A conversation on Twitter this week resurfaced a Wall Street Journal report from April about big investors getting into real estate, overbidding normal people to do so. “If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund,” the title says. “Yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices.”

The resulting social media traffic made the article No. 1 on the WSJ website on June 10.

“You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house,” real estate consultant John Burns told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive.” His firm estimates “that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in.”

This is a direct consequence of the Fed printing so much money and long encouraging debt by keeping interest rates so low for so long that investors are looking for better assets. Our government has long privileged debt over savings in large part because that makes it easier for the government to deficit spend, making debt less costly to Congress. So normal people essentially get punished for saving because Congress won’t stop spending.

Since the government quietly taxes away your savings through inflation, people and institutions who want to put money away for future use, or just grow their assets, are forced into riskier and more distortive behavior. Thus mega-dollar money asset managers and private equity firms are snapping up millions of homes at inflated prices because government profligacy has made it harder for them to secure a yield. //

CulturalHusbandry
@APhilosophae

Jun 8, 2021
Replying to @APhilosophae
So where does this position the average American in 30 years when its a given that every new neighborhood is to be bought up whole so they can be utilized as SFR's? It positions them as peasants. Being poor can be temporary condition bettered by upward mobility.

CulturalHusbandry
@APhilosophae
In the US and other nations home ownership is often the 1st and most vital step. This can provide for generational wealth and success. But as permanent, guaranteed renters youre pissing away a lifetime of equity and the chance for mobility. You just become a peasant. //

Blackrock is well known for its use of its massive financial power to elevate leftist social causes, including, as the tweeter noted, the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” strategy. WEF also predicted in an infamous 2016 video, based on “input” from their Davos crowd, that by 2030 “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

But when people “own nothing,” they are not happy. Refusing to take ownership is a refusal to take responsibility. In the beginning, that may seem carefree and glamorous, but in the long run, a refusal to take responsibility — whether that be refusing to commit to marriage, children, faith, a community, or to all of the above — actually makes people deeply unhappy.

In responsibility is where people find happiness. Our government should stop making financial decisions that steal from all of us the ability to take responsibility for our own families, homes, and happiness. And, regardless of what our corrupt and feckless governments do, each of us must continue to pursue ownership of our own lives through every avenue possible.

“My [county] judges are asking for one thing in particular,” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) told Newsmax. “I sit in front of them and I go, ‘If I can do one thing for you, what would that be?’ And this is the ask I’m getting. They go, ‘Tony, we need more body bags.’ And I’m going, ‘Body bags? Why do you need body bags?’ They go, ‘Migrants are dying at record numbers, and we don’t have body bags to handle the situation.’ //

Further, even if migrants are lucky enough to make it across the U.S. border, the chances are high that they’ve been raped and/or abused along the way. Men, women, and children are being used as drug mules, and in some cases, murdered. In short, while exposure, including dehydration and starvation, is taking lots of lives, that’s hardly the only threat faced. And on the topic of exposure, deaths as a result of that will skyrocket as the summer heat sets in.

All of this was preventable. The “remain in Mexico” policy and other safe-third-country agreements the Trump administration negotiated had stemmed the flow. We’ve seen an explosion since Joe Biden took office, and it’s solely his fault. That’s become so obvious that even the President of Guatemala is placing blame where it belongs.

Do you know what you call causing a tragedy that was otherwise completely preventable by elected officials? You call it immoral. Joe Biden may be absolved of the great sin of mean tweets, but the immorality of his presidency far surpasses anything the left ever accused Donald Trump of.

I’ve viewed every part of this journey through many lenses, not the least of which is one we call ‘WOMAN.’

I say all this because suddenly and tragically there is a movement afoot to erase womanhood. The “woke left,” progressives, some well-meaning conservatives, and even my own President have decided that in order to appease the tiniest of slivers of humanity who believe they can change their genders by surgically altering their bodies they must completely erase womanhood for all of us. It has come to the point where our own governmental and academic institutions have replaced the word “mother” with “birthing person,” as if that is some type of equality.

