I could see this going to multiple bids

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No showings until tomorrow, but 190 Lake Avenue has been brought to the market at $5.995 million. Built in 1900 for use as, I think, the Rosemary Hall’s Head Mistress (if that’s the proper term, and if this was her house — there were two, side-by-side homes built here as part of that school) and recently renovated. It sits on a full-acre in the R-12 zone and although it’s right on the road, the backyard is very special, and private. I was impressed while touring it back many years ago, pre-renovation, and it can only be better now.

Not for everyone, but I’d think this will have great appeal to more than one (rich) buyer looking for something close to town, but not cheek-by-jowl with the great unwashed next door.

"Progress"

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“Just three more tricks tonight, my dear, and then you may have tomorrow off.”

Belgium decriminalizes prostitution and grants the working girls (and anything else in the trade) a lot of goodies, like so:

In one sense, why not? If only the United States required welfare recipients to show up for work 8 out of 10 days; instead, we give the permanently retired (at 16) a monthly stipend, free medical care, permanent maternity leave, and old age payments when they’ve worn themselves out overseeing their children’s early morning street activities. If Belgium wants to see its ladies of the night perform at the dictates of their pimps, well, who are we to intervene? That’d be like telling Israel how to conduct its own self-defense, for instance, or a third world country to eschew cheap energy and fertilizers and embrace starvation.

But this still strikes me as somehow dehumanizing and grotesque. It’s back to reeducation camp for me, I suppose.

Good money after bad

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The owners of 230 Taconic Road paid $8.750 million for it in 2006 and tried to resell it in 2019 for $9.5. When that didn’t work, they pulled it from the market, renovated it, and put it back up for sale in January 2023 for $11.475. Today it was marked down to $8.850.

And in a totally-unrelated story, this:

‘Money Pit’ movie mansion finally sells for enormous discount

The Long Island mansion from the 1986 flick “The Money Pit” has become a real-life money pit.

This Nassau County home — which played the role of a falling-apart Gilded Age property that Walter (Tom Hanks) and Anna (Shelley Long) buy for a suspicious bargain — has sold for $3.5 million after five years on the market. That’s 76 percent less than its original 2014 asking price of $12.5 million.

Sellers Rich and Christina Makowsky invested $5.9 million in renovations after buying the North Shore spread for $2.12 million in 2002, according to Fox Business.

Realtor.com shows a lengthy pricing history for the listing, in the village of Lattingtown near Locust Valley. From the $12.5 million price tag five years ago, the eight-bedroom property underwent about seven price chops before landing on its most recent $4.5 million asking price.

The new owner of the 5.5-acre spread, who couldn’t be fully identified, is a Long Island resident, reports Newsday, adding the purchase had nothing to do with the home’s Hollywood history. The home was only used for exterior shots in the film. As is typical in television series and movies, interior shots took place on a sound stage.

But in reality, as in the movie, the place was in need of some work.

After their purchase in 2002, the Makowskys added new appliances, a pool house and 9-foot gates at the entrance. They also installed a cedar roof and upgraded the plumbing. The facelift took more than a year. Other features of the spruced-up house: a roomy chef’s kitchen with a mahogany center island and a media room with a refrigerated wine wall.

Just sayin’.

Victor Davis Hanson

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The Fall of the House of Presidential Persecutions

Another excellent essay from Hanson; After demolishing each and every one of the political witch trials that have been used by the left since Americans had the temerity to elect Trump president in 2016, VDH sums up:

What will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?

One, we have entered new territory. There will soon be hundreds of local and state prosecutors who feel they have now been given license in election years to go after national presidential candidates for political advantage, both local and national.

Two, conservatives are in a dilemma: whether to restore deterrence by boomeranging the left’s extra-legal effort to ruin a candidate and president or to refrain from what would be a descent into third-world, tit-for-tat criminalization of politics.

Three, the persecution of Trump, coupled with the derelict candidacy of Joe Biden, threatens to erode the traditional base of the Democratic Party and redefine politics in terms of class rather than race. Minorities are beginning to empathize with the gagged, railroaded, and victimized Trump while distancing themselves from the victimizers, who are using their “privilege” to warp the law on behalf of a bullying president.

