Suffering, Sorrow, Loss, Hopefulness, Faithfulness, and Prayer

This morning I came across this excerpt below in William Barclay's Daily Commentary on the Gospels.

I normally do not read this commentary.  This encounter today was by a happy accident, and a tender mercy, in a response to my own ongoing thoughts and prayers.    I wanted to share it with you because it speaks to many of us, and certainly most of those with whom I have shared conversations, especially over the past year.

Luke 2:36-40  There was a prophetess called Anna. She was the daughter of Phanuel and she belonged to the tribe of Asher. She was far advanced in years. She had lived with her husband ever since seven years after she came to womanhood; and now she was a widow of eighty-four years of age. She never left the Temple and day and night she worshipped with fastings and with prayers.

At that very time she came up and she began to give thanks to God and she kept speaking about him to all those who were waiting expectantly for the deliverance of Jerusalem. When they had completed everything which the Lord's law lays down they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. And the child grew bigger and stronger and he was filled with wisdom, and God's grace was on him.

"Anna was one of the Quiet in the Land.  We know nothing about her except what these verses tell but even in this brief compass Luke has drawn us a complete character sketch.

Anna was a widow. She had known sorrow and she had not grown bitter.  Sorrow can do one of two things to us.  It can make us hard, bitter, resentful, rebellious against God.  Or it can make us kinder, softer, more sympathetic. 

It can despoil us of our faith; or it can root faith ever deeper.  It all depends how we think of God.  If we think of him as a tyrant we will resent him.  If we think of him as Father we too will be sure that:

A Father's hand will never cause
His child a needless tear.

She was eighty-four years of age. She was old and she had never ceased to hope.  Age can take away the bloom and the strength of our bodies; but age can do worse— the years can take away the life of our hearts until the hopes that once we cherished die and we become dully content and grimly resigned to things as they are. 

Again it all depends on how we think of God.  If we think of him as distant and detached we may well despair; but if we think of him as intimately connected with life, as having his hand on the helm, we too will be sure that the best is yet to be and the years will never kill our hope.

How then was Anna such as she was?

She never ceased to worship. She spent her life in God's house with God's people. God gave us his church to be our mother in the faith. We rob ourselves of a priceless treasure when we neglect to be one with his worshipping people.

She never ceased to pray. Public worship is great; but private worship is also great. As someone has truly said, "They pray best together who first pray alone." The years had left Anna without bitterness and in unshakable hope because day by day she kept her contact with Him who is the source of strength and in whose strength our weakness is made perfect."

The prophetess Anna is not much remarked or remembered.  She is 'the quiet of the land.'  I believe that there is a beautiful little church, on the slope of the Mount of Olives, the Church of Dominus Flevit, that was built on the site of an ancient Byzantine church that was dedicated to her.

Do you wish to know what God is thinking, what He is doing?  Talk to Him.  Talk also to His people, those who are yours to walk with you on the way.   And do not allow a wayward heart to make you hardened, deaf and blind.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Thankfulness

"Since God has accepted you to be among the holy people that He loves, you must clothe yourselves with tender mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.   Make allowances for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you.  Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must also forgive others. 

Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which brings us all together in harmony. And let the peace of the Lord rule in your hearts.  For as members of one body you are called to live in peace. And always be thankful."

Col 3:12-15

There was a little more action in the markets today than I might have otherwise expected, especially in the afternoon session.

Stocks were weak, being led lower by the big cap techs. And the SP 500 got into the act, selling off rather handily in the closing hour.

We will have to keep a close eye on the performance of stocks in the first week of January, and then January as a whole. I am of the school that tends to try and make some conclusions about the rest of the year from the first month, where appropriate.

And gold and silver delivered a nice little rally, with gold sticking a close firmly above 1300 and silver grabbing the 17 handle by a couple cents.

While 1300 was 'psychological' the real resistance for gold is just overhead. How it does for the next few weeks will be key, and silver as well.

There are quite a few event risks to markets coming up around the US budgets and other political decisions as we roll over to the new year.

