Tom’s Big Picture

2. With the crummy weather and red tide situation (the little one was very attracted to the dead fish), we spent the first morning at a nice little outdoor mall. Outdoor malls seem to be the new pattern, as they deprive the riff-raff who usually frequent malls of any air-conditioned common areas to waste time and annoy others. This is very pleasant for those of us with families who wish to get our business done and go home. In any case, my girls did the Build-a-Bear Workshop. This is an incredible business, and a lesson for me that confirms what I’ve already learned in business: never underestimate what people will pay for something, and in this case especially what yuppies will pay for an “experience” for their children. They vacuum-cleaned my wallet for $66 for two made-in-China stuffed animals. But their little faces were so happy…and of course from a daddy’s perspective that’s worth it: once or twice, on vacation.

We had one of those “black swan” experiences. Northwest Florida is apparently suffering from a severe drought, yet it rains 12 inches over the two full days we’re there. Simultaneously, the annual but unpredictable red tide comes in, washing up scores of dead fish on the beach while causing respiratory irritation within 1/2 mile of the beach, for which I paid extra for a direct-on-the-beach condo. We did our best to enjoy, and for my readers a few random observations, to syndicate over the next few days:

1. The Florida real estate bubble is bursting, but right now most people are still in denial. About 30-40% of the properties on some streets are for sale, but the asking prices seem exorbitant to me, at least based on fundamentals. Compare: a $120,000 house in Houston might rent for $1200 a month. The $2 million 3-bedroom beachside condominium I rented was $300 a night, or $9000 a month, but probably more like $7500 a month when one accounts for vacancies and real estate management fees. That would imply a value of about $750,000 for the condo, max $1 million if you discount the uncommonly efficient (though aesthetically distasteful) Houston builder machines. So while it’s amusing to see a real estate bubble bust in realtime (as those of us with more frugal, long-term strategies must also suffer through this sort of silliness every few years as it moves among various asset classes), the blood is not yet in the streets. When it does, it would be nice time to buy a condo. But for my money, renting is a bargain. Most vacation home purchases seem to me not a rational way of deploying excess capital but an irrational attempt to crystallize positive vacation experiences that have everything to do with locale and personnel and little to nothing to do with ownership vs. renting.

The family and I are heading out for a little vacation the rest of this week, to the so-called “Redneck Riviera” of the Florida upper gulf coast. I thought I would share a story regarding this.

A few years ago I was discussing the real estate business with a friend of mine, an older man who had inherited a family fortune and seemed to be doing well playing the Florida real estate game. This friend of mine was from up North, but the generally likeable kind of Yankee, an unassuming Midwestern WASP from Chicago (a town historically known as a hotbead of Copperheads, and this would be especially true among the old Protestant families).

Anyway, he was sharing with me the dynamics of Florida real estate, from a sociological point of view. He basically said that there are these small little fishing villages up and down the coasts of Florida filled with likable locals and a few WASP snowbirds who prefer a small-town fishing village environment for vacation to the tasteless glitz of somewhere like Palm Beach. Eventually, though, he said, the developers come in, buy up the place, build ugly condos and lots of commercial space, which then attracts the generally distasteful population of snowbirds from places like New York and New Jersey, who ruin the zen-like calm co-existence of the locals and the genteel WASPs. So the key to small town survival and the preservation of the small-town feel, in his opinion, was enough local restrictions of development and building such that the big-city developers find buying land diseconomic. In an ironic twist, public advocacy of liberal environmentalism is really a front for the very conservative goal of keeping distasteful and unpleasant people and elements out of the idyllic fishing village.

I found this very interesting. I next shared with him that my family enjoyed vacationing in Destin, that the town tended to attract young families from the South and was definitely not distasteful like Palm Beach or Miami. Not only that, the beaches are prettier.

His comment: “Destin, well I guess it’s nice, but it’s full of crackers.” No, he wasn’t talking about Ritz or saltines. He means crackers in the pejorative sense of “poor white southerners”. I think I resemble that remark, and was surprised he would say it in front of me, knowing my background. But, then again, Yankees aren’t known for tact, even I suppose otherwise likeable ones from the Midwest.

