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This is from Tom’s Monthly Newsletter
It is for subscribers only
Tom as many know is an Extremely Passionate Emotional and Somewhat Egomaniacal Political Analyst.
Always Provocative and quite brilliant IMO
Warning you have to put up with his movie fettish as he often relates our “predicament ” with his favorite movies many of which are obscure
The Paywalled Post will be in the comment section ( 4 deep)
Here’s Luongo’s Ukraine map he is eluding to
snip
“Jordan Peterson, years ago, asked the question what would a
female-run society look like and he answered himself
concluding, a lot like today.”
Our cultural and spiritual war threatens to become a
civil one. If it comes to blows, who should we turn to lead us if
it does? That’s where stories come in, to make sense of the
confusion.
Meditations on the evil that lurks in good men and vice versa
are stories as old as humanity itself.
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction invokes this war in the
forgotten part of society, just beyond the headlines. For all its
narrative sophistication, it is a simple Joseph Campbell style
hero cycle of a meta-protagonist split across three different
characters, who struggle with the morality of serving a bad
man, Marsellus Wallace.
Act I starts with Vincent, the adolescent with no moral compass,
whose drug addiction nearly kills his boss’s wife, who he’s
tempted by. He seems to get away with it, until his carelessness
confronts a later version of himself, the desperate Butch, who
executes him, ignominiously, on the crapper.
This occurs in Act II as the movie follows Butch, a boxer who
wants out of this “thug life,” trying to scam Wallace and run
away with his girlfriend. But there’s no running from his
choices. For him to be free, he must go back into hell and face
the man he so thoroughly fears.
Which leads us back to Jules, who we met earlier with Vincent,
in Act III. He’s Wallace’s enforcer who now believes he’s been
given a second chance by God after surviving a shooting he
shouldn’t have. When confronted with two petty thieves, a
different version of Butch and Fabienne from Act II, he
confesses that he is the “tyranny of evil men,” but ready to walk
a different path. He lets them go on the condition of retaining
his honor by completing his last task to Wallace. Thus, he
completes his arc.
Pulp Fiction came out at the right moment for my generation as
we struggled with knowing the world was sinking, without
having any generals to follow.
Our artists told anti-heroic black comedies: Repo Man, Heathers,
and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York with equal skill as
arch-Boomers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg found the
heroic still worth pursuing.
But at its core, Generation X’s relationship with watching our
republic morph into an empire reduces to a simple throwaway
gag from Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness.
ou know the line, if you don’t, watch this. The camera zooms
in on Bruce Campbell’s incomparable chin, after blowing his
evil twin away with a shotgun and he says:
“Good? Bad? I’m the guy with the gun.”
This is my BOOMSTICK!
When things are this broken, there aren’t good guys or bad
guys. There are just guys. I’m not making a joke about the
trans-movement trying to erase women from humanity…yet.
No policy is any one thing. No public figure beset with myriad
pressures and loyalties are beyond reproach. While I’ve
lionized FOMC Chair Jerome Powell’s attempt at deflating the
quadrillions of Eurodollars that hold us hostage, I never forget
he is still in charge of the Federal Reserve.
In a recent podcast I did with bitcoin advocate and Wall St.
veteran Caitlin Long, she challenged me on the Fed’s devious
behavior concerning her project, Custodia Bank. Caitlin
pointed out that in denying Custodia their master account the
Fed may have placed itself in a legal situation that could
challenge its constitutionality.
And it would be naïve to dismiss out of hand Powell not being
involved in that decision. A point I have to concede.
My counter to her was, no one is any one thing. Powell may
have made a deal to freeze out Custodia to get buy-in from a
major bank with crypto designs without whom he can’t
implement his plans for the future of domestic banking.
In other words, shit sandwiches are the only thing on the menu,
even for the FOMC Chair.
This is what we need to constantly remind ourselves of.
Nuance is hard. Closed minds think in blacks and whites,
heroes and villains.
If a person or organization does one thing that contravenes our
version of them, we write them off.
I’m as guilty of it as anyone. If a person pings my Spidey-sense,
I’ll stay in “distrust, but verify” mode well past any point of
being reasonable.
