Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Civilisation - Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday

 

“I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta.  On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings, by satisfying our own egos.  And I think we should remember that we are all part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature.  All living things are our brothers and sisters."

Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but was wrong in thinking that we can get them for ourselves, without grace."

Simone Weil

"Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament. He has wished to ‘be himself,’ and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted.  To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

C. S. Lewis

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God.  Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.  Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."

Fulton J. Sheen


What is civility? 

Kenneth Clark, would say that civility is to be cultured, aware and appreciative of the higher things in life, and to be a gentleman in the great English tradition,  even as John Henry Newman himself observed, that a gentleman "is one who never inflicts pain."

But as Simone Weil points out so well, that mere humanism as an act of choice, of human will, may not be sufficient to stand up against the great objectifying beasts of our modern age.

What is needed to remain standing against the onslaught of greed and power and vanities and hate is grace.  'Faith alone may make a hero, but love makes a saint.'

And Bonhoeffer makes the final connection, that it is really a matter of respect for God.  

Civility is a respect and love and consideration for each person, not as the world and the market may value them, but with respect for the Lord, who has ennobled the human condition by accepting for himself as almighty God in the incarnation, and further, made love of neighbor an imperative to life as his disciple.

There are no two ways about it.  The words are there and are unequivocal. 

"Master, which is the great commandment in the law?  And Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

The markets were embarrassed by the whopper that the wiseguys promoted yesterday about a Fed pivot, again, under the leadership of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Especially in light of the stronger than expected jobs increase shown by the payroll company ADP.

And so today they plummeted.

But the Non-Farm Payrolls report is still a day or so away, so there is still some life left in this most recent wash and rinse.

And stocks finished the day mostly unchanged.  For now.

The Dollar rallied and gold and silver retreated a bit.

Show us who you admire and what you serve, and we will know you for what you are. 

For a man cannot serve both God and the world, even if they delude themselves with words like greatness and freedom, and profane ideologies that would make vain and selfish beasts of them, destined in their willful ignorance for everlasting darkness. 

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Prelude to a Wash and Rinse - Payrolls on Friday

 

“Lawlessness has come out of Babylon, that is, from the elders who were to govern the people as judges. They perverted their thinking; they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven, and did not keep in mind just judgments.  How you have grown evil with age.  Now have your past sins come to term, passing unjust sentences, condemning the innocent, and freeing the guilty."

Daniel 13:5,9,52-53


"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects."

R. J. Rummel, Death by Government: A History of Mass Murder and Genocide Since 1900


N’en déplaise à ces fous nommés sages de Grèce,
En ce monde il n’est point de parfaite sagesse;
Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgré tous leurs soîns
Ne diffèrent entre eux que du plus ou du moins.

"In spite of every sage whom Greece can show,
Unerring wisdom never dwelt below;
Folly in all of every age we see,
The only difference lies in the degree."

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, from Mackay's Madness of Crowds


"This is as old as Babylon, and evil as sin. It is the power of the darkness of the world, and of spiritual wickedness in high places. The only difference is that it is not happening in the past, or in a book, or in some vaguely frightening prophecy— it is happening here and now."

Jesse

 

The Reserve Bank of Australia only raised rates 25 bp this morning.

And the sages of Wall Street took this as a sign that Aussie is leading the world and that the Fed will shortly be following their lead.

I took it as a sign that we are approaching another sizable wash and rinse.

It does seem to be a recurrent play of our kleptocracy.

And so the spokesmodels and muppets cheered another glorious stock market rally.

The rally was broad based with the Russell showing some team spirit.

Let's see what happened.

Gold and silver have rebounded sharply at least, after the heavy-handed price suppression into the recent Comex option expiration.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Whom Do You Serve - Bear Market Rally Deluxe

 

"Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’  And Jesus said to him, ‘What is written in the law?  What do you read there?’ And the lawyer answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’  And Jesus said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’

"As you know, this passage above is the introduction to one of the greatest and most memorable of the parables from our Lord's own lips, the story of The Good Samaritan.  

Our Lord did not offer us an exemption from sin if we call on His name, but forgiveness, if that request is offered in true repentance, a recognition of our faults, and faith, and an active response to His command to 'go and sin no more.' 

It might be better to have been born without any knowledge of His word and His commandments, than to hear His words and then hypocritically parade in them and His sacraments, with intricate invocations of His holy name on your lips, as a call to hatefulness, pride, division, self-justification, and oppression.

I am speaking now, more directly, to those who embrace hatred and spread thoughts of violence and repression, often in the name of God, giving scandal to His faithful on earth.

 I am speaking to those who stoke the fires of hatefulness, and violent words, gossip and name calling, insults and hardness towards their brothers and sisters in this world, while cynically asking, Who is my neighbor?  Surely not them.

We are a generation made drunk with power, and a perverse individualism that has been foretold for increasingly dark times.  Examine your own actions and thoughts and behaviors first.   For you will not be called upon to answer for what others do, but what you have done. 

May God have mercy on any who provide provocation and false teachings to others, and scandalous examples to their brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren, especially because of their willful selfishness, stubborn greed, and foolish pride.  And you know who you are, if you are not already completely dead to the life of the Spirit."

Jesse, 19 January 2015

The markets decided it was time to rally this morning, and used a lightly worse than expected PMI number as a rationale to expect a Fed pause after the next rate increase.

Gold and silver rallied hard and never looked back.

Let's see how long this lasts.   Perhaps it will.

Or perhaps it will just be another cycle in the ongoing wealth transfer, the markets' wash and rinse.

There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday that may move the markets one way or another.

Have a pleasant evening.