Is what’s shaking the economic landscape just a simple banking crisis? Or is there – as so many feel, and as the tremors indicate – something more hidden just beneath the surface?

Let’s begin with a quick explanation from the ever-incisive Tyler Cowen. He notes:

“What is distinctive today is the drying up of market liquidity — the inability to buy and sell financial assets — caused by a lack of good information about asset values…Market prices have been drained of their informational value.”

Bolding’s mine - that’s an excellent beginning.

But Tyler doesn’t talk about root causes: why have prices been drained of meaning, especially to an extent never seen before?

The Stanford Experiment - 1959
Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith

Would you lie for a dollar?

In this classic experiment conducted at Stanford University, men were recruited to participate in an unknown study. The men assigned the monotonous and boring task of sorting spools. The experimenter would then convince each subject to lie to waiting potential female subjects about how much fun sorting spools was, and that they should help. The men were paid either $1 or $20 to convince these females that this boring, monotonous task was in fact exciting! (Festinger and Carlsmith, 1959) . Most behavioral theories (i.e. reinforcement theories) would predict that the more a male participant was paid to lie to the female subject, the more that male subject would come to like the actual boring task (after all, yes the work was boring, but they were getting paid $20 to recruit unsuspecting help, right?).

The Trillion-Dollar War
Yesterday’s Democratic debate about flag lapel pins didn’t leave much time for issues like the deficit and the sky-rocketing cost of the war in Iraq. In her Reason magazine cover story, Veronique de Rugy writes, “At the end of December, Congress approved $70 billion in bridge funding—a down payment to cover the gap between the beginning of the fiscal year and the passage of the actual appropriation bill—to keep financing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Legislators at the time were still chewing on the rest of President George W. Bush’s request for a fiscal year 2008 war budget of $196 billion. Should that funding be appropriated—and if recent history is any guide, it certainly will—then the total price tag for America’s present wars will rise to at least $822 billion, approximately 80 percent of which will be spent on Iraq. That surpasses the cost of the Vietnam War ($670 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars). And the Iraq portion dwarfs the $50 billion to $60 billion cost predicted at the outset of the war by Mitch Daniels, then director of the Office of Management and Budget.

By Ian Jobling
On the night of April 12, vandals tagged three homes, a mailbox, a dumpster, and 15 vehicles in a Denver suburb with the words ‘BROWN PRIDE,’ a Hispanic racialist slogan. Slapstick Politics, a Denver blog, notes that the Denver Post, which printed the photograph to the right, merely stated that the neighborhood had been tagged with graffiti, without mentioning what the graffiti said or speculating about its meaning or source. Even more egregiously, a local TV news report photographed the graffiti in such a way that you couldn’t read it. (The news video is here on the right hand side of the page.) The report speculates that the vandalism may have been gang-related, but does not mention that it was certainly Hispanic-related.

The blogger, El Presidente, asks, ‘If White Pride or anti-Semitic symbols had been spraypainted over quite a large swath of property (remember, just one word at a university has the moonbats up in a rage), would the local MSM have conveniently ignored this fact?’

You have follow that train of thought a bit further if you really want to understand what’s going on here and to appreciate the full measure of the media’s perfidy. If someone had tagged a neighborhood with ‘White Pride,’ the story would not only have been put on the front page of Denver newspapers and been picked up by the national media, but the vandalism would have been interpreted it as the expression of a desire for racial domination and ethnic cleansing, a terrifying prospect. In short, the media did their best to sweep a threat of ethnic cleansing under the rug. We only know it happened because a story on vandalism has to be accompanied by a photograph.

I know this is a sensitive subject but one I feel I need to express an opinion about.  We recently visited our friends in CA - a female couple that adopted a little boy who is now nearly 3.  It struck me as I sat there watching this bright little boy interact with his loving parents how absurd our society has become in its judgments.  Those that know me know that I’m not bound by religious constraints in how I decide to live my life and how I view others.  I don’t want to make this about religion but typically those that have the strongest stance against homosexuality are religious and base it on the religious views they have.  I am of course not saying that all religious people have this view or judge people in this way - quite the opposite in a lot of cases, but religion is used as an excuse to condemn at times.  People quote the Bible when it is convenient for their cause but ignore the Bible when it is not convenient for them.

I am not here to debate whether homosexuality is right or wrong (although Adolf Hitler thought homosexuality was wrong as well - any belief system that you have that has something in common with Hitler, I would suggest examining).  I’m here to proclaim that we need to leave it alone.  We need to stop jumping up and down and judging others from our own insecurities.  The debate over gay marriage and gay adoption is ridiculous.