SAR #14099

Facts are sometimes new, feelings seldom are.

Excuses, Excuses: All around the nation, the bad winter weather has caused a 'lack of inventory' that in turn has caused the price of houses to soar and sales to crater. Or something like that. Unmentioned is the collapse of enthusiasm for the 'reel them in and rent them out' get-rich-quick investment model, where even Blackstone, which gobbled up 41,000 houses, says “Prices have gotten to the stage where we cannot buy a house, renovate it, rent it, and still make a reasonable return.” And two middle class incomes are no longer enough to buy a median-priced home in most places. Maybe that's why mortgage loan originations have become an endangered species. 
 
About Farce: In January, small business were at their most optimistic levels in seven years. That has collapsed in the subsequent two months to reach levels last seen back when we all knew who Lehman Brothers was.

Get A Job! According to the Labor Department the fastest growing 'professions' in our newly recovered economy today and in the near future are: Personal care aides, retail sales clerks, home health aides, fast food drones, nurses' assistants, secretaries & clerks, janitors & cleaners and customer (telephone) service reps. The median salary for these jobs is a bit below $30,000, and do not require a college degree. Which may explain why most people are no longer really middle class. 
 
Get Off Your Ash: A judge has told the NC Environmental Management Commission that it had both the power and the responsibility to get on Duke Energy's ass about the massive and ongoing pollution from its 'coal ash ponds”, and that the Commission should “require an immediate halt to pollution.” The Commission, a wholly owned subsidiary of Duke Energy, is appealing the decision.

You Shouldn't Be In Kansas Anymore, Toto: Acting at night, over the weekend, brave GOP'ers in Kansas have nullified the existing contracts of the state's public school teachers, stripping them of tenure, making them individually renegotiate their existing contracts without any union representative tainting the process. And if a teacher does not agree to this process, termination is automatic and cannot be appealed. This travesty was committed in lieu of providing court-ordered funding levels to the state's public schools. 
 
Yawn: So many scared, ignorant parents in Oregon have refused to have their little darlings vaccinated against measles that the disease is on the rise again. Politically correct stupidity reigns supreme.

Take Two Actos and Call Me If You Live; Japanese drugmaker Takead Pharmaceuticals and its US co-defendant Eli Lilly have been ordered to pay $9 billion in damages for pushing a type-two diabetes medicine that gave folks cancer. Allegedly.

Slowly, Slowly: A message in a bottle was delivered 101 years after it had been tossed into the sea. Not the fastest way to communicate, but the NSA didn't intercept it.

Blood In the Street: Citing “difficult market conditions”, tech fund Coatue is returning $2 billion of the fund's $7 billion to investors because they can't find anything profitable to do with it. After they took their management fee, of course.

Porn O'Graph: I saw that.

The Parting Shot: