It's Thursday

Good post from Sudden Debt on how the stock market, like everything else, has been built on a bubble of easy credit.

From the OCRegister:

The Southern California Multiple Listing Service cites confusion and inaccuracies in deleting the age-of-listing figures from reports that agents give to home shoppers.

Yes, that's why they don't want you to know how long a house has been on the market. It's because realtors don't want to be confusing or inaccurate.

Meanwhile

Dumplings stuffed with cardboard and bogus rabies vaccines are the focus of the latest health scares in China, where the government has banned an industrial solvent used in toothpaste after a spate of global recalls.

And to think I thought that odd taste was just cat. What has the world come to when you can't trust Chinese rabies vaccine? Isn't globalization wonderful?!

Just when you thought Iraq couldn't get any worse:

THE Iraqi port city of Basra, already prey to a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, has now been gripped by a scary rumour – giant badgers are stalking the streets by night, eating humans.

Remember, we have to fight the giant badgers over there so we don't have to fight them here. Maybe this is the "gut feeling" the terminally incompetent Michael Chertoff was talking about.

Here's what NY firefighters really think of Rudy Guliani.

Mortgage brokers repeat after me: Would you like fries with your order?

And finally, some investment advice from Marc Faber to some Indians:

Go buy yourself a piece of land — which street, which city I can’t tell you — and learn to drive a tractor”. That’s the advice investment guru Marc Faber had for investors at a recent event organised by Reliance Mutual Fund. “At the end of the day, we all will make losses in equities,” he added.

Wall Street is very good at "making losses". Just ask Bear Stearns.