Free Republic

My original post said nothing about the death of the borrower, moron.

BS. That isn’t a losing move. The long term future hits reality in the 2026 mid-terms. We have to fix most of everything by then.

The bad news is that the loser RINOs want to lose. There is a fortune of good money for them being losers for their voters and the American Republic.

“but I suspect it’s close to true; you’re talking about a ridiculous amount of time to hit an equity mark where you realistically *CAN* upgrade. “

Please explain what you mean by “upgrade” and why it would take a ridiculous amount of time to do so.

Trump should have shut down Regan National, JFK, and LaGuardia.

November 10, 2025

Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine over three years ago with the intent, among other things, of stealing its children. Putin launched his imperial conquest to first and foremost dominate the Ukrainian people, and he recognized that to deprive Ukraine of its children would be to deprive it of its multigenerational potential. When Russian troops rolled across the border into Ukraine on the night of February 24, 2022, the groundwork for the massive deportation of Ukraine’s children was already in place. Ukrainian human rights activists uncovered Kremlin documents dated February 18, 2022, which laid out plans to remove Ukrainian children from orphanages in occupied Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts and bring them to Russia under the guise of “humanitarian evacuations.” These documents revealed that Russia planned to target vulnerable Ukrainian children, especially those without parental care before the full-scale invasion had even begun. In the subsequent three years, Russia has embarked on a Kremlin-directed, deeply institutionalized project to abduct Ukrainian children and forcibly turn them into the next generation of Russians.

Ukraine has been able to verify Russia’s deportation of 19,456 children to date, although the true figure is likely to be much higher because Russia frequently targets vulnerable children without anyone to speak for them.[1] Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab placed the number of deported children closer to 35,000 as of March 19, 2025.[2] Putin’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova (against whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in March 2023 for her role in abducting children alongside Putin) claimed that Russia has “accepted” 700,000 Ukrainian children between February 2022 and July 2023—a terrifying benchmark for the lengths that Russia is willing to go to rob Ukraine of its own people.[3] The true number of deported children is near-impossible to verify, but the implication remains the same—Russia has stolen tens, potentially hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children with the explicit intent of eradicating their Ukrainian identities and turning them into Russians. International law explicitly forbids the forcible transfer of children from one group to another group for the purpose of destroying, in whole or in part, a national or ethnic group, and considers these violations as constituent acts of genocide.[4]

Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian children have been remarkably well-documented, particularly by the perpetrators themselves. The Russian legal system made immediate accommodations for the intended influx of stolen Ukrainian children, signaling the intentionality behind Putin’s deportation project. Putin signed a decree in May 2022 providing for a simplified procedure for the acquisition of Russian citizenship for Ukrainian “children left without parental care and incapacitated persons,” which amounted to a legalization of the process of deporting Ukrainian children and forcibly granting them Russian citizenship.[5]

With the legal framework in place before the full-scale invasion, Russian occupation administrators and occupation officials have blatantly advertised programs that take Ukrainian children from their homes in occupied Ukraine to Russia under a variety of guises, such as camps for their supposed rest, relaxation, and rehabilitation.[6] As recently as March 19, 2025, Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky announced that his administration, with financial support from the Russian Ministry of Education, plans to remove 70 children from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast to a Russian government-controlled children’s camp in occupied Crimea in order to give the children an opportunity to “rest and improve their health” after living in proximity to the frontline.[7] Russia has gone to great lengths to claim that these crimes are humanitarian gestures, but the legally-consistent humanitarian response would be to transfer Ukrainian children back to Ukrainian-controlled territory and return them to the care of their fellow Ukrainians—not deport them to the invading country.

Author screenshot of the Krasnodar Krai Regional Administration page on August 23, 2022. Translation: “Kids from Mariupol are looking for new families.”

