And to quote one of my all time favorite movie characters, Forrest Gump, “And that’s all I’m going to say about that.”
Check out HVCC Petition at www.hvccpetition.com
Category: Group Therapy (page 63 of 81)
It goes beyond a failure to find ideas that increase education; many have embraced ideas that are clearly destructive. Our experts really don’t seem all that interested in education as most people understand this term. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, for example, don’t seem to be priorities. What we see in education makes sense only if we assume that our educators have an agenda we don’t know about, or that they are malevolent, or both.
So what agenda, you’re wondering, are they actually focused on? What’s the answer to the mystery? Here is my deduction: that those at the top of the Education Industrial Complex, since the time of John Dewey, have been collectivists first, and educators second or third. The goal of creating an educated child was too often superceded by the goal of creating a cooperative child.
Broadly speaking, they undermined educational success in two ways. First, they found reasons to delete and dilute the curriculum. Second, the things they did teach, they often taught in confusing, unhelpful ways. I could reel off a list of 50 failed pedagogies, none of which lived up to the hype or the hope, things such as New Math, Reform Math, Constructivism, Bilingual Education, Self Esteem, et cetera.
The paradigm of bad pedagogies, of course, is Whole Word, I.E. any non-phonics way of teaching reading. Around 1931, every public school in the country was told that phonics was out, and the children should be taught by Look-Say (think Dick and Jane). This switch is one of most amazing (and revealing) events in American educational history. Try to think of another instance where a profession abruptly decided to reverse everything ordinarily done for centuries.
Once you assume that all these conclusions are true, you find there’s no mystery at all. Everything that’s happened in American education is as logical as 1 + 2 = 3. My estimation is that if we tossed out the ideological admixture, we’d see steady improvement. Don’t think we can improve things by tweaking around the edges. We need an intervention. We need surgery.
Had the opportunity to drive up from beautiful San Diego to Orange County today. One of the great things about Southern California is that driving 50 or 60 miles to do something or see someone (which would have driven my mom and dad nutso) is rather routine. I just cranked up some tunes, and this morning because it was misting a bit I chose Gordon Lightfoot and all that kind of folksy stuff, and away I went.
Teri Lussier always talks about her beloved Dayton, and it delights me that she takes the time to share something that suspends the day to day real estate chatter for some homespun fireside chatter. So while driving up past Camp Pendleton today I wondered aloud how many people have been so blessed to live in a place so steeped in natural beauty, just within miles reach of the whirling world of business.
Mountains to the east, Catalina silhouetted in the overcast Pacific to the west, (yeah, really 26 miles across the sea) lying low on the horizon, and no traffic to speak of. I was filled with actual joy. Now there’s a word you don’t read much of on a real estate posting these days. But there it was, palpable and real, and filling me up as I drifted up Interstate 5 at 70 miles an hour, singing along to the music.
Scott Schang is a mortgage broker, and really a remarkable guy on top of that. I already mentioned to you in a previous posting that I was able and blessed to meet Scott at the Unchained conference a couple of months ago in Phoenix. We’ve continued our relationship, and today I was driving up to solidify some of the ideas he had for helping me market my database of potential homebuyers.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I pulled into the parking lot of his business to find it amuck with “Open During Construction” signs, jackhammers, compressors, painters, welders, yellow tape, plastic and sandbags all around the whole business complex. I took out my trusty video camera and Read more
Depending upon the last significant change in your life, the answer might be predictable. I remember the first time I earned six figures. I wasn’t even aware of it ’till the tax returns were finished. I was a little flummoxed when my wife asked me how I felt. About what? She thought I was kidding, but I’d only paid attention to the taxes owed. It marked a change in how I viewed not only myself, but the new frontier of what I almost immediately began perceiving as the possible.
We all have memories found on the opposite side of that same coin — financially hard times, illness, divorce, and the rest. It’s the changes precipitating sorrow, stressful times, and personal pain and suffering in whatever form that allow us the opportunity to, as Grandma used to say, stretch ourselves. With each passing year I understand more of what she meant
Who among us hasn’t felt the sting of failure smirking at us derisively? Hard times, whether personal, financial, or any of the endless combinations we’ve all experienced, come and go.
