The thing on the right is now facing two charges for luggage theft

 That's some weird fetish :

Sam Brinton [is] the deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.

Distressed debt reaches $271 billion after five straight weeks of growth

 Growing Pile of Distressed Debt Signals Coming US Default Wave

(Bloomberg) -- A heap of distressed debt is expanding in the US corporate bond market and investors worry that a burst of defaults will follow. The amount of dollar-denominated bonds and loans trading at levels indicating distress is the largest since September 2020, reaching $271.3 billion last week after five straight weeks of growth, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. ... the supply of distressed debt is still a fraction of the almost $1 trillion peak level in 2020 . . ..     

With long-term Treasury investments down 32% year to date, and long-term investment grade down 30%, you can imagine what's happening downstream and behind the scenes.

Bloomberg cites Carnival Corp. as an example, which had to pay 6% for loans in 2021 but is paying 10.75% now. That's 79% more expensive for Carnival.

Have you tried to buy a house?

A 30-yr fixed rate mortgage would have cost you on average 3.14% one year ago. Today it'll cost you 7.08%, an increase of over 125%.

US home price plunge is ‘just beginning’ as housing market rapidly cools: economist

Do you own stocks?

You are still down over 18% year to date despite the 7% rebound in October.

 

The recent stock market rally can be rightly viewed as part of an orderly selling process which has been underway all year. The March high failed the January high, and the August high failed the March high. The current rally is unlikely to succeed the August high. It has to be remembered this is all occurring in the context of a rising interest rate environment, which is negative for stocks, housing, and bonds.

Bull market advocates, who have stocks to sell to you, don't forget, have persistently ignored the distorting effects of Fed interest rate suppression. In fact, they've counted on that suppression. They call it the Fed Put. They laugh at these puny Fed rate hikes, and make gazillions off the inflation trade. Now they're ignoring the unwind, too, which is affecting all debt. Stocks are debts, too, don't forget. Up or down, they make money off the direction. The bull market cheerleaders are worse than used car salesmen.

October 31 marks the end of the fiscal year for investment companies, who have dividends to distribute by calendar year's end to avoid taxation as registered investment companies. In an already down year, they have had a huge incentive to finish the fiscal year on as strong a note as possible. That may account for the strong October for stocks.

Normally the investment companies would be selling their losers by October 31 for tax-loss harvesting purposes. If that's happening you wouldn't know it from the monthly view of the S&P 500 in October. The DOW and the Russell 2000 were up even more. Even the NASDAQ is up in October.

But the S&P 500 low of the year did occur on October 12 at 3577, ringed by heavy selling on Sep 30 and Oct 14, after which it has been elevator up. That was probably the tax-loss harvesting for fiscal 2022.

In any event rising interest rates remain negative for the bond market, the housing market, and for stocks. The consequences of massive debt repricing are only just beginning to be felt. Stocks will hold out the longest because they can. First the bonds, then the housing, then the stocks. The rest of us are just collateral damage.

The expected 0.75 point Fed interest rate decision is Wednesday, November 2, less than one week before the election. Don't expect the Fed to do more than this, even though they damn well ought.   

Breaking: Ozzy Osbourne moving back to safer, stabbing-epidemic-plagued England

 Ozzy Osbourne moving back to England, doesn't want to 'die in crazy America'...

Meanwhile in England:

Last summer saw London’s worst period on record for violence, with knife-related attacks consisting of a large proportion of the horrific acts carried out in the capital. According to Metropolitan Police figures, there were 134 murders last year, 85 of which involved a knife (around 63 percent). ...

ONS data shows that in the first three months of the year, assaults involving an injury or an intent to harm actually increased to 120 percent of what they were at the same time last year (965 to 806). Attempted murders went down marginally from 13 to 11.

But threats to kill also increased from 175 to 226 when comparing the two periods. In the first half of 2022, 1,223 people in London were caught with a blade, compared to 1,415 in January to June last year – a reduction of just 14 percent. ...

One deterrent that has often been cited is 'stop and search,' . . . But it is an area that has “always been really difficult”, Mr Hedges said, toeing a fine line between law enforcement and racial profiling.

 

Hm, you don't say.

Planting "evidence": Dirty rotten FBI spent 9 hours "searching" Trump's residence on Monday after fruitless hours-long May recon mission

 

A source close to the former president expressed concern that FBI agents or DOJ lawyers conducting the search could have “planted stuff” because they would not allow Trump’s attorneys inside the 128-room building to observe the operation, which lasted more than nine hours. ...

