In my never ending quest to understand more about why we are currently in a recession and why my house is worth less than a brace of Latte's from Starbucks, I seek insight from teh intertubes. I found such insight at the Church of the Apocalyptic Kiwi - (who were also inspirational during the presidential race, fyi) Enjoy!
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
P.Z. Myers concurs with Charles Pierce that Americans are turning into idiots. Myers' post springs from this passage from a new book by Pierce, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free:
The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
ASSIMULATED PRESS 2009 As the police were hauling Principal Soeht away in handcuffs, a reporter shouted one last question: “Why did you drown hundreds of students in the basement of Tarara Elementary School?” Soeht stared angrily at the reporter and replied, “Because almost all of those children were badly behaved…
A middle-aged couple who bought a home in my neighborhood are in a terrible situation. They paid too much for their new house, which needed a lot of repairs, and they failed to aggressively work to sell their existing home. Therefore, they now have two houses.
They continue to live in their original home while their new house (two houses away from where I live) has been vacant for three years and it is falling apart. I’m not talking about chipped paint. There are huge holes in the roof that are causing the house to rot out.
Check out the garage roof too:
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People who know a lot about rehabbing houses tell me that if this house and garage don’t get immediate attention, they will need to be completely torn down.
TMP has presented a terrible, yet not surprising, description of the enforcement arm of the SEC. Based on this detailed description of this dyfunctional enforcement arm, no wonder securities fraud has been running rampant. Oh, and on a related note, Huffpo reports that:
The inspector general tasked with overseeing and auditing the Federal Reserve knows pretty much nothing about what the Fed is doing. . . . She did not know where the Fed has invested its $2 trillion on the liability side of the balance sheet. "I do not know. We have not looked at that specific area at this particular point on," she said.