We’re the common denominators though, aren’t we? Regardless of what comes into and/or exits our lives, we remain the constant. Given that often unpleasant reality, how we respond tells much about us, doesn’t it?
Of course, there’s change and there’s Change. I wonder how many men and women in the real estate or mortgage business will respond with heroic efforts of which they never believed they were capable? I’m reminded of the much told story of the father whose son was diagnosed with hemophilia. It was before most of modern medicine’s breakthroughs, which meant the treatment was in short supply and therefore expensive — almost $20,000 a year. In the late 1950’s, early 1960’s that was three times the median income.
He was in straight commission sales, and up ’till then had done quite well, but hadn’t ever made more than $12,000 in one year. From that year forward he never made less than $40,000. He had a reason, depending upon how you look at it, to either ensure success, or avoid Read more
Well, here we are on the morning many people thought would never come. Many people said they never expected that GM would actually go under. Well, under they are with approximately $178 Billion in liabilities and only $82 Billion in assets (and I think the $82 Billion includes the money that you and I gave them.)
So what difference does that make for the mortgage market? A couple of things:
- It’s not a positive thing for the housing market because it “solidifies” what we all knew anyway. There are going to be additional job losses and as we all know, additional job losses equates to additional mortgage delinquencies and housing losses which is bad for the mortgage backed securities market.
- I don’t know the exact amount but there is a LOT of money out there in GM bonds. Those bonds are now essentially worthless (from what I understand, they were “exchanged” for stock – stock that’s currently trading at 75 cents per share). This is spooking the entire bond market and pushing rates higher.
- The government announced that as the “only one who would lend to GM right now” (not exactly what they said, but close) they are putting an additional $30,000,000,000 into GM. This makes the GM bailout the largest individual company bailout and increases the risk by the government going further in debt thereby pushing up on rates.
So, GM, the one company that was supposedly too big to fail, failed and failing isn’t a good thing for the mortgage rate market.
What else is happening?
- The ISM (Industrial Supply Management Index) showed that manufacturing is still contracting but once again it’s the “less bad” type of thing. It was slowing but not as rapidly in May as it did in April.
- Personal income rose and personal spending fell in May. That means that we all made a little bit more and guess what, we didn’t go out and spend it! For the long term health of the market, this is actually a good thing that we aren’t “over consuming” but short term, it’s quite painful because so much of our economy is based on consumers Read more
That’s the SplendorQuest server a moment ago. The numbers come and go, but it’s a rare thing for the server load to go over 5% right now. During the worst of our recent attacks, we were redlined at well over 90%, an enormous amount of computing power.
We still have a lingering problem with the MySQL server, but this is much abated by having rid ourselves of these battalions of termites. We’ll get that taken care of shortly, too.
Thanks for your indulgence during our recent troubles.
[Brian Brady asks for advice. This ain’t it. I wrote a book in 1988 about human civilization, a condition I believe human beings can but so far have not attained. I’m thinking of revisiting the topic, if only because I fear those kinds of ideas might have to transcend a dark age. I wrote the following essay seven years ago, and, of course, by now everything it addresses is just that much worse. Tyranny is an avoidable fate — but not if you don’t know how to recognize it. –GSS]
My son is a Cub Scout. A few weekends ago he had his yearly ScoutORama, a sort of Scout convention and trade fair. The theme of this year’s event was ‘American Heroes,’ and it turns out that American Heroes, for the most part, build small catapults and cook in Dutch ovens. One Cub pack took the theme rather more to heart, with a huge display called ‘Freedom In Unity’.
To an attending Cub Scout I said, “Is it conceivable to you that unity and freedom might conflict?”
After a moment’s thought, he said: “Huh?”
As a father of an eleven-year-old, I fully expected this retort. Undismayed, I pressed on: “Isn’t it reasonable to suppose that the quality best represented by the word ‘freedom’ is freedom from other people?”
