Category: Egoism in Action (page 17 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

May 19, 2009

No more free lunch! Understanding the National Association of Realtors — all the way down to your bones…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Michael DiMella wrote the remarks quoted below in a comment, but I’ve extracted them and my responses to him into a separate post.

The meta issue is this: Is the NAR a criminal conspiracy against consumers, and, whether or not it is, is there nothing else good about it?

Michael DiMella: > you seem to have a thorough unwillingness to learn what NAR actually is and does.

That’s astoundingly false. I have written more about the NAR’s criminality than anyone, ever. You may not want to focus on that, but criminality is NAR’s sole reason for being. Everything else it might do is window dressing devised to fool the public — and gullible patsies within the NAR.

> That doesn’t make you a bad guy, but I, for one, would appreciate a modicum of respect.

Good grief. I will offer you and the NAR the oath of respect Fiorello LaGuardia paid to a similar criminal mob when he was inaugurated as Mayor of New York: “E finita la cuccagna!” (“No more free lunch!”)

> To [eliminate mortgage interest deductibility without comprehensively revising the tax code] would be careless and have a major negative impact on a majority of Americans.

False. The deductibility of mortgage interest is a handout to the rich. I’m opposed to all taxation, but it is absurd to argue that the wealthiest Americans cannot afford to bear their own economic weight. In any case, as is discussed below, using tax policy to favor one group over another, thus artificially to churn the markets, is vicious and wrong no matter who is hurt or helped.

The next argument would be that, in a condition of pressure-group warfare, to lay down arms is suicidal. That’s as may be, but, in order to make this argument, you must first argue that there can be circumstances in which you feel yourself justified in expropriating other people’s property — stealing, that is — for your own benefit. Are you an advocate of theft? Did I hear you say something about wanting respect?

> I would say NAR’s support of the MID is well intentioned to protect consumers

The sole purpose of the mostly Read more

May 17, 2009

Earth to NAR: Drop dead — and try not to stink up the place while you’re doing it

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I haven’t paid any attention to this MIBOR business, and I’m grateful to John Rowles for keeping us up to date. Anyone who is dismayed at the way things worked out should be sure to sit at my table when we have a BloodhoundBlog poker tournament: You’re my kind of sucker.

The fact that the NAR is composed of clueless morons should come as a surprise to no one. The fact that they think they can buy off their intellectual superiors by kissing their asses should astonish no one who reads here: I’ve been telling you for years that the dinosaurs pretend to take you seriously in the hopes of compromising you in their corruption. Of course, no one will learn a thing from this experience, which suggests that the dinosaur strategy might well be sound, even though it is absurd on its face. They reason that a grand pageant of being lied to and pandered to makes people feel important, and the evidence suggests they’ve got a good bead on their designated spokesmannequins.

But none of this has anything to do with anything. Whatever combination of cluelessness and collusion motivated this MIBOR clusterfrolick, it’s just a side effect. The NAR is a criminal cartel. Its purpose is to deploy legislation at the federal, state and local levels in behalf of real estate brokers and to the detriment of consumers (and, secondarily, real estate sales people). If you despise the NAR because it is technologically inept, you’re hating it for the wrong reasons. The right reason to detest the NAR, and to seek its extinction, is because it makes war upon the free market in order to expropriate unearned wealth for brokers.

Who pays for the tax deductibility of mortgages? The 70% or more of us who don’t qualify for the deduction. Who will pay for the $8,000 first-time home buyer’s tax credit? Your grandchildren — and it will cost them quite a bit more than $8,000 in interest costs. Thus do the vampires in the NAR make make vampires of us all.

If you want to grouse or joke about how stupid the NAR Read more

May 15, 2009

Skinning elephants: The lifelong salutary benefits of negotiating your compensation with your buyers

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Here’s how Mike Elsberry, my home inspector, charges for an inspection for one of my clients:

A sliding-scale price based on square footage
A sliding scale price based on the age of the home

Bigger homes take somewhat longer and entail somewhat more work to inspect than smaller homes. Older homes may have more wear and tear, also resulting in a longer, more arduous inspection. Mike has a little pricing grid, and taking those two numbers, square footage and age of the home, he can plot the precise price point on his matrix.

