Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Captives of Madness and Illusions

 

"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."

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

"The face still smiles while the limbs, literally and loathsomely are dropping from the body.  These are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions.  When they give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth.  They have grown used to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils."

G. K. Chesterton, National Madness

"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."

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

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.  I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power."

Philip K. Dick, How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978

"What is offensive is that they lie, and worship their own lying."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

"For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children,
      unwilling to listen to the commandments of the Lord.
They say to their seers,‘Do not see!’
      and to the prophets,‘Say nothing of what is right!
Tell us only things that please us, prophesy illusions."

Isaiah 30:8-10

Another lull in the markets, as the VIX drifts lower and complacency seems to be settling in.

Stocks tried to pop a rally into the weekend, but it faded back to almost unchanged into the close.

Silver was off a bit, but gold rallied and held on to a good portion of it.

Option expiration for stocks next Friday.

Inflation data coming out which may move the markets.

War is simmering on multiple fronts overseas.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Mad and Blasphemous Rebellion Against Heaven

 

“Be silent no more.  Cry out with one hundred thousand voices.  I see that, because of this silence, the world is in ruins, the Spouse of Christ has grown pale; the color is taken from her face because her blood has been sucked out, that is the blood of Christ, which is given as a free gift and not by right. Out of darkness is born the light.  Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire."

Catherine of Sienna

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort?  They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.  A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.  Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.  No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do. Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system”

Dorothy Day

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.  By their fruits you will know them.  Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles?  Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit."

Matthew 7:15-18

"What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?  Can his faith save him?   If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,' but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it?  In the same way faith, if it doesn’t have works, is dead by itself."

James 2:14-17

"Our Lord has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours.  Yours are the eyes through which He looks with compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which He walks to do good.  Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world."

Teresa of Avila

"Holiness consists simply in doing God's will, and being just what God wants us to be.  Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, or even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.  Without love deeds, even the greatest, count as nothing.”

Thérèse Martin de Lisieux

"Wonderful providence indeed which is so silent, yet so efficacious, so constant, so unerring.   This is what baffles the power of Satan.   He cannot discern the Hand of God in what goes on; and though he would fain meet it and encounter it, in his mad and blasphemous rebellion against heaven, he cannot find it.

Crafty and penetrating as he is, yet his thousand eyes and his many instruments avail him nothing against the majestic serene silence, the holy imperturbable calm which reigns through the providences of God.  He makes a guess here, or does a bold act there, but all in the dark.   If even devils, sagacious as they are, spirits by nature and experienced in evil, cannot detect His hand while He works, how can we hope to see it except by that way which the devils cannot take, by loving faith."

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol 4, No. 17

 

VIX fell.

The Dollar fell.

Gold and silver rallied higher to their breakout points.

Stocks managed to pull higher after some waffling around.

Stock option expiration and inflation data next week.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

 

"...to the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."

Edgar Allen Poe, To Helen


“Now all the Athenians as well as the foreigners residing there used their time for nothing else but telling or hearing something new.

Then Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said: 'You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.  For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’  What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything.

Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.  He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.  For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.  God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.'  When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, 'We should like to hear you on this some other time.'”

Acts 17:22-32


Empires rise, and rage for their time upon the stage of history, and fall, to be forgotten. 

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

Stocks did their usual intraday churn and burn, finishing largely unchanged.

Gold and silver were feeling a bit wobbly, but not overmuch.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

VIX has now fallen, considerably.

Wash cycle is almost done.

"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.  It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped.  Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." 

Robert Kennedy, Day of Affirmation Speech, Cape Town, South Africa, 6 June 1966

Have a pleasant evening.