I’ve gone on some epic rants previously about Thomas Massie
(R-KY), because he always gets the spotlight at the right
moment to indulge his libertarianism
When the Democrats and Davos need help selling their
narrative that the Fed is out of control, Massie is ready with
another version of Ron Paul’s “End the Fed” bill, even when his
Senatorial counterpart from Kentucky, Rand Paul, doesn’t
follow him.
To some Massie is a hero and Paul the cuck, to me it’s the other
way around. But then Massie goes on Tucker Carlson to expose
the depth of AIPAC’s influence on Congress. His wife dies
suddenly a week later?
Good? Bad? Where’s the Gun?
It’s the chaos, the feeling of being out of time that drives this
lack of nuance. This is Mises’ arguments about time preference,
which always shortens when we feel insecure about our future.
And so, when the threat is real, our threat detectors go into
overdrive, and nuance is left on the cutting room floor.
In this environment there are anti-heroes and unwitting villains
enough to fill a football stadium.
High-mindedness takes a backseat to the single issue that we
think describes the problem.
Davos and the intelligence communities understand this. It’s
why they can so easily push our buttons, because they, like our
parents, installed them.
But they have taken these things way too far, their arguments
bearing so little resemblance to reality the spell has been
broken. Because when people are this focused, playing word
games or empowering temper
tantrums in public simply
doesn’t work.
There’s no power in phrases
like ‘far-right’ or ‘white
nationalism’ to shame me
when my kid is starving, or
my wife was murdered. I’m not a ‘Nazi’ for saying men can’t
have babies.
So, predictably, when those in authority see we’re not buying
the performances, all that’s left is the threat of the gun.
That’s when outright election theft occurs, false flag events
happen, and governments turn predatory. It’s as subtle as
Bruce Campbell’s 1940’s acting style or Sam Raimi’s blocking.
Parody loses its self-awareness and tragedy is just around the
corner.
Yo She-Bitch, Let’s Go
The divisions are everywhere, left/right, young/old, Yankees/
Red Sox, men/women. Feminism of its current variety is the
most toxic of all its incarnations. The mistake they made was
coupling it with the trans agenda to erase women from the
cultural landscape after first destroying the family.
You don’t believe all women yesterday only to let men stalk
them in the bathroom tomorrow.
The goal was to nudge us to accept that women can lead
nations while making a mockery of everything men do the keep
the lights on.
Jordan Peterson, years ago, asked the question what would a
female-run society look like and he answered himself
concluding, a lot like today.
Like all good ideologues, they didn’t know when to stop. The
gender bending of society became a purity spiral that was
always going to end with “birthing persons,” and “milk
provider.”
Or is that too 2023?
They prepped us for decades with sexless harpies like Angela
Merkel, Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton, as the
antithesis to the whores du jour like Jane Fonda, Sally Field, and
Diane Sawyer.
In politics we’re supposed to be awed by the bitches on The
View, AOC, Ursula Von der Leyen, Elizabeth Warren, Victoria
Nuland and Christine Lagarde while demonizing actual women
fighting for their homelands like Russian Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, America’s Tulsi Gabbard,
Germany’s Alice Weidel, or France’s Marine Le Pen.
They’ve created a world where reputational attacks through
media lies are the most powerful weapons. It’s all Lady
Macbeth all the time.
And Mary Poppins wouldn’t make it past the HR nanny.
But, sorry Virginia, The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t real. Two-trilliondollar deficits are.
By creating a world in which feminine conflict resolution
dominates, Davos brought the West to the brink of societal
collapse, forcing men to retreat into fantasy worlds and/or
women’s sports to feel potent.
Now capital markets are
nearly as fake as our politics.
Manipulating gold or silver
prices is passé, they’ve moved
to sovereign bonds and
currencies that were supposed
to be too big to manipulate.
For three years I’ve screamed about Treasury Secretary Janet
Yellen implementing fiscal policy to support ECB President
Christine Lagarde’s monetary policy. This is intended to sell the
lie the European Union is superior to a United States struggling
with an identity crisis.
Pay no attention to the riots in Paris and Berlin, at least Europe
functions with one voice – Slava Ukraini!. The US can’t decide
on who will run for president 100 days out from the election.
Our fiscal problem leaves us teetering on a national bankruptcy
which leads to civilizational wars.
It’s forced FOMC Chair Jerome Powell to hold interest rates
higher for longer than the economic situation in the US
warrants. While Yellen and Warren have tried to force Powell’s
hand, he has held firm saying repeatedly fiscal policy is
Congress’ responsibility not the Fed’s.
