What is a proper disposition towards life? It is to accept God as a loving father, who is full of tenderness and forgiveness for us, despite our willful blunders and hardened hearts. He yearns for us, as a father and mother yearn for the return of their most beloved child. It is to accept that we are not lost, we are not abandoned. We are wandering like a wayward child, full of our own headstrong delusions. And our father waits expectantly, calling out for us through the darkness. Jesse, 2018
The professional elite are, for the most part, talking around the matter, and whistling past the graveyard of their own long coming and well deserved demise. What has been called 'the placebo syndrome' of mindless pursuit of power and goods.
I think if you look at the charts, particularly the gold chart, you can see the preferred levels of support that must be held to make the bullish case.
I have forecasted for some time that the pressures in the physical bullion markets, particularly in London, would be feeling the pinch this month. And I think we are seeing that, although for the most part, the response of the official powers that be is denial.
“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and even murders that we are not going to be held to account.”
Czesław Miłosz
Every man and woman on this earth will die.
Now, this is of course a statement of the obvious. And yet very few really think about it, until something happens to bring that cold statement of reality into an unavoidable focus that they must confront. We are all dying, in our own way and time, from the moment that we are born; but we do our utmost not to think about it.
And this is understandable. Going around constantly thinking about your own mortality would be morbid, a misuse of the time and talent that we have been given on this earth to do things, to create, and love, and to be alive.
But we tend to put any thought of our true place in the world, put it off and out of mind so much, that we also start thinking that we are uniquely different, that we are above the common state of humanity. We are so much superior to all the others that we will likely go on forever, immune to the consequences that afflict the greater mass of humanity.
And if only this were true; but it is not. Not true for any one of us. Of this we can be certain.
One thing of which we can be sure of, is that we will draw a last breath, and that the darkness will come over our eyes and hold us in a final embrace. We may fantasize about avoiding death, about living almost forever, of extending our life here on earth indefinitely, and perhaps of leaving a great monument to ourselves that will last forever in this world that will provide us a kind of immortality. But this will not happen.
We know, deep down in our very heart of hearts, that at that moment, the moment immediately after our death, the moment in which we will finally discover for ourselves whether it is to be consciousness or nothingness, the regret that one might feel at having been wrong, of having misjudged the real rules of the game, of having purposely misunderstood and deluded ourselves about the true nature and meaning of our own life? Of having squandered everything on items that have no lasting consequence?
If so, it would be more overwhelming than anything we might dare to imagine. That is what Leon Bloy means when he says that 'in the end, the only real sadness is not to have been a saint.'
It is what is called Pascal's wager. But it serves us not to think about it. And so we distract ourselves with lesser things.
"...a full 95% of the cash that went to Greece ran a trip through Greece and went straight back to creditors which in plain English is banks. So, public taxpayers money was pushed through Greece to basically bail out banks...So austerity becomes a side effect of a general policy of bank bailouts that nobody wants to own. That's really what happened, ok?
Why are we peddling nonsense? Nobody wants to own up to a gigantic bailout of the entire European banking system that took six years. Austerity was a cover.
If the EU at the end of the day and the Euro is not actually improving the lives of the majority of the people, what is it for? That's the question that they've brought no answer to.
...the Hamptons is not a defensible position. The Hamptons is a very rich area on Long Island that lies on low lying beaches. Very hard to defend a low lying beach. Eventually people are going to come for you.
What's clear is that every social democratic party in Europe needs to find a new reason to exist. Because as I said earlier over the past 20 years they have sold their core constituency down the line for a bunch of floaters in the middle who don't protect them or really don't particularly care for them. Because the only offers on the agenda are basically austerity and tax cuts for those who already have, versus austerity, apologies, and a minimum wage."
Mark Blyth
Although I may not agree with every particular that Mark Blyth may say, directionally he is exactly correct in diagnosing the problems in Europe.
And yes, I am aware that the subtitles are at times in error, and sometimes outrageously so. Many of the errors were picked up and corrected in the comments.
No stimulus, no plans, no official actions, no monetary theories can be sustainably effective in revitalizing an economy that is as bent as these have become without serious reform at the first.
This was the lesson that was given by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. There will be no lasting recovery without it; it is a sine qua non. One cannot turn their economy around when the political and business structures are systemically corrupt, and the elites are preoccupied with looting it, and hiding their spoils offshore.
In 2008, their economic worldview and unrestrained corruption precipitated a global economic crisis that literally caused, and is still causing, billions of people to suffer — in response, they quickly protected the plutocrats who caused the crisis while leaving the victimized masses to cope with the generational fallout. Even now, Western elites continue to proselytize markets and impose free trade and globalization without the slightest concern for the vast inequality and destruction of economic security those policies generate...
Corrupt elites always try to persuade people to continue to submit to their dominance in exchange for protection from forces that are even worse. That’s their game. But at some point, they themselves, and their prevailing order, become so destructive, so deceitful, so toxic, that their victims are willing to gamble that the alternatives will not be worse, or at least, they decide to embrace the satisfaction of spitting in the faces of those who have displayed nothing but contempt and condescension for them.
Glenn Greenwald
Next week should be interesting.
Gold did a $100 overnight move last night at one point from the low to the high, before giving some back today.
We are still waiting on a proper breakout, but the ice has been broken.
I have been watching a live stream of the BBC, and they just called the election for 'Leave.'
The most repeated phrase of the evening from the professional class has been 'this is a wake up call' for Westminster. Wake up calls may be the order of the day for the status quo.
The politicians are shocked, shocked that the people have rejected the advice, arguments, and warnings of 'the experts.'
Some 'very serious people' are wondering what this means for the future of the EU.
And as always, they never saw this coming.
Gold is trading at 1334, silver at 18, the SP stock futures are down 90 points, and the FTSE futures are down 8%.
The map below shows the support for 'Remain' was centered primarily in the southeast which is London and in the north in Scotland. The huge majority for 'Remain' in Scotland raises the prospect of another referendum there for independence in order to remain in the EU.
I wonder if the professional establishments of the West will continue to misjudge the depth of the dissatisfaction of the public, counting on their complacency to maintain the status quo.
The November elections in the US may be another interesting situation to watch closely. The smug sense of complacent entitlement of the Democratic National Committee and their anointed one is striking.
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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