Gatto - Teaching Confusion

John Taylor Gatto actually wrote another book back in 1992 (republished in 2002). Here's an excerpt that I pilfered from Google Books.


1. Confusion

A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana, the other day:

What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn’t idiosyncratic – that there is some system to it all and it’s not just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That’s the task, to understand, to make coherent.

Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests, fire drills, computer languages, parents’ nights, staff-development days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world... What do any of these things have to do with each other?

Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, a host of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on than with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending, for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.

Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw data into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with facts and theories, the age-old human search for meaning lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make better sense because the good-natured simple relationship between “let’s do this” and “let’s do that” is just assumed to mean something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned how little substance is behind the play and pretense.

Think of the great natural sequences – like learning to walk and learning to talk; the progression of light from sunrise to sunset; the ancient procedures of a farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker; of the preparation of a Thanksgiving feast. All of the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifying and illuminating the past and the future. School sequences aren’t like that, not inside a single class and not among the total menu of daily classes. School sequences are crazy. There is no particular reason for any of them, nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher could be criticized, since everything must be accepted. School subjects are learned, if they can be learned, like children learn the catechism or memorize the Thirty-nine Articles of Anglicanism.

I teach the un-relating of every, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming that to making a scheme of order. In a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work, or because of too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition, of because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny. That’s the first lesson I teach.



And of course a confused horde is puddy in the hands of misanthropic propagandists.

Global Warming Hysteric

This is John Doerr, perhaps the greatest venture capitalist of our day, demonstating that he is no polymath.



Without question, this man is bonkers.

Seeing that such an idiot can amass a billion dollars, I am increasingly optimistic that I'll be rich one day.

There's some good comments (esp. by yours truly) on this clip on Rich Karlgaard's blog.

Google/YouTube was limiting videos to 5 or 10 minutes but apparently when it comes to trumpeting the green religion, they make an exception.

Aborting Morons and Thugs

A few months ago I read Aborting America by Dr. Bernard Nathanson. Chances are you, like me, have no idea who this guy is - and there's a reason for that. The press won't be talking about this guy anytime sooner than they'll be mentioning the success of homeschooled children. That's because Dr. Nathanson has morphed from being the Henry Ford of abortions to now a staunch anti-abortionist. Hence he's no longer an "expert".

Back in the early 1970s, Dr. Nathanson, et al, pioneered the legalized abortion movement. He not only performed and oversaw them (60,000?), he helped lead the political movements that liberalized and popularized the procedure.

There's hardly a person around that doesn't have a strong opinion on the subject of abortion, but how many of us have actually intensely researched the subject? Why not heed what this protagonist has concluded?

In 1979, Dr. Nathanson stopped performing abortions and wrote "Aborting America". Here are some disjointed excerpts that I jotted down.

(Note - Lawrence Lader was another pioneer in the abortion legalization movement, "alpha" is the term Dr. Nathanson used to describe a fetus in the womb, and also pay attention to the insidious propaganda tactics whose employment he testifies to.)



"If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going to have to recruit the feminists. Friedan [NOW] has got to put her troops into this thing – while she still has control of them." (Lawrence Lader)

"...and the other thing we’ve got to do is bring the Catholic hierarchy out where we can fight them. That’s the real enemy. The biggest single obstacle to peace and decency throughout all of history." (Lawrence Lader)

"Well, Larry, what do you think? Is the Catholic hierarchy identical with the anti-abortion forces? Aren’t there any others opposed to abortion?" As I nosed the car into the Lincoln Tunnel traffic, he set the intellectual tone for the next eight years with a single word.
          "No."

"Historically," he said after the usual throat-clearing ceremony, "every revolution has to have its villain. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a king, a dictator, or a tsar, but it has to be someone, a person to rebel against. It’s easier for the people we want to persuade to perceive it this way." I conceded that. It was good tactical strategy. "Now, in our case, it makes little sense to lead a campaign only against unjust laws, even though that’s what we are really doing. We have to narrow the focus, identify those unjust laws with a person or a group of people. A single person isn’t quite what we want, since that might excite sympathy for him. Rather, a small group of shadowy, powerful people. Too large a group would diffuse the focus, don’t you see?"
          I nodded. Where was he going?
"There’s always been one group of people in this country associated with reactionary politics, behind-the-scenes manipulation, socially backward ideas. You know who I mean, Bernie."
          Not the Catholics again?

"Well, yes and no." Throat-clearing again. A heavy thought coming. And I wasn’t wrong. It was his devil theory.
          "Not just all Catholics. First of all, that’s too large a group, and for us to vilify them all would diffuse our focus. Secondly, we have to convince liberal Catholics to join us, a popular front as it were, and if we tar them all with the same brush, we’ll just antagonize a few who might otherwise have joined us. No, it’s got to be the Catholic hierarchy. That’s a small enough group to cone down on, and anonymous enough so that no names ever have to be mentioned, but everybody will have a fairly good idea whom we are talking about."
          His syntax was as careful and surgical as his daily shave. It was irrefutable. The only thing that was a little jarring, even to my untutored mind, was that the original nineteenth-century laws in New York and elsewhere had been placed on the books mostly by doctors when there were few Catholics around. I raised that question, hesitantly.
          "Bernie, we’re talking politics, no? Watch and see how respectful of the facts the opposition will be once our campaign gets going. Just listen to the opposition."
          The opposition. Now I remembered. That was how Trotsky and his followers habitually referred to the Stalinists. Was this a purposeful designation, or was it coincidental? Larry thought everything – everything within his control – out very carefully. The opposition, though he did not say so, was the right wing, the Falange, the Tories, not to mention the Catholic hierarchy. And especially the Ruth Proskauer Smith axis.

"We’ve got to keep the women out in front," he asserted. "You know what I mean."..."And some blacks. Black women especially. Why are they so damn slow to see the importance of this whole movement to themselves?"

...A June 15th, 1972 dispatch from London to the New York Post reported on Karman’s claims to have invented the “two-minute abortion” and predicting that "the method is likely to find widespread use in Britain before the U.S." Quoth Karman, his technique "would eventually be recognized as the only way to tackle the world’s population."
          One thing in Karman’s favor: He had the come right out and advocate abortion as a primary means of birth control while the rest of us altruists were dodging the issue.

[after a legal victory, i.e. a Nelson Rockefeller veto that overrode a NY state legislative measure to re-ban abortions]

Our law – our crusade- was safe for one more year! The next day Larry and I had an excited exchange of phone calls, chortling in particular over the way in which our trusted ally, the New York Times, had phrased its editorial on the veto. The fourth paragraph hooked the Catholic Church in for us again, keeping intact the carefully orchestrated image of the opposition forces. That reliable old strawman with the turned-around collar was still an irresistible target for the Times.

