"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...
And what rough Beast, its hour come 'round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919
The Fed did nothing today, and their jawbones must have been fatigued.
Stocks continued in a relatively narrow range.
Gold and silver continued to hover underneath overhead resistance.
There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday. It just became much more interesting because the ADP private employment report came in today far to the upside. Details are in the economic news slide below.
Everything seems to be a mixed bag in the news.
Trump is injecting plenty of uncertainty, but the rally of hope for change continues hanging in there.
There is a huge divergence between the 'soft surprises' and 'hard surprises' in the company earnings reports. The hard data is of course money, and the soft surprises are found in clicks and tricks, and assorted metrics of the non-financial sort.
I have trouble taking a non-haven position in these markets, because I just cannot escape the feeling that we are in for a really serious breakout, one way or another. But so far, no.
There will be a PET scan tomorrow for the queen to examine her torso, where most of the action has been for the past few years. It was highly unusual for a colon cancer to move to the brain. The PET is a CAT scan with a couple of barium milkshakes thrown in beforehand to light up the areas of unusual metabolic activity. Since cancer tends to be 'fast growing' it lights up the chart, along with any other faster growing processes. Basic chemo is also based on this fact, and the chemicals kill cells as they grow, including cancer and other fast growing cells like hair, etc.
Now you may understand why the goal is to find more 'targeted' treatments like modified T cells that search out and kill the cancer cells, and not kill cells more widely, and make the patients sick, and weaken over time. But the innovations are coming slowly.
I have been doing a lot more housework, and also have been 'pampering' the queen. lol She becomes very physically tired in the afternoon.
Our money and priorities are for the most part elsewhere, disconnected from many of the common realities of most people. This is part of the reason for our historic economic inequalities. But there is an underlying goodness and kindness that you can find if you look for it, and let yourself become a part of it. We just forget, because we see so much wickedness and greed, and it gets the most attention.
As William Butler Yeats put it in the aftermath of the first World War, 'the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.' Perhaps, but these things come and go. And when it becomes bad enough, people rouse themselves from their torpor, and change comes, one way or another.
That is not what it is to be human. Most do not even have a genuine understanding of what that means anymore. They think, well, if Mother Teresa abandoned the poor and ran off to be an investment banker or an actress, well, that would only be human.
We are content to be trousered apes. We make beasts of ourselves to avoid the pain of seeing what we really serve, and who we are slowly becoming.
At some point, not to become fully human in every sense of the word and to hold on to your humanity is, in the end, the only real tragedy.
Have a pleasant evening.
