The media wakes up

The Washington Post finally notices that there might be a little problem in the housing market:

Senior Obama administration officials said Friday that a nationwide moratorium on foreclosure sales may be inevitable, despite their grave reservations about the impact a broad freeze would have on the nation’s housing market and economic recovery…. With foreclosed properties comprising one in every four homes sold in the United States, the spreading moratorium could disrupt real estate deals in progress, slow down the process of clearing the backlog of troubled home loans and prolong the economic recovery, analysts said.

A freeze would also strike at the financial sector, just two years after it suffered one of the worst crises in its history. One government official who has been in discussions with several big financial firms said the banks are bracing themselves for a wave of lawsuits from homeowners who are fighting to keep their homes and from investors who had bought mortgage loans on Wall Street. On Friday, while the Dow Jones industrial average crossed 11,000, most major bank stocks fell.

Translation: Senior Obama administration officials said Friday that a nationwide moratorium on foreclosure salesallowing the big insolvent banks to go bankrupt may be inevitable, despite their grave reservations about the impact a broad freezefailure to enact a second banking bailout would have on the nation’s housing market and economic recoverydepression.

Yesterday’s post about the 13.3% decline in bank credit didn’t really do proper justice to the seriousness of the situation. One also has to factor in the historical 8.4% annual increase in bank credit. This means that there is presently a $2.2 trillion gap between the current credit supply and the $8.477 trillion in credit that a nominally healthy economy would have at the end of 2010.

That is the gap that the massive increase in Federal outlays are attempting to fill. In other words, the magnitude of the problem isn’t defined by a 13.3% decline from where we were, but rather, the 25.8% shortfall from where we should be.

They can’t steal if you don’t work

Gonzalo Lira of Zero Hedge is correct. Once the middle class realizes that they are being scammed and participation in the scam is no longer worth it, what is presently and fraudulently passing for “America” is doomed.

Just like the poker player who’s been fleeced by all the other players, and gets one mean attitude once he finally wakes up to the con? I’m betting that more and more of the solid American middle-class will begin saying what Brian and Ilsa said: Fuckit.

Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing—what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?

Fuckit.

When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.

TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.

If a big enough proportion of the populace—not even a majority, just a largish chunk—decides that it’s just not worth following the rules anymore, then that society’s days are numbered: Not even a police-state with an armed Marine at every corner with Shoot-to-Kill orders can stop such middle-class anarchy.

It really isn’t even debatable anymore. Does anyone seriously believe that the bankers who are now known to have stolen literal billions from the government and from the public alike are going to spend any time in prison, let alone 12-15 years like my father? There is no rule of law, there is only the massive and ongoing monetary rape of the middle and lower classes by the financial-government complex. The latter have been gambling, and losing, at the former’s expense for decades; they have set up an indefensible system where it is heads they win, tails everyone else loses.

But more and more Americans are finally realizing that they can’t steal what you don’t earn. They may not have minded being milked, at least not within reason, but they also understand that there’s no benefit in being turned into hamburger.

Mailvox: homeschool or die!

Yet another example. Which makes one wonder: what good is that all-important socialization to a corpse?

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

The emailer who sent me this article wondered where the parents were. “How come they never have the parents of the bullies on the news? After all, what kind of kid walks around knocking books out people’s hands and calling them faggot? What kind of kid’s take pleasure in doing these kinds of cruel things to people? They weren’t provoked after all. I mean, I know from experience that the kid with the stuffed toy was just asking to get picked on, but I can’t imagine going out of my way every day to make someone else miserable.”

I don’t think it’s profitable thinking about the parents of the bullies. They may be unintelligent, unreflective bullies themselves, or more likely, they either a) have no absolutely idea what their children are doing to other children, b) they are in denial, or c) they’re total idiots who believe their little cretins are permitted everything. I actually had a run-in with the latter some months ago; the morons actually believed that their little thug-in-training shouldn’t even be threatened with being hit back after he, unprovoked, hit another kid in the face with a hockey stick. Needless to say, the little thug is going to be wondering what the hell happened the first time he runs into someone who doesn’t give a damn that his parents have declared him off-limits to playground justice.

My question is where the parents of the bullied children are. Protecting one’s children is a parent’s paramount duty. If one’s child is genuinely being seriously bullied to the point of personal danger, first train the child to defend himself by massively violent overreaction. Chances are very high that he’d be never be directly bothered again.

But in the unlikely event that fails, then the adult must directly confront the bullies and let them know in no uncertain terms that one will cheerfully spend the rest of one’s life in jail for multiple charges of homicide and desecration of a human corpse rather than permit one’s child to come to harm. And if spending a few days in jail on an assault and battery charge is necessary to send the message in a manner that it is received, then so be it. If your kid knows one thing, just one solitary thing, he should know that you have his back. No matter what.

“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.