...There was a time when various Protestant denominations united to put through blue laws or Prohibition, so "legislating morality" is not simply a "Catholic issue". As for abortion, opposition is not, in fact, as idiosyncratic or "Catholic" a concern as pro-abortionists would have us believe.

Anyone who is not innocent of history would realize that abortion has not been a "Catholic issue," not even an exclusively Jewish or Christian issue. The Hippocratic Oath, the standard for Western medical ethics (though rarely read in U.S. medical schools in the past generation) is an expression of what might be called high paganism. The oath denies abortifacient relief to pregnant women. So do Judaism’s traditional rulings, and authorities in Islam, except for strict medical reasons.

James Mohr’s historical book points out that the original nineteenth century feminists were universally opposed to abortion, even after antisepsis had made it a safer procedure. They considered it yet another outrage that had been inflicted upon women by men who forced them to have abortions.

Daniel Callahan objects to the argument about "men legislating for women" because abortion, child-bearing, and child-rearing have consequences for everyone in our society, of both sexes. For that matter, as a "women’s issue," abortion works against the pro-choicers in that virtually every U.S. poll over the past decade has shown that women are significantly more anti-abortion than men are.

How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L. we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always "5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year." I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think about it. But in the "morality" of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything that was within reason that had to be done was permissible. Statistics on abortion deaths were fairly reliable, since bodies are difficult to hide, but not all these deaths were reported as such if the attending doctor wanted to protect a family by listing another cause of death. In 1967, with moderate A.L.I.-type laws in three states, the federal government listed only 160 deaths from illegal abortion. In the last year before the Blackmun era began, 1972, the total was only 39 deaths. Christopher Tietze estimated 1,000 maternal deaths as the outside possibility in an average year before legalization; the actual total was probably closer to 500.

While the Supreme Court, altering historic protections, defines the concept of "person" in order to permit the elimination of alpha, we in science are continually widening the concept of life. In the far reaches of our past history, paleontology is looking for the line that marks the human community off from non-humanity by studying primordial remains, the true-to-life equivalent of novelist Vercors and his "tropis." ...Meanwhile, in the far reaches of space, radioastronomy is listening for bleeps from beyond in an anxious search for other humanoid beings "out there" that may be transmitting their codes to us.
          If "back then" and "out there," why not listen "in here," inside the human womb? We must expand our definition, our search for humanity, and technology and science are forcing us to do this. As yet the general public is incompletely informed, but eventually the research wing of medicine will pull society along with it. With alpha it is just as if an intelligent race of beings is transmitting massive electrical impulses from a distant star, and we are not receiving them...or we are refusing to receive them.



From Roe,

First trimester – For the first twelve weeks or so, the state is forbidden to control abortion in any way. The "woman and her physician" are granted full power. The argument is that abortion is safer during this period than normal childbirth (true), so that the state has no reason to regulate abortion in order to protect the mother’s health (false). The state regulates other medical procedures and facilities that involve even lower mortality rates, so how can it wash its hands of abortion? Even barber shops are licensed, and nobody ever died of a haircut. Abortion clinics need approval from the fire department and the housing inspector. It seems we should regulate everything in an abortion clinic except abortion.

Until birth, alpha is invisible, except to obstetricians, who are the people who generally see (and diagnostically perceive) alpha before birth. If the abdominal wall of the pregnant woman were transparent, what kind of abortion laws might we have?

There is a strange bit of illogic here, too. The feminists have waged a salutary drive to bring the father into the birth process, from prenatal exams through the delivery room. At the same time they would exclude the man from the abortion decision and claim that sector of pregnancy for themselves.

...Since the father has been stripped of all rights under the Planned Parenthood ruling, I do not see how the law can continue to hold him responsible for child support either before of after birth.

...Poverty justifications are cited in a society with more wealth than any other society has ever enjoyed.

...If we say that we must destroy alpha "for its own good" (so that it will not live in poverty when born), we accept the moral reasoning that social problems could be erased by eliminating people.

One does not morally discard the legitimacy of a law because of the bad consequences for those who disobey it. Taking the worst case, even if a certain number of women die because they circumvent an anti-abortion law (which, as I have stated, need no longer happen), this is not sufficient reason to rule out the law...People may die robbing banks, but we do not legalize bankrobbing. (Nor do good consequences justify an illegitimate law...)

...It had always seemed clear to me that the object of abortion was only to rid the unwilling woman of the burden of pregnancy. If a living child resulted, it was perfectly obvious that it was to be cared for like any other premature baby. There was no conflict of medical purpose or ethics in that policy, but when I presented that there were so many furrowed brows that the place looked like a recently plowed field of foreheads.
          A committeewoman from Iowa, hawk-faced with prosecutorial mien, piped up: "What about hysterotomy, doctor? Isn’t that surer than salting out?" She meant surer to kill. The pro-abortion women seemed disturbed by the thought that a stray alpha or two might manage to live. I replied that hysterotomy would not "guarantee" death and, on the contrary always produces a live birth because it is nothing but a miniature Caesarian section. It also has an unacceptably high "complication" rate for the mother. The Iowan sat there puzzled as if I had spoken in Esperanto. What were these people thinking? Were we to take living fetuses fresh from the uterine wound and wring their necks?

It is also curious that many hospitals do not use prostaglandins even though they are safer for the mother, and probably for exactly the reason that they are safer for alpha, too. They do not want to cope with the live births. It seems clear to me that prostaglandins ought to be used in preference to saline because the method is healthier for alpha, and is no worse and in some instance better for the mother.



I want to relay another of Dr. Nathanson's points that I don't see in my notes.

How many times have you heard the cry that banning abortions will result in back-alley, coat hanger-induced deaths? Dr. Nathanson calls this the most specious of arguments. Even if abortion was banned today, illegal abortionists would use the "safe" (for the mother) technology that doctors currently use. So dead pregnant women in back alleys is a propagandistic ruse of the highest order - yet multitudes swallow it whole.

Also, that Lawrence Lader was portrayed as quite a scumbag. The guy was independently wealthy and used all of his idle time to facilitate the destruction of other people's unborn children. Note Lader's deft use of propaganda and the media to achieve his ends. He manipulated the New York Times like puddy in his hands and chortled with glee. Also note his naked condescension towards blacks and women, those ungrateful recipients of his paternalism. According to Nathanson, Lawrence Lader was the consummate male chauvinist. Lader wouldn't so much as let his own wife hold an opinion or speak among mixed company. When the Nathansons would go over to the Lader apartment, it was customary for Larry to offer and get Bernard a drink without even saying hello to Nathanson's wife, never mind offer her a beverage. Lawrence Lader was the prototypical trust funded, elitist, misanthropic hypocrite.

