On the Road To Damascus: Faith and Sanctity In Corrupt and Cynical Times

Michelangelo, Paul On the Road to Damascus

“To know and to serve God, of course, is why we’re here, a clear truth, that, like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easily discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard.  But a little faith will see you through.

What else will do except faith in such a cynical, corrupt time?  When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word.

What is the last word, then?   Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids — all the places where the gravy soaks in, and grace shines through.   Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people...

What keeps my faith cheerful is the extreme persistence of gentleness and humour. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake."

Garrison Keillor

In Hoc Anno Domini
By Vermont C. Royster
December 24, 1949

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression -- for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.

So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.

But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.

Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid.  He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.

Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets.  Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter's star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty with which Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

"Caesar was swimming in blood.    Rome and the whole pagan world was mad.  But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.

When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one—  happiness and love."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: In the Time of Nero

Weekend Reading - The Leaven of the Pharisees

"Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is a pious, hollow hypocrisy."

Luke 12:1


“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees— hypocrites!   For you are like whitewashed tombs which appear beautiful, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. You outwardly appear righteous, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."

Matthew 23:27-28


"Why do you dwell on the splinter in your brother's eye, while failing to see the plank in your own?"

Luke 6:41

Ironically enough and as I have previously noted, I find myself more concerned these days not with those among my acquaintances that are unbelievers, although I do remember them all in my prayers. Each must find their own way in God's good time.

Rather, my concern is with my believing friends who, in their zeal for righteousness, fall prey into the trap of judging all others, and harshly.   Indeed, the destructiveness of their judgement extends not only to those whom they perceive to be in the most rigorous sense sinful, but to all others who differ from them, in almost any way, even to the most trivial details of rituals and observances.

And they justify the harsh distortion of their judgement not as a sin against the Spirit, but as a superior zeal for reform, purer than all others.    And finally it extends as a general anger to their own fellows, their own brothers and sisters, and to the very body of Christ on earth.

This is the leaven of the Pharisees. And the only safeguard against it is love. Not a love of the rituals and 'the Sabbath,' but of those imperfect creatures like themselves for whom the Sabbath was given.

The first sin is pride, and there is no form of it that is more toxic and destructive than a spiritual pride, contemptuous of the Spirit and all of its workings on the earth, which is love.   For pride comes to despise love as a weakness, and turns on it, and hardens the heart and the mind against it.

If you have less love and less forgiveness in your heart, and more harsh words and judgments, with a pessimistic and dour outlook even to the abundant graces and mercies of God and his messengers, I tell you truly that you may be in more peril than you can imagine.    You have been blinded to your own danger through the distraction of condemning others.

Look to your own sinfulness first, and beg God to show you all of your sins now, so fully and completely that you fall down in repentance, and have no time for judging others as you see them.

Judgement of others is a way of deflecting and avoiding a recognition of our own sinful nature.  It can be intoxicating to set oneself up as the Lord, and to pass out judgement without mercy and understanding.   But it is the way of darkness and death.

You were not put on this earth to judge others.  And so as you judge, so shall you be judged

"Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general Apostasy from it. Whether this very Apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, as he has already been delayed so long, we cannot know; but at any rate this Apostasy, and all its tokens and instruments, are of the Evil One, and savour of death.

Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones who are taken in that snare which is circling around us! Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison!

Do you think he is so unskilful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the Truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.

This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind.

He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods.

Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J.H.Newman, The Times of AntiChrist, 1890

Night of the Little Knives - Reince Priebus Out, Former General John Kelly In

Trump Chief Of Staff Priebus Is Out — In Biggest White House Staff Shake-Up Yet
July 28, 20175:01 PM ET

He rose from relative state-party obscurity and reached an unlikely pinnacle as the man responsible for the agenda of the president of the United States.

Now, Reince Priebus is out of that job as White House chief of staff in the most significant shakeup of the rocky Trump presidency.

