Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Pirates of the Caribbean

 

"For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money.  It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.

The official expectation of war also enables men to solve the problems of the economic cycles without resort to political policies that are distasteful to many politicians and to large segments of the American public.  The terms of their long-term solution, under conditions of peace, are hard for the capitalist elite to face.  Some of them, accordingly, have come to believe that the world encounter has reached a point where there is no other solution but war, even when they sense that war can be a solution to nothing.

An expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business.  To many utopian capitalists, it has become 'the Business Way of Life'.

Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle.  But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its 'inevitability,' want it in order to shift the locus of their problems."

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960

"We suspect that shorting gold has come to seem like a riskless proposition as long as there is confidence in the Fed. Synthetic gold is the perfect substance for a carry trade: an easy borrow with very low carrying cost and little upside basis risk. Such a hypothesis, in our opinion, does much to explain the incongruity of a declining gold price while fundamentals for paper currency, and the U.S. dollar in particular, obviously deteriorate; while demand for physical gold has exceeded new mine supply for several years running; and while above-ground 400-ounce .995-gold bars located in London, New York, and other financial capitals (in cohabitation with speculative trading activity in paper markets) have steadily dwindled and disappeared into Asian financial centers reformulated as .9999 kilo bars."

Tocqueville Gold Newsletter 2Q 2015


In their desire to appease Wall Street and the Cheeto bandito, the Fed initiated Döllardämmerung this afternoon. 

Gold and silver soared.  Silver is on an amazing bull run.

Stocks rallied on hopes of the oil of excess liquidity to calm the troubled waters of a faltering economy and pipe dreams of beneficent AI for all. 

VIX fell of course.

The US military seized a Venezuelan tanker in the open sea this afternoon.  They are not even pretending that it is carrying drugs, or threatening the US in any way.

Perhaps this will distract the public, at least for a little while. 

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - House of the Mad, Land of the Depraved

 

"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

"The gates of Hell are terrible to behold, are they not? The lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making."

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World, 2008

"The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation that the fully schizophrenic person feels.  In fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society.

Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer."

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973

"The illusions of extremists, of the right and the left, are dangerous things, for the very reason that they often incline themselves to sacrifice the individual, large groups of individuals, and entire segments of society, for the 'greater good' of their illusions.  No people, no organization of people, and no nation are immune or exceptional to this extremity.  Evil is a choice, a long, gradual succession of choices.  And the madness never sleeps, always hunting for souls to devour."

Jesse, A Cruel Deception, 28 October 2022

Stocks meandered around most of the day, and dipped lower into the close.

The big story today was silver, which broke out higher, and went out on a new all time high of 61.

Gold also moved higher, but not nearly with such explosive force.  

But that's silver, the beta monster.  When it runs, they are hauling the bears out of the trading pits on stretchers.

VIX ticked a bit higher as well.

Bitcoin bounced back up in its trading range.

ADP came in a bit light on the jobs this morning, just marginally positive.

FOMC tomorrow.  The expectation is for a 25 bp cut.   Their words might move the markets.

Gold and silver are telling us something, and the banksters and their servants are trying to hush them up.  

What do you think this means?

Change is in the wind. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Elite's Devotion to a New Order of Lawlessness

 

“The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory, but to keep the very structure of society intact.  The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”

George Orwell, 1984

"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: inverted totalitarianism, a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on 'private media' than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions.  According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has 'emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation’s political traditions.'

The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal.  Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry under cover of improving efficiency and cost-cutting.

Imperialism and democracy are, in Wolin's terms, literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die."

Chalmers Johnson, Review of Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated, January 23, 2010

"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism


Stocks took a dive this morning, but then recovered slowly in the afternoon.

As I said on Friday, VIX was showing signs of a short term correction.

But as Jesse Livermore once said, 'Never short a dull market."

And dull this market certainly is, to the point of sleepwalking.

Gold and silver took an early, purposeful hit judging by the volume and timing, but managed to take quite a bit of that back.

A similar story for Bitcoin.

The markets are dominated by a few big players, who have neutered and captured the regulators and politicians.

I am going to be trading very lightly until the end of the year, keeping a close eye of exogenous geo-political events and other economic developments.

I have now shifted my outlook to a market break sometime by the end of March, but with an eye for any moderately impactful 'trigger event' that will take this bloated bubble in valuations down.

The disapproval ratings of the major Western leaders is almost shocking.  This is the fashionable thing these days, to damn the public and do what they will.  Their devotion to a new order of lawlessness and power is slowly consuming us.   