You’ll notice we are not replacing “father” with “sperm producer” or some other idiot term. There is something so grossly misogynistic about the movement to erase womanhood. It’s as if none of the notions of women have changed in the last 1000 years. One philosophy is to the far right and one is to the far left, but both paint womanhood as inherently disgusting, flawed, misshapen, and grotesque. The natural form and function of our bodies are repulsive to each extreme. One extreme sought to eliminate our gender through silence – keeping us tucked away at home, away from the reaches of “civilized” society. The other extreme seeks to eliminate our gender through erasure – denying us the privilege of the markers that make us different than men and seeking to nullify the most beautiful aspects of our bodies. It is vile.

I am not a “birthing person.” I am a mother. I am not a “person who menstruates.” I am a woman. My body and my gender deserve your recognition. God knows I have fought a bloody and emotional battle to obtain that recognition. I have earned the respect of womanhood. How dare anyone suggest that because some people are gender bigots that I do not deserve the respect I have earned in this body?

I have given birth to the very future of humanity. That is the privilege of motherhood and the function of womanhood. And if one happens to be a woman who can’t give birth, or who chooses not to give birth, rest assured she is taking those journeys as a woman. She is dealing with the emotional fallout from how that affects her life as a woman. Those things still fall under the umbrella of womanhood and yes, motherhood. Because motherhood – the choosing of it or the absence of it – is an exclusively female function. //

Live your life how you want, but you will not steal my God-given and gloriously created form. You will not reduce me to a function – a person who can give birth. You will address me with the respect I deserve, the respect my mother and her mother and her mother before her fought for. The respect I deserve and I have earned as a WOMAN.

My gender is not your social experiment.

Rasmussen Reports
@Rasmussen_Poll
Our polling indicates 51%, a majority of U.S. likely voters, believe cheating impacted the 2020 election results, up from 47% just after the November election. Legacy media spends 24/7 demonizing any questioning of the 2020 results. Public trust in them is demonstrated below - //

Arizona has historically been a Republican state.

Since WWII, it has only voted for a Democrat twice, 1948 and 1996. Maricopa has not voted for the Democrat since 1948.

John Kerry added 118,166 votes in Maricopa in 2004.

Barack Obama added 97,677 votes in Maricopa in 2008.

Hillary Clinton added 100,619 votes in Maricopa in 2016.

Joe Biden added 337,867 votes in Maricopa in 2020.

Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes so if 0.5% of the 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa are illegal or invalid ballots for Biden then you have a state for the first time in the history of the United States that would have been wrongfully awarded in the American electoral college. //

“AZ still has over 21k “Federal Only voters” who cannot prove they are a citizen or that they even exist. They are not in the MVD system and all they need is a bank statement (easily doctored) to get a ballot. This will need to be addressed at the Federal level, and I have been working to make this more known for some time. This is the next thing that needs an audit, and voter intimidation is a flimsy excuse not to do it.” //

Approximately 3,000 mail-in ballots counted in the Nov. 3 election were supposedly cast by UCSB [CA] students residing in a voting precinct that, along with other dorm buildings, includes the Francisco Torres/Santa Catalina Residence Hall at 6850 El Colegio Road in Goleta.

Problem: Due to COVID-19, the Torres Building, which normally accommodates 1,300 students, was empty and locked down through most of 2020, as were all other UCSB dorms.

This means no students/voters were residing inside the Torres Building (nor any of the other dorms) during the election season.

It also means these ballots were fraudulent.

That’s because there’s a second problem: These ballots could not legally have been forwarded to students where they were actually living.

Why not?

Because forwarding ballots to alternative addresses is a felony. //

One final reminder: the AZ audit is NOT the “gold standard” for audits, as previously reported here. “Based on economic and time constraints (due in part to the aggressive resistance against any meaningful election audit), the Maricopa audit is a partial forensics audit. Based on the Statement of Work, we’d estimate that it is 75% of an FFA [full forensic audit].”

In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true. Yes, bitcoin eliminates certain trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin — and everything about it.

