Author: Greg Swann (page 8 of 209)

As I mentioned, I got thrown off of Facebook for three days, giving me time to think about what I want to do with them.

(Would-be closers take note: Giving the customer time and reason to think about killing your deal is contra-indicated.)

When Amazon shivved Parler, we had to rethink them, too. We can’t get all the way rid of them, so we cut our annual spend by around 90%, moving those purchases to other vendors.

I think I’m going to do the same with Facebook. I like the families and pets stuff, but I’m going to move everything else here or to Gab.

What makes a happening hotspot work? Everything has to work. What makes it fail? When the people who once thought it was hot decide it’s no longer working. Driving away reliable content creators is how Facebook will join MySpace, in due course.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Soaring home prices are spooking buyers.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyers: Paying Above Market and Reselling For More Upside.

Helen Raleigh: Suni Lee’s Olympic Triumph Is More Evidence American Meritocracy Works.

City Journal: Costly and Counterproductive: An executive order to mandate electric-vehicle sales presents economic and environmental problems.

The Heritage Foundation: Judge Defends Equal Justice Against Tide of Critical Race Theory, Disparate Impact.

Aboriginally, Marxism is patricide by proxy. Fathers with Cautious need as their first or second priorities – recalling that much of the post-Calvinist West is Cs at home – tend to produce rebels or replicas. Guess which Marx was? Both as expressions of their individual upbringing and as the motive of their movement, Marx, Engels and all of the Marxist theorists aim to rid the world of sternly disapproving Cs, Cd and Dc fathers, themselves becoming living saints of Ci theocracy.

Frustrated displays escalate and amplify. Underfathered Marxists (like every underfathered child) act out in dire quest of boundaries that never come. Accordingly, sources of disapproval multiply and the Marxism that was patricide aborning is genocide full-grown: Marxism is genocide by proxy.

And it seems to be turning out that any genocide at all will do. Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers, yes, of course – eventually. But for now, apparently, it will do to designate Unvaccinated Americans as the counter-revolutionary wreckers of the microsecond.

They’re not wrong: Anyone who refuses to be a replica of Ci is a rebel against the perfect order of everything. Don’t you ever dare doubt it: Heresy, not hubris, causes famine.

And who could be more worthy extermination than heretics? We can’t run out: The FBI is always whipping up more. And yet at some point, if only at gun-point, we can face facts: Marxism is genocide by preference.

In other news:

Redstate.com: Like Locusts, Hollywood Stars and the Tech Elite Are Swarming on Austin.

Don Surber: Leave the unvaccinated alone.

Heather Mac Donald: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2).

Pedro Gonzalez: ‘Defund the Police’ Is a Problem. Not Prosecuting Criminals Is Worse.

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

Mark Twain is reputed to have said that, and, if he did, it pays to remember that he was in the book-selling business. That’s why you used to see that quote so often in bookstores.

We repeat it like a dietary admonition: Good advice we have no intention of following. But I can go you one better, because I live it: To fail to write is to fail at being human.

Most of the credit we give to the thinking brain actually belongs to the mammal brain; in my spare time, I am demonstrating this with a French Bulldog named Cleopatra Chioux. What the thinking brain actually does, discernibly from the mammal brain and the snake brain, is make abstract connections – precisely what your dumbass dog can never do.

Qua telos, thinking rationally – in proportion to the facts – is our job – and for the most part we suck at it. Reason requires rigor, and rigor is meaningless if unmeasured. I am apt to say that discursive prose is thinking, but that’s not literally true. What is true is that if you expect me to believe that you have engaged in thought, you’re going to have to show me some proof. This – writing – is how that’s done.

Yes, you were cheated in school, and no, you’re not doing well at hiding that fact. But ignorance is everyone’s curse – we’re born that way – and it has never been more-easily exorcised.

The internet is very much your friend in this regard: It puts all the world’s facts at your fingertips, but it also drops you into little text boxes where you can make your ideas real by putting them into words.

There is nothing bad in this. Even belligerent assholes become better writers and thinkers, over time, by writing every day. And if you apply yourself honestly – never making persuasively-invalid claims, never indulging your biases, never attacking people when your Read more

So it seems me and Facebook are parting ways. I posted this photo yesterday:

Pretty pithy, no? Turns out, Facebook hated it. You’d think they’d hate it because it’s about their staff – pudgy college-bred Marxists who are begging to live La Vida Deathcamp. But no. The problem is their AI software thinks the photo is advocating eating disorders or something:

It’s hard not to agree with them that Marxism is suicidal – but only incidentally. Marxism is genocide, and Facebook is complicit.