The fight between Powell and Yellen is a microcosm of the
broader fight between the sexes over the future of the US, and,
by extension, the world. Viewing Powell as the embodiment of
patriarchy is just as false as seeing Yellen as a wise grandma
solving humanity’s big problems like climate change.
But we need a wise grandpa. Powell’s calm demeanor is one of
the few things keeping capital markets together. He leads by
not losing his cool. Epitomized by his, “Just close the fucking
door,” moment at the IMF earlier this year.
But that said, no issue is any one thing
On the one hand, high rates are great, draining the blood from
the vampires of old Europe, catalyzing discipline in China, and
forcing domestic capital away from terrible ideas like ESG and
DEI. On the other hand, it’s ballooned the federal deficit to
where drastic decisions must be made.
But to me, Yellen, Lagarde, and Warren refuse to be outwitted
by something as pedestrian as a man as they perform an
experiment in yield curve control that would make even a Bank
of Japan President blush.
By issuing mostly short-term debt to fund budget deficits and
actively buying the long-dated stock of outstanding Treasuries,
Yellen is openly assisting Lagarde maintain credit spreads
between US and European debt purposefully sending fake
signals to bond traders worldwide.
Her legacy is a fiscal nightmare that requires drastic spending
reductions no one believes we are capable of. And why would
they?
Pandering to gaslit female
voters about body
autonomy has kept a bid
under bad ideas for
decades. It’s helped
entrench the system where
the pork always gets voted
for. And, sadly, it’s turned a
lot of women into
unreasoning, abreacting
NPC’s.
To be fair, we’ve replaced
their highest calling,
motherhood, with a cubicle
job. I’d want my gibs too if
I were them, to be honest.
That’s why the trans thing
was a mistake. They are
losing women.
Powell’s job now is to stay
the course until the election
and hope that Trump can
close escrow with those
women who supposedly
voted for Grandpa Biden in
2020. But, as of this week,
it’s Kamala Harris, the
epitome of the social
climber all women despise.
She’s a tough sell.
But from the way the markets are trading, with a big rally
across the entire yield curve, and rapidly deteriorating US job
and real estate markets, Powell has his work cut out for him.
You’re Leading Two Things, Jack and Shit
It’s left us with the inability to perceive real leadership. Those,
like Von der Leyen and Joe Biden, braying for war shout down
those who courageously call for peace. Strength is defined by
unreservedly “standing up to Putin” while diplomacy is
ridiculed as weak.
This is coming from people who literally hold the fate of
humanity in their hands.
The court stenographers in the media have repeated this
madness so many times, there is a fundamental inability to
perceive…reality. The same people who tell us men can have
babies are also telling us to stay the course in Ukraine.
But Ukraine is over. They can’t win unless the US goes to war
with Russia.
Israel’s war in the Middle East can’t be won either unless we
support them.
And the truth is that if we fight either of these wars, the US
will lose what’s left of itself. It will be open season on us, more
so than it is now.
Earlier this month NATO finally revealed itself as a
dysfunctional alliance desperate to keep the gravy train of
American money flowing to Europe to subsidize their centuriesold war against Russia.
But when you’ve driven the
political discourse in all
idioms to the point where
affirming two genders
brands you a “Nazi!” and/
or “Fascist” how can you
solve anything?
This is the level of rhetoric
coming from NATO.
Ukraine must win. Russia is
beyond evil.
Screeching harpies like
uber-Davos-chick Kaja Kallis
of Estonia will only be
silenced by the sound of
Putin’s boomstick or
Trump’s overwhelming
victory with coattails that
should finish the modern
Democratic Party.
Whether in 2025 or 2030, I
still see Ukraine being
carved up similarly to how I
predicted at the beginning
of Russia’s invasion.
But these people won’t stop.
In the past few months
multiple EU countries and
the UK signed ten-year
mutual defense treaties with Ukraine hoping to create tripwires
for a US Article 5 intervention.
But, if I’m wrong and Europe is simply fang-bearing to build a
replacement for NATO and it’s own future security architecture,
good. They can then shed their socialist skin and their mommy
issues and finally grow a pair.
That would also imply they are going to fix their own problems
rather than go to war and default, which is obviously the plan.
