Author: Greg Swann (page 7 of 209)

Buck Phiden is clarifying for me. Brevity is not the whole of it, and Buck cheats, so you know, by means of well-understood sleights-of-mind, but nothing cuts to the quick like a rapier wit, so lately he gets all the best jokes.

But this, this morning, is not funny:

“Who would trust anything said by the U.S. government?” –Buck Phiden

I’m thinking of the Americans to be abandoned to their fates in Afghanistan, but I’m thinking of the vaccines, too, and of their totalitarian marketeers, and of every other species of bullshit now blown out of Washington every day.

The U.S. government has less credibility today than it had yesterday, before Fiasco Joe lied about the Americans who will be abandoned. Less than it had on August 13th, before the fall of Kabul. Less than it had on January 19th, before Fiasco Joe was installed as Resident. Less than it had on January 5th, before the U.S. government declared war on the people who, until the 6th, had always loved and defended it. Less than it had on November 2nd, before the election was stolen.

The U.S. government is illegitimate by the only measure that matters: No one believes it, believes in it, or believes anything it says.

The husk may yet stand, like the hollowed out tree in Atlas Shrugged, but it’s dead inside, at least for now.

Godspeed, America. Godspeed, Earth. Look out for your own…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Purchase mortgage applications rise as Treasury yields fall.

NPR.org: A Startup Is Turning Houses Into Corporations, And The Neighbors Are Fighting Back.

Joel Kotkin: Progressives have ruined California: Governor Gavin Newsom’s hapless reign exposes the rot at the heart of America’s liberal elite.

City Journal: The Results of the Labor-Market Experiment Are In: Reducing unemployment benefits reduced unemployment.

Joy Pullmann: ‘Trust Not In Princes’: 7 Reasons For Hope While The Ruling Class Lights Dumpster Fire After Dumpster Fire.

As of yesterday, and assuming the whole house of cards doesn’t come crashing down, life got even better for red state real estate brokers: In order to sustain their level of panic through the 2022 congressional elections, the blue states will be exporting still more of their most-productive citizens: More mandates, more movers. Keeping the hysteria going nationally helps, too, since it bolsters the arguments for remote work.

Florida has it best, for now, but if the world is teaching you anything, it’s that everything of governments is temporary. Arizona has done less than most, admirably – and, of course, most Zonies did nothing at all – except carry on in the golden glow of paradise. The most potent anti-viral is sunlight: The virus killed our shut-ins.

Seriously, I live across the New River from Sun City, which, like the homeless, should have been wiped out – but wasn’t. Get outside. You’ll zap every virus and soak up the best form of Vitamin D – the Driven part of your immune system. 😉

There is in fact a Biden Doctrine, no doubt written for him by minions of Obama, and it is simply this: ‘Progressively’ less-camouflaged Marxist domination of every level of American government. They can’t drive the final stake through America’s heart without stealing at least one more national election, so the dreaded virus – which killed precisely zero people yesterday in Arizona – must be hyped to maximum panic.

Panic doesn’t sell very well in Arizona. But the houses do…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Fewer first-time homebuyers are competing these days.

RedState.com: Eviction Moratorium Case Lands in the Supreme Court 17 Days After the 60-Day Renewal Began.

Brad Polumbo: The 10 States Leading the Economic Recovery All Have One Thing in Common (And So Do the Worst Ones!).

The Washington Post: Corporate America’s $50 billion promise.

CDR Salamander: Eight Days in Kabul: If you think this has a happy ending, you’re not paying attention.

City Journal: Beam-in-the-Eye Environmentalism: States and localities enact symbolic green regulations while embracing land-use regimes that harm Read more

Give it to Trump: “Everything woke turns to shit” is too long for a bumper sticker, but tee-shirt fortunes are being made today. Here’s why the claim is true:

The Who: We are born knowing practically nothing and nothing practical. We learn most and best by imprinting on the people we grow up around, with your lifelong character emerging from habituated choices you made when you were too young to know you could choose. You trusted the people around you to set boundaries for you, and, when they didn’t, you acted out until they did – the meltdown. Underfathered children typically have no one to set boundaries for them, and, since frustrated displays escalate and amplify, over time their acting out becomes louder and more bizarre. This is the origin of the woke, but also of the over-pierced, the over-tattooed and of all those brand-new flavors of involuntary celibacy and suicidal despair we stupidly call “genders”. The woke and all of the shrieking lost children around us – melting down for life – are the result of bad examples set by their parents, who were themselves too busy destroying marriage and the family to care.

