Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - All Who Labor For God In a Dark Time

 

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune, 1985

"His instruments are poor and despised; the world hardly knows their names, or not at all. They are busied about what the world thinks petty actions, and no one minds them. They are apparently set on no great works; nothing is seen to come of what they do.

Let this be the settled view of all who would promote Christ's cause upon earth. If we are true to ourselves, nothing can really thwart us. Our warfare is not with carnal weapons, but with heavenly. The world does not understand what our real power is, and where it lies. And until we put ourselves into its hands of our own act, it can do nothing against us.  Let all who would labour for God in a dark time beware of any thing which ruffles, excites, and in any way withdraws them from the love of God and Christ, and simple obedience to Him.

Such is the rule of our warfare. We advance by yielding; we rise by falling; we conquer by suffering; we persuade by silence; we become rich by bountifulness ; we inherit the earth through meekness; we gain comfort through mourning; we earn glory by penitence and prayer. Heaven and earth shall sooner fall than this rule be reversed; it is the law of Christ's kingdom, and nothing can reverse it but sin."

John Henry Newman, Sermons on the Subjects of the Day, June 13, 1841

"Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by twenty well-documented traits and characteristics.  The most visible are glib/superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self worth, a strong need for stimulation (that is, psychopaths are easily bored) and impulsivity.  However, there are others, which they successfully hide from view, in particular pathological lying, conning, manipulation, a lack of empathy, remorse and guilt.  Over time, one might begin to see examples of irresponsibility, lack of realistic, long-term goals, and their failure to take responsibility for their own actions."

Paul Babiak, Robert Hare, Snakes In Suits, May 9, 2006 

Stocks rallied back from steep losses, finishing into the green at the close.

Gold and silver advanced again sharply, giving back only a little.

The Dollar fell, prompting more bullishness in the metals.

Bitcoin rallied in the last half hour.  Smells like teen spirit.

Odd timing for all this in the depths of December.

Their arrogant ambitions know no shame, or bounds. 

Please try to remember God's creatures, huddling in the cold. 

“At this Christmas when Christ comes, will He find a warm heart? Mark the season of Advent by loving and serving others with God’s own love and concern."

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Pirates of the Caribbean

 

"For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money.  It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.

The official expectation of war also enables men to solve the problems of the economic cycles without resort to political policies that are distasteful to many politicians and to large segments of the American public.  The terms of their long-term solution, under conditions of peace, are hard for the capitalist elite to face.  Some of them, accordingly, have come to believe that the world encounter has reached a point where there is no other solution but war, even when they sense that war can be a solution to nothing.

An expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business.  To many utopian capitalists, it has become 'the Business Way of Life'.

Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle.  But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its 'inevitability,' want it in order to shift the locus of their problems."

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960

"We suspect that shorting gold has come to seem like a riskless proposition as long as there is confidence in the Fed. Synthetic gold is the perfect substance for a carry trade: an easy borrow with very low carrying cost and little upside basis risk. Such a hypothesis, in our opinion, does much to explain the incongruity of a declining gold price while fundamentals for paper currency, and the U.S. dollar in particular, obviously deteriorate; while demand for physical gold has exceeded new mine supply for several years running; and while above-ground 400-ounce .995-gold bars located in London, New York, and other financial capitals (in cohabitation with speculative trading activity in paper markets) have steadily dwindled and disappeared into Asian financial centers reformulated as .9999 kilo bars."

Tocqueville Gold Newsletter 2Q 2015


In their desire to appease Wall Street and the Cheeto bandito, the Fed initiated Döllardämmerung this afternoon. 

Gold and silver soared.  Silver is on an amazing bull run.

Stocks rallied on hopes of the oil of excess liquidity to calm the troubled waters of a faltering economy and pipe dreams of beneficent AI for all. 

VIX fell of course.

The US military seized a Venezuelan tanker in the open sea this afternoon.  They are not even pretending that it is carrying drugs, or threatening the US in any way.

Perhaps this will distract the public, at least for a little while. 

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - House of the Mad, Land of the Depraved

 

"Go now, write it on a tablet for them, inscribe it on a scroll, so that in the days to come it may be a witness to them, for ever and ever.  For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children, unwilling to listen to the instructions of the Lord.  They say to their seers, ‘Do not see!’ and to the prophets, ‘Say nothing of what is right!  Tell us only things that please us.  Prophesy illusions."

Isaiah 30:8-10

"The gates of Hell are terrible to behold, are they not? The lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making."

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

"The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation that the fully schizophrenic person feels.  In fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society.

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer."

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973

"The illusions of extremists, of the right and the left, are dangerous things, for the very reason that they often incline themselves to sacrifice the individual, large groups of individuals, and entire segments of society, for the 'greater good' of their illusions.  No people, no organization of people, and no nation are immune or exceptional to this extremity.  Evil is a choice, a long, gradual succession of choices.  And the madness never sleeps, always hunting for souls to devour."

Jesse, A Cruel Deception, 28 October 2022

Stocks meandered around most of the day, and dipped lower into the close.

The big story today was silver, which broke out higher, and went out on a new all time high of 61.

Gold also moved higher, but not nearly with such explosive force.  

But that's silver, the beta monster.  When it runs, they are hauling the bears out of the trading pits on stretchers.

VIX ticked a bit higher as well.

Bitcoin bounced back up in its trading range.

ADP came in a bit light on the jobs this morning, just marginally positive.

FOMC tomorrow.  The expectation is for a 25 bp cut.   Their words might move the markets.

Gold and silver are telling us something, and the banksters and their servants are trying to hush them up.  

What do you think this means?

Change is in the wind. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Elite's Devotion to a New Order of Lawlessness

 

“The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory, but to keep the very structure of society intact.  The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”

George Orwell, 1984

"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: inverted totalitarianism, a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on 'private media' than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions.  According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has 'emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation’s political traditions.'

The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal.  Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry under cover of improving efficiency and cost-cutting.

Imperialism and democracy are, in Wolin's terms, literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die."

Chalmers Johnson, Review of Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated, January 23, 2010

"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, Discreet Charm of Nihilism


Stocks took a dive this morning, but then recovered slowly in the afternoon.

As I said on Friday, VIX was showing signs of a short term correction.

But as Jesse Livermore once said, 'Never short a dull market."

And dull this market certainly is, to the point of sleepwalking.

Gold and silver took an early, purposeful hit judging by the volume and timing, but managed to take quite a bit of that back.

A similar story for Bitcoin.

The markets are dominated by a few big players, who have neutered and captured the regulators and politicians.

I am going to be trading very lightly until the end of the year, keeping a close eye of exogenous geo-political events and other economic developments.

I have now shifted my outlook to a market break sometime by the end of March, but with an eye for any moderately impactful 'trigger event' that will take this bloated bubble in valuations down.

The disapproval ratings of the major Western leaders is almost shocking.  This is the fashionable thing these days, to damn the public and do what they will.  Their devotion to a new order of lawlessness and power is slowly consuming us.   

This video interview with John Kiriakou and Anthony Napolitano is worth watching.    

Have a pleasant evening.