Russia’s abduction of Ukrainian children inflicts lasting psychological impacts as children are forced to assimilate to life inside a hostile occupying power.[8] Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab has confirmed that Russia is using at least 43 children’s camps throughout Russia to house deported children, at least 32 of which are explicitly “re-education” facilities.[9] At least one of these camps in Russia’s far eastern Primorsky Krai is physically closer to Alaska than it is to Ukraine. Russia uses these camps to indoctrinate Ukrainian children, punishing them for their Ukrainian identities and forcibly instilling pro-Russian sentiment through carefully curated Kremlin-approved curricula and “military-patriotic” training courses. Chechen Republic Head and close Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov has lauded the “military-patriotic” training of abducted Ukrainian teenagers in Chechnya, for example.[10] Former Ukrainian Children’s Rights Commissioner Mykola Kuleba has termed these re-education programs as “death camps for Ukrainian identity.”[11]

Of the tens of thousands of children whom Russia has deported since 2022, a likely significant portion have been forcibly adopted into Russian families. Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner, stated that Ukraine has confirmed at least 400 children whom Russian families have adopted, but as with estimated number of deportations, the true number of adoptions is likely to be much higher.[12] Within the first six months of the invasion, Russia’s Krasnodar Krai regional administration posted a quickly deleted advertisement claiming that there were over 1,000 orphans from occupied Mariupol alone “awaiting” adoption into Russian families. High-ranking Russian officials with close ties to Putin, such as Lvova-Belova herself and A Just Russia Duma Deputy Sergei Mironov, have adopted abducted Ukrainian children from occupied Mariupol and Kherson, respectively.[13]

The adoption process strips Ukrainian children of their Ukrainian names and birthplaces, replacing them with Russian birth certificates and documentation intended to erase the child’s Ukrainian identity and any paper trail that would allow Ukrainian authorities or family members to search for the child.[14] For teenage Ukrainian boys, their forced acceptance of Russian citizenship can result in a near immediate military summons to fight in the Russian army against their fellow Ukrainians—a completely separate but equally clear violation of international law.[15] The Russian adoption system is swallowing Ukrainian children up into a bureaucratic black hole, premised on the administrative eradication of Ukrainian identity. For the younger children, especially those adopted in their infancy, their adoption means that an entire generation of Ukrainians are growing up in Russia, unaware that they are Ukrainian.

There can be no true peace in Ukraine without the return of the children that Putin has stolen. The fate of these children is inextricably tied to both the military and political outcomes of Putin’s war. Negotiations and an end to the fighting without consideration for the deported children will empower Russia to continue to commit these crimes with absolute impunity. A negotiated outcome to the war on any terms but Ukraine’s will result in the loss of Ukraine’s children, a loss that will be impossible to reverse.

For further reading on Russia’s illegal activities in the occupied areas of Ukraine, see: The Kremlin’s Occupation Playbook: Coerced Russification and Ethnic Cleansing in Occupied Ukraine

[1] https://childrenofwar.gov.ua/en/

[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/yale-ukraine-war-crimes-investigation/33351956.html

[3] https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and; https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-children-taken-ukraine/32527298.html

[4] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf

[5] https://www.ukrinform dot net/rubric-ato/3496766-putins-decree-legalizes-abduction-of-children-from-ukraine-mfa.html

[6] https://t.me/SALDO_VGA/573

[7] https://t.me/BalitskyEV/4913

[8] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-children-abducted-by-russia-left-with-psychological-scars-campaigners-2024-06-15/

[9] https://www.razomforukraine.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/UPDATED-January-2024-one-pager-Children-of-War-_-Russias-Forced-Deportation-of-Ukrainian-Children.pdf

[10] https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/3104

[11] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/russia-ukraine-peace-deal-children-1.7488114

[12] https://www.dw.com/en/how-are-ukrainian-children-faring-in-russian-adoptive-families/a-68138393

[13] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67488646; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/07/19/maria-lvova-belova-adopted-mariupol-boy-philip-golovnya/

[14] https://www.dw.com/uk/ak-zivut-ukrainski-diti-v-simah-u-rosii-i-ak-ukraina-ih-povertae/a-68070847

[15] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67368313

What if housing prices declined

$410,000
$390,000
$370,000
$350,000
....