And, with that, this cracker will see all y’all next week.

It would be impossible the parody the depth to which George W. Bush has sunk.  A truly unprincipled traitor to his country and now his adopted home state:

President George W. Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the state’s execution of a Mexican national for the brutal killing of two teenage girls. Texas wants the death penalty to be carried out.

The case of Jose Ernesto Medellin has become a confusing test of presidential power that the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately will sort out.

The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated their rights to legal help as outlined in the 1963 Vienna Convention.

An amusing little story about a half-black candidate who acts white trying to act black while preaching to a mixed audience of happy black people and weird, awkward white people clapping their hands out-of-rhythm trying to feel more “spiritual” by trying to be black people. We certainly live in a mixed up country! The candidate, culturally a white Midwestern liberal, is doing his best to identify with the southern black people who dominate Democratic primaries, and no doubt an image consultant of some sort filled him in on the practice of calling down Holy Wealth Redistribution common among the lower classes of Pentecostals, white and black, in the South. Distribute your tithes to the preacher, who God hath given an Escalade, and it shall be returned to you ten times over. And then there’s the liberal social gospel variant- give your votes to the Democrat, and it shall be returned to you in welfare benefits one hundred times the cost of the effort of getting to the polls. Not to mention the free chicken dinner for turnout!

One of the most interesting angles was Obama’s endorsement of Rick Warren as his kind of evangelical:

Obama noted that he was pleased leaders in the evangelical community like T.D. Jakes and Rick Warren were beginning to discuss social justice issues like AIDS and poverty in ways evangelicals were not doing before.

“I think that’s a healthy thing, that we’re not putting people in boxes, that everybody is out there trying to figure out how do we live right and how do we create a stronger America,” Obama said.

Translation: so what if I want to murder babies, that’s putting me in a “box” and besides, it’s much more important to Jesus that we stick our hands into middle class wallets to subsidize illegitimate babies and keep AIDS patients alive with $500-a-month drug cocktails courtesy of the taxpayer. “Social justice” means “Socialism = Justice”.

The church where Obama visited calls itself the “Redemption World Outreach Center”. Sounds important- I bet they have a semi-circle display of flags of different countries in their parking lot to demonstrate how much more they care about missions than anyone else. In fact, this church is so important that they don’t even have a pastor. No, they have a real live APOSTLE. Check it out:

Together, Apostles Ron and Hope founded Redemption World Outreach Center in 1991 with three members and an undying heart for outreach.

If you thought T.D. Jakes was important because he gave himself the title of bishop, then you better watch out for the husband-and-wife tag team of apostles. I find it so amazing that there would be even two real live apostles left, and then that they would go to the same little Pentecostal Christian college, and then get married! Amazing evidence of God’s presence in their lives, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, other than that, the only possibility would be that they are taking advantage of poor and/or dumb people by promising them material benefits in this life based on dubious interpretations of Scripture and magical, primitive reasoning:

LORD, we thank you that Redemption World Outreach Center operates in the multiplication anointing. We multiply in every area of ministry. We thank you that we are financially multiplying. Money is coming from unknown sources. We thank you that your Word declares that the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous.

Redemption World Outreach Center will experience the miracle of debt cancellation! Every member and every partner in the name of Jesus! Every service will be filled with people regardless of how many services. I command thousands and thousands to come now from the north, from the south, from the east, and from the west! Angels go! Bring them now! Prompt diligent, dedicated, committed, sold out, tithing, on fire, anointed, Bible carrying, devil stomping believers now in the name of Jesus. Bring the hurt, bring the sick, bring the poor, bring the depressed, and they shall be healed in Jesus name!

Conservatives and liberals, recognizing the natural geographic diversity of their distribution in the population, unite in their desire to stop being used by the Tweedledee and Tweedledum major parties and embark on an experiment of true liberty to have the sort of society they each respectively prefer.  It is The Secession Solution to our country’s problems.  Instead of spending billions of dollars trying to force each other’s belief systems onto the other, we agree to an amicable divorce.  More like a nullification, actually, for Lincoln’s shotgun remarriage.