Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - What Does It Profit a Man

 

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1943

"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.   The CIA (with its on-going relationships to drug-traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not even the dirtiest.

The difference between 1963 and 2001 was in the White House.  Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson successfully contained the desires of their hawks to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union. But Bush and Cheney have maneuvered America into a war on terrorism.  That war threatens to become a permanent justification for curtailing the U.S. constitution’s elaborate checks and balances, and its guarantees of America’s traditional liberties. "

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

"The ultimate purpose of crime is to establish an endless empire. It seeks a state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world thought doomed to annihilation.   When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Friedrich Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933

“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.  To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.  Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing.  At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.

Truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. The fascist style depends upon endless repetition, designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. The final mode is misplaced faith. At the end of the war a worker told Victor Klemperer that 'understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.' 

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.  For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.  The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.”

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017

 

Stocks were hit by a steady selling today, and went out near the lows.

The VIX rose.

The Dollar rallied.

Gold finished unchanged from the open.

Silver was off a bit.

Waves of warm air were emanating out of Wyoming, as the Fed's annual meeting there staggered into the close.

I must have forgotten to watch the first Republican Presidential candidates debate last night.

Darn.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Rulers of Darkness In This World

 

"But it was not until 1967, when Jim Garrison burst upon the scene, that an inner circle of the French government, including de Gaulle and his secret service chief, Andre Ducret, made a move.  The first overt act came in the form of a phone call from New York to Garrison. The caller identified himself as a representative of Frontiers Publishing Company of Geneva, Switzerland.  He said that his firm had an important work in progress [Farewell America] on the Kennedy assassination which would soon be published in Europe [in French as L'Amerique Brule], and wondered if Mr. Garrison would be interested in taking a look.  It was like dangling a carrot in front of a rabbit."

William Turner, Farewell America: How French Intelligence Wrote a Book about the Kennedy Assassination, February 13, 1984

“What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me.  His story is the same as mine.  It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Organisation armée secrète tried to assassinate de Gaulle 22 August 1962] story.  The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.  All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks.  They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal.  They don’t want to know.  They won’t allow themselves to find out.”

Charles de Gaulle, President of France, to Alain Peyrefitte, 1963

"It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth - as opposed to only believe the truth - is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility."

E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us, 1996

“The Unspeakable is a term Thomas Merton coined at the heart of the sixties after JFK’s assassination—in the midst of the escalating Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and the further assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy.  In each of those soul-shaking events Merton sensed an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.

 What is unrecognized about JFK's presidency, which then makes his assas­sination a false mystery, is that he was locked in a struggle with his national security state.  That state had higher values than obedience to the orders of a president who wanted peace.

It’s unbelievable—or we’re supposed to think it is—that a president was murdered by our own government agencies because he was seeking a more stable peace than relying on nuclear weapons.  It’s unspeakable.  For the sake of a nation that must always be preparing for war, that story must not be told.  If it were, we might learn that peace is possible without making war.

These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor.  If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.

When we become more deeply human, as Merton understood the process, the wellspring of our compassion moves us to confront the Unspeakable.  There is nothing so threatening to systemic evil as those willing to stand against it regardless of the consequences."

James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness in this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

Ephesians 6:12

 

Stocks shook off the interest rate blues and swung hard into rally mode today.

Of course the VIX fell.

The Dollar fell as well.

Gold and silver were in rally mode after the recent, protracted decline that culminated on the stock option expiration last Friday.

What a surprise.

Comex metals option expiration next Monday the 28^th.

The Fed will be meeting again tomorrow.

This November 22 will be the 60th anniversary of the murder of the US president John F. Kennedy.

I have been watching quite a few documentaries and reading articles to bring myself back up to date on how the body of knowledge around this even has progressed in the past 20 years.

I am watching far more video and documentaries on demand, and reading these days, than I spend watching network television.

I think it's a positive development

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - On the Banks of Denial - History Will Not Absolve Us

 

"Empires have always succumbed to the same disease.  With each new conquest, Rome thrust forward her frontiers and retreated from her principles.  The first Romans were simple people, wholly devoted to their land and their gods.  But the pilgrims, the settlers and the' sages were succeeded by a promiscuous mob that capitalized on the victories.  

The spectacles of the circus served to distract the populace.  The free wheat and olives distributed to the needy at the Forum served as a subterfuge for social reforms.  The aristocracy purchased seats in the Senate.  The magistracy of the empire and the spoils of victory went to the senators, the consuls, the praetors, the quaestors, the censors and their wives.  Rome had become a corporation.

The government was in the hands of a few opulent families of the world of finance, supported by the military junta.  These families knew how to protect their interests: they disguised them as national necessities.  The preservation of Rome was identified with that of the ruling families.  'The Roman people consisted of a small oligarchy of landowners, bankers, speculators, merchants, artisans, adventurers, and tatterdemalions, avid for pleasure, excitement, and sudden gain, proud, turbulent, corrupted by the life of the city, and placing their own interests ahead of even the most salutary reform.'  [Guglielmo Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, 1909]

The national honor of the Roman Empire was nothing more than the caprices or the indignation of the rulers of the moment, its political institutions no more than the cupidity of its dignitaries and the indolence of its masses, its history nothing more than a series of petty larcenies and more important crimes."

James Hepburn (pseudonym), Farewell America, France, 1968

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe that they are free."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"'The light shining in darkness' is the token of true religion; and, though doubtless there are seasons when a sudden enthusiasm arises in favour of the Truth, yet such a popularity of the Truth is but sudden, comes at once and goes at once, has no regular growth, no abiding stay.  It is error alone which grows and is received heartily on a large scale.

Truth, indeed, has that power in it, that it forces men to profess it in words; but when they go on to act, instead of obeying it, they substitute some idol in the place of it.  When there is much talk of religion in a country, and much congratulation that there is a general concern for it, a cautious mind will feel anxious lest some counterfeit be, in fact, honoured instead of it:—lest, in short, it be Satan transformed into an angel of light, rather than the Light itself, which is attracting followers."

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 1839

 

Stocks attempted to rally again today, but fell back to unchanged, and drifted slightly into the red by the close.

A downgrade by S&P on the credit ratings of several US Banks yesterday helped to brink down banking stock prices.

The Dollar bounced higher.

Gold tried to rally but finished essentially unchanged.  Silver edged higher.

The VIX drifted lower.

There will be a precious metals option expiration next Monday.

Have a pleasant evening.