Category: Lending (page 1 of 56)

I live in a world in sticks: Everywhere I look, I see domiciles in progress: Single-family, huge multi-family projects – and the strange hybrid of single-family apartment communities, tiny single-story houses packed cheek-by-jowl, like little Legos affixed to a concrete carpet.

This is all Trump, so you know. Four or five years ago, investors decided that not only would right about now be a good time for new housing, the times would still be good for cashing in on opportunities planned for five years out.

You may think them unwise, but risk is what makes horse races. Moreover, had Trump retained the presidency, the bets would have paid off handsomely.

Things may be different where you are. It’s very easy to build in Arizona, compared to other places. Even so, you have your Trump-promise investments – in sticks, in stone, in steel – and you will have the opportunity to see how things work out locally.

I am beyond dour, for what that’s worth. We are on the cusp of global famine, and how tight belts will get in America remains to be seen. From borrower activity, we know the market has well and truly turned, and yet I suspect people still in the market are underestimating how bad things will get.

Will prices go down? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Since Reagan gifted us with Volker, we’ve treated housing prices as a bellwether to market trends – in real estate and everywhere. That will be a lot less useful as the market tries to find dry land, when it is awash in funds that are 80% newly-counterfeited. The tale going forward will be told by Days-on-Market – from single- to double- to triple-digits.

And yet: Isn’t there a housing shortage? There is here. How about Seattle? No one there will tell us, but the Great George Floyd Migration created housing shortages mostly where bus lines don’t run, leaving locales well-served by rioter-movers hugely vacant. We can expect rent-seekers to fill the most-vacant of that housing with Fiasco Joe’s illegal immigrants – Read more

Software gets better by versions, we are promised, but viruses do nothing but weaken: It’s actual evolution in action as highly-lethal strains do not propagate in time, while insufficiently-contagious strains do not propagate at all. The strains that survive tend to be more contagious but less virulent – and evolution gifted us long ago with the surefire solution to contagious respiratory diseases: The Nyquil trifecta – coughing, sneezing, runny nose – means stay away. How simple is that?

So what to make of the new Moronic strain of CoronaVirus? If you swear it’s more virulent, I want to know if it’s software. But if instead you tell me that the objective is to hide inflation by crippling demand, ideally long enough to steal the next election, you will have landed in a place where your claims make sense to me: The entire purpose of the virus is political – and plausibly genocidal.

We are as gods? Nonsense. We are far beyond gods. What god, be he ever so potent, would deliberately undermine his own nature? What god would intentionally self-annihilate?

In other news:

Zero Hedge: A Scared Nu World: Here’s What We Know About The COVID “Omicron” Strain.

City Journal: Guaranteed Murder: From Waukesha to New York, lax bail assures homicides.

Jim Brovard: The Biden Crackdown on Thought Crimes.

We watched network TV yesterday, briefly. Cathleen loves the parade, and she and Cleo were both thrilled by the dog show. Miss Chioux likes barking, running and, especially, running preceded by barking.

Fun to see from the commercials that all American families are black, and all black families are possessed of a scruffy male adult who dances madly and pretends that’s fathering. Amazing to watch American commerce shit all over the money – in pursuit of what, exactly? Paychecks for white voiceover actresses must be down by 90%, post-George-Floyd-sobriety-day, but is anyone measuring the consequences at the cash register of everything being sold by hectoring black women issuing treacly nursery rhymes?

If there is any such thing as a science of marketing, its iron law for the 21st century is simply this: Get woke, go broke. None so deserving. None too soon.

In other news:

American Thinker: Leaving California.

Newsweek: Salvation Army’s Donors Withdraw Support in Response to Racial ‘Wokeness’ Initiative.

Zero Hedge: ESPN Hemorrhaging Subscribers, Down To 76 Million As Disney Scrambles To Stem Tide.

I go to a free-market doctor: Cash-and-carry is the ideal, but if you want to get your insurance company involved, you’ll be doing all the paperwork. He has zero employees, an out-of-the-way office and a shrine to Charleton Heston in the waiting room.

That would be health care for the self-employed – self-insured for all but catastrophes – but I would go to him, anyway. I trust him to see reality for what it is and not to lie to me about it. He may be the only doctor I will ever see again.

Certainly I am done with all vaccines. Whatever the net lethality of the COVID vaccine turns out to be, it is by now obvious that anyone who presumes to speak in an “official” capacity about public health is a liar pursuing unknown objectives.

Nice going, dipwads. Your reputation was nothing but good, and now it’s shit – probably never to recover.

Meanwhile: Find a doctor you can trust. Otherwise, you’re on your own…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Home Prices Hit a New All-Time High, Giving Sellers Much to be Thankful For.

Seth Barron: Voting Is For Citizens: New York City’s latest effort to extend the franchise to legal permanent residents would devalue citizenship and dilute the power of the vote.

