Category: Uncategorized

“Potential flaws”

It sounds so much nicer than “massive criminal fraud“

Potential flaws in foreclosure documents are threatening to throw the real estate industry into a full-blown crisis, as Bank of America on Friday became the first bank to stop sales of foreclosed homes in all 50 states. The move, along with another decision on foreclosures by PNC Financial Services Inc., adds to growing concerns that mortgage lenders have been evicting homeowners using flawed court papers.

If Obama isn’t completely insane, he’s going to shut down the recent attempt of the House and Senate to immediately make all of this grand theft housing ex post facto legal. I am no green shoots optimist, but this is much, much worse than even most confirmed economic pessimists had been expecting. If Washington doesn’t break with Wall Street soon and jail the guilty bankers, it won’t be long before they find themselves facing crowds of the size of the Beck rally storming the barricades. Nor is this foreclosure fraud the only blatant chicanery. Consider the decline in commercial bank credit since its peak in December 2008.

Notice the immense and unprecedented $452 billion leap in loans that supposedly took place in the last week of March.  And immediately, the decline continued at much the same rate it had shown before.  Now, here’s how TOTLL would look without this reported one-week borrowing orgy.

As of the latest Fed report, correctly adjusted TOTLL is now to $6.297 trillion, down from $7.294 trillion; that is a $993.6 billion collapse in credit.  13.63% of the commercial bank credit in the country has vanished, even without counting all of the defaulting and foreclosed properties that may not even belong to the banks trying to claim them.   Keep in mind that the most TOTLL had ever previously declined in a two-year period was -0.76% in 1974-75.   Here’s the punchline.

“Here are seven predictions concerning economic-related events I expect to see by December 31, 2010

5. Commercial bank loans and leases (TOTLL) will fall below $6.3 trillion.”

After the March 31 report, I was thinking that I’d have to call shenanigans in defense of that prediction, but given the likely fallout from the Great Foreclosure Fraud of 2010, it’s quite possible that TOTLL will fall below $6.3 trillion despite the “potential flaws” visible in the Fed’s statistical reporting.

UPDATE – Apparently Obama isn’t a complete moron. He has made it clear that he will not permit HR 3808 to go forward and cover the mass foreclosure fraud by the banks preparatory to yet another bailout.

Presidential Memorandum–H.R. 3808

It is necessary to have further deliberations about the possible unintended impact of H.R. 3808, the “Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010,” on consumer protections, including those for mortgages, before the bill can be finalized. Accordingly, I am withholding my approval of this bill. (The Pocket Veto Case, 279 U.S. 655 (1929)).

The authors of this bill no doubt had the best intentions in mind when trying to remove impediments to interstate commerce. My Administration will work with them and other leaders in Congress to explore the best ways to achieve this goal going forward.

To leave no doubt that the bill is being vetoed, in addition to withholding my signature, I am returning H.R. 3808 to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, along with this Memorandum of Disapproval.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,
October 8, 2010.

Interesting that such a firestorm blew up fast enough to force Obama to show his hand in public this way. This is a very serious situation; it’s arguably more serious than when Paulson was threatening Congress with the image of tanks in the streets and martial law.

Media is educated

Just not, you know, about anything more intellectually demanding than the fall season’s hit new [insert type of television show] on [insert television network]. And Instapundit snickered:

ATLAS SHRUGGED, HAYEK WEPT. And the rest of us are kind of snickering. “The reporter covering the tea parties for the New York Times appears to think that ‘the rule of law’ is some sort of exotic term of art invented by right wingers.” Remember, the people who can’t get this stuff right regard the electorate as their intellectual inferiors.

And apparently they don’t know the difference between S corps and C corps either.

An article on Wednesday about the business culture at the Tribune Company after its acquisition by Sam Zell referred incorrectly to federal taxes on an S corporation, which Tribune became after the deal. S corporations pay no federal taxes because shareholders are responsible for all taxes; therefore, taxpayers do not become “essentially silent partners in the deal.”

The problem isn’t that people who work in the media are stupid, although they don’t tend to be brilliant either. From what I’ve observed in nearly two decades of working tangentially with them, they tend to fall in the +1SD to +2SD range. But what makes them look so stupid on such a regular basis is that they are almost uniformly and grossly ignorant. This is direct result of their narrow educations combined with a complete lack of experience of the non-media world.

Like teachers, journalists don’t actually learn anything useful or broadly applicable as part of their professional training. It’s mostly a lot of jargon and industry-specific minutiae that the average individual could pick up within six months on the job; in fact, that’s exactly how the media used to learn to do its job. And since the nature of the job is so fast-paced, they have to learn how to sound informative while making do with very superficial knowledge. That’s why they so often confuse having heard of something with actually knowing something; they actually believe the two concepts are synonymous on a subconscious level.

