Tough sale

7 Cherry Valley Road, asking $1.295, reports a contingent contract after 8 years. Started at $1.980 back in June, 2010, and its price dropped fairly quickly, but between the house itself, which requires either a complete re-do or a bulldozer, and the proximity to the Merritt Parkway, this four-acre lot lacked appeal.

To most buyers: now it turns out that someone likes it. In fairness, I thought the house was salvageable and the Merritt noise well buffered, so if someone wanted a starter home at a reasonable price (which I'm guessing will be below $1.1), the buy makes sense.

I wouldn't want to try a $4 million spec house here, however.

Stevie Wonder: "Global warming causes stupidity"

protesting against transgenders?

Headline lifted from this author, who reports on blind boy Stevie blaming Aretha Franklin's pancreatic cancer on global warming.

It's official: the country has gone totally insane

This is a leftist's brain on drugs

NASCAR racer loses sponsor because his father used "the N word" in an interview in 1982

“NASCAR Xfinity driver Conor Daly has lost one of his sponsors because of a racial slur made by his racing driver father in the 1980s before he was even born.

Lilly Diabetes said in a statement on Friday that it was pulling sponsorship of Conor’s No.6 car in the NASCAR Xfinity race at Road America, citing the racially insensitive remark made by his father Derek Daly that surfaced this week.

The company said in a statement that its sponsorship was intended to raise awareness for treatment options and resources for people living with diabetes.

’Unfortunately, the comments that surfaced this week by Derek Daly distract from this focus, so we have made the decision that Lilly Diabetes will no longer run the No. 6 at Road America this weekend,’ Lilly said.”

“In a statement, Derek said he admitted to using the slur during the interview. Derek, who had just moved to the US at the time, said the term had a different meaning and connotation in his native Ireland.

He said he was ‘mortified’ when he learned how the term was used in America and has never used it since then.

His 26-year-old son wasn’t born when he made the comment.”

Newsweek might have been right: the governing majority might well be socialists come November. Get out and vote.

"It's the cherokee way! And il Duce's"

Elizabeth Warren espouses what I fear is the sentiment of most of our under-60 citizens have been trained to believe since entering school:

Pocahontas' latest proposal for reforming our economic system

And her inspiration? Where's ANTIFA here?

So what's left to do, if policing is banned and morals are rejected?

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, having ordered the police to step down, now under fire for suggesting that black citizens assert moral authority to stop the mayhem.

“After one particularly violent weekend earlier this month when more than 70 people were shot, Emanuel deflected questions about police staffing and strategy. Instead, he ignited a firestorm when he said there needs to be a politically incorrect conversation about character and values.

“This may not be politically correct,” he said, “but I know the power of what faith and family can do. … Our kids need that structure. … I am asking … that we also don’t shy away from a full discussion about the importance of family and faith helping to develop and nurture character, self-respect, a value system and a moral compass that allows kids to know good from bad and right from wrong.”

He added: “If we’re going to solve this … we’ve got to have a real discussion. … Parts of the conversation cannot be off-limits because it’s not politically comfortable. … We are going to discuss issues that have been taboo in years past because they are part of the solution. … We also have a responsibility to help nurture character. It plays a role. Our kids need that moral structure in their lives. And we cannot be scared to have this conversation.”

Rev. Gregory Livingston of Newhope Baptist Church in Chicago slams Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s leadership.Video
Would a change in leadership curb crime in Chicago?

Critics quickly called him out for what they dubbed tone-deaf comments, in which he seemed to be blaming the victims.”

Those "victims" are gang members (and unfortunates in the way of those shooters' poor aim — rather than impose totally worthless gun control laws, the city should offer free weapons training). If black Chicagoans want to save their young men, they might want to reconsider their "Black Lives Matter" campaign — it wasn't cops that shot 70 of them in a single weekend — and pass out copies of Denzel Washington's movie, "The Equalizer", where, paraphrasing, he tells a young hood, "I don't care whether your mother was a crack whore, your papa was a pimp, what you have is choice". A renewal of moral teaching might help.