Since this is the third time I’ve been caught out telling the truth on Facebook, I am banned for three days. In addition, they imagine that I would ever think of giving them money again, so they won’t “let” me advertise for 30 days. There’s more, but we care a lot.

The question is: What next? I like Facebook as an experience, but I hate the people behind it, and, as with Twitter, I knew it was going to have to go. It’s a self-destructive grace on Facebook’s part for them to work so hard to make an enemy of me: They need free content – it’s the draw – so pissing off content-creators one-by-one is just the kind of business strategy I like to see them pursuing.

Where for me? Here. I came back to BloodhoundBlog because I saw this coming. If you want to hear what I have to say, subscribe by email or CSS. If you want others to hear what the Bloodhounds are saying, you have to do the linking. I’ll be on Gab as @GregSwann going forward, but I have no following there, so far. I will continue to post the very rudest of attacks to LinkedIn, but they’ll throw me off in due course, too.

But that’s why you should be here: We tell the truth that gets censored everywhere else.

In other news:

CNBC: Renters are behind $3,700 in rent, on average. This map shows a state breakout.

Joel Kotkin: Garcetti’s Legacy.

The American Spectator: The Recycling Police Are Here, and They’re Not Happy With You: Government officials spy and surveil Read more

So my wife cooks with the big ugly pans, and she leaves them dirty because she know I don’t like for her to wash the big ugly stuff. But she leaves all the other dishes dirty, too, knowing that I can’t wash the big ugly pans until all the smaller stuff is out of the way. But the joke is on her, because I like doing the dishes when there are a lot to be done. I am Driven first, Incandescent second. The only jobs I like are the ones where I can literally see the difference.

I smile. We study logical fallacies and cognitive biases – and so we should: Truth is more than just the absence of error, but error is a malign infestation, always worthy of eradication. But even then we are haughtily Ci, or at best Cs. Every other way of looking at the world is lost to us – and everyone who doesn’t mimic or at least idolize Ci is entirely excluded from the conversations of civilization.

I am twice delighted to see public education blowing itself up. At its best it was an awful usurpation of parental authority. By now, it is simply state-sponsored Marxism. But parents seeking alternatives means that some huge fraction of the current generation of school-kids is going to learn to read. That’s a low bar, I know, but some is better than none. Better yet: Some huge fraction of the kids public schools routinely throw away will get a shot at an education, for an earth-shaking change.

If you think Ci gnome-scoffing is the only path to truth, put down your phone – which you owe to the inexhaustible Di energy of Steve Jobs.

Now that’s a man who made differences everyone can see – but think of what today’s public schools would do to him…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Homebuying Conditions Improve Slightly as Mortgage Rates Decline.

Housing Wire: Delta variant fears send 30-year mortgage rates to 2.77%.

National Review: Small-Time Landlords ‘Hanging On by Their Fingernails’ as Eviction Moratorium Drags On.

Fox Business: Realtor groups sue Biden Read more

They’re setting up another Reichstag Fire event. That’s what the taunting is about. With every new act of cultural destruction, the Marxists move the game their way. But their motive in baiting you is to get you to lash out in protest – so they can call you a terrorist.

When the new lockdown comes, many people will resist – as people are doing all over the world. The more kinetic their response, the better – from the Deep State’s point of view. Sometime soon, the F.B.I. will commit an enormous crime, which will be blamed on the “violent” anti-lockdown protestors.

Is the goal a national vaccine passport? Confiscation of firearms? They’ll take all the territory they can grab, under the cover of keeping the peace.

Accordingly, if you’re going to protest, you have to do it in the most inert, most abstract, most prostrate way possible: If anything you do looks like violence, you’ve already lost.

You don’t need a Gandhi, you need to be Gandhi: Just go limp. They can’t charge you for doing nothing, and I should think that simply turning off your phone – you and a few million friends – would be enough to give the Ruling Class the shits.

But if the resistance to the lockdown is not just peaceful but positively inert, the F.B.I. and its Antifa stooges will stand out even more than they did at the Capital riot.

Don’t let them blame their crimes on you.

In other news:

Pedro Gonzalez: Nation of Renters.

Zero Hedge: Tenant Stampede Results In Largest-Ever Surge In Rents.

