Internet’s down

Posting this. From my iPhone, but I can’t put up much without my computer. Back once I fix that

A good reminder for the slow-witted

“If I were you, Mr. Fountain, I’d post his quote every day, just so your humorless readers will get it. Love your blog, by the way.” Mark

Sellers should only hope this trend crosses the Atlantic

British mortgage rates headed below 1%. At most price ranges, the amount of a buyer’s income is a fixed pie, divided between the seller and the mortgage lender. Reduce the size of one slice and the other necessarily grows larger.

Now that our own Fed has suspended, for now, its announced intention to raise rates this year, perhaps mortgage rates will drop like Britain’s.

Or not; you finance guys can correct me.

I didn’t understand the “’til death do us part” to mean the death of third parties

Wife of Michigan Uber gunman files for divorce. 

Fickle women!

 

If it weren’t for fake hate crimes, we’d have almost no hate crimes at all

Black Lies Matter!

Black SUNY Albany students who set off demonstrations and protests after alleging they’d been attacked by white students arrested after videos showed they were actually the attackers.

But a police review of video from the bus along with interviews of dozens of eyewitnesses revealed that all of the early reports about the bus attack were false. In fact as the university police chief describes it the report of a racially-motivated attack on the three black women is nearly the opposite of what actually happened on the bus:

“The evidence shows that, contrary to how the defendants originally portrayed things, these three individuals were not the victims of a crime,” university Police Chief Frank Wiley said in the statement. “Rather, we allege that they are the perpetrators.”

“No male struck the three women,” the police statement said. “The evidence indicates they were actually the aggressors … and that they continued to assault the victim despite the efforts of several passengers to stop them.”

Boy, are those girls in trouble!

University President Robert J. Jones published a letter which said in part, “I am deeply concerned, saddened and angry about this incident. There is no place in the UAlbany community for violence, no place for racial intolerance and no place for gender violence.” Jones also promised, “If those individuals are UAlbany students, we will hold them fully accountable for their behavior.”

Ooops! That letter was sent when the bogus story was about black victims – the president’s remained silent about holding anyone accountable now that those to be held accountable aren’t white.

So this is where Connecticut residents are fleeing!

Even Dannel’s granny’s gone south

A friend of mine told me she was going to visit her brother in some place called “The Villages”, down in the middle of nowhere in Florida, and the way she sounded abashed made me look it up. Sooo hoo! It’s sex city for grand ma in the swamps! Public nudity, sex on golf carts, a blackmarket in Viagra, and a Happy Hour that starts at 10 am.

There’s a more balanced article on the place over on Buzzfeed, but the Dail Mail article I link to is more fun. Regardless of the reporting, however, it’s clear that the old folks are having fun, and why the hell not? Sure sounds better than sticking around Connecticut waiting for the Democrats to strip your money. If you’re gonna get screwed, do it where its warm and sunny.

 

Here’s something title insurance WILL cover

Doing the spadework for profiting in real estate

Texan murders his landlord, then impersonates the poor fellow and sells his house, pocketing the proceeds.

A Texas man is accused of selling the home of his dead former landlord whose corpse found encased in concrete in September was identified earlier this month.

Police on Thursday said they are ruling 57-year-old Ronald Shumway’s death a homicide, according to the Dallas News.

They have not said whether his neighbor, former newspaper photographer Brian Colbert, 43, killed Shumway but they believe he posed as the owner of his Oak Cliff home after he went missing. Shumway owned the property for over 30 years.

Police are still on the hunt for former Dallas Voice photographer Colbert who they say forged signatures on documents, and superimposed his photo over his dead former landlord’s ID

 

The science is settled: Clinton, Sanders supporters more racist than the Republican candidates, including Trump

That’s the finding of the same expert who, at the request of USA Today, analyzed the same polling data used by the NYT to prove that Trump supporters are racist. – this time, she looked at Democrats’ responses. The Times, of course, didn’t mention in its article that they’d asked her to restrict her original analysis to Republicans. So what’d she find?

According to the poll, backers of Clinton and Sanders, white Democrats, are more likely to disapprove of the Civil-War executive order than supporters of Hispanic Republican Marco Rubio. One in 10 Sanders supporters disapproves of Lincoln’s executive order. Rubio supporters are less likely to disapprove of or have doubts about the landmark civil rights decision than African-Americans themselves.

