Author: Greg Swann (page 6 of 209)

To read me is to study DISC-my-way by default, because that’s what I’m doing. This is me yesterday on Facebook:

History, until lately, was either Ci theocracy or Dc oligarchy. Gaius Marius, the Nazarene and the Apostle Paul inadvertently fathered Ds civilization, which is everything you think of as being actually civilized.

Marxism is Ci subverting Ds – long-since in abdication – along with Calvin and Luther’s Cs, a new theocracy taking over. But: Ci is terrible in chaos, as we are seeing, and Dc is poised to take over everything with Dc speed and precision.

You’re looking for a Ds leader – Trump (Id) is not him, nor is Rand Paul (Cs) – and if you don’t find one, that could be it for Ds as a civilizational strategy.

I won’t live to see this play out, lucky me, but this is an epochal moment in human history: We must decide if we are one species or two.

Why are there no Ds leaders in politics – or business for that matter? You have to have a lot of either C or I to fight Ci – plus which, the man you seek has kids of his own to look out for.

Credit Loyola, too, but there was a Pauline genius in denominating “fathers” who did not themselves have children. That ideal, leadership as family – what’s best for all of us is what’s best for each of us – is absent from government and commerce for the same reason it is absent from the home: Almost none of us is wise enough to want it.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates stuck at 2.88% amid rise in COVID cases.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyer Profits At Risk With Falling Home Price Appreciation.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Despite Declining New Listings, Pending Sales Still Up 6% From 2020.

City Journal: From Empty to Empty: After 9/11, New York didn’t rebuild wisely – and that failure hurts the city in the current crisis.

Theodore Dalrymple: What We Have to Lose: Our civilization is more precious, and Read more

Fiasco Joe has by now lasted 15 days longer than I thought he would. Even as I admonish myself to abjure all predictions, still I keep expecting the world to drop that old shoe.

Here’s what’s what: Traitor Joe has the yips. Always has had, and the yips might well be the source of the ‘stutter’ he is alleged to have had. I’m not sure if he really has senile dementia or if he’s faking it to hide all the treason, but his response to all challenges – hiding – is only making the yips worse.

As is the world. A golfer with the yips is only looking at one ball. A batter with the yips is only staring down the next pitch. But the world will not stop throwing emergencies at Sleepy Joe, and hiding from them not only makes them worse – it makes everything worse.

I know Walkaway Joe is toast, because the preference cascade against him will swell with his every abdication of responsibility.

Hide and watch: A president with the yips is an ex-president.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage demand falls to lowest in two months as rates stagnate.

Mark Helprin: Defense Rests: We cannot survive without the defense of our sovereignty and independence.

City Journal: When Flags Waved: The stirring response by New Yorkers and Americans everywhere to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is a reminder of what the country used to be – and can be again.

Roger Kimball: ‘Adults,’ ‘Progress,’ and Disaster: Historians will look back at the Great Afghan Fumble of 2021 and say it was there and then that the United States took a large public step towards its own diminishment.

As a matter of news, OfferPad went public last week – meaning none of the iBuyers are now backed by wide-awake entrepreneurs, just pie-eyed punters. The “offering” was done by Wall Street chicanery to avoid even the casual due diligence white-shoe investors normally do.

But, of course, no due diligence will be possible for any iBuyer until the market has turned. Despite all the hoopla, the scam lives or dies on the rate of exsanguination caused by (stupidly) owning real estate.

When iBuyers buy at 95% of fair-market value and sell at 105%, they cheer themselves as real estate geniuses – when, just for right now, at the end of a nationwide feeding frenzy, everything is selling at 105%.

What story will they tell when they buy at 95% and sell at 85%?

What will shareholders say when they discover they were told only half the truth? – the only half that can be known in a market run-up that began before the iBuyers existed, but which will end resoundingly, hopefully not enduringly so.

Zillow and Redfin were already publicly-traded. OpenDoor and OfferPad have both just gone public in a mad rush – but why? If the idea is good enough to thrive in a down market, proving that fact would make the company worth much more, would it not?

I think the plain vanilla iBuyer idea is eclipsed by the move-up iBuyers – hence OpenDoor and OfferPad are both targeted poorly. But none of these notions have answered a real estate market when no one is calling, and, until they do, marketing them to arms-length investors strikes me as being predatory – like Dan Drew shedding himself of his watered (live)stock.

In other news:

CNBC: 48% of renters worry they won’t ever be able to buy a home, survey finds.

City Journal: No More Government Unions? A proposed California ballot initiative would outlaw public-sector labor groups.

