Sorry for this

[Jonathan Post]

Deepest and most sincere sympathy to Mr. and Mrs. David Wilson.  I
will miss you, and thank you for kind and intelligent communications
in the past, and hope to see you back here soon.

The global real estate deflation and economic chaos, and the
long-covered-up mortgage and credit scandals in the USA have just
become more real and less abstract when they attack one of our own.

The odds are that there is at least one more American seqfan member in
mortgage/credit crisis right now in one of the hardest hit states
(California, Nevada, Michigan, Florida, ...)

I can accept that my Southern California home has depreciated by a
multiple of $10^5 this past year, but at least I'm not "underwater"
(i.e. with negative equity) or foreclosed.  In the previous recession,
my wife and I came within 24 hours of our home being auctioned out
from under us by the mortgage lender, and pulled back from the brink
by selling my great-grandmother's 2-caret wedding ring which my wife
had then owned and worn, my childhood rare 1950 baseball cards, and
every other asset we could liquidate.I hope that Mr. and Mrs. David
Wilson are similarly able to step away from the abyss, and I curse a
dishonest government headed by a President who rejected plain
arithmetic as "fuzzy math" in his first presidential campaign, and
Presidential candidate/Governor Huckabee who said, to anti-Math
applause:

"I know the pundits, and I know what they say: The math doesn't work
out," Huckabee said Saturday morning at the Conservative Political
Action Conference in Washington. "Well, I didn't major in math; I
majored in miracles. And I still believe in those, too."

Because, from where I stand, and would swear on a stack o' bibles in
court as an Expert Witness, God is a Mathematician (see the Blake
etching of Him with compass, doing Geometry), and even His Miracles
are subject to (as C.S. Lewis argued, for aesthetic reasons) subject
to the Laws of Mathematics and Logic.

Because I may have two B.S. degrees (one in Mathematics from Caltech)
and a bunch beyond those, but you, Hucksterbee,  take the cake for
B.S. in general, however you pluck those bass guitar strings (cf.
Pythagorus, Mathematics of Musical harmony), what you say is
anti-intellectual B.S. that strikes at the very foundations of
civilization itself.

I know that it's bad taste to bring up politics in seqfans, but in
this case, It was the topic of the subthread, and I think that I am
not alone in wishing David Wilson et al the best, and being angry with
righteous rage at a corporate and political system that openly
disdains Mathematics except when incumbents are counting the cash in
their fundraisers for re-election.

On Feb 11, 2008 11:19 PM, David Wilson <davidwwilson at comcast.net> wrote:
> I found out today that my wife has been hiding a foreclosure notice from me
> for a couple months.
>
> Hope your days were better than mine.
>
> Don't miss me if I drop out of sight for a while.
>
>