On last night’s CBS Evening News, Trump said “we have hundreds of thousands of murderers in our country who were let in by Sleepy Joe Biden and ICE is trying to get them out.”

This is alarming.

And untrue.

Hundreds of mass shootings have been carried out by native born Americans.  Not one that I could find was committed by an undocumented immigrant who arrived during the Biden presidency.

The National Institute of Justice reportsthat undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to commit murder than U.S. citizens.

Undocumented immigrants account for (very roughly) 5% of the U.S. population.  They are less than half as likely as the native born to be murderers.  Thus, they account for (very roughly) 500 of those 20,000 murders.  Perhaps half of which are committed against each other (if rough rules of thumb hold), so 250 against U.S. citizens.

There are about 7,000 pedestrian deaths each year.

> Should we outlaw vehicles?  Cut the urban speed limit to 10 miles an hour?  Or just do our sensible best to reduce this number without causing mass societal and economic disruption?

There are nearly 50,000 deaths from firearms each year (versus just 1 or 2 in Japan and 25 or so in Australia).

> Should we ban all firearms?  Or just do our sensible best to ban assault weapons and cop-killer bullets, bump stocks and ghost guns; require gun owners (as we do drivers) to pass a safety test, get a license, and register their purchases — running “universal background checks” to prevent criminals and the mentally ill from so easily making those purchases in the first place.

There may be 250 murders of us U.S. citizens by undocumented immigrants each year.

> Should we spend tens of billions of dollars a year to deploy a poorly trained force of masked secret police to round up “hundreds of thousands” of undocumented immigrant murderers when you’re FAR more likely to be murdered by your spouse, a family member, or someone you know?  Or should we just do our sensible best to give local law enforcement the resources they request to deal with this important, tragic, but blessedly small, extra burden?

GUESS WHERE JEFFREY EPSTEIN ALLEGEDLY SAID TRUMP AND MELANIA FIRST HAD SEX

I mean, who cares — right?  We know he’s an adjudicated rapist and that he and Epstein were best friends.  We know he has never been big into fidelity or monogamy and that he lied about the $130,000 he denied paying a porn star.  So none of this is news.  I pass it on only because MAGA has long demanded to see the Epstein files.  Trump himself signed the law Congress overwhelmingly sent to his desk requiring their release by December 19.

So where are they?

HYMC

I sold some January 2017 HYMC calls yesterday for $11.60 that give the buyer the right to “call HYMC shares away from me” at $50 each, up from the $3 or so I had paid.

But I also bought back — for a loss — an equal number of the calls I had sold with a $35 strike price.  The folks buying these calls think there’s a good chance HYMC will be a lot higher within a year, and my bet — in eating a modest loss to raise my upside from 35 to 50 — is that they’re right.