Trump announced on Twitter that Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has been named as Priebus' replacement.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Blue Skies

"Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,
who have observed his law;
Seek justice, seek humility;
And perhaps you will be sheltered
on the day of the Lord’s justice.

This was the triumphal city, high and mighty,
Saying to herself, ‘I am the one, and none dare stand beside me.’
How desolate now has she become, a place fit only for wild beasts.
Those who pass by her scoff, and shake their heads at her ruin."

Zephaniah 2:3-15


“I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.”

Groucho Marx

I have a feeling that we are going to be seeing some real fireworks in the precious metals before the end of the year.

But feelings really do not count in markets.  But it is there, tempting my trading discipline. I know that you have never experienced that. lol.

Stocks bobbled a bit today. I also think we will be seeing a slide in stocks. But let's see how the earnings come out, and what the Fed does about their bloated balance sheet.

While I am not so sure yet about where gold and silver and stocks are going, here are three things that I am pretty sure about.

1.  There is no sustainable recovery. Basic items like housing and healthcare are fast outstripping the growth in real wages.  This is sustainable?  There is, and for too long has been, a well-funded class war underway, and the middle class is losing.

2.  Trump is a terrible president, and way over his head in the job.  I do not refer so much to the social graces, of which he has none or at least sees no need to use them, but in terms of organizing and managing and leading a very large enterprise.   From pitting underlings against each other to shooting from the hip and trying to get lucky he has some of the very management and strategy weaknesses that brought a certain German leader in the last century to his eventual downfall. Hopefully the span of his control over fanatical followers will not achieve the same critical mass.

3. The Democrats need to purge their ranks of the Clinton crowd who are hanging on to stubbornly to positions of power. It is just killing them, and failing to provide a fruitful and leverageable counterweight to the corporate Republicans who are pretty much beyond all hope. What the Democratic power brokers did to the Sanders grass roots movement and Occupy Wall Street is the real deplorable abuse of power and position that precludes any second or third chance for them. They are a disgraceful elite.

These three items will bear a heavy influence on what transpires between now and the midterm elections on a number of fronts and dimensions: social, economic, political.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Nocturne

"A horse walks into a bar, the bartender says, 'Why the long face?'"

And so we had both an FOMC and a precious metals option expiration on the Comex today.

Let's see if we get any post-FOMC, post-expiration shenanigans for the rest of the week.    Once gold breaks out it could be tough to stop, although I am not liking the small advances it has been making on such steady dollar weakness.

Stocks are continuing to edge higher, although with a big less verve than previously.

Pundits are now saying that a crash is probably at least two months away, so now is a good time to buy more stocks.

You cannot make this stuff up.

I think the theory is that when the Fed starts unwinding their balance sheet in September, that the air of liquidity, which is one of key components of these bubbles, is going to start coming out of the markets much faster than it went in.

And the result may be terrific—  not with a bang, but a whimper.


"She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies."

George Gordon Lord Byron

Have a pleasant evening.

Thinking Like An Economist

Most economists have to significantly reduce the complexity and finer details of the economy through a set of reality crushing assumptions in order to make their models work coherently. See the artist's depiction of how an economist thinks below.

Then again, the really harmful economists are relatively unconstrained by reality in the first place, and can freely draw their conclusions and make policy recommendations basic on gnostic wisdom received from the ascended masters of malarkey.

This has given rise to a priori based models, spawned by well-funded think tanks and other hired servants of Big Money, about the way markets work.   The economies they describe are evidenced only in an incorporeal universe of the economist's fevered imagination, and have been rarely seen in the real world.  

Nevertheless, there are whole schools of thought that engage in herculean attempts to erect an homage to their particular madness out of well-tortured statistical bones.  Some recent examples are the efficient markets hypothesis, free trade, supply side economics, and the infamous trillion dollar platinum coin that solves budget problems at a single 'clink.'

As a rule of thumb, the more arrogant certainty with which the economist states their revelations, and the more reliant they are on jargon and assumptions that suck the reality out of the room like intellectual black holes, the less space there is likely to be between their hat and their ass.

