Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Emptiness of the Exceptionals

 

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.  Each person cries out in silence to be seen as they really are.  But it is a fault to wish to be understood, before we understand ourselves. Love is not a consolation; it is light.”

Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce, 1947

"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.  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, Death by Government: A History of Mass Murder and Genocide Since 1900

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people."

Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz, 1966

 “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.  Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.  Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening.  Power is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the latter it crushes, the former it intoxicates. The truth is, no one really possesses it."

Simone Weil, L'Iliade ou le poème de la force, 1939

 

Stocks were on a yo-yo today, losing ground early, gaining much of it back, and then doing a dipsy-doodle down and up in the last hour of trade.

I suspect marketeers who are not connected with the ruling elite are wondering what the Donald is going to say to the joint session of Congress tonight.

The Dollar continued to slide.

Gold and silver went higher.

Stocks fell to near a 'must hold' area on the charts at their low points.  I have marked those with  bolder lines in red on their charts.

VIX climbed a bit.

So let's see what Trump and His Merry Pranksters have in store for us tonight.

I am hoping his mercurial decision-making will cause at least a few in Congress to reconsider the encroachment of the imperial Presidency which they have been abetting these past 25 years or so.

And do their jobs and fulfill their oaths instead of trying to please the donor class and line their pockets.

Complicit as enablers of the erosion of freedoms and war crimes, crimes against humanity.

Hypocrites.   How can they avoid going to hell?

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Fire Burn and Caldron Bubble

 

"Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Narcissists gravitate towards professions where they can control people and elicit adulation. They are more likely to work in politics, finance or medicine than in shoemaking. They are aware of what they are doing to others - but they do not care.  The narcissist devours people, consumes their output, and casts the empty, writhing shells aside.”

Sam Vaknin, Diary of a Narcissist, 2005

“I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their sin.   I will crush the arrogance of the proud and humble the pride of the mighty."

Isaiah 13:11

"Lack of accountability is a pet peeve for sure, and also a common problem with narcissists. Although there are many disturbing factors in the personality of a narcissist, this one is tough to deal with in any relationship. It’s hard to understand. What is so difficult about owning up to mistakes when we’re wrong? Have you ever met a perfect person who has never made a mistake? How about a perfect parent or a perfect family? I don’t think so. We all make mistakes and hopefully grow and learn from each one. Every failure becomes a significant stepping-stone for huge growth leaps in life if that is your worldview and you allow it to happen.

But, being accountable is difficult for a fragile self-esteem. For the narcissist, who has not developed a solid sense of self, and is emotionally stuck at a six-year old level, confrontation does not work well. In fact, when confronted, it is typical to see a six-year old temper tantrum that we call narcissistic rage."

Karyl McBride, Narcissists Are Not Accountable, August 19, 2013

"Double, double toil and trouble;
        Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
        Then the charm is firm and good."

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Stocks lost ground in an edgy trade today.

I suspect that the impending trade tariffs and concerns about war in the Mideast were weighing on the risk assets.

There was a fairly impressive wash and rinse in Bitcoin over the weekend.

Trump announced his preference for a strategic crypto reserve, and that sent Bitcoin and some of its ilk soaring.

But alas, it turned out to be an opportunity for those who had some heavy long positions to dump their holdings at a profit, and Bitcoin slid back down fairly quickly.  

If you did not see this coming you *might* be quaffing deeply of the true believer kool-aid.

Bears make money.  Bulls make money.  Pigs get slaughtered.

Wash and rinse.   It's what they do.

Gold and silver popped today, after last weeks pounding.

VIX rose sharply.

The Dollar slid steadily.

I don't know what they call Jimson weed in the UK, or what they might have that is like it, but I think Starmer is smoking it.  Boots on the ground. 

I doubt the average Brit or European desires a major war in Europe.  But the elites, the ruling class, and there servants in the media and the global deep state may be so inclined, as they so often are.

Trump seems to be doing the right things about the Ukraine with regard to American interests.

War in the Mideast is more concerning to me now.  Netanyahu and his war party are emboldened by support from the same class and types that are all for fomenting war in Europe.  But they will not be getting much pushback from any concerted effort of US thought leaders and politicians.

Their house may be made theirs, but will most likely be made desolate.

The first victim in war is the truth.   And after that the weak, the innocent, and the young.

And there is rarely a war, unless the ruling class thinks they can profit from it.

Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Awful Faces From Beyond

 

"We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc, The Barbarians, 1912

"The Hitler Party likes to emphasize its uniqueness, and it really should not be measured against conventional yardsticks.   Even if it were to explode into smithereens today, the fact would remain that it recently won fifteen million voters.  It must satisfy not only a particular political need, but also a specifically German emotional condition. Its brutality, loud-mouthedness and brainlessness have acted not as a deterrent but rather as an attraction, and have generated unconditional and subservient followers."

