Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Weep Instead for Yourselves and Your Children

 

“All tyrannies are virtuoso displays over many years of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control.  Tyrants are the greatest of all actor-managers — omnipotent impresarios.

For a dictatorship to last long, it has to ensure a degree of economic prosperity and justice. When these are no longer assured, their fall is inevitable.  A dictator meticulously collects around himself, people who feed him with 'facts' and 'assessments' he likes to hear rather than truth.  He shuts himself from the harsh reality outside and indulges in actions that only increase the wrath of the masses."

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Dictators Get the Deaths They Deserve, October 26, 2011

"Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true."

Søren Kierkegaard, Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, SKS vol.9, 1847

"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding.  This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet.  Millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable."

Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010

"Turning to them Jesus said, 'Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me.  Weep instead for yourselves and your children.'"

Luke 23:28

It was risk on today, as the dismal unemployment claims number came in hot, and the inflation numbers were high but in-line.

So its rate cut time, yay!

We may be led by hysterical fools and craven nincompoops, dancing along like trousered apes for the sake of a powerfully pampered few, but we still know how to celebrate 'winning.'

VIX fell.

The Dollar fell.

Stocks soared, pulling silver along with them.

Gold held its ground weakly on the risky exuberance.

There are some ugly things gathering on our horizon, but no one really wants to hear it.

A few years ago I made a decent forecast which came true, and a snarky reader said that 'I would probably like to be a prophet.'

And I answered, 'Certainly not.  Prophets have notoriously poor career prospects.'

And they do.  People do not want to hear about the consequences of their lawlessness and excess and foolishness.

You can't drive with your crazy drunk grandpa or your crazy drunk self at the wheel every other day, and not expect something bad to happen eventually.

And yet here we are. 

"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well.  Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them.  Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich.  Plunder, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola

Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.   Even if they delude themselves into thinking that for their greed, lawlessness, and even murders, that they will not be judged. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's Last Words To the American People

 

April 13, 1945
Jefferson Day Speech 

Americans are gathered together this evening in communities all over the country to pay tribute to the living memory of Thomas Jefferson — one of the greatest of all democrats; and I want to make it clear that I am spelling that word "democrats" with a small d.

I wish I had the power, just for this evening, to be present at all of these gatherings.

In this historic year, more than ever before, we do well to consider the character of Thomas Jefferson as an American citizen of the world.

As Minister to France, then as our first Secretary of State and as our third President, Jefferson was instrumental in the establishment of the United States as a vital factor in international affairs.

It was he who first sent our Navy into far-distant waters to defend our rights.  And the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine was the logical development of Jefferson's far-seeing foreign policy.

Today this Nation which Jefferson helped so greatly to build is playing a tremendous part in the battle for the rights of man all over the world.

Today we are part of the vast Allied force — a force composed of flesh and blood and steel and spirit — which is today destroying the makers of war, the breeders of hatred, in Europe and in Asia.

In Jefferson's time our Navy consisted of only a handful of frigates headed by the gallant U.S.S. Constitution — Old Ironsides — but that tiny Navy taught Nations across the Atlantic that piracy in the Mediterranean — acts of aggression against peaceful commerce and the enslavement of their crews — was one of those things which, among neighbors, simply was not done.

Today we have learned in the agony of war that great power involves great responsibility.  Today we can no more escape the consequences of German and Japanese aggression than could we avoid the consequences of attacks by the Barbary Corsairs a century and a half before.

We, as Americans, do not choose to deny our responsibility.

Nor do we intend to abandon our determination that, within the lives of our children and our children's children, there will not be a third world war.

We seek peace — enduring peace.  More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars—yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman, and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.

The once powerful, malignant Nazi state is crumbling.  The Japanese war lords are receiving, in their own homeland, the retribution for which they asked when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

But the mere conquest of our enemies is not enough.

We must go on to do all in our power to conquer the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed, which made this horror possible.

Thomas Jefferson, himself a distinguished scientist, once spoke of 'the brotherly spirit of Science, which unites into one family all its votaries of whatever grade, and however widely dispersed throughout the different quarters of the globe.' 

Today, science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close together that it is impossible to isolate them one from another.

Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships — the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.

Let me assure you that my hand is the steadier for the work that is to be done, that I move more firmly into the task, knowing that you — millions and millions of you — are joined with me in the resolve to make this work endure.

The work, my friends, is peace.  More than an end of this war — an end to the beginnings of all wars.  Yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples.

Today, as we move against the terrible scourge of war — as we go forward toward the greatest contribution that any generation of human beings can make in this world — the contribution of lasting peace, I ask you to keep up your faith.   I measure the sound, solid achievement that can be made at this time by the straight edge of your own confidence and your resolve.   And to you, and to all Americans who dedicate themselves with us to the making of an abiding peace, I say:

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.  Let us move forward with strong and active faith.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
Undelivered Jefferson Day Speech

FDR died of a heart attack on April 12, 1945

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - God Without the Justice of Love and the Cross

 

"Hitler did not believe in a personal god. He believed only in the bond of blood between succeeding generations and in a vague conception of fate or providence. Nor did he believe in a life after death. In this connection he often quoted a sentence from the Edda, that remarkable collection of ancient Icelandic literature, which to him represented the profoundest Nordic wisdom: “All things will pass away, nothing will remain but death and the glory of deeds.”