He was a staunch socialist to boot!

Though you'd never know any of this from reading whitewashed eulogies like this.

In 2001, Dr. Nathanson wrote another book, The Hand of God which I read after "Aborting America". Below find a few more excerpts I jotted down.



We live in an age of defining personhood upward so that fewer and fewer of us make the cut, an age of virtual abjuring of moral values, so that we can treat people like objects – and, yes, abortion has helped us learn to do that; and an age of cracking pillars of certainty – churches, schools, and political institutions – so that everything, including your life, my friend, is up for discussion… the methodical suffocation of authority and the hopeless balkanization of normative ethics...It is as Alisdair McIntyre so aptly put it: the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for some time.

Lader (Lawrence) was a fascinating farrago of paradox. He was economically secure, having been left a considerable trust fund upon the death of his father many years before. Yet he had worked for Vito Marcantonio, the only card-carrying communist ever to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Our favorite tack was to blame the church for the death of every woman from a botched abortion. There were perhaps three hundred or so deaths from criminal abortions annually in the United States in the 1960s, but NARAL in its press releases claimed to have data that supported a figure of five thousand. Fortunately, the respected biostatistician Dr. Christopher Tietze was our ally. Though he never actually staked himself to a specific number, he never denied the authenticity of the claims.

One of Lader’s greatest assets in this lightening campaign was also the most striking of the paradoxes in his personality. Though posing as a champion of the poor and powerless, he led a life of conspicuous affluence. Playing champion of the little people, a paradigmatic populist, he nursed a fine disdain for the common man. He often quoted to me the passage from Machiavelli that appeared to be his homing star:

          The people resemble a wild beast which, naturally fierce and accustomed to living in the woods, has been brought up - as it were – in a prison and in servitude; and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food and not knowing where to conceal itself, becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.

At this writing, there are at least fifteen thousand abortions after the twenty-first week every year. Today, at twenty-one weeks, the baby is considered viable. These are not even abortions, they are murdering premature babies. In the mid-seventies, I would be up on one floor, putting the hypotonic saline into a woman twenty-three weeks pregnant, and on another floor down, I would have someone in labor at twenty-three weeks, and I would be trying to salvage this baby.

After my exposure to ultrasound, I began to rethink the prenatal phase of life. Gradually, I began to understand that two hundred or three hundred years ago, childhood had not been understood as a special time in our lives and that in the seventeenth century, children as young as five years old were made to work in factories. There was no recognition of the phenomenon of childhood or of their needs until the last hundred or so years. Adolescence, adulthood, senescence – they are all bands in the continuing spectrum of life. When I began to study fetology, it dawned on me, finally, that the prenatal nine months are just another band in the spectrum of life.

An America capable of passing a pro-life amendment would not need one; an America that needs one cannot possibly pass it.

The networks have also refused to allow pro-life groups to buy time to air even the most innocuous pro-life ads, i.e., ads that do not even mention abortion but simply celebrate the choice of life.

Koppel queried her as to whether Reno believed there was a conspiracy afoot to systematically kill off all the abortion providers in the United States.



Nobody could read these books and not be impressed by Dr. Nathanson's intellect. In fact, I saw a few comments on Amazon complaining about his use of "arcane words". God forbid someone force them to open a dictionary and learn a new word!

His family had a very severe heritage - his father particularly so. Life was hard, women were Marginalized, and paternalism reined. Nathanson ends up blaming his father for many of his shortcomings. In fact, he claims that he couldn't be frank about his feelings in "Aborting America" because he father was still alive. Nathanson was born an orthodox Jew, spent much of his adult life in a religious vacuum, and will die a converted, devout Catholic.

Nathanson's books have value beyond their intellectual and scientific treatment of abortion. They provide a window into Americana, a glimpse into the Jewish-American culture of yesteryear, an exposition on the workings of an ascendant Big Media, and an illustration of how special interest politics can rupture the moral fiber of our nation.



If it's not terminated before birth, perhaps the baby will be "pro-choice". Stupidity is an apple that doesn't fall too far from the tree. However, note that the baby's grandmother wasn't quite as enthusiastic about abortion.

Abortion, infertility, and infanticide have been, throughout history, not only hallmarks of every wealthy civilization - they've also been harbingers of decadence and decline.

Perma-Optimism Dementia

You needn't enlarge the pic. Here's what Steve Forbes said about housing in the June 18th, 2007 issue.

Thanks to Fed-created inflation, housing prices in most of the country will firm and then rise. This won't save overextended subprime lenders and most come-lately speculators. But it will give much of the industry something of a second - albeit brief - wind.

Housing will "firm" and then "rise"?

Say what?!?!?!

The recent demise of 30-year Treasuries just shaved more than 5% off the value of every piece of real estate in the nation.

So much for a bounce!


Steve Forbes is a formidable intellectual but his puerile analysis on housing shows that an unshakable optimistic bias can be just as distortionary as its opposite.

(Steve's been bearish, and very wrong, on oil prices for a few years now as well.)

Believe me, since I have been watching every tick of the housing market these last few months - THERE IS NO UPTICK ANYWHERE IN SIGHT FOR HOME PRICES. We are still in the early innings of the real estate crash.

First, housing dropped due to the momentum of its own weight - due to gravity, if you will. That is what has happened over the past 2 years.

Next, negative leverage starts to pummel housing further, i.e. adjustable mortgages. (Feb 2007)

Then, interest rates start to rise - as they have been doing so sharply since December 2006. At that nadir, the long bond was yielding 4.52%. As I type this, it's yielding 5.35%.

As rates tighten the vice on a weak market, foreclosures proliferate and start to put a hurting on so-called Alt-A mortgages. (That will be this summer/fall)

The next leg down may be catalyzed by one of the following: a hurricane battering in the Southeast, a cold winter's heating bills in New England, or something like a massive municipal crisis (NJ?) that will decimate the real estate of an entire region. Or dare I say a terrorist attack in Manhattan?

The final nail in the coffin for home prices will be an economic recession. If you can't sell your house today, with low rates and the backdrop of a very strong economy, you are going to be totally screwed if you still have the "for sale" sign up when a recession eventually comes.

Remember "short the bond" is a key component of the End-of-the-World Trade. In fact, I just covered my bond short yesterday and will look to put it back on. The bulk of my trading profits this year have come from this position.

