Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Their Dream, Our Nightmare

 

"The present war crisis is something we have made entirely for and by ourselves. There is in reality not the slightest logical reason for war, and yet the whole world is plunging headlong into frightful destruction, and doing so with the purpose of avoiding war and preserving peace! This is a true war-madness, an illness of the mind and the spirit that is spreading with a furious and subtle contagion all over the world."

Thomas Merton, The Root of War, The Catholic Worker, October 1961

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.  All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.  War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1999

"Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality."

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1978

"I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.  Why should we not form a secret society with but one object— for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire."

Cecil John Rhodes, Confession of Faith, 1877

"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. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel, Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, 1994

"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." 

The Project For a New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses, 1997

"The selling of the Iraq War to the American public was an exploitation of mass gullibility.  Current circumstances give little or no hope that the public response would be much different to the selling of some future untoward war."

Paul Pillar, Selling the Iraq War: Gullibility and Mass Hysteria, March 15, 2023


Exceptionalism in any guise, whether it be for a race of people, a religion, an organization, or a nation, often turns toxic, and is the catalyst for aggressive war, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder. 

 The Non-Farm Payrolls report came in fairly hot this morning, but after some wild swings the Street decided that they could just ignore it for the day at least.

Stocks finished largely unchanged.

The Dollar chopped sideways and finished largely unchanged.

VIX fell.

Gold and silver ended slightly positive after a wide daily swing.

Exogenous risks remain unusually elevated.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Following That Madness Into Hell

 

"No doubt it is more comfortable to deliberately wear blinkers that prevent one from seeing the evil done in the discharge of their responsibility— to be unwilling to see that one is defending murder and robbery.  All my life I have been fighting against the spirit of narrowness and violence, arrogance, intolerance in its absolute, merciless consistency.  I have also worked to overcome this spirit with its evil consequences, such as nationalism in excess, racial persecution, and materialism.  In regards to this, the National Socialists are correct in killing me."

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Executed in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, 23 January 1945

"If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.”

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

"They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts.  They went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power.  You forget  our hatred is a deadly poison.  In our hatred, we are like bees who must pay with their lives for the use of their stingers."

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947

“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

"As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice.  Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed.  Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve."

Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, 1936

"The safest road to Hell is the gradual one— the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942

Stocks continued to wallow in weakness.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

Gold and silver continued to drift lower.

VIX crept higher to the 50 DMA.

Tomorrow is the Non-Farm Payrolls report with all its attendant hoopla.

This may likely set the direction of the markets.

The Great Beast incites the leaders of other nations into madness.

The innocent are sacrificed to the dark gods of money and power.

We persecute those who reveal the truth, and encourage the madness of whole nations, who follow that madness into hell.

Perhaps it is not too late to stop, and consider what it is we are doing, and whom it is we serve.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Public Be Damned

 

"The American economy increasingly serves only a narrow part of society. Too many of America's elite— samong the super rich, the CEOs, and many of my colleagues in academia chase wealth and power, and the rest of society be damned."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, 2011

"I think that in particular, we can see how the oligarchy has actually become more powerful in the last since the financial crisis. They've been spending more than $1 million per day lobbying Congress and fighting financial reform.  I think that for some time the financial sector got its way in Washington through the power of ideology, through the power of persuasion.  And in the last year and a half, we've seen the gloves come off.  They are fighting as hard as they can to stop reform."

James Kwak, Bill Moyer's Journal, April 16, 2010

"We now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production.  The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital."

Carroll Quigley, Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown Univeristy 1976

“While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.”

Horace Greeley, On the National Bank Act, 1872

"Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it."

Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Rise of a Shadow Government, 5 January 2016

"Accumulating by conscious frauds more money than they can use upon themselves, wisely distribute or safely leave to their children, these denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw a light upon their crimes.  Plutocracy is abhorrent to a republic.  It preys upon the nation in time of peace and conspires against it in the hour of its calamity.   Conscienceless, compassionless and devoid of wisdom, it enervates its votaries while it impoverishes its victims."

William Jennings Bryan, Address at Madison Square Garden, New York, 30 August 1906 

How do we know when the Wall Street mouthpieces on financial TV are 'talking their book', a euphemism for lying?   Their lips are moving.

As for the purveyors of the message, those paid to spread it?  As one of the spokesmodels said to those devastated by the frauds in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble: 'Well, no one made you buy stocks.' 

They do not care.  Truth and your well-being is not their job.  'Hate the game, not the player.'  It's not personal, it's just business.

Right.   Keep that one in mind.

Stocks were clobbered again today, as the markets were led lower by the broader market as shown in the Russell 2000.

The Dollar advanced a bit as the ongoing story of a soft landing with imminent rate cuts galore continues to fall apart.

Gold and silver were slightly lower.

VIX rose a bit.

Rough seas ahead as illusions fade.

Have a pleasant evening.