Jason Rantz: Mass Resistance Arises As Washington Makes It Nearly Impossible To Get Vaccine Exemptions.

Since the advent of flat-screen HD-TVs, I’ve been telling my clients that the future of common spaces in the home is the sports bar: Not one big screen, but one big one with two or three smaller ones.

That joke’s on me, as TVs proliferate in our house. For now we have two glaring – but only one blaring – in the living room. On Saturday, Miss Chioux and I didn’t watch Nashville reruns on one screen while college football was painting the room in pretty sunlit colors on another – over-the-air and without-sound.

Normally on weekends I watch golf for TV that I’m not watching – TV that’s a window to look up to from a screen more-actively-engaged – but football was a flower show on every network. A big effusion of indifference to COVID fear-porn, too, even though sunlit events always end up disappointing the death collectors. Cathleen saw a little bit of the Wisconsin game, noting all the missing masks and the supreme whiteness of the people in the grandstands, compared to the people on the field.

And I’m glad for the football fans regardless of the knots of hypocrisy they have to gnaw through to get to a good time, but it remains that the future of fun is more private that public.

Those colors didn’t kill the cinema, nor did the virus: It was dying, anyway. But the virus has hastened long-standing trends away from commonly-shared spaces generally, while the TV and more-interactive screens take away many of the rewards and most of the drawbacks of going to the mall or the stadium or the cineplex. Why would I want T-Rex when I’ve got TV?

So here’s the future I don’t share with my clients: HDTV has a scarcity problem, amidst all its abundance, and a multiplexing problem. The solution will be home-level TV – all input sources available at all destination TV-monitors.

The big screens will be really big: One screen, not three or four, with a big window for the show you’re watching, smaller ones for the things you’re monitoring – or for the video Read more

Our Afghan friends just won’t stay out of the news. I’ll leave out the salacious stuff, but it’s fun to watch diversicrats encountering too much diversity.

But: If the Afghan leak-ins are more of the Ant-replacement strategy, I think the whole program might be bonkers.

First, non-fanatical Muslims are Ants, not Grasshoppers. It seems unlikely that Fiasco Joe is importing very many abortion fanatics, for example, or flamboyant pansexuals – from Afghanistan or anywhere.

And second, America is her own best sales rep: Even if you came here for the hand-outs, you might find yourself staying for the opportunities.

The job of the middle class is cultivating the middle class. A whole bunch of brand new Americans are here – like it or don’t – but they haven’t been infected by American public schooling.

The Democrats despise immigrants, expecting them to be nothing but replacements for the welfare slaves they aborted. If you cultivate your new neighbors, where and how you can, you will help them discover the America all of us are yearning for.

In other news:

Associated Press: More than 50,000 evacuated Afghans expected to be admitted into US.

Tristan Justice: California Wildfire Devastation Was Entirely Preventable Through Proper Land Management.

RedState.com: Why Can’t Joe Biden Stop Lying?

I sing the praises of practical ontology because we live in a cacophony of lies: You either take personal responsibility for understanding what is actually happening around you, or you mimic the mouthings of professional mouthpieces. Do you see why? If you have no way of checking up on reality, you have no way of checking up on them, either.

So: Ignoring whatever might be the cause – which is most emphatically not the point – is the Earth warming? Or is it cooling? How could you tell, one way or another, all on your own, using only your own senses as your measuring apparatus?

Here in the Sonoran Desert, we are gifted in late Summer with a seasonal delight we call the monsoon. South Asians quibble about terminology, but the monsoon used to have an objective definition based on the waxing and waning of persistently high humidity (for us): Wet air for weeks with big storms in the late afternoons and early evenings.

The source of the moisture is the Gulf of Mexico. When the Gulf gets very warm in late Summer, the airflow moves from East – around Florida, up the coast and off to Europe, the Gulf Stream – to West – across West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, all the way to Las Vegas and Palm Springs.

That’s the monsoon, for the whole of the desert Southwest. England and France flock to the beaches in August because their bad weather comes our way for a while. In Phoenix, the monsoon used to commence around July 15th, ending around September 15th. That rule-of-thumb has been failing for a while, such that they revised the official definition to hide all the missing moisture.

What is happening, observably to the senses and apprehensible in secondary consequences – e.g., changes in barometric pressure put my guitars out of tune – is cooling, not warming. The Gulf gets warm later and for a shorter span of time, sending less moisture West and more East – not out and under Florida Read more

I wondered yesterday with Cathleen if the Texas abortion law would have an impact on migration.

