Did the Democrats and their press corp save the nation from attack?

Well, we’re saving the newer stuff for when he’s gone

It’s early days, but Iran appears to have contented itself with a “retaliatory attack” using dud missiles against desert dirt. Why such a wimpy response to our killing of its chief terrorist? Perhaps because Iran’s leaders bought into our own Democrats’ screeching that Mad Man Trump was poised to obliterate Iran and pound the mullahs to dust. They may claim to be ready for the return of the 12th Prophet and the installation of paradise on earth, but saying and believing are two different things.

In this market, "flat lining" is a good thing

54 Londonderry Road, priced at $1.495 million. is reported as pending. Assuming the normal negotiation process, it looks like it will sell for very close to the $1.4 paid for it in 2001. The lower end of our market is holding up much better than our higher-priced mansions.

Back again

10 Andrews Road, off lower North Street, is still looking for a buyer and after a brief hiatus, is back, still asking $4.325. This property sold new in 2008 for $4.850 (from an ask of $6.450) and again in 2011, off market, for $3.945. These owners renovated it and tried for $5.975 in February 2018, and are now down to this latest price. It’s also available for rent, and that’s what I’d expect to happen unless they budge from the $4s.

AOC finally has a friend in Washington

(In fact, Truman wanted no friends in Washington, and sent this one back)

She’s adopted a puppy. No name yet; I suggest “Truman”.

Global Warming as religion

St. Greta prayer candles now available for $18 and up; your choice, Greta dressed up as Jesus or the Blessed Virgin.

I’m going with the idea that these are intended as gag gifts for climate deniers, but who knows? After all, we were treated to this bit of lunacy last fall by New York’s Union Seminary:

And as Ed Dricoll points out,

While Nietzsche assured the Jurassic “woke” class of the late 19th century that “God is dead,” most of the branches of the “Progressivism” that followed are forms of a substitute religion to fill the void, including both radical environmentalism, and even socialist health care. As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”

No words necessary

Strangers on a Train?

So I have this plan ….

Fotis Dulas has finally been arrested and charged with the murder of his wife Jennifer. No huge surprise there, but what’s interesting is that Dulas’s lawyer and friend, one Kent Mawhinney, was arrested with him for conspiracy to commit murder.

Interesting because just days before Jennifer disappeared, Dulas attempted to persuade Mawhinney’s estranged wife to spend the night with her husband in Dulas’s house. She refused, and later told the police, “I think he was working with my husband to get rid of me”.

Could Dulas and Mawhinney really have thought they could get away with making both their wives disappear at the same time? Well, Dulas apparently believed that his preposterous story of his wife leaving and leaving her kids behind would fool the authorities, so why not two wives running away together? Dumb and dumber is not unheard of, as Hitchcock would attest.

Fire sale on Boulder Brook

16 Boulder Brook Road, purchased new for $5.832 million in 2007, (what looks like) a deed in lieu of foreclosure in September 2019, now reduced $350,000 and asking $3.650. The mortgage was $4.665, and the bank’s bound to be disappointed no matter what it sells for, so I’d go lower. You can’t hurt a bank’s feelings.

Just yesterday the "real" news organizations were denouncing the Babylon Bee for putting "fake news" on the Internet

““The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. They literally know nothing.” Ben Rhodes

Stand back, little boy, and leave this to us professionals.

ABC peddles hysterically wrong illustration of Australia’s wildfires

Stephen Green:

Let's get this out of the way first: There's nothing funny about Australia's wildfire season. People are dead or homeless, millions upon millions of animals have been killed, and everything is just awful.

But we must also say this: ABC News is so stupid it's funny.

This a story so dumb and wrong that it's unthinkable that the American network's news division hasn't deleted or corrected it -- and yet as I write these words, it still stands for all to see and mock.

(This is a screencap in case someone at ABC News finally wakes up and does their damn job.)

ZOMG! A THIRD OF AUSTRALIA is on FIRE!

ABC's Matt Zarrell, apparently stupid, shameless, or both, wrote a whole story (with help from three more reporters -- Samara Lynn, Christine Theodorou, and Maggie Rulli -- not one of whom apparently knows any better) using this fake map.

I want you to read from that report these two paragraphs republished here exactly as they appear at the ABC News website:

The size of the fires across the country are twice as large as the state of Maryland and bigger than several other states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

A superimposed map of Australia over the United States shows the scale of the regions affected by the massive wildfires that have spread Down Under.

[Green]: I live in Colorado, and Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New Jersey are what we westerners call "tiny little states." Tiny little states that in no way, not even when doubled in size, cover anything close to the area indicated by the superimposed map. So you literally cannot put those two paragraphs -- one claiming something like a third of a big continent is on fire, the other stating (correctly) that the fire is about twice the size of Vermont -- in the same story, one after the other, without looking like a total idiot.

But readers will remember the scary (but wrong) map much better than they'll remember the not-so-scary (but correct) words.

Here's a better and much more accurate representation of the fires, courtesy of Alexei T on Twitter:

To be clear: Those are bad fires. They're huge and they're killing people. But they're not a third of Australia, either. A third of Australia isn't even "affected" by the fires, whatever that means, and which the ABC News report never explained.

So where'd the map come from?

According to Alexei, ABC News editor Matt Zarrell "Appears [to have] used Himawari-8 🛰️ thermal anomalies ('hotspots') from Jan 2 ... so anything hot (cars in full sun, industry)+ fire used in land mgmt." In other words, that's not a map of stuff on fire, but a map of virtually anything in Australia that gets hot enough in direct sunlight to get picked up by a very sensitive Japanese weather satellite. Layers of editors and fact-checkers or whatevers.

But there are still believers

30 Will Merry Lane has sold for $3 million. Owners started at $4.490 million back in September 2018, but even $3 is a vote of confidence in Greenwich, which should send a warm tingle down sellers’ legs.

For a counterview, Publius has sent along an article from the Middletown Press, detailing Connecticut’s slow, sad descent, entitled “The Lost Decade”. Excerpt:

Connecticut’s jobs count, the most important measure of how we’re doing, grew by 4 percent in the decade, a total of 66,000 positions if we count annual averages including preliminary 2019 totals through November. By contrast, Massachusetts and the United States both added 15 percent. Those are just numbers. Consider what it really means. If Connecticut had gained jobs at the same rate as the nation, we would have added another 179,000 — enough to support as many households as there are in New Haven, Hartford, Fairfield and Greenwich combined. It’s as if we lopped off a hefty chunk of the state, heavily populated by young college graduates.

And the housing market reflects that haircut. When the decade started, a single-family house at the median among all sales — where half sold for more and half less — stood at $242,000, in shooting range of the Massachusetts median of $285,000, according to The Warren Group, which tracks house sales. As of 2019, Connecticut was up just 8 percent to $261,000.

In Massachusetts, that median house in 2019 fetched an even $400,000 — a 40 percent jump. And although there are no official figures for national median prices, one fastidious website calculates the U.S. gain at 44 percent for the decade.

What does that mean for the typical Connecticut homeowner? If you owned a house that was worth $350,000 in Connecticut a decade ago, you missed out on $112,000 of price gains that people in Massachusetts and most other states realized in just those ten years. Some parts of Connecticut, notably Fairfield County, fared even worse.