Germany, October 1940
The latest is that the Great Man himself now has a mistress,
named Eva Braun. Of course, we all know what the circumstances
are, and the lady should really be described as a maitresse en titre.
A prankish official who eavesdropped on a long-distance telephone conversation between the
two of them has reported that Hitler figuratively cried on the
blonde bosom of his girlfriend about the huge quantities of
hormones and injections of vitamins being put into him.
The average German now registers
developments as he would the scores of the Sunday football games,
shouts happily over the results and has forgotten all about them by
next morning. He has got into the habit of victory, and takes each
successive triumph more and more for granted, which is charmingly
simple of him - except that he is becoming more and more brutalized, and the level of his greed is constantly going up. I can
hear the rumbling of a terrible storm in the distance.
Truly, with the Germans it is as I have said: every nation
normally puts its demons, its delusions, its impossible desires away
into the cellars and vaults and underground prisons of its unconscious; the Germans have reversed the process, and have let them
loose. The contents have escaped like the winds out of Pandora’s
box.
A storm is raging across this long-suffering old earth.
Germany, drunk with victory, is sick. The language one hears, the
speech of the war commentators, the talk in the coffee-houses,
together with the German of the military, has degenerated into a
kind of street jargon that makes the blood run cold.
And behind it all are the ‘deals’. People sell stolen paintings and
sculptures and wine cellars, which may or may not exist — they
‘deal’ in securities, silk stockings, ownerless French factories - with
stolen machines, with soup spoons, toilet soap, and rubber goods.
In Berlin, absolutely everybody ‘deals’ — I was there recently, and
saw it. The ladies of noble Prussian families are busy transacting
business, and so are waitresses, drugstore clerks, high-school
students.
But what good does it do? Industry pulls the strings; it has
controlled the General Staff since the days of Ludendorff. The
instrument of power is terror, and the industrialists hold tight to
it. They control every means of influencing public opinion, and
have thereby stupefied the great unproductive mass-salaried
people, office workers, most of the lower ranking government
employees - to the point of idiocy.
The rest is a mixture of business people and nobility come down in the world, melted into a
middle-class lump with the newly created officers and quick-
turnover fellows. These people are more materialistic than the
Bolshevik Russians, live from day to day, and haven’t the slightest
conception of the grim little game that has been begun here.
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947
The market today gave me a good chuckle. While the price of Crude Oil on the Comex Futures were rallying, the market was pricing down the real instruments of energy.
Stocks were in rally mode today starting with the futures soaring in the late Sunday trade.
Gold and silver were meh.
VIX fell.
The wiseguys are doing their short term, we-can-do-what-we-want-because-we-can boogie woogie.
Breaking: The US has carried out strikes on Iran's Konarak Naval Base on the southeastern coast, wounding two Iranian soldiers, per Al Jazeera. It is the first US strike on Iran in nearly 7 weeks. Iran will likely retaliate tonight.
This is going to get interesting if you watch your leverage and personal supplies situation.
The theme for 2027 will be 'How are the mighty fallen.'
As popular TV documentarian A J Benza used to say, 'Fame, ain't it a bitch.'
I may have to dig out the popcorn hot air popper.
Have a pleasant evening.