Of course, the problem has only gotten worse as a generation of media whores have gone into the business with the objective of reading teleprompters on camera. And now that the other networks are following Fox’s lead by hiring journalists on the sole basis of their sex, hair color, and facial features, the downward spiral is approaching its nadir just in time for the industry’s final collapse.

It’s all good.

Mailvox: the difference between pico and nano

One would require the ability to detect interest measured in these units in order to discern my level of interest in what apparently has been an unhappy atheist outing on a television show. Nevertheless, DoCD writes:

I know you don’t write much about popular culture but have you caught any of the general atheist reaction to last night’s episode of Glee? Most of the observant ones are annoyed that their worldview wasn’t fairly and objectively represented and was defined by two prototypical angry atheists, one of whom ended up asking their sister to pray for them by the end of the episode, and another who is angry that he’s the subject of ridicule because of his sexuality and because of his mother’s death.

I watched the episode with my girlfriend — try not to judge — and I think the episode was pretty fair, even though I had to stomach through ridiculous lines of dialogue about the spaghetti monster and Russell’s teapot. I think the “religious side” ultimately won out, but I don’t think the atheists were presented nearly as unfairly as they seem to claim. In fact, most atheists I know arrived at their worldview due to an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one, but seek intellectual arguments to justify their atheism.

I’m not really sure what they expected to see, guest appearances by Dawkins and Hitchens mebbe? A soda cracker being defiled? I suppose the fact that the creator of the show is a former Catholic who still goes to church and is openly gay might be swaying their perceptions, but the truth is that I just don’t get what they’re whining about.

Now, I have seen part of one episode of a show in which twenty-somethings attempting to look like high school students dressed up like Lady Gaga in order to perform an improbably professional cover of an exceedingly banal pop song. It struck me as MTV meets the Donny and Marie show; no doubt it will be popular with the vacuous set. Needless to say, it takes considerably more than that to draw my attention away from my technotopian existence, so no, I was not aware of this dramatic little – if you will excuse it – tempest in Mr. Russell’s teapot. But KE enlightened me when he sent subsequent email.

“My wife revealed to me that the TV show Glee had an episode dealing with atheism this week, where the two characters were (this is what made me laugh since the stereotype fit perfectly), a self-righteous, uncaring, feminist coach and a flamboyant, gay kid.”

Because the New Atheists are explicitly working off the lavender model as per Richard Dawkins’s strategery, it shouldn’t be surprising that they are upset that they are not being given the conventional Saint Gay treatment on television, where every stand-in for the community is happy, healthy, handsome, popular, and behaves in a manner almost exactly opposite to the way the vast majority of the represented community is known to behave.

Anyhow, there is little of interest on the religion/atheism front these days; as I expected, the New Atheists are already a spent intellectual force. The only real point of interest in that area for me at the moment is to learn how heavily Sam Harris leaned on Marc Hauser’s fraudulent morality research in what is sure to be a philosophical trainwreck of a book on science-based morality. While I am well-disposed to skeptics and contrarians in general, it is unfortunate that Sam hasn’t yet learned that taking contrary positions to established and easily verifiable facts instead of consensus opinion founded on false assumptions is a sure means of rendering your arguments not only ridiculous, but ineffectual. So, without further ado, I shall return with some relief to Cicero, Divine Right, and the technotopia.

Welcome home, Randy!

I was most pleased to learn about the trade between the Patriots and the Vikings yesterday. Moss is still an elite receiver and the Vikings should never have traded him. Had they kept him and pursued Drew Brees, as I had wanted, I think they would have had more success over the last five years.

This bodes very well for the latter half of the season; between Moss, Rice, Harvin, and Peterson, the Vikings have assembled a fearsome collection of offensive talent to match their excellent defense. It should be enough to keep our resident divaquarterback both interested and happy; everyone has forgotten that the Vikings didn’t begin particularly well in 2009 either despite starting off 3-0. The defending Super Bowl champion Saints and the Miami Dolphins are considerably more difficult than the Cleveland Browns and the Detroit Lions and both games were quite close.

And the magical moment that set the stage for the 2009 season, the Favre touchdown to Lewis with no time remaining in the third game, was only necessary because the Vikings were trailing a mediocre San Francisco team. So, if I wasn’t feeling that the Vikes were going to walk away with the Super Bowl – as if any true Vikings fan would EVER think that for a second – I wasn’t the least bit worried about their 0-2 start either.

