some results of recent surfing

1. Here's a 3500sqft 5 bedroom brick house in a tree-lined neighborhood. Nice yard, hardwood floors, full basement. Yours for only $8,925. The catch? It's in Detroit.

2. At the above link you'll also note that realtor.com lists over 200 houses in metro Detroit for less than $1,000. The average house in Detroit is now valued at less than $20,000.

3. This blog documents how Detroit is now one the greenest metro areas in the world. The reason? Nature is reasserting itself amid the abandoned ruins, with burned out and bulldozed blocks reverting back to open prairies with tall grasses, and high rise buildings sporting rooftop mini-forests. More here. And here's a cool photo essay of the urban decay.

4. Roundup of 2008 economic forecasts and stock picks that didn't quite work out. My favorite:

• James J. Cramer, “Future of Business” New York Magazine
“Goldman Sachs… finishes the year at $300 a share. Not a prediction — an inevitability.”
Goldman Sachs’ share price [last week] was $78, and the firm announced its first quarterly loss — $2.2 billion.

Jim Cramer should never be taken seriously ever again.

5. Alberto "Judge" Gonzales opines that the true victims of the War On Terror are not the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, or the millions of displaced Iraqi refugees, or the thousands of dead and wounded American soldiers, or the innocent people tortured at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, or the millions of American citizens subjected to illegal electronic surveillance... no, according to the "Judge", the real victims are himself, George Bush, and Dick Cheney. All they did, you see, was implement some policies to Keep America Safe that "some people didn't agree with", and here they are being subjected to all of this vulgar criticism from the very people they were trying to protect all along. Actually, this viewpoint makes a lot of sense. If you're a deranged lunatic, that is.

6. From the Big Picture, lots of photos of the Gaza nastiness mentioned in the post below. Not for the faint of heart.

7. A somewhat unselfaware post on a blog called "Stop the ACLU". The post unironically derides and ridicules the British Culture Secretary's plan to censor internet content. No, really. That's what it says. The post is surrounded on all sides by childish, ill-informed harangues against the ACLU for destroying our great nation. It's a wonder that people this stupid ever figure out how to connect their computers to the inter-webs.