People would stop buying and building houses. I believe the stock folks call it catching a falling knife. Rents would rise and buying no longer is seen as a viable option.

People might even default on their mortgages. Many mortgagors are immigrants and they don’t have to stay in the USA to face debt collectors.

“affordable housing” is Democrat Newspeak for ‘Future ghetto’..............

Trump taught Republicans how to win; Republicans yawned and asked if they could go home now.

“My only issue now is my stupid real estate taxes. You’d think I’d own the thing clear by now.”

https://www.floridatoday.com/story/opinion/2025/11/09/florida-property-taxes-sure-to-be-main-topic-of-legislative-session/87125394007/

We shall simply disagree on this, then. I read your statement above as "I rent, kind of sort of." Totally your choice. We pay zero interest on zero debt on our homes, and even bought out my BIL's when he got into some cash flow difficulties, all duly registered with proper county officials. Different philosophies of life.

” We need to increase wages and bring housing costs down.”
I’m all for making more money, and having lower costs. That said, I’m also for personal responsibility.
If a person want to make more money, they have to provide more value to their employer. There’s plenty of folks out here making a lot of money, and able to buy houses at today’s market. They provide value to their employers.
“We” can’t expect higher wages just to appear suddenly, overnight, “we” have to earn them.
Housing costs are in line with the market, if they weren’t, they would come down. That’s just how it works.
Again, personal responsibility. Control spending, is how you keep your costs down.
Nail/hair salons, tattoo parlors, lottery tickets, fast food, music/cable tv, drugs/booze, are all choices people make. I’m proof you can live without all of them.

“But you do you, reddit fag.”

I see you have clarified your earlier post so no one will interpret it as referring to the death of the borrower.

Ah gee, I guess that’s just too bad.

This case reveals how deep networks infiltrate government institutions.

Comrades spooked who’s next?.

What I read this morning:

“The deal the Republican Senate negotiated over the weekend reinstates all of the employees terminated by DOGE and effectively reverses the entire program. That is why they did the deal over the weekend. They hoped you would not notice.

Once again, the Democrats win because there is no Democrat & Republican parties. There is a Uniparty vs the People. Republican voters are generally rightwing. Their elected officials are not.”

I bought my first house when I was 20-something, it was a 30 year mortgage at 10 1/2 percent. I put, I think 20% down, which was all our wedding gift money, and some money from my parents, as I recall.

It was at the top of the market. I thought it was too high, but I was pressured into buying by assurances from my wife’s family that you “never lose money in real estate.”

I sold it about 7 years later for about what I bought it for. After commissions, fees, and paying off the bank, I walked away with half of my original down payment.

I rented for years, and what was nice about that was I didn’t have the equity tied up, repairs were taken care of with a phone call, and I could move anytime I wanted to without incurring the transactions costs.

I liked it, but got sick of dealing with landlords that would snap up the properties and immediately raise the rent.

So eventually I bought a small (not too small) prefab 3 bed 2 bath house. I think the interest rate was about 6 1/2% a year, which in my 20s I thought I’d never see again. I refinanced when it was about 2 3/4% and paid the thing down with any extra money I would have.

After I got married (again), we bought a house at the bottom of the market for about 50K under appraised value. The bank screwed me by forcing me into a 30 year mortgage, at about 1/2% above the 15 year rate because I owned a second house.

I later sold the other house, although I hated giving up the low rate, and put the proceeds on the new house, cutting the mortgage about in half. Over the next 5 years every extra penny I could scrounge went into the mortgage, and I paid it off in about 5 years.

I screwed the bank out of 25 years of interest.

I now put the equivalent of the mortgage payment into a “house fund” used only for house repairs and improvements.

My only issue now is my stupid real estate taxes. You’d think I’d own the thing clear by now.

A 50-year mortgage would result in a slightly lower monthly payment...

Bears bolding, underscoring, and repeating.