May 14, 2024
FIND YOUR PHONE: Apple AirTag 4 Pack. #CommissionEarned
DID YOU KNOW WE ALMOST LOST THE INTERNET LAST MONTH?: It’s true, and Jonathan Bartlett has the scoop at Mind Matters. At the heart of this close call is a mysterious programmer by name Jia Tan, an obscure programming compression library known as xz, and an alert Microsoft software engineer.
UPDATE: Boy, good thing that Microsoft software engineer wasn’t as “alert” as I was while writing this original post. Y’all are the best copy desk editors in the business!
WOW: US home prices have soared 47% since 2020.
Despite mortgage rates skyrocketing to around 7%, double what they were at the peak of the pandemic, home prices refuse to plateau.
That’s due the insatiable appetite for housing coupled with a crippling shortage in supply.
“Because the Fed kept rates too low for too long during the pandemic, listing inventory was essentially wiped off the map, keeping prices rising sharply despite the surge in mortgage rates,” appraiser Jonathan Miller told The Post. “Would-be home sellers that bought or refinanced at a 2.5% to 4% rate during the pandemic became trapped due to the lock-in effect. They became reluctant to list their homes because, as new buyers, they would get a lot less for their money because of the much higher mortgage rates. The way out of this appears to be to hope for a drop in mortgage rates, but that could take years.”
To put things in perspective, the median US home sale price hit $420,800 in the first quarter of this year. Compare that to a modest $327,100 at the beginning of the decade. It was $124,800 at the dawn of the ’90s.
Lance Lambert, co-founder of ResiClub, says housing price growth in the first 50 months of this decade has outpaced not just one, but the last three decades combined.
I’d hate to be a young couple trying to buy a first house and start a family.
Related? Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed. “In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.”
Unaffordable housing is far from the only reason young people aren’t having enough kids but it’s on the list.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM—YOU’RE REALLY DOING IT WRONG:
Striking passage from @NellieBowles’s Morning After the Revolution, out today:
NYT colleague (an editor) calls her partner, @bariweiss, a “F-ing Nazi.” pic.twitter.com/t3wnsfAi2q
— Adam Rubenstein (@RubensteinAdam) May 14, 2024
IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Fruit fly testes offer potential tool against harmful insects.
SETH MANDEL: Lifting Hamas’s ‘Fog of War’ Reveals a Very Different Conflict.
The United Nations has announced that the Gaza casualty figures it has been using are bogus and it is adjusting its figures downward.
“The revisions are taken … you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,” UN spokesman Farhan Haq said at a press briefing in response to a question from JNS. “We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross check them. As we cross check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”
Ah yes, the fog of war. In fact, the change is due to the fact that the UN has decided to report only “identified” casualties and exclude “unidentified” casualties. Because Hamas uses media reports—itself a gauzy category which includes Hamas-aligned press fronts—to add to its “unidentified” category, there is no excuse for reporting those in the “unidentified” category at all.
If only there’d been a way to know not to trust the numbers coming directly from Hamas.
And what are those numbers? Now the UN says about half of its original estimate of women and of children can be disregarded, bringing those totals to about 7,800 and 5,000 respectively. That brings the total number of Palestinian fatalities down by over 11,000, nearly a third of the commonly reported total.
And that’s not all. The Palestinian statistical agencies are famous for using “under 20” as their marker for separating children and adults. That means among the “children” are likely a number of 18- and 19-year-olds (i.e. not children). Additionally, we know the IDF encounters 16- and 17-year-old militants in the field, meaning a chunk of the “children” are actually combatants. And of course Hamas makes no distinction between combatants and civilians when counting the casualties.
It’s possible, then—perhaps even likely—that the IDF has achieved a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio of around 1.5-1, an unheard-of level of precision and civilian protection in urban warfare.
Everything Hamas does boils down to three things: lying, murder, and lying about murder.
WELL, THAT’S DISAPPOINTING: Study: Brain-injured patients who died after life support ended may have recovered.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: ‘Rotary Hunger Strikes,’ AYFKM?
TRADING IN THE 21ST CENTURY: GameStop stock soars over 70% as ‘Roaring Kitty’ revival reignites meme-stock bonanza.
DO THE LETTERS F O MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU? Ancient Lame Duck Maryland Senator Wants to Limit How Much Ammunition You Can Own.
SO MANY LEFTIST ‘LOCAL NEWS’ OUTLETS: You may well have heard of States Newsroom or the Courier Newsroom because they are leading lights in the Left’s surge to dominance of what is left of local news reporting, according to Scott Walter of Capital Research Center (CRC).
It’s not to report the latest doings of your county board of supervisors or the local city council, however. It’s all part of the drive funded in part by $500 million from the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, and more from other Lefty funders, including Arabella Advisors. Expect lots of school and local government-related DEI stuff.
