Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Virtue of the Simple, and the Wisdom of the Just

 

"Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang."

Winston Churchill, The Birth of Britain, 1956

“She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things.

She was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities. Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.”

Mark Twain, Joan of Arc, 1896

"I know this now.  Every man gives his life to what he believes.  Every woman gives her life for what she believes.  Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives to little or nothing.  If I am not in the state of grace, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.  I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it.

You say that you are my judge. I do not know if you are.  But I tell you that you must take good care not to judge me wrongly, because you will put yourself in great danger.  I warn you, so that if God punishes you for it, I have done my duty by telling you."

Jeanne d'Arc, Trial records, 15 March 1431

"God have mercy upon us, we have burned a saint."

A Witness at the Execution, 30 May 1431


There was quite a bit more of end of month jockeying of stock prices that one might have expected for a non-end of quarter close.

Stocks ended up mostly unchanged after a wide-ranging day.

Gold and silver were shoved around, and the miners with them.

Silver and gold came back a bit but still finished lower.

The Dollar was largely unchanged from the close yesterday.

VIX is wallowing.

We have to sit back and watch to see how the geopolitical situation continues to unfold this weekend.  

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

We were born for this.

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Congregation of Liars

 

"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. And I was one of them."

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, 2004

“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.”

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, 2004

"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, 1994

"There is a certain madness in crowds. But the genesis of the madness is in those who assemble the crowds, give them weapons, and walk among them whispering&madness; madness."

Jesse, Housing Madness, 15 April 2008

"Go now, write it on a tablet for them, inscribe it on a scroll, so that in the days to come it may be a witness to them, for ever and ever.  For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children,  unwilling to listen to the instructions 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.'"

Isaiah 30:8-10

"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 choose to carry out your father’s desires.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not abide by the truth, for there is no truth in him.  

When he lies, he speaks in accord with his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.  But because I speak the truth, you refuse to believe me."

John 8:43-45 

 

There are some who love money and power, and serve their gods with lies, theft, and murder. 

They are desolate in the eyes of the Lord.

Their lawlessness will not stand.

Stocks were soaring overnight, as a judge struck down the legitimacy of the Trump tariffs declared 'in a state of emergency.'

Gold and silver were smashed.

But like so many things these days, none of this was real.  

Don't blame them, they say.  Hate the game, not the players.  Who run the game. 

Stocks finished unchanged to lower.

Gold and silver came back from fairly impressive losses overnight to finish in the green. 

Another opportunity to gather more for themselves.

But the VIX is still mispricing the risks of a recession, which now almost looks to be inevitable.

Who could have seen it coming? 

Do not be taken by their harvest of sorrows, and the wine press of God's wrath.

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Rulers of the Darkness of This World

 

"Structural deep events are events which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve lawbreaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 1993

"The end of Bretton Woods was a pivotal moment in the history of the US deep state.  The 1960’s and 1970’s saw something of a civil war within America’s deep political system.  The systemically destabilizing effects of Vietnam War spending created a conflict between 'Prussians' and 'traders,' i.e., neoconservatives and neoliberals.

The subsequent Petrodollar/US Treasury Bill standard replaced the Bretton Woods gold standard and formed one of the two pillars of the subsequent Dollar-Wall Street Regime.  This system gave the US the Rumpelstiltskin power to create credit that the rest of the world would have to treat as being 'as good as gold.'

Only a small number of economists and insiders recognized this at the time and in subsequent years.  This historically unprecedented power led to the reconciling of the neoliberal and neoconservative interests by facilitating US dominance of world trade and endless deficits for military spending."

Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, 2022

"If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media.  Important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran- Contra, and now 9/11.  All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination.  The CIA, with its on-going relationships to drug-traffickers, is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not even the dirtiest.

The difference between 1963 and 2001 was in the White House.  Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson successfully contained the desires of their hawks to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union.  But Bush and Cheney have maneuvered America into a war on terrorism.  That war threatens to become a permanent justification for curtailing the U.S. constitution’s elaborate checks and balances, and its guarantees of America’s traditional liberties. "

Peter Dale Scott, 9/11, JFK, and War: Recurring Patterns, 2013

“I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss.  That is the abyss from which there is no return."

Senator Frank Church, Meet the Press, August 17, 1975


Stocks did the old wash and rinse today, as one might have come to expect. 

Wash yesterday, rinse a bit today.

The market is holding its breath for the Nvidia earnings report tonight after the bell.  

