WILL ITALY KILL THE EURO, KILL ITSELF, OR BOTH?
Italy has progressed from pre-insurrectional anger to outright revolt. Insouciant markets are betting that this can somehow be contained. It smacks of delusion.
Risk spreads on Italian 10-year bonds are exactly where they were a week ago before the "anti-system" parties of Left and Right swept away the post-War establishment. The euro has shrugged off the vote entirely, rising 2% against the dollar since the earthquake.
Investors are acting as if they think Italy’s "poteri forti" and its eternal mandarin class will organize another technocrat government regardless of what has happened, or that the Five Star Movement’s Luigi Di Maio will cobble together a co-opted centre-Left coalition that scarcely differs from the last one.
Now damage control has begun. Praise is suddenly effusive for the elegant choir-boy leader Di Maio sitting on 33% of the vote. “Five Star does not frighten us, we have lived through worse,” the business lobby Confindustria says.
This is to play down the genesis of the Five Star phenomenon and the party’s avowed intent to push an eclectic anti-capitalist agenda inspired by the neo-Marxist writings of Thomas Piketty. The markets are singing in the dark.
YES, MAXINE NEEDS AN IQ TEST
In his Gridiron Dinner address last Saturday (3/03), President Trump had this to say about the looniest bird on Capitol Hill:
How about that one? Maxine Waters, “He must be impeached!” That’s all she knows how to say, “He must be impeached! Impeached!” … But he’s done nothing wrong. “Doesn’t matter. What has he done wrong? I don’t know! You got to be impeached!”
And then I say – I’ll get in trouble for this – Maxine, she has to immediately take an IQ test.
No doubt. Here’s why:
To See More of Crazy Maxine (Click Below)
HALF-FULL REPORT 03/02/18
Ereyesterday (2/28), the WashTimes headline: Trump vs. California Feud Escalates to All-Out Warfare.
Ridiculously hyperbolic, for Trump has been far more patient with the Sanctuary State’s lawlessness than you or I would be. Yet he is as sick and tired of the Land of Illegals as all of us.
TTPers are not interested in problems, however, but in solutions to them. Since it would take up way too much space here to provide that, consider this a separate adjunct to the HFR today: Should America Secede from California?
Time to put an end to this catastrophic nonsense – for we have no time to lose. FYI, it’s Free Access, so you can forward it to anyone and everyone you want. Okay, it’s been a “there’ll be days like this” week – here we go.
SHOULD AMERICA SECEDE FROM CALIFORNIA?
We constantly hear now about California’s threat to secede from the US. In certain ways, it already has, such as declaring itself a “Sanctuary State” in explicit defiance of the Federal Government.
What is needed is to ask, why shouldn’t it be the other way around? Why shouldn’t the rest of America kick California out of the United States?
What was the Golden State has become a Third World Poverty Pit sprinkled with gated and walled enclaves of the fantastically wealthy 1% -- just like every corrupt kleptocracy in Africa. California has become the poster child for the catastrophic destructiveness of Politically Correct Progressivism.
Yesterday on March 1st, the headline on Fox News was: California Has Worst Quality of Life in US, Study Shows. That same day, the Los Angeles Times headline was: How Can a Place [Downtown Los Angeles] with 58,000 Homeless Continue to Function?
This state of disastrous affairs, the ruination of what was an American Paradise, is the complete and total creation of California Democrats, wielding monopoly power in the state government at Sacramento and the largest municipalities of LA and San Francisco.
Thanks to them, California has become an AINO State – American in Name Only – run by Hate America Marxists and flooded by them with illegal aliens illegally voting to keep them in perpetual power guaranteed with perpetual welfare paid for by exploited taxpayers.
There is a solution to all this: the rest of America stops putting up with it. We tell California to get the hell out of our country.
How do we do that? By calling California’s bluff to secede. We move to secede from them first. The strategy to do so requires three key steps.
THE HOLY LAND IS CALLING YOU
All your life you’ve promised yourself to go to the Holy Land – to see and experience where the two religious foundations of Western Civilization, Judaism and Christianity, were created.
Time is a funny thing. The older you get, the faster it passes by. We dream of doing what we want “someday,” and somehow someday never comes. Then one day, there are no more somedays.
You know what the easiest thing to do is? To figure out an excuse to put something off. Everyone is a born genius at it. You’d be amazed at your creativity in coming up with incredibly clever and persuasive reasons why something is preventing you from making a life dream coming true.
This April, you can be with your fellow TTPers to experience the Holy Land in the way you’ve always dreamed of. I know them all, they are wonderful people, we are going to have a gloriously fun time together.