And of course, as the bond has dumped, I have been a double winner - since my "first house" drops in price along with it.

Really Dumb

"Rafael Delarosa of Lawrence testified yesterday that he could wind up losing his three-decker house on Stearns Avenue because of some false and misleading advice he got two years ago. ‘She told us the minimum we’d be paying (a month) would be $2,500, including taxes and insurance,’ Delarosa said of his mortgage broker."

"But Delarosa wound up with mortgage payments of $3,700, with the insurance and taxes included. And the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage he expected turned out to be two loans, one for two years and the other for 15 years."

"He and his wife earn a combined $2,400-a-month in Medford. They were counting on rent money from the triple-decker to help pay off the mortgage. But one of the apartments is vacant and new tenants are unlikely after he put a ‘for sale’ sign in his yard three months ago." (link)



Apparently in Massachusetts you can sue your mortgage broker if you don't know the difference between "minimum" and "maximum"...

Totally Screwed - An Adjustable Mortgage Pre-Mortem

Allow me to describe the plight of one of my wife's co-workers.

Two years ago, at the euphoric peak of the market, he bought a house for 500k.

Unfortunately he utilized an adjustable mortgage.

Today, his lender is charging him 7.75% while 30-year fixed rates are around 6.25% or 6.375%.

Remember, not only is he paying over a point more than market rates, he's still not locked in. So his rate could conceivably go to the moon (10%, 12%, 15%,...) as the mortgage market gyrates.

Recently he tried to switch to a fixed rate mortgage. The bank's assessors came and said his house "had structural issues" and they valued the house at 420k. That was a half-hearted ruse - really, the market had just deflated some.

Do you see the problem?

He owes probably 480k on the property; and no bank will loan him 480k to pay off his debt and facilitate a new mortgage; no bank will loan anyone 480k on a house that's only worth 420k.

SO HE CAN'T LOCK INTO A FIXED MORTGAGE!!!

He's stuck with the adjustable that could explode. At 7.75% he's paying over $4,000 per month. And that's just right now. The 30-year bond is still only yielding 5.05% - still not far from an historic low. Every tick up in long term Treasury rates will increase his payments, almost dollar for dollar. (I actually believe that at this point, housing will depreciate by MORE than corresponding increases in the cost of capital. Financial assets get over-sold with the same fury that they get over-bought.)

Even if he was fortunate enough to secure a 30-year fixed rate loan at 6.375%, his payments would still be around $3,000 per month ($2,994 to be precise). But alas, as I already pointed out, no bank will lend him the funds needed to refinance. You can't even say this guy is "stuck between a rock and a hard place" - there's really no dilemma, he's totally screwed.

In order for him to get a fixed rate, he'd have to write a check for $60,000 just for the privilege of locking in today's fixed rates. In other words, he just got hit with a $60,000 tab. Even if he musters up the dough, he's still going to have zero equity in his house and a 420k mortgage on it. Effectively, he'll have paid $560,000 for a house that's worth $140,000 less, just two years later. As I illustrated in a recent post, he'll still have all sorts of housing market risk even after sending 60k to the lender AND after locking in a fixed rate.

Most likely, this guy won't lock in at today's rates BECAUSE people like him, who put little money down and opt for the enticing low payments of variable mortgages, just don't have that kind of money lying around. He'll try to ride out his $4,000+ mortgage payments and hope that rates come in. Of course they won't; they are going much, much higher.



Even if he's not going to bite the bullet and ward off the disaster of higher rates, I'd like you to consider that scenario. Say rates tick up 2 full percentage points. His payments will rise to over $5,000 per month AND the value of his house will drop precipitously. In fact, a house worth 420k at today's rates will only be worth 341k with the 30-year yield two points higher, at say 8.375%. So instead of having to dig up a lump sum of $60,000 JUST FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF LOCKING IN A FIXED RATE AT THE SUBSTANTIALLY HIGHER RATE OF 8.00% or 8.25%, this idiot will now have to muster up $119,000!!!

Again, that's because no bank will loan him more than 341k on a house valued at that price. In fact, it's likely that mortgage lenders will be so ravaged at that point that they'll be wholly averse to lending 100% of market value. In other words, they might be so beat up by defaults that they are only willing to lend, say $320,000 or less on a house presently valued at 341k. That's not merely conjecture but an empirical fact. Just ask anyone who tried to take out a mortgage in the early 1990s. For example, my brother-in-law tried to pay 230k for his first house back then BUT the banks wouldn't loan him the money. They valued his target house at closer to 200k. So, even though he was willing to pay a higher price for his home, he, fortunately, had to tell the seller that no bank would write a loan for that price on that house. The seller, grappling with the market/banking realities of a real estate bust, had to sell at a price much lower than the buyer wanted to pay because any other prospective buyer would be similarly stymied in the mortgage approval process.

This co-worker of my wife's is effectively bankrupt. He might not realize it, but that's the truth. Real Estate Morons have long bleated that a stock price may go to zero but property values will never evaporate. That's a canard. Home equity can actually go below zero and render you insolvent. In fact, even if you own 10% of your house, a mere 4% decline in its market value will effectively wipe out your equity because any sale of the home would require a 6% real estate commission.

In California cities, over 40% of mortgages written in 2005 were of the variable or adjustable variety.

So this isn't just a tale of one guy in Boston; it the unfortunate case for swaths of people all across the country.

Prediction - In the next 3 months, after another disappointing "spring selling season", Alt-A defaults will be filling the headlines and roiling the stock market.

(Alt-A loans are the first notch above "sub-prime" mortgages in terms of bond ratings.)

Note that real estate would be in trouble EVEN WITHOUT all this embedded negative leverage from variable mortgages.

Don't forget, this guy stuck in adjustable hell can't even move. If he were to sell his house, it wouldn't pay off his debt, and he'd still owe 60k plus a $20,000+ real estate commission. He better pray to God that he doesn't lose his job or have to move to find a new one.



Recently I read (on an even more apocalyptic housing bubble blog) the point that for all the fear of Bin Laden, terrorism, or "climate change", no entity or person has more control over your entire life than your mortgage lender.

Ain't that the truth.

Rent as long as you possibly can.

Self-Rebutting Morons

"Noah's Ark", built on Mount Ararat to attract world leaders' attention to global warming, will be inaugurated for public visits.

As a part of the project prepared by Greenpeace, a ship similar to Noah's Ark has been constructed on the mountain - thought to be the location where Noah's Ark finally touched dry land.