You could argue that he could come up with a more predictive pricing scheme, but the genius of his system is obvious: It’s reasonably objective, making it hard to argue with, and Mike can price a job from his cell phone, while driving, with his mouth half full of burrito. Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech.

Okayfine. Now let’s sell a couple of houses.

I’m about to do a Facebook deal with an old friend from high school. I will be representing her son in the purchase of the condominium he will live in while attending graduate school. Approximate purchase price: $80,000. Gross commission to me: $2,400.

I’m also about to help a very nice couple buy a small hacienda in Paradise Valley, one of the wealthiest towns, per head, in the United States. Approximate purchase price: $800,000. Gross commission to me: $24,000.

Obviously the differences between the two transactions are myriad, but here’s the one that matters most: The $80,000 condo will almost certainly take a lot more of my time than the $800,000 hacienda. I’ll get paid maybe $50 an hour for the condo, and possibly as much as $1,500 an hour for the hacienda.

How does that make sense?

Home inspector Mike Elsberry’s pricing scale makes sense, even if you could argue that something more complicated might make even more sense. The compensation buyer’s agents receive bears no relation to the time and effort expended. As the Freakonomics boys point out, the incentives are misaligned, as well: I get paid more if my buyers pay more, even though their best interest is to pay less. But even Read more

May 12, 2009

The essential importance of criticism to my mental functioning

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I hate the idea of belaboring this topic, because I think it should be obvious. But it keeps coming up, so I wanted to take a moment to shoot it down. If the headline seems really boring to you, that’s only because you’re right. Feel free to make your exit while your faculties are still unbenumbed.

In response to my post this morning on the sartorial elegance of Todd Carpenter, Dave Gooden says:

I don’t understand your need to pile on people like this.

I never pile on anyone. Piling on is done by groups of people, generally speaking fairly stupid people. I always stand alone in everything I do.

But: That’s beside the point.

Without piling on, John Kalinowski adds:

I can’t understand for the life of me why you waste time insulting others publicly, which seems to happen often on this site.

Both comments are specious, in the sense that I wasn’t insulting anyone. I was tweaking Todd Carpenter for a comical photo of the most un-besuited person I know wearing a suit.

But I’m willing to entertain these questions, if only because these kinds of complaints come up fairly often, and it’s plausible that I can help people better understand how I use my mind.

I will say first that I consider rebukes like these to be unconscionably rude. I am chastised — to my face, in public and behind my back — for being some sort of paragon of bad behavior, but I would never in my life consider it good character to presume to remonstrate my host while I am a guest in that man’s home. If I have a big-enough problem with your behavior, I will certainly take you to task, but only on my own property, never on yours. In this respect, I am regularly amazed that people would seek to address minor issues of style while committing an outright betrayal of my hospitality.

In the same way, it would never occur to me to tell someone else how to write. Your mind is your property. Do what you want with it. I will tell you now — and I’m sure I’ve said this Read more

May 11, 2009

Making a virtue of necessity is usually an error…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Stuff like this is why I went public with our Notice of Trustee’s Sale:

Author : A concerned renter
E-mail : irquel@REDACTED.com
Stopped paying your mortgage? BAHAHAHHAAHA!

Welcome to the hell you brought on others, you pathetic parasite. Good thing you’re a psychopath and can’t feel anything, or you’d be really bummed.

The point was to deny vicious trolls like this the opportunity to claim that, by not disclosing the foreclosure, I am therefore trying to hide it. The fact is I told them in my post Friday night — and many times before then — that their behavior is self-destructive, but that doesn’t stop them from carrying on like this. It’s sad and stupid, but it is what it is. I called them by their true names when first I met them:

My BubbleBoys are mostly gone for the moment, no doubt off like a cloud of gnats desperate to enshroud someone else’s head. The truth is, I do have a particular kind of fun at their expense, not the least of which are their pitch-perfect echoes of the charges I make against them. They were so aghast they I called them flying monkeys that they swooped in by the hundreds to express their outrage. Surely none dare call them Brownshirts, when most of what they did was rage, swear and threaten with all their minimal mental might. A certain few of them were brighter than I expected, but not one seems to have caught on that the Heckler’s Veto doesn’t work on the internet. And for all their complaints, none of them seems to have noticed that I also compared them to the Communists.

