Howard Husock has an exercise in cognitive dissonance in today’s NYT Op-Ed pages titled Housing Goals We Can’t Afford, and it begins:

“The national wave of home foreclosures, many concentrated in lower-income and minority neighborhoods, has created a strong temptation to find the villains responsible.”

What can you say about an Op-Ed whose very first sentence is a giant pile of steaming bullshit? That statement is demonstrably false. As the prior post on foreclosures shows, the concentration is mostly middle class and upper middle class white suburban neighborhoods.

More CRA Idiocy | The Big Picture

This report, provided by MIT ANA, intends to provide a current aggregate view of ingress and egress filtering and IP Spoofing on the Internet. While the data in this report is the most comprehensive of its type we are aware of, it is still an ongoing, incomplete project. The data here is representative only of the netblocks, addresses and autonomous systems (ASes) of clients from which we have received reports. The more client reports we receive the better - they increase our accuracy and coverage.

State of IP Spoofing

possibly noteworthy wrote:

Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web apps

Was that supposed to be ironic? In fact their security approach sounds interesting:

The inner-sandbox uses static analysis to detect security defects in untrusted x86 code. Previously, such analysis has been challenging due to such practices as self-modifying code and overlapping instructions. In our work, we disallow such practices through a set of alignment and structural rules that, when observed, enable the native code module to be disassembled reliably and all reachable instructions to be identified during disassembly. With reliable disassembly as a tool, it's then feasible for the validator to determine whether the executable includes unsafe x86 instructions.

RE: Native Client

Connects via WiFi to your online bank account, and donates YOUR real money to an organization you HATE when you decide to snooze!

Wow! You can actually be threatened by a computer!

ThinkGeek :: SnūzNLūz - Wifi Donation Alarm Clock

Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.

These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods.

hahahahahahahaha

From the BoingBoing thread: I tried Linux once during college but I swear, I never compiled the source code!

Austinist: AISD Teacher Throws Fit Over Student's Linux CD

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s indication that he will use “quantitative easing” to prevent deflation points to a stock market rally that may last for the next two years, Napier said. With quantitative easing, a tool pioneered by the Bank of Japan, central banks can stimulate inflation by printing money and flooding the market with cash in order to encourage consumers to spend.

The government’s efforts will eventually fail as ballooning government debt devalues the dollar, causes investors to flee U.S. assets and takes the S&P 500 to its eventual bottom in 2014, Napier said.

“Bear markets always end for exactly the same reason, and that is the market begins to price in deflation,” he said. “The results are always horrific.”

Bloomberg.com: Bottom in 2014?

Rain Rain Go Away, Come Again Some Other Day

YouTube - Nine Inch Nails - Down In It

The UK's Internet Censorship group backs down. Unfortunately, the complicated issues that are raised by the existence of this infrastructure and the way that it is managed are not resolved by the fact that this particular controversy is over, and will inevitably rear their head again.

The IWF on Tuesday said that, "in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove the webpage from our list."

AFAIK, no law about images like this makes that sort of distinction.

"IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect," the group said in a statement

Censorship Group Removes Wikipedia Blacklisting | Threat Level from Wired.com

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Social Networks and Happiness

Tens of millions of people unemployed, inflation spiraling out of control, the government instituting price controls that result in shortages and blackouts and long lines for things. I think things are going to get very bad.

Financial doomsayer Schiff still grim on future - Forbes.com