Housing Bubble 2.0: Making America More Unstable, Again

With low inflation and continuing stagnation in median wages another housing bubble is just what the doctor ordered as a cure for the last financial crisis, caused in part by the rampant financial fraud associated with Housing Bubble 1.0.

And it looks like we have yet another tech stock bubble well underway.

Meanwhile the public is distracted by the corporate media's endless coverage of clown car antics and foreign plots to pollute our precious bodily fluids.

Well done, elites, well done.

And no one could have seen it coming, again.

FOMC Decision and Comex Option Expiration For Precious Metals Tomorrow - Beware the Leaven of the Pharisees

"Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is pious, hollow hypocrisy. There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, and hidden, that shall not be made known. Whatever has been said in the darkness shall be heard in the light: and what has been whispered behind closed doors shall be shouted from the roof tops."

Luke 12:1-3


“Those among the fortunate rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand the neediness of poverty, because they are needy themselves, after a fashion;  but they cannot understand true impoverishment.

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 the self-denial of His Cross, will horrify them.  For they want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, and hanging from a beautiful woman's throat.”

Léon Bloy

The charts are still pretty much lined up in areas where one might expect to see some movement when volatility returns to the markets.

The option expiry tomorrow is more significant for gold than silver.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts For the Week Ending 21 July - No Fear

"He who sows good seed is the Son of Man,
the field is the world, the good seed the children of the kingdom.
The weeds are the children of the evil one,
and the enemy who sows them is the devil.

The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.
Just as weeds are collected and burned up with fire,
so will it be at the end of the age.
The Son of Man will send his angels,
and they will collect out of his kingdom
all who cause others to sin and all evildoers."

Matthew 13:30-41


"No place so sacred from such fops is barred,
Nor is Paul's church more safe than Paul's churchyard:
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead:
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

In a way I am glad that I am so caught up in my long vigil of duty and love.  It lightens my exposure to the barking tangerine, and the ever more brazen offenses of the despicables, while putting all things into a much better perspective.

This too shall pass, and perhaps more quickly than we, and the wealthy and powerful of the world, can imagine.

See you next week.

Next Week's Economic Calendar - FOMC Meeting, Q2 Advance GDP, and Comex Precious Metals Option Expiration

And the beat goes on...

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - One Day In Texas

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Lewis Carroll


"Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin—
spiritual advisor to the Romanovs.
In 1916, at a dinner in his honor,
he was poisoned, shot stabbed,
clubbed, drowned, and castrated."

Hellboy, 2003


"A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power."

W. B. Yeats

Tomorrow is a stock options expiration.

Next week there will be a precious metals option expiration on the Comex and an FOMC meeting.

If the metals can make it past these, then the path to a breakout from the current intermediate rangebound trend may be clear.

Stocks look toppy.  Wait for it.

Have a pleasant evening.

History Repeats: The Continuing Threat to Freedom and Democracy

Lately it has been popular in some circles to talk about the US being a 'late stage democracy' that has 'never been more ripe for tyranny.'

Sometimes they like to drag in Plato to give their thought pieces a gleam of higher learning and a supposed grounding in history.

But their pieces fall into that trap, that very sort of temporal vanity and self-centered preoccupation to despair that Newman notes so well in saying that "every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it."

Would you be surprised to hear that less than one hundred years ago there was an actual plot, bankrolled by some of the most powerful and famous figures of the American one percent, to use military force to depose a sitting American President and instead install a fascist in the White House who would be more compliant with their greed and lust for power?

The model for this takeover would have been similar to Benito Mussolini's infamous 'march on Rome.'

Would you be further surprised to know that some of these unrepentant financial figures then went on to help bankroll Hitler, and continued doing business with his atrocious regime even as their most vile business partners actively fought the US, their own country, in the war?