To be one of them, just click here – The Hidden Holy Land – enter your email, and you’ll get all the info you need to be with us.
The Holy Land is calling you. Use your ingenuity to answer. Life is short. Someday is now.
WOLVES, SHEEP, AND SHEEPDOGS
Scene from Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper”
There is a disturbing cycle of violence that occurs when a wolf gets loose among a flock of domesticated sheep. The wolf kills and maims as many sheep as possible as fast as possible — far more than it needs to eat.This “surplus killing” is inflicted only on domesticated animals and is partly responsible for wolves’ reputation as bloodthirsty killers. Such killing sprees are often misinterpreted as killing for sport, but they really represent a wolf just being a wolf. “Surplus killing” is not caused by the wolf but by the behavior of the prey.
In the natural order of things, the taking of prey by a predator is a risky business and wolves often must work hard to cull a single animal from a flock just to survive. But when offered domesticated sheep, who’ve been bred into a state of docile helplessness, no such deterrence exists.
I am struck by how similar our society has become. Wolves are out there whether we like it or not. And wolves will be wolves. The problem is in how much like sheep we have become.
We clamor for yet more gun control, expanded “safe zones” and politically correct appeasement measures that serve only to embolden the wolves. These responses are useless in preventing the next attack and, in fact, only reinforce the vulnerability that virtually guarantees an escalation in the cycle of violence.
WE NEED A WALL THAT CAN STOP A TIDAL WAVE
Harden your hearts.
According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 68 million people around the world are or at risk of becoming refugees.
The migration of a few million people has already turned the European Union inside out and motivated the election of an America-first presidency. What we have seen so far, though, is nothing compared to what is to come.
The problems of too many Third World countries are physically too large for the West to remedy: The sheer numbers of people in distress soon will exceed the total population of the industrial world.
President Trump's reported bleephole comments about certain countries as sources of prospective immigrants may sound callous. He simply is ahead of the curve.
THE NEUROLOGICAL DYSFUNCTION OF THE LEFT
The lovely and courageous Dana Loesch was absolutely correct when she commented that the Left loves mass shootings – not the tragedy aspect, but the ratings gold, of which they leap to take advantage.
Before the bodies are removed from the site, the Left begins politicizing the event. The massacre in Florida was no exception.
Ms. Loesch, a representative of the NRA, was also correct to point out that the Left media who are so obsessed with using the Florida catastrophe for their own ends never pay a moment of attention to the thousands of grieving mothers of the dead in Chicago. Not one bit.
When someone points to this fact, he is generally called a racist. It is racist to point out that more people were shot and killed in Chicago this month (31), four times as many in 2018 so far (67) than died at that Florida high school (17). Go figure.
The purveyors of progressivism’s hatred of the president has made them all neurologically dysfunctional. So much so it is turning them into criminals.
WILL THE MEDIA EVER STOP SELLING EMOTION RATHER THAN ACCURACY?
Q: Which is the hunting rifle and which is the assault weapon? A: Both are both, the only difference is cosmetic
Fuzzy and fact-free thinking are too kind as definitions for much of what has passed as public policy analysis this past week. The discussions regarding the Parkland school shooting, the Russian political investigation, and the immigration debate triply illustrate the problem.
The FBI, the local sheriff’s office, the local school officials and the local mental health officials all had been made aware that the school shooter was likely to do exactly what he did.
The people in these government agencies failed to do their jobs. Rather than discuss what punishment should be handed out to each of those who failed in their responsibilities, most of the media’s and others’ attention was incoherently directed at attacking the NRA and “assault weapons.”
The so-called “assault weapons” normally are painted black and have a pistol grip as part of their design but are no more or less lethal than any other semiautomatic rifles — which have been standard hunting firearms for decades.
Banning “assault weapons,” as has been shown by past bans, is likely to do nothing to prevent mass shootings. Putting government officials in jail for not fulfilling their responsibilities is likely to be far more effective.
WHY CAN’T A WOMAN BE LESS LIKE A MAN
Okay, then let’s ask, “Why Can’t A Woman Be Less Like A Man?” To answer, consider:
Two conflicting strains of contemporary obsession collided fatally in Parkland, Florida, two weeks ago, when an unstable teenage boy brought a rifle to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 students.
The first is guns and what, if anything, should be done about them in a country whose constitution guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.
The second is the concept of “toxic masculinity,” the current bugbear of the female social-justice warriors whose brand of “feminism” is essentially misandry writ large.
The concept is an appalling combination of fear, ignorance, misapplied compassion, prescription drugs, and social mores—and a clear and present danger to American society that we must sort out, fast.