Like shooting fish in a barrel.

You know, it gets old constantly pointing out how the real estate market is still screwed, our city frittered away the boom and is now going to be constantly short of cash to pay basic services, that CACB's glory years were encased in bubble wrap.

So, I try not to talk about it all the time.

It gets old.

Slowly, but surely, the apologists, the white washers inch their way back; real estate blogs proclaiming the bottom, Cascade bank announcing that 'help is on the way', the city sweeping Juniper Ridge under the rug and blaming the short fall on other things....

So, here I am again, pointing out that these problems were of our own making. And they aren't going to go away simply by wishing them away.

It's so obvious, it feels like shooting fish in a barrel. But, damn, those fish are slippery.


POSTSCRIPT:


Coincidentally, there is an article up on Le Monde, (English edition) about the Power of Positive Thinking. The first two paragraphs give you a gist.

Wishing it don’t make it so

Author Barbara Ehrenreich keeps questioning US business, social and psychological orthodoxies, especially in her latest book on the power of positive thinking: she doesn’t believe it has any power and tells us why

by George Miller

A few odd facts: George W Bush was head football cheerleader in his senior year at prep school. The total US market for “self-improvement products” in 2005 was estimated at $9.6bn (1). The most popular course offered by Harvard University in 2006 was positive psychology. Last month, during the Haitian earthquake, the top international story on happynews.com (which publishes only good news) was “Prince William attracts crowd in New Zealand”. There are at least four different species of breast cancer awareness teddy bears. Sales of the self-help book The Secret (“the secret gives you anything you want: happiness, health and wealth”) by former Melbourne TV producer Rhonda Byrne, published in 2006, exceed seven million.

In isolation, each of these facts may cause no more than mild disquiet, a sense that the harsher realities of life are being brushed aside. In fact, as US journalist and campaigner Barbara Ehrenreich has discovered, they are all manifestations of the ubiquity of positive thinking in the United States. When she began to put the pieces together, they revealed a nation in the grip of a collective delusion that does damage to people’s lives all the way from corporate boardrooms to those struggling with house repossessions and poverty.