Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
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quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | |||
| S&P futures | 2857 | -2.75 | ||
| Eurostoxx index | 389.8 | -0.69 | ||
| Oil (WTI) | 68.41 | -0.76 | ||
| 10 Year Government Bond Yield | 2.99% | |||
| 30 Year fixed rate mortgage | 4.58% | |||
Stocks are flattish this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are down.
Mortgage applications fell 3% last week as purchases fell 2% and refis fell 5%. Activity overall has fallen to a 19 month low. The refi index has is at an 18 year low.
Mortgage credit availability increased in July, although it tightened for government loans. The MBA’s MCAI increased 1.7%, which is a post-crisis high, but nowhere near what it was during the bubble years. “Credit availability continued to expand, driven by an increase in conventional credit supply. More than half of the programs added were for jumbo loans, pushing the jumbo index to its fourth straight increase, and to its highest level since we started collecting these data. There was also continued growth in the conforming non-jumbo space, which reached its highest level since October 2013,” said Joel Kan, MBA’s Associate Vice President of Economic and Industry Forecasting. Note that some observers think the MCAI understates how loose credit is, when you look at things like LTV and credit scores.
Separately, US banks eased lending standards for business loans. The report noted increased demand for business loans, and decreased demand for commercial real estate loans. As mortgage lending dries up, banks are competing more for small business loans, although increased liquidity in the secondary market for these loans also helped.
Elon Musk proposed the largest LolBO ever on Twitter yesterday, saying he was thinking of taking Tesla private at $420 a share. He claims he has funding secured, which is quite the statement. Even in this market, raising $71 billion isn’t the easiest thing in the world, especially for a negative cashflow company trading with an EV / EBITDA in the 150s. Perhaps the price should have tipped people off that this was a joke, but apparently it isn’t.
The NAHB conducted a survey of potential homebuyers, and only 14% are planning to buy a home in the next year. That number was 24% in the fourth quarter of 2017. Of those planning to buy a home, 61% are first time buyers, of which 71% are Millennials. Most are noting that the number of homes for sale with the desired features and price point are smaller than they were 3 months ago.
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
Heh…thought these were good, from Ace.
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Not really. Comparisons of the Democratic party now to the KKK and the Dixecrats is pretty weak. I prefer more sophisticated trolling.
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How so? Both generations primarily judge people’s worth by the color on their skin?
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The modern Democrats are more communist than racist.
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jnc:
The modern Democrats are more communist than racist.
But their tactics are the same. (And they are still fairly racist, albeit is a very different way.)
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McWing:
Both generations primarily judge people’s worth by the color on their skin?
Bingo. And they both seem to tolerate, if not enjoy, physical confrontation and coercion against those they disagree with.
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Identity politics is essentially racism 2.0. All of the ugliness, but with the new feature of being much more broadly and flexibly applied to almost anyone, for any reason, at will. To the point where a white dude and can yell and harass a black woman not for being black, but for being A WHITE SUPREMACIST. And thus, a white dude going all Bull Connor on a black woman in public is somehow social justice.
Racism 2.0 is much more versatile.
Not that that particular feature-upgrade isn’t starting to manifest of the right, as well.
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KW:
Not that that particular feature-upgrade isn’t starting to manifest of the right, as well.
How so?
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I think the bottom one is right on. At least, it resonates with me.
Anything that uses the KKK falls right into Godwin territory for me, so I don’t think much of the comparison. Particularly because the antifas are just aspiring fascists and perverts with very little to lose and very little personal investment in the way things are, while the KKK-era dems were that way in no small part because of their investment in the way things were.
But they were also douchebags wanting to be better than everybody else for fake reasons and folks easily hypnotized by #fakeNews (in that case, Birth of The Nation) so . . . similarities, too.
But I’ve seen the KKK=Democrats thing so many times now. It’s just not very punchy.
I vote for the bottom one.
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jnc:
Not really.
Yes, I really did think they were good.
Comparisons of the Democratic party now to the KKK and the Dixecrats is pretty weak. I prefer more sophisticated trolling.
I guess everyone has their own tastes, but I think putting a mirror up to the left and showing it how remarkably similar it is to the very kinds of people they not only claim to be against but so enjoy accusing others of being is always worthwhile.
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“I guess everyone has their own tastes, but I think putting a mirror up to the left and showing it how remarkably similar it is to the very kinds of people they not only claim to be against but so enjoy accusing others of being is always worthwhile.”
There may be a sense of catharsis for for the person doing it, but pretty much everyone dedicated to their lefty-or-liberal tribe is going to have (unbeknownst to them) their cognitive-dissonance shields at 100% max, and no introspection will occur.
The admittedly inflammatorily named “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg (as you know) makes a great and detailed case as to how so much of what the left is ostensibly against now, they were totally for, at that laying fascism and Nazism at the feet of the right is simply wrong. Yet the left’s response was predictable accusations of lies and general caterwauling. Although many of the online reviews suggests they never, in fact, read the book, but were just responding to the name. Still.
He makes the point (and it’s a great one) that the only reason that liberals are always on the right side of history, historically, is that they inevitably appropriate the correct side, often long after the fact. The rewrite history so that Nazis and fascists and Eugenicists were right-wingers, and behave as if a direct line can be drawn from those formerly leftist positions to the modern right.
And, not without reason, Dems and liberals respond to the “the KKK were all democrats” thing with the same sort of yawn that “Republicans are Hitler” gets from the right.
Thought it’s hard to capture Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism and it’s inspiration to the early 20th century KKK movement, which was largely a progressive phenomenon, in a meme.