Much has been written about blockchains and how they displace, reshape, or eliminate trust. But when you analyze both blockchain and trust, you quickly realize that there is much more hype than value. Blockchain solutions are often much worse than what they replace.

First, a caveat. By blockchain, I mean something very specific: the data structures and protocols that make up a public blockchain. These have three essential elements. The first is a distributed (as in multiple copies) but centralized (as in there’s only one) ledger, which is a way of recording what happened and in what order. This ledger is public, meaning that anyone can read it, and immutable, meaning that no one can change what happened in the past.

The second element is the consensus algorithm, which is a way to ensure all the copies of the ledger are the same. This is generally called mining; a critical part of the system is that anyone can participate. It is also distributed, meaning that you don’t have to trust any particular node in the consensus network. It can also be extremely expensive, both in data storage and in the energy required to maintain it. Bitcoin has the most expensive consensus algorithm the world has ever seen, by far.

Finally, the third element is the currency. This is some sort of digital token that has value and is publicly traded. Currency is a necessary element of a blockchain to align the incentives of everyone involved. Transactions involving these tokens are stored on the ledger.

Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and — as far as I can tell — the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.

All three elements of a public blockchain fit together as a single network that offers new security properties. The question is: Is it actually good for anything? It’s all a matter of trust. //

In 2012, I wrote a book about trust and security, Liars and Outliers. In it, I listed four very general systems our species uses to incentivize trustworthy behavior. The first two are morals and reputation. The problem is that they scale only to a certain population size. Primitive systems were good enough for small communities, but larger communities required delegation, and more formalism.

The third is institutions. Institutions have rules and laws that induce people to behave according to the group norm, imposing sanctions on those who do not. In a sense, laws formalize reputation. Finally, the fourth is security systems. These are the wide varieties of security technologies we employ: door locks and tall fences, alarm systems and guards, forensics and audit systems, and so on.

These four elements work together to enable trust. Take banking, for example. Financial institutions, merchants, and individuals are all concerned with their reputations, which prevents theft and fraud. The laws and regulations surrounding every aspect of banking keep everyone in line, including backstops that limit risks in the case of fraud. And there are lots of security systems in place, from anti-counterfeiting technologies to internet-security technologies. //

What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

When that trust turns out to be misplaced, there is no recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?

Blockchain enthusiasts point to more traditional forms of trust — bank processing fees, for example — as expensive. But blockchain trust is also costly; the cost is just hidden. For bitcoin, that’s the cost of the additional bitcoin mined, the transaction fees, and the enormous environmental waste. //

To the extent that people don’t use bitcoin, it’s because they don’t trust bitcoin. That has nothing to do with the cryptography or the protocols. In fact, a system where you can lose your life savings if you forget your key or download a piece of malware is not particularly trustworthy. No amount of explaining how SHA-256 works to prevent double-spending will fix that. //

Do you need a public blockchain? The answer is almost certainly no. A blockchain probably doesn’t solve the security problems you think it solves. The security problems it solves are probably not the ones you have. (Manipulating audit data is probably not your major security risk.) A false trust in blockchain can itself be a security risk. The inefficiencies, especially in scaling, are probably not worth it. I have looked at many blockchain applications, and all of them could achieve the same security properties without using a blockchain­ — of course, then they wouldn’t have the cool name. //

Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They’re only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don’t like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money.

To answer the question of whether the blockchain is needed, ask yourself: Does the blockchain change the system of trust in any meaningful way, or just shift it around? Does it just try to replace trust with verification? Does it strengthen existing trust relationships, or try to go against them? How can trust be abused in the new system, and is this better or worse than the potential abuses in the old system? And lastly: What would your system look like if you didn’t use blockchain at all?

RedState has now learned some details of the information provided by the defector, including that he provided data proving that SARS-CoV-2 was manmade and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in addition to evidence confirming that the People’s Liberation Army managed the Wuhan program (and others), as Chinese virologist Yan Li-Meng told the FBI last year.