The wooden ship will be ten meters long, four meters wide and four meters in height.

"We are in front of a second universal flood. But it is not yet too late. If all the nations of the World make a turn in favor of environment one will be able to avoid the catastrophe," indicated Andree Behling, Greenpeace expert in energy." "The politicians must assume their responsibilities and cannot continue to look at a world threatened to be submerged by the tides, the storms and floods, while hundreds of thousands people lose their houses, while plants and animals disappear by the diseases and dryness," he said. (link)

The quartet of irony, hypocrisy, ignorance, and stupidity, even if each raised to the n-th degree, could not adequately describe Climate Change Morons.

When did modern scientists start touting biblical tales of creationism? What happened to the Big Bang Theory and Darwinism?

Is "climate change" alarmism a science or a religion? If it's a science, when do they need to invoke the religious metaphor of Noah?

(Answer: it's really all about deception!)

The fact remains, every civilization throughout history has had doomsayers warning of cataclysmic flooding. Furthermore, they have always blamed it on human iniquity. So despite millennia of scientific discovery and innovation, today's experts have nothing more than an age-old popular myth.

These days I am partial to historically-based arguments and wisdom. Read what Will Durant wrote over 70 years ago to put today's fears of "climate change" into proper focus:

"Even more universal was the story of the Flood; hardly an ancient people went without it, and hardly a mountain in Asia but had given perch to some water-wearied Noah or Shamash-napishtim. Usually these legends were the popular vehicle or allegory of a philosophical judgment or a moral attitude summarizing long racial experience – that sex and knowledge bring more grief than joy, and that human life is periodically threatened by floods, - i.e., ruinous inundations of the great rivers whose waters made possible the earliest known civilizations. To ask whether these stories were true or false, whether they “really happened,” would be to put a trivial and superficial question; their substance, of course, is not the tales they tell but the judgments they convey."

That last line really is the crux of the pathology, "...but the judgments they convey."



Noah's Ark is a self-discrediting argument - most especially coming from today's scientists. Greenpeace is trying to invoke history to buttress their alarmism when in fact, history exposes "climate change" as just another in a long line of scaremongering hoaxes.

This would be like saying that O.J. Simpson's acquittal PROVES that murderers are often falsely accused.

Where are those "real killers" anyway?

A Guinea Pig As Your Role Model?

Click the pic to enlarge and read.

This was sent to me by an over-stimulated relative. The email was titled "Check out our hero!"

Feeding Rats and Lawyers...

Some deranged "old coot" near me has adopted the neighborhood rats. No wonder the local egg rolls melt in my mouth.

According to Gruss and ISD, Hanron realized there was initially a rat issue in July 2005 when she hired a contractor to remedy the problem. When that work did not completely eradicate the rats, she started feeding the creatures because, as Gruss described her, she loves animals and taking care of others and “even agreed to feed me as a lawyer, if you can believe that.” (link)

My mother-in-law is also an inveterate "feeder" - but she restricts her bounty to humans.

She cooks for her neighbors. She cooks for her contractors (and their kids) and I also suspect she feeds her local garbage collectors. She has sneaked pancetta and prosciutto through customs on her way back from Italy (spraying the sniffing dogs with perfume to mask her smuggling). She has toted chicken soup as a carry-on halfway across the country to bring to her sick daughter. I maintain that she would feed Bin Laden if she showed up at her house hungry.

More Propaganda...

Touché!!!

30 Year Treasury Bond - Linchpin of Prosperity

Above find an intraday graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for May 24th. As you can see, it spiked sharply that morning at 10am (9am Central Time) when new home sales data came in "better than expected". From Briefing.com,

Economic Perspective: Review of New Home Sales data

New home sales in April took a surprisingly large 16.2% jump to 981,000 annual rate. This follows a modest gain in March. It is hard to conclude from this increase that the problems in the housing market are over, but this will certainly ease concerns about the severity of the problems in the new home market. It is clearly bullish from an economic and stock market standpoint because it lessens the downside risks... The major indices have seen a strong move to the upside on this morning's data, with the Dow pushing higher by ~60 points following the data, the SPX gaining 5 pts, and the Nasdaq gaining 5 points on the release.

I shorted into this spike of the market and quickly made some good money. I shorted because the sales "volume" of new homes (or existing homes) remains a wholly irrelevant metric. All that matters is the PRICE of home sales - at least as far as the larger economy is concerned. Getting aroused over a sales jump would be as silly as celebrating a high volume day in one of your stocks. But nobody really cares if Google traded 2 million shares on a given day or 20 million shares; they care whether or not the stock went up or down.



Home prices are dropping, in fact quite rapidly these past two weeks. I know this from watching the 30 year Treasury bond. No anecdotes from brokers or aggregate national sales data can refute the mathematics of Higher Rates = Lower Home Prices.

First of all, almost nobody knows this. They may sense it but I have never seen or heard the naked math discussed anywhere. So I'll provide that service presently.

On May 8th, the 30 year yielded 4.80%. Two weeks later, as I type this, it's yielding 5.03%. So essentially, rates have risen a quarter point (23 basis points). That lowered the theoretical value of every home in America and I will tell you by exactly how much.

Consider four theoretical homes priced at: 250k, 500k, 750k, and $1 million bucks.

When 30 year fixed mortgage rates are 5.75%,

A 250k house costs $1,459 per month
A 500k house costs $2,918 per month
A 750k house costs $4,377 per month
A $1 million house costs $5,836 per month

(These figures represent total capital costs of homeownership. It doesn't matter how much money you put as down payment on the house because the total cost of lost interest on your down payment and paid interest on your mortgage always adds up to the capital cost of the home's price.)

Now when interest rates rise, obviously a given monthly payment doesn't mortgage as much as before. To find out how much, change the interest rate on a mortgage calculator and then lower the principal amount until the monthly payment equals the level before the rate change.

You'll find out that at 5.75%, a $1,459 payment covers a 250k house, but when rates rise to 6.00%, such a payment only buys a $243,300 house.

Continuing, a 500k house drops in value to $486,700.

A 750k house becomes a $730,200 home.

And a $1 million house depreciates to $973,500.

As the math illustrates, every house in America just lost about 2.65% of its value.

This semi-dated link I found says that American consumers owe $8 trillion in mortgage debt. Since consumers own about half of their homes these days, impute the total value of housing real estate is around $16 trillion.

Therefore, the recent bump in rates shaved roughly $424 billion (2.65%) from the coffers of homeowners.

$424 billion !!!!

Now let's do the math again, only with a theoretical rise in rates from our current 5.75% to 7%, 8%, 10% and then 15%.

