Put it all together, and throw in mainstream media outlets that as recently as June were calling for mortgage haircuts specifically to allow people to keep borrowing against their houses, and you’ve got the mother of all perfect storms mixed with the crack cocaine of third rails on steroids. The foreclosure wave may seem all tired and 2008, but it’s hotter than ever.
Update: Because commenter hmm brings up the Coming Commercial Real Estate Hyperpocalypse, which is the elephant in the room of all swords of Damocles spreading like wildfire; and also because like a golem I screwed up Jim the Realtor’s title in my latest print column, I urge you to run, don’t walk, to give two thumbs up to this tour of ghost malls by Jim the Realtor®.
Tim Cavanaugh, “Corpse of a Thousand Houses”, Hit and Run, 2009-09-23
September 24, 2009
QotD: Return of the revenge of the subprime mortgage apocalypse
Another reason why there’s still debate over Climate Change/Global Warming
True believers treat skeptics on the Climate Change/Global Warming question as heretics because “the proof is right there” . . . except the data supporting the case is not available to study:
. . . the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.
[. . .]
If we are to believe Jones’s note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?
All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can’t be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there’s no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.
Polls and the 25% nutty fringe
Over at The Crossed Pond, Brad put together an interesting statistical post contrasting the “Birthers” with the “Truthers”:
Generally, I out-of-hand dismiss poll results under, say, 25% meant to imply that a party, country, or demographic are stupid or out of touch. Because almost always, those poll results are entirely without context. X% of Republicans believe Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster. OMG! Y% of Icelanders believe in pixies! What morons!
The fact of the matter is, if you poll any demographic on the right question, you can find a good chunk of them who believe in really dumb things. [. . .]
But, according to my own general yardstick for such things, Trutherism falls about where I would expect it to — in the general range common to any nutty proposition. Roughly the same amount of Democrats believe in Trutherism as people believe in vampires. That says much less about Democrats than it does about the crazy shit people are inclined to believe.
On the Birther question, however, we’re pushing past the normal range of nuttiness, and are getting a bit more mainstream, at least in the Republican ranks. About twice as many people believe in Birtherism as I would expect them to applying my general rule of thumb. In other words, it’s something more than run-of-the-mill crazy.
What bothers me a bit more about this sort of thing entails my own assumptions about crazy thoughts, and is based on what one might call the galaxy of nuttiness that comes in the Truther/Birther package. For example, a Truther, and I’ve known many, will generally have a constellation of other beliefs that sort of goes part-and-parcel with Trutherism, and tends towards a fanatical skepticism about government in general. That often leads to them being “don’t tread on me” style libertarians, ala Ron Paul, or “the government is out to get you” conspiracy theorists ala Alex Jones. Birtherism, and I’ve known less but enough to generalize, tend towards a much more cultural/racial/religion based constellation of thoughts — there are Good Decent Americans and then there are the rest of them, from horrifying illegal immigrants to muslims demographically taking over Europe and about to instantiate Sharia law, etc. etc, which generally leads them into a weird tribalistic culture war crouch, ala “we are being taken over by Others” culturists/racists ala Lou Dobbs, or “there is a conspiracy to subjugate the American way of life” hysterics ala Glenn Beck.
Biggest Anglo-Saxon treasure find since Sutton Hoo
Amateur “metal detectorist” Terry Herbert is the discoverer of an Anglo-Saxon treasure hoard in a field in Staffordshire:
The collection contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far bigger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge in Suffolk.
Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum’s Department of Prehistory and Europe, said: “This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries.
“(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.”
A great exploit for Mr. Herbert, although the report makes what appear to be conflicting statements: “It has been declared treasure by South Staffordshire coroner Andrew Haigh, meaning it belongs to the Crown”, but also “BBC correspondent Nick Higham said the hoard would be valued by the British Museum and the money passed on to Mr Herbert and the landowner”.
I hope that the latter part is true, because if it isn’t, it will only encourage future treasure finders to conceal their discoveries in hopes of selling it off on the black market, likely destroying the historical and archaeological value of the site in the process.