Technical details provided by the defector, RedState is told, were given to scientists (who were not told how that information was given to the government) who then re-analyzed data from published sources in conjunction with the new data and concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered. And, the defector was able to confirm numerous non-public details Yan provided the US government. //

Dr. Li-Meng YAN
@DrLiMengYAN1
Verified again! “CGG-CGG” in SARS-CoV-2 genome is part of smoking-gun evidence to prove Gain-of-Function done by CCP.
I have presented analysis with other smoking guns in the First Yan Report last Sep.
However, CCP’s unrestricted misinformation campaign dismiss it using lies! //

And just how was it that Yan’s information was able to be so effectively dismissed? As we’ve covered over the last few weeks, EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak strongarmed other researchers into writing pieces in influential journals, like Lancet and Nature, dismissing the theory, and specifically dismissing Yan’s claims. Those pieces were used by Science Feedback, Facebook’s fact-checker, to deplatform news organizations who shared the information and wouldn’t take it down and to shut down the accounts of individuals who shared the information. News organizations couldn’t even report about Yan’s appearance on Tucker Carlson without being censored by big tech. //

Ted Cruz
@tedcruz
Wow. Stunning scientific evidence suggests that: (1) Covid escaped from a Chinese lab & (2) the virus was CREATED in that lab, thru “gain of function” research.

For over a year, corporate media & deep state insisted this was a “conspiracy theory.”

Why? https://wsj.com/articles/the-s

By Irina Slav - Jun 11, 2021, 11:00 AM CDT
China will stop subsidizing new solar farm projects, distributed solar projects for commercial users, and onshore wind farms as soon as this year, Reuters reported, citing the central planning authority of the country.

The change will enter into effect on August 1 and is a departure from the course set late last year. The country’s finance ministry had previously committed to granting 57 percent more subsidies to solar power projects this year, although it did slash subsidies for wind power.

After you have installed the RouterOS software, or turned on the Router for the first time, there are various ways how to connect to it:

Accessing Command Line Interface (CLI) via Telnet, SSH, serial cable or even keyboard and monitor if your router has a VGA card.
Accessing Web based GUI (WebFig)
Using the WinBox configuration utility (Windows app, compatible with Wine)
Every router is factory pre-configured with the IP address 192.168.88.1/24 on the ether1 port. The default username is admin with no password. After you log in for the first time, please create a new user with a password in the "full" group, re-login and delete the default admin user. We highly recommend you to follow the general guidelines of the article Securing your router to protect the device from any unauthorised access.

“Just coming off of May 31st, marking the 100 years of the Tulsa riots, it is sad that we are even contemplating something like critical race theory, where children will be separated by their skin color and deemed permanently oppressors or oppressed in 2021,” she said.

King then immediately checked one of the aspects of the left’s arguments that they haven’t yet considered.

“That is not teaching the truth unless you believe that whites are better than blacks,” she added. //

“I don’t know about you, but telling my child or any child that they are in a permanent oppressed status in America because they are black is racist, and saying that white people are automatically above me, my children or any child is racist as well,” she said.

King said that we can’t allow this kind of thinking in our country after we’ve spent so long fighting and dying for the exact opposite of what CRT is trying to accomplish.

“Our ancestors, white, black, and others hung, bled, and died right alongside each other to push America towards that more perfect union,” said King. “If this continues, we will look back and be responsible for the dismantling of the greatest country in the world by reverting to teaching hate and that race is a determining factor on where your destiny lies.”

AOC and her ilk thought they could accomplish their legislative goals while they appeared to be ascendant within the party — “get on board or get left behind”. But the progressives/socialists never had the votes even when the media touted every move they made. Yes, the Democrat caucus is more liberal, but it is not monolithic. It’s easy to vote “Yes” in the House or Senate when you know the legislation is DOA because Joe Manchin said so.

Joe Manchin is the Senate’s exterminator, and he allows a lot of Democrat friends to make “Show Votes” to keep the socialist hounds at bay back at home.

But AOC has seen enough. She knows he’s not the only problem.