The Whom: Historically, theocracies have been Ci on top, Cs below. Go to temple, pay the tithe, don’t transgress overtly, stone a whore with the boys every now and then if you have a need to show off – otherwise you’re on your own. Cs dads are good dads, which is why these cultures endure. But: Theocracies suck, economically, and there is a limit to how much the parasitic class can demand without being replaced by new parasites. Marxism, by contrast, is Ci top to bottom. Displays are Ci down and Ic up – no exceptions, no deviations, no excuses. The only currency is compliance, and, in consequence, the only opportunities to stand out and advance come from spotlighting non-compliance. Hence cancel culture. To be woke is to be self-imprisoned into being nothing but woke – with your own unique, irreplaceable self being the everything that turns to shit Read more

Shakespeare has Horatio say, “You might have rhymed,” and that reproach is never far from my mind. To live around me is to live in a world of verse: Couplets, a lot, but songs, too, written on the fly as conversation. But: No cheating: Everything rhymes, scans and makes sense – as poetry in English must.

And how stupid is that? My wife might be impressed – or perhaps she just pretends to be – but it profits me truly nothing – perhaps less than nothing – to do things this way. It is pleasing to me, and that is sufficient, and I don’t (often) torment the ears of strangers. But speech is sound and sound is music and poetry – spoken or sung – is the music of a thriving mind.

Let me sell it to you that way as I tell you about my poetic relationship with Miss Cleopatra Chioux, the now-eleven-month-old French Bulldog to whom I am mentor, Dutch Grandfather and valet. I can say whatever I want with dogs, and I always have. Miss Chioux is patient with me if I have to dig for a rhyme, and she has never yet mocked any club-footed trochees.

Because so much of what I say at home is sung-spoken verse – aka mock-Broadway-style musical comedy – and because I am so-much focused on this ding-dang dog, it could be I’m writing a musical of my own.

What’s it called?

“Dogshit – a musical.” If my second hope is that there one day might be a “Dogshit on Broadway,” my first would be that you do not groan, “Not again!”

Is there a plot? We had our troubles with every puppy’s evil twin – Poo Peter – but his noxious influence is easily vanquished by plastic bags deployed like disposable gloves on the hands of people who make enormous money at other times of the day. That just by itself is hugely funny to me: Children and grandchildren alone are an insane capital sink to any accountant or actuary, but policing the poop of pets – hands-on, Read more

This is me, coming on six years ago, nevermore newsworthy than now:

One line from Shyly’s delight:

A Driven who is not in charge of something important to him will be disruptive – and eventually destructive.

To be rational is to be rational about everything – including oneself. I am very Driven, and much of the advice I give amounts to Drivenism – how to work harder, how to lose weight, how to think and feel better by adopting Driven habits of mind. But I am too much aware of the dark side of the Driven state of mind addressed in that quote: Leadership is the amplification of one man’s will, and, accordingly, Driven people build amazingly well – but they also destroy amazingly well.

The headline of this post is a shorter statement of this very short statement:

1. Marxism is the temporary and catastrophic mutiny of the Cautious over the Driven.

2. Islam is the enduring but persistently failed mutiny of the Cautious over the Driven.

3. History is what happens when the Driven wake (or sober) up.

The Driven are never not leading, even when they’re putatively out of power. If they’re not leading people toward their own ideals, they’re leading them away from yours – or simply leading each other to their own destruction.

The whole world is a Runaway Minivan by now – and if the Driven won’t drive, nobody’s going anywhere – except backwards. But while it’s good news for a family when Dad takes back the wheel, when the Driven put down a mutiny, rivers run red.

The Hellenism of the Hoplite Greeks creates peace by being continuously prepared for war. But the foreign policy of the ancient Greeks and Romans – still very much the foreign policy of The West – consists of negligence punctuated by exterminations. Multiculturalism is Act I in a story for which Monoculturalism is Act III.

If you want to avoid the extermination of the people the suddenly-diligent West will exhort you to kill, share Hoplite civilization now, by your affectionate displays. Our Read more

I have so many questions for dogs.

That’s a funny observation, and I want to make it the first line of a book someday, but it really is no joke: In my personal ‘Freaky Friday’ fantasy I get to quiz dogs about everything.

As noted, I think academics are useless when it comes to apprehending ontology, so my very first question might be: “How do you see?”

Not the optics or the bio-mechanics, but simply this: “What means what to you in this chaotic tableaux?”

We are Greeks – thoughtless ones – so we have been rigorously trained from birth to focus on differences: “Which bunny is brown?” “Color only the triangles.” “Where’s Waldo?”

Why would your dog go about things that way?

Here’s fun: You know you can easily hide things from your dog simply by covering them. A ball under a tee shirt is a comedy triumph to a toddler and a complete mystery to a dog. Try hiding things in plain sight: Put something the dog loves to see into a setting so chaotic the dog persistently overlooks it.

Give a Bloodhound like Odysseus one of Waldo’s dirty socks and that skinny emo freak has no place to hide. You can get your dog to watch videos – if they’re about dogs and involve lots of motion and barking. But show a dog a static still life expecting anything but boredom? Good luck with that.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates dip slightly to 2.86%.

Redfin.com: July Marked 12 Straight Months of Double-Digit Price Increases.

City Journal: No Home for Innovation: Why China will never have the world’s preeminent economy. Innovation is D or I, not C. You can’t be both new and perfect. Perfectionism is the enemy of all originality.

Asia Times: Are Taliban planning to massacre Americans? The Taliban know their history well and they want to make the Americans pay for the last 20 years of warfare.

The Federalist: Homeschooling Is Surging Across America. Homeschoolers Told Us Why.

Dr. Ben Carson: Does The Definition Of ‘Fascism’ Apply To The Biden Administration?

If you can read me, chances are you have lived your entire life in a Golden Age you did almost nothing to notice or appreciate. For every day of your life, everything has gotten better, faster, cheaper – and cooler – and you lived with a despot’s expectation that everything would always be that way.

Wrong answer.

We have spent the past 18 months indulging in Normality Bias and the Post Hoc Fallacy – “When things get back to normal…” – while steadfastly refusing to notice that things are less and less normal every day.

Vide:

• Fiasco Joe just licensed Red China’s wished-for conquest of Taiwan.
• Taiwan has F-15s and bombs if not nukes – and, unlike the U.S., a will to survive.
• Red China has military weaknesses of epochal proportions.

Do the math – if you dare.

Every day should be better than the last – and that can be true for you, despite everything, if you look out for your own. But it could be a very long time before anything is normal again…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: 5% of Home Sellers Dropped Their Price in Recent Weeks.

CNBC: Rent is about to go up again—here’s why.

Raymond Ibrahim: The Real Lesson of Afghanistan: The ‘Journey of Jihad’ Marches On.

Michael Anton: Afghanistan: Doomed from the Start: Twenty years of ruling class failure.

Christopher Rufo: Bank of Amerika: The financial giant teaches that the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work.”

We are awash in copy about copy-writing. Do your eyes glaze over? Mine sure do.

Claude Hopkins wasn’t wrong, but he was writing for people who like to read. Shakespeare was mocking Polonius, but so what? Brevity is your only hope.

If you can make a cogent argument in a tweet, you’re in command of the material. If you can do it with a meme, so much the better. But the challenge for every persuasive writer is brevity beyond brevity:

The bumper sticker.

If you can sell an idea with a bumper sticker, you can sell.

Seven words is far too many. If people can’t absorb it at a glance – and remember it forever – it’s not working. Persuasion is a verb and a noun. Everything more is weighing you down and costing you influence.

So, accordingly, here is my Buck Phiden bumper sticker:

“Mock evil.”
–Buck Phiden

I’ll be making more.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage rates hit their highest level in a month, and weekly demand drops.

