Author: VD

Living beyond your means

This is an extreme example of the cash-out game, but it shouldn’t be hard to understand why the US economy is so completely hopeless as a result:

It’s obvious from looking through the property records that many borrowers supplemented their lifestyles with regular trips to the home ATM machine. The regularity and the size of these withdrawals is astonishing. It also explains much about why houses are so popular in California. If owning real estate gives you the opportunity to obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing absolutely nothing, ownership will be highly desired; in fact, it becomes the primary reason people buy homes. Californian’s live in their own personal ATM machines.

The owners of today’s featured property paid $441,000 on 4/25/1991. I don’t have their original mortgage information, but it is likely that they put 20% down ($88,200) and borrowed $352,800.

* On 5/27/1997 they obtained a stand-alone second for $50,000.
* On 12/7/1998 they refinanced their first mortgage for $387,500.
* On 3/26/1999 they got a $47,500 stand-alone second.
* On 12/28/2000 they refinanced with a $441,000 first mortgage and crossed the threshold of borrowing more than they paid.
* On 3/31/2004 they refinanced with a $536,250 first mortgage.
* On 10/5/2004 they obtained a $628,000 first mortgage.
* On 11/30/2005 they refinanced with a $686,250 Option ARM with a 1.5% teaser rate.
* On 5/3/2007 they obtained a second mortgage for $15,764.
* On 7/3/2007, after witnessing the above patter of serial refinancing, World Savings Bank brilliantly loaned them $788,000 in an Option ARM.

Total property debt is $788,000 plus negative amortization and missed payments. Total mortgage equity withdrawal is $435,200 including their down payment. Total squatting time was minimal as the bank moved quickly to evict these squatters.

The important thing to understand from this is that there is no such thing as “home ownership” with a mortgage. It’s just renting from a bank. The problem is that debt is intrinsically inflationary, (inflationistas take note regarding the implications of this in a debt-deleveraging environment), so the willingness of others to take on debt severely harms the ability of more prudent individuals to make purchases without debt.

On a related note, watch for panic over the UNEXPECTED collapse in home sales next week. Now that the federal credits have expired, Texas monthly home sales have fallen 25% to the lowest July level since 1997.

The power of hypergamy

Roissy moonlights as a romance advisor:

She wants to know whether to stay with her doting, all-around niceguy boyfriend or to dump him to take one more stab at trading up in the hothouse dating market of Manhattan.

(rubbing hands)

She’s come to the right place!

Reading between the lines what we have here is a girl who likes, perhaps loves, her boyfriend, but has recently been propositioned for a date by a higher status man (the CTO of [major bank]). Her sexual market options suddenly thrown into stark relief, her hypergamous instinct is kicking in and she is contemplating, via the sounding board provided by the residents of the stately countryside Chateau, whether her boyfriend is really all that she thinks he is, and whether her ego isn’t as big as it deserves to be.

Gentlemen, behold the awesome power of female hypergamy. You can be the best boyfriend in the world, (and judging by her description of him, he sounds like a stand-up guy with plenty of positive traits), but if a higher ranking man comes along and shows some interest in your girlfriend (or wife!), you can bet your last penny she will be unable to resist pondering the opportunity to trade up and the concomitant reevaluation of her own market worth that goes along with attention from higher status suitors.

I have to admit, this is a remarkable lesson in the reality of female hypergamy for the betas, deltas, and gammas of the world. This cold and rational calculation is how women who are capable of seeing beyond tomorrow evaluate long term relationships; their emotional, logic-free romantic front that they present doesn’t run all the way down or even particularly deep.

Roissy’s advice to her is sound, if slightly cruel. If she gives into temptation and breaks up with her boyfriend in order to grab for the brass ring of a CTO – stifles laughter at the female obsession with corporate titles – she’s going to be pumped and dumped in short order. And, of course, I always recommend that men steer clear of women who are drawn to the big city in search of alphasadventure.

