When I say prices look like they have bottomed, I don’t mean that the prices sellers are asking may have bottomed. Asking prices are, for the most part, still way too high. But if we look at sales that are actually being made, both for houses, and for land with secure development approval, the prices are a good deal lower, the people buying are the smart money, and the people …
Fitna the movie
Most servers have been intimidated into silence, but the gutsy “Pirate Bay†is still serving “Fitnaâ€, in bittorrent form, the only major commercial service still standing. But the interesting thing is who is doing the intimidating. At first, it was a western, politically correct, demand for pre-emptive surrender.. Fitna shows a verse from the Koran urging murder, terror, or conquest. Then it shows today’s Muslim preachers urging murder, terror and …
The long war
As I write this there is chaos in Basra. Tomorrow there will be chaos some place else. In Basra today Iranians are backing every pony in this race, for what they want is chaos, and chaos is easy to create. We are pursuing a strategy based on creating order. Creating order in the Middle East is like pushing mud uphill. As I wrote when the attack on the Taliban was …
Global warmers lie again 2
The Salt Lake Tribune tells us Antarctic ice melt shows warming is speeding up The sound of a chunk of Antarctic ice hundreds of years old and seven times the size of Manhattan collapsing into the ocean should be enough to rouse the concern of even the most staunch global warming skeptics. A more accurate headline would be “Rapidly expanding Antarctic ice shelf spawns gigantic icebergs.†The antarctic ice shelf …
Losing in Iraq, part two
An hour or so ago I read that the surge was about to be diminished, because it is unsustainable, and posted “Losing in Iraq, part one†I guess Sadr read it also, for a few minutes ago I read that the Green Zone is being shelled and the oil is being cut off. I read it and posted, Sadr read it and started shelling. The major alternatives: Declare victory, since …
Losing in Iraq, part one
When the US began its attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan, I said that destroying our enemies anywhere in the world would be easy, but building states would be hard, would most likely fail, for no one understands how a state is built, and the trend of the times is for states to fail. And so it has proven: The surge produced the temporary appearance of relative quiet in Iraq, …
Global warming explained
In a paper with the deliberately boring title “A Provisional Long Mean Air Temperature Series for Armagh Observatory†C.J. Butler and D.J. Johnston find a near perfect correlation between solar cycle length and temperature from 1796 to 1992 – which implies that recent warming is real, but wholly explained by events happening on the sun. The paper starts off with lots of worthy, important, and extremely boring stuff about thermometers. …
Future Housing prices
Real mortgage interest rates are high and rising in the US, because the the future value of the US dollar is uncertain. Lenders fear the possibility of very high inflation, so demand high interest rates. This makes it difficult to buy a house. At the same time, borrowers fear deflation.  They fear they could put down a deposit, then be wiped out as the value of house falls, along with …
Alan Greenspan on crack
Four days ago, Alan Greenspan posted an article wondering what went wrong: “We will never have a perfect model of risk†“Risk management systems – and the models at their core – were supposed to guard against outsized losses. How did we go so wrong?†Hey Alan! Check your spam folder for 2006. You will find it is full of ads saying: “Buy the house of your dreams for no …
Stagflation
The US economy faces recession: To stimulate the economy, the fed is lowering interest to near zero and the government handing out six hundred dollars to everyone. But what the US faces is not recession, but stagflation, and handing out free money is not the cure for stagflation. Stagflation was first observed in the first great fiat money inflation of modern times, the French assignat. The more assignats they printed, …