Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Liberty Cabbage

 

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage‘ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles?’ And the wartime censorship of honest papers?  As bad as Russia!  Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for dictatorship as ours!”

Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here, 1930

“Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing.  At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.  Freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear.  Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires."

Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 2018

“If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of foolishness in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the foolishness of others.  It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1951

“It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity.  They dislike divisiveness.  They prefer unity.  A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry.  They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.

Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus.  The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.  People have always had different opinions.  Now they have different facts."

Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, 2020


Charts are early tonight, because we have to take Daisy to the vet.  

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Burden of Self-Deception

 

"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.  You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.  You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’  Why not?  It is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows.  Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy.  One hears no protest, and certainly sees none.  You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this.  In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say?  They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist.  You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it.  These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?  On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you.  On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.  You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now.  Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work.  You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings.  Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither.  Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things.  This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what?  It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker.  So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you.  The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.  The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.   

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.  Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.  The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.  Suddenly it all comes down, all at once.  You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).  You remember everything now, and your heart breaks.  Too late.  You are compromised beyond repair."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

 

Stocks managed to stage a little rally into the close and hold it.

Gold and silver marched in place.

The Dollar was nominally unchanged.

VIX continues to wallow in self-deception.

Our complacency in the face of growing lawlessness is astonishing.

Who could have seen it coming.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - To Undo the Folded Lie, and Remain Human

 

"That little Kennedy— he thought he was a god."

Allen Dulles, CIA Director 1953-61, suspect in JFK assassination, prime mover on the Warren Commission, in an interview with Willie Morries

"While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in [Zurich] Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother Foster was doing the same in New York.  By playing an intricate corporate shell game, Foster was able to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property. 

Some of Foster’s legal origami allowed the Nazi regime to create bottlenecks in the production of essential war materials—such as diesel-fuel injection motors that the U.S. military needed for trucks, submarines, and airplanes.  By the end of the war, many of Foster’s clients were under investigation by the Justice Department’s antitrust division.  And Foster himself was under scrutiny for collaboration with the enemy.

But Foster’s brother was guarding his back.  From his frontline position in Europe, Allen was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm.  “Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” observed Nazi hunter John Loftus, who pored through numerous war documents related to the Dulles brothers when he served as a U.S. prosecutor in the Justice Department under President Jimmy Carter.

If their powerful enemy in the White House [FDR] had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities.  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.

But with Franklin Roosevelt gone from the arena, as of April 1945, there was not enough political will to challenge two such imposing pillars of the American establishment.  Allen was acutely aware that knowledge was power, and he would use his control of the country’s rapidly expanding postwar intelligence apparatus [CIA] to carefully manage the flow of information about him and his brother."

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard, 2015

“After a long discussion of the country's woes, the interviewer asked Bobby, "But you are an optimist?" Kennedy nodded and smiled his weary-eyed smile. "Just because you can't live any other way, can you?" he replied.”

David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, 2007

"All I have is a voice
  To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
  Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
  Whose buildings grope the sky:
We must love one another or die."

W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

"It is never really between them and you, but between you and yourself, between you and your God. No act of kindness is wasted.  You store them in your heart, and these are the only things that you will take with you when the day is done.  It is how you rise above, and become human. To be a light to the world."

Jesse, Even In a Time of Vanity and Greed", 5 May 2013


Stocks rallied higher today.   And then flopped into the close.

Silver was the star of the day moving higher up to the 37 handle.

Gold managed to hold a decent bounce after an overnight selling program.

VIX is still rather complacent.

Geopolitical risks remain grossly underpriced.

Domestic risks are building, artificially driven by the audacious oligarchy.

Grifters are running things these days.   

And they are feeling ebullient. 

Pride comes before a fall.   And this will end in tears. 

Madness. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Last Links With Joy and Reason

 

When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”  He replied, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”  Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.”

Jesus said to him again, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”  He replied, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”  Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.”

Jesus said to him a third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”  Peter was hurt that Jesus had asked him a third time, “Do you love me?”  “Lord,” he said to him, “you know everything.  You know that I love you.”  Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep."

“Verily verily, I say to you,
    when you were young
    you dressed yourself
    and walked where you liked.
But when you are old,
    you will stretch out your hands,
    and someone else will gird you
    and take you where you would not like to go.”

He said this to indicate the kind of death through which Peter would glorify God.  After this, he said to him, “Follow me.”

John 21:15-19

“The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic.  Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him.  But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself.  Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. 

With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet, for the moment, unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul.”

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945

"And that same evening he went to the Ostian cemetery to teach and baptize those who wished to bathe in the water of life.  And thenceforward he went there daily, and after him went increasing numbers.  It seemed that out of every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and that every groan on the arena found an echo in thousands of breasts. 

Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad.  But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.

When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one — happiness and love."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, 1905


Stocks rallied today on what was just a so-so jobs report.

Smells like teen spirit.

Gold took its usual NFP hit.

Silver on the other hand rallied higher.  Impressive.

The Dollar bumped back up a bit.

VIX is now saying we are in a risk extended range of bullishness.

Lots of geopolitical risk out there.  

Many years ago, when my wife was expecting our son, we went to Rome.

One day we took the bus out past the walls of the city to Santa Maria di Palma, also known as Chiesa del Domine Quo Vadis.  

It was a pleasant day, and we walked on on the old road, the Via Appia Antica, towards the catacombs.

All the ruling elite have to offer to us is hate and fear— both of which obscure reason, that instrument of scrutiny which their self-serving actions and policies cannot bear.  

Where are we going, Lord? 

Have a pleasant weekend.