Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - In Dark and Pathological Times

 

"In a dark and pathological times, when the better parts of the human spirit are on the wane and love grows cold, everyone wants to have power.  Power becomes the standard of value, the coin of the realm in a deeply fallen world.  And in such a perverse world the only virtue is greed. 

Those who serve the world want to be tough guys, unafraid, quick and intemperate on the attack, harsh.  Yes that is the mark of power, the formidable wielders of weapons not for a higher purpose, but for their own ends and pleasures.  As if there can be any just weapon that we may take up on our own, that is not given to us by the Lord.

Those who seeks power may desire to take up the sword like an avenging angel, and smite their enemies, who are all too often those who merely annoy and offend them. This is because their idea of what it is to be a human being has been subtly poisoned by the times; in their brokenness they exalt themselves.

Too often that feeling of offense simply becomes a blind hatred of 'the other.'  The other may merely be the different, and often the weak.  The will to power despises weakness.  Those who take up the sword for their own purposes, even in God's name, will die by it in a death without redemption.

This desire to be among the avenging angels is not service, or greatness.  This is a willfulness and a destruction of the self that comes from sin, but that in its own insidious way may encompass many of the trappings of a religion: the ornaments of ritual, and symbols, the language and initiation into the mysteries, the noise and pomp of human office — but remarkably devoid of God's love.

Worldly power in excess is a perversion of heavenly power in that it expresses itself in the ability not to create and fulfill life, but to diminish and destroy it.  And it exults in what it thinks is its power over life, which is death.

How much money, how much power is enough?  The will to power is a pathological sickness, that becomes insatiable and all consuming.  And thereby it anoints its own angels of death.  Be on your guard, and do not allow yourselves to be among those simple ones who will be taken in during the dark times, as the love of many grows cold.  Stand humbly, but firmly, to the end.  And you will have your greatness."

Jesse, Preserving Sanctity in Times of Darkness, 6 July 2017

"Leur aveuglement est le châtiment du crime d'idolâtrie.”

Simone Weil, L'enracinement 1943

Typically I start working on the theme for my blog either in the early morning or even the night before.  But I was sidetracked with a few personal tasks, and after a few false starts after lunch I just decided to leave it up to God.

So about three PM I put a general search for the word 'sanctity' on my site, and voilà, the quote from my site above appeared.

It gave me a chill, and I almost didn't use it.  I realized that I had written this sitting in my chair while I kept watch over my wife as she slowly approached her passing at the end of August.  

This was indeed the darkest time of my life.  And I was struggling with the notion of standing firm in the faith during times of extreme hardship and trial, and found some comfort in reading and writing.  After she passed I fell apart from exhaustion, and when I stopped moving, a tidal wave of grief rolled over me.  

Big cap tech flopped today.  It is surprising that tech keeps leading the markets lower while the rest of the markets seem to be holding up in the form of the SP 500 and Russell.  This is the lull before the storm.  I suspect that the powers that be are pouring oil, made of paper, on troubled waters, as it were, to continue the collection of their booty.

Gold and silver were slammed lower in observance of their August futures contract option expiration on the Comex.  It is customary to give the new holders of positions a gut check.  

Tomorrow is an FOMC rate decision.   

VIX fell as the bulk of the market felt buoyed that Armageddon has been kicked like a can down the road. 

The Dollar declined a bit.

When the reckoning comes, the crème de la crème will jet off to their bunkers with a vanguard of lawyers and private security.  But the lower echelons of the power elite are going to hit the wall, and fairly hard.  They have given themselves up to a blind faith in the world, and their reckoning is going to be biblical.  

"And at this point they exceed the measure of the force that is actually at their disposal. Inevitably they exceed it, since they are not aware that it is limited. And now we see them committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them. Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel. But in any case there they are, exposed, open to misfortune; gone is the armor of power that formerly protected their naked souls; nothing, no shield, stands between them and tears."   Simone Weil, L'Iliade ou le poème de la force, 1939

Keep the faith.  The loving kindness and tender mercies of the Lord make all things new — and sin turns even the most extravagant luxuries to bitter ashes.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Incoming

 

"There is a certain madness in crowds. But the genesis of the madness is in those who assemble the crowds, give them weapons, and walk among them whispering: madness, madness!"

Jesse, Housing Madness, 15 April 2008

"If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media.  Important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and now 9/11.  All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination."

Peter Dale Scott, 9/11, JFK, and War: Recurring Patterns, 2013

"I am on your side.  But you have no way of knowing it, because your heart is blind."

Albert Camus, The Stranger, 1942

"The reality is that the repeal of Glass-Steagall ushered in the greatest wealth transfer scheme in the history of America, allowing six mega banks in America to control the vast majority of insured deposits, use those taxpayer-backed deposits to gamble for the house, loot the bank from the inside by paying billions of dollars to select employees and customers and then hand the gambling tab to the taxpayer when the casino burns down.  This model is a staggering headwind on both U.S. and global growth because it has created the greatest wealth and income inequality since the Great Depression."