Carl von Ossietzky, Die Weltbühne, January, 1933

"Representative institutions no longer represent voters.  Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans.  The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security.

Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media.  Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment.  What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.

No doubt these remarks will be dismissed by some as alarmist, but I want to go further and name the emergent political system 'inverted totalitarianism.'  By inverted I mean that while the current system and its operatives share with Nazism the aspiration toward unlimited power and aggressive expansionism, their methods and actions seem upside down.   For example, in Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took power, the 'streets' were dominated by totalitarian-oriented gangs of toughs, and whatever there was of democracy was confined to the government.

In rebuttal it will be said that there is no domestic equivalent to the Nazi regime of torture, concentration camps or other instruments of terror.  Instead, inverted totalitarianism has its own means of promoting generalized fear; not only by sudden 'alerts' and the publicized heavy-handed treatment of aliens and the Devil's Island that is Guantánamo Bay, but by a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits available, especially to the poor. 

With such instrumentalities for promoting uncertainty and dependence, it is almost overkill for inverted totalitarianism to employ a system of criminal justice that is punitive in the extreme, relishes the death penalty and is consistently biased against the powerless.

Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.

That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents.  What is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, May 1, 2003


Stocks took a dive again today, but managed to rally back and post some measurable gains.

Gold and silver were smacked again, hard.

The bears were leaning pretty heavily on the miners, particularly some that were ex-dividend today.

Buying them on the dip was an edgy trade at times.

But they managed to come back again into the close, somewhat.

VIX declined.

The Dollar rallied.

And so we toddle on into the weekend. 

As a reminder there will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday March 7th.

The weather has become rather warm here the last few days, rising into the low 60s while the sun is out.

And so today was a good day to wear shorts while taking Daisy for her afternoon walk.

It's the little things that make life worth living.

Need little, want less, love more.

For those who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Dying of Their Hypocrisy

 

"The same pride which makes a man treat those of less powerful standing arrogantly, makes him cringe servilely to those above him. It is the very nature of this vice, which is neither based on personal merit nor on virtue, but on riches, posts, influence, and useless knowledge, to render a man a snob to those who are below him as to faown upon those who are above."

Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, 1688

“We run heedlessly into the abyss, after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

"And I'll leave you with one set of numbers that I found today, which is just an absolute for this whole thing. In 2015, Wall Street Bonuses, not regular compensation, bonuses, seven years after they were bailed out with the public purse, totaled $29.4 billion dollars. Total compensation paid to every single person in this country who makes minimum wage totaled $14 billion.  The era of neo-liberalism is over. The era of neo-nationalism has just begun."

Mark Blyth, Foreign Affairs, November 15, 2016

"There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, and hidden, that shall not be made known. Whatever has been said in the darkness shall be heard in the light: and what has been whispered behind closed doors shall be shouted from the roof tops."

Luke 12:1-3

“There may be thunder in Europe, but it is in America the lightning will fall.”

Ambrose Bierce, The Fall of the Republic

"What theology, history and common sense have also taught me is that the civilizations which allow the gap to widen between the ideal to which they claim and the realizations which they propose of it, these civilizations are dying of their hypocrisy.“

Henri-Irénée Marrou, France ma patrie, Le Monde, 5 Avril 1956


There was a general sell off today in the markets, led lower by the risk assets in the stock market bubble.

The GDP price index came in higher than expected.

The Dollar rose on expectations of interest rates maintaining a higher level for a longer time and a flight to safety.

Bitcoin continued to decline, but is holding support in the low 80,000.

Gold and silver were smacked lower.

VIX rose sharply.

There will be some additional inflation information out tomorrow morning.

Let's see how that goes.

Most of the news these days is interwoven with lies.   This is expected in times of madness.

What I find more concerning is the cavalier attitude that the ruling elite is taking towards personal freedoms and liberties. 

Even in the height of the civil rights movement and anti-war protests the better, 'sophisticated' universities were not so draconian and biased in their suppression of even peaceful dissent. 

And to think that much of this pressure now is coming from the 'thought leaders' who are generally the transmitters of culture and civilized behavior is particularly discouraging.  

Especially when they betray their official duties and oaths for position, worldly admiration, and money.  

The madness twists even the best of intentions in its lust for power and control, and turns on those who embrace it, and in the end serves none but itself. 

People forfeit their souls for vain idolatries, and help to raise the abomination of desolation, which in turn destroys all that they have been given.

It is an old story. 

Have a pleasant evening.