Even the winter won't last forever
We'll see the morning, we'll feel the sun
We'll wake up in April, ready and able
Sowing the seeds in the soil
Even the darkness cannot disarm us
We'll see the morning, we'll feel the sun
We'll break up the earth, 'cause we know
That it's worth it
Sowing the seeds in the soil
Of our love.
Audrey Assad, Even the Winter
Stocks had another ranging day, with a sweep from the highs to the lows. The SP 500 finished nearly unchanged with the tech heavy Nasdaq a little weaker.
All in all it was a stock option expiration, and the market was looking for a direction.
At this point the right kind of trigger event is going to send this skittish market much lower. I am looking around the 2500's on the SP 500 futures, so it could be quite a wild ride.
But the lack of organic action and 'investment' buying, as opposed to short term gimmickry, makes this a difficult market to trade.
Gold and silver finished largely unchanged as the Dollar gave up a little of its strength from yesterday.
I was getting restless watching this inane market action in the late morning. And so I asked the Lord for something to do to make things better in the world. And I kid you not, I found myself almost immediately directed to thoroughly cleaning and scrubbing the bathroom, top to bottom. I think the Queen was listening in on that conversation. Not a doubt in my mind.
Little consolations and tender mercies. They are there, where you least expect them. And there resides peace of mind, and an easy heart.
Well after that task was completed, I went outside and trimmed some late growth in the trees and hedges and shrubs, and cleaned up the front lawn. We cracked the freezing mark here last night. The temperature dipped to about 27 degrees, which was quite chilly to say the least. But it warmed up today, and the afternoon was one of those glorious autumn days when working outside is just the right thing to do.
Need little, want less, and love more. Because those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
"If modernity is characterized by a loss of the sense of the real, this fact is connected to what has happened to money in the twentieth century. Everything threatens to become unreal once money ceases to be real.
Money is one of the primary measures of value in any society, perhaps the primary one, the principal repository of value. As such, money is a central source of stability, continuity, and cohesion in any community. Hence to tamper with the basic money supply is to tamper with a community’s sense of value."
Paul Cantor, Literature and the Economics of Liberty
"One of the most nefarious consequences of dishonest money is to destroy our ability and willingness to act responsibly in the light of our own judgments. It has led us to replace common sense by compliance. We have substituted the law for what is moral and what is right. We have substituted audit checklists for an auditor’s judgment about what is true and fair. And we have substituted phony mathematics for the judgment we once possessed in understanding the nature of value and that of risk."
Anthony Deden, Investment Value in an Age of Booms and Busts
"Advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."
Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses, 2000
Stocks were weak today. Global jitters and weaker than expected results from real economy companies shook bully's swaggering confidence.
Gold and silver tried to rally, and gold managed to hold a bit of a gain, as the US Dollar gained ground higher.
Politically active and publicly prominent men and women in the US would do well to remember this sage advice from George Bernard Shaw: 'I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.'
Today was an absolutely beautiful autumn day here in the northeast.
"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."W. Shakespeare, The Tempest
“The easiest way to steal a man's wallet is to tell him you're going to steal his watch.”
Leigh Bardugoh
“They support freedom for themselves and slavery for everyone else, and they use the freedom of the market to disguise this. Economic coercion is just a different form of force.”
Robert Peate
“As long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob will turn cruel.”
Leigh Brackett
“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil. And there is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice.”
Eric Hoffer
You have surely heard of 'the fog of war.'
Its financial analogue is 'the mist of mispriced risks and their deceptive valuations.'
Note that fraud requires a longer description than war. Fraud and the power of money is necessarily more complicated than simple murder, which too often serves as one of its instruments of policy.
Alcoa kicked off the real earnings season tonight, after the Banks have finished spewing their financial results early.
Gold and silver tried to rally, but were smacked down in the afternoon in the currency crosses. The Dollar gained.
Stocks were slumping badly, but were rescued in the late afternoon, led back up by the SP 500 futures which closed unchanged.
The SP 500 futures are the locus of market intervention. See the writings of ex-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for the technical and ethical justifications for this.
Here is a message I received from Pam and Russ Martens at Wall Street On Parade:
"Our publishing schedule has been interrupted due to the pressing need to provide loving support and care-giving to a family member who is experiencing a health emergency."
Please remember them in your thoughts and prayers.
There will be a stock option expiration on this Friday.
There will be a Comex precious metals option expiration on the 25th. It is not a significant option contract month. The focus is now on the December contract.
Murder a Washington Post columnist? Not a problem, if you have the right connections and 'juice.'
'What is truth' asked Pilate? And then turned and washed his hands of it.'
