Free Republic

“. . . this time the story has escaped the narrative guardrails and some real reckoning looms.” —Jeff Childers Unwittingly, that New York Times headline is a wondrous case of the self-solving mystery. You come here to understand the many social and political mysteries of the day. I will attempt to unravel this hairball.Most obviously, the suspect, now dead, in Wednesday’s Minneapolis school shooting was not a “her.” He was a him, a 23-year-old male, Robert Westman, who had been pretending to be a female for some years since undergoing puberty, with the encouragement of his parents and the cultural...

The European Central Bank has opened the door to emergency support for the Spanish and Italian bond markets, setting off a blistering rally on bourses across the world. Picking codewords instantly understood by traders, Mr Draghi said the violent spike in bond yields in recent days was hampering "the functioning of the monetary policy transmission channels" - the exact expression used to jusfify each of the ECB's previous market interventions. Yields on Spanish two-year debt plunged 72 basis points to 5.47pc in barely an hour, with comparable moves on Italian debt - easing the pressure before a string of debt...