I have a bad feeling about this. Home values continue to drop, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. The fact that loan programs are operating in ignorance of this predictable fact, and that government policies are struggling against it are truly disturbing.
Some quotes from a Reuters article (hat tip Paul Yoh)
“The overwhelming majority of the U.S. is still seeing home prices decline,” said CoreLogic senior economist Sam Khater. “Many borrowers continue to be quickly wiped out.” — Reuters
This “wipe out” is only meaningful if you are using the home primarily as an investment vehicle rather than as a place to put your family and all your stuff. After all, a home which loses ALL of it’s value, sale price … Continue reading
Doing research for my “Three Speeches” paper (which has been expressed so far in my Marxism of Barack Obama posts), I noticed a defining difference between progressives and conservatives. The jumping-off point is actually a line from the Gettysburg Address, which at any rate is worth reproducing in whole as often as possible:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of … Continue reading
Right down to the de-industrializing impulse that winds up massacring intellectuals and reducing millions to the enslaved subsistence farmers, too busy starving to fight back. A friend of mine, who is a good guy and a committed social and fiscal conservative, posted the following, for which I took him to task. I do not doubt his commitment or his intents, but he is whistling past the grave here, revealing a potentially “fatal” logic bomb. I have replicated the whole thing below.
My conservative friend:
Thought for the day: Two hundred years ago, an American spent most of his day WORKING to hunt, farm and anything else that provided the basics of food, shelter and clothing to survive. They were, of necessity, self-reliant and independent so it’s no wonder … Continue reading
This blog seems to be up and running again! Links are working! Everything is working.
One of the valuable things I am taking from ITIL training is the confidence to STOP tinkering with things. I have developed a workaround for this issue: category links were not working, and now they are. Now it has cost me my preferred URL style, but that;s fine. That;s not my problem, although “problem” is the key word.
In ITIL, Incident Management is exclusively focused on restoring a service, whereas Problem Management is focused on understanding root causes and preventing repeated or similar occurrences through permanent changes (or deciding that the changes are not worth it).
I have done the Incident Management portion of this, and I figure that the problem management portion … Continue reading
The Federal government’s role is not to provide jobs, but to perform only those duties enumerated in the Constitution. It is obscene for a organization with an IRS, a bevy of regulatory powers, and a military, to put itself in competition with the private sector which it is supposed to protect.
Thought experiment: If every ten civilian Federal workers were required to vote one of their number off the gravy train and divide his former duties among the remaining nine, wouldn’t they select the most useless?
The word “decimate” means literally to kill every tenth member of your organization. Well, all we’re talking about here is jobs, but the selection method for a decimation is just as valid now as it was back when the Romans did it.
First they came for Reagan’s Legacy,
and I didn’t speak out because that’s in the past.
Then they came for Sarah Palin,
and I didn’t speak out because she wasn’t running anyway.
Then they came for Herman Cain,
and I didn’t speak out because he was not perfect.
Then they came for the RINO who wound up as the nominee,
And he went down in flames along with the House majority.
The End.
[This is still a bit rough. The beatings will continue.]
Are we in the grip of domestic enemies of the Constitution? I believe so. Because I believe so, I have a duty to consider action to defend the Constitution. Much hinges upon two questions:
I will attempt to answer both of these in a train of thought I call Ethical Resistance. More pointedly, I will try to set up a framework for answering these questions rather than answer them specifically, and hope thereby to teach a man to fish, rather than provide fishsticks.
Employees of the United States Government including all members of Congress are required to take the … Continue reading
Been spotty around here. I’ve been travelling, sick, busy, sick, and finally had a network meltdown at home just when I wanted to write a post to remind me of all my great post ideas. All of this while I am caught flat-footed in trying to change the look of this place. Trust me, if you are reading this in October of 2011, this is not the look I’m aiming for. Meanwhile, I need to get cracking on my novel.
So it’s been kind of sketchy around here. But I think you’ll like what’s coming.
Somebody has taken blog comment spam to the next level. Somehow, this comment made it past Akismet (the Cloverfield monster of blog spam defenders):
Whenever I read one of your posts, my balls get even bigger.
Naturally, the comment was accompanied by a link to a commercial site, in this case a page on the highly suspect site “Evaporative Humidifier Reviews“, which I am going to simply link here and wish the guy good luck. If all spam were this funny, the web would be a different place. I hope you get lot of hits, dude.
The President has been speaking for about five minutes. It’s way too early for the “early returns” on his speech, but I have a prediction: I think that his high-handed yet empty rhetoric about what he will and will not tolerate or allow, and all the rest of his claptrap is going to bang hollow in a silent room.
I do believe that I am not alone in being spectacularly unimpressed with this moron upon the occasion of this part-campaign, part-lecture. Now I have never been for the man, but tonight marks a special moment. I have never heard him more urgently condescending, as if he must somehow pound his elementary knowledge into the heads of a bunch of retards (that would be us) before heading out for … Continue reading