Walter Schellenberg, SS Officer of Counter-Intelligence, The Schellenberg Memoirs, 1956

Gottgläubigkeit: (German for belief in God) was the term for a Nazi-sanctioned, non-denominational belief system for people who had formally left the Christian church but still professed a belief in a 'higher power.'  The purpose of Gottgläubigkeit was to separate German citizens from institutional Christianity and promote a form of piety and morality aligned with Nazi ideology.  According to a 1936 decree, this was the official term for people who had left the church but were not without faith.  Belief in God was a form of deism and fit with the National Socialist idea of a 'natural piety' of the German character."

Wikipedia

"We will have to deal with Christianity in a tougher way than hitherto.  We must settle accounts with this Christianity, this greatest of plagues that could have happened to us in our history, which has weakened us in every conflict.  If our generation does not do it then it would I think drag on for a long time.  We must overcome it within ourselves.

Today at Heydrich's funeral I intentionally expressed in my oration from my deepest conviction a belief in God, a belief in fate, in the ancient one as I called him—that is the old Germanic word: Wralda.  We shall once again have to find a new scale of values for our people: the scale of the macrocosm and the microcosm, the starry sky above us and the world in us, the world that we see in the microscope.  The essence of these megalomaniacs, these Christians who talk of men ruling this world, must stop and be put back in its proper proportion.  Man is nothing special at all.  He is an insignificant part of this earth.  He must once again look with deep reverence into this world. Then he will acquire the right sense of proportion about what is above us, about how we are woven into this cycle.

If we do not secure this moral foundation which is the deepest and best because the most natural, we will not be able to overcome Christianity on this plane and create the Germanic Reich which will be a blessing for the earth.  That is our mission as a nation on this earth.  For thousands of years it has been the mission of this blond race to rule the earth and again and again to bring it happiness and culture."

Heinreich Himmler, Speech to the Oberabschnittsführer and Hauptamtschefs, Haus der Flieger Berlin, 9 June 1942


If you cannot see the parallels between the deistic, politically subservient Christianity of the Nazis, and the co-opting of God as a benign figurehead for land, power, money, and nationalism today, you may wish to take a closer look.   

They do not serve God.  God serves them, or remains obediently quiet.  They replace His bloody crown of thorns, the symbol of His suffering for the sake of love, with a red cap of greatness and power. 

Why would God become man, suffer and lay down His life for his sheep?   What was in it for Him? They don't get it.   And they certainly do not want anything to do with the Cross.  God serves them.

And so they steal and murder en masse, in a perversion of His promise.  For the sake of their own pride and prosperity. 

This is the abomination that brings desolation, the raising of idols and calling them God. 

Serve whom you will, but know whom it is that you serve.

Stocks were trading weakly again today, buoyed in the morning by the surprise low number for the PPI. 

But alas, they faded in the afternoon.

Gold and silver were able to rally in what looked like a mild risk off sentiment.

The Dollar rallied.     

VIX ticked up a bit.

Feel the power, the intoxication of winning.

"Be not deceived, for God is not mocked.  As a man sows, so shall he reap." 

Dancing on a volcano.  

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Marching Defiantly Into Their Complacent Demise

 

"Nazism and Communism imagine themselves as exact opposites.  They are at each other’s throats wherever they exist all over the world.  They actually breed each other; for the reaction against Communism is Nazism, and beneath Nazism or Fascism Communism stirs convulsively.  Yet they are similar in all essentials. 

There are, of course, differences between the dictatorships.  Yet they are largely discounted by one significant fact.  It is easy to imagine Mussolini or Hitler as head of a Communist State or Stalin as Fascist Duce or Führer.  Nothing in Communism or Fascism, as we know them, or in the characters and records of these three men, makes such a situation incredible."

Winston Churchill, The Infernal Twins, Colliers, 3 July 1937

"To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men."

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, An Ambitious Man, 1896

"However combinations or associations of the above description [lobbies and special interests] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. "

George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796

"Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people.  From these great staffs, both of the old parties have turned aside.  Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them in martialling to serve their selfish purposes.  Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.  To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."

Theodore Roosevelt, The Progressive Covenant with the People, August 6, 1912


Stocks did a little wash and rinse today, moving lower initially and then rallying back in the quiet of the afternoon, with a fade into the close.

There was a whopping downward revision to the BLS Jobs numbers from last year.  Makes sense, since the Trumpeters can pin that on Biden, and hopefully add some back once Donnie gets his rate cuts.

Gold and silver popped initially with gold cracking up through its intermediate measuring objective at 3710, but then fell back into the afternoon.

I find it almost amazing how boldly Trump's cabinet members lie to the people.  Yes, all politicians lie, but generally it is the exception and not the rule.  And there is always an element of 'shame' to it.  

Not anymore.  Lying is now a duty to the Commander, even when it doesn't matter, or is counter-productive.

And the manner in which the mask has fallen away from the madness of governments is stunning, even moreso for the lengths to which some will bend their minds and hearts to excuse obvious sadism, dishonesty, injustice, and murder. 

This helps to explain the moves of investors and other nations into the safe havens of gold and silver.   If you own it, it doesn't lie.  It has no counterparty risks.  It is without time limits and expiration.

“Gold is money. Everything else is credit.”

J. P. Morgan, Testimony to the US Congress, 1912

In comparison crypto, although popular, is fragile, untested by time, and subject to the whims of a wealthy and powerful few who operate largely in secret.

Maybe I am wrong, and time will prove it so.   But it remains to be seen, and I'll believe it when I see it. 

"Gold has worked down from Alexander's time. When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory."

Bernard Baruch

Politicians lie, but gold and silver do not.  And therein lies a potential safe haven for many.

Have a pleasant evening.