DEDICATED TO EXPOSING DISINFORMATION AND PROPAGANDA AND TO PROMOTING UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS - WITH SHARP ANALYSIS AND BLUNT COMMENTARY. NO ADS. NO TIP-JAR. JUST THE TRUTH.
Had George Bailey never been born, the people in his town might very well be better off today.... WAS HERE AT THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS THREE FREAKIN DAYS AGO.
“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”
... Darrin West could not believe it. The president of the United States was standing in his living room.It was June 17, 2002, a day Mr. West recalls as “the highlight of my life.” Mr. Bush, in Atlanta to unveil a plan to increase the number of minority homeowners by 5.5 million, was touring Park Place South, a development of starter homes in a neighborhood once marked by blight and crime.
Mr. West had patrolled there as a police officer, and now he was the proud owner of a $130,000 town house, bought with an adjustable-rate mortgage and a $20,000 government loan as his down payment — just the sort of creative public-private financing Mr. Bush was promoting.
“Part of economic security,” Mr. Bush declared that day, “is owning your own home.”... So Mr. Bush had to, in his words, “use the mighty muscle of the federal government” to meet his goal. He proposed affordable housing tax incentives. He insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending.
Concerned that down payments were a barrier, Mr. Bush persuaded Congress to spend up to $200 million a year to help first-time buyers with down payments and closing costs.
And he pushed to allow first-time buyers to qualify for federally insured mortgages with no money down. Republican Congressional leaders and some housing advocates balked, arguing that homeowners with no stake in their investments would be more prone to walk away, as Mr. West did. Many economic experts, including some in the White House, now share that view.
The president also leaned on mortgage brokers and lenders to devise their own innovations. “Corporate America,” he said, “has a responsibility to work to make America a compassionate place.”
THIS GRAPHIC DEPICTS THE ROOT CAUSE OF FINANCIAL CRISIS:We posted on three days ago.Posted at 5:22 pm by Glenn ReynoldsSHEER GENIUS: at Credit Suisse.
No one can say they didn't see it coming: Israel this week expelled a United Nations investigator who compared Israeli policies to the Nazi Holocaust.Interesting how it sounds like the BBC host wanted him to stand by his blasphemy. Not surprising coming from the Beeb. But also disappointing is how people like these are never asked for their opinions on Islam itself, though as I'm aware, the UN banned the discussion of it a short time ago.
Israeli officials barred Richard Falk from entering Israel to investigate its policies towards the Palestinians because, as one Israeli official said, of Falk's "extreme, methodic criticism of Israel."
[...]
In May, Falk had a chance to explain what he meant in an extended interview on the BBC.
While Falk said he regretted using the analogies, under persistent pressure from the host, he stood by his statements.
Like thousands of others arriving here [to the UK], Rashid Ali dreamt Britain would be a land of opportunity. But when he failed to gain asylum, he just wanted to go home to Morocco.The following words from Bristol Crown Court, Judge Michael Hubbard the Royal Crown Court sum up his frustration with government bureaucracy:
With no money, job or passport, the illegal immigrant resolved to flee Britain by stowing away on cargo ships.
Yet after six failed attempts he is still here – because the UK authorities have forced him to stay. He was supposed to have been deported in 2005 after he was caught stowing away for the fifth time and was jailed for stealing a coat and some food.
But instead the 30-year-old was then held at an immigration detention centre for three years – at a cost to the taxpayer of £250,000.
Now he could be jailed again after being caught hiding on another boat two days after being released. Yesterday a judge said it beggared belief that the Home Office had failed to repatriate him....
'It beggars belief that during that time in detention it wasn't sorted out for him to return home. Can we not use this court to kick some backsides and have something done?'
"Alaska officials are investigating racist jokes about President-elect Barack Obama that have been circulating on state government e-mail accounts.
One of the five e-mails obtained by The Associated Press asks about the outcome of the Democrat's victory after all the time and money invested and concludes: "Another black family living in government housing!"
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“I’ll work on bringing it back. I still believe in it,” Eshoo told the Daily Post in Palo Alto.
The Fairness Doctrine required TV and radio stations to balance opposing points of view. It meant that those who disagreed with the political slant of a commentator were entitled to free air time to give contrasting points of view, usually in the same time slot as the original broadcast...
Eshoo said she would recommend the doctrine be applied not only to radio and TV broadcasts, but also to cable and satellite services.
“It should and will affect everyone,” she said [calling] the present system “unfair,” and said "there should be equal time for the spoken word."
