Genuine regional italian cooking!

I don't understand what all the concern is about. Everything will be fine, humans. There is nothing to worry about.

Ravioli not being a dumpling is so bogus. What the hell did Italians eat before Marco Polo anyway.

Your video, Fra gile - It must be Italian mail, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Yeah.... "Italian mail"

Italians are known for putting up flags derived from the American flag and the words "Freedom" and "Liberty" on the wall.

That'd be good 'ol 'Merkin workers there. Hard at work. Probably friends of @bobknight33 (maybe his wife? That would explain some of his issues)

Speaking even a little Italian has brought smiles, extra plates, great service, and complete confusion (I'm not caucasian); same with Chinese.
Gotta work on my Spanish!

Advertisers did NOT put this on your screen. Dodge employees did NOT put this on your screen. An Italian shitbox car company did. Try to remember that.

Two interesting articles on the nature of fiat currencies today.

First, Stephanie Kelton has an op-ed in the NYT titled How We Think About the Deficit Is Mostly Wrong.

Second, J.D. Alt notes that Italy is dipping its feet into MMT territory.

Ah. Thank you.

And still. Latin men and Italian men have more in common emotionally than they do Americans.

I am sooo looking forward to the time when American men break free from the box that they have been stuffed into by society.

Women have been at it, breaking free, for decades now and have a ways to go still.

We are all suffering from constructs from our youth. I swear.

Italian men are still manly, even with all those "girly" emotions. Can you imagine an American father and son touching so much?

*doublepromote

Mark's been on the money since about the time he wrote "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea", but there have been two significant developments in Europe that he seemingly didn't see coming: Portugal and the UK.

The Left Alliance in Portugal has basically been giving Schäuble the finger for two years now, with their unilateral end to austerity. How dare they defy the master of coin?! If Schäuble says you need another round of austerity, by God, you better tighten your belts, even if they are already around your neck.

Unsurprisingly, everyone going along with austerity without having a completely export-dependent economy is in deep doo-doo. Meanwhile, those pesky Portuguese actually managed to massively reduce unemployment, despite running a deficit that is entirely too small for their current situation. But that's a different story.

And then there's the UK. There's Corbyn. Tribune of the Plebs. Managed to get the youth voting by offering actual left-wing policies (the "radical youth", as the NYT likes to call them, while claiming that the warmongering, Constitution-shredding, wage-depressing, ecosphere-destroying "centrists" are not the real radicals). Managed to turn quite a lot of UKIP voters around as well. Within striking distance of the Tories, despite the media running 24h a day of drivel like "Jezza's Jihadi Comrades" -- Goebbels would be ashamed of the crudeness of the propaganda campaign by the Sun/Daily Mirror/etc.

The populist left is back, bitches. Corbyn and Sanders are the first steps past the neoliberal warmongers of the Third Way. The Obama experience of a corporatist disguised as a left populist may have given us The Orange One, but it also put another nail into the coffin of neoliberalism.

Antonio Gramsci, founding member of the Italian communist party, who was killed by the fascist regime of Mussolini, gave us the appropriate description of our time:
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

That's your Trump. That's your opioid epidemic. That's the EU's austerity program in Greece, doing twice as much damage as the German occupation in WW2.

I just want to point out that I posted this video because it reminded me of another classic show from many years ago, All in the Family.

As to my personal opinion, we need to get past words, guys and gals. I am a white male of Italian descent. In my life I have been called a lot of names, by people of all ethnic backgrounds. I have been called a wop, a dago, a greasy (wop/dago), a cracker, whitey, and many other things. As a kid, it definitely hurt sometimes, but I came to understand that it could only hurt me if "I" let the names define me as a person. The N word, the C word, whatever word, only can hurt you if you allow it to do so.

Now treating someone different, directly based on their ethnicity, that is something that needs to be addressed. It will ALWAYS need to be addressed because human nature is to shun differences. In the US, we have problems with racism and sexism, but out of all the countries I can think of, we are blended enough that it is actually (slowly) starting to work out. We definitely aren't the worst, even countries in Europe that pride themselves on being accepting of diversity are flipping their shit right now with the influx of so many strange people (refugees). Countries like Japan and states like Hawaii, that is where you need to visit if you want to see some hardcore cultural racism.