#well ok they did damage but she has fixers for it which is the same as nothing functionally yknow

[sodrippy]

how is she not dead yet 😭😭😭😭😭😭

[giancarlonicoli]

Blain's Morning Porridge, submitted by Bill Blain

“It doesn’t matter if you are a bullying billionaire or a penniless troll, such behaviour is destructive..”

Lots to look forward to this week. A “Goldilocks” economic picture in the US?  Strong job creation and strong stocks – what’s to worry about?  Not so rosy in Europe – the bets are mounting the dismal continent is heading into Japanification. China is all about Trade war.  Who knows anymore?  The latest Chinese numbers show both sides are hurting with China exports down 23% to the US, and importing less.  What has Donald’s trade spat achieved?  Not much apparently.

Here in the UK, on Thursday we get to vote for the least bad alternative.  It’s a sad state of affairs the leadership-vacuumed Labour party has self-destructed ahead of what should have been the easiest electoral victory in decades.  After 10-years of Austerity, Policy Mistakes, Weak Leadership, and Shenanigans, the best of the bad choices before us is to give the Tories yet another go.

Talk this week will all be about tactical voting to keep the Tories out.  Why?  The chances of any other party getting a majority to achieve strong government other than the Tories are zero.  The best that remainers can hope for is a hung parliament that will plunge the UK back into a political Brexit cul-de-sac, extend economic uncertainty, and plunge sterling back into the Peso bucket.  

All that to look forward to, but its nearly Christmas – and my lunch calendar is looking good.

Meanwhile… SELL TESLA

I experienced another bout of train misery this morning.  Again, no functional table to work my computer from – quite funny really… I can’t get the tiny little table down against my Santa Claus belly!  All I want for Christmas is the head of the RMT, Mick Cash’s head on a Spike – which is hopefully one of the many Christmas presents Boris will deliver us..  I have used that line: “head on spike” deliberately to illustrate a point.

No one really thinks I am seriously contemplating decapitation of the RMT Union Boss.. and I’m sure readers will agree it’s a stupid, unwise thing to put on the digital record.  I can probably wriggle out of making such a stupid comment by expressing great regret, and explaining it was my great frustration and dissatisfaction with the current rail strike that made me write such a stupid thing. I would beg forgiveness and get away with a mild censure in the current febrile environment. My comment was hyperbole.

However, if I was to state the Head of The Rail Union was a wifebeater, a fraudster, or a child molester – none of which is true – then I would be guilty of a grievous untruth which would greatly damage his reputation and credibility.  If I wrote such a thing with zero evidence to support it – then I would be guilty of the most heinous libel.

Let me assure Mick Cash of the RMT, I don’t really want his head, and I’m sure he’s not the monster all we SWR commuters believe him to be. (But, he is utterly wrong in mounting the strike – but his mistake will work against him. Whatever sympathy anyone had for the train drivers has evaporated.)

There is a great line in the Lion King – “Life is not fair”, as the evil uncle Scar toys with his lunch, a mouse. If you make any of kind of mistake in business, the cost is likely to be high. Just ask Carlos Ghosn how much he is enjoying Japanese hospitality now. This year we’ve seen a host of senior executives punished for errors of judgement, like sleeping with employees.  Steve Easterbrook, head of McDonalds, was sacked for hiding a relationship with an employee.  Mark Wiseman lost his senior position at Blackrock after a consensual affair with another staff member.  While Ghosn may be the victim of a Japan Inc plot, the other two are example of bad decisions by business leaders – and in today’s world business judgement is everything.

The world is a very sensitive place. The merest hint of sexual impropriety is career-ending (just ask BlackRock's Mark Wiseman).  It raises immediate questions about judgement and suitability.  Sensitivity has become a watchword – while everyone will shake their heads in disbelief at a hospital branding a cancer patient transphobic because she requested a lady doctor who was born female (it transpired she had been was a victim of child molestation), smart businessman will do whatever they can to appear balanced and considered, and show their awareness of such sensitivity.

