Category: Thoughts

Via Brad Delong: No One Makes you Shop at Wal*Mart. From a very good review: “Slee’s book is the best of the anti-market books: it is well written, serious, and knowledgeable about economics. In fact, I regard Slee’s book as an excellent primer on asymmetric information, free riding, externalities, herding, coordination problems and identity – Economics 301 for all those budding young Ezra Klein’s of the world who think that Economics 101 isn’t quite right.”

I am certain that markets are a great way to solve some problems, but not all problems– but I can’t really articulate why, because I am not an economist. For example, Wal*Mart and sprawl worry me, but I can’t be sure that I don’t just find them tacky. This book sounds like it might provide the kind of serious theoretical framework that can demonstrate exactly why those things are true.

“I hope that Chairman Bernanke is right when he says that a slumping housing market will not affect the broader economy, but I would not bet the house on it.” — Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.)

For loan refinancing– especially cash-out refinances, where you trade the equity in your home for cash in your pocket– lenders typically lend a certain percentage of the cash value of your home. If that’s not as much as you hoped, you can always get an appraiser to claim it’s worth more. Mortgage brokers may even have over-generous appraisers on tap– they want to loan you more money, after all, and once they’ve cleared the loan they don’t have to worry about you repaying it.

And it’s not that bad a lie, really, not in a surging market: after all, if the house isn’t worth a half-million now, it will be next year, right? As long as the market keeps going up, and as long as the client makes the payments, the lie goes undiscovered. If the rate resets and the payments go up, the client can refinance again, or sell the house in that surging market. If the rate resets and the payments go up and the market tanks… well then, we’re all in trouble.

Later: watch as I try to sort out the difference between “an investment” and “an expense.”

OK, the promised Harry Potter thought: Emma Watson could get out of being typecast as Hermione Granger by starring in a sex tape with Miley Cyrus. Seriously. It would be at least as effective as Dan “Harry Potter” Radcliffe appearing bollock-naked in “Equus.”

Slate’s got a great roundup of Falwell’s greatest hits (my favorite– cheap shots at Martin Luther King Jr. for his ties to pinkos, then later denials of same), and a predictably nasty Christopher Hitchens piece on how Falwell was nasty. Better is Salon’s interview with Tinky Winky. But my favorite Fallwell wrapup is probably from the gossip blog TMZ, which has no words at all.

Here is a horrific satanic gay video that contains all the kinds of amoral nastiness Falwell abhorred and which we are free to enjoy now that he’s dead:

Seriously, those bunnies are freaky huge.

Via Tiny Revolution (and the New Yorker), an excerpt from Fallwell’s autobiography:

There were times that Dad’s pranks bordered on cruelty. One of his oil-company workers, a one-legged man he nicknamed “Crip” Smith, complained about everything. Dad and Crip’s co-workers got tired of the old man’s bellyaching and decided to take revenge. One morning Crip called in sick and Dad volunteered to send by lunch to his grateful but suspicious employee. Dad and his chums caught Crip’s old black tomcat, killed it, skinned it, and cooked it in the kitchen of one of Dad’s little restaurants. They called it squirrel meat and delivered it to Crip on a linen-covered tray. When Crip returned to work the next morning, Dad and his co-conspirators asked him how he liked his meal. They knew he would complain even about a free home-cooked lunch, and when Crip called it “the toughest squirrel meat” he had ever eaten, they were glad to tell him why.

Bordered on cruelty? That’s some serious Jack Bauer shit right there.

Growing up with that kind of family explains, even if it doesn’t justify, Falwell’s hate-mongering over the rest of his career. (See also The Power of Narrative for further commentary on psychology and evil).

I think I need to go into further depth about the NYT gluten story. My objection to it, and my ire, really stems from the fact that I’ve seen a lot of similar pieces in the Times recently. See, it’s a trend story masquerading as fact-based journalism. Real journalism would have stats and research on the number of people with celiac disease, the number of gluten-free products available, and the number of people who do not have celiac disease but claim some other sort of gluten sensitivity. But it doesn’t. It’s just fluff, and the Times is passing it off as substance.

Don’t get me wrong: I love trend stories. They’re fun, they’re a great way to discuss unquantifiable changes in popular culture, and they’re occasionally insightful. They may even help point to areas that need further study. They are also a lot quicker and easier to write than real research-driven journalism, and that’s their downfall, because it’s tempting to write a trend story when you’re on a deadline and need something to fill up a page. It’s totally fine to write a trend story about lipstick colors, but when it comes to a serious issue like celiac disease, drug abuse, or teenage sex (those last two are particularly hard to research and particularly prone to alarmist trend stories.) It’s one thing to write a trend story, but it’s not OK to put it in a real news section and let it pretend to be real news.