At some point in 2018 I do think we are going to see the start, at least, to a genuine change in trends. How it plays out may require some flexibility on our parts.

I wish you and your families a happy New Year. Life may be like a box of chocolates, but families are like fudge— mostly sweet, but with a few nuts.

Have a very pleasant and safe holiday weekend.

Thomas Frank Interviews 7 and 8 with Paul Jay on the Real News Network

Here is the two part continuation of the interviews on the Real News Network between Paul Jay and Thomas Frank.

Frank has the Clintons nailed, and continues to reiterate the high points of how they led the Democratic Party into an historic betrayal of their base, the working people.  For money and power.

However, he is far, far too kind, almost to the point of what can be called a willful bias, to Barack Obama.

I am sorry, but can it be more obvious that Obama was a bait-and-switch brand for the oligarch class?

He seems to come back to a more realistic assessment in the second segment.  But he just cannot bring himself to draw the conclusion that Obama was not some hapless dupe, a victim of circumstance, but knew exactly what he was doing, and early on had made his choice of what or whom to serve.

It is very hard to assess motives to a series of actions.  Was it due to the bullet or the bribe?  Was it a foregone conclusion from the very first?  But at some point the circumstantial and particular evidence can become overwhelming.

He’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters – after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, 'Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for?' Obama turned sharply and said, “Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?” That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote.

Ray McGovern

The Democrats love to blame those diabolically crafty Republicans, the evil and omnipresent Russians, the weakness of virtue in the face of implacable darkness.

But for a variety of reasons, the liberal intelligentsia cannot bring themselves to accept the fact that our first 'black president,' articulate, well-educated, and charismatic, for whatever reasons, quickly became a willing tool of the moneyed interests.  Paul Jay flat out says, 'Obama is too sacred to touch.'

And the 800 pound gorilla in the room, who is incredibly never mentioned, who was a phenomenon in the presidential primaries, is Bernie Sanders.  They did manage a passing nod to Elizabeth Warren, however.  Paul Jay kept trying to bring the conversation back to Obamas ongoing role in crushing the Sanders progressive wing of the Democrats, but Frank cannot help but run away from it, back to the more comfortable areas of liberal outrage like W.

There seems to be a lot of that going around, however.  The supporters of Trump are buying into his populist mystique, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is a long time friend of big money, albeit a much clumsier deceiver and liar. 

Ah the wonderful ironies of the credibility trap.  

And how easy it is to see the hypocrisy and expedient rationalizations of the other guys. Which is why we must examine our own souls first before we would seek to harshly criticize another.

Don't get me wrong. I find both Thomas Frank and Paul Jay to be absolutely spellbinding, and much more intelligent and articulate than myself. It is just what, a comfort, to see that even the professionals and highly talented have the same human foibles as ourselves.

Where will all this end, this tragic overreach by the rich and the powerful?  History and human nature both suggest that the truth cannot be admitted, and then faced and overcome, until one hits bottom.

I have embedded episode 7 here.   You can click on the link below this to go to the RAI site for episode 8 and presumably an episode 9 when it appears.





Click here for episode 8.

Here is a link to the Reality Asserts Itself series on the Real News Network.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lead Kindly Light - A Forecast Connecting the Dots

"Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’...

As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’."

Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin'


"The only constant is change."

Heraclitus

Let me start out by saying that in my estimation, about 95% of short term predictions are worthless from an actionable trading standpoint.  In most businesses, short term is less than one year.

That is why so many jokers on Wall Street keep so busy rigging the game, and cutting down their forecasting window to microseconds.  It is the only way that they can provide consistent returns— they cheat.

Oh yea, I know that some guys have cobbled together some remarkable runs in the short term, and then generally flame out at some point.  I had a run at the blackjack tables in Vegas that had the dealers talking.   It seems like everyone gets at least one night like that, they are just flat out golden and can't seem to lose at the turn of the cards.

But any seasoned gambler knows that the odds will always catch up to you.  Always.  That is why the casinos are, at the end of the day, the only ones to make real consistent returns.  One of the best gifts I ever received was a copy of Casino Management by Bill Freedman, which I got from a guy I knew from the old neighborhood who worked in the comptrollers office at Caesar's.

