29 May 2024

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Masters and Monsters

 

Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. Nothing is hidden that will not be revealed, and nothing is secret that will not be made known. Whatever has been said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what they have whispered in private will be proclaimed from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more they can do. But fear the one who, after the killing, has the power to cast you into hell.  Fear this one!

Luke 12:1-5

Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot bear to hear my words. You are from your father, the devil, and you willfully carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not stand with the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks in accord with his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

John 8:43-44

The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love.  And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?

Maximilian Kolbe

The root of it all is in the will to power, the desire of a select few to determine the value of all life, and to define both good and evil, with themselves as the ultimate good.  And their handiwork is not life, but a profound emptiness, the abomination of desolation.   They never have enough.  Not enough money, not enough power, not enough killing.  They cannot give life, so they will bring death.  They fear weakness and death, so they attempt to be its master.  They would be as gods.  And in their pride they make themselves, and all those around them, not masters but monsters.

Jesse, Social Darwinism, 17 September 2014
 

Stocks were hit with selling this morning, and it last in varying degrees throughout the day.

The Dollar rallied in a 'flight to safety' as the VIX rose higher.

Gold and silver were hit early, but silver shook it off and finished roughly unchanged.

Gold dropped a little.  It had the more significant option expiration yesterday, and this may have been the expected 'gut punch' that often follows a major expiration.

Gold was moving in and out even-handedly in the Hong Kong warehouses yesterday.

We'll be getting some GDP data tomorrow morning, and PCE inflation on Friday.

We had some storms roll through yesterday and they brought cooler weather in the 70's with a welcome breeze.  

The garden is all in now and growing well.

The young man is getting married in July, and so Daisy and I will be looking after things for a while.

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.
And here it is, our world of monstrous realities, veiled in scolding deceits and thinly spun illusions.

Have a pleasant evening.



28 May 2024

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Sliding Down Quietly Into the Abyss

 

Easy is the descent into hell;
Its dark doors stand open, night and day.
But to retrace one's steps,
To return to the upper air,
That is the task, that is our labour.

Publius Vergilius Maro, Aeneid

'Simon, Simon.  Satan has asked to have you, and to sift all of you, like wheat.  But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail.  And when you have returned to the faith, you must help to strengthen your brothers.'

Luke 22:31-32

They spend their days in prosperity, and slide down quietly into the abyss.  They say to God, 'Leave us alone!   We do not want to learn your ways.   Who is the Almighty that we should serve him?   And what would we gain by praying to him?  Is not the prosperity of the wicked the result of their own efforts, since they have never sought God’s help?'

Job 21:12-16

The Lord reached down and rescued me;
      he drew me out from raging torrents.
He delivered me from powerful adversaries
      who hated me, and were too strong for me.
They assaulted me in the time of my distress.
      But the Lord sustained me and brought me to safe harbors.
      Because he delights in me, he saved me.

Psalm 18:16-19

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Stocks were wobbling around, but managed to finish the day in the green.

Gold and silver in particular rallied.

VIX rose slightly.

Today was a quiet option expiration on the Comex for Precious Metals.

Most of the work had been done in slamming prices in the days leading up to today.

Sometimes we see another gut punch to test the new longs who were holding call options that were in the money, and have been converted into new futures positions.

Have a pleasant evening.



27 May 2024

C. Wright Mills: The Causes of War

 

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts

War is hugely profitable.  It creates so much money because it's so easy to spend money very fast.  There are huge fortunes to be made.  So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are 'others' whom we can legitimately make war upon.

Roger Waters, Concept Tour, Rolling Stone, 23 February 2017

An expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business. To many utopian capitalists, it has become the Business Way of Life.

In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands.  The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; it also confronts them with many new problems.

Yet these, the problems of war, often seem easier to handle.  They are out in the open: to produce more, to plan how to kill more of the enemy, to move materials thousands of miles.  So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe.

They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines.  Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out—except war—which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be.  For they still believe that 'winning' means something, although they never tell us what.

The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.

Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle.  But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its 'inevitability,' want it in order to shift the locus of their problems.

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960