Every investment firm on the planet now claims to have put ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance – principals at the forefront of their investment methodology and criteria.

So how many have demanded the removal of Elon Musk, or threatened to sell their stock unless he demonstrates maturity and awareness of his manifest wrongs?  

Apparently the same rules don’t apply to the likes of Musk. Don’t tell me he was found innocent in court last week and therefore has no case to answer. Yes… he does. Its not just his harassment and defamation of the British cave diver and rescuer Vernon Unsworth that is cause – there is a change in the way we need to look at Unicorns.

I don’t want to hold an investment in a firm run by someone like Elon Musk. The next 10-years are not going to be about Unicorn Hype - it will be back to fundamentals.

I can’t think of any deliberate lie more calculated to destroy a man’s reputation than to brand him a child rapist and child molester – a paedophile. (I have checked with a number of South African friends, and none of them said Paedo meant a “creepy old man”. It means what it says and is a vile insult when applied with the kind of malice Musk employed.)

I was shocked when Musk walked away from court on Friday – declared innocent.  Its apparently fine for a US billionaire to call another man a paedophile, brand him a child rapist, hire investigators to dig dirt on the victim, and then declare his guilt was proven because he didn’t immediately sue.  I watched the case last week, held off commenting, but after watching Must declare “faith in humanity was restored” I can’t resist. I don’t give a toss if he is a visionary, a great engineer, or whatever baloney he claims. In my opinion, such a man is not fit to run a major firm and is not deserving of our respect.

Musk is a product of our age. Entitled, arrogant, unbelievably rich and powerful, he reckons normal rules don’t apply to him. He’s a bit like that other serial sociopath Adam Neumann of WeWork – and we know how well that ended.  

He sends a clear message it’s fine for marginally socialised billionaires to act above the law. It's ok for Musk to tweet untruths not just about a brave British spelunker, but also to mislead the market with tweets about taking his company private, about the number of cars being produced, and in a spectacularly unfunny April Fool’s joke, that the company was bankrupt. He and the company were fined US$40mm and he joked about it.

That is not a man you want to invest your pension in.

I just know I will get a storm of abuse for this, but the trial last week puts another nail in the American concept of justice. One of the jurors, who it turns out owns not one but two Teslas according the Sunday Times, says there was no proof Musk’s tweets about the guy being a paedophile referred to the British Caver. That is a nonsense.  Musk got away with about the most malicious insult possible.  Rich justice.

Mark Johnson, former head of FX at HSBC is likely to be sent across the Pond to serve jail time in the US after a series of complex transactions were done for Cairn a few years ago.  It’s difficult to perceive exactly what wrong Johnson is accused of – certainly he did nothing criminal that merited investigation in the UK. It looks a very dubious case that seems to have forced through purely so the US Department of Justice can show it flexing its muscles. Or the case of the Libor fixers – a crime the Americans regard as the ultimate martet manipulation is nothing of the sort – back in the old days the Governor of the Bank of England wasn’t above suggesting a high or low rate might be helpful..

The American’s have got this badly wrong. I read this morning Musk may face a re-trial. Somehow, I doubt it.  

[thisdaynews]

Assange fight draws in Trump's new intel chief

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/assange-fight-draws-in-trumps-new-intel-chief/

Assange fight draws in Trump's new intel chief

Fairbanks recorded two phone calls she had with one of Grenell’s close associates, Arthur Schwartz, and took screenshots of their conversations about Assange and Grenell. She also gave the materials to the nonprofit transparency group Property of the People, which provided them to Politico.

The screenshots and phone calls span from October 2018 to September 2019. In them, Schwartz tells Fairbanks that Grenell was “taking orders from the president” when he got involved in facilitating Assange’s arrest and urges her not to disclose what she’s been told about Grenell’s role in the process.

But Schwartz appeared to grow frustrated and fearful after Fairbanks tweeted, on Sept. 10, 2019, that Grenell “was the one who worked out the deal for Julian Assange’s arrest.”

