The Noo Yuck Posthole (a Murdoch rag) is out beating the drum for a new Central Insane Asylum "report" that supposedly torpedoes the Russiagate investigations.  I'm not going link it because I refuse to platform bullshit.  DYOFR.  Needless to say it actually says nothing.  It once again claims the Steele Dossier was part of the basis for the intelligence conclusions drawn and "discloses" flaws in the investigations that have long been known and were rectified long before and final reports and indictments.

It's a bundle of rubbish.  First, anyone who still claims the Russiagate investigation was based on the Steele Dossier is not a serious person.  It was reviewed by intel agencies, it was dumped, it is click bait MAGAt mouth-breathers.  The final Intelligence Assessment in 2017 was not based on it, the 2018 report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (which was Republican-controlled) was not based on it, and the July 2018 indictments of a dozen Russian intelligence officers were not based on it.  Second, it's long been known the investigation was rushed, and it's an old saying in the intel community that there's nothing more dangerous than a spy in a hurry (Cornwell didn't invent that line for Smiley's People.).  There was a reason they were rushed: They knew Trump was taking over and would deep six everything.  That doesn't change that the ultimate conclusions were based on a lot of digging through a lot of sources.

Finally, even the "serious" investigations from the Right run the gamut from the spurious to the scurrilous.  An example is Richard Sakwa's Deception.  Sakwa's objectivity is suspect out of the gate since he is one of those people who claims Russian attacks on the Caucasus and Ukraine were necessitated by Western aggression, ignoring centuries of Russian politically and religiously motivated aggression in those regions (Being of Polish descent, Sakwa really ought to know better.  But then he's a commentator for Russia Times and holds an honorary professorship at Moscow State University, so . . . .).

Deception really is kind of a mess.  Sakwa purports he's doing and intelligence and academic deep dive, but it is apparent he was more than peripherally involved with many of these people, institutions, and events.  Personal involvement with the intel being collected does not make for good analysis.  For example he downplays any involvement by the Valdai Club (and his own involvement in Valdai), even though FSB/GRU constantly run assets through Valdai.  Sakwa criticized the Mueller report for biased investigating (He makes the same claim about the Roger Stone investigation, and if you're white-washing that guy, you need to rethink your life.) because he did not run down all the details on the Steele Dossier and all the dirt Matt Taibbi and Julian Assange had supposedly dug up.  The thing about investigations in the real world, though, is that resources are limited.  If you have a line of investigation and it looks like there's no there there, you stop going there.  By the time Mueller started, the Steele Dossier had been debunked, and Taibbi's and Assange's choo-choos had already jumped the track, so what was the point.  There was no point.  And while there were plenty of exasperating things about Mueller's report, most of the criticism Sakwa levels is actually the result of Bob Barr immediately flushing the report down an industrial commode.  But that would be contrary to Sakwa's narrative since it would indicate Putin in fact runs Trump.

Property Tax

Alright, I do a bunch of work in real property tax, and there are a few things I need to unload.

First, Salt Lake County.  The county assessor's office has no idea what they are doing.  And on a number of occasions when they do know, they're not entirely forthcoming.  They don't know how business entities work.  A few years ago they were tossing out all sales where a trust was selling as not being arm's length.  Turns out they had no idea a trust could own property and thought these were all trustee's foreclosure sales.  They don't know how corporate financing works.  They think that because two investment vehicles were created by the same bank and one gets into financial straits, property sales by the other are distress sales because its just raising money that will flow straight to the other vehicle.  This is a level of Dunning-Kruger reminiscent of Karen Martinez and her Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight at the Salt Lake SEC 10-15 years ago.  They have no idea much of the international commercial real estate market is now on line, that bid rooms are set up there rather like with construction bidding, that typically there is no struck price and the buyer picks the bid that's the best fit, and these transactions are typically run through major international law firms.  I know Utah's a backwater, but come on.

And then of course there's the stuff where they know better but do it anyway.  Like pretending to have subdividing authority to chop an economic unit up.  Like removing the haz-mat tag from a property.  Like reclassifying a building to something it isn't just so they can jack up the value/sf.  Like pretending there haven't been recent sales of a certain type of building so they have to go back to 2020 and 2021 and 2022 when lending rates were half what they are now just so they can drive the cap rates down and send assessed values into orbit.

And the mayor and the council and the tax admin office cover it all up.  Especially tax admin, which ignores any evidence and any reality that interferes with affirming the assessor.  And it all stinks like last week's diapers.

