Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
Fudrucker gooses Tesei to encourage him to do the right thing
Peter ran the town better than any local Democrat would have, probably, but that’s a low hurdle. Long past time for him to find a real job, if anyone will have him.
start the popcorn popper
Reader Barometer Soup has alerted me to the latest scandal, breaking today a mere 35-years after it happened: Virginia’s Democrat Governor posed in blackface or a KKK outfit (unclear who’s who) back in medical school in 1984. Will he survive? I’m guessing that he will, because the left learned a lesson after forcing breast-fondling Al Frankin out of the Senate and discovering that it missed his seniority, but at least this may slow down the drive to haul Justice Kavanaugh before one of their committees to defend himself against charges of perjury.
(My guess is that he’ll defend himself by pointing out that the KKK hates Jews as well as colored people, and he was just focused on the Kike part — that will bring him back into the bosom of the new Democratic party)
In defense of the quote he uses on his page, it’s from a classic Wille Nelson song, “I gotta get drunk”. No harm in a country boy referencing that. Hell, even Kavanaugh would agree.
UPDATE: My fault for not following this election more closely, but it turns out that our blackfaced Governor Northam campaigned against his Republican opponent by calling him a racist for opposing sanctuary cities. My, my.
I’ve written about 30 Club Road, Riverside, before, but it’s dropped again and is now priced at $5.099 million, still farther away from its original 5/18 price of $6.549.
This house sold for $4.350 million in 2007 and was completely gutted, renovated and expanded (by about 1,500 ft), then resold in 2012 for $6.453 million. It’s a fabulous house, and Club Road remains where it’s always been, meaning a short stroll to RYC and the train, and an easy walk to two of our town’s best schools. So what gives?
We’ll have to see after the spring market whether this home’s huge drop in price is just a reflection of disaffection for older homes or a wilting of the Riverside rose in general.
In the meantime, it’s a very attractive house, to my eye, especially if it can be had in the $4s.
642 Lake Avenue, once listed for $4.995 in November, 2015, has continued its fall, and dropped to $3.2 million today. I’ve written about this house before, and my opinion remains unchanged: somewhere between the town’s appraisal of the land, $1.5 million, and the extra “value” added by the $1.250 house. I’m inclined to see it as pure land value, period.
17 Heronvue, way out west on our New York border, failed to sell for $4.995 million in 2015-2016, so is back today at $3.495. Nothing at all wrong with the house itself; it’s very nice, in fact, but that location is a killer.
Which is not to say that houses out here can’t fetch prices in the $3s and $4s — I even sold one in this range, once, but they’re tough sells, simply because the pool of buyers is shallow.
The listing agent in 2015, who is still the agent today, had a creative idea back then: stage a 3-week art exhibition to show off and illustrate the possibilities of this house, which was custom built by an artist in 1952 precisely to accommodate and display his work. The show failed to produce a buyer, but I still give credit to the agent for trying something different.
I give her less credit for her listing verbiage, written in 2015 and carried over to today’s:
In a world with challenging and ever-changing demands, here, at last, is a house that meets all the requirements!
I had no idea what that meant four years ago, and still don’t.
Lindsay Vonn retires, “Body broken beyond repair”.
What an incredible skier. She’s just 33, and while that’s old for a competitive skier, she’s just the age of my older daughter Katie — a kid, to my mind. I do hope she’s wrong about being irreparably broken, and wish her a strong, fun life apre ski.
85 Round Hill Road, listed at $7.495 million, pulled in 2009, and returned to the market in 2012 at $6.695, has sold for $4.5 million.
Tow appraises it at $6.366.
i blame bush
Decries “attack” on Jussie Smollett. Okay, I’d never heard of the guy either, but he’s a gay black comedian who claims to have been viciously attacked by two white men who broke his ribs, broke his nose, hung a noose around his neck and doused him with bleach, all while screaming homophobic slurs and shouting, “this is MAGA country!”.
There was much to raise doubts about this story in the first place, including the fact that Smollett’s attackers were supposedly lying in wait for him, despite his arriving in Chicago five hours later than scheduled due to a flight cancellation — that takes patience — but new details keep arising that makes it look more and more like a fake hate crime, including: he waited 40 minutes before calling the police and when they did arrive, he was still wearing the noose, he refused to let the police see his cellphone, demanded that they turn off their body cams, refused transportation to the hospital and drove himself, there’s no evidence of broken ribs and the police, despite scouring hours of surveillance tapes, can find no evidence of any attack. Certain Chicago policemen are calling “bullshit”, and you can read that here.
Was Jussie up to something else, and decided to blame whatever befell him on white racists? My guess is yes, but events will tell. I suspect it will turn out that Trump had no reason to condemn a non-event, but again, politically, he had nothing to lose.