The [Fairness] doctrine, which only applied to broadcasting, was scrapped by the FCC as unconstitutional in 1987... The doctrine's demise is credited -- or blamed, depending on who is citing it -- for the rise in conservative talk radio. Hosts including Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have expressed concerns that the new Democratic regime in Congress will try to reinstate the doctrine as a way to silence their critics.
Contributing to that concern were recent comments by Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York to Fox News last month.
The office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, yet another California Democrat, has raised the specter of its return. More recently, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said in an interview on talk station KKOB-AM Albuquerque that he hoped there would be a push for the doctrine, saying that “all stations should have to represent a balanced perspective…instead of always hammering away at one side of the political [spectrum].”
As of this moment there are 61 radio stations in New York City. Stations broadcast everything from Air America to Reggae Hip Hop and everything in between.MOSCOW (AP) - Russia would come under crippling financial pressure and may need to raise money externally if oil languishes at an average of $30 a barrel over the next two years, the World Bank predicted Friday.
The bleak scenario would mark a rapid unraveling of Russia's oil-fueled economic gains over the past eight years, during which time the government has paid down most of its foreign debt and built up a vast stockpile of international reserves.
"If oil prices in 2009 and 2010 average $30 a barrel, that would be a nightmare scenario for a global economy," Zeljko Bogetic, the World Bank's chief economist in Russia told investors on Friday. "The pressures on the current account and public finances in Russia would quickly rise to a point where the financing constraint would become so sharp that it's possible even to envisage Russia's return from a creditor to international organisations to (that of) a borrower."
At $50 a barrel, Russia could drain much of its reserve funds and run budgetary deficits, but would not face a "meltdown" scenario, said Bogetic.
Oil prices took a sharp turn downward this week, with the February light sweet crude contract trading just over $42 a barrel—more than $100 lower than its July peak—despite a large output cut pledged this week by oil producers' cartel OPEC.
Some major oil-importing countries have criticized OPEC's move to push up prices during a global slowdown.
The World Bank currently forecasts an average oil price of $75 a barrel over the next two years, said Bogetic.
Among emerging markets, Russia has been one of the hardest hit by the global financial crisis and plunging oil prices, the mainstay of the Russian economy. These factors have put the national currency under intense strain and triggered massive stock market losses and capital outflows from the country.
Russia, which grew at over 8 percent last year, is facing a severe slowdown in growth, and possibly even recession next year, analysts say. Torrid figures released earlier this week showed that industrial output had plunged 10.8 percent in November from the previous month, signaling a dramatic slowdown in the final quarter.
“Tonight, I propose a new tax cut for homeownership that says to every middle-income working family in this country, if you sell your home, you will not have to pay a capital gains tax on it ever — not ever.”By itself, the change in the tax law did not cause the housing bubble, economists say. Several other factors — a relaxation of lending standards, a failure by regulators to intervene, a sharp decline in interest rates and a collective belief that house prices could never fall — probably played larger roles.
— President Bill Clinton, at the 1996 Democratic National ConventionBut many economists say that the law had a noticeable impact, allowing home sales to become tax-free windfalls. A recent study of the provision by an economist at the Federal Reserve suggests that the number of homes sold was almost 17 percent higher over the last decade than it would have been without the law.
... Charles O. Rossotti, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner from 1997 to 2002, said: “Why insist in effect that they put it in housing to get that benefit? Why not let them invest in other things that might be more productive, like stocks and bonds?”
The provision — part of a sprawling bill called the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 — exempted most home sales from capital-gains taxes. The first $500,000 in gains from any home sale was exempt from taxes for a married couple, as long as they had lived in the home for at least two of the previous five years. (For singles, the first $250,000 was exempt.)... By favoring real estate, the tax code pushed many Americans to begin thinking of their houses more as an investment than as a place to live. It helped change the national conversation about housing. Not only did real estate look like a can’t-miss investment for much of the last decade, it was also a tax-free one.
Together with the other housing subsidies that had already been in the tax code — the mortgage-interest deduction chief among them — the law gave people a motive to buy more and more real estate. Lax lending standards and low interest rates then gave people the means to do so.
HAD ANY ONE OF THESE THREE THINGS NOT HAPPENED, WE'D BE DOING OKAY.
WALL STREET GREED AND DEREGULATION HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT AT ALL.
Credit Suisse has a fine idea:
Credit Suisse announced today that bonuses for its top executives would be made in illiquid, mortgage-backed securities. Seeing as these guys are responsible for getting this stuff on the companies books, it makes sense to shove it back to them. And if the market gets liquid again, and the stuff goes up, that's going to be a huge windfall for execs.
