal, and deception."

Jesse, Thinking the Unthinkable, 11 November 2008

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952

"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

 

Stocks were their usual wobbly selves in the early trading.

However, around 1:30 there was a longer dated Treasury auction that was not received well by the market.

And so down risk assets went.

Interestingly enough the Dollar bottomed around that time, and then gained back a little of its losses.

Intervention or a 'flight to safety?'   No way to know for sure.

But gold and silver rocketed back to go out near the highs of the day.

VIX ticked up slightly.

The US markets are a mispriced accident waiting to happen.

The talking heads are reassuring.  As they often are, when talking about other people's money.

I sold some of the miners I bought last Friday at fire sale prices.

My allocation to equities was the highest it has been in a very long time.  

And was highly concentrated.

So now it has been reduced to something a little more comfortable, and amenable to hedging.

This afternoon I watched this interview 'Deadly Betrayal' with Jeffrey Sachs and US Air Force Chief Dennis Fritz about the endless wars and American exceptionalism.  

There is some interesting information disclosed which you might find to be illuminating about things that happened then and are happening now, that you won't hear on the mainstream media.

It seemed to fill in some of the blanks I still had from my own intensive reading into these things. 

We have surely have been misled by those gripped with an illness of the mind and of the Spirit.

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A More Repulsive Picture Can Hardly Be Imagined

 

Metropolis, The Whore of Babylon

"Everywhere Rome was failing in her duties as mistress of the civilised world. Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties.  When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept waste to minister to pleasure; when the shibboleth of art is on every man's lips, but ideas of true beauty in very few men's souls.

When the business-sharper is the greatest man in the city, and lords it even in the law courts; when class-magistrates, bidding for high office, deal out justice according to the rank of the criminal; when exchanges are turned into great gambling-houses, and senators and men of title are the chief gamblers; when, in short, 'corruption is universal, when there is increasing audacity, increasing greed, increasing fraud, increasing impurity, and these are fed by increasing indulgence and ostentation.

When a considerable number of trials in the courts of law bring out the fact that the country in general is now regarded as a prey, upon which any number of vultures, scenting it from afar, may safely light and securely gorge themselves; when the foul tribe is amply replenished by its congeners at home, and foreign invaders find any number of men, bearing good names, ready to assist them in robberies far more cruel and sweeping than those of the footpad or burglar' — when such is the tone of society, and such the idols before which it bends, a nation must be fast going down hill.

A more repulsive picture can hardly be imagined.  A mob, a moneyed class, and an aristocracy almost equally worthless, hating each other, and hated by the rest of the world; Italians bitterly jealous of Romans, and only in better plight than the provinces beyond the sea; more miserable than either, swarms of slaves beginning to brood over revenge as a solace to their sufferings; the land going out of cultivation; native industry swamped by slave-grown imports; the population decreasing; the army degenerating; wars waged as a speculation, but only against the weak; provinces subjected to organized pillage; in the metropolis childish superstition, wholesale luxury, and monstrous vice."

A. H. Beesley, The Gracchi Marius and Sulla, 1921

Despite almost daily weak openings, stocks are hanging on to their lofty levels.

There is not a lot of doubt in my mind that some assistance is coming from the President's Exchange Stabilization Fund.

Gold and silver rocketed higher today, from their recent and cynically calculated drubbing which they took last week.

The Dollar slipped to the bottom of the 100 handle.

As I said on 'X' at the bottom of the gold rout last week Friday, time to 'stack up and sack up.'

It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

I don't see anything good coming out of this clown show, except more lies and flashy bright things as distractions.

Have a pleasant evening.