Our modern procurators and prefects of plutocracy and empire don't even understand the purpose or substance of the question, except as a means of distracting us from yet another one of their lies.
We have taken a natural paradise, and a beacon of freedom to the world, and are turning it into a suburb of Hell— for the unquenchable greed of a few.
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
1 Corinthians 13:1-3
Fears of yesterday were cast aside as the hot money came back into the markets, and the shorts who overstayed their position in the recent decline were scrambling to cover.
We have seen a particularly effective wash and rinse in the equity markets this week, ahead of the stock option expiration on this Friday.
Netflix showed better-than-expected results, including the all important subscribers, after the bell. This lit the afterburners of the big cap tech stocks. Huzzah!
Safe havens joined prudent words and wisdom in leadership today— all are generally in disrepute amongst the exceptional ones.
"For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks;
It still looks home, and short excursions makes;
But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks;
And never shocked, and never turned aside,
Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide."
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
Hannah Arendt
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...
The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.
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.”
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free
Gold and silver managed to rally up a bit today on a slightly weaker dollar.
there was no breakout. I know quite a few people are watching the 100 DMA for gold. I think the chart is pretty much in concurrence with a widely watched metric and manages to convey more information overall.
Stocks tried to rally all day, but just could not hold it into the close and sold off a bit.
So, no breakouts or breakdowns. The best the market mavens could do was manage a draw.
The situation with the Saudis is interesting and worth watching.
The retail sales data was not constructive to the sustainable recovery story.
Even with the one percent fat and wealthy, and corporations chock full of cash and building monopolies at a record pace, can the US economy sustain itself with a consumer base that is frightened, unhealthy, generally put upon by frauds, and scraping by on stagnant incomes?
I don't even live in a 'swing state' and the level of television ads and door to door volunteers is at surprisingly high levels.
All politicians lie, but lately they are lying so much and so casually that they doesn't even bother to hide their tracks or make any attempt to save face, except with more lies and denials. And the whole process on both sides of the aisle has become cynically slick, professionally noxious, noisome and disgusting.
The working class may be hooked on opioids, but the elite's drug of choice is Denietol.
Why not? It appears to be working fine for them.
Our healthcare system is criminally insane. The level of corruption in the corporate world and on Wall Street is at record levels.
And what are we talking about on the national stage? Certainly not financial and healthcare reform.
"Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination.
In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression...
You can tell your people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish."
Oscar Romero
In El Salvador in the 1970's, a right wing coalition backed by the country's richest families inflicted a reign of terror on the reformers who sought peaceful change in their repressive, oligarchic rule where a few had the most, and the rest lived in deprivation and poverty.
The Catholic Church in that country, under the leadership of Archbishop Romero of San Salvador, offered peaceful support and comfort to the protesters and the reformers and the many victims of official murder and terrorism.
On 24 March 1980 Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying Mass at La Divina Providencia, one day after calling on the soldiers to stop torturing, raping, and murdering people in the reign of terror.
No one was every arrested or held responsible for this act.
On the day of his funeral, the mourners were bombed, and attacked by snipers positioned on the rooftops. Forty people died and many more were wounded.
Later that year four missionary nuns were raped and murdered shortly after they had arrived at the airport.
The assassination of Oscar Romero provoked a vicious twelve year civil war against financial and political repression, as the reformers gave up hope of any peaceful change. And it opened the door for more radical elements in their ranks as the people gave in to despair.
As had happened in the past, and continues to happen today, repression of peaceful change and justice threatened to bring about the very conditions that the ruling families of the country had feared. These are the fruits of greed and the lust for power, driven to hysteria and violent repression.
People like to remember the frightful abuses of state socialism at the extreme, and well they should do this. But they tend to overlook and excuse the crimes and repression inflicted on the people in the name of neo-liberal capitalism, which is nothing more than oligarchy and a fascism of the powerful. They both use fear and terror to herd the people into the abbatoirs of predation and repression. And we allow ourselves to be blinded by their lies and propaganda, their myths of our exceptionalism, and our own fear, hate, and willfulness.
Hatred and violence in all their forms, whether of the extremes of the left or right, no matter what is used to justify such acts, are little different in their offense against His commandments and His love, and to the sorrow of the individual victims.
"It was a civil war of the 1980s, one that pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades—with U.S. support—keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished. It was a bloody, brutal, and dirty war. More than 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the fighting, most of them victims of the military and its death squads. Peasants were shot en masse, often while trying to flee. Student and union leaders had their thumbs tied behind their backs before being shot in the head, their bodies left on roadsides as a warning to others...
Many Americans would prefer to forget that chapter in American history; those under the age of 40 may not even be aware of it. Salvadorans haven’t forgotten, however."
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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