Credit Scoring - Satanic worship or just active evil?

Credit scores are a protection racket. Your credit scores are not accurate. Your credit scores were not designed to be accurate. It’s not that the credit rating agencies deliberately insert errors into their scores, but rather that they calculate them with a deliberate disregard for accuracy. To calculate them accurately would undermine one of the primary revenue streams of the credit rating agencies’ business model. You’ve seen the ads, you know the jingles. Credit rating agencies make money by charging a monthly fee to “allow” consumers to do their job for them. Pay a monthly fee to each of the three credit rating agencies and you will be permitted to attempt to ensure the accuracy that they cannot be bothered to attempt to ensure themselves because, if they did, then they couldn’t get you to pay them each a monthly fee.
The racket is exactly that transparent. And please note that this isn’t something I am accusing them of, this is something they explain themselves, explicitly, hundreds of times a day on the radio, on television and in advertisements all over the Internet. If you don’t pay them, they will not guarantee the accuracy of the credit score on which your ability to borrow or to purchase — or perhaps even to earn a living — depends. “Nice credit score ya got there. Shame if anything happened to it.” That’s exactly what they’re saying, brazenly, in all those ads.

(part of an excellent exposition at the Slacktivist)

Danger signs

The ramifications of abuse are yours, and the payoff is his. If you feel crazy, he’s in control. These things add up to an all-around anxiety of being crazy:
• I often feel disconnected and confused, wobbly.
• I engage in introverted dissections of our conflicts to figure out what went wrong.
• I’m wary and distrust my own ability to form friendships.
• I feel as if an important dream shattered, but I can’t remember what that dream was.
• I have a growing doubt in myself and my self-respect.
• I feel like the whole world is muffled and out of my reach.
• Emptiness lingers around me like an endless fog, and I’m afraid to tell anyone.
• I must carefully edit anything I say because I’m not normal.
• I used to love doing some activities, now I just can’t muster the enthusiasm.
• I don’t know why I’m not happier within my relationship.
• I’m ill at ease in his presence, but I know I love him.
• I often don’t trust that my perceptions are valid.
• I have an intense desire to NOT be the way I am (as in “too sensitive”)

(stolen whole from I Blame The Patriarchy)

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America

Bottom Line: If Jesus loved you as much as He loves Donald Trump, you’d be as rich and deserving as Donald Trump.  If Jesus just barely tolerates you, then suck it…

Biological Determinism.

Still, to the extent that you really do believe that cognitive abilities are (a) important, and (b) strongly biologically determined, shouldn't you also believe that the poor are more unlucky than anything else, and haven't done anything to deserve hunger, lousy housing, poor medical care, or crappy educations? If genetic luck plays a big role in making us who we are, then support for income redistribution from the rich to the poor is almost a logical necessity for anyone with a moral sense more highly developed than a five-year-old's.
Long story short, belief in biological determinism should make you into a liberal. And yet, here in the real world it mostly does just the opposite. Go figure.

(Words of Wisdom courtesy Kevin Drum of MotherJones magazine)

Financial bubbles aplenty

 "there are too few good investment opportunities in the world of real goods and services"
---

Another way of saying this is that too much money goes to the top; too much demand for financial assets, not enough demand for actual 'stuff'.

The Republican mantra is that low taxes are good for capital formation; what they neglect to acknowledge is that you can have *too much* capital formation.

My tomato plants need water, but submerging them is obviously not a good idea.

Civil Rights? You must be thinking of some other country

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry.

And it pretty much deteriorates from there:

“We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”

from The Agitator, courtesy of LGM

Ireland - sacrificial maiden before the dragon

This is a fascinating, and quite accurate, analysis of why Ireland is screwed, blued and tattooed:
Morgan Kelly in the Irish Times

Basically, German (and French) banks prefer to crush Ireland like a grape in order to scare Spain into obeying orders. The cost to Ireland ... well catastrophic won't be the half of it.