I'd like to see this idea spread. Maybe Congressmen could be paid in Freddie Mac paper and union officials in GM stock. The possibilities are endless!
Justice: As you make your bed, so you lye down. According to your Conditions you have your Bargain. [1721 J. Kelly Scottish Proverbs 16]
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Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. ... the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” Now that’s scary. ... Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. ... Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.
THE NYTIMES IS ACTUALLY ENDORSING POTTERSVILLE. SICK.I checked my theory [THAT GEORGE COMMITTED A CRIME] with Frank J. Clark, the district attorney for Erie County upstate, where, as far as I can tell, the fictional Bedford Falls is set...WRONG. HERE'S PROOF:
Holman W. Jenkins Jr.: Put Madoff In Charge of Social SecurityWhere was the SEC? Such is the plaint lofted in the wake of the Bernie Madoff scandal.
Must not mention that a crook is a big Democrat donorREGULAR READERS KNOW WE SCOOP THE BIGGIES ALL THE TIME. SPREAD THE WORD. BLOGROLL US. BOOKMARK US.
We read:"Very few media stories of the fraud perpetrated by former Nasdaq chairman Madoff mentions the heavy financial support that Madoff has donated to the Democrat Party. Campaign contributions by Madoff show many thousands of dollars going to Democrat candidates and causes. Including $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign, thousands to Charles Rangel (D, NY), Charles Schumer (D, NY), and $6,000 to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Madoff also gave generously to Senator Frank Lautenberg (D, NJ) who runs a charitable foundation that invested with Madoff.The Madoff fraud is said to be the biggest scam ever, with billions lost. Banks worldwide were caught. He stole from charities, 401(k)s, pension plans, retired people and some really vulnerable souls. Some charities lost their entire investments. More on the losers here.
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Comments on this postYou have to admit this is a pretty smart guy. Perhaps there is a place in the government for him.. wouldn't doubt itha!
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we should make him the chief of social security --- which is after all a PONZI SCHEME.
Listen to The Gathering Storm Radio Show, which WC and I cohost. The show broadcasts live every Friday beginning at noon, Pacific Time."Ministers banned the word 'obese' on letters to the parents of fat children - because focus groups did not like it, England's chief medical officer said today. Professor Liam Donaldson revealed that the term was replaced on letters to parents by 'very overweight' over fears it would upset and stigmatise fat children. Writing on the BBC News website he said obesity had become a taboo word or an 'O word'.
The Department of Health announced in August that for the first time parents would be routinely informed if their child was clinically overweight. Children are weighed on entering primary school (at age four or five) and in their final year (aged 10 or 11) as part of the National Child Measurement Programme.
Letters are then sent out to make parents aware of potential problems with their child's weight so they go and see their doctor about it if needed. But Professor Donaldson said that in the planning stage, a 'stumbling block' was the wording of the feedback letter. 'The majority of these parents felt that using the term "very overweight" in combination with the associated health risks was a better approach. Suddenly, we had stepped on eggshells.' He added: 'Obesity has become the new cancer. A word that is taboo, that intimidates, strikes fear, that promoted softer euphemisms. In effect it has become an "O" word.
At the time, the National Obesity Forum described the Government's decision not to use the word obese as 'prissy and namby pamby'.
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If you walk around Washington, D.C., on a regular basis, youre likely to see some rather peculiar posters. But you wont see any more peculiar than the ads put out by the American Humanist Association. Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake, say the signs, in Christmas-colored red and green. Sounds great, doesnt it? Just be good for goodness sake. You dont need some Big Man in the Sky telling you what to do. You can be a wonderful person simply by doing the right thing. Theres only one problem: without God, there can be no moral choice. Without God, there is no capacity for free will.
Thats because a Godless world is a soulless world. Virtually all faiths hold that God endows human beings with the unique ability to choose their actions -- the ability to transcend biology and environment in order to do good. Transcending biology and our environment requires a higher power -- a spark of the supernatural. As philosopher Rene Descartes, put it, Although I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined [my soul] is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body and can exist without it.
Gilbert Pyle, the atheistic philosopher, derogatorily labeled the idea of soul/body dualism, the ghost in the machine. Nonetheless, our entire legal and moral system is based on the ghost in the machine -- the presupposition that we can choose to do otherwise. We can only condemn or praise individuals if they are responsible for their actions. We dont jail squirrels for garden theft or dogs for assaulting cats -- they arent responsible for their actions. But we routinely lock up kleptomaniacs and violent felons.
