Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Blind Heroes of the Resistance

 

“Since it was not I who was making the light, since it came to me from outside, it would never leave me.  I was only a passageway, a vestibule for this brightness.  The seeing eye was in me.  Still there were times when the light faded, almost to the point of disappearing. It happened every time I was afraid..."

After the first deportations of French Jews and the first arrests for resistance that Jacques became aware of, he fell ill.  Jacques realized that the German occupation of France was his illness.  And so he became the leader of a Resistance Movement.  

Everyday Jacques knelt in prayer;  “My God, give me the strength to keep my promises. Since I made them in a good cause, they are yours to keep as well as mine.  By myself I know how to do almost nothing, but if you will it I am capable of almost everything. Most of all give me prudence. Your enthusiasm I no longer need, for I am filled with it.

The Lord took pity on the poor mortal who was so helpless before him.  But there was one thing left which I could do: not refuse God’s help, the breath he was blowing upon me.  That was the one battle I had to fight, hard and wonderful all at one: not to let my body be taken by the fear.  For fear kills, and joy maintains life...

I was nothing but skin and bones, but I had recovered.  The fact was I was so happy, that now Buchenwald seemed to me a place which if not welcome, was at least possible.  If they didn’t give me any bread to eat, I would feed on hope.  It was the truth. I still had 11 months ahead of me in the camp.  But today I have not a single evil memory of those 333 days of extreme wretchedness.  I was carried by a hand.   I was covered by a wing.  One doesn’t call such living emotions by their names.

I hardly needed to look out for myself.  I was free now to help the others; not always, not much, but in my own way I could help.  I could try to show other people how to go about holding on to life.  I could turn toward them the flow of light and joy which had grown so abundant in me.

From that time on they stopped stealing my bread or my soup.  It never happened again.  Often my comrades would wake me up in the night and take me to comfort someone.  I became 'the blind Frenchman.'   Hundreds of people confided in me.  The men were determined to talk to me.  They spoke to me in French, in Russian, in German, in Polish.  I did the best I could to understand them all.  That is how I lived, how I survived.  The rest I cannot describe.”

Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light and Poetry at Buchenwald

"Could you see, what God sees, those snares and pitfalls which the devil is placing about your path; could you see that all your idle thoughts which you cherish, which seem so bright and pleasant, so much pleasanter than religious thoughts, are inspired by that ancient seducer of mankind, doubtless you would tremble, even as he does while he tempts you.

But this you cannot possibly see, you cannot break your delusion, except by first taking God's word in this matter on trust.  You cannot see the unseen world at once.  They who ever speak with God in their hearts, are in turn taught by Him in all knowledge; but they who refuse to act upon the light, which God gave them by nature, at length come to lose it altogether."

John Henry Newman

"We can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.  We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.   There is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”

Dorothy Day

We hear far too little about those who shine like lights in the darkness, down through the halls of history.  It's not good for the sake of the elite to give hope and good examples to the common people, I imagine.

Thankfully few are challenged in such a manner, and called to be heroes for conscience.

But we are all beckoned, everyone of us, to deny ourselves, take up our own cross, and follow Him.

So we are all called to be 'blind' heroes of the resistance to evil, taking one step at a time through the darkness, following with trust in the light of the Lord.

Stocks and the markets were chugging along, and in the afternoon Fed heads Bullard and Mester delivered a one-two punch with some rather hawkish remarks about the Fed's stance on interest rates.

Stocks plunged, and went out on the lows ahead of tomorrow's option expiration.

The VIX shot higher.

The Dollar edged higher.

Gold and silver finished largely unchanged.

I hope someone is keeping track of the current and former Fed head insider trading this week.

As if.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Slow Manifestation and Sanctification of Lawlessness

 

"It is always the soul that dies first, even if it's departure goes unnoticed.  And it always carries the body along with it.  Man is nourished by the invisible, man is nourished by that which is beyond the personal.  He dies from preferring the opposite."

Jacques Lusseyran, Poetry at Buchenwald

"It is not the world that is a source of evil, but the willfulness of our hearts, made hard with pride.  Only love is creative and productive.   Only love is accepting and uplifting, able to bring all things forward to His plan and make them new.   Love consecrates, while sin desecrates and destroys in its lust for possession and the will to power.

God is the essence of all existence, which is His love. The pity for those who would otherwise be faithful, then, is not to love."

