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Greece has sucked the oxygen out of the financial news at owing $270 billion for this country of 11 million people and now wants to stick it to those who became the “other peoples’ money”.  PR also made news when its governor said that it could not pay back its $72 billion debt and now wants US laws changed so as to be able to go bankrupt (and also stick it to those who became the “other peoples’ money”.

And then there is China – no, not quite the debt that is the topic.  It is their absolute meltdown of their stock exchanges over the last 3 weeks or so: $3.2 Trillion of value just vanished.  We Groksters had a number of emails on the techie news of the day (United Air Lines, Wall St Journal, NY Stock Exchange) but also mentioned China.  My 2 cents:

China has been a ticking time bomb for a while, financially.  Folks for a few years, have thought that Commies have been fudging their economic numbers and their exchanges have lost $3.2 Trillion over the last month or so.  Now, the Chinese govt can’t stem the flood of what Instapundit calls a “preference cascade” – investors finally got sick of putting up with the nonsense and started pulling out as some of the real data’s results starting showing up.

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Huh (reformatted, emphasis mine)?

Fidel Castro hails Alexis Tsipras’s ‘brilliant political victory’

ATHENS: Former Cuban president Fidel Castro congratulated Greek Prime Minister Alexis ­Tsipras for his “brilliant political victory” in the country’s ­referendum, which saw voters ­deliver a resounding “no” to more austerity measures…

…Dr Castro wrote to Mr Tsipras saying he had “closely followed this victory” on Venezuelan TV station Tele Sur, said a statement from Mr Tsipras’s office.The letter from the 88-year-old described Greece as a country well-known to Cubans for its ­history and famed contributions to “the most complex of all human activities, art and political science”.  Dr Castro wrote that Greece had “the admiration of the Latin American and Carribean peoples” for the way in which it “defends its identity and its culture against external aggression”.

Really?  Only in a Socialist / Communist world of delusion can one Commie tell another one that.  OK, buckos, riddle me this:

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Snarky title aside, here is yet another example where someone demands additional Government action because someone made a rather dumb decision to do something rather dangerous, thinking he would not be in line for a Darwin Award. No, the site doesn’t list Devon Staples yet (it used to be MUCH more up to date in the past but rarely much lately) but I will not be surprised if soon.  This is the 22 year old Calais, Maine that decided he could use a mortar based firework as a helmet – and lit it even as his buddies were telling him with words to the effect “dude, that might not be such a great idea”.  It is also my understanding that liquid libations containing ethyl alcohol added to his refusal to listen (“hey, wanna hold my beer – watch this!” is a common sentence that precedes a dismal outcome). They said “No!”, he beamed broadly, and lit it off.  And died instantly.

Now, I do feel bad for his friends and family.  I, however, do have to take issue with this (reformatted, emphasis mine):

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• Hillary Clinton: And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
• Michelle Obama: “That’s why we start with kids, right? We can affect who they will be forever.”, “He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism…Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed”

And add in the militant gay activists who are demanding total affirmation and celebration – or you will be destroyed.  Doubt me?  From taking away tax exemptions from churches that won’t give into gay demands, the destruction of businesses, reputations, and careers, we see this mob not just willing to win but have a scorched earth policy of General Sherman.  And now we can add kicking anyone out of the military who violates their secular religion (and with no small amount of attitude):

“What truly troubles these cretinous sentinels of vile prejudice and hate-mongering bigotry is the fact that this ruling will go down historically as the watershed moment which may indeed shatter the spine of the religious right in the U.S. military, whose prior viselike grip over the chaplaincy has formed the key obstacle to social progress within the Armed Forces. Cry us a river!

Translation:

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we’d rather see the shards of the current Establishment on the floor than continue to see the shards of the broken promises and actions that the Republican Party is actually delivering.

I do have to say that there are a lot of Republicans not liking that Donald Trump has crashed their party of “The Party”. It has been hilarious, as well as very telling, to watch and listen to the howls of indignation of the Establishment Republicans and their coterie of consultants and commentariats invoke Reagan’s 11th Commandment even as they violate it themselves (consistency?).  Frankly, for a lot of them, this is beginning to become their Oz moment – the pulling away of the smoke and mirrors by a guy who just doesn’t give a crap what they think.  And as I, and a lot of others are saying, they hate the idea that their nuanced and calibrated politicalese messages, angles, and strategies are going down in flames more flamboyantly than the Hindenburg.

And I believe that they hate the idea that many of the Right body politic are nodding their heads in agreement when Trump says what he does – because these other chuckleheads won’t.  And when they lay in their broadsides, thinking that their screeds will shame him off the stage and put a sock in it, Trump is sidestepping and saying even more that shows the hypocriticalness.  Tit, tat, BOOM!

There is also the insider-outsider aspect to this – and Trump is playing this well (almost like he had a deck of marked cards) and Conservative Review has a nice take on it (emphasis mine):

…There is an answer to the “why” however.  An answer that speaks directly to both why Trump’s candidacy resonates – and the visceral nature of the opposition to him in some of these conservative quarters.