On the other hand, there are a bunch of innovative Right Media operations moving ahead, too, and Walter provides some genuinely encouraging news about several of them. One especially intriguing project involves the Baltimore Sun, long ago one of America’s great daily newspapers, and Sinclair Broadcasting Group chief Dave Smith.
EXCUSES: The Dog Ate Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Foundation Homework. “Even before all of this odd news, Archewell hadn’t been doing very well.”
THOUGHTS ON FRIENDSHIP: Spent a bit of quality time jawing with a good friend from way back on Capitol Hill yesterday, and it sparked some reflections on HillFaith about why close, lasting friendships are uniquely human and so deeply vital to our individual happiness. And I share some thoughts on the ultimate Best Friend Forever as well, and point to a collection of 15 scripture verses that lay out the good, the bad and the source of friendships in blunt detail.
BUT JOE BIDEN ASSURES ME THAT THE BORDER IS FULLY SECURE:
DO WORDS MATTER?: Well, the “right” words matter quite a lot actually if you are following Saul Alinski’s “Rules for Radicals,” as clearly is the case with the radical Lefty activists and organizers behind the continuing wave of anti-semitic Pro-Hamas/Pro-Palestinian, former New Left protest riot trainer Richard Pollock explains in the second of a series of three explanatory columns.
This is essential reading for those who want to understand why the protests and riots continue unabated and why spineless liberal administrators on all of the “best” campuses are caving to the demonstrators’ demands faster than a greased deck of cards.
LIFE IN JOE BIDEN’S AMERICA: Dining out is increasingly a domain of the wealthy. Restaurants are feeling it.
What’s for dinner? For an increasing number of Americans, especially households making less than $150,000 a year, the answer doesn’t involve going to a restaurant. And when people do go out to eat, they are spending less money.
Battered by higher-than-normal food prices, some consumers are pulling back on their spending — and restaurants are feeling the effects.
Dine Brands Global Inc. DIN, +0.32%, the owner of the pancake chain IHOP and restaurant chain Applebee’s, said in its earnings call Wednesday that fewer consumers earning $50,000 a year and below visited its restaurants in the past quarter. Even when they do, they are “more aggressively” managing the amount they spend, Dine Brands CEO John Peyton told investors.
Although some higher-income guests have traded down to eat at the company’s cheaper restaurants, behavioral changes are most pronounced among lower-income consumers, he said. “[T]he most impactful change in consumer behavior is clearly the $50,000 and below segment,” Peyton said on the call. Dine Brands Global did not immediately respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment.
While lower-income Americans are dining out less — even at fast-food restaurants — higher-income Americans are dining out more.
I’m so old, I remember when Biden promised to build prosperity from “the bottom up and the middle out.”
WHY BIDEN IS LOSING: Former Americans for Prosperity (AFP) chief Tim Phillips gets around and talks to a lot of folks across the country. He sees in a new column on Cyberreport “a jarring and growing disconnect” between decision-makers in Washington, D.C. and the rest of the country.
LINCOLN BROWN: Justice Alito Has a Stark Warning for College Grads. “Right now in the world outside this beautiful campus, troubled waters are slamming against some of our most fundamental principles. Support for freedom of speech is declining dangerously. Very few colleges live up to that ideal. This place is one of them … but things are not that way out there in the broader world.”
READER FAVORITE: 10-Minute Strength Training Exercises for Seniors: Exercises and Routines to Build Muscle, Balance, and Stamina. #CommissionEarned
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Air Force is “growing concerned” about the pace of Vulcan rocket launches.
It has been nearly four years since the US Air Force made its selections for companies to launch military payloads during the mid-2020s. The military chose United Launch Alliance, and its Vulcan rocket, to launch 60 percent of these missions; and it chose SpaceX, with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, to launch 40 percent.
Although the large Vulcan rocket was still in development at the time, it was expected to take flight within the next year or so. Upon making the award, an Air Force official said the military believed Vulcan would soon be ready to take flight. United Launch Alliance was developing the Vulcan rocket in order to no longer be reliant on RD-180 engines that are built in Russia and used by its Atlas V rocket.
“I am very confident with the selection that we have made today,” William Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said at the time. “We have a very low-risk path to get off the RD-180 engines.”
As part of the announcement, Roper disclosed the first two missions that would fly on Vulcan. The USSF-51 mission was scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2022, and the USSF-106 mission was scheduled for launch in the third quarter of 2022.
It turned out to not be such a low-risk path. The Vulcan rocket’s development, of course, has since been delayed. It did not make its debut in 2020 or 2021 and only finally took flight in January of this year. The mission was completely successful— an impressive feat for a new rocket with new engines — but United Launch Alliance still must complete a second flight before the US military certifies Vulcan for its payloads.
This is on the Air Force for planning 60% of their missions on a non-reusable rocket that had never flown when the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy were flight-proven.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Police clash with aggressive pro-Palestinian protesters outside Pomona College graduation.