The same poll finds that Clinton supporters are about 40% more likely than Sanders backers to be fans of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to round up Japanese-Americans and throw them into “internment camps.” Supporters of the two Democrats are both more likely to support the racist policy than Rubio’s backers by a margin of 2 to 1. The poll of 2,000 Americans found that 39% of Clinton backers either support the action, for which the U.S. Congress and President Ronald Reagan apologized in 1988, or are unsure of their position. The United States paid reparations to the interred Japanese-Americans.

The YouGov poll results began to gain national attention on Tuesday when Vavreck reported in the Times that more than 1 in 5 Trump supporters disapproved of Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. YouGov had provided the raw data so Vavreck could perform her analysis. The Times cited the poll’s results as evidence of racist undercurrents and intolerance on the part of Trump and his supporters in the Republican presidential primary, backing them with exit poll results and data from another pollster the Times described as “aligned with the Democratic Party.”

Originally, Vavreck, the Times and YouGov only reported on the racially insensitive views of Republicans, failing to publish or even analyze the responses of potential Democratic voters. Vavreck only performed the Democratic analysis and released it to me on Friday after YouGov refused to release the data on Thursday and I contacted YouGov’s European executives, its in-house polling expert and Vavreck herself.

What USA Today will tell its readers, the NYT will not:

While The New York Times, Time magazine, Nate Silver’s 538 and Ezra Klein’s Voxtreated the poll as credible, the results are transparently ludicrous. The poll found that almost one-third of African-Americans polled on Lincoln’s executive order to end slavery in the treasonous Confederate States of America either opposed freedom for their ancestors or were not sure what they thought.

So the point is not that this poll shows any particular candidate’s supporters to be racist – it’s useless for that, but that the New York Times presented it as a credible poll and manipulated the results, by focusing solely on Republican voters, to “prove” what all good progressives already know: Republicans are racist. Thus the Paper of Record.

New you can use, if you’re a market timer

Scientists: Universe won’t end for at least another 2.8 billion years.

 

“New” listings

Some are just being delisted after their old listing expired, like

26 Stag Lane

26 Stag Lane, asking $3.950 million. This was a good house, built by (the good) Richard Harris back in 2006, but I think, and he thought, he was lucky to get out of it in 2007 for $4.250 million. It’s down in a hollow, on a narrow, shared driveway, and is adjacent to the Merritt, so only the irrational exuberance of 2007 could have yielded that price.

As was demonstrated by the buyer, who lost it to foreclosure, and watched it sell to the present owner for $2.6 in 2013. Now that guy is trying for the 2007 price, assuming, I assume, that he got a bargain three years ago. My feelings on “bargains” is that you always end up paying exactly what something’s worth, if not more.

15 Wyckham Hill

And the same status for 15 Wykham Hill Lane, back from the expired at $3.950 million. The listing says “custom built” and it was, by Hobbs, one of the finest, but back in 1996. It sold to this owner for $3.3 million in 2000, and he’s been trying to resell it since 2008, when he tried for $5.295. It’s been dropping ever since, and the last price before this, in November, was $3.995. The trouble with custom designs is just that: they’re custom, built around the owners’ tastes. The taste of this oner matched that of the people he bought it from but since then, no one’s showed up with the same esthetics. I happen to like it, but I’m not a buyer.

Price Cut

24 Highland Farm Road

24 Highland Farm Road, which started off at $7.795 million, is down to $5.995. That may still not be enough, but it’s a lovely house, custom built for the owners back in the day (1987), and not too too far up Round Hill.

Video tour here, if you’re interested

Sale prices reported

1093 King Street

1093 King Street, an 1850 home on 3 acres, sold for $1.550 million. Purchased for $1.575 in 2003, “completely renovated” in 2011, sold for less. So it goes.

101 Lockwood Rd

101 Lockwood Road, Riverside, $2.3 million, bought for $2.1 in 2010. Discussed here previously when it went to contract, perfectly decent house for this price range.

 

No sooner did we say that the + $3 million market is moribund then …

Three new contracts are reported. Mind you, the pending sales of two of them might not give too much cheer to sellers of big ticket homes but hey, at least there are buyers.

32 Lower Cross Road

32 Lower Cross Road has a contract, asking $7.1 million. That’s great, but it did start off, long, long ago, (April, 2012) at $11.750.