“HUH?!
And my wife pulled me away, arguing, quite correctly, that it is unfair to expect children to regurgitate, much less competently defend, the horseshit they are force-fed by adults.
They do so eventually, of course, and thus become the adults who do the force-feeding of the next generation of helpless victims — unminded before they can be fully mindful, starved and stuffed at the same time, gorged forevermore on horseshit.
But: It’s not the what, it’s the where, the who, the how. And most especially: The why.
When the French, to pick an odorous example, rail against Individualism, we know what we’re hearing. When radical feminists — or radical environmentalists, or radical vegans — heap scorn upon Liberty, it doesn’t take much acuity to see right through them.
But to listen carefully — and I am cursed with the skill of listening Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Stanislav Mishin writes a weblog called Mat Rodina. His email address suggests that he is in his late 30s which means he grew up “back in the U.S.S.R.” Stanislav was probably one of the kids the nuns made us think of when we prayed for “the children in Godless Russia”, back in my grade school days.
Stan, ol’ buddy…if you’re reading, please pray for me. Your article in Pravda was right on the money.
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
As much as this arrogant American hates being punked on the pages of Pravda, I’m terrified and I need your petitions. This economic recession is like a New York City power outage and our politicians are walking away with a television set on each shoulder….but Stan, ol’ buddy, you already know this.
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.
These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?
Precisely. I visited with my parents last month and they asked me what I thought of President Obama’s first 100 days. I replied, “Well, you gotta respect the speed and efficiency with which he’s looting our country“.
Stan, ol’ buddy, your conclusion is scary:
The Read more
I’m in a lousy mood today and I need your help.
The crooks are resurfacing.
If you thought the bad guys have been flushed out of the system, I’ve got some bad news for ya. We spend an inordinate amount of time debating who and what caused the mortgage meltdown. We spend very little time debating how we make sure it never happens again. The key word I want to emphasize here is “we”.
It’s not up to the government to fix this mess. It’s not up to NAMB, or NAR or Ghostbusters. It’s up to US – the folks in the field and on the street that see the dishonesty and suck in the stench seven steps before it gets packaged into mortgage backed securities.
I wrote an article entitled The Code: How the Mortgage Industry Could Self Regulate a few days ago. Alas, my baby blog is a PR2 and I doubt too many people saw it. I think it’s an important concept and I am grateful for a venue like Bloodhound Blog to facilitate the conversation.
If you leave it up to your government, you get lame-brain ideas like HVCC. I’m telling y’all right now, right here that I’m going to do my little part to protect the general public from the bad guys. We need to clean up our own industry. Brian Brady has it right in my book: you do wrong and he’s gonna “come down on you like a ton of bricks”. People look to us as fiduciaries, and I do believe in buyer beware. But unfortunately the doofus who doesn’t do his homework and gets himself ripped off just lowered the property values of every smart guy on his block.
So here’s the question I want to pose to the Bloodhound Community:
I know a bad guy, a predatory lender who ripped off hundreds of borrowers. He went away for a while and now he’s back. What can I do about it? How do we take our industry back?
I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately. In fact, we’ve had four problems, and three of them may be fully addressed.
First we had memory issues, which I didn’t understand at first. Y’all would have seen them as memory errors or lengthy timeouts when submitting comments. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, and that issue is by now long since dead.
But: That solution would have been masked, to the untrained eye, by problem number two. The account all of the Splendorquest.com domains live on had been set to 25GB, max, back when we lived on semi-dedicated server. This wasn’t changed when we moved, with the result that we’ve been thrashing for disk space for a couple of months. Again, an easy solution once the problem was discovered.
I said nothing about these two because I still haven’t solved problem number four — which used to be problem number three — a significant overcommitment of our MySQL server.
But, in the meantime, we got hit with problem number three, a three-day denial-of-service-like attack. The villain was probably an itinerant spammer, but the effect, from your point of view, was just like a DOS action: No action on your end.