UPDATE – Apparently the girl is real but the email is not, or something like that. Sounds like bitter gamma revenge, but who knows. For what it’s worth….

Ahead of schedule

And here I thought the first media references to Great Depression 2.0 wouldn’t occur until the fourth quarter:

The fake “recovery” was nice while it lasted, says famous apocalyptic forecaster Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute. But now the fun’s over, and we’re headed for what Celente describes as the “Greatest Depression.” Specifically, the always startling Celente says the country is headed for rising unemployment, poverty, and violent class warfare as the government efforts to keep the economy going begin to fail.

The interesting thing isn’t that Celente is saying this. He’s been warning about this for a while. The interesting thing is that someone like Henry Blodgett is finally paying attention to him.

Cop worship

Instapundit rightly slaps down a reader who wants to give carte blanche to cops:

If there is one thing about your political views that drives me nuts, it’s your seeming animosity towards law enforcement. I understand that much of what you highlight are honest to God abuses of power, some of a very serious nature. (Some are just bad mistakes.) But I think you ignore one salient fact – cops basically deal with dangerous assholes. You and I don’t, typically, deal with such people on a regular basis, so we have to be careful how we judge policemen. Maybe the officer was wrong to mention rape, but how many self-righteous (and guilty) jerks whip out their cell phones and start giving cops shit? A lot, I’ll bet. They can’t afford to take a kumbaya approach to dealing with people, you know? Perhaps you should cut them some slack.

Well, I’m happy to cut people slack in cases of, say, mistaken self-defense where it’s an honest mistake. But the things I flag are abuses of power, pure and simple. We don’t have titles of nobility in this country, and when you have a badge and a gun you should behave better than the average schmuck, rather than having a license to be a jerk. I’m always surprised that people find this controversial.

The reader is absolutely wrong. Police should be given absolutely NO slack whatsoever. If they are going to enforce the law effectively, then they must be more law-abiding than the average citizen. Instead, they are little more than a licensed gang of armed criminals whose lawless behavior is overlooked because it is in the interest of the state. Fortunately, there are some law enforcement officers who are capable of rising above their bureaucratic profession, but it is not hard to observe that most police have more in common with the “dangerous assholes” of the criminal minority than they do with the non-criminal majority of the population.

The fact that police forces tend to be made up of corrupt and undisciplined individuals has been seen throughout history. Soldiers are seldom considered to be society’s elite, but even inexperienced second-line military units make police units look like a collection of gutter riff-raff in comparison. In strategy games like ASL, for example, police units are usually represented by conscripts, which tells you all that you need to know about their professionalism, effectiveness, and morale.

I don’t know if bad men are drawn to the job or the strains of the job makes good men bad. But regardless, the ethic of “badge makes right” is a legal, moral, and ethical non-starter.

The affirmative-action president

Jennifer Rubin is among those who have finally figured out that Soebarkah is nowhere near as intelligent as advertised:

To be blunt, Obama suffers from a lifetime of others excessively praising his intellect. It insulates him from ideas and facts that conflict with his pre-existing liberal rubric (so “every economist” believed his stimulus would work). It leaves him unprepared to engage in real debate with informed opponents (e.g. the health-care summit). It skews his understanding of how geopolitics works, as he imagines that his own wonderfulness can sway adversaries and override nations’ fundamental interests (the Middle East)…. The image of himself clashes with the results he achieves and the reaction he inspires. No wonder he’s so prickly. You’d be, too, if everyone your entire life had told you that you were swell but now, when the chips are down and the spotlight is on, you are failing so badly in your job.

I figured out during the campaign that while Soebarkah is more intelligent than the average, he is far less intelligent than his academic background would normally lead one to believe. He’s simply not as smart as his underlings or most of his peers in the political elite and he knows it, which is why he accepts the de facto leadership of Reid and Pelosi. This doesn’t make him uniquely cretinous among the Washington set; John Kerry has a similar IQ in the 115 to 120 range. But because people expect more from a president, I have little doubt that by the time Soebarkah’s political career is done, most likely after his first term, the national consensus will be that he was one of the dumbest presidents with whom the electorate has ever inflicted itself.

