We Should Live - Ben Bateman

at least not in the sense that the author of the WWII-era song meant it.  Via Ace of Spades:

UK Bus Driver Kicks Passengers Off Bus…So He Can Pray!

The white Islamic convert rolled out his prayer mat in the aisle and knelt on the floor facing Mecca.

Passengers watched in amazement as he held out his palms towards the sky, bowed his head and began to chant.

“Eventually everyone started complaining. One woman said, ‘What the hell are you doing? I’m going to be late for work’.”

After a few minutes the driver calmly got up, opened the doors and asked everyone back on board.

But when the already unnerved passengers saw the driver’s rucksack on the floor, they refused to get back on.

“One chap said, ‘I’m not getting on there now’”.

“An elderly couple also looked really confused and worried.

“After seeing that no-one wanted to get on he drove off and we all waited until the next bus came about 20 minutes later. I was left totally stunned. It made me not want to get on a bus again.”

Perhaps they were being paranoid. But as one person said in the comment section:

“you cant fault anyone for not wanting to get back on after the rucksack came out - the London bombings are still very much with the general public and it is a legitimate concern that we all have to live with. The world IS a much different place post 9-11/7-7…”

From WSJ.com:

Foreclosure on Las Vegas Casino to Begin

The developer of the Cosmopolitan Resort Casino, a $3.9 billion condo-hotel complex on the Las Vegas Strip, has been notified by its primary lender that it will begin foreclosure proceedings.

The move by Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on a $760 million senior loan, comes after the developer, Ian Bruce Eichner, wasn’t able to finalize a deal for new financing amid the credit crunch. Mr. Eichner in late February cut a tentative deal with two of his other lenders, Global Hyatt Corp. and New York hedge fund Marathon Asset Management, for a possible rescue of the twin-tower project.

I’m not one for doomsday scenarios.  The coming crash will not be the end of the world as we know it.  But it will be very unpleasant in the short term, and the aftereffects will linger if the Fed continues to inflate away the dollar to try to prop up Wall Street.

As I explained earlier, the subprime mess basically means that our economy has been growing for the past several years based on lending that was based on bank assets, which included a great many mortgages, and those mortgages were based on home valuations that were too high because the system fell into moral hazard.  Nobody can wave a wand and restore the value of those lost assets.  Not Bernanke, not Bush, not George Soros or Warren Buffet.  Not even Congress giving us back tiny scraps of our own money and expecting gratitude for it.  Nobody.

The banks must cut their lending to levels that are proportionate to the real value of their assets.  And that means that a whole lot of businesses will be denied loans, and other businesses will pay much more for credit than they did before.  Basically they’ll be unwinding the loans that they never would have made had they known what their assets were really worth.  Without those loans, businesses will go under, and the liberal press will give us the usual “Women and Minorities Hit Hardest” stories.

But then it will recover.  Unless the government gets too deeply involved and really makes a mess of things, the economy will shrink to the point at which it would have grown had the assets not been overvalued, and then it’ll start growing again.  Until then, I wouldn’t invest much in stock.  Heck, I’m even worried about investing in dollars, since they’re declining in value, too.  But you gotta own something, so pick your assets wisely.

If you live long enough and pay attention to the news long enough, these sorts of stories become routine: Series of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain:

Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.

The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.

Gordon Brown announced last month that he would force supermarkets to charge for the bags, saying that they were “one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste”. Retailers and some pressure groups, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, threw their support behind him.

But scientists, politicians and marine experts attacked the Government for joining a “bandwagon” based on poor science.

But how could this be? Only a few years ago “everyone” “knew” that plastic bags were a scourge on the planet. Now the fearmongers say, “Never mind.”

Could this have some connection to global warming? Is it conceivable that the current eco-scares will be debunked in ten years, just as the eco-scares of 10 years ago are being debunked today (and those of 20 years ago were debunked 10 years ago, and so forth)?

No, don’t believe it. Sure, the eco-scaremongers have a long track record of drumming up fake scientific consensus that is later demonstrated to be false. Sure, they’ve done it with nuclear power, alar on apples, radon in basements, the spotted owl, the vanishing rain forests, plastic bags, and many others that I could find with just a few minutes of Googling.  But surely this time the eco-fanatics are right, and we should immediately make ourselves miserable with the knowledge that doing so will somehow make the future better for someone else.  Maybe.  Or maybe not.

(And isn’t it strange how selectively those people become concerned about future generations?  I mean, these are the same people who love abortion and hate procreation.  In fact, they hate humanity generally.  And yet they always claim to be deeply concerned about future generations.)

I understand how youngsters can be fooled by these hoaxes. They just haven’t lived long enough to see the pattern. But I don’t understand the grown-ups. Even someone who pays minimal attention to the news ought to notice that yesterday’s panics quietly go away, while the new panics are reported with breathless excitement.

The internet may slow these hoaxes down, though. When I was a kid, the only information most people had was whatever the mainstream media fed them. Now the truth is out there, just a few clicks away. Continuing ignorance becomes steadily more difficult to justify.

The People’s Cube has an entertaining quiz that asks you to guess which socialist uttered a given quote.  It’s not too hard to guess most of the right answers, just based on the differences in language from past to present.  Be sure to click on all the wrong answers, too.  They have some funny lines.