This is an interesting Washington Post article about how rising property values have hurt homeowners who bought their homes through Habitat for Humanity.

Rising property values across the region have put the squeeze on taxpayers, but the bite has been especially acute for owners of Habitat for Humanity homes in Northern Virginia. In some areas, their homes have doubled and tripled in value in the past three years.

At least a dozen of the 47 Habitat homeowners in Northern Virginia pay more in property taxes and insurance than they do to pay off their mortgages, according to Karen Cleveland, executive director of the Northern Virginia arm of the housing nonprofit group. It is part of an international group that builds homes with volunteers and sells them to low-income buyers.

Now, you’re probably wondering why they just don’t sell. Here’s why:

In recent months, Habitat for Humanity of Northern Virginia has launched a campaign to persuade localities to provide tax relief for their homeowners. It is arguing that the Habitat homes shouldn’t be assessed at market rates because deed restrictions prevent their owners from selling the homes for profit or getting home equity loans until the 20-year mortgages are paid. If Habitat homeowners sell their homes before 20 years are up, they must sell them back to Habitat for the amount they cost — $80,000 to $120,000 in most cases, Cleveland said, which is the restricted value.

Perhaps someone can help me out here; why put this onerous restriction on the deed? I can sort of see that the nature of the charitable donation would be altered if it essentially became a cash gift rather than a house. And I suppose it makes some sense to restrict immediate sale. But 20 years? This seems to deprive the recipients of one of the main benefits of homeownership: capital appreciation. What would be wrong with letting this woman sell and buy another, cheaper house elsewhere in the area, rather than petitioning the local government for tax abatement? She and her family would be just as “housed.” On the other hand, she would seem to have a good case that her house is not actually worth the assessed price, since she can’t sell it for that amount. Thoughts?

I’ve just seen that we’re through to the final stages of the “Best Group Blog” category of the Koufax awards. As Dan observed at an earlier stage of this process, CT has a sorry enough history in these awards.

bq. Oh god, it’s the same every year. We get nominated as “Best Group Blog”, which means “Maybe about Ninth Or Tenth Best Blog On A Good Day, But There’s A Group Blog Category So We’ll Nominate Them In That”. And then we lose.

If you want to show Dan that he’s talking smack for once, exercise your democratic rights, and “head over there and vote for us”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001709.html (while you’re at it, consider “giving the nod”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001724.html to Belle’s classic “and a pony”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html , which is up for the best humorous post). If any further reason is needed, we’ve already gotten endorsements from Fafnir and the Medium Lobster (although Giblets has apparently decided in a fit of pique to vote for Obsidian Wings instead).

Update: Looks like the awards site is down (I suspect due to bandwidth limits) – will update this again when it reappears.

Update 2: Site back up.

Useful site of the year, and it’s only January. Chris Lightfoot has (I think with a couple of his mates) put together this extremely useful site which will allow you to send a communication to your MP, free gratis and for nothing (Americans, spammers, and loonies[1], you are out of luck I’m afraid and will need to wait for someone to invent a different service for you). It’s very useful for sending letters to MPs who don’t have readily available email addresses but (for example) helped sort out a parking ticket for you a couple of years ago and you want to say thank you. Or for that matter, if you want to ask them not to start any more wars, introduce ID card schemes. Or to suggest to them that the government is unlikely to do any better picking winners among immigrants than it did among nationalised industries. If your local MP (or MEP, MSP, etc) is a Tory or a LibDem, you can have a go at him or her too.

Personally, I think that democracy is basically doomed in the UK, but Chris still thinks it’s worth saving, so well done him for trying.

Footnote:
[1]Other than loonies who happen to live in the constituency of the MP they are trying to write to, I suppose.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/02/hiatt_on_social.html should be pleased to hear that Princeton University Press has re-issued Harry Frankfurt’s well-known essay, “On Bullshit,” as a small book. You can “buy it”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691122946/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ at Amazon. There’s a nice piece in the Times about it, distinguished by the fact that the newspaper’s stylebook forbids the word “bullshit” — though of course its pages are filled examples of the stuff — so it’s referred to throughout as “[bull]” instead. As I think Matt’s also observed, journalism would be serving its readership much better these days if it were possible to write headlines like “More Bullshit from White House on Social Security Reform.”