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KW:
There may be a sense of catharsis for for the person doing it, but pretty much everyone dedicated to their lefty-or-liberal tribe is going to have (unbeknownst to them) their cognitive-dissonance shields at 100% max, and no introspection will occur.
No one is doing it in an effort to convince anyone of anything. As jnc rightly pointed out, it’s just trolling.
Dems and liberals respond to the “the KKK were all democrats” thing with the same sort of yawn that “Republicans are Hitler” gets from the right.
I wonder. The right yawns at the Nazi references because a) it is obviously overwrought hyperbole and b) it’s been overplayed for going on 50 years. I suspect the KKK references strike a different chord for the left because, well, it actually is true, and they know it.
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“I suspect the KKK references strike a different chord for the left because, well, it actually is true, and they know it.”
If this is really your position, then you’ve been too disconnected from the left for too long. That’s not what they think at all.
And in this case they are right if you look at who David Duke supports these days.
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jnc:
If this is really your position, then you’ve been too disconnected from the left for too long. That’s not what they think at all.
I'm not talking about how they view themselves today. I am talking about the historical fact that the KKK were all Democrats. I'm pretty sure most people on the left are aware of this fact, and probably don't like it. Hence the trolling value in bringing it up.
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Not really. It’s too easy to point to the Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond switching parties after the Civil Rights Act passed, and thus pretty much backfires.
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It’s a troll, for goodness sake, not a serious argument.
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@scottc1: “I suspect the KKK references strike a different chord for the left because, well, it actually is true, and they know it.”
I’m not sure most of them do (I think they are actually convinced of their typical position: that “democrats” (they don’t ever seem to get deep into it enough to characterize the 20th century KKK as a progressive project) were actually the conservatives of the time, and so . . . what’s in a name?
Again, goes back to liberals always being on the “right side of history” because they appropriate the present-day consensus views of past disputes during their revisionism.
…
Anyway, as trolling, it’s fine, but I’ve seen enough “the KKK were the Democrats” to last me, personally. A card to be played only when a particular naif argues that the GOP started the KKK or something.
If talking about FDR and the internment of the Japanese-Americans doesn’t do it, nothing will. 😉
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Officers…
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/08/07/six-lieutenants-getting-booted-from-the-corps-after-allegedly-cheating-on-land-navigation-course/
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When the APC drove down Richmond, VA, the inside joke among vets was that yet another officer had gotten lost on a a land navigation exercise.
https://www.newsweek.com/virginia-solider-arrested-stealing-tank-and-taking-it-joyride-through-richmond-960703
And sure enough he turned out to be a First Lieutenant.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/05/us/stolen-armored-personnel-carrier-virginia-trnd/index.html
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At least Thomas Friedman has some self awareness:
“I’ve found lately that I can ruin any dinner party. It’s like magic. Just get me going on Trump or Putin or climate change and I can put a frown on every face and a furrow in every brow. ”
Edit: Snark aside, the column is spot on about Libya and also the fissures between Eastern and Western Europe.
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I was going to say, I think he’s spot on about Libya. And identifies the fissures between Eastern and Western Europe without really addressing the fact that the E.U. has not really helped that, and perhaps arguably makes them worse.
As for the rest, there seems to be a lot of mind-reading and fortune-telling, neither of which are human beings actually all that good at.
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Counter narrative!!
https://hotair.com/archives/2018/08/08/trumps-approval-rating-african-americans-hits-record-high/
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Indeed. Don’t know what it will be, but I will say what the establishment GOP was never going to attract any African American voters. Maybe Trump’s larger-than-life personality will turn the trick, at least by a few percentage points.
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Does she have a name?
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Her name is Robert Paulson. Her name is Robert Paulson.
(Sorry, that was probably weird, but your question immediately brought to mind that scene from Fight Club.)
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Her name happens to be “Openly Gay Dem Native American Woman”. Don’t judge! You can’t judge!
Also, are we sure she’s not a transwoman? I mean, bone structure. I’m just sayin’.
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Twitter refuses to ban Alex Jones because he didn’t violate their policies.
Vox freaks out.
“Dorsey’s statement is a startling attempt to frame Twitter as an apolitical neutral party”
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/8/17662774/twitter-alex-jones-jack-dorsey
If you aren’t with them, then you are against them.
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jnc:
Funniest revelation in the article…Twitter has a “Safety Team”.
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This line jumped out at me:
This problem [of hate speech online] — and that’s too light a word — reveals that social media was a bad idea in the first place, and there really is no fixing it!
The left is cannot stand the fact they cannot have sole possession of the megaphone. They detest that.
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“reveals that social media was a bad idea in the first place”
No one is forcing them to participate. Delete your accounts if it’s so bad.
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@brentnyitray: “The left cannot stand the fact they cannot have sole possession of the megaphone. They detest that.
This doesn’t surprise me, and almost every spoiled and entitle group in history has been like that, just like spoiled, entitled people get irritated when other people have opinions about anything.
What I find a little odd from the “smartest people in the room” and lovers of science is that they think investing any energy in this at all can possibly be productive. They are not going to be able to monopolize the megaphone. They can encourage people to self-censor and exist only in their own bubble, and they can financially impact those who depend on advertising, like Jones, and make them scale down potentially, or find other platforms.
But they aren’t going to take sole possession of the megaphone again. They need to focus on infiltration, as they’ve done at colleges and in philanthropical foundations. That’s they’re best angle.
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Heh
https://twitter.com/Heminator/status/1027282637575077888
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See Scott, that’s how you troll.
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