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Over these years we had violent financial crashes of various types, bank panics, piles of recessions and a huge depression, many foreign wars and one enormous domestic war, had a central bank and didn’t, were on the gold standard and weren’t, had governments topple in scandal and multiple leaders assassinated, and what did it all amount to in the medium to long run? In per-capita income terms: Nothing. The overall trend does not bend or shift. Every bad year was followed by a good year that returned us to trend.

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India is where we will be.

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What do you think is paying for AlGore’s Manhattan-sized carbon footprint?

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Pythons will be pythons….

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

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Boy, there’s a shocker.

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Towns not on interstates cannot make it we are told, towns that are not hip and exciting are dead. And so, our young people leave — with at least a casual observance that those left behind are falling to the drug culture. In a recent focus group of young males in one eastern Kentucky town one participant stated, “Sure I sell drugs — it’s easy money and I don’t have the connections to get a job even at Wal-Mart.”

A lot of it, I think, is convenient transportation. In the Good Old Days, it was difficult to move, so people stayed put. Nowadays it’s easy to move, so people staying put is surprising. I was born in one town in Indiana, and my parents moved us to another when I was too young to remember. I stayed in that town until I was 9, then my parents moved us back close to where I was born, where we stayed until I joined the Navy. I was therefore on the leading edge of the “let’s move if it might be better over there” trend. it never even occurred to me that I might stay in the small town (45,000) where I went to high school. I suspect that people just don’t have that expectation any more. Our communities are not where we live but those we share interests with through politics or hobbies or other connections — I’m closer to people I went to college with 20 years ago than whoever it is that lives next door to the house I’ve been in for the last 10 years, whom I’ve never met.

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Mostly by eating meat, it seems. Further proof that vegetarianism is dumb.

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Women are actually an alien species. I’ve always said so.

Well, at least it wasn’t $12 million to a dog. That’s a hostile alien species.

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Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it’s really an incredible case study in regulation
because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over them. And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting and all of that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that’s $65 million a year, and all they have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you know, I look at more than two companies

So, of course: The government’s response to this failure of regulation is — more regulation! With more government employees and a higher budget, of course.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

This suggests that there is no way to avoid disasters permanently. That’s no doubt true. But we can make them rarer and less catastrophic just by being less stupid. Consider two economies, both of which either grow 5% per year or shrink 5% per year. The first economy is more bubble-prone, so it grows for seven years then shrinks for three years. The second economy grows for ten years, then shrinks for two years. Over the course of sixty years (six cycles for the first economy, five for the second), the second economy will end up over twice as big.

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When social order declines through bad leadership, common sense is not to best on the past — the social order that just failed — but to bet on the future, which is getting your pile of cash away from the idiots before they screw it up again. I think that’s why people who are older and wiser and accustomed to this system have not really blinked at this bailout. Waste all your money keeping the system going? Of course they did — they do it with every single thing they do, every day. When society is ruled by popularity, it tends to deny social order, because individuals don’t want to be obligated. They want to be free. As a result, it creates decaying situations in which anyone with a brain would do as those Wall Street traders did — raid while the raiding’s good, because soon the idiots will destroy the rest of it with another well-intentioned, unrealistic plan. Civilization is its own enemy.

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Time to take it back? Just asking.

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Well, then, let’s rush right out and do it.

Perhaps painting black people white would end racism. Somebody get on the horn to Jesse Jackson.

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At first sight, the idea seems plausible. True, vertical farming would be a non-starter if urban rents were higher than rural rents. But we all know that land is just as cheap in downtown Manhattan as it is in rural Nebraska, right? One wonders, though, why farming moved off the island a more than a century ago.

Professor Despommier claims that food grown indoors would be pesticide-free, unlike that dirty outdoor produce. Once again, totally plausible. Big American cities are as free of rats and roaches as Ireland is of snakes. The Museum of Natural History has a glass case containing the last rat found in New York City, way back before World War I. (Just don’t look down at the tracks when you are waiting for a subway).

But then if we admit there are millions of rats and billions of roaches, then the crops growing in vertical farms would have to be protected by enough rat and roach poison to kill Xerxes’ army. Fortunately, in rat- and roach-free urban America, that is not a consideration. And even if it were, we would not need to worry that health inspectors would be bribed to overlook the rodent droppings and roach eggs in our tenth-story grown arugula. The civil servants in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia are known worldwide for their incorruptibility.

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In other words, he’s scared of America.

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When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm. This will highlight the importance of your cultural discovery, the fineness of your discerning taste, and your early adopter insiderness for having found it before anyone else.

Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.

No, this isn’t a proto-entry in Stuff White People Like, but an actual column in the New York Times.

The name “David Brooks” does not usually jump to mind when one is searching for the names of humor writers, but apparently he’s attempting to broaden his career path. I wish him luck.

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Two companies in the United States have won new patents on ways to convince the brain we are consuming foods that are far sweeter or saltier than they actually are. The firms are working with Cadburys and Coca-Cola to create healthy yet appealing products.

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The Brownshirts and Blueshirts reborn. Thank God you don’t live in Europe.