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Obama said,  “I think it is important for us to recognize the threat of violent extremism is not restricted to any one community. Here in the United States, we’ve all kinds of home grown terrorism. And tragically, recent history reminds how even a single individual can inflict horrendous harm on Americans. So our efforts to counter violent extremism must not target any one community, because of the patriotic Muslim Americans who are partners in keeping our country safe.”

He talks about religious freedom but his actions have defied his words when it comes to the US majority religion, Christianity? And once again we see him simply brush aside the attacks that Muslims have inflicted on American soil; it almost like he wants to whitewash history.  In fact, there are quite a few Muslim attacks going back a few decades:

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Paul Moreno over at American Spectator has a post whose title didn’t do all that much for me but the subtitle did:   Progressives succeeded where the Confederates failed.  While to most of the population, the Civil War was about slavery, it really was about differing interpretations of the Constitution.  And the desire to take those differing interpretations from a war of ideology and economics to a war of weapons.

The real battle, however, never stopped as the foreign political philosophy called Progressivism (really, just a rebranding from Socialism) moved from Europe to America and took over the role that the South had had in trying to subvert and make irrelevant our foundation as a nation.  Here are the ‘graphs that caught my eye (emphasis mine):

..The Civil War ended slavery and seemed to vindicate the principles of the Declaration, as Lincoln so ably articulated them in the Gettysburg Address. But it was only a few decades before a new generation, the “progressives,” renewed the war on the Declaration and succeeded where the Confederates failed. The progressives aspired to give America a European-style welfare state, and they knew that the principles of natural rights found in the Declaration and the Constitution stood in their way.

They also realized that religious beliefs and strong family bonds were impediments as well.  Ask yourself:

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While I have a few folks that I am watching (and quite partial to one), I will have to say that I have not decided on The One for my expensive vote.  In the meantime, as these silly seasons get really boring, I am glad to see that the “anti-candidate” Donald Trump is just letting go.  What the rest of the field seems to not recognize is that there is a lot of anger in the right side of the Party.  They / me DO see our traditional country disappearing under the shoving that both the Hard Left Progressives are giving – and the Establishment / Ruling / Political class is giving it mere lip-service at best.  The latter couch their words in political correctness, triangulated with focus groups and hemmed in by that identity group vs another.

Translation: nuanced to the hilt to the point of being gibberish now and unaccountable later. 

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Yes, I am the guy who called out the reporterette from the Daily Beast during the media panel during the 603 Alliance Grassroots Summit for not reporting the stories that really matter – just tell us the truth, unvarnished and without bias. Not the gotcha questions or the constant ambushes of politicians.  It’s a bit different, though, (reformatted,emphasis mine):

The short-lived senator from Massachusetts wants the world to know about his new weight-loss scheme via some very strange supplements. Last night, shirtless pictures of former Senator Scott Brown appeared in my inbox.

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Steve’s post on the ludicrous position that the Press allowed themselves to be in (literally, in) by the Hillary campaign brought this thought to mind:

What, none of these dunces have an EDC setup that has sharp knife?  Or are they really that dull?

That would be Every Day Carry – stuff that you think you might need “just in case” when out of the house.  I carry a SOG jackknife – sharp sucker; would have cut that rope (probably just thin clothesline rope) in a single swipe.  But that’s beside the point.  A better question is:

Really, you lapdogs ALLOWED yourselves to look this stupid?  The Scoobie van episode wasn’t enough debasement for you?

This guy will be the butt of jokes and derision for years.  So why did they allow it to happen?

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I just read this piece by Myron Magnet at National Review – a short history of why self-government was so important to our Founders.  What struck me after reading is how fragile our Liberty is even with the SO high of an expense with which it has been bought through the centuries.  Yes, we consider it our birthright – but even with payments already, it demands even more.  These are the most salient ‘graphs from the post (emphasis mine):

The Founders believed that the purpose of government was to protect life, liberty, and property from what they called the depravity of human nature— from man’s innate capacity to do the kinds of violence that slave-owners, to take just one example, did every day. But government, they recognized, is a double-edged sword. You arm officials with the power to protect you; but those officials have the same fallen human nature as everyone else, so who is to say that they won’t use that power to oppress you, as European governments had oppressed the colonists’ forebears? From Pharaoh to Nero to the Stuart kings, history teems with examples of such despotic governments. Even the democratic republic the Founders created had to be run by imperfect men, and thus even it could turn into what Richard Henry Lee called an elective despotism. So the second great Founding idea is this: The mere fact that you elect representatives to govern you is no sure-fire guarantee of liberty. Or, as Madison saw it in Federalist No. 10: Taxation with representation can be tyranny.

Even if it is done with the “best of intentions” – elective despotism is still tyranny if it oversteps it bounds in “helping people” by taking away others’ freedoms.

This danger worried the Founders constantly,

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