Adding one of the great receivers of all time and a huge fan favorite isn’t going to hurt either. Aside from what it means for the team’s chances, I’m just glad to have Randy back where he belongs. He never should have left.

Notes from Cicero

For some time now, I have been intending to make notes on the various bits and pieces I pick up while reading and post them here for whatever edification they might happen to offer you. And I very much recommend Mahan’s two-volume Life of Nelson; unfortunately I failed to mark any of the salient points it contained while I was reading it. But here are two little things that caught my attention in my present reading, which is the first volume of Cicero’s extant letters:

1. Those who believe in the New Economics aka Keynesianism will find it somewhat difficult to explain how despite more than two thousand years of technological development and the advancement of economic science, interest rates are still pretty much the same. As of this week, a 30-year fixed-rate mortage is around 4.5 percent. Plus ça change….

To P. Sestius in Macedonia: “In point of fact, money is plentiful at six per cent., and the success of my measures has caused me to be regarded as a good security.”

2. Deflation has not always been considered a disastrous thing by the educated classes, at least by those not beholden to the bankers. And it is ominous to note his optimistic description of Rome and compare it to the present state of our latter-day Rome on the Potomac.

To Atticus in Epirus: In short, I was cheered to the echo. For the subject of my speech was the dignity of the senate, its harmony with the equites, the unanimity of Italy, the dying embers of the conspiracy, the fall in prices, the establishment of peace. You know my thunder when these are my themes.

Feminists discover economics

Or at least, the basic concept of supply, although they remain innocent about the consequences of its intersection with demand. It’s rather like watching monkeys figure out that the bright sparkly stuff dancing on top of the wood is hot:

“There is this notion of slut shaming in the media and it happens on a more personal level among people who shame one another. There is also something that is discussed on other websites but never in the wider media – something called slut rejection. The latter is what heterosexual men who seek a life partner supposedly engage in. I have personal experience with this. My ex did not try to shame me but upon knowing more about me, he just sort of faded away. Its so wrong that women may have to lie or not say anything and either strategy is prone to backfire. I believe that if men had less alternatives, that is if most or many women had a fruitful sexual history, then that would become the norm and therefore acceptable.”

That’s quite a remarkable statement, don’t you think? The feminist solution to slut shaming is to recruit so many women to sluthood that the supply of sexually inexperienced women will disappear. Men will have their fun in college, and when it comes time to marry, their only choice will be from among “fruitful” women. It’s interesting because it’s an acknowledgement that men can’t be rehabbed into the feminist way of thinking. The Women’s Movement tore down many walls, but the male brain is the last frontier, and the feminist siege cannot succeed in eradicating this last double standard.

As we have learned to expect, the feminist reaction to unforeseen and undesirable consequences is an intrinsically fascistic one of removing options from others rather than rethinking her assumptions. Susan Walsh’s observations of this breakthrough moment in feminist intellectual history are correct. The constant attacks by anchor-jawed, furry-armed Pandagonian warpigs on what they call “slut-shaming” is little more than an attempt to reduce the supply of sexually inexperienced competitors for long-term relationship status. Seeing that forty years of constant K-BA propaganda has barely altered the male preference for female sexual inexperience in a life-long mate, they have begun to give up on the idea of haranguing men in favor of focusing on what has been a much more successful strategy of converting young women into easily accessible sex toys.

This may sound insane given what 6,000 years of written history about civilizations and their fate, and in fact it is both insane as well as societally destructive. But one must never forget that women are not only hypergamous, they are also solipsistic. In other words, most women assume that what they believe is good for them is therefore good for society, to the extent that they even recognize the existence of any society outside of their own selves. The feminist slogan “The personal is political”, which dates back to a 1969 essay in the Feminist Revolution collection does not quite do the concept justice; “the self is society” would be a more accurate description.

This is the primary difference between a nihilistic practitioner of the crimson arts like Roissy and the feminists. The male predators recognize and accept the societal destructiveness of their attitudes and behavior. The feminists not only do not recognize their societal destructiveness, they stubbornly deny it. This is the difference between selfishness and solipsism.

Needless to say, the feminist strategy of supply restriction is doomed to failure just like every other totalitarian attack on the supply of anything that Man particularly desires. As we have seen in 30 years of war on drugs, it would not work even if it were encoded into law and utilized government force. American men are already turning to foreign women who have not been rendered less attractive to them by feminist attitudes and bestial behavior; the more successful feminists are in ruining those they consider to be their competitors, the fewer American women will find American men willing to marry them or American men they want to marry. Those who still seek to marry and are deemed marriageable by women will not come to accept hard-ridden Alpha leavings any more than they do already. Instead they will either seek out non-American women who are increasingly available to them via the Internet and immigration or they will not marry at all; there is no need to commit to a woman who has been riding the copulatory carousel when one can simply insert a quarter instead.

