Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Nemesis, Punisher of Pride - Gold Mugged, Uber Files Its IPO

Alfred Rathel, Nemesis

"It is a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent."

Martin Luther King, A Dark Day In Our Nation, Riverside Church, 30 April 1967


"The metals made it through another Non-Farm Payrolls report reasonably well. I will not be surprised at all to see the gold bulls take a sharp gut check at least once next week."

Jesse, 5 April 2019


"Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us."

Chalmers Johnson

I think most would agree that today qualifies as a 'sharp gut check' for the gold bulls.

The Dollar was up marginally. Silver was knocked down to the 15 handle.

Stocks were wobbly and weak.

But there are some more IPOs hovering in the wings so as long as volumes stay light the professionals will continue to prepare and maintain the launch pad for the latest round of flying pigs  To that end Uber filed its IPO after the close. 

Julian Assange was turned over by the Ecudorian government and arrested in the UK today. There is a comment and an illustrative story from history here.

It was funny in a very sad sort of way watching the Hillarians on MSNBC tying themselves into moral knots trying to justify the arrest and detention of Assange, obvious agent of Russia.   I could only bear a brief peek or two, because it is a difficult thing to watch grown people debasing themselves so cravenly for money and access to power.  

I will be watching to see what, if anything, the current crop of Democratic hopefuls have to say about this. I suspect that most if not all will fall into line under the Lady Pelosi and her minions. I suspect they will be the usual corporatists sell outs—  that has been their hallmark since the 1990s.  Change is coming, but slowly.  

Money and power are powerful drugs, to paraphrase Rick James.

Trumpolini took the CEO defense today, saying he doesn't know anything about Wikileaks. “I know nothing about Wikileaks, it’s not my thing.” It sounded better when the Enron boys claimed they didn't anything about what was happening all around them in their own organizations.

When the president says it—  well it can be a little unnerving,  But as we all should realize by now, he is not cleaning up the swamp— he is picking the best and juiciest parts and trying to private label them.  And going along with all the rest to get along. 

Let's see if this smackdown on gold is just a one time thing to clean out the specs who were leaning into their leveraged metals positions and miners, or not.

The backbone of the power of the US, the enabler of its grossly oversized military presence around the world, is the Dollar, or more precisely, the petro-dollar.  And to that end, the US tolerates and even nurtures the TBTF banks to help it enforce its financial will, through sanctions and attacks on other currencies.

I think we all understand this, but it is good to keep it in mind when we see things happening that simple graft and the usual soft corruption seem inadequate to explain, like the multi-trillion dollar bailouts and the lack of meaningful prosecution for serious, serial felonies.

Praying for those who disappoint us and let us down, or themselves and their sworn office and obligations down, is difficult.  But it can be rather therapeutic if you can do it well, with humility, mindful of your own weakened nature and imperfect actions.

'Only when it's dark enough can you see the stars.'

Have a pleasant evening.

The Controversial 1935 Nobel Peace Prize For Speaking Truth to Power

"We cannot speak to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."

Carl von Ossietzky


"Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Ossietzky had to fight. He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power. He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war.

In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world.

It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work.

It is also wholesome for mankind today, since the fatal illusion against which he fought has not been removed by the outcome of the last war.

The abstention from the solution of human problems by brute force is the task today as it was then.

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1956


"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana


"The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their destruction; and of course they do so.  Is this a sign that the Germans are brutalized in their simplest human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal consciencelessness from which they will never, never awake?"

Sophie Scholl, The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich 1942

This time, we will not be silent.

Who will be among those who remember the moral imperative to speak truth to power, and nominate Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize?

In memory of Carl von Ossietzky, an investigative journalist and editor of Die Weltbühne who died in hospital in Gestapo custody after being held in various prisons and concentration camps.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. The award was controversial because von Ossietzky had been imprisoned for revealing the illegal steps the German government had been taking to rearm militarily.

There are those who believe that no matter what a country may do, it is the duty of its citizens to obey their laws without objection. And there are those who hold the primacy of natural law and private conscience and moral duty to resist evil even when it has been declared by a temporal authority to be legal.



Carl von Ossietzky was born in Hamburg, the son of Carl Ignatius von Ossietzky (1848–1891), a Protestant from Upper Silesia, and Rosalie (née Pratzka), a devout Catholic and Social Democrat. His father worked as a stenographer in the office of a lawyer and senator, but died when Carl was two years old.

During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919 – 1933), his political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison. He was released in 1932.

Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began. Even then, Ossietzky was one of a very small group of public figures who continued to speak out against the now ruling Nazi Party.

On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in 'protective custody' in Spandau prison. Ossietzky underestimated the speed with which the Nazis would go about ridding the country of unwanted political opponents. He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg, among other camps.

He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross. Burkhardt described Ossietzky as “a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.” Ossietzky said,

“Tell my friends that I have come to the end, soon it will be over and that is good. I hear my wife tried to visit me. I only wanted peace.”

Ossietzky's international rise to fame began in 1936 when, already suffering from serious illness that was not being treated, he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize after an international campaign of people who hoped to achieve his release through this recognition and honor. Despite intimidation and protests directed against the Norwegian government, the Nazis had been unable to prevent this, but they now refused to release him so that he could travel to Oslo to receive the prize.

