They're doing it again

Remember those "bankers" who drove hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes after selling them mortgages they couldn't pay? Balloon payments? The banks that shuffled around sub-prime mortgages, screwed over each other? That cost U.S. taxpayers multiple millions of dollars? Remember how their greed crashed the U.S. housing market starting 10 years ago? Which took the rest of the economy with it? Nobody was punished ... except the victims.

What looks like another housing boom is inflating, starting with ads on TV telling you to get a mortgage over your phone. Easy peasy. Anybody can buy a house. Realtors waiting by the phone. Download the app.

Well, no.  The remains of the lower middle class can't afford mortgages, but finance companies want to sell them. How long before the house buyers' finances crash and burn?

Money aside, if everybody in America gets a house, there will be no farmland, no wilderness. Only little boxes made of ticky tacky, occupied by people on the edge of bankruptcy.

They're doing it again.

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An impossible mission

Slate.com reports: 

"The former director of a pro-Donald Trump Super PAC officially defected from Team Trump on Monday with an essay on xoJane about how she lost faith in her candidate of choice. Stephanie Cegielski, a strategist and communications specialist, says she was brought in to run the Make America Great Again Super PAC last summer, but ultimately came to realize what everyone who hasn’t fallen under the Trump spell could sniff from the very beginning: Trump is wholly unprepared to be president and is only out for himself. ...

"Trump campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, issued this response to Cegielski: This person was never employed by the Trump campaign. Evidently she worked for a Super PAC which Mr. Trump disavowed and requested the closure of via the FEC."

Why does Donnie Boy "disavow" so many people and organizations? Is he the "Secretary" who runs the Impossible Mission Force?

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What's radio, Grandpa?

A U.S. car maker has a TV ad touting teen driver technology, including a function that mutes the radio until the seatbelts are fastened.

Somebody should tell Chevy that teens of 2016 don't listen to the radio. They prefer tunes played from the cloud.

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I wound up re-watching "Inside Out" with friends a few days ago and realized the father is obsessed with his daughter's happiness. He never permits Riley to have any other emotion.

Creepy. Controlling. Patriarchal.

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Scary woman runs again

Sharron Angle, who failed to unseat Harry Reid in 2010, has filed paperwork to run for that U.S. Senate seat again, in the Republican primary, against the establishment's favorite and seven other people.

A couple days after the Nevada primary in 2006, in which Angle lost a close one for a U.S. House seat, I found myself seated a row ahead of two men talking about the election, on a flight from Reno to Las Vegas.

One man had worked for the Angle campaign. What I remember from what he said (didn't hear much, what with jet engine noise) was that he was happy, beyond happy, to be done with her.

You won't believe me, but Sharron Angle makes Sarah Palin look smart. Smart-ish. Not quite so dumb.

Honest.

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I'm not gloating. Honest

Did you see the story today about the Carnegie Mellon University study that compared current presidential candidates' language and grammar in texts of campaign speeches? Trump's vocabulary matches that of children ages 11 and under and his grammar children ages 13-14. They threw in Obama, G.W. Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and Lincoln for balance. Highest overall: Lincoln. Trump came in next to last, ahead of Bush.

 I finally finished reading Steven Pinker's 1,009-page "Better Angels of Our Nature." He wrote:

"There’s no such thing as the IQ of a speech, but Philip Tetlock and other political psychologists have identified a variable called integrative complexity that captures a sense of intellectual balance, nuance, and sophistication. A passage that is low in integrative complexity stakes out an opinion and relentlessly hammers it home, without nuance or qualification. Its minimal complexity can be quantified by counting words like absolutely, always, certainly, definitively, entirely, forever, indisputable, irrefutable, undoubtedly, and unquestionably.

"A passage gets credit for some degree of integrative complexity if it shows a touch of subtlety with words like usually, almost, but, however, and maybe. It is rated higher if it acknowledges two points of view, higher still if it discusses connections, tradeoffs, or compromises between them, and highest of all if it explains these relationships by reference to a higher principle or system. The integrative complexity of a passage is not the same as the intelligence of the person who wrote it, but the two are correlated especially, according to [psychologist Dean] Simonton, among American presidents.

"Integrative complexity is related to violence. People whose language is less integratively complex, on average, are more likely to react to frustration with violence and are more likely to go to war in war games.

"Working with the psychologist Peter Suedfeld, Tetlock tracked the integrative complexity of the speeches of national leaders in a number of political crises of the 20^th century that ended peacefully (such as the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Cuban Missile Crisis) or in war (such as World War I and the Korean War), and found that when the complexity of the leaders’ speeches declined, war followed.