John Daniel Davidson: With Biden’s Illegal ‘Eviction Moratorium’ Democrats Openly Embrace Lawlessness.

Paul Bedard: Gun sales already at 11 million, poised to break another record. Attn: #Redfin: I was wrong. Gun sales continue to surge. If vaccine passports blow up in big cities, expect further volatility.

Real Clear Politics: When Confidence in Our Institutions Collapses.

Who can deny that the Supreme Court is useless?

Just in the last year:

• It gutted the Takings Clause by refusing to shut down the CDC’s completely lawless eviction moratorium – now renewed under the ‘what are you gonna do about it?’ principle.

• It wreaked chaos in the eastern half of Oklahoma, undermining a century of common understandings about who governs what.

• And by finding the words “sexual orientation” where they are entirely absent from any statute, it rendered unemployable anyone who won’t refer to a he as a she or to an individual in the plural.

The Supreme Court was sold to conservatives and libertarians as the last, best hope for freedom. Instead, it has delivered us to Room 101: Lie or die, no exceptions.

Nice going, asswipes. Y’all oughta shop for flashier dresses.

In other news:

CNBC: CDC to issue new eviction ban effective through Oct. 3, source says.

Housing Wire: 30-year rate drops below 3% for first time since February.

Joel Kotkin: Garcetti’s Legacy: The Los Angeles mayor will leave his city diminished, if not permanently undermined.

Jack Cashill: Newly Released Documents Suggest Coercion in the George Floyd Case.

The American Mind: The End of the Long March: The army and the police have not capitulated to Wokeism—yet.

UnHerd: America has become its own worst enemy: Like the Soviet Union, the US is dying from despair.

City dirt was waning, anyway, before the pandemic. With every Uber ride, every Door-Dash delivery, the commercial corner was losing value – along with the car dealership sitting on it. The virus rushed this transition, but suburban car-culture was being replaced by suburban delivery-van culture, regardless.

But the riot-borne exodus that no one can talk about so no one can document will have affected commercial corridors and inner-city neighborhood market centers worst. As we have discussed, people fled from spaces that are easy for rioters to get to: Neighborhoods accessible on foot or by public transportation.

So, arguably, commercial dirt already suffering a slow and steady leak has now been abandoned by the half of the traffic that had money to spend.

Fear hides in silence and shadows: Drop you keys in an empty mall to figure out why you’re never going back. Empty streets invite predators – who keep the streets emptied. Once-active city streets are now home only to the homeless – who will do their own part to keep offices emptied.

What’s actually left? Live performances and restaurant meals? And you were planning to go to those by bus…?

The Ants in the suburbs will have all they ever wanted of the city, and the city will have the Grasshoppers it foolishly put first.

In other news:

CNBC: Despite national protection expiring, some states will continue banning evictions.

The Federalist: Crime Is Spiking In U.S. Cities Because Democrats Literally Asked For It.

The Daily Wire: Report: 9 Of The 10 Worst Cities For First-Time Home Buyers Are In California.

City Journal: Hosting Mostly Debt: Cities have borrowed billions to build convention facilities, an industry with a cloudy future.

Karol Markowicz: Masking kids and closing schools is irrational, unscientific child abuse.

Christopher Bedford: Masks And CRT Are Just The Start: It’s Time To Break The Public Schools (And Here’s How).

Joy Pullman: A Guide To Long-Term Strategic Thinking For Parents Who Oppose CRT In Schools.

I’ve written a zillion very-short jokes in my life, many of them band names. ‘The Breakthrough Superspreaders’ is funny all the way to the morgue, but everything that claims to be leadership is fatally comical by now.

The good news is the bad news: Insanity is always temporary: A moral philosophy that is anti-human survival will be abandoned, eventually, by the survivors. That’s how you can tell that true Marxism has never been tired: There are always some survivors.

But the bad news is in no way good: Billions will suffer and millions will perish so the Deep State could get rid of Donald Trump.

What was the consequence of not having ‘Nuremberg Trials’ for the many Marxist genocides?

More genocide.

And it is very far from over…

In other news:

The New York Post: Ignore the hysteria: It’s time to move past COVID, America.

The National Review: AMA to Urge End of Sex ID on All Birth Certificates.

Heather Mac Donald: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact: Succumbing to specious charges of racism, America’s orchestras, opera companies, and conductors are abandoning the Western canon.

We had a listing appointment yesterday for a house I will list in two years, at the soonest. That sounds silly, but it’s not: Cautious people over-prepare. If you can’t accept that, they work with someone who can.