We’ll know if she more than “just talk” when it comes time for her to decide whether to try and slay the King himself — a primary challenge to Chuck Schumer.

The left operates on its own internal currency and it’s the one currency in the world where the more of it you have the less of a person you are…at least by intent.

Social justice rules the Democrats and it’s a kind of ideology that puts more value on victimhood than it does success, merit, or talent. In fact, the more you have of those three, the worse of a person you are in the eyes of social justice adherents. It’s from this ideological foundation that we get “critical race theory.” //

Democrats are a lot like Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He whispers lies into the ears of anyone he targets, and sometimes what he says may seem soothing and understanding but really they’re pure poison meant to make you doubt yourself and your own ability. Like the Democrats, he speaks for people, accusing those who resist his agenda of attempting to bring burdens and troubles upon the people he speaks for. Meanwhile, the person he’s poisoning believes what he says and grows as weak and incapable as he tells them they are. //

CRT is an attempt at teaching the black community, specifically children, that they can’t do anything because it will automatically result in failure thanks to the American system. The only way they’ll get anywhere is if they lean heavily into whatever program the Democrats say they should, oddly enough, driving them further into a system that oppresses them.

This is an unbelievable amount of racism that no one is addressing. The left says it’s attempting to help out those who America considers second class, but in truth, it’s Democrats who continue to put them there. They continue to divide races against each other, making them even more incapable of working for a better future.

Telling someone of a certain race that they can’t function without them is racism. Period.

These spoon-fed questions and powder puff interviews somehow got Harris into national office; but when she actually has to perform under pressure, Harris chokes. //

So, when I say Kamala Harris has been hand-picked, propped up, and groomed, it is legitimate. The ability to make a credible stand, stay cool under pressure, and think on your feet, are lessons learned when the challenges and pressures that produce growth and change are applied. Harris’ “Root Causes Guatemalan Tour” puts on full display that she has never had to suffer under any form of challenge or pressure for a very long time.

Whatever “intellect” or “smarts” Harris may have started with in her career, she quickly abandoned them for the easier cult of personality route, being handed roles and places of power that she never earned and would never be able to fill. //

Jmied01
15 hours ago
“…Did the Biden team not pay attention to her entire failed Presidential campaign…?”
They didn’t care about anything she said, they only cared about how many intersectional boxes she checked. //

Jaye
17 hours ago
You are a Californian. I am a Californian. Can either of us name a single thing Kamala Harris did for us when she was elected senator fo our state?

Her list of crimes while Caliof AG is long enough - mainly destroying two qualified ballot initiatives for public pension reform that could have saved this state, which she re-wrote the ballot language as AG, in order to ensure they would fail. And they did.

The second time she did this, the ballot sponsors just gave up and stopped campaigning for the issue they got enough signatures for to qualify - but Kamala Harris stuck a knife into both efforts - the second one was to repair what she inflicted the first time, but she found a way to destroy it the second time.

Harris is an absolutely awful politician on her own merits. Every embarrassing flub and hysterical cackle of the last week serves as a reminder of why her own presidential campaign was such a failure. Yet, the Biden administration knows she’s incapable of being a likable, competent figure. Instead of helping her and protecting her, they are hanging the border crisis around her neck and throwing her into the deep end with no floaties on. Further, they are negating to do the one thing that could settle a lot of the questions causing Harris so much consternation – just sending her to the border and getting it over with.

Meanwhile, Jill Biden is chilling at the G7, rubbing shoulders with royalty and cosplaying as co-president to the glowing reviews of the media. It’s all just too perfect to be a coincidence at this point. I’m convinced – Harris is the fall guy, and she’s being pushed over the cliff by the very administration she serves. //

bk
5 hours ago
Joe Biden has illustrated perfectly how the Democrat party works - use black people as props at election time and then kick them aside until the next election rolls around. //

Steve in CO
7 hours ago
Maybe some of us have been wrong all along. Maybe there really is no master plan, and it’s all just as absurd and random as it appears.

ReeNC
6 hours ago
Stealing election(s) was the only plan. This is the aftermath.