Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Dark Triad: A Deep Well of Sickness

 

"If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control.  As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumor broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body."

The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich 1942

"Coined by psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in 2002, the term 'Dark Triad' describes three distinct but overlapping traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy.  Each carries its own texture — grandiosity, manipulation, coldness — but they share a common core: callousness and exploitation. Think of it as a psychological Venn diagram. 

• Narcissism craves admiration. 
• Machiavellianism craves control. 
• Psychopathy craves thrill and dominance.

At first glance, the narcissist dazzles.  They radiate confidence, charm, and certainty.  They know how to light up a room, and how to make you feel lit by their glow.  But beneath the sheen lies fragility.  The narcissist is addicted to admiration-craving it like oxygen.  Without it, their grandiosity cracks.  Criticism cuts deeper than a blade.  Rejection feels like annihilation.  What marks narcissism in the Dark Triad isn't just self-love, it's exploitation.  Others become mirrors, reflecting back validation.  Relationships become stages for their performance. In modern culture, narcissism thrives because it's rewarded. Influencers curate endless self-image. CEOs spin their charisma into power. Politicians build cults of personality. The narcissist doesn't just survive in today's world-they're celebrated for the very traits that corrode intimacy and truth.

Where the narcissist craves the spotlight, the Machiavellian prefers the shadows.  Cold, calculating, and relentlessly strategic, the highly Machiavellian treat life as a chessboard.  People are pawns.  Relationships are leverage.  Morality is optional.  High-Machs aren't impulsive like psychopaths. They're patient. They bide their time, cultivate influence, and strike when it counts.  This makes them dangerous not for their explosions, but for their persistence. In workplaces, they thrive in office politics.  In relationships, they use charm and deception as tools.  In leadership, they cloak self-interest as pragmatism.  Where narcissists want applause and psychopaths want chaos, Machiavellians want control.  And they'll wait as long as it takes to get it.

If narcissism dazzles and Machiavellianism plots, psychopathy devours. Psychopaths are marked by callousness, impulsivity, and thrill-seeking. They feel little fear, little remorse, and little empathy. To them, people are not companions or colleagues-they are tools, obstacles, or prey. Unlike narcissists, they don't hunger for admiration. Unlike Machiavellians, they don't always wait patiently for the long game. Psychopaths live for the immediate rush-risk, dominance, the thrill of breaking rules.

The dark psychology of psychopathy lies in its emotional poverty.  Charm without care.  Action without regret.  Desire without restraint.  It's not always violent crime.  Sometimes it's the executive who cuts thousands of jobs with a smile.  Sometimes it's the partner who betrays without a flicker of guilt.  Sometimes it's the leader who gambles with millions of lives, chasing only their own win.  The predator doesn't always snarl.  Sometimes it shakes your hand."

Mark Hussey, The Dark Triad, The Brink, 29 August 2025

"The mood may be summed up thus: a shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all."

Tacitus, The Murder of Galba, Annals

Stocks did their usual pop on Monday, as those who hedged their positions over this weekend of war were squeezed by the wiseguys.  

Machine-gunning lifeboats is one of their favorite plays. 

There will be an option expiration at the end of this week.

There will be an FOMC rate decision on Wednesday afternoon.

I am have little doubt that Bessent is lobbying hard for a rate cut, at Donnie's behest.

The Dollar slipped off the 100 handle.

Bitcoin is hold in the low 70's.  

This market is pumped by the bubble fluffers in the Treasury and NY Fed, and their Banker friends who will hitch an easy ride on any wash and rinse, especially if it is backed by the Administration. 

It is set up for what could prove to be a fairly impressive correction.

The 'war' is not going well at all.  My major concern is that someone is going to do something monumentally foolish and cross the mother of all red lines.

We are caught in a deep well of sickness, made by the servants and enablers of the Dark Triad.

What is surprising is how slowly people are coming to recognize this dilemma we are in. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - An Unjust War

 

"Questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents have persisted for more than 40 years.  But once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War."

Pat Paterson, The Truth About Tonkin, US Naval Institute, February 2008

“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

Major General Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket, 1935

"In his magnificent piece, War Is a Racket, Smedley Butler recognised two forms of war profiteering by the industrialists who supply war material and the bankers who finance the warring parties. However, other forms of war profiteering can be identified as war is the ultimate enterprise. To start with, imperialism and wars of aggression are motivated by the desire to secure raw materials and markets for the industrialists.

Wars of aggression are triggered by factors such as exceptionalism, greed, nationalism, unleashed capitalism, blind patriotism, the desire for dominance and collectivism.  Since wars of aggression are illegal according to international law, the aggressors justify them on the grounds of protecting civilians in the target country and in terms of self-defence involving pre-emptive strikes.  The self-defence pretext can be sold more easily if a false flag attack is staged to demonstrate that the target country or parties related to it initiated an attack when the attack is staged by the country planning a war of aggression.  A false flag operation can be costly, both in terms of blood and treasure, but for the aggressor it is a price worth paying to achieve the ultimate objective of benefiting war profiteers."

The argument put forward in this book is that wars are about money rather than the noble causes often claimed to be the true causes. War involves the transfer of wealth from taxpayers to war profiteers, from the defeated to the victors, from the victims to the aggressors and from the oppressed to the oppressors." 

Imad A. Moosa, Professor of Finance RMIT, The Economics of War, 2 December 2019

"Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers, with approving smiles."

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

Hope for the best, but prepare for the alternatives.

Stocks were slumping today as the realization sinks in that the current 'excursion' in the Mideast looks like a tragic misstep that will not present an easy off ramp to the proud and the ignorant.

Gold and silver were hit hard, as the Dollar rallied into the 100 handle.