Here's how much every house will depreciate for given higher mortgage rates.

-12.28% at 7%
-20.47% at 8%
-33.50% at 10%
-53.80% at 15%

I believe that within three years, we will see 8% mortgage rates. So I am forecasting an approximate 20% decline from today's levels.

Devil's Advocate - But if they have a fixed mortgage, homeowners are safe, right?

NO.

Their payments for that particular house may be locked in at a set rate, but the proceeds from any sale of the property will theoretically be 2.65% lower; also any potential home equity loans would be lower. Remember, the value of your home has nothing to do with what you paid for or put down on the house - it's wholly determined by what OTHERS can currently pay for it.

Say this homeowner lived in a development of identical houses and wanted to move down the street into a facsimile of his current house. He couldn't do it without incurring higher costs. Allow me to illustrate how this fixed rate borrower is still at risk to interest rate pops.

Joe Blow just paid 600k for a house in this mythical neighborhood of identical homes. Every home there is currently worth 600k. Joe Blow puts a 100k deposit down and mortgages the 500k balance.

Suddenly every home is now worth 550k due to an interest rate spike.

Joe decides to sell his house and move down the street into another house that's also now worth 550k.

He sells his original house for 550k, uses $500,000 of it to pay off his mortgage, and used the 50k he has left as a down payment on his "new" house. Obviously Joe needs to borrow 500k more in mortgage debt, ONLY HE HAS TO DO SO AT THE PREVAILING HIGHER RATES NOW - so his payments are higher than they were before.

Joe Blow bought his first house and "locked" into a fixed mortgage. He thought he was safe from the bond market - HE WAS WRONG. Now he has zero equity (instead of 100k) and he has higher payments and an equal debt for the exact same type of house!!!

Many people mistakenly think that once you buy a house, they are insulated from larger market fluctuations but that is only true if rates stay the same.

In America, one cannot take their mortgage with them when they move (in Britain it may be allowed). They need to take out an entirely new loan at market rates. After all, a mortgage is a loan based on a specific house. The specific location, price, timing, and financial status of the borrower were extremely important variables for the lender. The lender doesn't want what they had previously deemed a safe loan transferred to another property, in another town, on a differently priced home, when the financial status of the borrower may or may not have changed.



I want to make a few more points about how important the 30-year bond is to our economy.

When interest rates tick up as they just did, it's not just homes that lose value. All income bearing assets lose some value because they compete with Treasuries and corporate bonds for funds. Everything from gas stations, to hardware stores, to shares of stock, to professional sports franchises lost a couple of percentage points of value over the last few weeks. Cars and college tuitions got more expensive because they rely on financing. Name just about any enterprise or product and it recently got pricier to underwrite and produce.

Now this leads to my second point.

Right now, real estate has consumers in an inflationary vice. Residential rents are rising. Commercial rents are rising - they always do but are on a meteoric rise now. Allow me to explain. Most businesses sign ten year (or longer leases). So when they expire, they'll be reset in an entirely different (higher) real estate market. You may have noticed several of your favorite restaurants or stores suddenly closing. "How could that be...", you wonder, "they do a good business there?" Well, their lease was probably up and the building owner can likely get a whole lot more rent from say a real estate agency, a pharmacy, or a corporate restaurant chain. (Have you noticed how the CVSs, Duane Reades, and Walgreens are taking over everywhere? It's because they make so much money from prescription drugs that they can pay exorbitant rents, that little delicatessens and bakeries can't compete with.) The reason commercial rents are rising so much more than normal is because the economic landscape has grown extraordinarily since 1997 - remember, back then, the internet was just a novelty. We've had the greatest bull markets in both stocks and bonds (real estate) crammed into a mere ten years. Your bakeries, restaurants, and bars will still be around but expect some real expensive shopping there going forward - after all, they have to pay their ballooning rents.

It's easy to see how rising rents (commercial and residential) are inflationary events for consumers, but house prices are dropping, that has to be deflationary, right?

WRONG.

If nobody owned a home, declining house prices would be a very good thing. BUT, about 70% of households in America now own their home. This dropping market is only a deflationary event for first time home buyers like me (though my rent is ticking up slightly).

The housing malaise may be deflationary for plasma televisions, sheet rock, and granite countertops, but it's absolutely inflationary for consumers. This was always just an undeveloped intuition of mine. I figured that home equity was in part a major currency and any depreciation of a currency could be deemed inflationary because it represented a loss of purchasing power. So then, is home equity a currency? Well, Americans re-mortgage their homes to send their kids to college. They use it to buy vacation homes; and they use it for estate planning/life insurance. Etc. It defies all my experience to NOT see homes as veritable ATMs for most Americans.

Recently Taylor sent me an insightful article that had a more illuminating take on the interplay of home ownership and inflation.

Number Three: Home ownership was the American dream only to the extent that housing protected Americans from monetary inflation. Presidential candidates this year will wax ad nauseam that home ownership is the American Dream and that this dream is now too expensive for average Americans. What they won't talk about is how government policies, and specifically monetary policies, help bring this situation about.

What is rarely asked is why home ownership ever became the American Dream. The dream was never so much to own a home for the sake of it. Rather, the real dream has always been to protect wealth from the evils of inflation, and the middle-class housing market generally served that purpose. Housing was the middle class's best hedge against a growing government intent on expanding its scope and power by inflating the money supply.

Today, housing looks like a relatively weaker hedge, and if this trend continues, middle-class wage earners will have to find better assets in which to store the brunt of their wealth.

In other words inflation has been omnipresent for a while, but homeowners have been sharing in it and thus its full bane has been blunted. Now, the declining housing market will unmask the villain for all to see.

Lastly, why am I so bearish on the bond?

Here's part of a comment I left on another blog.

How do I know the bond is toast?

Look at it this way, the housing boom brought homeownership (or home indebtedness) up to 69%. Essentially, it made the whole country long the bond. When the public piles into an asset, a reversal always follows.



So there you have it. Higher long term interest rates are bad for real estate prices, bad for consumers, and inflationary. Oh yeah, they are bad for all debt-laden governments as well.

Long the long bond....it's a very crowded trade. It's something you definitely should diversify away from.

Drudge Report Links To CaptiousNut

Matt Drudge just linked directly to one of the videos I posted on YouTube.

There it is, at the bottom, titled "FLASHBACK..."

Democrats, United on Terrorism - John Edwards

I saw that Michelle Malkin had it up earlier and I was patting myself on the back. Then about 5 minutes ago I saw the link on Drudge and was almost blown away.

