This Thursday evening, Integrity Investment Advisors, Inc. of San Diego, California will offer "Real Estate Investments – 3 ways to protect your assets in a down market". The event is at 7:00 pm at their headquarters,

11772 Sorrento Valley Road, Suite 100
San Diego, CA 92121

(and interested parties should kindly call in an RSVP to 858-523-0093. Refreshments are provided!)

Some say affluent people have already begun off-loading real estate, shorting REITS, or hedging with futures. Presidential advisors claim no housing bubble exists, and others urge correction from a bubble shrinking down. Economists, journalists, and mathematicians debate whether fundamentals explain housing prices.

Are banks rationally providing mortgages or playing in the moral hazard of a liquid market? Does America's housing market reflect global housing trends or defy them? Are rental prices in line with housing services? How badly are strange taxes distorting housing prices? Was there really long ago a Tulip Bubble, stife for possessing the beauty of a rare flower, or is it myth and legend?

Is a house owned in bubble less owned or more owned than a house bought in market without froth? It may be less owned --- one needs to sell it in good order to the next rational speculator --- or it may be more owned, as one so bravely over-extends to secure the good in question. If the asset does not comprise part of one's enduring legacy, who will steward that house to good use over the long course?

If "clothes make the man" and "you are what you drive", how much does the asset of a house, and all of its shifting financial relations (with ownership, renting, taxation, eminent taking, land grant ...), make the person? Does Justice Souter know?

How much of a house, and a bubble, are material --- here and now in the world? How much of house, and a bubble, is nounemal --- a state of mind, a coming into and going out of Existence, an American Dream? Can we gain in these ethereal depths, gazing across the sublime, glittering Pacific from Torrey Pines?

07.18.2005 As much as any nice lady in Springfield, Illinois could read this last week on Rove Rage and Plame Wars, I have. Smoke and mirrors inside the Beltway, but it is so early, still July. Not yet August!

Maybe timings will unwind just so for a long August day, steamy and menacing in its misleading quiet. Then, we can grind bitter embers of impudent intrigues slowly through our knowing minds.

Four years ago, we had another slow August. Golden day mellowing and turning to another endless sun-filled eternity. We lived, day upon blessed day. But also that August held awful menace, with dogs and police sifting again and again the grounds of our capital's Rock Creek Park.

No endless day, no fierce menace, no charred ember of Truth, forestalled the ensuing thrust in contingency's store: 9-11 came, act done, after golden, slow August. And this time, menace has struck our London, dear Londontown. What is in store by Fortune's hand?

No treachery or relenting prevails. In Time's great maw, with its hungry tiger teeth sunk deep into quivering Contingency, only Truth prevails.

We should read of it (Truth) in the news, come August, come Future.

What, when, is seeking and pursuit when a good is desired?

Is a sale a sale, when, just when? Not when it is a simple idea of purchase in the mind of the buyer, or officials in state visits to Niger. Or, not when it is an idea in the mind of an investigator who finds no receipt of delivered good. Not when the available yellowcake is slated for shipping off to France or Spain. Or, not when a shipment is diverted, slipped off, skedaddled off from chartered arrival in France or Spain or wherever, to shipment elsewhere?

Where are the sixty-one suitcase bombs? Who bought them?: I have read that cash lying out and about on the street, is not much of an economic reality.

If Knowledge makes us strong, our threat is Ignorance. The fourth estate does not grasp the threat quite as suggested here. Mr. Blair says on July 15,

"The greatest danger is that we fail to face up to the nature of the threat we are dealing with. What we witnessed in London last Thursday week was not an aberrant act. It was not random. It was not a product of particular local circumstances in West Yorkshire. Senseless though any such horrible murder is ... ... It was done according to a plan. It was meant. ... ...

Their cause ... ... is founded on a belief ..."

Yet, it is worse than Mr. Blair explains. Their cause is founded, as great evil can be founded, on a possibility: Their cause is founded upon the very possibility and contingency they exploit and by which their intent is to win.

Why do they do it? Because they can.

It is only that simple in the bottom line.

Mr. Blair urges argument in confrontation of their belief. Argument does not suffice, for war is at hand and we are in it. One also needs the Spirit that will confront the evil.

We need the Spirit that is within us when we assess War necessary, just, effective, valorous and due War's duration. It is a long, hard, slog. One we give over to political processes which are also long in conflict's urgency.


Time's menace, that ripped and bleeding contingency, never outlasts Truth. Truth is eternal, whole, and beautiful.
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From the Butler Commission Report, (14th July 2004, for The Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors, Chairman: The Rt Hon The Lord Butler of Brockwell KG GCB CVO, p.139),

"503. From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased [emphasis], as opposed to having sought [emphasis], uranium and the British Government did not claim this.
d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it."

See also "Bush's "16 Words" on Iraq & Uranium ... ...", The Anneberg Public Policy Center, August 23, 2004.
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07.26.2005 I went back and refreshed myself with Joe Wilson's Op-Ed. Fairly enough, two sentences in the article detail the point that uranium shipments are so closely monitored that skedalleding-off is not likely. But the logic of the article escapes me. No sale or purchase was alleged; and what is seeking purchase, but what any might desire?