CNBC: Homebuilder sentiment falls to lowest level in a year as buyers face sticker shock.

City Journal: In Los Angeles County, a Democratic sheriff who wants to enforce the law finds himself on the wrong side of his own party.

The Federalist: How To See If Critical Race Theory Is In Your Kids’ School—And Fight It.

Bob Barr: Afghanistan: an Intelligence Failure Bigger than 9/11.

Christopher Bedford: How To Stop People From Falsely Accusing You Of Racism.

American Greatness: The ‘Thank You for Your Service’ Red Pill: Citizen armies don’t fight endless wars with literally nothing to show for it; professional armies do.

In nature, ontos and telos (being and shoulding) are wed: They are the faces of the same coin – form as function – and to find one is to find the other.

So: All birds and all mammals are warm-blooded, and all warm-blooded creatures thrive by storgic love – the enduring love of families. How family is defined is dependent on the critter, but – ontos being telos being ontos – family is who you share body-heat with.

There’s more: The socialization of body-heat begat pair-bonding in birds – scaling their chances of survival – and lactation in mammals – scaling their storgic love to a state of frenzied worship.

But: Storgic love doesn’t scale: You can’t share your body-heat – or any genuine compassion – with distant strangers. Family is right here – or it’s nowhere.

That’s leadership’s challenge: Every social machine is a family – almost always a dysfunctional family because storgic love doesn’t scale. When the big-boss tells you, “We like to think of ourselves as a family” – you know he’s full of shit. And yet social machines that work do so because everyone believes – typically without direct evidence – that the big-boss loves them.

Accordingly: Ds is the best leadership strategy – period. Best for fathers leading their families, best for entrepreneurs leading their staff, best for political or religious or social leaders of any sort.

Leadership is love. We are in the mess we are in because Ci is a terrible leadership strategy, but we won’t be out of it until Ds takes back control of everything.

In other news:

City Journal: Washington State’s Tax Revolt: Local municipalities balk at a new state levy they fear will hurt their economy.

J.D. Tucille: Free Society Dwindles as Permission Requirements Grow: Many things once done as a matter of right are now privileges to be dispensed or withheld by those in power.

Brendan O’Neill: This is worse than Saigon: America’s humiliation in Afghanistan confirms that the woke West is utterly incapable of standing up for itself.

FrontPage Mag: Fleeing Afghanistan: The worst possible message to our enemies across Read more

To my chagrin, I was for this war, when it started. I believed the bullshit about ‘democracy building’ and I agreed that you cannot negotiate with bullies until you disabuse them of bullying.

I was wrong about America’s resolve, obviously, but I was wrong as such in the way that Donald Trump was very right: Bullies will be obliterated, but you can screw up your own countries however you like, provided the trade routes stay open. How right was he? Until yesterday, Islamofascist terrorism has not been news since the vaporization Soleimani. Until yesterday, U.S. forces had been free of casualties in Afghanistan for four years.

You can peruse Buck Phiden to quarry all the dark veins my mind can mine, but two stand out today:

First, the actual target is Taiwan – and please do recall that the purpose of ‘shock and awe’ was to put China out of the war business. That worked great. America’s well-advertised fecklessness leaves Taipei completely fecked – which may make Red China’s rivers run red.

And second, China Joe just rearmed Islamofascist terrorism – just when Trump almost had Paleo Islam’s head back up its ass, where it belongs. The War Party is tabulating its replacement orders this morning, but nothing sells weapons like more war – and Sleepy Joe, sellout or somnolent, just bought us a lot more war.

In other news:

PJMedia.com: Yes, There Are Victims in the Government’s Eviction Moratorium.

Redfin.com: Homebuyer Bidding-War Rate Drops to Lowest Level Since January.

City Journal: Please Don’t Feed the Businesses.

The New York Post: President Biden will own the fall of Kabul – when the real killing begins.

Angelo Codevilla: The Silence of the Shepherds.

Buck Phiden graced me with five new jokes this morning, in the first hour of my day – which starts for me sometime in the dead of the night. This is ephemera on ephemera, fleeting snark on a platform where I am already suppressed. Fun for me, which is all that matters, but a clinic for you, too, if you like, in how to write graffiti.