In May, Corcoran granted access into Mar-a-Lago’s windowless storage room to FBI agents who spent several hours searching through the boxes. Trump stopped by the basement to say hello at one point, says someone who was there.

More.

But the San Francisco Gay Men's Choir said they were just joking

 

Nancy Pelosi knows nothing about her husband's purchase of Nvidia on June 17th

 

Paul Pelosi, an avid stock trader, was shown to have spent between $1 million and $5 million to purchase 20,000 shares of the semiconductor company Nvidia in late June, around the same time when he sold portions of his stocks in Apple and Visa. The disclosure raised questions about whether Paul Pelosi had knowledge of the pending legislation. 

More here and here.

Definitional breakdown: It's not just the New England Journal of Medicine, which thinks 18 and 19 year olds are children (for political reasons)

 Now The New York Post thinks 62 year olds are "elderly".

Before it was just Obama and Democrats who infamously and routinely seemed not to know the size, proportion, and meaning of things (when life starts was above his pay grade, 57 states, hundreds of millions getting Obamacare, 200 million dead from COVID-19, et cetera).

Now everyone is getting into the act.

Life expectancy in the US is about 77 years old. You are elderly when you are near that or exceed it.

 

 

 

Federal law prohibits FFLs from engaging in handgun commerce with anyone under 21 and longgun commerce with anyone under 18. Meanwhile 18 year olds can vote, be tried as adults, sign contracts, and get drafted to have their asses shot off in wars, and fry in the electric chair for shooting up schools. Let's have some of that, shall we?

And just in case you were wondering, a woman is still an adult human female, at least until it becomes Wokepedia.

 

Kevin Williamson: Biden has done everything wrong on inflation, all at once

 For The New York Post, here:

And it is what you get when you combine the wrong monetary policy with the wrong fiscal policy, the wrong trade policy, the wrong regulatory policy, and the wrong energy policy.

A bit of good news from North Carolina

 NC cops fatally shoot man who threw Molotov cocktails at precinct...

The incident started around 1:20 p.m. when the unidentified suspect began lighting cars on fire in the police parking lot with the incendiary weapons, officials said at a press conference.

Obama White House visitor logs show congenital liar VP Joe Biden met with son Hunter's business partner Eric Schwerin in Nov 2010, who also met Biden aides 18 other times there from 2009-2015

 All the visits are detailed here:

The logs also reveal that Schwerin met with various close aides of both Joe and Jill Biden at key moments in Hunter’s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China. Yet President Biden has long insisted he had no involvement in his son’s foreign affairs. “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” he said in 2019.

 

51 former "intelligence" officials lied about Hunter Biden's laptop, and thousands of health "professionals" have been lying about the vaccines

 Seems like kind of a pattern for the Trump-Russia-dossier-collusion crowd who all just happened to vote for Hillary, too.

Story.

 

NY Post: "If the markets don’t scream over a rate hike, it’s not enough"

 Hear! Hear!

Here.

Maybe the shoplifting would decrease if we started chopping off their hands

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Shoplifting reaches crisis proportions

• "It's out of control — it is just out of control," Lisa LaBruno, SVP of operations and innovation at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, tells Axios. ...
  
• “They come in every day, sometimes twice a day, with laundry bags and just load up on stuff,” the Post quoted a store employee saying. ... 
• District attorneys in cities like Chicago and New York are considering harsher measures against shoplifters. ...
• Teams of "boosters" will throng a store with laundry bags, grabbing what they can and assaulting workers who confront them — sometimes fatally.

Vaccinologist more worried about fakers spreading C19 than the New Zealander who was paid by them to get the C19 jab 10 TIMES in their stead

Vaccinologist and associate professor Helen Petousis-Harris called the behavior “unbelievably selfish” and taking advantage of somebody who needs some money. It could cause serious harm from the people who are not vaccinated, saying they are, and spreading the virus, she said. Prof Petousis-Harris said the man who took multiple doses of the COVID-19 vaccine is unlikely to come to any serious harm, but likely to feel crap the next day from a general immune response. “We know that people have in error been given the whole five doses in a vial instead of it being diluted, we know that has happened overseas, and we know with other vaccines errors have occurred and there has been no long-term problems,” she said. But Prof Petousis-Harris said receiving multiple doses of the Covid-19 vaccine is not ideal, saying when people get given higher doses, they get more fever, pains and headaches.

Story.

Oh those evil people who say they are vaccinated when they are not! They are the spreaders, not us!

Warped.