Even so, I ended up feeling sorry for them. It’s not the specious arguments repeated over and over, not the garbled grammar, not the atrocious spelling. Those are secondary consequences. What grabbed at my heart, despite myself, was the lack of internal resources that would lead a man — and they seem to be almost exclusively men — to join a gang of thugs. Surely this is not true of each one of them, but it is true in the main, in Read more

May 10, 2009

Maybe the book we need is not the BloodhoundBlog book…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

…but the BattleBack book…

I’m delighted by the discussions I incited today, both public and private. I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve worked alongside so many people who inspire my undiluted admiration.

(Someday I should write a post about admiration. I see it as being the most important mental state in the future production of human values.)

But I didn’t intend to incite any conversations, and I internally debated turning off the comments in my foreclosure post. Certainly, I did not want to do anything to induce concern or pity or, god help me, charity. The first quarter paid for itself, and the second quarter is rockin’. I’m doing two and three appointments a day, plus lots of work in the office and on the phone. Refilling a pipeline takes time, and every transaction is a delicate dance right now. But lately I’ve been thinking about my first days in real estate, when I had my day divided in 90-minute segments to maximize my belly-to-belly time during the business day.

Here’s the thing: Despite the financial hole we’ve dug ourselves into, I’ve been feeling massively competent as a Realtor for the first time in my career. That might sound funny, since I’m such an arrogant prick all the time. But in our own battling back to a real estate market with a reliable supply of achievable transactions, I quietly feel myself the master — or the someday master — of all these tools I’ve been juggling these past few years.

I make the analogy of learning to drive, or learning to drive stick-shift, but lately I feel myself in that state of splendor, that flow, that I’ve always known in my work — for my whole life. I don’t mean that I felt less than adept before, because I’ve always been a very thoughtful Realtor — a Realtor very full of thought. But now it all seems kinesthetic, perfectly integrated into my bones. Not doing real estate. Being real estate.

It’s just there for me now, and I’m free enough in my mind that I can watch myself work, live inside the process Read more

May 9, 2009

My own first-hand foreclosure story

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

On April 27th, ironically the day before BloodhoundBlog Unchained commenced, IndyMac Bank posted a Notice of Trustee’s Sale against our home. I didn’t know about this until this week, although I had known it was a possibility.

This is really nobody’s business. But as a matter of steadfast policy, I have never let anyone make a truthful statement about me that I have not first made myself. I know I tend to excite the most evil sentiments in people with evil minds, so they may want to take this opportunity to further their self-destruction. This matters to me not at all. I live my life well to the right of the zero on the number line, and the only people I deal with or care about do the same. People who pursue disvalues are of no value to themselves, nor to anyone.

But so as not to introduce this topic and then leave it unexplained, here’s what happened: For the past three years, our outflow has exceeded our inflow. This is not an unusual story in the real estate business, and we have been lucky to have enough high-paying work to at least keep us within reach of profitability. During this same time, as you have seen here, we have completely reengineered everything we think about marketing, with the ultimate test of those ideas beginning only now.

But our debt load became severe enough last year that we had to make some hard choices. I elected to take a chance on our mortgage payments, since there was a plausible threat that we might lose the house anyway. Our choice was to keep the doors open at the risk of those doors themselves. I could see an upswing in our business activity, to the extent that I expected to catch up on the mortgage by the second quarter of 2009, and to catch up on everything by the fourth quarter.

I still expect this to be the case. My one mistake was that I didn’t think IndyMac would pull the trigger this soon. I played chicken and I lost, so now, in addition to buying back Read more

May 6, 2009

Meet the new dogs: Six new Bloodhounds to fill out the pack

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

We added six new BloodhoundBlog contributors last Friday at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. Actually, we added seven, but Dave Smith of the Real Estate Blog Lab has elected to take a pass for now to free up time for other projects.

It’s no accident that all of these folks are coming out of Unchained. A year ago, BloodhoundBlog Unchained was something that we did. By now, it’s something that we are. The blog and the events are conjoined, like a two-headed Cerberus, and each generates content and cultivates talent for the other.

