Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts

Groundhog Day. Every artificially created dip gets bought by stronger hands.

"In order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted." William Hazlitt

But when deception fails, it unleashes the pent up power of an earthquake.

SP 500 and NDX March Futures Daily Charts

Stocks were selling off in Europe this morning, and the US opened lower as well, chilled not only by the New York winter storm, but by the interest rate increase in China.

AIG is reported to be receiving private financing, and this led the financials and the SP futures higher on very thin holiday volumes. The market closed unchanged to higher.

I got a bit of a 'kick' out of the market today watching the VIX insurance plays rise with the SP futures in an obvious paired trade. Someone does not believe in this rally. It looks like a puffball fueled by the SP futures.

Price manipulation with a purpose in my humble opinion. End badly and all that. Frauds and fees are the primary US exports.

Vermont C. Royster: A Light On the Road to Damascus

Most people confuse freedom with power.

Freedom is not the ability to do whatever we wish when we wish however we wish, to serve our passions as ends unto themselves, to be rude and demeaning to those who we think are weaker at the moment.  This self indulgence is the act of small and mean spirited souls when they yearn to show that they have a little power.

True freedom is to know what is good, what is the right thing to do, and to have the will to do it, even when it goes against our selfish inclinations. It is to free ourselves from fear and all those things that hold us down, which prevent us from finding and fulfilling our part in the great renewal of creation and the triumph of life over death, of being over nothingness.

The most powerful in the eyes are the world are often the most enslaved, victims of basest passions, servants to the most undeserving and meanest of ambitions, lashing out in their insatiable misery. With obeisance they serve and nuture the willfulness that delivers them first up to slavery to themselves, and then to darker powers, and finally into the jaws of self destruction.

The paradox of life is that we hate what we fear, but we eventually become what we hate, because it occupies so much of our energy and mind. It makes a place for itself in our hearts.  When the adversary of all goodness interwines his fingers with ours, whispering sweet words of power and fame, of hatreds and passions slacked, he slowly tightens his grip and holds fast, and then we are his.

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always." Mahatma Gandhi

WSJ
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 wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

h/t to Catherine Austin Fitts for introducing me to V. Royster's writings and for being a light in her own life and writings at Solari.