I was looking at a photo of voluminously unmarriageable women demanding their right to abort the pregnancies they didn’t incur from the dates they didn’t have. Will they be moving to states friendlier to infanticide? I can’t see why.

But Florida is the new Texas in this way, too, and other states – like the Four Corners of the Mormonosphere – are likely to restrict abortion, too. Legislation is no way to treat your neighbors, but the Red/Blue division between the states just got that much more intense – now with a bright-line quality of life issue: Pro-family versus pro-career.

Have the corporate weenies and NCAA types weighed in, yet? “Relent or it’s nothing but rodeo and pro-wrestling for you!” Frankly, their better argument is free egg-freezing – the low-cost way to pretend you’re not throwing them away.

But that’s where the migration will happen: Not now, among very-well-planted women, but going forward, as young women plot their life’s plan.

Real estate is kids and dogs. I don’t like laws, but the long-term effect of restoring federalism to infanticide laws will be immensely beneficial in the places where kids and dogs are already thriving.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates stuck in a rut at 2.87%.

Housing Wire: iBuyer Offerpad goes public at $2.7B valuation.

American Thinker: Afghanistan fiasco may have been the result of blackmail. Or, you know, China Joe simply sold America and all of its interests to a foreign empire…

Hydroxychloroquine worked all along. This was obvious all last summer, through all the lying on TV. Ivermectin apparently works, too, given the chorale of hysteria against it. We have foreign news sources to tell us what our own propaganda stooges won’t, and we have their spitting-in-unison to paint a negative image of the truth: Everything they denounce is worth looking into.

So we’ve known all along that having a healthy immune system matters more than anything: Fit, not fat, sunlight, D3, zinc, minimal alcohol, real food. Advice from the choir? Silence.

Obvious but well-concealed is the enduring immunity resulting from recovery from the virus. Sweden was half-right by not locking down – why we never hear about them any longer – but the other half we all missed: Corona parties for the healthy: Get it, prove it, kill it with therapeutics, herd immunity kills the virus. Since we’ve heard nothing at all about this, not even hysterical denunciations, I’m wondering if it might have worked.

Here’s what we can safely infer from the Deep State’s well-paid choir of liars: The stop-gap approach to health is suicidal. The people who took these vaccines may be stuck taking “boosters” for life – and the suppression of reports of side-effects is yet another disturbing choral sound-effect – but the whole vaccinated approach to human life is failing us.

The people who will have thrived, when the Age of the Coronavirus is a piece of history, are the free-range humans: Hard to kill because healthy from within. The rest of us are stuck praying that we’re not taking the wrong advice.

In other news:

CNBC: Here’s why experts believe the U.S. is in a housing boom and not a bubble.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: 9% Increase in Pending Home Sales is Slowest Growth Since June 2020.

American Thinker: Events in Afghanistan are about to destroy our American complacency.

I saw a tweet that perfectly expresses the tragic futility of Marxism, why it seeks only the impossible.

Vide:

nobody with a white mom should be happy. ever.

The racism is grandfathered in: Pretend-pissing on white people is every poser’s LoserPass™. As teleology, it’s just stupid; refuted in reality billions of times, as evidenced by the historical fecundity of the offspring of white mothers.

But what’s interesting is the open admission that the objective is the socialization of emotional states – which is not possible.

You don’t get to have my hare-brained happy childhood, and you can’t stick me with what you got. You can try to steal what I own, but you can never steal what I know, what I envision, what I’ll build when I’ve dispensed with you.

Marxists are miserable because they are at war with the good – in vengeance against their too-stern or too-absent fathers. By means of looting and cargo-cult costumery, they ape their victims – never doubting that the pose is just that.

Inadequacy fuels resentment, but that just makes things worse. The victims are ultimately just tokens, too. The cancerous conundrum for every Marxist is that you can’t steal any of the things that make life worth living.

In other news:

Housing Wire: US home price growth hit record level in June.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage-refinance demand drops as interest rates stall.

Brad Polumbo: Stanford Study: More Businesses Have Already Fled California This Year Than in All of 2020. California has regulated and taxed its once-thriving economy into a coma.

City Journal: Failure at Every Stage: What the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan tells us.

Helen Raleigh: Dr. Scott Atlas: Science Killed Itself Over COVID-19.

I expected Fiasco Joe’s resignation a week ago tonight. This evening’s good, too, and China Joe’s reputation sinks with every hour he remains in office.

But I am well-advised by myself to dismiss normality bias – the absurd belief that, since yesterday was good, tomorrow will be, too. We are the prized pets of a Diamond Jubilee Golden Age – that has now come to an end. Where once men who aspired to the ideal of honor made honorable exits, by now ‘governance’ comes down to lying about catastrophes and clinging to power by any means available.