Countermigration

It begins as France starts the expulsions:

France expelled nearly 100 Gypsies, or Roma, to their native Romania on Thursday as part of a very public effort by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to dismantle Roma camps and sweep them out of the country, the Immigration Ministry said.

This is why I have never bought into the notion that the European nations are going to disappear due to their demographic issues. They are reacting much more strongly to a much lower percentage of the population than Americans have with Hispanics because they have no “melting pot” mythology. Notice that with the economic contraction, the assumption that Turkey would join the EU has faded away. Demographics are destiny, but they do not always proceed in a clean and linear fashion.

Illustrating MPAI

China Mieville kindly demonstrates that intelligent, educated, and talented writers can most definitely be idiots:

To designers across the world: there’s a hot need for someone(s) to design & disseminate a symbol & slogan to unify & express, on t-shirts, websites, blogs, badges & buttons, support for the right of Muslims to gather in lower Manhattan, & indeed anythefuckwhere else. & with it to proclaim disgust at & condemnation of this scary hatemongering horseshit.

Racism out of Manhattan.

Tell you what, you silly English twit. Limit your historically ignorant, politically correct, socialist sensitivity concerns to Londonistan and the rest of your island. I was under the impression that the English already have all the mosques in their backyard that they want, but if you, China Mieville, happen to desire a congregations of Muslims at the University of Warwick, then by all means feel free to build them a mosque there. You see, it’s not my business what you want in your backyard.

Of course, what sort of buildings and what sort of people Americans happen to want in their backyards IS NOT YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS AND IT HASN’T BEEN SINCE 1776!

Although it pains me to have to point this out, I will restate the obvious for the benefit of clueless science fiction writers and anyone else whose ignorance of religion is near complete. A religion is not a race and opposition to the symbolism of the 9/11 Mosque has nothing to do with racism. For crying out loud, even the name of the group that wants to build it is a provocation that refers to the Muslim conquest of Spain! This is a not a freedom-of-religion test, but rather a semiotic test and Mieville has failed it badly.

Unsurprisingly, the irritating nature of Mieville’s foreign nannynagging somehow managed to escape one of John Scalzi’s subs. This is a fine example of why guest bloggers are usually a bad idea.

Correcting the gay defect

It would appear that none of the homosexual activists ever thought through the logical ramifications of the so-called “gay gene”:

A hormonal treatment to prevent ambiguous genitalia can now be offered to women who may be carrying such infants. It’s not without health risks, but to its critics those are of small consequence compared with this notable side effect: The treatment might reduce the likelihood that a female with the condition will be homosexual. Further, it seems to increase the chances that she will have what are considered more feminine behavioral traits. That such a treatment would ever be considered, even to prevent genital abnormalities, has outraged gay and lesbian groups, troubled some doctors and fueled bioethicists’ debate about the nature of human sexuality.

First, the fact that any gay groups would be “outraged” over a medical treatment that is intended to prevent serious physical abnormalities shows that their priorities are too solipsistic to be taken seriously. Logic has always dictated that if there was a material cause for orientational challenges, there would always be at least the potential for medical science to successfully address that cause and correct for the defective orientation.

The fact that some unfortunates are born without limbs and manage to live reasonably happy lives despite their birth defect does not make limblessness either normal or desirable, just as the idea that someone has been born orientationally-challenged does not mean that anyone else has to be born that way in the future. I am not entirely convinced that all orientational challenges are birth defects; like most things homosexuality is likely a combination of nature and nurture. But even if we set all moral and religious tradition aside, (the wisdom of which is of course debatable), there can still be no question that to the extent nature is responsible, homosexuality is a birth defect from every relevant secular, material, and sociological perspective. Defective is not synonymous with bad. Blind people aren’t bad and yet scientists seek to give them sight. Deaf people aren’t bad and yet scientists seek to help them hear. So, there is no need to condemn gays in any way in order for scientists to help them achieve sexual normality.