One of the things we do here, one of the things we’ve always tried to do, is to make stars of our contributors. In a world without middle-men, the engaging expression of expertise should earn a writer a cachet of authority, and that authority should influence larger and larger audiences. We have built a big megaphone for talking to real estate professionals, and we want to make that megaphone available to the most creative and talented people we can find.

So: Here are the new dogs. I hope you’ll make them feel welcome.

It would be an understatement to say that Ira Serkes was the stand-out student at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. The man is a geyser of fascinating real estate marketing ideas, which he shares with an unrestrained delight. Ira and his wife Carol are Realtors in Berkeley, California. Ira co-authored “Get the Best Deal When Selling Your Home — SF Bay Area Edition” and Nolo Press’s best-selling book “How to Buy a House in California.”

Scott Cowan is a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog. He organized our invasion of Seattle in February, and, while we were there, he signed on to work as a staffer for BloodhoundBlog in Phoenix. That is, he and Brad Coy served admirably as the Vice Presidents in Charge of Everything Else. Scott sells classic homes in the Tacoma, Gig Harbor, and the Puyallup areas of Washington State. If you want to make his day, ask him about the $8,000 home-buyer credit.

Kerry Melcher may be the most unlikeliest contributor to a weblog that has always endeavored to bring you unlikely contributors. Kerry is Read more

May 1, 2009

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix 2009: A quick wrap-up…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

I don’t know how I’m still awake — and from moment to moment I’m not. But we wrapped up Unchained in Phoenix tonight, and I wanted to take a quick minute to salute everyone who was part of an amazing experience. Two fingers of Bushmills — more would be a waste. To all the dogs and to everyone who learned to howl like a Bloodhound this week, we are in your debt. This was by far the best Unchained event so far, and we are but begun. Per ardua, ad astra!

April 24, 2009

Unchained Melodies: Here’s what our world sounds like to me tonight…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Everything I see lately of what was once so decisively “our world” just looks to me like intramural patty-cake. That’s as may be, by now. It is what it is. I am not in it. I am not of it. And I am quite a bit less interested in it than I was when this was still an avoidable fate. But I know — and in a year’s time everyone will know — that BloodhoundBlog is what’s left outside the walls of the Praesidium. We are free because we understood that chains can be forged from burnished gold and not just pig iron.

But I am a rude dude in a rude mood, tonight more than most nights. We’re four days away from BloodhoundBlog Unchained, and I am profoundly inspired by all that we are going to do. And I look around me and I realize that “our world” is what it has always been. It doesn’t matter who chose to kneel for those “glittering prizes and endless compromises.” All that matters — all that ever mattered — is who didn’t.

Here’s what our world sounds like to me tonight.

April 17, 2009

The epistemology of open-mindedness…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

In email to me this morning, someone said, “Your site is major-league high-brow.” I thought that was a funny observation, but I also know there is some truth to it. I don’t know that we’re all that high-brow-civilized, but we do try to take up ideas in a very penetrating way.

Epistemology — the philosophy of knowledge — how can you verify and validate your knowledge? — is an idea I’m always bringing up. There is no limit to how much better we can get at thinking.

This is a video I saw yesterday at Little Green Footballs. This is on-topic for BloodhoundBlog only in the absolute broadest sense, but BloodhoundBlog is all about looking at things in the absolute broadest sense. In any case, this is a very nice example of video doing an intellectual job that would be much harder to pull off in prose.

April 15, 2009

“Americans today are taxed at levels most of our forebears would have considered unthinkable. By our own nation’s historical standards, we are outrageously, insanely overtaxed. And yet we shrug our shoulders and say, well, at least we’re not France…”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

The American Spectator:

How did it become “fair” for an American family to give to government a third of its income? How did it become “fair” for an American family to give to government half of its income?

