This and That Vol 3 – Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire
By
Cognitive Dissonance
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Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Sometimes it is possible to read or view something that completely changes the way one looks at things. I had that experience last week when I read an article at Lobelog entitled “A Plea for Common Sense on Missile Defense,” written by Joe Cirincione, a former staffer on the House Armed Services Committee who now heads the Ploughshares Fund, which is a Washington DC based global foundation that seeks to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Just under a year ago, US home prices finally surpassed their prior all time highs, one decade after the 2006 bubble...
... and haven't looked back since. Which, all else equal, would be great news for America, where the bulk of middle-class wealth is not in the stock market contrary to conventional wisdom, but in its biggest, and most illiquid asset-cum-investment: one's home.
America's obsession with the ever-growing McMansion, combined with a perpetual lack of funding for said McMansion, has resulted a unique phenomenon which Trulia has dubbed "The Incredible Shrinking Yard." Analyzing public records to compare residential lot sizes to home footprints, Trulia says that homes built over the past two years occupy a staggering 25% of the land on which they sit, compared to roughly half that amount in 1975.
Here are some of Trulia's key findings:
In recent times, we have covered a grade-rigging scandal in Baltimore, Maryland that is worth paying attention to. Baltimore City Schools could be on the verge of gaining national attention, as the prime example of America’s broken education system.