How is Russia supposed to respond to this?
Hopefully with bemused detachment.
Polish PM Donald Tusk has declared that Poland can shoot
down Russian missiles over Ukraine not to defend Poland but
Ukraine, as long as they are traveling vaguely in the direction
of Poland. Poland desperately wants to declare a “no-fly zone”
over L’viv
But what’s really happening is that Ukraine is in the early stages
of being permanently carved up into pieces (See map). And
Ukraine may be the beginning of a complete geographic
restructuring of Europe. Why not? Yugoslavia was broken up
into eight countries.
After Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s world tour to relay
messages to everyone, I suspect this map is close to what is on
offer from Putin.
The big wildcard to this point has been the US election. With
everyone in Europe acting as if on autopilot and no one in the
US worried about Trump getting re-elected, the sense I got was
there would be no shift in foreign policy after November. Now
we know why.
The usual suspects were just rolling through their daily task lists
until the next escalation regrettably demanded drafting another
Western generation to fight a war to make pedophilia secret
again.
We have spoken with very loud voices, however. End these wars.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe Putin or Zelenskyy is the
villain here. The war itself was never a simple tale of good
(Ukraine) resisting evil (Russia). It’s just a meat grinder
designed to exhaust everyone until the US can be convinced to
tip the balance.
If that doesn’t happen those that view of America as either the
villain trying to save its empire or the hero saving the world from
dictators will have to update their model. Because both are true
and not true. It’s Schrödinger’s Empire, just waiting for someone
to fix the future into one outcome.
The single issue we should always vote down is war with a
nuclear power. Macho grandstanding over Ukraine from either
position, empire or crusader, is simply childishness.
But that’s what we have masquerading as leadership today,children
And it’s why, for all his faults, Donald Trump scares the living
daylights out of them. Trump has remade himself from what
I’ve called, “A shitbag property developer from Queens,” to a
real leader of men who, like Megyn Kelly, “I would walk over
broken glass to vote for this November.”
That vainglorious narcissist is still there inside Trump, but with
the right people and the right milieu his weaknesses can be
turned into strengths. His enemies in the media get this as they
begrudgingly admit that none of their smears work.
I mean, even Mark Zuckerberg and Cenk Uygur called his fistpump after getting shot badass.
There is now clarity about who Trump really is, rather than the
cartoon evil he was portrayed as. It has already revealed far
more about their lack of character than I could have ever hoped
for.
Hail to the King, Baby
We’ve all heard the aphorism, “If you take a shot at the King,
you’d better not miss.” Davos, the US IC blob, the GOP and
everyone else who hates him took their shot at Trump and
missed by an inch.
Had that bullet hit we’d be in a completely different world, one
where my February call for a Hillary v. Haley fake election cycle
could have occurred, plunging the US into a death spiral.
But it did miss. And because of that Trump now has a clearer
path to the presidency. Not clear. Just clearer. Because there
will be another attempt. He has the nomination, despite the
effort to remove him.
J.D. Vance, his running mate, is cut from the exact opposite
cloth of Trump. Vance is young, a former marine from the
poorest area of Ohio. This is where my wife is from. I’ve been
to the towns where the walking dead live. Vance’s story is a
powerful one.
Trump, the guy who has no reason to risk everything for his
country and Vance the guy who had nothing to lose. It’s a good
story. It may even be mostly real. If the initial reaction to
Vance from the usual neocon suspects and the European NATO
gravy-trainers is any indication, he is a fine choice to back up
Trump, providing him with a little more insurance against a
second attempt.
They are men who were on opposite sides eight years ago. But
experience matters. Time matters. If we don’t allow for that,
if we judge them from only who they were or who they keep/
kept time with, then we risk missing the nuance of the moment.
Worse, we risk becoming that which we say we despise, people
so out of touch with reality they refuse to see it even after it
doesn’t go away.
Sometimes, bad men rise to the occasion to do the right thing
and, at times, good men fail to.
It’s called being human. Because, good, bad or somewhere in
between, ultimately that’s what we all are, opportunities to
make changes which serve as wisdom through stories unbound
by time.
Much obliged, Fully!
I guess I prefer reading (skimming) him to listening for a hour plus.
Thanks for the transcription.
What did he say?
(Stay tuned?)