On to Washington.  In 2023 the legislature passed a bunch of laws intended to expand urban affordable housing, mostly through increasing density.  They'll probably increase density, but I seriously question whether they'll do a damned thing about affordability.  And I believe one of them, HB 1337, is a ticking bomb.  It requires cities within urban growth areas to allow for two accessory dwelling units (ADUs) per lot.  That means ADU approvals will be pretty much automatic as long as health and fire codes are met.  Which means the assessor will start valuing empty spaces as ADUs.  That basement area your kid used to live in but is empty since they moved out?  Better relet it, because the assessor is going value it as revenue producing space, and your property value is about to spike yet again.  It won't do squat to fix the affordable housing shortage, but it could well drive Ma and Pa out of their home.  I wonder who might show up to snap up properties like this?  It's such a mystery.

The Tangerine Latrine's Shit Show

Man, this mess is worse than even I thought it would be.  The Tangerine Latrine, the Muskrat, and their merry mob of thugs aren't interested in just taking power.  They're intent on a full-on rape and run.  They're playing this as End Game, and at the rate they're going, they may make it happen.  We're about to live Game of Oligarchs, but with climate change looming in the background, so we may end up living Fallout.  But these goons don't care because they're all convinced they're Enclave.  I hope I live long enough to see them realize there isn't enough room for all of them and start picnicking on one another.

It's our own damned fault, really.  We didn't do the heavy lifting necessary to make the system work for us, certainly not since WWII.  We didn't replace the Constitution, even though it needed replacing from the start.  We acted like Mormons, pretending the thing was divinely inspired, rather than admitting it was just an ugly compromise between slave owners masquerading as farmers and land speculators masquerading as merchants to keep all real power in the hands of white, propertied, Christian men while pretending to share it.  And we never corrected this, the result being the 1% made sure we couldn't have nice things.  The barest in civil rights.  The minimum in employment, workplace, and personal autonomy laws.  Hells, even Obamacare barely passed muster under this Constitution according to the Extreme Court.  And they cemented it all with Citizens United, which opened the money gates.

And now even our vaunted rule of law is being exposed for what colonized peoples have always known it to be: a device to protect and preserve the position and power of the 1%.

Actual Real Estate Stuff

Yeah, believe it or not.

First, ag land auctions.  Currently these are mostly retirement and estate sales with some foreclosures and bankruptcies mixed in.  Iowa is currently loaded with $15,000+/acre auction prices.  Even though commodity prices are flat and expenses are up.  Even though the American Bankers Association thinks only half of ag borrowers will be in the black in 2025.  So what's going on?  I have a strong suspicion the bigs are getting bigger.  They have cash and can get their hands on more, and they're turning it into dirt.  So yet more family farms are landing in the hands of agribusiness.  Which bodes ill for surviving small farmers, consumers, soil, water quality, name it.

Now on to office space.  Most law firms I know are reducing their footprint.  No reason not to given how much we can do remotely.  But the bigs are entering into big, new leases.  Why?  Because they can.  Because they know the legal industry is changing dramatically, and size means survival.  Because their corporate clients want image and are willing to pay for it.  Because they have hammerlocks on their employees and can force on-site work.

What we're seeing is yet more asset concentration to the detriment of all the rest of us.  I won't call this neo-feudalism, though, because it isn't.  There is no interlocking system of rights and responsibilities.  The rights have all floated up the hill, and the responsibilities have all rolled down it.  There are no holidays.  We're on call all the time.  There are no commons we have access to.  Any possible Third Space either has an admission fee or is locked down entirely.  We aren't peasants.  We're serfs.

OF Redux

This is an update of this post.

OF continues down the multilateral currency road.  In spite of many electrons being spilled, just how the BRICs are supposed to accomplish this remains unexplained.  One member (Russia) is failing in its war against a measurably inferior opponent and and is dancing with a demographic death spiral (although Putin's takeover the the US may buy some time).  One member (China) is so desperate to distract everyone, foreign and domestic, from its being history's largest Potemkin Village, it's preparing to invade Taiwan in 2027 or early 2028.  One member (India) is so insecure about its currency it's trying to eliminate cash.  One member (Brazil) is simply mired in a multi-pronged inability to function (although Trump's tariffs may give it a boost).  And as OF has reported, China has just issued a new round of bonds denominated in US$.  Not the surest way to break the US$ as the reserve currency.  I don't see anything, BRIC or otherwise, remotely capable of replacing US$, even as part of a basket of currencies.

Do I think US$ is undefeatable?  Absolutely not.  Bad Vlad has done a very good job of putting a mob of ticking bombs in the US government.  By the time Trump is done this time, I think everything that made the US function will have been plundered and pillaged, and the US$ will be irretrievably broken.  So the US will lose; that doesn't mean anyone will win.  By 2034 the whole world could look like Central Europe in 1634.  Only worse, because all attempts to stop climate change will have fallen by the wayside.