When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, Americans had never before experienced direct taxation. They rebelled. In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which levied taxes on an array of British goods. The colonists responded by boycotting British imports. Parliament repealed most of the Townshend Acts in 1770 (except the tax on tea), and in 1773 passed the Tea Act, which essentially told Americans they had to buy their tea from the East India Company through government-approved merchants. Though the act actually lowered the cost of British tea, Americans were so outraged at Britain’s assertion of authority that they forbade tea-bearing ships from docking. And, of course, in Boston they threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

All of these taxes, by the way, were passed to finance the British Army. The newly independent United States taxed its people directly to pay off the war and ongoing conflicts with France, but in 1802, under President Jefferson, all direct taxation upon the American people was ended. That lasted for a decade, until we had to finance the War of 1812. That war was paid off by 1817, and Americans experienced no direct taxation from their federal government until 1861.

That means that “Manifest Destiny,” including James K. Polk’s war with Mexico, and the expansion of the country from coast to coast, was financed without a single direct federal tax being levied upon the American people.

The federal income tax imposed to finance the Civil War had two tax brackets — 3 percent and 5 percent — and was repealed in 1872. It remained off the books until 1913, when the 16th Amendment was ratified. The federal income tax rates in 1913 ranged from 1 percent to 7 percent. That highest rate applied to people earning $500,000 a year or more. Today, a married couple earning that much would pay a federal income tax rate of 35 percent, Read more

April 14, 2009

If you want to learn what we know — and to learn what we are learning — you’re coming to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Okay, this is my last pitch for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. If you can’t figure out which side of the bread has the butter on it, you’re just going to have to wear a bib.

Here’s the deal: What we’re going to teach you, nobody teaches. We’re going to go hands-ons, step-by-step through the things you need to be doing to create a state-of-the-art marketing profile. By the time you leave Phoenix, punch-drunk and exhausted, you will have built yourself a brand new marketing profile — just in time for the real estate market to make its rebound.

We’re going to be together for 72 hours, and out of that you might sleep 15 hours. The rest of the time we’re going to be working — in eight three-hour hands-on labs and in between-class and after-class sessions where we can learn, think and grow together.

The goal is to build a scenius, a shared genius among the bunch of us, so that we all come away smarter and better-equipped to take on the wired world of real estate.

What are you going to get for your money?

State-of-the-art weblogging techniques, photography and graphic arts expertise, social media marketing acumen and the salesmanship skills necessary to make belly-to-belly conversions. (Excuse me: To Skin cats.)

On my side of the quad, you’ll learn search engine optimization and search-engine marketing, lead generation and management techniques, landing pages and a whole lot more.

Taken together, we’ll be covering every step of the real estate marketing process from the customer’s first tenuous investigations through first contact, incubation, the sales cycle and conversion.

And these classes will be taught by actual working real estate professionals who are actually doing this work in their own practices.

Like who? Mister Ubiquitous, Brian Brady, is the Dean of Marketing. He’ll be leading Linda Davis, Kristal Kraft and Sean Purcell on the content side of the campus. I’ll be serving as the Dean of Geeks, working with Eric Blackwell, Kelly Kohler and the inmimicable Ryan Hartman.

There will be other people speaking, including Mark Green giving a presentation on CRM marketing. And there will be a support staff of experts to Read more

April 8, 2009

The Inman Prayer: “Deliver us not into deliberation and tempt us not into leadership, for ass-licking for lucre is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever, amen…”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

You just can’t make this stuff up:

Inman News is launching a new feature: Real Estate Product Reviews.

Would you like to be part of a team of real estate professionals that reviews and rates new real estate technologies, tools and services?

We want to hear from you.

I’ll just bet you do…

I loved this bit of reptilian reciprocity:

Imagine if the digital/virtual book (Vook) knew at what point you stopped reading, and then starting sending you Tweets from characters in the story up until that point, or giving you a tease of what’s coming up next. I can riff a bunch of ideas off this but my head is going to explode!

Amazingly enough, this harshly critical review of vacuous vaporware comes from a vacuous vaporware vendor who has suffered equally harsh treatment from Inman “News” — call it quid pro lizard.

Our whole world is out of joint by now, so much has the word “supportive” come to mean “promotional.” Drew Meyers is a sweet, sweet man, but this article is nothing but vendor-pimping. The vendor might well deserve the accolades, but, if so, why bury the lead? The post is not about SEO nor about a well-optimized web site. It’s about the vendor who built that attestedly well-optimized site. Hiding that fact reeks, in my opinion.