Canada's phony Native American Carrie Bourassa, aka Morning Star Bear, exposed as of Russian, Polish, and Czechoslovakian heritage, not Métis, Anishinaabe, or Tlingit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carrie Bourassa, a public health expert who served as scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health, was suspended on Nov. 1, five days after the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation published a lengthy expose on her background. ...

But when pressed to provide evidence of Native American heritage, Bourassa suddenly changed her story — saying that she had been adopted into the Métis community by an unnamed Métis friend of her deceased grandfather, Clifford Laroque.

More.

Hawk Newsome "promises" new violence against new NYC Mayor Adams

 You see what he did there.

“If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” New York BLM co-founder Hawk Newsome said outside Borough Hall after the meeting.

“There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed,” he threatened. ...

“I am not threatening anyone. I am just saying that it’s a natural response to aggressive oppression, people will react.”

More.

You people just don't understand performance art when you see it, especially this rich tapestry of intersectionality combining race, class, and gender issues

A Mount Holyoke College professor of art and Asian studies has been sentenced to 10-12 years in the slammer for nearly killing her female colleague who "should have known" she was in love with her:

Rie Hachiyanagi, an arts professor at Mount Holyoke College, was sentenced to 10 to 12 years in prison on Wednesday over the 2019 attack on fellow professor Lauret Savoy, MassLive reports. ...

When the victim let her in, Hachiyanagi bludgeoned her with a rock, fireplace poker and garden shears during a twisted, four-hour attack. ...

Hachiyanagi — who specializes in handmade paper crafts and performance art — had allegedly driven to the victim’s house uninvited the night of Dec. 23, claiming she “wanted to talk about her feelings,” according to a police report.

Once inside, she began attacking the victim, who is over the age of 60, with a myriad of household objects, including rocks, garden clippers and a fire poker, WWLP reported.

More here and here.

Price of one year at Mount Holyoke College in 2019-20: $67,578 for tuition, room, and board. Performance art included at no extra charge.

Can't we all just get along?

 

 

America thinks it is done with the Forever Wars, but the Forever Wars are not done with America

 

Three weeks ago the New York Post was pooh-poohing "hysteria" over the Delta variant in the UK

Rising cases even prompted Prime Minister Boris Johnson to delay the end of restrictions. But the huge case spike didn’t lead to similar hospitalization or death spikes, so Britain’s back on track to lift regulations July 19.

The seven-day average of new UK cases is above 25,000, the highest since late January, when the weekly average had just dropped from a peak of 50,000. But only 2,000 COVID cases are hospitalized, vs. nearly 40,000 in January. Daily deaths average under 20, vs. more than 1,000 in January.

More.

OK, well, daily new cases coincidentally rolled over after July 18th, so there's that, but hospitalizations are up over 542% in two months, and 179% in the three weeks since the editorial.  And daily new deaths aren't in the 20s anymore. They were 131 yesterday.

The confident pronunciamentoes of a month ago don't look so firm today. They were premature, as is typical during this pandemic, which has made fools of us all.

Debates about severity aside, the main point is still that the vaccines prevented none of this in merry old England in July, where 66% were fully (49%) and partially vaccinated as of the end of June.

We are witnessing vaccine failure in place after place, even as the progress of the pandemic changes as the virus mutates and host populations experience transformation. The low hanging fruit easily picked off and killed by the virus in the past will likely not be matched in magnitude going forward by the deaths of what are by definition sturdier hosts. It would be a mistake to miss that and credit the so-called vaccines instead, which are not preventing disease. 

FBI had at least a dozen "informants" involved prodding along the Gov. Whitmer kidnap plot

But as it was revealed that the FBI had at least a dozen informants heavily involved in the Watchmen — including that Iraq veteran — critics say the G-Men did as much to prod the plot as they did to prevent it from happening in the first place.

The agents took an active part in the scheme from its inception, according to court filings, evidence and dozens of interviews examined by BuzzFeed. Some members of the Wolverine Watchmen are accusing the feds of entrapment. ...

Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has reportedly recruited thousands of informants. Some, according to a recent investigation in The New York Times that centered on the dubious arrest and conviction of the so-called “Herald Square Bomber” by the use of an informant, said they were retaliated against if they refused. ...

Coulson said he and others are “very upset” the FBI hasn’t arrested anti-government and anti-fascist protesters who have been leading violent demonstrations in Portland and Seattle for more than a year — yet are bearing down so hard on those arrested for the insurrection at the Capitol.

Read it all here.

Looks more and more like a replay of the FBI's Michigan Hutaree Militia fiasco from 2010.