So while I expect US$ to fall, I do not expect it to be replaced.  If there's no global economy, who needs a global reserve currency?

He's Baaaack

Awhile back I posted about Mikkel Thorup and his "advice".  Shortly after that, his incessant emails dried up.  No loss.  Then a couple of months ago I got a promo email.  Shortly after that, I received another "newsletter" type thing.  And it looks like he and his tools have only gotten worse.

First, he's completely come out as a COVID denier who believes "woke" is destroying civilization.  Second, he's using that fear-mongering to sell his latest grift, Veritas Villages scattered throughout developing nations, where you can live independent of "government" grids because you have your own water and power and apparently (though Thorup doesn't mention this point of course) your own staff of locals to maintain all this because you sure as Hells aren't going to.  In other words, rank neocolonialism.  Not that the types who buy into this rubbish see anything wrong with that.

The other big drum he's beating is for Pavel Durov, the Russian tech bro who was arrested in France in August.  According to Thorup, Durov was arrested because he protected free speech.  According to France and its case filings, it was because Durov refused to cooperate with investigations into criminal activities on his Telegram platform.  I would note that crime is not free speech, at least not when it's fraud, drug dealing, trafficking, and political hits, so it doesn't really look like Durov was protecting free speech.  But the truth wouldn't help Thorup's sales pitch.

Old Friend Is Off The Rails

As I have noted before, I have an Old Friend (OF) whose opinion I've always respected.  In the prior post I disagreed with OF, sharply.  The latest evidence, though, indicates OF has become a complete Putintute and shill, confirming the fear I voiced in the prior post, that OF had found a couple of new "friends" in the Middle East.

It began a couple of months ago when OF announced a new role, economic and finance commentator on CGTN (Chinese Global Television Network), an international propaganda organ for the CCP and PRC.  This was followed closely by a piece on how the national debt will lead to hyperinflation (Given, if Trump is re-elected, his disastrous economic "policies", which include more tax breaks for oligarchs which would in turn balloon the debt, could well cause a collapse.  But it would take the full shit tsunami that is Trump; the debt alone does not get us there.  OF is effectively rejecting Modern Monetary Theory.  Why?  More on that below.).

Then about a month ago came a comment that really had me scratching my head.  OF started bitching about the effect on the London Stock Exchange of International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) regulations.  IOSCO is basically there to coordinate among different securities regulators, making legitimate financing easier and illegitimate financing more difficult.  It's well known London has been a hub of money laundering since Tommy Pitt practically invented it during his side hustles from the East India Company over 300 years ago.  And it got worse after Maggoty Trencher.  Until the UK joined IOSCO and had to seriously shore up its enforcement.  Why would OF be against that?  As I've said, I'm afraid OF picked up some new friends in the desert.

Then just last week, things ramped up.  OF started promoting the BRIC (Read: Russian.) position of dedollarization, attacking the US's freezing of Russian assets in response to the invasion of Ukraine, and beating the drum for a recent report from Russia that claimed Putin wants there to be no reserve currencies.  Right.  First, Brazil, Russia, India, and China are in no position to make this happen.  If the US and the West fail, and Putin is quite obviously trying to make that happen, the BRICs won't step in.  Civilization will just collapse.  Second, if you think Bad Vlad does not intend to replace US$ with a currency or basket of currencies he controls, I have some oceanfront property in Yuma, AZ, to sell you.

Sorry OF, but I seriously don't trust what you're saying anymore.

This Looks Like the Opposite of an Opportunity

Saw this today.

First, Whitney didn't predict squat. She "predicted" that Citigroup was in trouble in Fall 2007 a week before Chuck Prince resigned and that Merrill Lynch and Lehman were in trouble two weeks before they collapsed. That's called being Captain Obvious. I started telling people to get out of real estate in December 2005, ratcheted it up in December 2006, and set off flares in April 2007. Where's my genius award?

Second, given the cost of financing and the lack of regulation of buyers, all this opportunity is going to do is going to do is concentrate yet more wealth in the hands of the 1%.

Putin in Dresden

OK, let's see if we can connect a few dots.  We know Bad Vlad was in Dresden in the late 80s (just what his brief was remains an open question).  We know the KGB was running revolutionary groups out of Dresden (Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhoff, PLFP).  We know the KGB was running out of Dresden rather than Berlin because they thought there were no prying, Western eyes in Dresden (It probably kept the operation away from prying, GRU eyes as well.  And Stasi.  Apparently much of this was done without Stasi's approval or even knowledge.  At the very least, it gave Stasi plausible deniability.).  We know they kept the operation records in Dresden, close to the vest (only summaries going to Berlin and Moscow), and the operations included bombings and assassinations in the West.  We know that in the late 80s a number of KGB officers saw the writing on the wall and started preparing for their personal futures by setting up entities in the West and skimming Soviet money into them.