So: What next? Who knows? Kamala Jong-un is as clueless as Slow Joe, without dementia as an excuse. What the Democrats have actually done, almost 250 years after this experiment began, is demonstrate how the U.S. Constitution can can be corrupted from within.

And, just like that, “What next?” is a much bigger question, isn’t it?

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuyers sign fewer contracts in July, as high prices chill the summer market.

Joel Kotkin: Jim Crow returns to California: The Golden State’s climate policies have enforced racial segregation.

City Journal: No Liberty? No Problem: Australians shrug at their government’s draconian pandemic response.

Michael Anton: Importing Enemies: The demand to resettle Afghan refugees brings the war home.

Charles Hurt: Biden’s War: Image of President in Fetal Position Has Enemies Quaking.

Just The News: Homeschooled children increased from 13K in 1973 to 5M in 2020, report finds.

I rhapsodize church, but I don’t go to church. But: I do go to Fellowship Hour, as valet and manservant to Miss Cleopatra Chioux, church dog. I’m perfect for the job: I don’t want to go to church and Cleo can’t. But receiving her vast and adoring fan club is the cherry on the sundae of her Sundays.

Until this Sunday. I am steadily more vertical in my pursuits, but not reliably so. I am no kind of dog-scooper, for now, and I’m completely useless as a poop-scooper. Miss Chioux stayed over Saturday, like usual, but she was hugely disappointed in me: I wasn’t playing right. Cathleen was a hero in every way, but I wasn’t good for much until Sunday morning. And, of course, there was no way I could take her to Fellowship Hour.

BFD? It matters to me. I’m trying to figure out what she can figure out, and the reliability of her weekly routine matters to us both. If she was clocking her weeks on the bright spot – Fellowship Hour – then I threw out more than my back. But it matters just because I love her and I want for her to have as much as she can of everything she loves.

How she’ll deal with this exception, I don’t know. I may be expecting too much from her – each day a brand new surprise, too many to keep track of. And yet I know she can clock her days, and many of our other dogs could, too. Ophelia, a Redbone Coon Hound, would come with her lead when she knew by the late-afternoon light that it was walking time – and so she would show up at 11 am on cloudy days.

All dogs – all mammals? all organisms? – live by the sun. Cleo is very playful for a French Bulldog, and we have worked hard to keep her busy – to not let her slip into that lazy torpor that defines too many dogs’ lives. But it’s been fun to watch her sleep cycle Read more

I’m an atheist, but I really like the idea of church, and I wish we had better ways of doing church. In the same kind of seemingly schizoid way, I hate the public schools, not alone because they are tax-funded, but I love charter schools, even though they are tax-funded.

Here’s the why for both: Ds civilization is a friendly competition among fathers to do everything better – especially fatherhood.

When a lot of Ds and Cs dads live near each other – in what we used to call a neighborhood – their awareness of each other leads each of them to better and better performances as fathers: Better providers, better homesteaders, better handymen, better coaches – better at everything at home and therefore better for everyone at home and in the world at large.

Better for their wives and children, too, it should go without saying. Moms compete with other moms when they can – meaning when dad has provided so well that mom can stay at home for kith and kin. And dance lessons and little league and summer camps and soap-box derbies are all made possible by Ds and Cs dads – prosperous enough to pay for it, loving enough to stay for it.

Churches and charter schools recreate that good-neighbors environment without the neighborhoods. By their being, they engender communities of like minds in which dads, moms and kids can all strive to do better together.

Churches are families of families, the fallback for failing families, much as the family is the fallback for failing individuals. Plus which, your church is the ideal place for your kids to meet their lifelong mates: Opposites might attract, but it’s shared values and expectations that go the distance.

And shared values and expectations are what unite kids from charter schools: All of the parents are serious about education, the curriculum itself is sound, and results matter, since the stock-in-trade – the children – is fungible. Good charter schools have branch locations all over. Bad charter schools get bought Read more

In the years immediately after World War II, the United States imported scads of German intellectuals. Nazi envy? The fear that we’d vanquished the lesser enemy? Or just plain old ‘aw shucks!’ American suicidalism?

Yes, we scooped up Werner von Braun and all his little Braunies – putting the U.S. weeks or even months ahead of the Soviets in space exploration.

But we also infested our universities with all of the Frankfort School, the neo-Marxist cabal who vomited out Critical Theory, among other intellectual atrocities.

