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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.

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Income inequality in the United States consists of two gaps. The first gap is an upper-lower gap, between those with a college education and those without. The second is an upper-upper gap, between those with high incomes and those with extraordinarily high incomes.

As best-selling writer and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in The Black Swan, safe occupations are those where the worker is paid a fixed amount per unit of time. An accountant or a nurse is not going to become extremely rich or extremely poor; they could be called “billers,” because they bill for their time. On the other hand, a professional singer or a software entrepreneur is playing in a winners-take-most tournament. The difference in talent between an international pop star and an unknown lounge singer may actually be quite small. However, the nature of these fields is that the difference in rewards can be enormous. People who choose these sorts of occupations could be called “players.”

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Well, duh. There’s that old democracy thing rearing its ugly head again.

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In 18 months of searching, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility chief H. Marshall Jarrett have uncovered new e-mail messages hinting at heightened involvement of White House lawyers and political aides in the firings of nine federal prosecutors two years ago.

Well, duh. These prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President. If he wants to fire them for wearing the wrong tie, he is perfectly entitled to do so. This is like saying “Warren Buffet implicated in the firing of one of his vice-presidents”.

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If you’re looking for racism in American politics, look no further.

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In a political year unlike any in Alaska’s short history, Stevens’s extraordinary resilience might prove as reliable as his indictment was upsetting. The man who first went to Washington in 1956 to lobby for statehood has, as the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, shipped home the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, nurturing along the way a paternalism that earned him the nickname “Uncle Ted.”

And that, in a nutshell, illustrates why our current political system is structurally dysfunctional. The way to succeed in Washington is to get re-elected. The way to get re-elected is to bring home enough pork that the constituency thus established is sufficient to do so. That’s all it is. So long as legislators can buy votes with taxpayers’ money, the system will continue to reward that sort of corrupt dealing. The best way to win a game is to cheat, and our political system rewards, rather than punishing, cheating.