Wall Street continued to push the risk envelope today.

My sense is that this is a 'wash and rinse' operation, designed to clean out the shorts and especially the holdings of weak hands who trade for the short term.

But we will see how much follow-through these jokers can squeeze out next week, with or without tweet effects and support.

Gold and silver had a rough week, to say the least, especially silver which has had quite the fall from a recent high.

This is not government intervention per se in my judgment in the metals markets. Perhaps it is with stocks, and for obvious reasons.

With the metals, it seems more likely that some of the big banks are cleaning up on their oversized short positions, albeit with the government standing idly by and doing nothing to regulate and ensure 'fair markets.'

But isn't that what so many utterly propagandized free marketeers want? To allow powerful interests to have their way with markets, and healthcare, and insurance, and the distribution of wealth, enforcement of the laws, and just about everything else?

The huge disconnect between what people say that they believe and what they want is very typical of people who have been molded into a particular pattern of thought by repeated arguments that, upon closer inspection, are obviously founded in wicked self-interest.

But in the short term, there is no helping people who have reached their 'opinions' by emotionalism. They reject thought and facts and cling to the delusions fostered in them by the crowd that surrounds the demagogue. They insulate themselves from reason with a kind of fervor.

I am not overly concerned myself. This is nothing new, and we have seen it all before. I have seen it and I am not even all that old really.

Could it get worse? Absolutely. Will it get worse? I don't think it will get any worse than it was in the '60s and '70s.

We do live in dangerous times. But all times are dangerous, to the individual. This is the nature of this world, since recorded history.

Have a pleasant evening.

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