But the great part about meeting that early in the process is that we can help devise the grand strategy, so that we will get the house just the way we need it, when it is finally ours to sell.

Even so, it was funny, because we were being asked about a listing strategy that won’t exist until we’re ready to list the house – in what will surely be a very different market.

I made Cathleen come, because we may be staging again by then. For the past few years I have scheduled staging and cosmetic repairs for the week after I list – knowing the houses won’t last that long. Two years from now, we might actually have to market homes to get them sold.

We love the seller, but we are blessed that way: We don’t represent anyone we don’t love like family. Every house I see, I want to sell today, because I don’t like what the market looks like tomorrow. But we killed it yesterday, at the listing appointment two years before the listing appointment, and we will kill it when the house is ours to sell.

In other news:

Associated Press: Bacon in California May Soon Be More Hard to Find as Pig Rules Take Effect.

Becker News: YouTube Suspends One of Biden’s Biggest Critics in the International Media: ‘The Fox News of Australia’ Sky News.

Michael Anton: David French and the Conservative Case for Hereditary Bloodguilt: A prominent “Never Trumper” argues that the sins of the fathers must be visited upon the sons.

The CDC’s completely unconstitutional eviction moratorium ends tonight. I am innocent of any first-hand experience with this mess. We didn’t miss a payment on the rental homes we managed, and we sold three tenant-occupied homes – allegedly the third-rail – for top dollar, with no trouble.

Linked below, the Foundation for Economic Education is making the propertied argument, and it’s one I agree with in principle.

But: Most landlords who get into trouble went looking for trouble.

There is a median for everything, half above, half below. If you shop for tenants above the median on follow-through, you had an eviction moratorium experience like ours – no experience. If you shop below the median – thinking, perhaps, that people with few choices will stay longer, or, worse, planning to evict, thus to rack up another huge financial judgement – I’m guessing the last 18 months have been painful for you.

Dang.

Until some grown-up puts his foot down hard, you can expect more unconstitutional usurpations. But you can improve your results in a crooked game – by giving up crookery yourself. If you want people to treat you right, treat them right. If you want to make an honest living, stop being a bottom-feeder.

In other news:

FEE.org: The Push is On to Extend One of the Federal Government’s Worst Pandemic Power-Grabs: Whenever the order finally expires, crushing bills will come due.

Redfin.com: Prices of the Most and Least Expensive U.S. Homes Are Surging the Fastest.

The Federalist: New York Is A Cautionary Tale About The Dangers of Progressivism.

John Podhoretz: Bill de Blasio and the Decline of New York City.

The Federalist: Cuomo Is Begging New Yorkers To Come Home, But Why Would They?

Matt Taibbi: From ‘Yes we can’ to ‘No, you moron’: Dems have selves to blame for vaccine hesitancy.

Julie Kelly: ‘Unprecedented, Unreasonable, Unconstitutional, and Wrong’.

City Journal: The Perpetual Emergency: Regular talk of crisis can degrade liberty.

Is today the day we find out the vaccines don’t work? Yesterday, the Biden cabal admitted that the vaccines are Trump’s accomplishment – which would seem to imply blame, not credit.

Until lately, I would have argued that the lockdowns were humanity’s worst-ever unforced error. Can the vaccines relegate last year’s bungling to second place?

Here’s worse news: Cautious tyranny rules by intimidation and lies: “You don’t want me to call you a racist again, do you?” When the lies stop working, all that’s left is the intimidation.

In other news:

CNBC: Pending home sales drop in June — more evidence of a housing turnaround.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Pending Sales Post Smallest Increase in Over a Year.

CNBC: White House calls on Congress to extend expiring eviction ban.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyers Are Back: Purchase Volumes and Prices Soar to Record Highs. The sound effect for every kind of hubris: The Jack-in-the-Box.

Ron Paul: The Jan. 6th Show Trials Threaten All of Us.

American Greatness: The Dissident California Right Is the Future.

Linking to a ZeroHedge article on governors in rebellion against the CDC, I issued this bit of snark:

“Yo, #Redfin, now would be the time to watch for ‘pandemic’-caused relocation – rather than the riot-flight afoot over the past year. Same destinations, but without the corollary gun sales.”

As always, I am apparently the only person in real estate publishing who can say out loud that the real estate surge that followed the inglorious death of George Floyd was caused by the riots that also followed the inglorious death of George Floyd. This is completely obvious, is easily demonstrated in Redfin’s own charts and is corroborated by a corresponding surge in firearms sales. Ignoring reality is a full time job, apparently, but I’m guessing it pays well.