But in general it is the longer term and luckier, well-disciplined value investors who really ring the bell.  That is why so many of the big insiders like to set themselves up to grab the more certain flow of fees than depend on the big wins, which they will also take when they can.

So having said all that, someone from the crowd says, 'Yeah but tell us what is going to happen next.'

Ok.  Let me pick up the thread from the original broad trends forecast that I cranked out a long time ago.

After a long slump, the American people were likely to make a bad choice and pick someone who made a lot of promises, but ended up betraying them all pretty much.  With all due respect to the faithful, let's give that one a check.

By the way, there is nothing particularly remarkable about that.  If you look at the political and economic flows after the crash of 1929, we are fairly well tracing them out if you discount FDR out of the picture, and add in the weighted average of all the bad leaders and demagogues to whom the people resorted.

So next up is likely to be some form of dramatic change.  I am not sure how much of this is going to be so dramatic as to be violent, and what the mix may be of international and domestic, but there is likely to be 'blood on the streets' either literally or figuratively.

You can go back and look at every instance in history where the inequality of wealth and power was as high as it is now, and see violent change rising as the social and political system struggles to cope with the distortion and stress on the social fabric.

The Fall of the Soviet Union was a very dramatic change, and Gorbachev reacted in a way that steered it away from physical violence, more or less.  But there are plenty of other examples that went differently. Any number of times I have referred to the sad end of the Romanovs, the French aristocracy, and the decades of labor violence and wars that followed on the Gilded Age.

Distortions tend to build stresses that will be a force for adjustment, and if resisted too stubbornly, in an adjustment that resembles an earthquake.  Kennedy ironically cited the Soviets some years before the fall in saying that those who thwart peaceful evolution will invite violent revolution.

So in my outlook the bigger variable will be the manner in which those who are in power will react to the growing demand disenchantment with their brave new world.  Will they begin to allow for reforms, or will they resort to the kind of stubborn defense of the status quo that ends up with a delayed but more violent adjustment?

This will be a dominant theme over the next couple of years.  We have seen the early signs of it already, politically, in large part because of the extreme denial of the power elite, caught as they are in a credibility trap.

And then the voice in the crowd may ask, 'And so how can I do well for myself in this trend by trading in the short term?  How can I easily get rich quick?'

You cannot.   Have you not been listening?  It's a gamble. Overseen by cheaters.

But in a type of value investing, we may profit through watchfulness and prayer.  Change is coming, a very big change in trend, and a sort of uncertainty will come with it.   And those waves of change will break upon the hardened hearts of the wealthy and powerful and the worldly god of the market that they have raised, once again.

For because of the increase in wickedness, the love of most will grow cold. But those who stand firm in the faith will be saved.  And the good news that has been given as a witness to the nations.

As Rust Cohle said, picking up the pessimistic Weltanschauung of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, 'time is a flat circle that keeps repeating.'   Except that is for the faithful, for whom time and the endless failure of sin to rise above itself has been overcome by the eternal.  The people who were lost in darkness have seen a great light.

Pretty grim and heady stuff, huh?  We have been here as a people, the human race, many times before.

If you look at the history of the 20th century, about half of which some of us have personally enjoyed,  the riots and wars and revolutions and fanatical demagogues and dictators and their genocides, it is a wonder that our grandparents and parents did not lose their minds, as well as their hearts and faith, along the way.  It certainly took a toll on a lot of them,  their rendezvous with destiny.  And so now I think may come ours.   And we have not yet seen the darkest hours before the dawn. 

But as I started out earlier, no one really knows what comes next. We can look at the prevailing conditions. There is no doubt a grave mispricing of risk in the system. And the foundations and propositions of the current powers are shaking. You have seen my picture of the 'imperial Presidents.' What were things like after the fall of Nero? An avalanche of change. Vespasian was called back from the siege of Jerusalem to be named emperor, the fourth that year.

I am glad that the queen is home safely.

Have a pleasant evening.