Pam and Russ Martens, The Real Reason Global Stocks Are Flashing Red, 2015

"The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain.  As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright.  And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power.

There is the word. It is the king of words— Power.  Not God, not Mammon, but Power.  Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it.  Power.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907


The announcement came out over the weekend that the US was open to negotiating a peace with Iran, again.

And they were pumping the futures on Sunday night into Monday morning.

But alas, the rally quickly flopped and stocks sold off.

They did manage to gain a little back into the close as hope beats eternal.

There will be a precious metals futures option expiration tomorrow on the Comex.

The August contract is significant for gold, less so for silver.

VIX rose.

There will be a Federal Reserve interest rate decision on Wednesday afternoon. 

The energy situation is looking increasingly dire.   The manner in which it is being papered over is just going to make the ultimate impact of it on the economy all the worse. 

The situation in the private credit markets is also looking very potentially kinetic, as they say. 

Think of a few, over-sized dominoes falling down as they tip each other over, while smashing hundreds of smaller dominoes flat all around them.

It will not be pretty.   It will be more comprehensive than the talking heads will allow.

What makes it even more vile is that it is brazenly conscious and deliberate, a part of an ongoing scam by insiders to become fabulously wealthy.

This is the legacy of the last two bubbles and the failure to correct the arc of the civic and financial morality in the US.  

Across all three branches of government, this is the most ineffective and self-serving group of individuals that we have seen in power since the period after the Civil War and the Gilded Age. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Consumed by Vicious Vanity, Again

 

“There have been men who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself, as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist.  There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.

Hell is a state of mind.  And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind is, in the end, Hell.  But Heaven is not a state of mind.  Heaven is reality itself.  All that is fully real is Heavenly.  For all that can be shaken will be shaken, and only the unshakeable remains.

There are only two kinds of people in the end — those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'  All that are in Hell choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.  No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves.  They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein.  They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods."

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 1945

"Our hearts are continually prone to wander from Him; prosperity and enjoyment all too easily satisfy us, dull our spiritual perception, and unfit us for full communion with Himself. It is an unspeakable mercy that the Father comes with His chastisement, makes the world round us all dark and unattractive, leads us to feel more deeply our sinfulness, and for a time lose our joy in what was becoming so dangerous.

Though He has indeed no pleasure in afflicting us, He will not keep back even the most painful chastisement if He can but thereby guide His beloved child to come home."

Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ, 1895

"For to admit that the Reich was a lie, and a mistake, that they were fanatical fools, and Hitler an incompetent creature of evil would be to admit that one was wrong, a failure, and worse, had become an accomplice to an unimaginable evil.  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 that their pride was based on a lie."

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

"Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important — wonderful. If you want to be recognized — wonderful. If you want to be great — wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant.

That's a new definition of greatness. And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve."

Martin Luther King, The Drum Major Instinct


So stocks once again teetered on the edge, with the bloated, high flying AI-onsphere leading the way lower. 

Gold and silver had a little bounce.

I think there are signs of the invisible hand of the ESF in the markets, mispricing risk aggressively to cover the official looting of the public trust.   

There is so much wrong with the governance of the Western world today, with its tolerance of cruelty and theft and heinous murder, that it is difficult to even talk about.

Moral hazard enabled this, with the gullibility of naive and angry people, powered by the corrupting influence of big money.  

"The Fed has spent years turning moral hazard from an embarrassing side effect into a rational business model. Every rescue lowers the perceived cost of the next gamble. Every emergency facility teaches markets that liquidity risk is temporary. Every rapid intervention tells executives that the real objective is not avoiding catastrophe, but making sure a catastrophe would be too politically expensive to tolerate.

So the structures get larger. The collateral gets murkier. The ratings get friendlier. The capital cushions get thinner. The chains of counterparties get longer. Then everyone acts stunned when one downgrade causes twelve institutions to discover they were all holding the same risk.

We are not preventing the next crash. We are steadily assembling the mother of all crashes while congratulating ourselves for distributing the explosives more efficiently. And when it finally happens, the people who designed it will explain that nobody could possibly have seen it coming.

Except, of course, anyone who remembers 2008…or who is unlucky enough to sit next to me at an airport bar when I have 3 hours to kill and feel talkative."

Quoth the Raven, OMG They're Doing It Again

Once more, with feeling. 

The wages of sin will be paid.

But the most pitiable will be the ones who made vows and took oaths to uphold justice and the Word, but did nothing to protect the innocent who suffered around them. They will be reaping a harvest of sorrow and regret, legendary even in hell.

Their only recourse for the unrepentant is the belief in nothingness after death.   And that wish may be granted to them, with the inescapable ache of emptiness and regret. 

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Malignant Self-Love: The Cult of Moloch

 

"What is hell? I maintain that it is the inability to love."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880

"Dictatorship is characterized by having absolute sole power over people, and this power is often used in a cruel way.  A dictator disrespects basic, political, socioeconomic, and cultural human rights.

