January 25

In an interview at the website Mortgage Calculator, financial blogger Steve Waldman has plenty interesting to say about the U.S. housing market, the fetishization of home ownership, and the morality of defaulting on loans. His arguments deserve extended quotation:

"A social order that routinely demands heroic sacrifice of people in the name of virtue will fail. Clever hypocrites will be rewarded while naive saints pay, and the overall tenor of society will not be virtuous...There’s a kind of hygiene we have to attend to, in order to ensure that doing well and being good are not terribly inconsistent. Over the past few decades we’ve failed to attend to that hygiene, in large part I think because we let simplistic economic ideas persuade us that we didn’t have to, and that the pursuit of wealth yields virtue automatically and dirty is the new clean...

The financial industry has changed the economic and legal landscape surrounding consumer lending so that it simply bears no resemblance at all to interpersonal loans among people of good will in continuing relationships. But those are the norms they ask borrowers to adopt with respect to repayment. That act, demanding others act in accordance with standards from which one exempts oneself, is morally offensive...It is clear that, in general, banks and the special purpose entities that increasingly replace them treat their transactions with borrowers as hard-nosed business arrangements which they are willing to pursue on adversarial terms when doing so is in their interest. Borrowers should do the same. To do otherwise is to reward the cynical immorality of others, which serves no social good."

http://news.mortgagecalculator.org/interview-with-interfluiditys-steve-waldman-the-government-has-chronically-oversubsidized-mortgage-lending-and-homeownership/#more-475

After reading all that, you need a little cheering up, right? How about a cartoon? Leonard Maltin in his history of animation Of Mice and Magic mentions that the 1965 Chilly Willy cartoon Half-Baked Alaska is outstanding, but when I first read that reference years ago, it was hard to find specific cartoons. Now, between DVDs and YouTube, it's often a snap. Maltin was right about Half-Baked Alaska -- it's great:



Among notables born on this date are poet Robert Burns, novelists Virginia Woolf and Somerset Maugham, composers Antonio Carlos Jobim (Brazil) and Witold Lutoslawski, conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, singer Etta James, Filipino politician Corazon Aquino, Scottish punk poet John Cooper Clarke, Russian singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky, and film director Tobe Hooper. When I was first delving into contemporary classical music as a teen in the early Seventies, Lutoslawski and his compatriot Krzysztof Penderecki were the vanguard composers of Poland, and I listened to everything of theirs that I could find. Since no one had ever taught me that this or any other modern music was "difficult" or "unlistenable," I not surprisingly found it thrillingly communicative and absorbing, and still do.