5 Kernan Place

Another old chestnut dating back to 2012 is 5 Kernan Place, in Old Greenwich, most recently asking $3.3 million. It once asked $4.5. I’ve always liked this house, and so so over the years, but a 6 bedroom home screams for lots of children, and this one has no yard. That proved to be a tough sell.

16 Mortimer Drive

And 16 Mortimer Drive, Old Greenwich, new, post-Sandy construction, sold in October 2014 for $2.940 in 2014, was placed back up for sale just bout  moth ago t $3.175, and has a buyer. Completely FEMA compliant, as you’ll note from the stairs leading up to it, but apparently the prospect of carting groceries and children up those stairs is not a deterrent.

There’s always a place for GHS’s Winters: ROTC commander

ROTC cadets forced to march in red high heels to demonstrate solidarity with women. (The is a story from last year, but given this week’s event at our PC high school, I thought it’d be fun to revisit it.

If global warming is real, why do scientists lie about it?

North meets south: “actual footage” of endangered polar bear touring Antarctica, looking for new living quarters

Polar bear eats cub, “scientists” blame global warming 

Long time fans of the global warming hysteria will remember when global warmists used poor bears as poster boys for their religion, only to quietly demote them after it turned out that the bears were flourishing and in fact increasing in numbers.

Beginning in 2009, a new story  started appearing in the alarmist press claiming that, “well yeah, there may be more polar bears, but what about seals? There aren’t enough seals, so the bears have turned to eating their young, and now they’re in trouble”. This, too was promptly debunked, but the claim persists, and will be repeated as “science’ by the popular media until something better comes along.

So again: if the science is “settled”, why all the distorted statistics and, in the case of polar bears, outright lies?

“Chickens home roost to come,” says Yoda

Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey: “You look at Greenwich’s Grand List now – the very definition of callipygian, ripe for the grabbing”.

Connecticut’s budget deficit, estimated by the Democrats in charge to be $20 million, is now acknowledged to be $900 million, and climbing. That’s a problem for any government, like Connecticut’s, that doesn’t have a printing press.

Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden, said more structural changes are needed.

“This reflects the reality of an economy where families are working harder for less,” he said. “Savings and efficiency must be the priority, where accountability of state agencies for every taxpayer dollar is the new watchword. This is how the budget challenge we face will be met.”

It’s nice that the Hartford Yahoos now concede that “accountability … for every taxpayer dollar” has not been  an objective of their rule for the past four decades, but I do believe their gallows conversion comes too late.

What’s the solution? The standard one: new taxes on Fairfield County.

He might actually win this one

Man sues hotel for mistakenly giving him key to wrong bedroom, where he ended up fondling a 9-year-old girl when he awoke the next morning.

He was acquitted of molestation charges but lost his job, and now he wants revenge.

Let’s go to the videotape:

Not much actual real estate news to report, but here’s a price cut

27 Chieftans

27 Chieftans, now down to $2.850 million. Owners paid $3.687 for it in 2004, did some sprucing up and tried for $4.6 in ’06, and have been trying unsuccessfully to unload it for a while now. The Chieftains development on the old Bernard Gimbel estate was a winner back in 1995, but prices have been declining there ever since. Wrong part of town, and the designs are out of favor.

If only she’d seen the Monty Python training video

German man on trial for causing death of his lover with a cucumber.

While the video actually deals with attackers bearing fruit, its lessons could surely be applied to a cucumber-wielding maniac.

GHS principal is about as ignorant as a four-year-old

It’s symbolic, don’t you get it? Underneath the rd gown, there’s a little girlie in all of us. All same!

When his little sister Sarah was born, our son John, 4, was hugely disappointed; he already had a little sister, and he wanted a little brother. After reviewing the situation at the hospital, he came up with an idea on the ride home: “I know,” he said, “let’s go back there and switch the pink name tag for a blue one”.

John grew up, and learned that that’s not how the process works: changing the color of an identifier does not change the nature of what’s being identified. The man in charge of educating students at Greenwich High, Dr. (huh) Chris Winters, never grasped that concept, and so, in order to end sexism and, presumably, bring about world peace, he has unilaterally decreed that all students will wear the same color robes at graduation. That won’t change the students’ gender, pal; and it won’t end what you perceive to be a problem. Dressing people all alike does not make them all alike.

How nice for Dr. Winters that he’ll be able to gaze out over the field on graduation and see what he’ll perceive as 1,000 identical, all-equal, all average students. Just what he and his politically-like-minded assistants have worked so hard to achieve.