It's not only our criminal justice system that presupposes a Creator. Its our entire notion of freedom and equality. We hold these truths to be self-evident, wrote Thomas Jefferson, supposed atheist, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Human equality must spring from a Creator, because the presence of a soul is all that makes man human and equal. Biology suggests inherent inequality -- who would call Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stephen Hawking equal in any way? Biology suggests the sort of Hegelian social Darwinism embraced by totalitarian dictators, not the principles of equality articulated by the Founding Fathers.
Without a soul, freedom too is impossible -- we are all slaves to our biology. According to atheists, human beings are intensely complex machines. Our actions are determined by our genetics and our environment. According to atheists, if we could somehow determine all the constituent material parts of the universe, we would be able to predict all human action, down to the exact moment at which Vice President-elect Joe Biden will pick his nose. Freedom is generically defined as the power to determine action without restraint (Random House). But if action without restraint is impossible, how can we fight for freedom?
If there is no God, there is no freedom to choose. If there is no freedom to choose, there is no good or evil. There is merely action and inaction. There is no way to be good for goodness sake -- that would require an act of voluntary will far beyond human capacity. Atheists simply gloss over this point. The American Humanist Association states on its website, whybelieveinagod.org, We can have ethics and values based on our built-in drives toward a moral life. Without a soul, this is wishful thinking of the highest order. Since when does biology dictate a moral drive? If it did, wouldnt man always get more rather than less moral -- wouldnt history be a long upward climb? What about the murderers, rapists, child molesters and genocidal dictators? Are they all ignoring that built-in drive toward a moral life?
Atheism may work for individuals. There are moral atheists and there are immoral religious people. But as a system of thought, atheism cannot be the basis for any functional state. If we wish to protect freedom and equality, we must understand the value of recognizing God. We must recognize the flame of divinity -- free will -- He implanted within each of us.
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Have you ever had the nagging sense that there's something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell - the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn't quite put your finger on it? We're here to help, dear reader. Gladwell gave two vanity "performances" in the West End - prompting fevered adulation from the posh papers - the most amazing being this Guardian editorial, titled In Praise of Malcolm Gladwell.
It appears that we have a paradox here. A substantial subclass of white collar "knowledge workers" hails this successful nonfiction author as fantastically intelligent and full of insight - and yet he causes an outbreak of infantalisation. He's better known for his Afro than any big idea, or bold conclusion - and his insights have all the depth and originality of Readers Digest or a Hallmark greeting card. That's pretty odd. So what's really going on here? Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What's he really saying? Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he's saying that hold so much appeal? Let's start with the first two first.
Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it's reassuringly predictable. The most famous book Tipping Point, takes an epidemiological view of social trends and throws in a bit of network theory. You won't draw anything more profound from this than "we're all connected" - gee! - and you certainly won't get the drawbacks of epidemiology - much of which is now indistinguishable from junk science. A good book to write would be about how how epidemiology became so debased so quickly: it's now merely a computer modeling factory for producing health scares, or in the case of British foot-and-mouth disease, catastrophic policy responses that cost billions of pounds. John Brignell's The Epidemiologists does just that. (For good measure, Milgram's Six Degrees theory, has subsequently been debunked since Tipping Point appeared. Gladwell could have done that himself using a bit of investigative research of his own - but he probably wouldn't have liked the conclusion.)
The next book, Blink published in 2004, asks (in his own words) - "What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?" But he ends up pursuing the idea that rationality is overrated - and with only speculative cognitive science to go with, it isn't suprising that this book, too, doesn't get to any conclusion. And the message of the new one? Genius takes hard work. Again, it's something bleedingly obvious, but which leaves deeper questions unanswered. Take two geniuses: George Best and Tesla. What did they offer? Why do we admire them so much? There's obviously much more to each of them than perspiration - but we don't find out, and the book is as flattening and reductive as the others.
Perhaps it's Gladwell's stunning oratory that draws the crowds? Perhaps he's such a magnetic performer, that you go for the ride, not the destination? But when we see a example of the Master at Work - the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. Here's an excerpt of the master strolling the stage at Ted - a presentation called Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce. Gladwell blathers at great length about an obscure market researcher called Howard Moskowitz. Who? On his own website, Howie calls himself "a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics". Yet Gladwell describes Moskowitz' market testing of varieties of soup as if he was an unsung genius of the 20th century. All this takes up 15 minutes, but it's so repetitious and predictable, it seems to take about three times as long. (So much for the dazzling oratory Guardian leader writers admire.)
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