In Search of the Perfect Investment

My favorite news today. From Business Insider:

Italy banned short selling of the world’s oldest bank. Consob, Italy’s Securities and Exchange Commission, says it has implemented a short-selling ban on shares of Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank. The ban, which will be in effect until at least October 5, comes after shares have tumbled 99% since the 2008 financial crisis.

Talk about closing the barn door after the horse has bolted!

Hillary’s server: There’s got to be a reason why Hillary put an email server in her home. She didn’t trust her own State Department? She didn’t want them reading her private love notes to Bill? She didn’t want them to see what she was buying from Amazon? All those pricey handbags?

Whichever, it smacks of arrogance, stupidity, unthinking and horrendous entitlement. All of which I could forgive — except for the lies. She simply lied and lied about her server and what was, or was not on it.

You can get a full feeling for my utter disgust for Hillary’s lies by watching the beginning of last night’s Daily Show. The host Trevor Noah contrasts, with video clips, what Hillary said and what the FBI director said. It’s black and white. She lied.

Click here. Trevor Noah likened her to VW scandal..”We just learned that, just like VW, there’s a whole bunch of sh*t she’s been hiding from us.”

Note the black smoke pouring from the exhaust.

But not just Hillary. Noah talks about Donald’s latest nuttiness — his embrace of mass-murderer Saddam Hussein. Watch the full clip of last night’s show.

Donald has gone nuts. He’s into burbling, fear and nonsense. He usually gives unscripted speeches, with only the skimpiest notes for help. You get the impression the campaign trail has now gotten to him and he’s become very, very tired. Here’s Donald pointing to a plane in the sky and saying “that could be a Mexican plane ready to attack.” A what?

For the Mexican planes coming to get us, click here.

Sophie’s Choice is the title of a 1979 novel by William Styron, about a Polish woman in a Nazi concentration camp who is forced to decide which of her two children will live and which will die. 

It’s gruesome. So is our choice between Hillary and Donald.

I’m depressed this morning. What is happening to my beloved country?

The New York sent a reporter out to find what where support for Trump and where all the voter anger is coming from. Here’s a paragraph:

Where is all this anger coming from? It’s viral, and Trump is Typhoid Mary. Intellectually and emotionally weakened by years of steadily degraded public discourse, we are now two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two subcountries reason differently; they draw upon non-intersecting data sets and access entirely different mythological systems. You and I approach a castle. One of us has watched only “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the other only “Game of Thrones.” What is the meaning, to the collective “we,” of yon castle? We have no common basis from which to discuss it. You, the other knight, strike me as bafflingly ignorant, a little unmoored. In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional. (As a proud knight of LeftLand, I was interested to find that, in RightLand, Vince Foster has still been murdered, Dick Morris is a reliable source, kids are brainwashed “way to the left” by going to college, and Obama may yet be Muslim. I expect that my interviewees found some of my core beliefs equally jaw-dropping.)

You can read the rest of the New Yorker’s piece — Who are all these Trumpo supporters? — here.

Harry Newton, who notes with pleasure: the sun is shining, the sky is blue, the market is up a little and FBI Director Comey is fumbling around in front of Congress trying to explain what went on with Hillary, her server and her lies. I’m playing tennis this afternoon. I’ll feel better.