Whenever anyone raises the possibility that resource shortages may have serious social consequences in public, they’re almost certain to run into flak from someone citing Julian Simon’s “bet”:http://www.answers.com/topic/wager-between-julian-simon-and-paul-ehrlich with Paul Ehrlich on metal prices. Thus, Jim Henley, in response to my previous “post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003168.html on Gregg Easterbrook and Jared Diamond says:

bq. Right-leaning technophiles adopt this posture because, in our experience, scientific (or scientistic) pessimism has proven itself repeatedly, embarassingly wrong, from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich to the Club of Rome. We saw Julian Simon win the Great Dispute of the 1970s, and are inclined to think the Julian Simons of today and tomorrow will win their own disputes.

But what I suspect Jim doesn’t know (and what I didn’t know until I read it yesterday in Jared Diamond’s Collapse), is why Simon was quite so confident that metal shortages weren’t a problem. Over to Diamond:

bq. There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort (anti-environmentalist predictions that have proved wrong): e.g. overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus there is no risk of a copper shortage.

Now Diamond himself exaggerates a little when he says one page later that copper cannot be made from other elements by definition, because it itself is an element. More precisely, we could make industrial quantities of copper from other elements if we had the power and the inclination to whizz around the universe “creating supernovas”:http://www.vectorsite.net/tastga4.html. Quite why we would want to create more copper if we had these superpowers is a question that I’ll leave to our readers’ ingenuity and imagination.

Simon’s prediction is far and away the most impressive example that I’ve ever seen of lunatic technological optimism in support of a transparent political agenda. I don’t think that even the boyos over at Flack Central Station would have the chutzpah to make this claim; Easterbrook’s belief that we don’t have to worry about material shortages because we can spread across the galaxy is strictly minor league stuff in comparison. More seriously, Diamond makes a strong case that a qualified scientific pessimism (along with a qualified optimism about the ability of human beings to respond to environmental problems and resource limits) is the appropriate attitude to take. Otherwise, we face a very serious risk of environmental collapse – not the end of humanity, but some very serious problems all the same. Jim should read Diamond’s book (we live quite near each other; I’m happy to lend him my copy) – while I doubt that it would convert him, I do think that it would give him some serious food for thought.

This piece by Nicholas Kristof encapsulates everything I don’t like about ‘evolutionary psychology’, particularly in its pop mode. Kristof makes the argument that the success of the religious right is due to a predisposition to religious belief grounded in supposed evolutionary advantages, supposedly reflected in a particular gene, referred to by its putative discoverer as ‘The God Gene’. This is pretty much a standard example of EP in action. Take a local, but vigorously contested, social norm, invent a ‘just so’ story and assert that you have discovered a genetically determined universal. Kristof doesn’t quite get to the point of asserting that there exists a gene for voting Republican, but it follows logically from his argument (Dawkins defends the idea of a gene for tying shoelaces, for example).

Where to begin on the problems of all this?

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Our own Henry Farrell was on “NPR this morning”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4461850 talking with Scott Simon about blogs and their role in propagating rumors.

Tomorrow is the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. The other week I “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003128.html W.G. Sebald’s “The Natural History of Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 , a work that addresses the horror of the Allied bombing raids and the inadequacy of the German postwar response to that horror. Today, of course, the bombing is being cynically used by German neo-Nazi groups who want to relativise or diminish Nazi crimes. The methodical slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis on Jews and others shouldn’t lead us to close our eyes to what happened in Dresden and in other German cities. What was done there was wrong, even though I, for one, would hesitate in blaming those who did it. Der Spiegel’s English site has “an interview with historian Frederick Taylor”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,341239,00.html , a “piece on Victor Klemperer”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341147,00.html , and “an extract from Klemperer’s diary”:http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341230,00.html .