Mrs. Walsh’s reader is to be commended, however, for recognizing a reality that so many women still fail to recognize. Every new sexual partner taken by a woman renders her marginally less attractive to men interested in permanent commitments and reduces her potential marital value.

Why publishing deserves to die

I have repeatedly urged those who would be professional writers to pursue it as a fulfilling hobby, not a lucrative profession, because conventional publishing is a dying industry. My thesis tends to be supported by the fallout from the latest Duke scandal. Read, writer, and despair:

In the last 24 hours, we’ve received several of these types of inquiries. This is from a woman at the William Morris Endeavor agency, who requested her information because they want to represent her:

We think this thesis was GENIUS! Can you help in any way? Would be amazing & much appreciated.

I’m an editor at HarperCollins publishers, where I specialize in pop culture and entertainment books. I’m intrigued and entertained by [the writer]’s PowerPoint “f*ck list,” which is making the rounds online and am wondering if you could give me her email address or forward my note of interest to her.

At least Katie Price demonstrated that she had superlative self-marketing talent in addition to her aggressive plastic surgery and willingness to take her clothes off anytime anyone pointed a camera in her direction before being handed her book contracts. This rather unattractive young woman doesn’t even have that going for her.

Et tu, Jonah

Mr. Golberg takes an astonishing position on the Obama administration’s assertion of a right to assassinate American citizens without trial:

Some civil libertarians seem to think we can never, ever kill an American citizen without a trial by jury (and perhaps not even then). That argument would have been silly during the days of conventional warfare. Now it’s plain crazy. And the Obama administration is right. This is no job for courts. Wars and how we fight them are political decisions, properly left to Congress and the president.

Jonah should know better. He is, after all, the one who built the case against the pragmatic, “it’s just this one brick” approach of progressive totalitarianism in his very good Liberal Fascism. He further compounds his error when, after being correctly called on his erroneous reasoning by a reader, he attempts to justify his position by bringing up the example of World War II.

“Surely, “the battlefield” is a very amorphous term these days. An American fighting in Nazi uniform in 1943 could be killed and even singled out for killing without a trial by jury, or at least I think that’s the case. Awlaki — like all of al Qaeda — refuses to play by the rules even the Nazis agreed to. I’m at a loss as to why they should be rewarded for it.”

Of course, the only reason that an American fighting in Nazi uniform – more likely Wehrmacht, but never mind that – could be killed on the battlefield was because no one knew he was an American. The Constitution clearly and explicitly deals with the question of treason in time of war, which makes since because it was written by men who had recently fought in the Revolutionary War, so it is ludicrous to appeal to some pragmatic sense of sobriety and sanity and claim that it supersedes the Constitution.

Article III
[Section 3.] Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Jonah isn’t one of National Review’s Trotskyites, so it is a little disappointing to see him toeing the anti-constitutional neocon line on this issue.

The consequence of female choices

I have frequently written on the way that some women choosing to work has a negative impact on the ability of other women to choose to stay home and raise their children. Despite the fact that the economic logic behind this statement is impeccable and the reality of these consequences are inescapable, many critics, especially women, have nevertheless scoffed at this and insisted that the decision of one woman to work cannot possibly have any effect on subsequent choices available to other women.

Their economically illiterate doubts make the following comments by the author of a new feminist book blaming the lack of female executive achievement on a “culture that undervalues an entire gender” all the more ironic:

The New York Times asks about the impact of women choosing to “flee” the workforce (a loaded question), Feldt explains:

They make it harder for the rest of us to remedy the inequities that remain. We have to make young women aware of how their choices affect other women. It should be acceptable criticism to point out that, although everyone has the right to make their own life decisions, choosing to “opt out” reinforces stereotypes about women’s priorities that we’ve been working for decades to shatter, so just cut it out. And, the “individual choice” women have to become stay-at-home moms becomes precarious when they try to return to the workplace and find their earning power and options reduced. If we could see child-rearing as a necessary task and not an identity, and if we could collectively recognize that facilitating it benefits us all, we would go much further in guaranteeing women’s choices than we do when we are expected to uncritically celebrate every individual’s decisions.

The amusing thing is that while Gloria Feldt asserts “We have to make young women aware of how their choices affect other women”, she is talking about the immaterial and imaginary effect of “reinforcing stereotypes” whereas I am pointing to a material decline in real wages as well as a reduced chance to marry a man who is capable of supporting a wife and children, much less is more successful than the woman interested in him.