John Daniel Davidson: Your Default Assumption Should Be That Everything Corporate Media Says Is A Lie: The media’s deluge of lies about the Rittenhouse case is a disturbing reminder that the corporate press lies about everything all the time.

Miss Chioux is with us for Thanksgiving, a very special treat, and I don’t feel much like hectoring the world this morning. Instead, I will send you to one of my favorite essays: “How to fight with your relatives over the Thanksgiving Dinner table.” Seems especially momentous this year…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Rental Market Tracker: Rents Up 13%, Outpaced by 17% Growth in Monthly Mortgage Payments.

City Journal: Strength in San Diego: The city’s triumvirate of police chief, district attorney, and mayor has not given in to disorder.

Much of my speech is ironical. I am a poet, to begin with, and I hate to bore my own ears. And I am a Swann boy, raised into a rapid-fire verbal wit: Homophones, definition-swaps, non sequiturs – work it and work with it fast or be swept away in the vortex. And: I am Loki from my father, my mother, her father, her brother – and from my own delight in trickery.

Accordingly, to speak with me is kind of a shit test: I can tell right away if you are actually listening to me, since you won’t get the jokes if you’re not. The good news is, if you are listening, I know you will be listening when we get to the parts of the conversation that are not deliberately inverted for comic effect. But before even that, there is simply this: People who are awake enough to laugh at the world are awake.

Last night on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Kyle Rittenhouse issued an unintentionally-comic national shit test: “We all know how the FBI works.” He wasn’t being ironical, alas, but everyone who laughed knows he is telling the truth.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Cooled in October, But Relief For Homebuyers Was Short-Lived.

TheHill.com: Electric car chargers to be required in new homes in England.

Andrea Widburg: Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kyle Rittenhouse is fascinating.

Seth Barron: Trial By Jury Needs No Fixing: Outraged by the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, the Left claims that the American justice system is illegitimate.

I managed to surprise Cathleen the other night: I argued that what makes a song great – we were talking about Take It Down by John Hiatt – is not the lyrics but the music.

That’s a claim I would normally dispute: Popular music – and all music with a lyrical or performative component – is narrative first, with the music serving in supportive, ornamental or incidental roles. No story, no opera. No story, no ballet. Grieg wrote music better known than the play he wrote it for, but this is very much the exception, not the rule.

Cathleen’s complaint is that John Hiatt has lied about the lyrics, but in the end, I don’t care. Much as with Wagon Wheel, the music is so much better than the lyrics, I just don’t care. Plus which, my love is fifty feet tall.

Why does it work so well? You tell me. It’s not a song, not even a coherent chord progression. It’s a dirge with a bridge. But once I give it to my hands, it’s hard for me to stop playing it.

I like it when I find out I’ve been wrong, even if only by a little. Without any lyrics at all, Wagon Wheel is the perfect American work song, and if you play it enough it will sweep you back to the Irish reels from which it comes.

Take It Down has none of that music theory, and none of that pedigree. What it has is a pain that’s fifty feet deep. It’s easy to see why someone might lie about that…

In other news:

Pacific Research Institute: Los Angeles Is Gearing Up to Ban Wood-Frame Construction. Renters Will Soon Pay the Price.

Brad Polumbo: Here’s Everything That’s Wrong With the Build Back Better Spending Bill House Democrats Just Passed.

Ron Paul: It’s Time to Get the Federal Welfare-Warfare State Under Control.

Yesterday at the dog park, Cleo and I met a Boerboel – a South African Mastiff. A gorgeous animal, five months old and huge. She’s going to be 150lbs, and the males get to 180.

Her person is a physician at Boswell Hospital, and he has grand Boerboel plans: He has land out in the sticks, and his goal is Boerboels abounding, with his breeding operation documented by a YouTube page. I enjoyed talking to him, not alone because he is operating from the premise that there will be a future.

My belief, defended solely by historical anecdotes and prejudice, is that all domestic dogs emerge from two prototypical breeds – Saint Hubert Hounds – Bloodhounds – and Mastiffs. Snouted dogs run down their prey where flat-faced dogs fight like big cats – well-timed leaps followed by close combat. Mastiffs pulled war wagons, and if you doubt that, put Cleo – twenty pounds of Mastiff-descendant – on a lead and see where she drags you.

She was intimidated by the Boerboel, who was in her turn intimidated by Miss Chioux. But later she demonstrated what that Mastiff form-factor can do: She ran down a Standard Poodle who started with a fifty-yard advantage. Cleo is fast, and people notice when she floors it. The Poodle didn’t know she was caught until Cleo raced past her.

And then, as every flat-faced dog must do, she panted for half-an-hour. As always, I had to carry her out of the dog park…

In other news:

Victoria Taft: How Unethical Were the Prosecutors Trying to Put Kyle Rittenhouse in Prison? Let Us Count the Ways…

Thomas Lifson: Kyle Rittenhouse Did NOT Get a Fair Trial.

Allowing for Portland, as always, there were no looting riots last night in response to the Rittenhouse verdict. Too cold. There are other kinds of riots, but the only kind I’ve ever seen are looting riots, whatever their reputed pretext, and looting riots like a sultry Summer night.

