"The problem with movies and books is they make evil look glamorous, exciting, when it's no such thing. It's boring and it's depressing and it's stupid. Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over. They're shallow, empty, boring people who couldn't give you five minutes of interesting conversation. Maybe some can be monkey-clever, some of the time, but they aren't hardly ever smart."
Dean Koontz
It was damn the gloom over Brexit and full speed ahead, led by the SP futures which remain the tool of choice for those who wish to drive the markets here and there, particularly in periods of low volume/genuine commitment to just about anything.
The markets are broken, given over to manipulation and corruption. And those who continually point the finger at manipulation by the government are really missing the whole point of the need for reform, and too often willfully so.
The financialization of the economy has turned 'the markets' into wealth transfer mechanisms from the public to a crooked and corrupted few.
Let's see if this was a real turnaround or merely a dead cat bounce.
Nike was down sharply after hours on real world things like earnings and revenues.
The professional elite are, for the most part, talking around the matter, and whistling past the graveyard of their own long coming and well deserved demise. What has been called 'the placebo syndrome' of mindless pursuit of power and goods.
I think if you look at the charts, particularly the gold chart, you can see the preferred levels of support that must be held to make the bullish case.
I have forecasted for some time that the pressures in the physical bullion markets, particularly in London, would be feeling the pinch this month. And I think we are seeing that, although for the most part, the response of the official powers that be is denial.
“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and even murders that we are not going to be held to account.”
Czesław Miłosz
Every man and woman on this earth will die.
Now, this is of course a statement of the obvious. And yet very few really think about it, until something happens to bring that cold statement of reality into an unavoidable focus that they must confront. We are all dying, in our own way and time, from the moment that we are born; but we do our utmost not to think about it.
And this is understandable. Going around constantly thinking about your own mortality would be morbid, a misuse of the time and talent that we have been given on this earth to do things, to create, and love, and to be alive.
But we tend to put any thought of our true place in the world, put it off and out of mind so much, that we also start thinking that we are uniquely different, that we are above the common state of humanity. We are so much superior to all the others that we will likely go on forever, immune to the consequences that afflict the greater mass of humanity.
And if only this were true; but it is not. Not true for any one of us. Of this we can be certain.
One thing of which we can be sure of, is that we will draw a last breath, and that the darkness will come over our eyes and hold us in a final embrace. We may fantasize about avoiding death, about living almost forever, of extending our life here on earth indefinitely, and perhaps of leaving a great monument to ourselves that will last forever in this world that will provide us a kind of immortality. But this will not happen.
We know, deep down in our very heart of hearts, that at that moment, the moment immediately after our death, the moment in which we will finally discover for ourselves whether it is to be consciousness or nothingness, the regret that one might feel at having been wrong, of having misjudged the real rules of the game, of having purposely misunderstood and deluded ourselves about the true nature and meaning of our own life? Of having squandered everything on items that have no lasting consequence?
If so, it would be more overwhelming than anything we might dare to imagine. That is what Leon Bloy means when he says that 'in the end, the only real sadness is not to have been a saint.'
It is what is called Pascal's wager. But it serves us not to think about it. And so we distract ourselves with lesser things.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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