A few months ago when I saw the clip on O'Reilly I knew it was gold (of course, so did Bill).

A genius isn't someone who has great ideas insomuch as it is someone who quickly recognizes them.

So that makes Matt Drudge a genius, right?

Marrying Morons

Someone I know is engaged to be married. She and her betrothed went to see the local priest in preparation for a Catholic wedding ceremony. Here is an appalling excerpt from that colloquy.

Priest - Tell me about a married couple you admire and why.

Bride-to-Be - We admire Bob and Mary Smith because they have a beautiful home in Port Washington, a summer house out in Montauk, and an awesome 30-foot boat.

I am not sure what's worse:

1) The fact they she doesn't admire Bob and Mary for a wonderful, harmonious, and intimate relationship.

2) The fact that the bride-to-be hadn't the brains to at least feign admiration for a warm, loving marriage - even if boats and square footage are most important to her.

3) Or the fact that she's out relaying this episode, exactly as it happened, and is patently clueless as to how shallow it makes her look.

????

Illegal Immigrant Prediction

Only if you are a Drudge Report-reading newshound would you know that our abominable Congress has recently been trying to pass "comprehensive" immigration reform. The disconnect between these unctuous pols and the public on this issue is truly astounding. Clearly, they are acting as whorish lackeys for the money dispensers - those farsighted, rationalist party chieftains. Why else would a sitting politician ignore his current constituent voters for the sake of very hypothetical future voters?

I am also aware of, and partial to, this theory that Congress has agreed amongst itself to pass something now on illegal immigration simply because it wants the messy issue over and done with before next year's elections. A "comprehensive" bill allows them to claim that they have dealt with every thorn from enforcement to eventual citizenship. The issue is just "too divisive" and these incumbents don't want to have to debate any upstart challengers who are fired up on border jumpin', identity thieves. That's wonderful, the slimeballs are thinking about themselves first and whom they serve second third fourth - who knows where we fall on their list? Or maybe it's more of what I described in the first paragraph - namely, that they don't want to have to fight with the money dispensers during the election season, when they really need them.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to make one, prescient prediction.

There will be a massive public uproar against and clampdown on illegal immigration whenever it is that the economy turns sour.

This isn't so much a prediction as it is a history lesson. Whenever financial times have gotten tough, the outsider has always been shunned if not blamed. The Jews were economic scapegoats in ascendant Nazi Germany. The Poles were thrown out of England after WWII when jobs became scarce. In fact, that is how my grandfather, a Polish pilot, ended up in South Africa; nobody dared hire a Pole in England while Englishmen were unemployed thus my grandfather set off for Johannesburg with his English wife and 2.5 children. He had no job lined up and enough money in his pocket for about a week's worth of food. (Remember the Poles became personae non gratae despite having rescued England from the brink of Nazi domination.)

And the most recent example of economic scape-goating was the welfare reform of the early and mid-1990s. It can be argued that seeds of that were sown by the 1990-91 recession.

Mark my words, the values of your house and portfolio won't be the only casualties of the next recession - you could lose your gardner as well.

Housing Crash Imminent

My wife and I have a live bid in on our first house.

The bid technically expires at 7pm tonight.

Will advise.

Starter Home?

I found this listing that just popped up on my MLS really funny.



(click to enlarge)

$900,000 for a "Nice starter home"?

You've got to be kidding me. That's not a starter home even in the more expensive New York Metro area, no less in Westborough, Massachusetts - a suburb only marginally commutable to Boston.

Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest

First off, let me say that I hate having to cover subjects like I am about to here - but no blog named Marginalizing Morons can justifiably ignore this.

22% Believe Bush Knew About 9/11 Attacks in Advance

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Reiterating, I hate having to put stuff like this on my blog. One, because everyone else is talking about this poll and two, because it crosses the line into the "political arena" - a fray I try to stay above.

Clearly, the fact that 35% of Democrats believe Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand is one mother lode of a Moron indictment.

Almost on par with these demented conspiracy theorists was the reaction among some Democrats that I observed. Bill O'Reilly had a "Democratic Strategist" on last night and he asked her to respond to the results of the poll, namely the 35% number. Her Moronic response was two-fold. First, she screamed "15% of Republicans believe it too!" Bill O'Reilly demanded a more legitimate answer so she exclaimed, "President Bush has created a lot of mistrust in voters..."

Okay, he may have created "mistrust" among the electorate, but he didn't start confiscating brain cells. Can you say external locus of control?

If I was a Democrat I would just say, "Sure we have a lot of dummies in our party, but we also have a lot of smart people too" or "Well, 75% of Americans can't find their own country on a map..."

I certainly wouldn't have gotten as defensive as the guest on O'Reilly. Doing so essentially corroborates the point they are trying to deflect. This illustrates why arguing has gotten real boring for me. I can't hardly get a good argument from anyone. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I know better counter-arguments against my views then the Moron or genius trying to altercate with me.

I emailed the story to a couple of acquaintances who I knew would get similarly "defensive". One responded with the Republican percentage just like the clown on O'Reilly. While the other tried to draw a Moronic equivalence with those who "reject evolution" - which started a whole other sidebar discussion. But the evolution analogy is fatuous at best. Evolution is a theory on human development. Many evolution deniers don't "reject evolution", they consider it a theory and not a fact. Also, how can anyone compare doubt of what happened incrementally over a period of millions of years to doubt of what happened six years ago in a time of prevalent video cameras, human witnesses, etc.? Evolutionists and 9/11 conspiracists have one thing in common in that both groups' evidence has yet to "fossilize".



Identity politics is out of control in 2007. I voted for President Bush in the last election - so did Don King but I don't feel any obligation to vouch for his intelligence.

Lord Halifax said that ignorance,

"maketh most men go into a party, and shame keepeth them from getting out of it."

Indeed.

One more excerpt from that poll,

White Americans are less likely than others to believe that either the President or the CIA knew about the attacks in advance. Young Americans are more likely than their elders to believe the President or the CIA knew about the attacks in advance.

Let's see....Ethnic minorities and college kids are most likely to believe in the 9/11 conspiracy tripe.

Does that mean that American socialists are failing in their efforts to elevate and educate?

Or does it mean that they have been successful in creating a docile horde of bitter voters?

Can A Winning Streak Be Bad?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 13,313 yesterday, another all-time high. The benchmark index has risen 24 out of the last 27 days - a streak unmatched since 1927.

Mmmm....how'd the economy do in the years following 1927?

I just noticed that I have the End-Of-The-World Trade on again.

