My Feeble Attempt at a Video

Slightly cheesy, but hopefully beneficial.

Preparing for Chinese Olympics: Fantastic

Amid the international discussion regarding the merits of a somewhat tyrannical government hosting the 2008 Olympics, TIME magazine reported the most important preparations underway:

Government officials say some 4 million Beijing residents have received English language lessons. Famous for aloofness and droll irony, the city's people have been getting training in other areas too in the hope that they will curb their spitting, erratic driving, incessant littering and inability to form an orderly line.

Mulling Over Bush's Proposal

Bush's plan to alleviate the credit crunch (expanding FHM loans) seems mild compared to the political alternatives. The Wall Street Journal today discussed its without comparison.

No one wants to see borrowers lose their homes, and the good news is that private lenders are already working with late-payment borrowers to refinance the terms of these subprime loans. What's troubling about the FHA expansion plan is that the insurance guarantee places taxpayers atop the housing bubble. Uncle Sam would insure tens of billions of dollars in new mortgage liabilities, and just when default levels are cascading.
Worse, both the White House and Congress want to suspend the FHA's downpayment requirements to insure even zero-equity loans. They should read a new study by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), which reviewed 5,000 FHA loans and found that borrowers "who make no downpayment at all have the highest default rates." Sometimes these default rates were three times higher than high downpayment loans. In the latest "FHA modernization" bill, some borrowers would have no equity in their home.

Why They Should Stay

I apologize for the delay in posting, I've been out of town. As I've said before, subscribe to my RSS reader to make up for my skirmish-ness.

Allow me to briefly delve into foreign policy. The Economist had a very well organized argument in their cover story last week.



From a slightly different perspective, but perhaps a more pertinent one, economist Thomas Sowell articulates the mistake of Iraq--and the disaster it would be to leave.

If nothing else comes out of the Iraq war, it should banish the concept of "nation-building" from our language and our minds. "The track record of nation-building and Wilsonian grandiosity ought to give anyone pause," as was said in this column before the Iraq war began...


You cannot turn a territory and its population into a functioning nation with the stroke of a pen or the drawing of lines on a map.

Real nations evolve over time out of the mutual accommodations of peoples, not by imposing the bright ideas of theorists from the top down...


This is not a plea for withdrawal. Whatever the situation when we went in, international terrorists have chosen to make this the place for a showdown battle. We can win or lose that battle but we cannot unilaterally end the war. It is the terrorists' war, regardless of where it is fought.