Recent Articles

Now that so many people have lost their homes

| April 22, 2013 | 2 Replies

Now that so many people have lost their homes to foreclosure, the banks are swooping in the buy them up as investments. This is raising the cost of owning housing, making it difficult for many people to buy their own home. This article suggests that this is the beginning of yet another housing bubble. Furthermore, it has the perverse effect of steering former homeowners into the arms of banks, who will now be happy to serve as landlords.

The ability of investors to make cash deals is helping them buy a large portion of the distressed homes that continue to flood the market. Property brokers and others in Florida say traditional buyers — even those able to qualify for financing in a still-tight mortgage market — are finding it difficult to compete with the cash and market savvy of large investors.

“The investors are making it hard for a regular homeowner to buy a property,” said Robert Russotto, a broker with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate in Fort Lauderdale. “They are getting outbid by people with cash.” Russotto noted that out of the 20 home sale contracts he is the process of completing, 17 of the buyers are major investors.

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Even scientists tend toward magical (teleological) thinking

| April 21, 2013 | 1 Reply

In his new book, psychologist Matthew Hutson has documented many instances in which all of us latch onto what he terms “magical thinking.” Hutson argues that this is not necessarily a bad thing–we do it to keep our sanity in this crazy dangerous world, in which our final destiny is certain death.  Nor is magical thinking aways a good thing.  Hutson’s book is an excellent read full of intriguing and often counter-intuitive observations, many of them based on rigorous experiments.

Hutson is also authors a blog at Psychology Today.  In a recent post, he notes that even scientists are susceptible to “magical thinking,” which often takes the form of teleological thinking:

Over the years, a number of psychologists have suggested that we are promiscuously teleological. Telos is Greek for end or purpose, and teleology is the belief that an object was created or an event occurred to fulfill some purpose. You believe there’s not just a how but a why to its origin, that there’s a mind with intentions behind it. And when an event seems especially meaningful (such as a hurricane destroying your home) or an object seems especially complex (such as the human body) the prospect of a designer appears all the more likely. Some things really are designed—watches do come from watchmakers—but most of the universe isn’t.

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Magical thinking as a sometimes useful crutch

| April 20, 2013 | Reply

I’m almost finished reading Matthew Hutson’s new book, 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane. I’m feeling fully engaged, in that Hutson addresses many of the issues that I’ve been grappling with at this website, and does it insightfully in a book that is easy to understand. There’s no jargon in Hutson’s book, and his main idea is the explosive one often addressed by Friedrich Nietzsche: our understanding of the world is dominated by false ideas that are sometimes useful. Hutson takes this idea to a new level, incorporating modern cognitive science and evolution, as well as many of his own observations: In Hutson’s words,

Most of the world is religious, and millions more are openly superstitious, spiritual, or credulous of the paranormal. But I argue that we all believe in magic—luck, mind over matter, destiny, jinxes, life after death, evil, and heavenly helpers—even when we say we don’t.

I draw on cognitive science, neuroscience, social and evolutionary psychology, and cultural observation to show that we engage in magical thinking all the time—and that it’s not all bad. Supernaturalism leads us to think that we actually have free will. It makes us believe that we have an underlying purpose in the world. It can even protect us from the paralyzing awareness of our own mortality. Irrationality makes our lives make sense.

I’m going to be repeatedly referring to 7 Laws of Magical Thinking in the coming months from a variety of angles. In the meantime, I recommend this video interview of Hutson.

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Germany’s renewable energy revolution

| April 20, 2013 | Reply

While we in the U.S. are barely moving forward on renewables, Germany is streaking into the future. Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute explains:

While the examples of Japan, China, and India show the promise of rapidly emerging energy economies built on efficiency and renewables, Germany—the world’s number four economy and Europe’s number one—has lately provided an impressive model of what a well-organized industrial society can achieve. To be sure, it’s not yet the world champion among countries with limited hydroelectricity: Denmark passed 40% renewable electricity in 2011 en route to a target of 100% by 2050, and Portugal, albeit with more hydropower, raised its renewable electricity fraction from 17% to 45% just during 2005–10 (while the U.S., though backed by a legacy of big hydro, crawled from 9% to 10%), reaching 70% in the rainy and windy first quarter of 2013. But these economies are not industrial giants like Germany, which remains the best disproof of claims that highly industrialized countries, let alone cold and cloudy ones, can do little with renewables.

Here’s an example of how poorly some of us in the U.S. are postured for divesting ourselves of carbon. This is an example from my home state of Missouri, where the utilities and the coal industry apparently owns the place.

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Other things security cameras capture

Other things security cameras capture

| April 20, 2013 | Reply

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In New Zealand, an historic vote on gay marriage, and then a song

| April 20, 2013 | Reply

New Zealand recognizes gay marriage:

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Experimental evidence supporting reaction formation

| April 19, 2013 | Reply

Suspiciously often, those who are most vocally anti-gay turn out to be gay. In this experiment, men who were the most opposed to male homosexuality were shown to have particularly strong homosexual urges for other men. Classic reaction formation.

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Not the will of the people

| April 18, 2013 | Reply

Tonight I received this mass-distributed email from Josh Silver of represent.us:

The US Senate just rejected a basic background check law for gun sales despite the fact that 90% of Americans support it. Even 74% of NRA members support it!1

Represent.Us has no official position on gun rights/gun control, but you’re damn right we have a position on whether America’s Congress follows the will of the American people. And they don’t. Our leaders are FAILING US, and by letting it happen, by letting them continue to steal our country, we’re failing America.

It’s time to WAKE UP. Stop writing emails to Congress. Stop yelling at your computer screen. Stop feeling hopeless.

Instead, face this simple fact: The insanity in Washington won’t end until we cut the corruption and cut the cord between Congress and the Fat Cat lobbyists who run our country.

Let’s commit ourselves to this fight. Let’s commit to creating a government of, by, and for us, the American people. The Represent.Us plan will work — if we all go the extra mile to make it work.

Tonight I’m asking you to do one simple thing: Forward this email to ten people who have not joined the fight to get money out. Tell them we must all work together on this issue, or no other issue can prevail. Tell them to become a “Citizen Co-sponsor” of the American Anti-Corruption Act by visiting this link.

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Fear on the brain

| April 16, 2013 | 7 Replies

At Time Magazine, Maia Szalavitz writes that fear “hijacks the brain.”

“Fear short circuits the brain, especially when it hits close to home, experts say— making coping with events like the bombings at the Boston Marathon especially tricky.
. . . This dramatically alters how we think, since the limbic system is deeply engaged with modulating our emotions. [W]hen people are terrorized, [p]roblem solving becomes more categorical, concrete and emotional [and] we become more vulnerable to reactive and short-sighted solutions.”

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