"In particular, they found a linkage between rhetorical simple-mindedness and military confrontations in speeches by Arabs and Israelis, and by the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War."

I'd still vote for Trump over Cruz: better away-from-home violence than at-home coerced Christianity.

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Uphill climb

Is jogging/walking in a bike lane, facing into car traffic, safe?

I'm lazy, so I won't check with city laws, but it's not illegal, it should be.

I've seen this twit of the female persuasion three times now, trudging uphill near my apartment, facing traffic, in the bike lane.

When she gets hit by a car, will the driver be punished? Probably, even though it will be her fault.

There's an asphalt-paved sidewalk on the other side of the four-lane street. Maybe she can't see it because of the elegant bushes and trees in the median and on that side of the street. They are budding out right now.

Related question: why do people out running or jogging for exercise never look happy?

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Tone deaf

It seemed like a good idea, I'm sure, at the advertising agency that talked Jet.com into using video of people's heads exploding when they realize how wonderful Jet.com is. Blowing their minds.

Blowing up people, top of skull or any other body part, isn't entertaining, what with Boston, Iraq,  Syria, Libya, and Israel and a dozen other places.

Another company recently used the same thing—blowing off tops of heads—for a product I have forgotten. The blowing up, I remember.

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New season of "What History Forgot" has started on American Heroes Channel. Patriotically stupid name. Calling it AHC doesn't help.

I am grateful beyond words to the people who convinced history buff/teacher Joe Moniaci to tone down the hand gestures. They were so fake, I lost track of what he was saying, waiting for another hand-chop, or something else out of his limited repertoire.

Maybe he visited a theater department and got tips from the drama coach.

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The Net is awash in arguments over who is the stalking horse for whom.

Trump working for Cruz? For Clinton?

Lexicon.ft.com (Financial Times) says a stalking horse is an offer or bid designed to test the market for an asset often ahead of a formal auction. It effectively places a floor underneath a proposed asset sale.

Apple Dictionary adds that it is "a false pretext concealing someone's real intentions."

As we've been told, Trump is the best businessman ever. 

Best stalking horse? Doubtful. The equine has the bit in his teeth.

Right-wingers turned their "base" into terrified fanatics. Reap what you sow, slimeballs.

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Bluffer-in-Chief D.J. Trump?

 I'm still working my way through Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature," and found this:

A subtype of self-serving bias is "positive illusions," considered a bargaining tactic, or a credible bluff.

"In recruiting an ally to support you in a risky venture, in bargaining for the best deal, or in intimidating an adversary into backing down, you stand to gain if you credibly exaggerate your strengths. Believing your own exaggeration is better than cynically lying about it, because the arms race between lying and lie detection has equipped your audience with the means of seeing through barefaced lies.

"As long as your exaggerations are not laughable, your audience cannot afford to ignore your self-assessment altogether, because you have more information about yourself than anyone else does, and you have a built-in incentive not to distort your assessment too much or you would constantly blunder into disasters.

"On the other hand, no individual can afford to be the only honest one in a community of self-enhancers."

 So, proportionality is vital. If I were a wine-o-phile, I'd pour a glass of Trump-brand wine and read Trump Magazine. Oh, wait, its Web page says it is not affiliated with Donald J. Trump, and the magazine's out of business. Is Donnie Boy running out of real things to brag/bluff about?

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Ideologically speaking

Chapter intro in Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature:" 

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Oh, to fervently wish for a shortage of ideology in the USA. 

And, perhaps, a shortage of volume in Mr. Pinker's 1,009-page (digital) tome.

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Out of the mouth of goblins

 “Think about this, Mister Trev. Don’t be smart. Smart is only a polished version of dumb. Try intelligence. It will surely see you through.” 

— Nutt, the goblin, “Unseen Academicals,” by Terry Pratchett

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Blowed up real good

The end of "Mythbusters" is in sight.

While the show should have ended some years ago, around the time that they starting calling movie stunts "myths," I already miss Adam and Jamie, just as I still miss Tory, Kori and Grant after their unwarranted dismissal.

The Mythbusters made, not quite by accident, a flying torpedo, the most wonderful unexpected contraption ever.

They gloriously created goo and gunk and gratuitous destruction.

Power, harnessed to educate.

One stoic, one manic (but in a good way), exploding their way into rerun history.

If failure was always an option, they never exercised the option.

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Amendment re TV commercials selling catheters: They are elsewhere in the cable-TV spectrum, rather than on RetroTV. The creep factor continues, however.

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