We think of it as Roman art – graffiti and satire itself – but the Loki joke is as old as Loki, and the best exemplar of Loki in classic lit is Homer’s Odysseus, whose canine presence here graces us with a joke of his own every day.

A joke has a seller (“Knock-knock”) and a buyer (“Who’s there?”). A Loki joke has a seller, a buyer and a target – and the joke consists of the unexpected pain inflicted on the unsuspecting target.

Graffiti is a Loki joke made anonymously, ideally against a powerful target. The power of the joke comes less from the underlying humor than from the risk of crossing the powerful. Accordingly, reading and especially reacting to graffiti is also risky – and, in that respect, anyone who is presumptively forbidden from laughing at graffiti is also the target of the joke.

But laughter is a mammal brain phenomenon. It races ahead of the thinking brain’s plodding clerical efforts, so a chuckle can slip out before studied propriety can suppress it. Knowing in detail that we are organisms does not make us not-organisms, so our failures at the suppression of irrepressible biology are funny, too.

If one man laughs at the wrong moment, it might cost him his job – or his life. If a nation laughs when it has been ordered not to – another dictatorship has fallen.

It took a while, but Odysseus won everything in the end – and, of course, the world ends and begins, over and over again, because of Loki and Sigyn. And Marxism in power is always a pageant of ineptitude, a bulging balloon of sanctified buffoonery: Humorless Read more

“One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy” – the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people – than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.” –James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism.

Although he claims to come from Scranton, PA, Sleepy Joe Biden apparently has yet to meet the Cumberland Strain of American patriots. Joe Bob Briggs wrote a wonderful send up of the Cumberland Kind, and you should read it, but here’s a key incident to illustrate the idea: When the federal government turned on redneck distillers west of the Cumberland (ahem) Gap – The Whiskey Rebellion – some folks paid the new taxes, but the Cumberlanders moved out of reach of the revenuers and proceed to invent Bourbon and later stock-car racing.

If you put yourself on the freeway and set the cruise-control for four miles-per-hour above the speed limit, everyone who is passing you is a Cumberlander in spirit – a taker of no shit. The ones who honk at you could find a way to shoot you, if you get too much in the way.

These are the people Sleepy Joe intends to make war on…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Fannie Mae’s rental payment change worries some.

CNBC: U.S. judge denies landlords’ request to block CDC national eviction ban.

CNBC: U.S. Supreme Court strikes down part of New York’s eviction ban.

KOMO News: Seattle police’s response times reach over 60 minutes as staffing shortages continue. Ahem.

Scott McKay: Toward An American Revivalism: It’s time to say “goodbye” to conservatism. CTRL-F ‘fatherhood’; not found.

Human Events: The Biden Justice Department Can’t Seem To Produce The Evidence It Supposedly Used To Indict The January 6th Protest Cases.

Julie Kelly: The Justice Department’s ‘Troubling’ Discovery Delays: January 6 defendants appear to have practically no shot at a fair trial in Washington, D.C. Some judges are finally pushing back.

Here’s a fascinating fact, at least for everyone resonating between my ears: Miss Cleopatra Chioux, the French Bulldog to whom I am valet and Dutch Uncle, does not know how to jump down from chairs or sofas.

She jumps masterfully, mind you – on terra firma. But she has always feared and doubted jumping down from a height, and I have done nothing to amend this aversion. Instead, I am happy to constrain her movements whenever I need to. Our conversation pit is her hamster trail: Room to roam, nowhere to go. In the mean time, I am waiting to see what she works out on her own.

And yes: When I am not selling and managing real estate, I am playing with a puppy to figure out how she knows what she knows. I’ve been writing little things like this at Facebook forever, typically precedent to writing something more momentous, but that’s a habit I have to break.

Here’s the fascinating part: Much like infants, dogs know almost nothing when they’re born. The snake-brain stuff works, but that’s more process than knowledge or even awareness. But instinct or race-memory or anything like an in-born wisdom of the workings of the world outside the womb seems to me to be utterly absent.