Publius sends along this link to a recent article from Watt’s Up with that?
Mathematical modeling illusions
The global climate scare – and policies resulting from it – are based on models that do not work
Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris
For the past three decades, human-caused global warming alarmists have tried to frighten the public with stories of doom and gloom. They tell us the end of the world as we know it is nigh because of carbon dioxide emitted into the air by burning fossil fuels.
They are exercising precisely what journalist H. L. Mencken described early in the last century: “The whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The dangerous human-caused climate change scare may well be the best hobgoblin ever conceived. It has half the world clamoring to be led to safety from a threat for which there is not a shred of meaningful physical evidence that climate fluctuations and weather events we are experiencing today are different from, or worse than, what our near and distant ancestors had to deal with – or are human-caused.
Many of the statements issued to support these fear-mongering claims are presented in the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, a 1,656-page report released in late November. But none of their claims have any basis in real world observations. All that supports them are mathematical equations presented as accurate, reliable models of Earth’s climate.
It is important to properly understand these models, since they are the only basis for the climate scare.
….[T] oday’s climate models account for only a handful of the hundreds of variables that are known to affect Earth’s climate, and many of the values inserted for the variables they do use are little more than guesses. Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Laboratory lists the six most important variables in any climate model:
1) Sun-Earth orbital dynamics and their relative positions and motions with respect to other planets in the solar system;
2) Charged particles output from the Sun (solar wind) and modulation of the incoming cosmic rays from the galaxy at large;
3) How clouds influence climate, both blocking some incoming rays/heat and trapping some of the warmth;
4) Distribution of sunlight intercepted in the atmosphere and near the Earth’s surface;
5) The way in which the oceans and land masses store, affect and distribute incoming solar energy;
6) How the biosphere reacts to all these various climate drivers.
Soon concludes that, even if the equations to describe these interactive systems were known and properly included in computer models (they are not), it would still not be possible to compute future climate states in any meaningful way. …..
Although governments have funded more than one hundred efforts to model the climate for the better part of three decades, with the exception of one Russian model which was fully “tuned” to and accidentally matched observational data, not one accurately “predicted” (hindcasted) the known past. Their average prediction is now a full 1 degree F above what satellites and weather balloons actually measured.
In his February 2, 2016 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space & Technology, University of Alabama-Huntsville climatologist Dr. John Christy compared the results of atmospheric temperatures as depicted by the average of 102 climate models with observations from satellites and balloon measurements. He concluded: “These models failed at the simple test of telling us ‘what’ has already happened, and thus would not be in a position to give us a confident answer to ‘what’ may happen in the future and ‘why.’ As such, they would be of highly questionable value in determining policy that should depend on a very confident understanding of how the climate system works.”
Similarly, when Christopher Monckton tested the IPCC approach in a paper published by the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, he convincingly demonstrated that official predictions of global warming had been overstated threefold. (Monckton holds several awards for his climate work.)
…. As Science and Environmental Policy Project president Ken Haapala notes, “the global climate models relied upon by the IPCC [the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and the USGCRP [United States Global Change Research Program] have not been verified and validated.”
An important reason to discount climate models is their lack of testing against historical data. If one enters the correct data for a 1920 Model A, automotive modeling software used to develop a 2020 Ferrari should predict the performance of a 1920 Model A with reasonable accuracy. And it will.
But no climate models relied on by the IPCC (or any other model, for that matter) has applied the initial conditions of 1900 and forecast the Dust Bowl of the 1930s – never mind an accurate prediction of the climate in 2000 or 2015. Given the complete lack of testable results, we must conclude that these models have more in common with the “Magic 8 Ball” game than with any scientifically based process.
While one of the most active areas for mathematical modeling is the stock market, no one has ever predicted it accurately. For many years, the Wall Street Journal chose five eminent economic analysts to select a stock they were sure would rise in the following month. The Journal then had a chimpanzee throw five darts at a wall covered with that day’s stock market results. A month later, they determined who preformed better at choosing winners: the analysts or the chimpanzee. The chimp usually won.
For these and other reasons, until recently, most people were never foolish enough to make decisions based on predictions derived from equations that supposedly describe how nature or the economy works.
Yet today’s computer modelers claim they can model the climate – which involves far more variables than the economy or stock market – and do so decades or even a century into the future. They then tell governments to make trillion-dollar policy decisions that will impact every aspect of our lives, based on the outputs of their models. Incredibly, the United Nations and governments around the world are complying with this demand. We are crazy to continue letting them get away with it.
Dr. Jay Lehr is the Science Director of The Heartland Institute which is based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition
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