Why Goldman Sachs sucks? Recidivism?

Goldman’s role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren’t in IPOs but in mortgages.

All right, I’m officially a fan of Matt Taibbi.  And it’s issues precisely like this that are going to have me investing uber-conservatively, in annuities and other instruments where I can actually see the fine print before signing*, rather than having much of anything to do with stocks.  If I hadn’t been working for a company that was blatantly letting loan applicants get away with murder while the underwriters were pretty much told “suck it up or you’re out of a job,” I’d have fallen for it, too.

*not that annuities are a panacea – they can also be full of fail.  BUT, they tend to be unromantic and thus fly under the scam-radar.

Hired!

Not the mst3k version, though.

It’s not the golden ring, but it’s a paycheck.  Keeping my resume up to date and looking for actual opportunities rather than dead-ends, but I’m not going to bitch in a 10%+ unemployment context.

Andrew Sullivan needs some perspective on Palin

Has Palin’s soap-opera been rather bizarre?  Sure.

But Sullivan’s been “all cannons on automatic” for a while now… if he’s of “no party or clique,” why hasn’t he been offering a running account of Biden, as well?  They were both, after all, VP candidates in the same race.  IF she’s fundamentally wackier than “we drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon” Biden (and that was only one of the “what planet are you from” lines he tossed off in the campaign debates), then let’s hear it.  But if she and Biden are mental bedmates, let’s spread the vituperations around, eh?

Tim Worstall at the Examiner makes a certain icky sense.

More porn = less rape?

Besides wanting to shower at the mere thought of connecting said dots, I suspect that not only is Worstall correct, but that this may also go some ways towards explaining the generally-degrading treatment of women within porn (and why “porn-for-women” is such a dramatically different beast.  Then again, porn-for-women can also be defined as HGTV, which tends to fill itself with as much misandry as its counterpart does misogyny, so….).

Perhaps, like all things, this is the evil of the boob tube (unintentional) at work — it makes you passive.  In some cases, perhaps the world benefits by making a certain sort of person more and more passive?  The rapist has that evil itch (which, unless I’m well out of date, is more to do with power than sex) satisfied via porn, and then goes out and buys a pizza or something?

Makes you wonder, then, if that idea holds up:  what’s porn-for-dictators?

4th of July: The stakes

This is why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

From a horrifying little work by RJ Rummel (don’t read this before bed):

The one factor present in all this Chinese democide, and that in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and other such cases of genocide, is arbitrary power….

Power kills. And absolute power kills en masse. Consider–the Soviet Union, 61,911,000 people murdered; the Chinese communists, 38,000,000; the Nazis, 17,000,000; the Chinese Nationalists, 10,214,000; the Japanese militarists in World War II, 5,890,000; the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, 2,000,000; West Pakistan over East Pakistan, 2,000,000; Turkey during and after World War I, 1,500,000; and Yugoslavia after World War II, 1,105,000.

Ilya Somin nails it.

Freedom belongs to people….not to “peoples.”

One of my Long Bet Challengers has Withdrawn

HEH.

Still need to cough up 200, though.

Ye Blog: It must be updated.

It’s clunky, old, the widgets are ancient enough that it doesn’t work well… (e.g., currently can’t update my links, which are textwidgets I used to be able to modify, but now for some unknown reason cannot)

long story short, I need to upgrade.

So, keep this one, go back to blogger (cruder controls, vastly superior user flexibility), or some third option?  I’m trolling for opinions here, since my last change actually got complains (They haz complains!)

Ideas?

UPDATE:  Okay, weird.  NOW I can update the textboxes where my links live…

I don’t know if the housing crisis was created by idiots

as Instapundit suggests…

…but I did drive past a neighborhood in Coppell this morning where they were offering houses in the “low 500s” which were constructed of chipboard.

Half a million.  House made of chipboard.  Sure, it’s walled off and near the club, so you never have to deal with anybody who isn’t just like you (given my experience actually working in places like that, I regard this as a win-win scenario — I don’t want to deal with any more of them, the folks who honestly think it’s critically important that their children play with the right playmates, than they do with me)…. but wouldn’t the financial success allowing you to plunk down that kind of money for a house also be predicated on enough common sense not to buy a…

excuse me now….

Half-million-dollar house made out of fucking chipboard?

Not only is it strong,

but forests of them are pretty as hell.  Would love to see it springing up here.

When the going gets tough…

the mice go surfing.

Apparently, anyway.

Polishing the resume

Have heard from unimpeachable source that performance is a non-issue, and that employment issues are directly centered around my ethnicity.  Aka, while the department thinks I rock, the administration is basically pulling a Dallas.

Have found a couple VERY interesting potential jobs locally, one of which would be right up my alley and kick butt; will be applying shortly.

Honduran soldiers defend constitution, UPDATED

The link, of course, is AP (and therefore shit), so if you don’t know the background, here’s the deal:  Zelaya was in deep trouble for having screwed with the Constitution, attempting to pull a Chavez, and the Honduran Supreme Court was getting ready to deliver a smackdown when Zelaya decided to try to do things the old way.

AKA, if you can’t manipulate the law, cow your political opponents with the threat of mass-violence via mobs of useful idiots like Ms. Gaitan (see article).  In this case, the Honduran military wasn’t having it.

Central and South American politics gets narsty, it’s true.  Because of the cronyism inherent to politics, the pure liberals (classical liberals) never quite seem to have a solution that really helps the poor, and the leftist and so-called “nationalist” solutions simply seem to spread the misery around.  I don’t know what balance or prescription would work, but Zelaya isn’t it.  He’s jsut another representative of old-school political thuggery that has continually failed to deliver for about a century and a half now.

Oh.  For those of you new to the problem (aka, Central and South America’s politics are f’d up), an EXCELLENT, rather leftist (but openly so, and therefore intellectually honest) basic history I’d recommend is Born in Blood and Fire.  It’s well-written, reads quickly, and presents the basics in a way that’s easily accessible, even as a bathroom book.  It’s got solid currency as a basic freshman-level textbook, and I strongly recommend it.

UPDATE.  Apparently Obama’s siding with Chavez on this one (no surprise, since it’s Chavez who printed the illegal ballets).  Apparently it’s easier for a Chicago Democrat to sympathize with a left-wing mobocratic caudillo than with a bunch of grunts, legislators, and supreme-court types concerned about preserving the rule of law.  Shameful.  BUT!  Apparently it’s all words, b/c SecState Clinton says we’re not considering dropping aid, either.  Hypocrisy, or Rope-A-Dope for the sake of the rubes?

OW.

Just… ow.

Wait, first we hugged tigers…

now we’re up to hugging SHARKS??