If you are determined to find something to worry about, don’t fret about the possibility that parents will one day be able to select anti-gay therapy for their unborn children. In light of the AGW/CC shenigans, I would be more concerned about the nascent totalitarians in the Gaian movement forcibly mandating pro-gay therapy in the interests of population control. There’s really no rational reason for this to become a political issue anyhow, not in a country where unborn children can be murdered at will by their mothers. It would be impossible to convincingly argue that a parent has the legal right to kill a child but not therapeutically de-homo one.

You might want to check that

The claims of average temperatures rising don’t mean a whole lot when the thermometers don’t work:

US Government admits satellite temperature readings “degraded.” All data taken offline in shock move. Global warming temperatures may be 10 to 15 degrees too high. The fault was first detected after a tip off from an anonymous member of the public to climate skeptic blog, Climate Change Fraud

Caught in the center of the controversy is the beleaguered taxpayer funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s Program Coordinator, Chuck Pistis has now confirmed that the fast spreading story on the respected climate skeptic blog is true….Great Lakes users of the satellite service were the first to blow the whistle on the wildly distorted readings that showed a multitude of impossibly high temperatures. NOAA admits that the machine-generated readings are not continuously monitored so that absurdly high false temperatures could have become hidden amidst the bulk of automated readings.

In one example swiftly taken down by NOAA after my first article, readings for June and July 2010 for Lake Michigan showed crazy temperatures off the scale ranging in the low to mid hundreds – with some parts of the Wisconsin area apparently reaching 612 F. With an increasing number of further errors now coming to light the discredited NOAA removed the entire set from public view.

I found this level of incompetence a little hard to credit, so I checked the link. Sure enough, here was the message: “NOTICE (8/11/2010): Due to degradation of a satellite sensor used by this mapping product, some images have exhibited extreme high and low surface temperatures. Please disregard these images as anomalies.”

Needless to say, restructuring the global economy on the basis of conclusions drawn from data of this sort wouldn’t be so much stupid as absolutely and certifiably insane. As for the so-called “scientific consensus”, remember two things. 1) Most people are idiots. 2) All scientists are people. Ergo, it is safe to assume that most scientists are idiots, especially when one takes into account their apparent inability to understand either a) that science depends upon capitalist wealth not government largess, and, b) that the basic laws of supply and demand apply to their profession as well as their academic credentials.

Marriage: the options

The Dark Lord of the Crimson Arts points out what should now be obvious to everyone who is paying attention:

As it is, our society is at a fork in the road. We can go one of two ways if an end to the divorce industrial complex is your goal:

1. Rescind feminism.

Basically, turn back the clock on the so-called “improvements” in divorce litigation. Put divorce lawyers out of business. Custody of children would be split evenly, half the time with mom and half the time with dad, unless solid evidence of extenuating fault could be found, such as pedophilia or physical abuse. End all affirmative action and favoritism, explicit or implicit, for women. This means no more maternal leave or sexual harassment workshops. Return shame to its rightful place as a molder of human behavior.

2. Follow feminism to its logical conclusion.

Completely gut the traditional notion of marriage by legally establishing polygamy and assorted polyamorous relationships as equally valid unions. (Should be easier now that there is legal justification for gay marriage.) Make divorce as easy as buying a gallon of milk. Reform marriage so that it better reflects the evolutionary disposition of people to fall out of love after seven years (or approximately the time the kids are old enough to function without constant parental supervision.) If we are biologically designed by evolution to weary of our partners after seven to ten years, then why is marriage not arranged in such a way that acknowledges this reality?

Obviously, our suffragized society has chosen the latter goal. How’s that working out for everyone? Bankrupt, divorced and stupid is no way to sustain a civilization.