• The Curse of Cheap Money | The Big Picture – This is the central enabler of the Housing Bubble.
• How to Ease Your Transition to Google Voice – Google Voice – Lifehacker – Once you accept an invite, register your number, and make your first text or phone call, you might be wondering how to go about actually using Google Voice—after all, nobody's calling you on that number just yet, and your number doesn't have any rules set up to begin with. That's where this guide starts off. There are lots of resources that explain how Google Voice's features work, but we're hoping to help you learn how to get people calling that number, work past the flaws in its system, and manage the callers for a better overall phone experience.
• High-Priced F-22 Fighter Has Major Shortcomings – washingtonpost.com – Its troubles have been detailed in dozens of Government Accountability Office reports and Pentagon audits. But Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it to be "too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof." Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 states, and Sprey — now a prominent critic of the plane — said that by the time skeptics "could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most congressmen were already defending their subcontractors' " revenues.
• Netanyahu’s paranoia extends to ’self-hating Jews’ Emanuel and Axelrod – Haaretz – Israel News – Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communicat[e] normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.”
• Consumerist – General Motors May Sell Cars Through eBay – General Motors – General Motors is considering a partnership with eBay to make it easier for consumers to impulse-buy new vehicles, the recently solvent car maker announced yesterday. Though the deal isn't yet finalized, General Motors would like to sell their vehicles both through traditional auctions and with a "Buy It Now" option.
• Bill Moyers Journal . Wendell Potter on Profits Before Patients | PBS – Looking back over his long career, Potter sees an industry corrupted by Wall Street expectations and greed. According to Potter, insurers have every incentive to deny coverage — every dollar they don't pay out to a claim is a dollar they can add to their profits, and Wall Street investors demand they pay out less every year. Under these conditions, Potter says, "You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations."
• Bob Sutton: Jeff Pfeffer on Why "Efficient Market" Thinking is Inefficient – Jeff's arguments (read the rest, it gets even better) for some reason reminds of what one of my friends in college used to say when people were following the herd rather than thinking for themselves or taking a different path: "Eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong."
• Jonathan Curiel – ’round the world we go – Robert McNamara: reluctant anti-war activist – True/Slant – During the run-up to the Iraq War, Robert McNamara never joined an anti-war protest, never went on CNN to voice his displeasure at George W. Bush. That wasn’t McNamara’s style. But he did announce his views on conflict in general, in the 2003/2004 documentary “The Fog of War.” And in interviews with reporters – including me – McNamara all-but-said the Iraq War was a big mistake that would lead to scores of American and Iraqi deaths, and the diplomatic isolation of the United States. As the Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy, and a still-admired figure in matters of warfare and diplomacy, McNamara had gravitas. He knew this. In his own old-school way, McNamara became an anti-war activist.
• Sarah Palin Battles The Internet (And The Rest Of Your Scritti Politti) – Anyway, shortly after Sarah Palin went WARBONKERS on a blogger you never heard of, the entire internet responded in an even more vapid and juvenile fashion, and now there are stupid Photoshops everywhere, thanks to Sarah Palin, because that is what happens when you feed the beast with your stupid anger, instead of calmly letting some stuff slide and depriving the beast of oxygen.
• Are Your Initials Holding You Back? « PsyBlog – In fact we are so sensitive to what things are called and the unconscious associations these generate, that our performance in a variety of arenas may be marred by something as seemingly insignificant as our own initials.

A federal law went into effect this month that allows people to adjust student-loan payments based on their income. The program limits monthly payments to 15 percent of the difference between the debtor’s income and 150 percent of the federal poverty guideline.

After 25 years of qualifying payments, any remaining debt could be forgiven.

The story is long on anecdote of one Pennsylvanian’s experience with loan debt and also reveals some of the reasons why Pennsylvanians pay more.  Unfortunately, none of the resources mentioned in the article are hyperlinked.  You can check your eligibility at IBRinfo (using their online calculator – note that the program is dependent on income and not debt) and get information from Pennsylvania lender AES at YouCanDealWithIt.

I’m still not personally sold on the concept and format, but for the heavy reader, the Kindle may become more appealing at a lower price point.  The Kindle (not the DX) is now $299, a reduction of $60.

• The Meanings Behind the Symbols: Family Crests, Blazons, Coat of Arms, Personalized Crests – Please note that the following descriptions and meanings are gleaned from a variety of sources, some of which disagree on those meanings. The most commonly accepted meanings are given, but scholars vary in the their opinions concerning the reliability of any "commonly held" historic meanings for coats of arms and crests.
• Is Transformers 2 Racist? – UGO – If you snoop around movie sites today, you’ll find references to Mudflap and Skids, twin Autobots from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen who bear more than a passing resemblance to minstrel show depictions of African Americans. CHUD.com aptly dubbed them Little Black Sambots. The wider story is that Mudflap and Skids are just the tip of the insensitive iceberg in Bay’s newest film. Here is a list of what you can expect when you go to see the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
• Sociomapping – Sociomap.com – We are introducing a new revolutionary tool for visualization and analysis of data. Sociomaps (a result of Sociomapping analysis) are complex graphs that resemble a landscape. Your abilities to move in space, for which you are trained from early childhood, will help you to interpret the complex relationships encoded in Sociomap. Sociomap enables to visualize, explore and analyze the structure and dynamics of a system and to present it in a way, which is easy to understand, especially for the public and non-scientific audience.
• Ryan Sager – Neuroworld – Founding Thinkers – True/Slant – Metacognition is the act of thinking about thinking — understanding one’s own mind, so as to be its master instead of its slave. Madison, along with the other founders, didn’t have the luxury of designing a government that others would operate. He and his contemporaries would be wielding this government’s power (Madison himself would go on to be the nation’s fourth president), and in writing its founding documents, he and the others were designing constraints on their own future power. They had to admit basic facts about their own human nature — that they were no angels, that they were subject to “passions” as much as any other mortal — and they had to act wisely in accordance with those facts. They had to engage in metacognition in the most consequential circumstance imaginable; and they succeeded.
• The Fourth of July: Throughout the Decades | The Saturday Evening Post –
• wirthusflag2009site.jpg (JPEG Image, 2000×1294 pixels) – Scaled (44%) –

Resist the urge to pick the low hanging fruit on Sarah Palin.   Her abrupt resignation (transcript here) may be just the beginning:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I originally thought that this was simply another shakedown – like the Letterman imbroglio – just an attempt to pay off her half-million dollars-plus of legal bills related to her gubernatorial legacy of ethics violations by shaking down the rubes.  The recent Vanity Fair expose certainly did her no favors.  I fully expected their to be cries of sexism related to her Runners World ‘centerfold’ interview.  She certainly has had an ‘interesting’ week.  But then I saw this at the bottom of this FDL post by EdwardTeller:

Update: This just in my in-box, from a source connected sometimes to CNN:

“Here’s a quote I got from law enforcement here in Alaska yesterday afternoon regarding Palin “a criminal indictment is pending authorization.”

Jane Hamsher further speculates:

Bill Kristol is kidding himself if he thinks this is a “shrewd move” on Palin’s part. That press conference and everything about this make Mark Sanford look like a master of public relations. Nobody springs a “surprise resignation” as a way to guarantee an orderly transition just because you decide you don’t want to run for re-election. It doesn’t even make sense on the face of it.

It’s more like something you do because you cut a deal with a prosecutor.

The Daily Beast further speculates.