My take is that Cleo does not know anything that she has not learned from the world of experience. She has no thinking brain, but since all mammals are easily-trained, we know she has the ability to connect dots: Not A to C, but A to B on her own, all the time, and A to B to C with training.

I think much of what is denoted as instinct in mammals is actually learned, emulated behavior: Otters teach their young to swim and male dogs who don’t grow up around leg-hikers pee like girl dogs for life.

Cleo is two treats away – one for the jump down, one for the jump back up – from being mistress of the sofa. But she doesn’t know she can do it, even though she never couldn’t, Read more

This is me seventeen years ago, writing about a cat who cheated death for as long as she could:

Anti-evolution asserts itself…

Understanding anti-evolution, step-by-step:

1. My wife Cathy has been feeding feral cats in our neighborhood, depriving them of the natural evolutionary process of starvation. Denying them, even, of the opportunity to prey on some other sucker. She did not try to adopt the feral cats, to her credit, first because we already have seven cats, and second because they’re feral–which means skittish and really good at drawing blood.

2. One of the feral kittens, to get warm, climbed into the fan housing of my wife’s car.

3. The next morning, Cathy thumped the stuffing out of that kitten while trying to start her car.

4. Greg, the strong, silent type, wrestled the ding-dong kitten out of the fan housing.

5. Greg, because he really, really likes having sex and wants to continue having sex, did not strangle the kitten, even though it was sliding right under death’s door.

6. Instead, Cathy rushed the thumped-up kitten off to the vet.

7. The vet didn’t kill the kitten either, even though he doesn’t get to have sex with my wife.

8. Many weeks and many, many dollars later, the kitten was released from the veterinary hospital.

9. Because it is a feral kitten, completely unsocialized, my wife spent a lot more money on it on the way home from the vet.

10. Then she fell in love with it and gave it (her) a name: Nero Marquina.

11. Now we have eight cats.

12. Even so, the free food continues for the neighborhood feral cats, more and more of them every day…

Miss Chioux is helpful to me, at least. I have worked with her to do things as procedures, and she delights in knowing and doing what comes next. Death is what comes next for Marquina. All of us, including the little yearling Cleopatra Chioux, are lucky she was able to hold it at bay for so long.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise to 2.87% after jobs report.

CNBC: Rental bidding wars Read more

The Federal government has no Constitutional power to police commercial transactions. Per the Founding Fathers, the Federal government has no police powers over the citizens of the sovereign states at all.

This matters because it seems likely that today or someday soon, Sleazy Joe Biden will try to impose a national lockdown, a national mask mandate or a national masks-in-schools mandate. All of these would be unconstitutional – you know, like the CDC eviction moratorium.

The Fedly intrusions on individual liberty over the past 90 years were made possible by a deliberate misunderstanding of the “commerce clause” – reinterpreting the word ‘regulate’ to mean micro-manage, where the Founders and everyone until then knew that ‘regulate’ meant what faucets do to water.

There are all sorts of Supreme Court decisions I would like to see reversed, but the decisions that created the Federal leviathan are by far the worst. In the American Thinker link below, John Green tells you how much worse the Supreme Court has gotten, but I invite you to consider how much better everything could be – if we only had the Constitution we were promised.

What Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Cross-Dressers teach us is that dictatorship is always caprice, and caprice is the death of everything worthy. With one reversal, the Court can get rid of all the awful alphabet agencies – including the property-usurping CDC – and give Americans back the limited government they were promised.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications up 2.8% amid jobs gains.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand hints at return of the first-time homebuyer.

Joel Pollak: Major Landlords Sue L.A. for $100 Million over Eviction Moratorium.

Jordan Davidson: It’s Only A Matter Of Time Before The CDC Shuts Down Your Child’s School.

City Journal: Individual Choices, Not Lockdowns: Most people don’t ignore risks, and they can react more quickly than governments.

American Thinker: The Supreme Court has Become a Council of Kings.

Daniel Greenfield: Cuomo Quits Over Cuomosexuality, Gets Away With Cuomocide: Nursing home patients who choked out their last breaths still await Read more