Zee Links and Minifeatures: June 2007 Archives

Hugh Hewitt Contributor Dean Barnett on non-religious opposition to abortion. I take a more libertarian stance: that seeing as we cannot prove it is human life, we do not have the legal or moral justification for dictating the woman's decision. However, because it is at the very least potential life, abortion should be as strongly discouraged, socially, as possible.



If this was a convicted felon we were talking about, instead of something that's going to be a human being someday if they aren't aborted - a human being who has done nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral - before they were executed, wouldn't we be talking about removing the last possible shreds of doubt, appeals that go on for years making certain the law was applied in an absolutely even-handed manner, and all sorts of humanitarian appeals? Wouldn't they have years, at a minimum, to attempt to justify their continued existence? As opposed to thirty minutes of no communication whatsoever while the would-be mother decides that being pregnant would be inconvenient?



Next to that, seems to me that social stigma is an awfully low price to pay for terminating a potential human life that's done nothing more than have the misfortune to be conceived by a woman who doesn't want to be pregnant (and that is how low we have set the threshold). I think legal abortion is necessary. But I don't have to think it's in any way laudable. And I think that the social stigma should apply to both people that were involved in that act of procreation. If you aren't willing to be a dad if that's what happens, no matter what precautions you take, you shouldn't engage in sexual behavior that could result in pregnancy. The situation for women is no different. If you're claiming the ability to give informed consent to sex, you are claiming to be an adult, and should be prepared to deal with the responsibilities involved. There are extenuating circumstances such as rape, but abortions are never something to be proud of. The thing to be proud of would be being a parent to the child despite the circumstances. There's no shame or stigma in not being a hero. But there's nothing that should increase anyone's level of esteem, either.

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Socializing the Free Market of Ideas, or free speech for me, but not for thee.



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Explosives-packed car defused in London



In a nightclub district. With thousands of random people who could have been anyone from anywhere in the world.



Just to remind you, Tony Blair is no longer their prime minister, or even involved in their government, after his long-promised resignation. Effectively torpedoes the "it'll go away when Bush and Blair are gone" pie in the sky.



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Michael Barone on how we pick Vice Presidents and how it is evolving.

Senate Republicans Block Labor Bill

Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a bill that would allow labor unions to organize workplaces without a secret ballot election.

The article makes it plain who the reporter favors:

Unions complain that employers have greater access to workers during secret ballot campaigns and claim that corporate threats, intimidation and eventual firings have become common for union activists. By dragging out the election process, companies often succeed in wearing down union enthusiasm, they add.

No mention whatsoever of the fact that employers aren't the only ones known for intimidation. Without a secret ballot, the boss fires you if you vote "yes", and the Union goons kneecap you if you vote "no."



I know that I have spoken of transparency here in the past. As an ideal situation, transparency is great. However, requiring transparency for the individual workers while allowing the powerful employer or union to remain masked in their activities is a recipe for misery. I'll support individual election vote disclosures when the everything undertaken by the union or the employer (or their respective representatives) is equally available.



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Not a good sign for the Iranian regime: Iran fuel rations spark anger, pump stations burn



The central quote:

Despite its huge energy reserves, Iran lacks refining capacity and must import about 40 percent of its gasoline, a sensitive issue when world powers have threatened new U.N. sanctions in a row with Tehran over its nuclear program.

Good to see totalitarian regimes can be as stupid as democracies. We haven't built any refineries in thirty years either.



Gateway Pundit has photos and more.



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Liberals vs. Free Speech



Too much generalization to be taken as evidence, yet symptomatic of a real problem. Arguing with the opposition is the sign of a strong rational argument. Conceding the opposition has some points, while maintaining that your own outweigh them, is the sign of a strong rational argument. Suppressing or trying to suppress the opposition, or the opposing argument, is a sign of fear or facism. In either case, those advocating censorship of opposing ideas are indicating that they cannot outargue the opposition rationally.



Yes, people make stupid decisions. That's part of it being a free country. In fact, being able to make stupid decisions is a requirement of it being a free country. But people must be free to commit the stupidity and discover that it was a stupid decision on their own.



And every once in a while, that stupid decision turns out, upon experimentation, not to have been so stupid after all. In fact, it turns out that the "crazy" act was a better way of solving the problem. The fact that we have the economic and political freedom to allow a minority to risk stupidity in order to discover a better way of doing things is one of the central reasons why democracy beats totalitarianism, and why the free market beats central planning every time.