Four, the U.S. has lost a great deal of credibility abroad due to the erosion of what was once seen as the greatest system of jurisprudence in the world. No longer.

Enemies like China and Russia now boast that America’s new political prosecutions are similar to their own systems, or even more egregious, and will welcome us into their own customs of bastardized justice.

Latin-American, African, and Asian dictators are delighted that the U.S. has lost the moral authority to lecture them on the need for a disinterested and independent judiciary and the rule of law.

Our democratic allies in Europe and Asia are increasingly disturbed that the instability and unlawfulness apparent in the current lawfare put into question the reliability of the United States and its adherence to a rules-based order—whether at home or aboard.

Any president who would sic the justice system on his opponent might be equally vindictive and lawless to his allies abroad.

I've heard exactly this argument from a middle school science teacher friend of mine — when asked, though, he wouldn't volunteer to go first

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Professor Bill McGuire is a well-known vulcanologist and climate scientist who doesn't care much for humanity. …. Ooopsie. McGuire deleted the tweet a few hours later but had no regrets. The trouble is, we just don't understand how brilliant he is.

As I said, I have a friend who remains a friend so long as we don’t touch on politics, but he’s given to grand pronouncements of what he perceives as his field of expertise, global warming. One day recently, while he was spouting some truly misinformed nonsense about how solar energy would save the world, he pronounced that the maximum population the world could support was one billion (a figure often cited by expert depopulators like Bill Gates). “How will that be achieved?” asked I; “what will you do with the surplus 6 billion?”. “War and disease will do it”, he explained.

So this jolly, jovial fatman, beloved teacher and ardent Democrat, hates humanity just as thoroughly as the rest of his peers; that’s not surprising, but it is a warning of what they have in mind for us.

Just like Covid spending

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into the black hole

California spent $24 billion of its taxpayers’ money on homeless people, has no idea where it went, or whether it did any good.

Exactly how much is California spending to combat homelessness — and is it working?

It turns out, no one knows. That’s the result of a much-anticipated statewide audit released Tuesday, which calls into question the state’s ability to track and analyze its spending on homelessness services.

The state doesn’t have current information on the ongoing costs and results of its homelessness programs because the agency tasked with gathering that data — the California Interagency Council on Homelessness — has analyzed no spending past 2021, according to the report by State Auditor Grant Parks. Three of the five state programs the audit analyzed — including the state’s main homelessness funding source — didn’t even produce enough data for Parks to determine whether they were effective or not. 

The audit also analyzed homelessness services in San Jose and San Diego, finding both cities failed to thoroughly account for their spending or measure the success of many of their programs.

“The lack of transparency in our current approach to homelessness is pretty frightening,” said Assemblymember Josh Hoover, a Republican from Folsom who co-authored the request for the audit. 

That means state policymakers have little data to go on when they make funding decisions related to what has become one of California’s most dire challenges. 

“The State Auditor’s findings highlight the significant progress made in recent years to address homelessness at the state level, including the completion of a statewide assessment of homelessness programs,” the Interagency Council on Homelessness wrote in an emailed statement. “But it also underscores a need to continue to hold local governments accountable, who are primarily responsible for implementing these programs and collecting data on outcomes that the state can use to evaluate program effectiveness.”

Tens of billions of dollars, nine agencies and more than 30 programs

As the homelessness crisis has intensified, California under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leadership allocated an unprecedented $24 billion to address homelessness and housing during the last five fiscal years, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Nine state agencies administered more than 30 programs aimed at preventing or reducing homelessness. Some of those programs did such a poor job tracking their outcomes that it’s impossible to tell if they’ve been successful, according to the audit, which marks the first such large-scale accounting of the state’s homelessness spending.

RELATED:

Sacramento gave a homeless camp a lease as an experiment. Here’s what happened

(Spoiler alert: exactly what you’d expect to happen)

A “Self-governing” community for addicts and alkies. Yes, there are dumpsters, no, they aren’t used