Meanwhile, problem number four persists, but in a seemingly calmer state of exigency. We’re serving a lot of folks when the sun is up over North America, and we’re shipping 200GB of data every month. Put this all under the category of growing pains, but it remains that our growth has put us in this kind of trouble four times a year, at least, for three years running.
And even with all of that, comes today a note from Mark Madsen congratulating BloodhoundBlog for making it back up to a PR6. We’ve been there before, so this may just be temporary, but it’s doubly amazing given our late semi-compromised state.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for the thought and effort — and the links — you bring to BloodhoundBlog.
Wow! What a day in the mortgage and bond markets today. I think it’s a good thing to say that while a lot of us saw this coming, very few of us expected that it would happen today. Let’s walk through what happened, what it means and where we go from here.
What happened? A couple of things happened that caused the bond market to go into a free fall (okay more than a couple):
- Several analysts and rating agencies have raised significant questions about whether both the United Kingdom and the United States will be able to continue to pay their debts as the staggering amounts that they are borrowing to keep their financial systems afloat are well, truly staggering.
- As GM inches/races/inches (depending on the moment) towards bankruptcy, it is becoming obvious that the US Government is going to have to shell out a LOT more money to keep GM somewhat afloat (another approximately $50,000,000,000 – but who’s counting?)
- Although the headline number looks good, as we discussed earlier, the existing home sales for April were less than spectacular.
- Case Shiller came out with their housing price value reports and they showed a pretty nasty case of the housing price drops. That means that the collateral for mortgage backed securities is dropping in value making them less desirable.
- A number of reports have come out recently that showed that the performance of mortgage backed securities is continuing to suffer and mortgage delinquencies are continuing to rise. We talked about one of those reports here, and another one of them here.
- Oil prices have been going up and the people in OPEC who control a lot of that are talking $75 to $80 a barrel while we’re only at $63 right now. Increasing the risk of inflation puts pressure on rates.
- The Federal government, through their manipulation of the long term Treasury and mortgage backed securities markets (also known as buying the market), had been keeping mortgage rates artificially lower than what the economic, financial and mortgage portfolio conditions would typically warrant.
- Oh and there’s this little thing called North Korea firing test missiles and Iran running ships in Read more
I am reputed by Macleans magazine to be well-versed in verse, so, in concert with my soul’s sister, Teri, I will lend my ear to the muses in the celebration of glorious land:
Sussex
by Rudyard Kipling
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.So one shall Baltic pines content,
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!No tender-hearted garden crowns,
No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
But gnarled and writhen thorn—
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
Blue goodness of the Weald.Clean of officious fence or hedge,
Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
The sunlight and the sward.Here leaps ashore the full Sou’west
All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
The Channel’s leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
Along the hidden beach.We have no waters to delight
Our broad and brookless vales—
Only the dewpond on the height
Unfed, that never fails—
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
Which way the season flies—
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
Like dawn in Paradise.Here through the strong and shadeless days
The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
The Lord who made the hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
Dreams, as she dwells, apart. Read more
One of the paths to the singularity, and the one that is mostly readily plausible given the current state of physics, is nanotechnology. Here are two new nano-entities ready to break out of the laboratory.
First, how would you like to store your entire movie collection on one DVD-sized disc?
A DVD that can store up to 2,000 films could usher in an age of three-dimensional TV and ultra-high definition viewing, scientists say.
The ultra-DVD is the same size and thickness as a conventional disc, but uses nano-technology to store vast amounts of information.
Scientists believe it could be on sale in five years and say it will revolutionise the way we store films, music and data.
One disc could back up the memory of a computer or record thousands of hours of film.
The breakthrough comes from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, where scientists created a prototype using ‘nano rods’ – tiny particles of gold too small to see – and polarised light, in which the light waves only flow in one direction.
Professor Min Gu, whose findings appear in the journal Nature, said: ‘We were able to show how nano-structured material can be incorporated on to a disc to increase data capacity without increasing the size of the disc.’
A DVD can hold up to 8.5 gigabytes of information, enough for a movie, several special features and an alternative soundtrack.