I may occasionally advocate the idea that someone censor themselves, and I heartily believe that divulging information that harms American troops is treason and worthy of punishment up to and including death, but one can make political and economic arguments without endangering our defenders. No matter how stupid certain politicians and talking heads are, so long as they don't endanger the United States by divulging classified information, they must be free to argue their case.



On the same subject, Captain's Quarters has a word on resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine as a cover for a partisan attempt to destroy the opposition.



Michelle Malkin has the political play by play



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Victor Davis Hanson on civilization



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Wizbang on both what the real problem is with healthcare and why we don't want it run by the government.



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Shots Across the Bow on the immigration bill. Adult Language Advisory applies.



If you want the text of the bill, it's here in searchable format



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Iraq the Model with some good news that those who are rushing to declare the surge a failure should read.



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Finally, something directly real estate related: A cogent, well made argument for repealing real estate licensing requirements



I agree more than I disagree. When I came to this business from financial planning, I was shocked at the lies that get routinely told by some practitioners. Things that would have the practitioners in federal prison if they were in the financial planning industry are completely legal in real estate and mortgage. Not that the financial planning industry doesn't have its issues, chief among which are the impediments to practitioners showing or advertising the actual benefits of their expertise.



Real Estate brokerages control the industry, and through them, the regulators. It is to their benefit to have a large supply of agents while constricting the alternatives for the public. Hence, the current low bar to entry. Unbelievably, even the state exam for California, one of the more difficult, requires only basic four function mathematical competence!



A low bar to entry is no bar to entry, particularly with such high dollar values. I'm not certain that outright repeal is the best answer, but the information clearinghouses that would spring up (analogous to Underwriter's Laboratories) would be far superior at protecting the consumer to the current set up. A very long way from perfect, as I have detailed in Relying Upon Reputation: There Are No Silver Bullets, among other places, but better than the current system.



(Searchlight Crusade is not such a clearinghouse. The emphasis here is on detailing what good practice is and is not and why, so that you can judge for yourselves by the evidence of your experience. I do not remember that I have ever pointed a specific finger for good or ill at anyone in the industry here, only at the advantages and disadvantages of certain practices.)



The only alternative that I can envision is making the real estate license curriculum a lot more difficult. Even the hardest possible curriculum, however, would provide no protection against intentional malefactors. Basically, I would like to remove any possible defense of ignorance from all licensees while dramatically streamlining the disclosures process so that all major issues that should stand out, have to, rather than the current process which is so driven by fear of lawsuits that major problems get hidden behind trivial ones, obscuring the real interests of consumer.

I have trimmed the site roll. Basically, if there were no posts on a site within a couple months, I deleted it. If I deleted your site and you're still active, send me an email.

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Earth's Heat Keeps America Afloat



I'm kind of glad not to be under 3000 feet of water, thank you.



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Work on my client's condo continues. Shouldn't be long until we're putting it on the market.

The San Diego Special Edition

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More on the client condo



It's looking nice inside!



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Volokh Conspiracy on sexual abuse of children in order to "prove" sexual abuse.



Rudyard Kipling had the right idea about what to do in those circumstances...



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Many media outlets have banned political donations by their reporters. It seems they were concerned with accusations of bias stemming from the fact that approximately 90% of the donations were to Democratic candidates. So of course, rather than disclose the bias, they've decided to cover it up by prohibiting political donations. This is not only troubling from a First Amendment perspective, but merely hides an existing bias rather than attempting to rectify it. Captain's Quarters has a better suggestion. Let the reporters contribute if they so desire. Just make certain their personal biases are disclosed to the audience. Most Americans correctly no longer trust the media to deliver the news straight up and without bias. Disclosing the existence of such a bias or potential bias actually takes the wind out of the conservative sails, as the audience becomes fully aware of the reporter's biases.



Of course, it makes it harder to influence public perceptions while pretending to be unbiased...



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An interesting change in IRS enforcement policy and priorities over at Bloodhound. Expect this to put a severe brake on cash out refinances, among other things.

I have a special reason to celebrate Flag Day every year, because on Flag Day of 1997, I married the world's only perfect woman. Yesterday we celebrated 10 years of marriage. So it's not only happy birthday to the world's foremost freedom fighters and the world's foremost symbol of freedom, but it's personally important to me as well.



