Thus the decision as to what is a safe loan is moved to politics and the government bureaucracy, far far away from anyone who knows the borrower or has actually seen the assets.
Category: culture
Once upon a time, the living dead were scary
Miller tells us that a society that has difficulty recognizing monsters in its art, will probably have trouble recognizing terrorists at its airports.
No moderate Islam, and not many moderate Muslims
How many Muslims are moderate? In the recent Iraq election, moderates gained, just barely, a plurality. Not a majority, a plurality. To govern, they will need the support of some violently immoderate people. They have a plurality because the various different kinds of extremist hate each other, splitting the extremist vote.
The Obamized future
America was the place where the future was created. All the world depended on America for progress. It ceased to be that place under Clinton, and things got worse under Bush. We cannot rebuild the two towers, we no longer have a human presence in space, and the next big thing on the internet, networked money that bypasses our legacy banking system, is coming from China, and, God-help-us, Africa. Remember that in the 1950s, we were about to settle Antarctica, …
No men on the left
A leftist women, who merely wants humans to return to the stone age, was publicizing her book criticizing the far left, who want to get rid of humans altogether (They want the stone age with no killing of non human animals, an arrangement where one’s life expectancy would be measured in weeks.) A bunch of far leftists attacked her. They did not throw pies at her, they punched her with jalapeno pepper pie. The people in the audience, even those …
Pedestalization of women
Roissy, in one of his many excellent political posts, asks Why Do Conservatives Sanctify Women? The correct answer, which he misses, is that they hanker for a world in which women stayed on pedestals instead of sneaking off to bang strange males.
Natural law and natural rights
Doc Zero attributes the modern idea of natural law to Hobbes. This is backwards. Hobbes originated the modern idea of facism. It was John Locke that originated the modern idea of natural rights deriving from natural law.
Microsoft the good guys
Google is evil in that they spy on users, and that they censor their services, and politically cook their search results. Microsoft’s Bing has not yet been detected cooking their search results Microsoft reports to law enforcement to what extent they spy on users, the report was leaked, and the interesting fact is that they log less than anyone else. They only log the last ten logins, and when you delete emails from a hotmail account, they really are deleted …
The suicide of the elites
Participatory transexual vomiting as high art. This illustrates Unwin’s “Sex and Culture†– that no civilization long survives the end of the patriarchy and female chastity. Unwin’s suggested explanation for this observation is that civilization is produced by the Freudian energy of sexual repression. I favor the theory that civilization is created by patriarchs for their offspring. Another plausible theory is that civilizations survive by high asabiya, Roissy being a walking talking demonstration of low asabiya. A monogamous patriarchal society …
The Cathedral and social decay
In 1984, I said the Soviet Union was falling. In November 2005, I said the mortgage market was collapsing. I was very far from being the first to say those things, but I was in a minority when I said them. And here is another prophecy:  The decline of our currency, and the our inability to rebuild the two towers, are symptoms of an illness that will bring about American collapse and crisis around 2020 or so. As to what …