Blu-ray discs, which were designed to replace them, can store 50GB, enough for a film and extra features in high definition.
But ultra-DVDs will be able to store ten terabytes – or 10,000GB.
Of much greater moment, consider Graphene, a perfect carbon structure one atom thick.
Eight MIT researchers, along with colleagues at Harvard and Boston University, have just received a major U.S. Department of Defense grant for graphene research. With this five-year grant, Palacios says, MIT and its collaborators “would become one of the strongest multidisciplinary teams working on graphene in the world.”
Its unique electrical characteristics could make graphene the successor to silicon in a whole new generation of microchips, surmounting basic physical constraints limiting the further development of ever-smaller, ever-faster silicon Read more
Joe Loomer: > what could and should NAR do to dispell your views of it as a criminal enterprise?
In very broad outlines:
1. Stop writing and lobbying for legislation devised to churn the real estate markets.
2. Work tirelessly to eliminate all laws that serve to advance the interests real estate brokers at the expense of consumers in general as well as other people who might want to broker real estate for compensation.
3. Eliminate all coercive membership requirements.
4. Work with lenders and HUD to eliminate the co-brokerage fee so that buyers can obtain — and pay for — true, honest, untainted representation.
5. Work tirelessly to eliminate all laws impinging upon the right of each citizen to buy, own, use, enjoy, profit from and sell real property without interference.
For what it’s worth, I think number 5 is the greatest betrayal of the American people by the National Association of Realtors. Zoning? The NAR is for it. Eminent domain? The NAR is for it. Expropriation of ancillary rights such as water rights? The NAR is for it. At the national level, the grand poohbahs might issue a toothless snarl about Kelo, but at the local level, the Boards of Real Estate that make up the NAR are always working hand-in-pocket with governments and developers to rob ordinary citizens of their right to own their own property.
Soldiers are to be found everywhere in history, but freedom is won and held by citizen soldiers — which means a soldier who has his own land to return to when the fighting is done. By undermining the right to own real property, the NAR works — insidiously, corrosively — to undermine American liberty.
And, for what it’s worth, if the NAR were to apply itself and achieve item number 4 on my list, none of the rest would matter. More than anything else, the NAR and the MLS are made possible by the co-broke. Get rid of that and the rest of this ugly mess will crumble to dust in due course.
Michael DiMella wrote the remarks quoted below in a comment, but I’ve extracted them and my responses to him into a separate post.
The meta issue is this: Is the NAR a criminal conspiracy against consumers, and, whether or not it is, is there nothing else good about it?
Michael DiMella: > you seem to have a thorough unwillingness to learn what NAR actually is and does.
That’s astoundingly false. I have written more about the NAR’s criminality than anyone, ever. You may not want to focus on that, but criminality is NAR’s sole reason for being. Everything else it might do is window dressing devised to fool the public — and gullible patsies within the NAR.
> That doesn’t make you a bad guy, but I, for one, would appreciate a modicum of respect.
Good grief. I will offer you and the NAR the oath of respect Fiorello LaGuardia paid to a similar criminal mob when he was inaugurated as Mayor of New York: “E finita la cuccagna!” (“No more free lunch!”)
> To [eliminate mortgage interest deductibility without comprehensively revising the tax code] would be careless and have a major negative impact on a majority of Americans.
False. The deductibility of mortgage interest is a handout to the rich. I’m opposed to all taxation, but it is absurd to argue that the wealthiest Americans cannot afford to bear their own economic weight. In any case, as is discussed below, using tax policy to favor one group over another, thus artificially to churn the markets, is vicious and wrong no matter who is hurt or helped.
The next argument would be that, in a condition of pressure-group warfare, to lay down arms is suicidal. That’s as may be, but, in order to make this argument, you must first argue that there can be circumstances in which you feel yourself justified in expropriating other people’s property — stealing, that is — for your own benefit. Are you an advocate of theft? Did I hear you say something about wanting respect?
> I would say NAR’s support of the MID is well intentioned to protect consumers
The sole purpose of the mostly Read more