My beloved fiancee received two hermit crabs for Christmas. Due to pressures both foreign and domestic, she has not named the crabs yet, and has consistently (cruelly, some would say) rejected my suggestions.

(pictured: a very similar hermit crab)

Luckily, I have the wisdom of crowds on my side. If any commentor suggests a pair of names for two hermit crabs which are adopted by my fiancee, I’ll donate $20 to Habitat for Humanity in his or her name.

The eminently reasonable Jack O’Toole has been driven to despair by this one-two punch.

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. (emphasis added) What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

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Like “Ted”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003098.html, I sometimes worry about whether the blogging medium is being used to its full potential. Then I stumble across uses for the medium that reaffirm my faith in it. “1000 Bars”:http://thousandbars.blogspot.com/ is, as the name suggests, the story of one drinker’s quest to drink at 1000 different bars in 12 months. He is well on the way, with 189 in the first 41 days of the year. I’ll be following his progress, and the pithy summaries of the decor, crowd and ambience of various fine drinking establishments. When taken in large quantities the bar reports all start to sound the same, and they have a pleasing relaxing effect, which is a marked contrast to some political blogs I used to know.

“Michael Totten”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000730.html recounts his night out with Christopher Hitchens and a couple of Iraqis that they talked to. Some of the latter weren’t too happy. Totten reflects:

bq. Maybe there was no way to avoid the tension wrought by invasion and occupation, and the air just had to be cleared. Perhaps our Iraqi guests … really didn’t (and don’t) completely understand how we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past.

He goes on to say that “Friendly Arabs are the easiest people to bond with I’ve ever met.” It’s the unfriendly ones that cause everyone such problems. And, he continues,

bq. I respected them more, too, because they stood up to me and Christopher Hitchens. They are not servile people. They will never, _ever_, be anyone’s puppets.

They’ve got spirit, the little buggers. Me ‘n’ Hitch are quite the team, but when you’re trying your best to tell them the way things are, they will be interrupting and getting annoyed and saying unreasonable things like “Who are you to tell us what to do!?” What’s that phrase again? “The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard.” But dissent is the lifeblood of democracy. Of course, we can’t permit them to pick the wrong government for themselves. “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power” (Hitchens). The invasion force would consist of “the US and Britain … along with — hopefully — everyone here at this table” (Totten). Or, as Tom Lehrer put it “more succinctly”:http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/marines.htm some years ago, “They’ve got to be protected / All their rights respected / Till somebody we like can be elected.”

“Read the whole thing”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000730.html if you like. It’s full of small moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is. Like Hitchens’ schoolboy-debater habit of calling people “Sir” as he talks down at them (as in “So you’re saying, sir, that you can be bought”). Or Totten’s heartfelt comment that “Something I said must have got through to him, and thank God for that. He and I — truly — were on the same side. I knew it, and I’m pretty certain he knew it too.” Or Hitchens saying that he has to leave because “I have to get up in the morning and continue the fight on CNN.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, mate.

(Via “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2005_02_06.html#005890.)

Apologies to readers for the rather odd post below, which was meant for my own blog. Since people have made comments, I’ll leave it in place, and add a few notes of explanation. The post refers to a state election campaign in Western Australia, which the incumbent Labor government was, at the outset, expected to lose. A major issue in the campaign is the water supply problems facing Perth, the capital city where the great majority of the population lives. Issues include the traditional Australian ideology of developmentalism, and the role of public-private partnerships

My piece in today’s Australian Financial Review, over the fold, brings together arguments about the Kimberley canal project, which has been debated here on the blog on my blog. As usual, I got a lot out of all the comments, whether or not this is obvious in the published article. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the debate.

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Here’s a picture of a small part of Milford Sound, on New Zealand’s beautiful South Island. I took it when I was there about a year and a half ago. It was my laptop wallpaper for a while. All this is really apropos of nothing, but I can’t look at that “tentacle mole”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003223.html any more. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.