This video interview with John Kiriakou and Anthony Napolitano is worth watching.    

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - To Be Human: The Implications of the Incarnation

 

"The glory of God is the human, fully alive; and the human life of a person is to be found in reflecting the glory of God."

Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies,

“A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance."

John 10:10

"I must have been ten years old. In the summer, when school was out, I would go down to my father’s ground-floor law office, where they would put me to work copying legal documents. For four pages without a margin, I was paid one drachma.

Sitting at one of the assistants' desks, I occasionally gazed at the clients of all sorts who were coming and going. One morning, a spirited old man arrived in a snow-white fustanella. I watched the assistant lawyers rise and give him a particularly warm welcome. The first assistant, who seemed to know him well, struck up a conversation with him. And at one point he asked him: “And now, Uncle Mitro, how old are you?”

And Uncle Mitro, whose name was Dimitrios Malamoulis and who had meanwhile settled himself comfortably, answered quietly: “Two.” That is, one hundred and two. He had begun a new numbering system after one hundred.

In the meantime, my father came out. He escorted him into the inner office, spoke with him and his son, a sturdy seventy-five-year-old, and when they came out to the room where I was, he first introduced me and then announced that we would go on Sunday to visit Malamoulis at his winter pasture, somewhere in Oropos.

Uncle Mitro was not one for much talk. Few words, measured, weighty. I had the feeling that he looked at my father’s assistants and me like a small flock of lambs. Small, because Malamoulis had over 3,000 sheep and goats—in Agrafa in the summer and in the mountains of Attica in the winter.

On Sunday, when we arrived at the place where he had set up the tents for his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, the customary volleys of shots were fired, and afterward, we gathered in the Elder's large tent. Soon the Elder blessed the first loaf of bread with the sign of the cross. And the women, silent and busy, distributed the meat — lamb, goat, all the goods. 

I still remember the dairy products, the yogurts. Old Malamoulis, sitting cross-legged in the middle amidst the white woolen blankets, supervised everything, giving orders to the women and the farmhands.

As I was sitting next to my father, I whispered to him: “Qu'est-il ce vieux?” (Who is this old man?).  “C'est un grand seigneur” (He is a great lord), my father replied, also in a whisper.  And, later turning the conversation back to Greek: “You must understand what lordliness is.”  It was my first lesson on that great moral good: lordliness.

Lordliness is not synonymous with aristocracy, nor does it signify any class difference or difference in wealth.  But neither is it merely a moral trait.  It is a synthesis of pride, decency, self-confidence, and magnanimity.  You find Archons (Lords) scattered among all types of people.  The Archon never becomes a part of a mass of people, no matter what class he belongs to; he always remains a person.

I cannot, perhaps it is my failing, define lordliness in a single phrase.  But when I meet someone who possesses that complex set of virtues that compose it, then I recognize it.  I say to myself: This is an Archon.  He belongs to that select category of people.

All of us together, with God's help should fulfill our duty, as human beings and Greeks, and leave as our bequest to our children and grandchildren our glorious inheritance.

We have Archons in the legal sense who lack lordliness.  But we also have manual laborers who possess lordliness in abundance.

Konstantinos Tsatsos, Words for the Fathers, 1975

"In the mysterious structure of the Church one discovers again the mysterious structure of the world.  The world has no meaning, except if we accept it as God’s gift to man.  The world is the vine given to men from God.  The world became for man, and not man for the world."

Dimitrios Stăniloae

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but it was wrong in thinking that we can get them for ourselves without grace."

Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce, posthume 1947

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God.  Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.  Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

I have long embraced a belief system within my church called 'Christian humanism   

It has its roots in the Renaissance, when it was revived by figures like Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More who were versed in classical thought and the fathers and doctors of the early church.  

Jacques Maritain called Humanisme intégral.  

The last quote above from Bonhoeffer seems to capture the essence of it fairly well.  

In every case it might be viewed as a reaction against secular humanism and iconoclastic puritanism. 

We had our first serious blast of Arctic cold today.   

The Dollar is hanging on near the 99 handle.

VIX has now fallen to the 'correction is imminent' level.

Stocks popped and flopped, and then took a little bounce into the close.

Gold and silver were under pressure but were hanging on.

I just don't have the words to describe my disappointment with the anti-human actions of this government, and the Western elites in general.

And it seems as though the majority of the public now tends to agree.  

Change will come.   The darkness ebbs and flows, but it will never finally prevail.

Have a pleasant weekend.