They will be looking for any tariff impacts, etc. 

Gold held its ground, but the miners seem to be anticipating an end to this event-driven correction.

Silver took it on the chin a bit and fell with equities.

VIX remains below its 200 DMA.

The Dollar bounced higher again, now back to the top of the 99 handle.

We will be getting quite a bit of key economic data for the rest of this week.

The geopolitical risks remain seriously underpriced. 

US foreign policy is seriously warped by special interests, with the American people fairly low on the priority ladder. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Well of Deep Politics

 

“C. Wright Mills was among the first to take note of how 'national security' could be invoked by the power elite to more deeply disguise its operations.  Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite that America was ruled by those who control the 'strategic command posts' of society—the big corporations, the machinery of the state, and the military establishment.  These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in the 'permanent war economy' that had emerged during the Cold War.

The crucial task of unifying the power elite, according to Mills, fell to a special subset of the corporate hierarchy—top Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers.   'For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without foreseeable end,' Mills wrote.  

In the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust.  From their earliest days on Wall Street—where they ran Sullivan and Cromwell, the most powerful corporate law firm in the nation—their overriding commitment was always to the circle of accomplished, privileged men whom they saw as the true seat of power in America.

Carl Jung’s portrait of Hitler is as chilling a picture of psychopathology as you will find.  And Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.  Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason.

After the war, Dulles helped a number of notorious war criminals escape via the 'Nazi ratlines' that ran from Germany, down through Italy, to sanctuary in Latin America, the Middle East, and even the United States.

During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena.  In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality.

Allen Dulles was one of the wiliest masters of secret power ever produced by America.  And his most ambitious clandestine efforts were directed not against hostile governments but against his own.  While serving in multiple presidential administrations, he learned to manipulate them and sometimes subvert them.  The drive for absolute control was the only passion that truly gripped Allen Dulles.  Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office.

On the weekend of the JFK assassination, Dulles hunkered down for unexplained reasons at a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia known as 'the Farm,' despite the fact that he had been removed from the agency two years earlier.

Under Dulles, American's intelligence system had become a dark and invasive force - at home and abroad - violating citizens' privacy, kidnapping, torturing, and killing at will.  His legacy would be carried far into the future by men and women who shared his philosophy about the boundless authority of the national security system's splendid watchmen.

The CIA was empowered not only to engage in the deadly 'spy versus spy' antics against the KGB that became the stuff of Cold War legend but to subvert democratic governments that were deemed insufficiently pro-American and to terminate these government's elected leaders.

The Allen Dulles story continues to haunt the country.  Many of the practices that still provoke bouts of American soul-searching originated during Dulles’s formative rule at the CIA.  Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, massive surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies—these were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign.

These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words.  He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest.  'I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.'  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were 'the grand masters,' he said.  'If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.'  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. 'I guess I will see them there soon.'

The Devil’s Chessboard seeks to shine a torch down the well of  'deep politics,' as Peter Dale Scott—an important scholar of American power—has termed this underworld of unaccountable authority.  Until we have a full reckoning of the Dulles era and its high crimes, the country cannot find its way forward."

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, 2015 

"The coming of the lawless will be the work of Satan made manifest in all power and false signs and wonders, and in every wicked deception for those who are perishing because they refused to accept the love of the truth to be saved.  For this reason, God allows them to have a powerful delusion to believe their own lies, that all those who deny the truth and instead take pleasure in lawlessness will be condemned."

2 Thessalonians 2:7-12 

I was reading The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot over the long weekend.

It is an enlightening look into what we now call the Deep State.  

They had no shame.  None at all.  And very little fear of any consequences. 

Speaking of which, the new centurions of Wall Street were juicing the futures higher in the dull holiday weekend trade, and that enthusiasm carried on to the cash trading today.

Gold and silver were similarly smashed over the weekend.

No surprise there, since today was a futures option expiration on the Comex for precious metals.

VIX slumped as risk assessment was set aside for the MAGAnificent US economy.

The Dollar popped back up a bit.

We may get some follow on action tomorrow.  

I believe Nvidia earnings are out this week.

Things do not look good.  

The looting of the Treasury by the oligarchy accelerates. 

Freedom of speech and assembly is threatened and curtailed to the approving smiles of 'patriots'. 

And the killing and repression of innocents continues. 

But we can surely kick that can down the road, and distract ourselves with passionate words and colorful circuses. 

Have a pleasant evening.