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Schwartz told Fairbanks in a September 2019 phone call, accusing her of posting “classified information” in the tweet. Fairbanks posted the tweet around the time Grenell’s name was being floated to replace John Bolton as Trump’s national security adviser.

“Please. I’m begging you,” Schwartz says in the recording. “They look at you, they see that we speak, that’s bad.”

Grenell’s entry into the legal fight over Assange highlights the fact that, in since-deleted tweets from 2016, he promoted the WikiLeaks disclosures targeting Democrats; later, in April 2017, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo labeled the group a “hostile intelligence service” aided by Russia.

And the suggestion that one of Grenell’s close associates who was not in government may have been privy to conversations surrounding a sensitive law enforcement operation will likely raise more questions about his fitness to lead the entire U.S. intelligence community. A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not return a request for comment.

It’s not clear whether Schwartz was actually privy to anything classified, or whether Grenell told Schwartz anything about his involvement in Assange’s arrest. “I highly doubt I would tell her anything real, accurate or of any importance,” Schwartz told Politico, adding that Fairbanks is “not someone that I trust.”

“I barely remember that conversation,” Schwartz said. “I remember that she was slinging mud at a friend of mine on social media and I wanted her to stop. Knowing that she’s not too bright and easily manipulated, I threw a bunch of nonsense at her that I thought would get her to stop. And she did stop.” Schwartz also said he did not recall chatting with Fairbanks over Signal, a secure messaging app.

In a written timeline Fairbanks provided to Assange’s legal team that was also obtained by Politico, Fairbanks said Schwartz told her on October 30, 2018—two weeks before prosecutors accidentally revealed in a court filing that DOJ had secretly filed criminal charges against Assange, and nearly six months before Assange was arrested—that the U.S. government would be going into the embassy to arrest him, and implied that Ecuador would allow it to happen.

That same month, Grenell had secured Ecuador’s cooperation with the arrest, via the pledge for no death penalty—but his role was not revealed publicly until ABC News did so in April 2019.

“I need to let Julian’s lawyers and family know that the president personally ordered an anti WikiLeaks ambassador from a country uninvolved in the case to secure Julian’s arrest,” Fairbanks told Schwartz on October 30, 2018, via the encrypted messaging app Signal, according to screenshots provided to Politico. “It’s clear he’s a political prisoner and his health is deteriorating rapidly. I don’t know if it will matter to them, but it seems important, and they should know.”

Schwartz was not sympathetic, but didn’t dispute her claims as he sought to persuade her not to reveal the impending operation to Assange.

“I wouldn’t get so emotional until you see exactly what that worthless piece of garbage did,” he replied, referring to Assange. “There’s a good reason the death penalty was on the table.”

Fairbanks was incredulous: “Are you sure it’s not just Clinton friends taking some random photos and pinning it on him for revenge or something?”

“Forget about pictures,” Schwartz replied, possibly suggesting that he had access to non-public information. “There were other things that happened because he did what he did that led to horrible suffering and death. I have zero sympathy for him. Doubt you will either when/if it comes out publicly.”

Fairbanks visited Assange on March 27, 2019, roughly 2 weeks before his arrest, and relayed what she’d heard from Schwartz in October, she told Pierce.

On March 29, Schwartz told Fairbanks in another call obtained by Politico that “there’s an investigation now, into people at State” into who leaked Fairbanks the information about the operation. “I’m sorry,” she replied.

Schwartz is well known in Washington as a Trumpworld fixer who often criticizes journalists and other perceived enemies on his Twitter account. According to the New York Times, Schwartz is a “central player” in an effort to “discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.”

But last September, he appeared worried about being exposed himself.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Schwartz told Fairbanks in the September call. Fairbanks denied posting anything classified, telling Schwartz that she had just been referring to the ABC News report, from months earlier, about Grenell’s role in the Assange operation.