Okay, I apologize. That graph is a little bit on the alarmist side. I don't really think the stock market is going to crash, at least not directly. I believe there could be a bubble in the bond market (30 year Treasury) and we'll just have to wait to see whether or not that's true.

(Technically speaking, the housing bubble has been a derivative of the frothy bond market.)

Marginalizing Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban recently posted a blog titled, Ripoff Commercials = Stupid TV Stations and Networks. Here's an excerpt:

How stupid can you be to run these commercials ? Do you not realize that its not a commercial for the product, its a commercial to reduce the value of the brand of your station or network ?

HDNet wont run informercials or any ripoff commercials. We don't need or want their money and I would rather go without commercials than run them. My viewers are my customers. For some reason that is a strange concept to stations and networks these days. They would rather squeek out a commission on herbal enhancement pills and end up with a poorer, upset viewer than run a show without commercial breaks. Thats ridiculous. Its a brand killer

How about this for a concept: If you havent sold a commercial, dont run a commercial. The lack of a spot will hurt your bottom line far less than running a spot to ripoff your customers

(In addition to owning the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban owns HDNet, a high-def television channel.)



Pardon the grammatical errors but such is par for Cuban's course. He's as intellectually incontinent as they come.

So Cuban is anti-late night-infomercials, big deal, right?

But consider another brouhaha that Cuban is currently embroiled in.

His film company is about to distribute a 9/11 conspiracy film titled "Loose Change". That movie promulgates, "that a corrupt faction within the federal government orchestrated the mass murder at the World Trade Center". (link)

More from that link,

Cuban e-mailed us: "We are having discussions about distributing the existing video with Charlie's involvement as a narrator, not in making a new feature. We are also looking for productions with an opposing viewpoint. We like controversial subjects, but we are agnostic to which side the controversy comes from."

Cuban is "agnostic" about the content of his distributed films?

So let me get this straight, he's oozing with ethics when it comes to putting "ripoff" commercials up on HDNet, but when it comes to the content of his films, he's resolutely non-judgmental.

Okay, one more quote from Cuban,

"I don't believe the movie. Not at all," Mr. Cuban explained. "But I do believe that lies in the shadows are far more dangerous than lies you can confront and refute. There probably will be a movie that responds to this one, and we would be more than happy to distribute it as well, for the very same reason."

So, the airhead is a self-serving hypocrite, right?

Maybe, maybe not.

I submit that there is a consistency to Mark's ruminations.

It's all about money. To Mark Cuban, ripping someone off is a crime (particularly one of his customers), but he thinks nothing of polluting minds and debasing public dialogue with lunatic propaganda. The almighty dollar trumps all. (not that there's anything wrong with that)

Cuban's does have some balls though. He pens near one blog post per week complaining about how YouTube isn't aggressively taking down "copyrighted" videos. You see, when it comes to Google/YouTube, he doesn't buy their "agnostic" stance toward content hosting.

Incontinence, both intellectual and the other variety, usually manifests in old coots. Imagine how leaky Mark Cuban is going to be when he is sixty or seventy.

Mark may be a successful guy; but he's a doer, not a thinker.

TV's Lost - An Allegory?

Like millions of people, I have been watching and enjoying ABC's Lost for the last few years.

It just dawned on me this week that maybe the show is a deliberate allegory.

Dictionary.com defines allegory thusly,

1. a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.
2. a symbolical narrative: the allegory of Piers Plowman.

Now, like most normal people I couldn't stand trying to figure out stuff like this back in English class. Who is supposed to represent what? Why is the story muddled with "deeper meanings"? And was the symbolism even intended by the author or is it all just a bunch of academic mental masturbation? I mean how many scores of dead authors and artists are looking down from heaven and chortling at the analyses of their works?

So where do I see metaphor in Lost?

Well, the "Others" are depraved socialists who worship science - as such they see humans as mere lab rats (Hitler anyone?). While Jack, Kate, and the rest of the gang represent the goodness of common man. Though seemingly mired in fate, the plane crash survivors still have enough free will to wield against their personal and common demons. There's no doubt in my mind that this clash of free will versus determinism is a deliberate motif - as it is in so many works of literature.

There is of course the supernatural element of the island in the "beast" coupled with the isle's mystical healing powers: John Locke's cured paralysis, Sun's miraculous pregnancy, etc. But I am going to end my discourse right here.

I just did a google of "Lost is an allegory" and found a blog that sees the show as political allegory of the post-9/11 world. Skimming the posts, I found them a little too extrapolative for me. This blogger actually sees Desmond as a fighter of "neoconservatism" and Naomi(the parachutist) as representing the United Nations.

More likely, somebody is lacing their kool-aid with vodka on Wednesday nights.

More web surfing finds that Lost is supposed to be about "man versus man", "man versus nature", etc. Some people really just suck the life out of everything. I think the term for it is "killjoy".

And since I don't really want to be lumped in with these losers, I promise to never post on Lost as an allegory again.

Idiots Chasing A Tornado

I thank these jokers for sharing a great video but I have Marginalize anyone who'd chase a tornado.

(May 4th, 2007, Ellis County, Oklahoma)

More NBA Racism

A recent study suggests that black referees in the National Basketball Association are in fact racist.

It turns out that they call fewer fouls on black players than other referees do.

Some academics at UPenn, actually used the same data to conclude that white referees are the racists because they call more fouls on black players. (link)

An academic study of NBA officiating found that white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players, The New York Times reported on its Web site Tuesday night.

Clearly, since both conclusions are possible from the research, the "study" is complete garbage.

The Morons at the NBA decided to criticize the data mining methodology, saying that the nerds couldn't even count which particular ref called each foul - all they had to go on were the names (and races) of the officiating crew and the individual game tallies.

But this is a ridiculous criticism. Just assume the quantitative results of the study are true, and retort with my conclusion of black refs being lenient on black players, arguably a de facto act of racism against non-black players.

This study, and I use that term loosely, like most propaganda, took the bricolage route. They also slung against the wall the overall statistic that black players get called for more fouls than whites. This datum is supposed to somehow buttress their racism accusation against white referees?

Let's see - white guys stand around outside and shoot three-pointers while black guys are taller and mix it up underneath the basket. Who the heck who you expect to commit more fouls?

If anyone can't see the transparent race-baiting agenda of this study, then they are an absolute, complete Moron.

Black professional basketball players score a lot more points than white players.

Doesn't that imply the scorekeepers are biased against white guys that can't jump?

There will never be an adult national dialogue on race in this country so long as taxpayer monies are funding bullsh*t studies and the Associated Press is propagating them.

(See also an old post, NBA Salaries, A Medley of Socialism and Racism.)