perverse incentives make collapse inevitable
Minority mortgage meldown and diversity recession
People are starting to realize wonder where all the money was pissed away to. The answer, of course, is that most of it was pissed away on affirmative action loans to members of protected minorities. Whose fault is this? Steve Sailer blames primarily Karl Rove and George Bush There is much truth in this, but I would primarily blame Basel. Under Basel, what matters to a financial institution is not …
Freedom flotilla vs Israeli Defence Forces.
Don’t take a knife to a gunfight. Israel is blockading Gaza. Activists attempted to force the blockade with pathetically inadequate weapons. Perhaps the intent was to suffer some pathetic casualties, that they could then whine about, or perhaps they were just stupid. If you are going to engage soldiers and marines, you should either take no weapons at all other than moral force, which may not be all that effective, …
The past is always changing
We have always been at war with Eastasia
Someone in Academia received an order like that given to Comrade Winston Smith, and all of Academia fell into line, and remains in line to this day, a thousand megaphones attached to one microphone.
Mission accomplished
Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010. But has everything goes to hell in a handbasket, it will all be blamed on free markets, despite …
I predict an Obama win
With these tactics, Obama should be able to win in 2012 And 2016, and … Of course, winning by such tactics may well result in a victory as useless as that which Patrice Lumumba won when the Congo became independent. Two or three weeks after independence, the government of the Congo had largely vanished from underneath Premier Patrice Lumumba, even though parliament continued to meet and vote him ever greater …
How to fix the financial crisis
Proposed reforms, both left and right, are unlikely to have any effect on the continuing massive misappropriation from the financial system. It is absurd that people are discussing obscure details of the credit swap market. To fix the financial crisis, we have to revoke, or at least denounce and denigrate, Marie Curie’s Nobel prize. When they gave a Nobel prize to Marie Curie for being female, that did not hurt …
Yale Harvard and Basel style Free Enterprise
Basel II is tens of thousands of pages of regulations, no one knows how vast it is, because not all the regulations can be found in any one place, but it could all be replaced by two simple rules: Politically correct victim groups shall always find it easy to borrow money, regardless of their ability or intention to pay it back, and politically well connected businesses shall always make money, regardless of whether they are competently run or not.
The left as astroturf
Whenever one sees supposedly insurrectionary leftism, one usually detects a government official sponsoring it, as for example in the recent suppression of US flags on Cinco de Mayo. Observe the recent firebombings in the Greek riots, where the “rioters†murdered three people. Here are a couple of videos of the “rioters†firebombing police. The “rioters†charge the police, and bang on their shields with light sticks, making no attempt to …
Official statistics smell of official truth
Mandel points out that there is something mighty funny about official US economic statistics.