The glorification of a dictator has been called the cult of personality.  At its heart lies a paradox: the modern dictator must create the illusion of popular support or consent by rigging the electoral system.  He must rely on military forces, a secret police, a praetorian guard, spies, informants, interrogators and torturers.

Many dictators suffer from manic-depressive disorders, paranoia and delusions of omniscience and omnipotence.  They are usually ruthless, intolerant of criticism and indifferent to the suffering of others.  Acutely suspicious of others, they surrounded themselves with flatterers. 

Narcissistic individuals have a greatly exaggerated sense of their own importance and are preoccupied with their own achievements and abilities.  They see themselves as grandiose, have difficulty empathizing with the feelings and needs of others (lack empathy), and tend to be vindictive.  This becomes so serious that it interferes with daily life.

Many believed in the cults of Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Mussolini.  People had to acclaim their leaders and shout party slogans on command.  The purpose of the cult was not to convince or persuade, but to sow confusion, destroy common sense, enforce obedience, isolate individuals and crush their dignity.  People had to self-censor and in turn they monitored others, denouncing those who failed to appear sufficiently sincere in their professions of loyalty."

Francesco Gallo, Psychopathology of Dictatorship, Il Sileno Edizioni, 24 July 2020

“Evil wins through the strength of its splendid dupes, and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.”

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils, 1922

"The narcissist is the guru at the centre of a cult.  Like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his flock, and feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his followers.  He punishes the wayward and the straying lambs.  He enforces discipline, adherence to his teachings, and common goals.

Every cult needs a hate figure.  Narcissists and cult leaders thrive on hatred and pathological envy. 

Narcissists, and often by contagion their unfortunate victims, don't talk or communicate: they fend off, hide and evade. They perfect the ability of saying nothing in lengthy speeches.  They employ a lack of commitment elevated to an ideology.  The narcissist prefers to wait and see what procrastination brings: postponement of the inevitable leads to the inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival.

The narcissist has to condition his human environment to refrain from expressing criticism and disapproval of him, or of his actions and decisions.  He has to teach people around him that any form of disagreement, however mild and minor, throws him into frightful fits of temper and rage attacks and turn him into a constantly cantankerous and irascible person.

To the narcissist, all other people are cardboard cutouts, two-dimensional animated cartoon characters, or symbols. They exist only in his inner universe. He is startled when they deviate from the script and prove to be complex and autonomous.  Narcissists damage and hurt but they do so offhandedly and naturally, as an afterthought. They are aware of what they are doing to others — but they do not care."

Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self-Love, 2003

“Every idol, however exalted, turns out in the long run to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.”

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun, 1952

"The consensus as to Donald Trump’s psychiatric issues is nearly unanimous. 'Textbook narcissistic personality disorder.'

Yet while the various diagnoses with which he has been labeled may accurately describe his actions, attitudes, verbal patterns and mental states, they cannot explain them.  As a stressed electorate tries to make sense of a campaign unlike any other, many people are asking themselves, what is the root of Trump’s bizarre displays?

Underneath all psychiatric categories Trump manifests childhood trauma.  His opponent Hillary Clinton evinces her own history of early suffering, even if milder and far more muted in its impact.

The ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, reports that Trump had no recollection of his youth.  There is always a reason for such amnesia.  People have poor recall of their childhoods when they found reality so painful that their minds had to repress awareness and push memories into the unconscious.  'I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,' Trump admitted to a biographer.

What does it say about our society that such deeply troubled individuals frequently rise to the top ruling circles, attaining wealth and power and even the admiration of millions?

People who are anxious, fearful and aggrieved may be unable to recognize the flaws in those seeking power.  They mistake desperate ambition for determination, see grandiosity as authority, paranoia as security, seductiveness as charm, dogmatism as decisiveness, selfishness as economic wisdom, manipulation as political savvy, and the lack of principles as flexibility. 

The flaws of our leaders perfectly mirror the emotional underdevelopment of the society that elevates them to power."

Gabor Maté, Trump, Clinton and Trauma, Globe and Mail, October 14, 2016

“The world says: 'You have needs — satisfy them.  Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.'  This is the worldly doctrine of today.  And they believe that this is freedom.  The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880

Stocks slumped today as the recognition of what is happening in the Mideast and its economic consequences penetrated the fog of AI bubblemania.

The dollar rose.

Gold and silver fell in the related impulse to increase trading liquidity.

Bitcoin slipped from the top of its trading range. 

The impact of the price of oil is not fully priced into the markets, although it is starting to creep through.

I have included a map of Iran with population density superimposed over a map of continental Europe.

Politicians who say we should just 'bomb the hell out of Iran and let them negotiate from the rubble' should consider the magnitude of what they are suggesting.  Their lack of basic tactical and strategic knowledge, and the limitations of air power, especially in light of their positions, is shocking.  

But considering their basic lack of knowledge and regard for US law and the Constitution it may not be so surprising.  

Let's see how this progresses.

Have a pleasant evening.