How well does this fit the efficient markets and rational actor models that so much of economic theory, and certain factions in modern political ideology, seems to rely?   If only we can get rid of government, and then people will be free to spread their natural goodness and take wing like angels.  Let us free the pathological and sociopaths from external constraints, and their better natures will surely rise to the occasion.  And if not, we can surely explain it to them with our economic learning.

It never ceases to amaze how many economic and social models of human behavior are based, not in history, but rather on simplistically convenient constructs and myths that serve the status quo and the power of Big Money.

A better model perhaps is to think that freedom and truth are always under threat by those who value neither more than their own obsessive lust for power and money,  beyond all reason.   That last is important to remember because the current liberal impulse is to simply blame bad information for some of the most outrageous abuses of power and privilege.  If only we could explain the economic benefits of general prosperity rather than relying on such weak tea as 'moral arguments.'

Alas, it seems to be the duty of each generation to defend what has been given to them by their forebears against the continuing threats of the perversion of knowledge and reason that is tyranny.  And what is odd about it is that it seems to catch each subsequent generation by surprise.

I am not sure that I understand why FDR and his administration did not take more dramatic action in pursuing such perfidy as the plot to overthrow the republic by the fortunate few.   It certainly was not for personal gain and power, as it seems to be the case of our more recent betrayers of justice in not pursuing the indictment and public prosecution of financial crimes.

We may have arrived at that time, that rendezvous with destiny, in which we either stand for truth and justice, or fall one by one in a contemptible struggle against the forces of injustice and duplicity.  But we are certainly not the first, and not even the most distantly distinctive in this challenge, as compared to our parents,  and grandparents, and great-grandparents.

Freedom in not a prize to be won and held forever.  Rather, it is a continuing commitment and state of mind to view certain principles above others.  And one of them is certainly not personal greed.

My Mother Wasn't White Trash

"At first reading, the story of my mother's life seems like little more than a tragedy. However, it is much more than that. Her story reveals the stark realities of growing up poor. All across Appalachia, there are thousands of women just like my mother working, striving, struggling, just to exist. So many people in Appalachia have broken minds and broken bodies and broken hearts, and they do nothing more than survive because that's all they can do.

It is as popular now as ever to blame poor people for their station in life. Republican politicians love to talk about how poor people could stop being poor if only they made better choices or worked harder. If only they'd stop buying iPhones, they could afford insurance! These assholes - and I do not use that slur lightly - have no clue what it is like to grow up poor. They have no clue how hard it is in many places in the US just to keep the lights on and food on the table.

It is easy for them, from the comfort of their cushy offices and homes, with full bellies and bank accounts, to pretend that poor people like my mother are poor because they are stupid or lazy or ignorant or irresponsible rather than confront the broken systems that perpetuate poverty in Appalachia and all across the US.

Poor people don't contribute to reelection funds, but those who profit from poor people sure do. Therefore, truth be told, most politicians couldn't care less about the plight of the poor. There's so much profit to be made from poor people - think payday loans, high-interest rent-to-own stores, for-profit colleges, and overpriced mobile homes - that politicians and their crony-capitalist donors have a vested interest in keeping them poor."

Joshua Wilkey, My Mother Wasn't White Trash

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - No One Sees, No One Knows

"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident...And yet none of this conduct has been punished in any significant way."

Charles Ferguson, Inside Job


“The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true. It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

Neil Barofsky


"The historical evidence is overwhelming. Many societies have done well for a while – until powerful people get out of hand.  This is an easy pattern to see at a distance and in other cultures.  It is typically much harder to recognize when your own society now has an elite less subject to effective constraints and more able to exert power in an abusive fashion.   And given the long history of strong institutions in the United States, it appears particularly difficult for some people to acknowledge that we have serious governance issues that need to be addressed."

Simon Johnson

Stocks largely moved sideways today on weak economic data and a lower dollar.

Precious metals continued to rebound a bit off their recent Non-Farm Payrolls low.

Consequences will be served in the main dining hall, sooner than you might expect.

Have a pleasant evening.