And it wouldn’t do to forget the best little PR3 weblog in Texas. Agent Shortbus is not a whore, and don’t you dare say it is! It’s more like a big-hearted, big-haired, round-heeled gal who just happens to like a Prime Rib before and a Blue Agave Margarita after. What’s so bad about that?!?

Diogenes might as well be Cassandra, I do understand that. But we are too much at risk of becoming entirely enmired in bullshit, to the extent that we can’t even smell it any longer. When Inman News, the high temple of the vendorslut religion, can pretend to do product reviews — that seems like a good time to tune into Radio Cassandra.

We have this thing, and maybe none but few of us have understood from the first how unusual it is for real estate professionals to live Read more

March 29, 2009

The mapmaker’s dilemma: What the hell are you doing with your time?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

That’s a screen shot of the user interface of the beta version of the mapping software I talked about on Friday.

This version:

Creates a Google Maps KML file from a list of street addresses
Assigns a user-selectable map marker to those addresses
Optionally creates a folder on the file server for that address — to serve as an engenu folder
Optionally creates folders and folder structures, thus to create an engenu hierarchy
Optionally builds links from the map markers to the individual street address folders

This is me writing to the Swallow Hill Gang last night, a very brief outline of features and capabilities:

Any valid addresses, one to a line, will produce a KML file that can be imported into Google Maps.

Like this, which is me and my best beloved:

314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

You’ll have the map marker you choose. I’ll be adding more.

If you select Folders, a folder will be created for that address:

“314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

If you select Links, the folder will be linked from the map marker.

If you select Links without Folders, neither one happens, for obvious reasons.

If you precede a line with a tilde — “~” — a folder is created, and subsequent address lines and their respective folders and links are created hierarchically. Like this:

~Top Level Folder

would create a folder at the top level named “Top_Level_Folder”.

This structure:

~Top Level Folder
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

would create a link to a folder from the map marker for my house inside of the “Top_Level_Folder” folder, hence:

“Top_Level_Folder/314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

If you do this:
~Top Level Folder
~Top Level Folder/Second Level Folder
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

You would get this:

“Top_Level_Folder/Second_Level_Folder/314_East_El_Caminito_Drive,_Phoenix,_AZ_85020”

You have to build each level of the hierarchy as you go. No harm, no foul if you try to create a folder that already exists.

You can do this:

~Love
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek
314 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek/Girl Next Door
322 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020
~Love/Barefoot Boy With Cheek/Girl Next Door/And Baby Makes Three
402 East El Caminito Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85020

and you will have created what I hope will be a by-now obvious hierarchy.

If all you want to do is create a folder hierarchy, Read more

Category: Egoism in Action (page 17 of 26)

No more free lunch! Understanding the National Association of Realtors — all the way down to your bones…

by Greg Swann

Earth to NAR: Drop dead — and try not to stink up the place while you’re doing it

by Greg Swann

Skinning elephants: The lifelong salutary benefits of negotiating your compensation with your buyers

by Greg Swann

The essential importance of criticism to my mental functioning

by Greg Swann

Making a virtue of necessity is usually an error…

by Greg Swann

Maybe the book we need is not the BloodhoundBlog book…

by Greg Swann

My own first-hand foreclosure story

by Greg Swann

Meet the new dogs: Six new Bloodhounds to fill out the pack

by Greg Swann

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix 2009: A quick wrap-up…

by Greg Swann

Unchained Melodies: Here’s what our world sounds like to me tonight…

by Greg Swann

The epistemology of open-mindedness…

by Greg Swann

“Americans today are taxed at levels most of our forebears would have considered unthinkable. By our own nation’s historical standards, we are outrageously, insanely overtaxed. And yet we shrug our shoulders and say, well, at least we’re not France…”

by Greg Swann

If you want to learn what we know — and to learn what we are learning — you’re coming to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

by Greg Swann

The Inman Prayer: “Deliver us not into deliberation and tempt us not into leadership, for ass-licking for lucre is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever, amen…”

by Greg Swann

The mapmaker’s dilemma: What the hell are you doing with your time?

by Greg Swann

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