Low Hanging Fruit

Having a Journal of Unintended Consequences when the subprime loans crisis comes due is sort of embarrassing. Yep, if you take out a loan with the certainty that prices will go up and interest rates stay down, you will get burned. If you call 'losing' a house you never even made much of a down payment on losing something you owned, I guess these people are victims. (Ask an elderly couple about paying the exorbitant taxes in Austin on a home they own outright. That, my friends, is criminal.) And if you make these loans or buy packages of them? Well, shame on you, too. Because getting these houses back in foreclosure won't be fun.

Nope. This journal's topic is just too easy. I was thinking maybe of starting the Digest of Unremarkable Headlines. (DUH) for things like "Happy People Found to Live Longer" but then who needs another journal. I'm not keeping up as it is with The Visible Woman and Austin, Texas Daily Photo. And I'm threatening to start a WEB page for all the Baby Boomers and elderly people moving to downtown Austin. (How does The DOWNTOWN AUSTIN BOOMer sound?)

Anyway, two other headlines have caught my eye while I was wearing my Journal of Unintended Consequences hat. In one (The New York Times, Saturday October 6, 2007) entitled "Save the Gnostics" it is brought to our attention that a group called the Mandeans are being wiped out by the war in Iraq. The group is small and pacifist and in spite of surviving in a delicate balance with the conquerers and dictators of the past, the situation now is scattering the group and they are landing in places in small numbers where continuing their culture is not encouraged.

In other news, there is a polio outbreak in Nigeria. Due to cost and training requirements, they use a live oral vaccine. But not enough people get it (some think it is a Western plot to sterilize Muslims). People who do excrete the weak virus and people who aren't inoculated can actually get the disease.

Yeah, life is teeming with UCs (unintended consequences) but I'm clearly not paying enough attention. Being caught up in the vortex of downsizing will do that to a person.