The mask is cuz he’s gonna be a banker soon
The most obvious question about Libya is: Why?
The reason you have to ask that is a little secret you won’t hear much about: Libya under Qaddafi wasn’t that bad for most people. And that’s according to the CIA. Take a look at the CIA factbook on Libya under Qaddafi and you’re in for a shock. (more…)
August 30th, 2011 | Comments (43)
I’ve been living in Venice Beach for the past few months, convalescing after almost two years of immersion-reporting out of Victorville, California–the front lines of California’s real estate meltdown. Life out in Victorville, a remote exburb on the edge of…
February 1st, 2011 | Comments (19)
Once again, the Case/Schiller Index has lived up to its name. All summer long, real estate shills have used it to jack up homebuyer confidence and fluff the housing market. Now, they are doing it again. Just look at the bullshit…
September 29th, 2009 | Comments (3)
If you search your favorite news aggregate for “US housing market”, you’ll find a whole mess of headlines guaranteed to make you feel good about that crappy McTractHome you might have bought at the height of the real estate orgy….
September 3rd, 2009 | Comments (25)
I’ve been thinking about sleaze and corruption lately. It’s hard not to. Out here in windy, sun-baked Victorville, underhanded swindles are about as common a sight as the tumbleweeds blowing around the Mojave Desert. The biggest scam now is the…
August 12th, 2009 | Comments (26)
It’s 5 AM in Victorville, California, and I haven’t slept in 48 hours. Outside my second-story window, the sun is rising up over the jagged mountains across the desert. In the three months I’ve lived here, I’ve seen more sunrises…
July 21st, 2009 | Comments (64)
US Stocks Gain On Report Of Pending Home Sales . . . Pending Home Sales Rise the Most in Over Seven Years . . . Consumer Confidence Spurs Broad Gain . . . You see the same bullshit headlines churned…
June 5th, 2009 | Comments (39)
I’ve always taken it for granted that brokers disseminate lies through the media to tweak property values. But a couple of weeks ago, I became a small cog in the national real estate propaganda machine myself while reporting for the…
May 10th, 2009 | Comments (27)
But let’s take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I’ve already said that Dick Cheney’s DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole.
There are actual American heroes. Not a lot, and you don’t hear much about them, but there are a few. I don’t mean working moms who spend their Saturdays spooning soup into winos. I mean classic citizen-soldiers who get it right every…
Some of the weirdest, longest wars around have been on the other side of the Big River, but for some reason most American war nerds would rather read about Eurasian battles. Not sure why, except I remember when I was…
When we lived in Long Beach, my dad used to say the same thing every time we saw the sign to the yacht club: “You know what a boat is?” He’d ask the car that, then wait for somebody to…
Well, it’s ten years and a couple of days since 9/11. The reason I’m two days late doing a look back is that 9/11 is boring. I’m sick of it. And the ten years since are just depressing, at least if you’re an American.
While everybody was distracted with Libya, something interesting happened on the Golan Heights. The Palestinians, with a lot of pushing from the Assad people, staged their own version of the Green March. And it failed.
Dude on the right look local? A sharp-eyed reader named Pete S. sent me a picture off an Al Jazeera blog on Libya with what Pete thinks might be an SAS operator taking in the parade. This is the guy…