Yes: The rampant Marxism that is destroying the world by way of America was brought to America by the American government. Who made your kid irredeemably obnoxious? Well, you did – but Uncle Sam provided both the noxious vocabulary and the inescapable intellectual straight-jacket.

The idea of ‘narrative’ is essential to the modern way of (none-dare-call-it-)thinking: The truth is what we say it is – or what the powerful say it is, or what we can make the powerful say it is with the right combination of flattery and torture. If I’m getting it all wrong, fear you nothing: There is no way to get it right except to swallow it whole with no objections – none, ever – by donning that straight-jacket yourself.

What’s wrong with the ‘narrative’ idea? How about Fiasco Joe? The ‘narrative’ needed a worthy opponent to take on Trump, so Sleepy Joe was literally ‘nominated’ – named – that epic hero.

Amtrak Joe is a cargo cult, and this is “no accident”. All of Marxism is a cargo cult: By stealing this wealth, I will also have stolen the attributes of character that created the wealth. Marxism is patricide-by-proxy, but the underlying crazy might be a sort of imagined post-mortem summing up, son-to-father: The triumph of vice over virtue at last!

If you watch for it, you’ll see that kind of snickering among all sorts of screw-ups, most notably Sleazy Joe himself: He gets off on getting away with things. That’s the reason for all of the very public child-molestation, too.

But now China Joe has his nuts Read more

I am circumscribed, written into my corner, temporarily. I threw out my back yesterday, so I am leaving you to our own devices with the news – with some commentary as we go.

My big problem is a matter of reliability: Miss Cleopatra Chioux, the French Bulldog I valet for, does not know that her social hour at church is not a fact of nature but is instead a matter of follow-through by a lot of people – mission-critically: Me.

I don’t know that she can really clock her whole week, but, if she can, visiting with her fan club is the cherry on the sundae of her Sundays.

I don’t want to let her down.

In other news:

The National Review: Supreme Court Strikes Down Biden Eviction Moratorium. Great news! The Supreme Court rushes in to protect the right to property – only a year late. How many lives were ruined? Who cares? Procedure matters more!

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates hold steady at 2.87%.

CNBC: ‘They were snatched up in 12 hours’: First-time homebuyers face stiff competition and high prices.

Business Insider: A real estate CEO appraises the home ownership inequality problem in the US — and how to fix it. What to make of Glenn Kelman? Is he really that red, or does he just spout Marxist jibberish to hang onto his job – and his head? Business Insider is captured, so it’s hard to tell how red Kelman actually is. He says the poison of government is so bad for housing that we need a lot more poison – but all corporate weenies talk like that. Here’s hoping the First Class section in the boxcar to the gulag is worth all of these compromises with undoubted evil.

Joel Kotkin: Big D Is a Big Deal: Dallas–Fort Worth is becoming the de facto capital of America’s Heartland.

City Journal: The Moralistic Corporation.

I’m going to give you a brand-new term: Black-washing.

Black-washing is racially-motivated white-washing.

The term ‘diversity hire’ is a ‘dog-whistle’ denoting a persistent beneficiary of black-washing. Consequential errors by people of preferred racial categories are dismissed, ignored or lied about. To address the error as would normally be done would call both the original hiring decision and the very idea of ‘diversity hiring’ – racial preferences – into question.

You’ll be able to see an example of all this tonight on television, I expect, as ‘diversity hire’ Lester Holt interviews ‘diversity hire’ Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Leroy Byrd about Byrd’s murder of Ashli Babbitt – which turned out not to be criminally-negligent-homicide (we are told), and yet somehow is not an act of heroism worthy of a medal and a ceremony. In other words: Black-washed.

Yesterday, I wrote a list of questions Holt will not ask:

1. Did you once abandon your firearm in a washroom?
2. Did you observe strict trigger discipline until you fired your weapon?
3. Were there members of your own team in your line of fire?
4. Were you given seven medals and a banquet by Congress?

They’re not really fair questions, since I already know all the answers: Byrd did leave his weapon in a washroom some years ago, and, but for black-washing, should have been fired then. Byrd not only had his hand on the trigger the whole time his weapon was drawn, he was weighed down by freight – a huge pile of documents – in his other hand. Byrd fired without issuing any warning, and without any obvious reason for shooting, with his own teammates in his line of fire. And, of course, he was ‘exonerated’ without getting any medals, his identity concealed for months, because all of these crimes are being black-washed.

Walking away on his firearm might require a special black-washing effort, but I expect the others to be ignored. So what’s the point of doing the interview at all? Bryd risks self-Smolletting, after all: Drawing explicit attention to the black-washing by Read more