Even so, I think the governors are trafficking in proxy signals: What “We are CDC rebels” really means is: “We are Ant-friendly in every way – especially schools.”

That would be actual dog-whistling, albeit not the kind we’re always warned about: Red-state governors are advertising for freedom-seeking Ants to relocate to their states – not to escape risible mask rules but to escape the color revolution in Grasshopper-led cities.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates creep up slightly to 2.80%.

Matt Welch: CDC Sentences Kids to Another School Year of Irrational Masking.

Katie Pavlich: We’ve Discovered the Real Reason the CDC Is Requiring All Kids Wear Masks in Schools.

Kay Hymowitz: Dr. Biden’s Lesson: Runaway degree inflation reinforces the class divide.

Among American religionists, the most vaccine-resistant turn out to be the atheists. I don’t like most atheists – too often Ci pedantic assholes – but this is an outcome easy to foresee: People habituated to making critical distinctions are not going to be early-adopters on anything. Festina lente all damn day, but contemplation won’t be rushed.

But letting the other guy make the early mistakes is never a bad strategy. Almost nothing new works as planned, and every sort of launch is understood as a shake-out – an opportunity to inflict all the undetected design flaws on unsuspecting dupes.

My attitude, always: I can wait. And I am always happiest when I keep my own counsel.

If you didn’t know paper masks are a joke, your sense of smell was already gone. If you didn’t know the diagnostic testing was juiced to get Trump, you have not been paying attention. And if you thought “MUST-RUSH-NOW!” and universal vaccination were ideas that would go good together, then yesterday must have been the joyous day of your birth.

If Democrats were smart – if dogs could talk – they’d already be smearing Trump with the vaccines. Their failure is imminent and obvious – and part of the plan?; lockdown-lust is also imminent and obvious – so somebody’s going to have to be the fallguy.

Meanwhile: Look out for your own. The way to avoid getting viral infections is to stay away from sick people and to be healthy enough to repel any virii you didn’t avoid. Even if they worked, the vaccines would simply relicense the bad choices that are actually killing people.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage rates just dropped to a six-month low, and refinances shoot higher.

Housing Wire: Foreign buyers are avoiding American homes: NAR.

Fox News: Seattle mayor calls for more police after six shootings in one weekend.

Victoria Taft: The People Who Brought You CHAZ Get Their WA State Police Reform Wishes Granted and They’re a Hot Mess.

The Daily Wire: Thanks To Inflation, American Wages Drop By Nearly 2%.

Josh Hammer: How to Interpret Section 230?

I spent much of last year hearing the lyrics to Steely Dan’s “King of the World” every time I went to the supermarket: “If I stay inside, I might live ’til Saturday.” So I have been delighted, this year, to again hear the voices of children in stores.

Real estate is kids and dogs, and I engage well with both. It’s them that all of us are working for – the satisfaction of their needs. Plus which, they’re excellent closers: Whey they move in, everybody moves in.

But I read a horrifying article this morning – anecdata, so take it for what you will – about the birth dearth among the Cautious.

I’ve been saying this all along, of course: Where reproduction is optional, the Cautious prefer not to – lifelong marriages with one or at most two offspring for Cs, serial graduated celibacy for Ci.

But: America is a Cs nation, has been since Ibsen’s world premiere performances took place in Minnesota, since Kolachis came to Texas, since the Mormons blazed the Hashknife Trail. Cs is why your grandma was surrounded by six kids at all times, and it’s why your own grandkid is surrounded by six grownups at all times.

But at the end of a year where dogs and even chickens were adopted with what will turn out to be sociopathic abandon, no children were spawned. And now we are well into an inexplicable global vaccination frenzy, and I am wondering what that is doing, de facto, to fertility.

I can belay all suspicions, for now, but I really would like to see some infants. Practical ontology proves nothing, of course, but it does distinguish fact from fiction.

So: Are there any newborns out there?

In other news:

CNBC: Housing boom is over as new home sales fall to pandemic low.

Housing Wire: Why the US MLS system is the envy of other countries.

CNBC: Home prices broke records in May, according to S&P Case-Shiller.

City Journal: Better Red Than Taxed: As government revenues rebound, GOP-led states are cutting taxes while Democratic states ponder increases.

Josiah Lippincott: The Conservative Read more