One kiss is all it takes.

​The title comes from a song by Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa, of course, but there is a flip side to it.
In his dark comedy, A Woman of No Importance, Oscar Wilde wrote, “A kiss may ruin a human life.”
Looks to me that the woman wasn’t of no importance at all to Wilde. Women have this influence over men when we’re in the dangerous age, between 18 and 80 more or less. It’s like the great song by Robbie Robertson:
 
“Like a moth to flame
She leads me down”
 
And this line of thinking translates into recent events.
The world of politics is coming unglued this week with Trump’s campaign chairman Manafort convicted on 8 felony counts. None of this really implicates Trump, but the real problem is with Stormy Daniels, the adult movie star, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, and who was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer.
So the prosecutors will multiply it to the monkey square to make it bigger than the Clinton affair with Monica just to try to get Trump impeached. And this could well happen even though I hope it won’t.
In Agatha Christie’s brilliant novel “Murder on the Orient Express”, detective Hercule Poirot says: “there is always price to pay for romance.”
Men don’t seem to really understand that simple fact until it hits them hard. It looks to me that the Donald is now learning it the hard way.
 
Moving on to Europe, the event that shook everyone just to the South of me, was the Morandi bridge collapse in Genoa. Witnesses said the bridge was struck by lightning during a thunderstorm before it crumbled, so maybe sometimes one lighting is all it takes.
The bridge formed an arterial connection between France and Italy, so its collapse is not an insignificant event, plus, of course, 43 people died.
 
As the name suggests, stays are a crucial part of a cable-stayed bridge. They pass directly from the towers to the deck, helping distribute the weight of the bridge evenly across the towers. 
Trust me on this - I’m a civil engineer by training.
The main difference between the cable-stayed bridge and its close cousin, the suspension bridge, is that cable-stayed bridges lack the primary cables that connect towers to one another. They rely only on the cables that pass from tower to road. As result, they need a precise balancing of weight – if they start falling apart, they really fall apart.
And this is what happened in Genoa on August 14th.
Now the Italian government is in full force blaming European Union austerity policy for the lack of funding for the infrastructure maintenance.
And while there are several other factors at play here (bad design, build quality that goes along with corruption), they are totally right saying that.
Austerity is a bad idea, pushed on the south of Europe by Germany, who never really understood what caused the catastrophic hyperinflation that brought Hitler to power in 1933.
The Germans are mentally stuck with the idea that the quantity of money in circulation causes inflation. While this could contribute, it’s not a driving factor at all. The confidence in the government is. Once the people lose it, it all falls apart like the Morandi Bridge. And fast.
It’s interesting how the Germans got out of the hyperinflation episode. They had to back the Deutsch marks with something that people will trust. But there wasn’t enough gold in the country, so they backed the currency by real estate. People have confidence in their homes and buildings in general - you can see them, they’re real. And you need one to live in to survive. And this is how the trust was restored.
And it happened fast – life has to go on, like, right now.
 
A moment of straight thinking is all it took.