This too shall pass.  Wall Street is full of sound and fury, but only for the short term.

VIX continued to tick higher in an escalating pattern.

Bitcoin held on to 71k.   

There is room for serious concern that desperate men will do desperate things, recklessly, when they are not restrained by wiser and clearer minds.

Never have so many failed in their oaths and responsibilities to protect the common people.

Those liars and breakers of oaths will be put paid, sooner or later.  

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 - Hide Us From the Wrath of the Lamb

 

"What I said was this: Listen to my voice, and I will be your God, and you will be my people.  If you follow all the ways that I command you, then you will prosper.

They did not obey or pay heed to my words.  They persisted in following their own evil inclinations with stubborn hearts and turned not their faces but their backs to me.   From the day your ancestors left Egypt until now I unfailingly sent my servants the prophets to them.  Yet they have not listened, but stiffened their necks and proved to be worse than their fathers.

When you speak these words to them, they will not listen. When you call to them, they will not answer. Then you are to say: This is the nation that did not obey the Lord, their God, or accept correction. Truth has perished. It no longer issues forth from their mouths."

Jeremiah 7:23-28

"Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me divides. Amen I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven."

Matthew 12:30-31

"From the day it was built this city has so aroused my anger and wrath that I must remove it from my sight. The people of Israel and Judah have provoked me by all the evil they have done. Their kings and officials, their priests and prophets, the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem have turned their backs and not looked to me. Though I taught them again and again, they would not listen or respond to my commandments. They set up vile images in the house that bears my Name, and defiled it. They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters in the fires to Moloch."

Jeremiah 32:31-35

"God has a way of standing before the nations with judgement, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America 'You are too arrogant!  If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power!  And I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name.  Be still, and know that I am God.'"

Martin Luther King, Why I Am Opposed to the War, 1967

"Wonderful providence indeed which is so silent, yet so efficacious, so constant, so unerring.  This is what baffles the power of Satan.  He cannot discern the Hand of God in what goes on; and though he would fain meet it and encounter it, in his mad and blasphemous rebellion against heaven, he cannot find it.

Crafty and penetrating as he is, yet his thousand eyes and his many instruments avail him nothing against the majestic serene silence, the holy imperturbable calm which reigns through the providences of God. He makes a guess here, or does a bold act there, but all in the dark.  If even devils, sagacious as they are, spirits by nature and experienced in evil, cannot detect His hand while He works, how can we hope to see it except by that way which the devils cannot take, by loving faith.

Let us ever bear in mind this divine truth, — the more secret God's hand is, the more powerful — the more silent, the more awful"

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol 4,17

 

Stocks managed to slip the props being deployed by Bessent and crew, and ended the day down, going out on the lows.

The wiseguys are far from done, but cold reality is beginning to penetrate into the halls of the power elite.

VIX rose.  It has been setting higher lows for a little while now, a sign of the building tension on the tape.

The Dollar rose, giving gold and silver the usual rough time.

When the 'flight to safety' actually hits in earnest, it's action could be rather dynamic.

But for now, we are existing in the fog of war lies and myths.  

Donnie and Pete have little sense and background for broad front strategic and tactical planning.  They are both performative, hardly practical and effective.  And the same could be said about the GOP and Democratic leadership in Congress, and the Robert's Court majority.   The mainstream media in the West should be ashamed.

The problem is the US cannot simply walk away from this mistaken military action.  Well, technically they can, but then Tel Aviv is going to end up looking like Gaza.  And the adjustments in the global balance of power would be hard for the neo-cons to accept.

The same might be said of the warhawk cheerleaders, and their advice to resort to even greater damage and merciless treatment for the major population centers in Iran.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - All Is Well

 

"It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.  These may, perhaps, succeed at first, and limp along on hope for awhile with a flourishing appearance.  But time betrays their weakness, and they eventually fall into ruin of their own designs."

Demosthenes, Orations Against Philip of Macedon, 4th century BC

"It was incredible.  It was distressing to me how simple and outrageous it was.  It wasn't so complicated that you said, 'Wow, at least they're smart in the way they're doing it.'  It was simple.  It was brazen.  The evidence of it was overwhelming.  It's just that it hadn't been revealed to the public, and that's why could get away with it.  One of the things that is eminently clear from our investigation is that all the compliance departments, all the self-regulation is nothing. They watched it, but they did nothing."

Eliot Spitzer, The Wall Street Fix, March 16, 2003

"The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated.  The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered.  The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.

The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright.  The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the fully loaded pistol.  In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States."

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

"Be glad as children, as the birds of heaven.  And do not let the sins of men confound you in your doings.  Do not fear that they will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished.  Do not say, 'Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.'  Of the pride of Satan what I think is this: it is hard for us on earth to comprehend it, and therefore it is easy to fall into error and to share in it, even imagining that we are doing something grand and fine."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, pages 407-8, 1880


Stocks were slumping a bit today, but found support at 33 Liberty Street in New York.

Three ships in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz were 'hit by projectiles' today. 

Gold and silver were hit by selling as the Dollar had a little boost into the 99 handle.

VIX is meandering around, and might be coiling up for a move.

Bitcoin managed to hang on to the 70k handle.   

There is still some time to make provisions for the admittedly low probability of more severe disruptions to your daily lives, in the manner of the Covid lockdown.

No surprise, the movie 'Melania' is the number one movie sensation on Amazon Prime.   I am going to wait for the RiffTrax release to watch it. 

As in every war, the governments are covering up negative news, and promoting the messages that they wish for you to believe. 

And in this case our elites are engaging in some highly lucrative insider trading at almost every opportunity they can create.

Shameless, and without honor.  These are the fruits of moral hazard. 

Have a pleasant evening.