Jesse, 24 June 2015

"At first, the love of money, and then that of power began to prevail, and these became, as it were, the sources of every evil. For avarice subverted honesty, integrity and other honorable principles and, in their stead, inculcated pride, inhumanity, contempt of religion and general venality.  Ambition prompted many to become deceitful; to keep one thing concealed in the breast and another ready on the tongue; to estimate friendships and enmities, not by their worth, but according to interest; and to carry rather a specious countenance than an honest heart."

Sallust, Conspiracy of Cataline

"Dallas Fed President, Robert Kaplan, wasn’t just trading like an aggressive hedge fund kingpin in 2020, he’s been doing the same thing for five years at the Dallas Fed while simultaneously having access to non-public, market moving information from the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting FOMC meetings and other confidential communications."

Martens, Trading Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin for Five Years while President of the Dallas Fed; a Dozen Legal Safeguards Failed to Stop Him

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future.  When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956


Stocks were slumping this morning from the better than expected retail sales numbers.

Now that they have inflated an asset bubble, further enriching their powerful patrons, they are set to balance things out by suppressing the real economy, which has been so sadly neglected for so long.

The Dollar rallied, while gold and silver were further pressed down into a correction.

 The VIX fell.  Our pride in our exceptionalism knows few bounds.

There is no way to tell if this is done and overdone yet, but we seem to be drawing closer.

More shenanigan are on deck, no doubt. 

And beyond the markets, the recent derailment of a train bearing hazardous chemicals in Ohio, from a rail industry that has been resisting safety and reform and the investment in infrastructure, should give you some indication that in the name of profit, the moneyed interests will burn you and your family to the ground, in there is a profit without consequences in it.

And then there are the steady drumbeats and perpetual foment to war.

Their greed is without limit.  Their serial lawlessness prevails.  

They cynically resist all efforts to change, and be made whole.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Our Murderous Potential

 

"On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that ... Masters of the Universe."

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

"Christianity is called the religion of pity.  Pity stands opposed to the powerful emotions which heighten our vitality; it has a depressing effect.  We are deprived of strength when we feel pity.

The essential characteristic of a good and healthy ruling elite is that it views itself not as a function of the monarchy or the commonwealth, but as its very meaning and highest justification, and that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments.

What is good?  All that heightens the feeling of power in a man, the will to power, power itself.  What is bad?  All that is born of weakness.  What is happiness?  The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Modern politics is expensive—power follows money. Money confers the power to command the labor of others.  Love of money is love of power.  And love of power is the root of evil."

Edward Abbey

"Power will achieve its murderous potential. 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

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis

Stocks had yet another wide ranging day, with the SP finishing flat and the NDX up a bit.

The VIX dropped sharply.

The Dollar chopped sideways and finished slightly lower.

The precious metals joined in with the old intraday two step, down and then back up a bit.

The CPI came in 'meh' this morning.

Stock option expiration on Friday.

The US is busy shooting down things in its upper atmosphere.   Good times.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - To Be Human - CPI Tomorrow

 

"Our money and priorities are for the most part elsewhere, disconnected from many of the common realities of most people.  This is part of the reason for our historic economic inequalities.  But there is an underlying goodness and kindness that you can find if you look for it, and let yourself become a part of it. We just forget, because we see so much wickedness and greed, and it gets the most attention.

As William Butler Yeats put it in the aftermath of the first World War, 'the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.'  Perhaps, but these things come and go.   And when it becomes bad enough, people rouse themselves from their torpor, and change comes, one way or another.

That is not what it is to be human.   Most do not even have a genuine understanding of what that means anymore.  They think, well, if Mother Teresa abandoned the poor and ran off to be an investment banker or an actress, that would only be human.  We are content to be trousered apes.   We make beasts of ourselves to avoid the pain of seeing what we really serve, and who we are slowly becoming.

At some point not to become fully human in every sense of the word, and to hold on to your humanity is, in the end, the only real tragedy."

Jesse, 1 February 2017


"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...

And what rough Beast, its hour come 'round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

Stocks were in a mood to move higher today, although the CPI data point tomorrow morning had them on edge.

Gold and silver were hit.

The Dollar slide lower.   Althugh it's funny because if I had just listened to bubblevision I would have thought it moved higher.

The VIX fell.

There will be an index option expiration next week.

If the CPI makes an unexpected print tomorrow we may have some action.

The geopolitical bias in the media is almost astonishing.

I suppose it has always been there, but it is very handed of late it seems.

Perhaps the abomination of desolation draws steadily closer.

Have a pleasant evening.