In an act of civil disobedience, after Hermann Göring, then Minister of the Interior for Prussia and head of the police, prompted him to decline the prize, Ossietzky issued a note from the hospital saying that he disagreed with the authorities who had stated that by accepting the prize he would cast himself outside the deutsche Volksgemeinschaft (community of German people).

'After much consideration, I have made the decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize which has fallen to me. I cannot share the view put forward to me by the representatives of the Secret State Police that in doing so I exclude myself from German society. The Nobel Peace Prize is not a sign of an internal political struggle, but of understanding between peoples. As a recipient of the prize, I will do my best to encourage this understanding and as a German I will always bear in mind Germany's justifiable interests in Europe.'

The award divided public opinion, and was generally condemned by conservative forces. The leading conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten argued in an editorial that Ossietzky was a criminal who had attacked his country "with the use of methods that violated the law long before Hitler came into power" and that "lasting peace between peoples and nations can only be achieved by respecting the existing laws".

Ossietzky's Nobel Prize was not allowed to be mentioned in the German press, and a government decree forbade German citizens from accepting future Nobel Prizes.

The Nobel Peace Prize money was sent to Germany where it was stolen by Ossietzky's Nazi 'defense attorney.'

In May 1936 he was sent to the Westend hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg because of his tuberculosis, but under Gestapo surveillance. He was largely forgotten during the period of favorable international regard for the Third Reich, sparked in part by the massive public relations campaign surrounding the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the German 'economic miracle.'

Ossietzky died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on 4 May 1938, of tuberculosis and from the after-effects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps. In 1938 Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler as their "Man of the Year."

In November of that year, the Reich entered a new phase of their oppression of dissent and undesirables and those to be cast outside the community of the German people, such as the mentally ill, the disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, and trade unionists, with Kristallnacht.

In 1991, the University of Oldenburg was renamed Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in his honor. This could be seen as a political statement, as Ossietzky's case was being decided upon by the German courts at the time. In 1992 the Federal Court of Justice shamefully upheld his 1931 conviction. After all, as Marin Luther King once noted, what the Nazis did 'was legal.'

I would like to join those people of conscience from around the world who nominate Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize, for speaking truth to power, and upholding the moral imperative for freedom of the press.

Please make as many copies of this as you can and distribute it.

Stocks and Precious Metal Charts - The Good Die Young

"We've got some difficult days ahead.   But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.  And I don't mind.  Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. 

But I'm not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God's will.  And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. 

So I'm happy, tonight.  I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man.  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Martin Luther King, Last speech before he was assassinated, 3 April 1968


"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, former CIA analyst

The FOMC minutes were fairly benign today, and although not particularly dovish, they had little impact on stocks.

US stock indices were in melt up slowly mode today, but on wispish volume.

A good stiff breeze is going to blow this market over. At least in the short term, and for what will most likely be a decent retracement of this rally off the end of year lows.

But if not, if the wiseguys keep pressing their advantage, then when the trigger event comes we might get a much larger decline, something attention getting like we saw in December, and then some.

Earnings started today with a weak manufacturing showing, but they begin to get more serious with the Banks that report on Friday.

Gold continued inching higher towards resistance, with silver continuing to tag along.

Have a pleasant evening.

But If Not...

The God of the Worldly, of Principalities and Powers

"O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king.

But if not, even if he does not preserve us, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the images of gold you have set up and commanded us to worship."

Daniel 3:16-18

"Now I want you to notice first, here, that these young men practiced civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is the refusal to abide by an order of the government or of the state or even of the court that your conscience tells you is unjust. Civil disobedience is based on a commitment to conscience. In other words, one who practices civil disobedience is obedient to what he considers a higher law.

And there comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust. And I tell you this morning, my friends, that history has moved on, and great moments have often come forth because there were those individuals, in every age and in every generation, who were willing to say "I will be obedient to a higher law." These men were saying "I must be disobedient to a king in order to be obedient to the king."

And those people who so often criticize those of us who come to those moments when we must practice civil disobedience never remember that even right here in America, in order to get free from the oppression and the colonialism of the British Empire, our nation practiced civil disobedience.  For what represented civil disobedience more than the Boston Tea Party.

And never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal. It was legal to do everything that Hitler did to the Jews. It was a law in Germany that Hitler issued himself that it was wrong and illegal to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I tell you if I had lived in Hitler's Germany with my attitude, I would have openly broken that law. I would have practiced civil disobedience.

And so it is important to see that there are times when a man-made law is out of harmony with the moral law of the universe, there are times when human law is out of harmony with eternal and divine laws. And when that happens, you have an obligation to break it.

And I'm happy that in breaking it, I have some good company. I have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I have Jesus and Socrates. And I have all of the early Christians who refused to bow...

And this is what I want to say finally, that there is a reward if you do right for righteousness' sake...Don't ever think you're by yourself. Go on to jail if necessary but you'll never go alone.

Take a stand for that which is right, and the world may misunderstand you and criticize you, but you never go alone, for somewhere I read that "One with God is a majority," and God has a way of transforming a minority into a majority.

Walk with him this morning and believe in him and do what is right and he'll be with you even until the consummation of the ages. Yes, I've seen the lightning flash, I've heard the thunder roll, I've felt sin breakers dashing trying to conquer my soul but I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on, he promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone; no, never alone, no, never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.

Where you going this morning, my friends, tell the world that you're going with truth. You're going with justice, you're going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship. And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow.

But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, November, 1967