I’m delighted that the railroading of young Kyle failed, dismayed beyond belief that it happened in the first place, and reconciled to the fact that this sort of persecution of the good for being good will recur: “My internal disquiet is caused by your disapproval, not by my own cognitive dissonance. I’ll feel better once you’re exterminated.”

We are sometimes reminded that almost all the violent crime in America is committed by a tiny percentage of the population. We are even slower to take notice that looting riots only happen because there is an extant looter population among us: People who are opportunistically-predatory graduate their predations with the inverse of their estimate of the risk of the consequences. A looting riot is a short period of consequence-free predation.

This is all more underfathering – Kyle, too – but we don’t have a civilization if we do not have good people, if fewer and fewer people learn in childhood why being civilized matters.

In other news:

RedState.com: The Rittenhouse Trial Shows Us Why Cameras in Courtrooms Are the Proper Move for Our Legal System.

The Federalist: LEAKED: Teachers Reveal How They ‘Stalk’ Kids, Sideline Parents To Pull Middle Schoolers Into LGBT Groups.

The Federalist: Thanks To Leftists, The Black Talent Companies Seek To Hire With Racial Quotas Doesn’t Exist: Lack of representation in corporate boardrooms is not because of mythical white privilege. It is due to the breakdown of the black family.

Joel Kotkin: America Is Built on a Great Culture. Progressives Want to Abandon It.

Another day, another stupid dog study: “Everyday household noise stresses dogs out.”

Is that true? Your dog can’t snooze through the vacuum cleaner or the dishwasher? Every new thing is a dragon to your dog – and to your toddler – but toothless dragons get ignored in due course.

What does the study actually study: Are dogs uncomfortable with random sounds in laboratories that look, smell and feel like the vet’s office? No one observing an adult dog at home could draw these stupid conclusions. Only childless and probably dogless Ci academics would ever imagine they could assess a dog or a toddler from a laboratory.

Here’s the news, no useless Ph.D. required: If your dog is snoozing through anything – from house-cleaning to the football game on TV – he is telling you by his tells that he does not give a shit: Not threatening, not rewarding, not interesting. If your dog is at peace while you are getting other things done, that’s just exactly right. Dogs and toddlers are pack animals, and sleeping near you, where the night-watchman can still hear you, is participation with the pack.

Want to stress your dog out? Leave him alone – at the vet, at a kennel, at an academic’s laboratory or just at home. If you want to know how that feels to your dog, imagine doing it to your toddler.

Stop listening to academics: They can’t even keep a houseplant alive. Instead, recognize that your dog is never not a toddler and respond accordingly.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Redfin Predicts a More Balanced Housing Market in 2022. Kenosha won’t burn, “refugees” won’t be made millionaires and black swans cannot ever be permitted to exist. Who needs a window when you’ve got a weatherman? [PS, post-Kyle-verdict: Oops!]

City Journal: Mandates Won’t Immunize Against Crime: Cities imposing vaccine requirements on public employees are making their police-retention problems worse – and endangering public safety.

Julie Kelly: Terror in the Capitol Tunnel.

Here are three facts about intelligence:

1. Your dog is not intelligent, nor is any entity lacking a properly-functioning thinking brain.

2. “Artificial Intelligence” is quite a bit less intelligent than your dog – and it is never capable of even the most basic forms of awareness, understood biologically.

3. The only actual intelligence in the universe, that we know of so far, occurs between the ears of mature genetic homo sapiens within whom a properly-functioning thinking brain has been appropriately cultivated. Importantly: Nothing of “Artificial Intelligence” can or even attempts to do any of this.

Why does this matter?

When Rich Barton blames “Artificial Intelligence algorithms” for his abject failure as an investor, he’s bullshitting you yet again: Computers – even computers decked out in the Incumbent’s New Machine Learning – do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do. In this one way, they are preferable to our sometimes willful dogs, taking account that neither is capable of informed discretion.

Zillow’s computers were bossed around by CEO Rich Barton, a tyro “investor” who insisted that tomorrow would always replicate yesterday – static market fallacy – and that black swans cannot exist – where, of course, real estate is a black swan business.

The computers did what they were told to do – by a fool drunk on his own hubris, blinded by his self-seeking sycophants and blindfolded by his absurd insistence that deliberately knowing nothing about real estate investing is the best way to make bank. I wish I were joking.

Take some responsibility, Poindexter. You made a classic egghead mistake, “reasoning” by unreliable proxy signals, but it doesn’t do to blame your vehicle. It went where you drove it – blindfolded.

In other news:

Bari Weiss: The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse: Why so many got this story so wrong.

ZeroHedge.com: The Rittenhouse Case Proves The Establishment Wants To Bring Back Star Chamber Tyranny.

Christopher Rufo: Enemies of the School Board{ Parents in some school districts find their input suppressed – and their dissent criminalized.