(Oh, and June 13th is the date I became a homeowner)

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Politburo Diktat notes the evolution of online advertising, and gives some investment advice.



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10 things Bob Barker waited 50 years to say

I do want to apologize for missing more days than I'd like to. I am trying for four new financial articles per week. However, I'm fighting both depression and being busy with real life, and working for money has to take priority over writing about work essentially for free. Sometimes it's kind of hard to pick a topic I want to write upon. It's not a shortage of ideas. I have over 200 essay topics outlined, and about 90 percent of them are real estate related. Perhaps it's an embarrassment of riches. However, many of the topics require more time than I have to devote to them in a lot of cases. Sometimes, it's also hard to pick one topic out of the list.



If you do have a specific question or topic you'd like to see covered, though, asking it does make me feel like someone out there is paying attention. Sometimes, one question or comment makes all the difference.

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Bush pardons Armitage: details at Scrappleface



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The new realpolitik from Victor Davis Hanson

One of my clients would like me to link to her site so for those of you who might like to see work in progress, here's her most recent post, showing the condo torn apart.



2 bedroom 2 (full) bath condo in El Cajon, CA. 900 square feet. We got it for $197,000. The previous model match had sold for $273,000.

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Don Surber on "marriage is hate speech?" makes a point about double standards and double talk. Looks like political and career intimidation to me.



If you're going to allow one advocacy viewpoint, you need to allow the opposing viewpoint. If we can tolerate Nazis and Klansmen and other brands of racial supremacist which are explicitly hate oriented, it seems unlikely to me our society is going to get torn apart by people who merely disagree with gay marriage.



I've said it before and I'll say it again: Political Censorship of opposing ideas is a response to an argument you can't deal with rationally. It is an admission of weakness. The correct response is to out-argue your opponents.



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House Democrat warns GOP on earmarks

Saying Republicans indulge in earmarks as much as Democrats do, Obey warned GOP leaders to stop politicizing the subject. If Boehner and his allies "think they can demagogue the earmarks process all the year long and expect Democrats to carry the burden of passing earmarks, they're wrong," Obey said. "There will be no earmarks for anybody."

He says that like it would be a bad thing.



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It hurts to think about, but it's also amazing in a way:

19th-Century Weapon Found in Whale

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt - more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

Carnival of Money Stories



Consumer Oriented Real Estate

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Scrappleface

hits another one out of the park - this time on a compare and contrast between immigration and other criminals.

Carnival of Capitalists

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Jury indicts Jefferson in bribery probe. More here: Officials say Louisiana congressman is being indicted



He was re-elected after the FBI found $90,000 wrapped in tinfoil in his freezer. He was using his congressional offices to shelter evidence against him from the FBI, resulting in a big stink when the FBI got a warrant from a judge and raided the offices, and found the evidence, and still he was re-elected. He diverted Army and National Guard resources for personal use during the aftermath of Katrina, and still he got re-elected, documented on 60 Minutes for crying out loud.



He's a Democrat, but it wouldn't matter if he were Republican, Libertarian, Reform, or anything else. This is evidence of a broken system, when somebody this bent can nonetheless get re-elected.



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A Bad Day In Africa (Short video)



I'm pretty sure most of us have had days where it seemed like that tree appeared out of nowhere at the last possible instant.

Traffic: May set new daily traffic records twice: 7279 visits on the 14th, then 7319 on the 16th. It also set a new record for monthly visits: 144,499 visits from just over 41,000 unique visitors. Thank you all for stopping by.



Page views went way up in the last two days of the month. They had been running about 10000 or so, and suddenly skyrocketed to over 20k. To correct a possible misconception, it doesn't help me to run your normal searches here, although you're welcome to do so. But if you're like me, every once in a while you're looking for some commercial good or service. If you come here to run those searches and click on a paid advertiser when you do, I get the occasional ten cents or fifty cents or dollar - and sometimes a little more - off that. This offsets some of the money I spend keeping the site running. (What I really want, of course, is people coming to me for a loan or real estate transaction. Every time someone says they come to me off the website, not needing the advertising it would have taken to get one client in the door has effectively paid the site expenses for a couple months, but if you're not in California for a loan or San Diego for a sale or purchase, that's not going to work.)

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Yes! I tested this URL at Great Firewall of China and it was blocked!



I must be doing something right!



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Captain's Quarters on Venezuela and our greatest weapon in the war against tyranny: The truth.



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via Instapundit, Indoctrinate U