An unfair competition

nothing to see here, move along, move along

Hartford hotels are the cheapest in New England "vacation centers". I went to school in Hartford back in the late 70s. Other than Mark Twain's house, there was absolutely nothing of interest in the city then, and I'm sure (though I've never returned) there's less so now. If prices are set by supply and demand, there's probably one lost, befuddled family  of vacationers for every thousand hotel rooms in that blighted city, and they probably check out by midnight on the first day.

Nothing going on in the market but rentals

Going down?

Lots of those: new, closed, pending, but nothing exceptional or worth noting. There's a single family price reduction, 16 Boulder Brook Road, down today to $4.7 million, which might merit attention — it sold new for $5,832,000 in 2007 — but that was a crazy price back then, so it's hardly a surprise to see it drop so far today.

That 2007 sale, right at the crest of the market, lured a number of developers to rush onto Boulder Brook to build spec houses priced in the high $6's, even low $7's, to their sorrow. I don't know who, if anyone, was advising these builders, but any number of realtors could have warned them against their great expectations, had they asked.

Sale on Richmond Hill

51 Richmond Hill Road, $3,091,000. Previous records show that it sold to these owners for just $750,000. That may be accurate. It was a non-MLS sale. seller's agent sold to his own customer. Zillow shows it as having been built in 2017, so perhaps the $750,000 purchase price reflected a tear-down price? 

Beats me. 

July sales statistics, per MLS

““July 2018 is up 40% in sales from last year! There were seventy-six sales July 2018, from fifty-four last year. The median sale price had a 12% increase from $1,633,250 in July 2017 to $1,837,500 this year. The number of new listings that came on the market in July 2018 increased by 40% to seventy-seven from fifty-five last year. Greenwich remains the strongest sector from the beginning of the year, with thirty-nine sales. Riverside was runner-up, closing in on fifteen sales. Condo/Co-Op sales had eighteen closings, with a median sale price of $590,000. Current pending sales for Single Family homes are fifty-one and nine for Condo/Co-Op. July was a very active month and did not show signs of slowing down for the summer. With only a few weeks left of August, it is hopeful that we can finish this month off as strong as we did in July”, stated BK Bates, 2018 President of the Greenwich Association of REALTORS®.”

Get out those coat hangers, ladies, and serve your country.

Chelsea Clinton: "Roe v. Wade added $3.5 trillion to our economy"

In a speech given at "Rise Up for Roe," an event aimed at expressing feminist displeasure with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court, the younger Clinton opined:

Whether you fundamentally care about reproductive rights and access right, because these are not the same thing, if you care about social justice or economic justice, agency – you have to care about this.

It is not a disconnected fact – to address this t-shirt of 1973 – that American women entering the labor force from 1973 to 2009 added three and a half trillion dollars to our economy. Right?

The net, new entrance of women – that is not disconnected from the fact that Roe became the law of the land in January of 1973.

So, I think, whatever it is that people say they care about, I think that you can connect to this issue.

Of course, I would hope that they would care about our equal rights and dignity to make our own choices – but, if that is not sufficiently persuasive, hopefully, come some of these other arguments that you’ve expressed so beautifully, will be.

Setting aside the fact that she didn't cite a source for that figure, Chelsea Clinton believes that if people can't be convinced that it's okay to murder babies by appealing to, you know, "dignity" and "choice," an appeal to economics should do the trick.

Fine. Stepping into the crassness of reducing life to economics, allow me to appeal to economics then, too.

I wonder how much more stable our tottering Social Security system would be if the millions of babies murdered since 1973 (around 50 million) had been allowed to reach adulthood and enter the workforce. Not to mention the amount of value 50 million+ workers would've added to the economy. The taxes paid by that large of a group would add more than a few pennies to the Social Security coffers.