Pardon My Dissonance

Dancing Figures on Websites Lower Investor IQs
Immigrants R Us
MSN Home Page Dumbs Down in search of LCDs
P.J. O’Rourke Solves Mystery

We talked a blog post or so ago about the confusion about who to tag with the sub prime market mini-disaster. It’s mini in the investment sense. Investors big and small are always self destructing, they can’t help it. Blame for the problem reminds me of the Abbott and Costello routine, Who’s on First? Of course, that famous routine has become the template for congressional investigations and presidential debates. The idea is simple. After a lot of questions and answers, everyone is more confused at the end than the beginning.
In a more serious vein, J. Krishnamurti, teacher and world’s best self-help author, said, “The beginning is the end.” This simple, razor sharp observation covers all you need to know on the sub prime mess. And much of everything else in life.
Borrowers thought it was cute to lie about their capacity to pay the mortgage. Throw in a little self delusion, “Well honey, if we cut back on the dry cleaning, don’t go out to eat, and get used to fresh air instead of all that conditioned stuff, we can just about afford the payment. And god knows we need the extra room. You were just saying the other day that we should rent another mini storage because the one we have is already full of our cherished memories.”
Lenders thought it was cute to collect a fee for originating a loan that had little or no documentation, for a house that was grossly overpriced. Who cares if the borrower defaults? They were selling the loan as soon as the ink dried.
Investment banks thought it would be fun and profitable to chop the loans up into fragments that Einstein couldn’t understand and pawn them off to investors who pretended to understand what the investment banks didn’t. Now everyone wants to be bailed out. It smelled at the beginning, it reeked at the end.

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow.
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!
Immigrant Song Led Zeppelin

Immigrants emigrate for a variety of reasons. Apparently they don’t like living in the dirt, or being murdered. Go figure. If illegal immigrants should be deported, we can start with the pilgrims. We’re all illegal. The Indians should have built a wall. Maybe we should be deported to Mexico.
I prefer to let the Mexicans in. When the terrorists invade, who better to fight Muslim jihadists than Catholics? Catholics invented the Crusades and the Inquisition. Bush and Cheney are the Protestant version. The only thing people learn from history is how to do the same stupid things more efficiently. Take that Santayana.
Here in California, people complain about immigrants for breakfast, then go down to the Home Depot and pick up a few to do their gardening, child care and fruit picking. If unemployed auto workers have immigrated to California to pick fruit, it hasn’t hit the papers yet.
Let’s cut to the chase. You can believe that people, and their elected representatives, are serious about illegal immigrants when you see employers doing the perp walk for hiring them. Until then, ignore the whining and pontifications.
I have a proposal. Nobody, anywhere, for any reason, can ever use the phrase “…the Founding Fathers intended…” Or any other suggestion that they have read the minds of any of the so-called FF’s. Whenever you hear the term Founding Fathers, you can rest assured the statement that surrounds it will be self righteously smug.

Smacks of a Committee Decision
I have more e-mail addresses than I need. I like to see how the various mail systems work. I started out with hotmail. Then Microsoft “improved” it and made it something called Windows Live. Now, it won’t allow me to cut and paste things from a received e-mail.
The trick I really love is that the improved version defaults to the address line when you hit “reply.” So, if you’re dumb enough to assume “reply” meant you wanted to reply, you start to type and all you do is remove the address you wanted to reply to. Microsoft stock is likely doomed to perpetually under perform for the same reason automakers and airlines do. They confuse tweaking old ideas with actual new ideas. It’s not the same thing. That’s what managers and committees do. They change the color and stamp “new and improved” on the box. Can a thing really be both new AND improved? If it’s new, really, then what’s the basis for comparison? Too metaphysical for me. Let’s move on.
The MSN homepage almost always has a box about celebrity stupidities. Stupid celebrity stories appeal to the LCD, least common denominator. If you click on the most recent celebrity stupidity, you find out something. Not stupid celebrities, about yourself.

Today’s Timeless Question
Why does it take one click more than necessary to get to your inbox?

Now that MSN has determined the functional IQ of it’s audience, they’ve decided to put what are clearly ads into the headlines within topic boxes. They appear to be news or information items, but they aren’t. They’re, so far, just more ads for mortgages. Which brings us full circle. If easy mortgages created so many enormous problems, why are they still hawking easy mortgages on every page of the net?


“Intelligence is a constant. The population is growing.”
P.J. O’Rourke