Streams of Consciousness in a Desert of News

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi have fled America forever due to the election of Donald Trump. The Babylon Bee reports they are fleeing to escape America’s forced pregnancies that are certain to come from VP JD Vance. America will miss them greatly—a hard lesson learned as our childless, liberal lesbian population vanishes, taking their cats with them.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, is reaching for the brass ring of $100,000 valuation per coin recently. If attained, a single Bitcoin will be enough to buy you a new Jeep truck so you don’t have to join the other fleeing masses, which are Jeep customers who are rejecting Jeep’s massive inflation via mass migration to other brands.

Another crowd in flight in recent news is the home-buying crowd, but they have nowhere to go. Highly inflated home prices created demand destruction on an epic scale during 2024 to a rock-bottom level of sales, even though October just got a small uptick due to a brief drop in mortgage interest that has already started rising again since inflation started rising again, causing bond yields to rise again. Up, up, and away.

Destruction of sales, as rising mortgage interest made outlandish home price inflation impossible to cover, looks like this:
Wolf Street

Last I saw, that looked like a graph of the number of people wanting to move to the state of California. (Or maybe a graph of Jeep sales.)

On an annual basis, those sales look like this
Again, hard to say whether we are looking at houses or Jeep pickups.

Still, the ice dam that has locked up the housing market has not given way, though a few chunks have melted off and flown down river lately, especially the Florida chunk.

One thing that is breaking up is Google. At least, if the DoJ has its way. The DoJ regulators decided late Wednesday to force Google to turn Chrome into a separate company. Making Google’s web browser a separate company will supposedly break up Google’s monopolistic stronghold on internet searches. I’m not sure how since a few other major browsers already compete with Chrome, and that hasn’t stopped Google from owning the searching world.

Google’s CEO says,

“This is why you back presidential candidates in both parties. You never know when you’ll need to use them.” *

Breaking out his AT&T playbook, he also said, “Forcing this perfectly integrated system to break up will not bring new innovation but will make the seamless integration of products that people can currently use with great convenience a nightmarish mess of technology.” We all know how that turned out when Ma Bell broke up.

Speaking of breaking things up, Putin retaliated for Ukraine’s use of ATACMS with new hypersonic missiles that could have carried nuclear warheads but did not. He launched enough of them at a single factory to break it up up pretty good but also to make it clear they were not armed with nuclear warheads when launched (clear unless NATO were to assume his intention was to pound one extraordinarily deep hole into the location of a single arms factory).