Two More Pet Peeves with the Media

Some of my most frequent pet peeves are people in the media "explaining" an issue in a completely ass-backwards way. So part of the fun of writing a blog is to put out my own take on an issue that has been poorly explained to the public by the TV and newspaper media. Two such stories come to mind today.

First is Canada's new rules for mortgages, tightening up the requirements for obtaining and keeping a mortgage. I didn't keep track of which news person said this, but I'll bet she was not alone. She was talking to an expert, and asked "This probably means that the average home buyer will have to be paying more for their house. How much more will we have to pay?". If you spotted the error already, good for you! The error is this: By tightening up the credit rules, home buyers will pay LESS for their homes, not more. You heard that right. Most people buy homes on credit, that's what a mortgage is all about. They usually buy the most expensive house that they can afford. The person who tells them what they can afford is the banker who approves the mortgage, and the bankers do the calculation according to set rules, based on the buyer's financial position. When you tighten up the rules, you are effectively saying "You cannot afford this $500,000 house, therefore we reject your mortgage request. However, we would be able to approve of a mortgage for $350,000". The numbers here are just an example, but it gives you the idea that people will be spending less. Even for people who buy a smaller house than their limit, they will pay less because they will not be extended as much credit, therefore less interest to pay.

My second complaint was stirred up by a comment by one or more meteorologists, that they are better able to predict global warming than climatologists. (March 29, 2010 New York Times). I know this story is almost a month old, but I'm actually focusing on a problem with the entire meteorological business, that has been going on for a while. The weathermen and women on TV keep pounding us with the message that "warm is good" and "sunshine is good". It sounds something like this "We have some good news for the weekend, sunny and warm with no chance of rain." Listen to the weather forecasts yourself, and in about 99% of them, the meteorologist attaches the words "good news" to any report of sunny and warm, and some variation of "bad news" to any rain, snow or cold.

The one exception is when a forest fire is destroying million dollar homes in California. Then they switch around the good to bad.

This attitude is not scientific, which confirms my opinion that most of these weather girls and men are more announcers than scientists. But for heaven's sake, do not make your pretty faces even redder by claiming to have greater scientific knowledge of climate change than climatologists. Meteorologists have a hard time predicting 5 days ahead, and have been totally brainwashed into thinking warmer is better. These are not the people to be deciding if it is good or bad that the climate gets 5 degrees warmer in the next hundred years.

Picture: It looks like a Spanish language station, so just to be clear, I didn't choose the picture because their forecasts are worse, but because their forecasters are better looking.

Quem Deus Vult Perdere, Dementat Prius

 The title of this blog is in Latin, I don't know Latin, except the last word which is "Prius". The full phrase in English is "Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad enough to drive a Prius".

Just kidding of course. The phrase actually comes from a play called "Medea" by Euripides. In this play, Medea is fully aware of her descent into madness, but cannot stop it, as she kills her own children to hurt her ex-lover.

I'm not sure how aware an individual might be of his or her own madness, normally. But there is another kind of madness called group madness. When an entire country goes mad, there are usually a lot of people left scratching their heads, wondering why people around them are going nuts, but unable to do anything about it. Think of the case of Nazi Germany, where it would seem almost the entire country went crazy and resulted in the destruction not only of themselves, but much of Europe. I'm sure there were lots of German people living through it who must have thought the whole thing was a bad dream, but every time they spoke out they were shouted down by Nazi fanatics.

We have a book titled "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, about collapsing civilizations. The New Yorker review by Malcolm Gladwell is here. A quote from Malcolm:

"The lesson of “Collapse” is that societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death"

The idea of madness preceding destruction makes a lot of sense whether or not you believe that the Gods caused the madness. For example, take a character like Osama Bin Laden. He is a smart person, and he knows that he does not have the firepower to take down the USA. So he used a tactic that was not designed to fight the USA straight up, but to drive them to madness, after which they could destroy themselves without his help. And so far it is working like a charm, with the US economy crumbling, and Republicans talking of breaking up the country rather than submit to Obama's tyranny.

While talk of secession is clearly the result of madness, it is not so obvious that the crumbling economy is also a result of madness. What mixture of greed, laziness and arrogance could make us think that sending all our jobs to China would make our economy stronger? How did we come to believe that banks drive the economy? And craziest of all, the very bankers who destroyed the economy while paying themselves multi-million dollar bonuses, are still being paid multi-million dollar bonuses. If this was China (a place where the economy is actually growing) those people would have been lined up and executed by firing squad.

A spokesman for the craziness is Kevin O'Leary on CBC TV who thinks it is a bad idea to regulated the banks because "They are greedy, and greed is good", and "They are the only ones making money". And while he is crying out for someone to stop Obama from destroying America, he also makes this interesting remark. That he likes to invest in China, because of their management incentive program. "If a manager doesn't perform, they kill him". Hey, Kevin, be consistent. You should be in favour of  killing the American financial CEO's , not paying out staggering bonuses. 

Growing up in a remote paper mill town teaches some lessons in economic theory that are not accessible to people who live in "normal" places like Kevin. Not one person in our remote one-industry town would have ever thought that if the paper mill closed, we could continue to thrive by all going to work for the bank. And once in the bank, by paying ourselves million dollar bonuses. That's because we were not crazy. In case you didn't grow up in a paper mill town: The bank gets money from the paper company to cash the paycheques. The bank also loans money to mill workers to buy houses, and those loans are repaid only if the paper mill stays in business. It's really not that hard to understand, even when scaled up to a national economy.

There is a lot of evidence to support the idea that the Gods are trying to destroy the USA and Canada through madness. Here we are trying to fight a war to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan. I see crazy bumper stickers in the mall parking lot "If you won't get behind the troops, get in front of them!" Why should Canadian citizens be shot for expressing their opinion? Meanwhile our Canadian Prime Minister has suspended Parliament.  Afghans should come to Canada and help us win back our freedom of speech and democracy from the crazy people over here.

The next form of madness is actually not so important, but still pretty funny. It is "Toyota Madness". For the first time in my life, when people say "you're going to kill yourself on that bloody thing" they are talking about my Toyota Matrix, and not my Kawasaki motorcycle. Why do I call that madness? Because in the last ten years, 300,000 people have died in vehicular accidents, of which 19 were blamed on Toyota's unintended acceleration. It is a form of madness if Toyota's have become death traps that everybody is scared to drive.

Are these the only cases of descent into madness? Of course not. Christian missionaries running child trafficking rings. Torture, wiretapping, teabag parties, Obama bowing to the Japanese Emperor, motorcycles not allowed on the road in Quebec in winter, wind turbines, healthy care, pro-war Jesus, Islamics taking over the world, evolution, global warming, Haitian earthquake caused by a pact with the Devil. All these subjects have more than a whiff of madness about them. I'll leave it to you to decide which side of each issue is actually mad, but whichever side you choose, the other one is surely mad.

The real translation of the title is "Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad", and a good place to print it is right on our money.

Picture:  Thor, who just might be the god must likely to want to destroy us as we have not been worshipping Him a lot.

Bank Bonuses Again

So an AIG executive has resigned over a pay issue.

All the bank executives want pay in the millions of dollars. Back in the eighties, air traffic controllers wanted a pay hike too. But Ronald Reagan fired all of them, and hired any back on at a reduced rate, and the skies have not been full of falling planes. It took guts, we need the same medicine for these morons running the banks.

One difference in the analogy is that the banking fat cats actually did crash the economy. Also, the bankers are asking for millions of dollars a year each do keep on doing what they did so well. The air traffic controllers only wanted a little more pay and a 32 hour work week.

I wrote about this before, and the same still is true.