And we know that in December 1989, Bad Vlad suddenly emerges from behind the curtain in full hero mode.  The Berlin Wall had fallen the month before, and an angry mob that had been busily tearing apart the Dresden Stasi HQ started turning its attention to the nearby KGB HQ.  Putin bluffed the mob into jogging on, protecting the facility (Accounts differ on whether he was brandishing a pistol.  Putin himself has never claimed to have been armed.).

Now we get to the speculative parts.  Just what was Putin doing there?  Actual information is thin on the ground (more on that in a bit).  This lack of information has led the usual suspects to conclude Putin deliberately destroyed the records to hide he was chief of Black Ops at the Dresden station.  Ahem.  People, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  Putin's career before and immediately after Dresden does not support this grandiose conspiracy theory.  Bad Vlad was the guy who carried the briefcase for the actual players.  Did he work with the officers who handled the foreign revolutionaries?  Yes.  Was he himself the show runner, or even a show runner.  Let's just call it unlikely and leave it at that.

As to the lack of documents, Putin himself has said he along with everyone else was burning documents as fast as they could, which appears to be true as far as it goes.  There is very little documentation concerning anyone who was operating at the Dresden station.  Most of our information on Dresden comes from three types of sources: 1) KGB associates of various sorts who flipped prior to Putin's being there and so could not have known about Putin's activity; 2) KGB associates of various sorts who are selling memoirs and such; and 3) people who may or may not have been in the revolutionary groups and may or may not have been to Dresden but who are more than willing to talk about it in an effort to rehabilitate themselves.  Little of this information can be corroborated, and even less can stand on its own without corroboration.  Except perhaps for those who just want to attract readers and viewers, as opposed to those trying to parse actual information from fool's gold.

So what happened in Dresden in December 1989-January 1990?  All evidence indicates a massive amount of documents were destroyed.  But suppose that isn't the whole story (Try to contain your shock.).  Suppose an ambitious, reasonably intelligent, and in his mind underappreciated KGB officer saw a number of those documents and didn't see "security risk" but "leverage".  Here were a pile of Soviet officials, including who knows who many KGB officers, with their fingerprints all over "third-party" wet operations in the West.  Officials and officers who were now trying to make nice with the West, even find soft landings there.  Landings that would get a whole lot bumpier if Western authorities learned of their parts in killing Western citizens.

So this KGB officer packages up these gold nuggets, perhaps with the assistance of a couple of close associates, but how to move them?  Certainly not through KGB channels.  Enter Major General Horst Boehm, Stasi chief for the Dresden district and the KGB officer's long-standing local contact.  Unlike Putin, Boehm had been unable to protect Stasi HQ, and it was royally trashed to his chagrin and shame.  It was apparent to Boehm the game was up and he needed friends in other places.  Whatever the KGB officer threw at him, Boehm slurped it up with a big spoon.  So he moved the documents to Destination Unknown on one of Stasi's rapidly crumbling and therefore unsupervised mule trains.  Probably via Rotterdam, but that's experience talking, not evidence.

Corroboration?  None.  You see, in February 1990 Boehm and two of his district chief colleagues became so depressed and ashamed over everything that they "committed suicide".  Am I alleging our KGB officer had them whacked after their services were delivered?  Absolutely not; there's no way he had that kind of pull.  Boehm was terminated with extreme prejudice because, among his efforts to cultivate friends in the West, he devised a plan to leverage his knowledge of the complicity of Dutch and Swedish officials in East Germany's international arms smuggling.  Boehm's two colleagues were probably in on it, but that's fuzzier.  The only question is how anyone with sufficient muscle to hit three secure targets in an East Germany still crawling with Soviet military and security forces found out about Boehm's plan.

His documents secured and Dresden station being cooked, our KGB officer is transferred to Leningrad.  From there he blackmails his way up the ladder, builds a coterie of cronies around him, and takes command.  And becomes filthy rich in the process.

The interesting question before us now is, "What has changed?"  Why is Putin no longer concerned about burning down whole wings of the house, ranging from foreign relations to former friends?  I figure the options are as follows, and they aren't mutually exclusive: 1) He figures he's so powerful he no longer has to rely on the Dresden docs; 2) He figures he's so powerful the gang he built around himself using the Dresden docs is expendable; 3) The people who could have been threatened by the Dresden docs are now all gone, the docs are now irrelevant, and any part of his power still based on those docs needs shifted.  I recommend that intelligence agencies focus on researching those points.