Schwartz was not convinced. “Ric’s role is classified,” he said. “You can’t do that … you are posting things that are classified, that no one knows, that has not been reported…I know what’s been reported, I see what you’re tweeting, what you’re tweeting is not what was reported. Someone’s going to go to jail. You need to stop this.”

“Yeah, Julian’s in jail right now, because of this,” replied Fairbanks.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Schwartz retorted.

“Alright, well, I’ll delete my tweet, only because you’re saying you’ll get in trouble,” Fairbanks replied.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Schwartz repeated. “Please. I’m begging you … They look at you, they see that we speak, that’s bad. He’s [Grenell] is taking orders from the president. OK? So you’re going to punish me because he took orders from the president? I’m begging you, I’m begging you, please.”

Fairbanks agreed to delete the tweet, but retained a screenshot that was reviewed by POLITICO.

The materials will be introduced as soon as Wednesday, according to a person with direct knowledge of the legal strategy, and are “just one piece of the argument” that the U.S. criminal charges and extradition request for Assange stemmed from “a political imperative to get him at all costs” rather than a good-faith legal process.

Another big piece of that argument was presented by Assange’s legal team last week, when they submitted a statement from one of WikiLeaks’ lawyers claiming that Assange had been offered a pardon on Trump’s behalf by California’s then congressman Dana Rohrabacher.

Assange would be pardoned, Rohrabacher allegedly claimed, if he would provide evidence that Russia was not WikiLeaks’ source for the hacked DNC documents that the organization released in 2016.

Rohrabacher acknowledged meeting with Assange, but said only that he promised to ask Trump to pardon the WikiLeaks founder “if he could provide me information and evidence about who actually gave him the DNC emails.”

“At no time did I offer a deal made by the President, nor did I say I was representing the President,” Rohrabacher said in a statement.

Ryan Shapiro, the executive director of Property of the People, said he wanted to release the Fairbanks materials now because they raise concerns about Grenell’s judgement.

“The Trump regime is consolidating power and the nation’s new top spy is a former Fox News contributor and far-right public relations flack who appears to have leaked classified information to a Trump family political fixer who subsequently shared it with a prominent alt-right blogger,” Shapiro said. “Americans must confront the Trump regime’s ongoing seizure of power or suffer the United States’ descent into genuine authoritarianism.”

Read More

[carpediempagesite]

5 First-Time Home Buyers Share the Good -and the Bad

If buying a home is on your to-do list, you’re not alone: Eighty-three percent of young people still believe homeownership is part of the American Dream, and 78 percent believe they can achieve it.

But while exciting, the process of purchasing a first home is fraught with potential pitfalls—some costlier than others.

Here, Alison Rogers, a licensed broker at Upstairs Realty in N.Y., weighs in on some of the highs and lows of five first-time home buyers’ experiences. From hidden home-repair nightmares to the benefits of putting down more than 20 percent, you may want to read this before you start house hunting.

The All-Star Savers

Tanner, 32, and Ashley Callais, 33, a travel site owner and interior design assistant in Austin, Texas

“We bought our first home—a three-bedroom in Austin—last March for about $300,000. We’d been longtime renters, but learning our first baby was on the way lit a fire under us to put down roots.

We each had a healthy savings account when we got married in 2012. Since then, we’ve been all-star savers. There have been periods where we’ve saved 70 percent of our low-six-figure (combined) income—thanks to avoiding debt and sticking with a strict budget. (Even after my career took off, I drove the same old Saturn from college so we could save more.) This helped us put down 30 percent on our new home.

Our monthly payment now lands at $1,400 including taxes, compared to $1,050 in rent for a much smaller place. It’s also way nicer than our old digs and in the heart of an up-and-coming neighborhood.

My one regret is not being more aggressive with bidding. Austin is a very competitive housing market; it isn’t uncommon for properties in our price range to go under contract within days. We actually lost several houses we really liked because we weren’t comfortable bidding more than asking price, which ended up lengthening our house hunt by several months.”

Expert insights

“Tanner and Ashley did a lot right—particularly putting down such a hefty down payment. Doing so lowers your mortgage payments, which means you’ll have more available income for unexpected expenses.

When it comes to bidding, I’d tell stressed-out house hunters to repeat this mantra: ‘It’s ok to lose a house; there’s always another.’ You don’t want to get so caught up in the bidding that you drive yourself to a number you regret. I suggest researching what similar houses are going for in the area, then looking at your budget and determining your top number. This gives you a built-in boundary.”

The Passive-Income Seeker

Jake Rheude, 25, director of business development at an ecommerce fulfillment company in Knoxville, Tenn.

“I bought a $170,000 three-bedroom townhouse in Knoxville last year after socking away enough money over nine years—from gifts, income from after-school jobs in high school and a $4,000 loan from my dad—to cover a 10-percent down payment.

Because I didn’t put down 20 percent, I’m on the hook for PMI (private mortgage insurance), which is $49 a month for two years. Still, I consider it a great investment. My monthly payment is $950 including taxes and insurance, which is probably $400 less than what I’d pay to rent a comparable property.

I’m particularly attracted to the home’s rental potential. I’m a single guy and enjoy living in Knoxville, but don’t know what the future holds. If I move one day, I’m confident I’ll be able to rent it out to college students who live in the area.

It feels good to have a future passive income stream in the pipeline. Adding a rental property to my portfolio will be a huge asset in the long run.”

Expert insights

“Putting down 20 percent is the rule of thumb because it gives you a cushion should you have to sell into a market that’s since declined. It also lowers your monthly payment and means you don’t need additional insurance. So putting down less than that makes maintaining a solid emergency fund all the more important, should disaster strike. You’ll also want enough wiggle room in your budget to afford all related housing costs (think: taxes, insurance, maintenance, HOA fees and the like).

As for renting it out, my biggest advice as a longtime landlord is to remember that you’re likely going to have vacancies in between tenants—even in active renters markets. Build this into your budget so you aren’t blindsided by dry periods. Also, depending on how far away you live, it might make sense to hire a property manager to help with maintenance and repairs.”

The Unsuspecting Fixer-Uppers

Yenni, 29, and Jonathan Desroches, 29, pet care company owner and a senior hardware engineer in Worcester, Mass.

“Jonathan and I were thrilled when we put down 10 percent and bought our three-family home in August 2013 for $295,000. We live in one unit and rent the other two for $2,400 per month, which covers our entire mortgage, taxes and insurance.

The house is now valued at $335,000—a nice uptick in just a few years—but there’s a huge downside: Post-sale, we found over $125,000 in necessary repairs, from mold to structural issues to water damage and more—all of which our inspector should have noted. We’ve leaned on our savings and a mix of family gifts and loans to cover $90,000 so far.

We also discovered during the sale that our seller’s agent happened to be our buyer’s agent’s boss and fiancé. (Hello, conflict of interest!) Plus our mortgage broker forgot to submit our rate-lock forms, which bumped our interest rate up from 3.25 percent to 4.25 percent.

In a nutshell, it’s been a nightmare. If we could go back in time, we’d do way more research and definitely hire a more qualified inspector.”

Expert insights

“As Yenni well knows, it’s really important to find a trusted inspector. I recommend going with someone who belongs to the International Association of Certified Home Inspectors because they’ve taken a certification exam and adhere to a standardized code of ethics. Her situation also drives home the potential pitfalls of putting down less than 10 percent; without a fully loaded emergency fund, big-ticket home repairs can be a huge financial burden.

Also, the relationship between the buyer’s and seller’s agent should have been disclosed to her in writing, and is in clear violation of Massachusetts’s disclosure laws regarding dual agency. At the very least, it sounds like she wasn’t treated with proper care, but I’ll leave it to a Massachusetts attorney to say whether she has any financial recourse.”

This post originally appeared on Grow

Related:

This May Be the Smartest Thing You Do With Your Wedding Gift Cash

How I Survived Unemployment Without Touching My Emergency Fund

What I Gained From Giving Up 50 Percent of My Income

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