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There was a New York Times story a couple days
ago in its "Debt Trap" series. Although they could have
also entitled it "Desperately Seeking Scapegoats." After detailing
the financial
woes of Ms Diane McLeod of Philadelphia PA, and intimating that her
sad story is shared by bazillions of Americans "standing at the
financial precipice":
While the circumstances surrounding these downfalls [yes, Americans are at a "precipice", but at the same time have experienced a "downfall"] vary, one element is identical: the lucrative lending practices of America’s merchants of debt have led millions of Americans — young and old, native and immigrant, affluent and poor — to the brink. More and more, Americans can identify with miners of old: in debt to the company store with little chance of paying up.
For Thomas Sowell, the phrase "lucrative lending practices" is a fat slow pitch in the middle of the strike zone:It must take either a willful determination to believe whatever they want to believe or a cynical desire to propagandize their readers for the New York Times to call "lucrative" the lending practices that have caused many lenders to lose millions of dollars, some to lose billions and some to go bankrupt themselves.
Kip Esquire is unsympathetic to Ms. McLeod: his article on the NYT piece is titled "New York Times Devotes 3,233 Words to Defending an Idiot". Ouch. -
I saw a pointer in the new Wired to GraphJam, billed as "Pop Culture for
People in Cubicles". I resemble that! Sample:
And from that very same movie:
Those are just examples, there are plenty of others. You have to have a certain mentality to find this amusing, but … you know who you are.
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Speaking of Wired, I was also much impressed by this
brief interview with NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson describing her
harrowing Soyuz re-entry last April.
Wired: Any landing you can crawl away from is a good one, I guess.
Whitson: Obviously it wasn't totally nominal.
Jul
22
2008
URLs du Jour
2008-07-22