The SF Gate, Slate, and Radosh all have similar stories explaining the dangerous trend of trend journalism.

The Correction
Second, I made the mistake yesterday of mocking “crazy,” implying that it was not a real illness. Crazy is a serious problem, and if crystals, blue-green algae, or reiki help your symptoms, that’s just super. But just as trend stories should not be confused with journalism based on research and facts, people suffering from crazy should not be confused with people suffering from other illnesses. The NYT story managed to conflate people who suffer from an inconvenient and probably psychosomatic gluten sensitivity and those who suffer from a clearly defined and probably genetic gluten sensitivity that damages the intestinal cilia. That’s a mistake which trivializes both the neurotic, who are genuinely suffering from something (not gluten-related, but something nonetheless) and people with celiac disease, who are suffering from celiac disease.

The NY Times and Slate both do coverage of the wedding-industrial complex, related to the release of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. My favorite bit is where the limo company admits that they will refuse service to brides who refuse to get the special, more-expensive bridal service. You can’t be ferried around in a nice car for three hours for $300– you must get the three-hour $400 service with special “Here Comes the Bride” sound effects.

Both, however, are just dumb trend articles that are fun and have some cute anecdotes about how wedding expenses are way out of control. Less amusing is an article on gluten, which fails to distinguish between people who actually have celiac disease, and those who think that going “gluten free” is going to cure their depression, just like the crystals helped with their arthritis. Let me give you a handy-dandy explanation of the difference between people who have celiac disease, and people who are into gluten-avoidance because it’s a health-food trend:

If you have celiac disease, you will spend a day crapping your guts out if you eat anything that has been anywhere near gluten, fried in oil that has had something breaded fried in it, etc. Many brands of moisturizer will make you sick. Anything processed in a factory that also processes wheat is probably going to make you sick. Some foods say they don’t contain wheat, but are made in factories which use wheat flour to smooth their conveyor belts– they’ll make you sick. You probably know someone who is deathly allergic to shellfish– imagine those people in a world where everything is made of shrimp. To be sure, that’s a delicious world to you and me. But they would live in constant fear of food or food-related products.

If you think gluten is bad for you, and have found it easy to avoid, you are wrong. You have psychosomatic symptoms which are being alleviated by eating nasty placebo nonwheat pasta. You probably haven’t even actually avoided gluten– you’ve gotten rid of the obvious sources in your diet. I suppose it’s possible that cutting way back worked for you, but I doubt it. I don’t wish to disparage your symptoms or your relief, but you do not have celiac disease. You have crazy.

The Times can’t bother to distinguish between these two categories, and has written a piece which manages to lump people with a severe autoimmune illness in with people who have a mild psychological problem similar to believing that cell phones cause constipation.

Wikipedia, re: the Hawaiian goddess Kapo: Kapo also had a detachable vagina, which she once used as a decoy to aid her sister Pele to flee the overzealous Kamapua’a.

I’ve been busy creating synergy and building new business dynamics in the world of TV and gossip journalism, and there’s precious little I can say to the public about the subjects that occupy the vast majority of my recent days.

However, I have begun trying to guess what songs will be the hot song of the summer.

I would love for it to be this one:

But it is far more likely to be this remix of Rihanna and Lil’ Mama:

I remember learning in grade school that the United States was a great nation because it was a nation of laws, not a nation of men. That is, the United States was just because nobody was above the law and it was durable because it did not depend on having a virtuous and charismatic leader at its helm at all times.

The Wall Street Journal disagrees. Now, for many years, the Journal’s editorial pages have been the land of crazy wingnuts, and the rest of the paper has been a decent source of information. However, this has gone on for far too long. The honest and factual side of the paper lends respectability to content that would otherwise be relegated to a rightist organ like the Washington Times or the Free Republic. It’s time for the paper as a whole to suffer the consequences of publishing this kind of trash.

There is simply no excuse for the legitimate journalists of the Wall Street Journal to be carrying water for those who advocate the dismantling of the US government and its replacement with tyrrany. Weren’t right-wingers just recently throwing words like “treason” and “sedition” around when people dared to criticize the policies of the government? THIS, my friends, is sedition.