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The U.S. government has been sending fewer Iraqi immigrants to Michigan because of its struggling economy, though some expect refugees to make their way here anyway, costing the cash-strapped state more in the long run.

Gee, you mean immigrants come here and promptly go on welfare? My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Michigan is one of the nation’s top destinations for Iraqi refugees, having received about 3,000 of the 13,823 Iraqi refugees allowed into the country between Oct. 1, 2007, and Sept. 30, based on State Department figures obtained by the Associated Press.

That might have something to do with the fact that the Detroit area has the largest concentration of Muslims on North American continent. Times being what they are, you can’t impose shari’a law without a sufficient number of sandals on the ground.

Michigan has had the nation’s highest average annual jobless rate since 2006. The seasonally adjusted August jobless rate of 8.9 percent was the highest in the state since late 1992.

That’s what being run by Democrats will do for you, as I keep trying to get through to my brother and his leftoid wife.

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Works for me.

It is a mark of maturity on the behalf of Latinos as an immigrant ethnic group that they should want an extraneous layer of government to call their own and provide patronage jobs for the politically faithful.

It’s the American way.

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How long before people in America do the same?

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

As a native Californian, something that I’ve noticed is an increasing intellectual disconnection between the power centers of the East and the reality on the ground in California. At bottom, this financial crisis is California’s fault. But Wall Street and Washington seemed to have no clue what California was like in this decade. Observe, for instance, all the incredulity when I’ve pointed out the role of Latinos in the housing fiasco.

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That’s a great picture of an alpaca. Wouldn’t mind having some of those myself, since my wife is a knitter.

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I lust for an iPhone, but I’m not willing to deal with Cingular/AT&T to get one. This post illustrates why. My wife and I briefly had mobile phone service with Cingular/AT&T, and it was unpleasant. (Quite unlike the “old” AT&T, which was fantastic until Cingular bought them and infected the whole organization with their craptacular attitudes.)

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Presumably the Georgians see themselves as the new mujahadeen.

Cringely thinks that my chosen career field, database development, will be going away soon.

Perhaps I ought to retire soon.

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Well, that’s not what I’d call a “close shave”, but I suppose the photo is worth sharing.

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I’d be happy to criticize but I can’t say with a straight face that the CIA does any better.

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Hey, when you’ve really gotta have a foot-long….

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

One off the things I’ve been trying to explain is that the late mortgage bubble was so crazy because, unlike most bubbles, it was not a bet on the rich getting richer (as in the Internet Bubble). Betting on smart young people to invent new Internet stuff wasn’t nuts — they actually did invent a whole lot. The nutty part was that there weren’t many ways to use an open system to achieve a quasi-monopoly and earn above normal returns on investment.profit from the inventions.

But the housing bubble was a bet on the increasing ability to pay of the part of American society — the working class and lower to middle-middle class, primarily — that has been getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop since about 1973.

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Health and safety officials say that the wording in police bravery awards should be changed to avoid encouraging officers to risk their lives.

“Unclear on the concept” seems totally inadequate, but I can’t think of any better.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Most discussion of the mortgage crisis has been at the elite level — where it impacts banks, Wall Street investment houses, interest rates, liquidity. But on the street level, there are other, less obvious, consequences. Animals are abandoned as owners decamp; untended swimming pools breed mosquitoes. Abandoned dwellings in far suburbs don’t attract vagrants but they do get used by human smugglers as drop houses, since there are few neighbors to notice. Owners stop paying their HOA dues and maintenance is neglected, even as the dues escalate for those who stay behind. And much of the time there is no-one to do the work, due to the disappearance of the Latino labor-force.

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Repeat after me: “multi-centered metropolitan region.” This is the model that characterizes most city/suburban regions in the US, where the urban core is just one of several nodes of development or centers of economic, residential, office, industrial, educational and recreational facilities and life. This is the model that, planned or unplanned, has evolved in the United States. It works, we like it, we’re keeping it.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Well, it’s traditional.

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Now this is really cool.

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Jim Carrey will do the voice in the movie.

Steven E. Landsburg, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.

We are embarking on the most radical transformation of the American economy since the New Deal, committing hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to save banks and other financial institutions from the consequences of their own bad investments. This, we are told, is the cost of averting a crisis. But I sure wish someone would explain to me exactly what crisis we’re trying to avert.

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Not only “off the grid”, but “off the pipe” as well.

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One of the hottest Internet videos during the mortgage and banking crisis has been a YouTube clip titled “Burning Down the House,” which outlines the untold story of how liberal Democrats pressured banks and lenders to throw standards out the window and give money to people who couldn’t pay it back.

Try watching it now, however, and you won’t be able to, thanks to the growing problem of “flag spam,” the practice of abusing online filter systems to squelch political speech with which one disagrees.

They’ve already hijacked Digg and Reddit. Who’s next?

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Gotta love Australians.

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Sounds like a Congressional press release.

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China has missiles. China has nuclear weapons. China is run by Communists. If that doesn’t scare you, you are an idiot.