Category: Marketing (page 22 of 191)

Last year was a clinic for the Cautious, but preening Ci came off very badly, compared to compassionate Cs. Whether the impetus is the virus, the response to it or the riots, Cs and Ds are on the move – away from every pernicious Ci influence.

Housing is about kids and dogs. Every noun in that sentence will do better, going forward, because of 2020’s hysterical Ci overreach. Everyone wants to believe in his own peculiar genius, but good news, most often, comes from the other guy’s mistakes. Rejoice and be glad in it.

Elsewhere:

Housing Wire: Will we have a buyer’s housing market in 2021?

Housing Wire: Could 2% define mortgage rates for the next decade?

CNBC: Home prices are rising faster in the middle of the U.S. as Covid drives people away from coasts.

Jordan Davidson: Exodus From Blue States In 2020 Fueled By COVID And Government Mandates.

City Journal: For Chicago Homeowners, It’s All Pain, Little Gain: Driven by exploding pension costs, the city’s property-tax hikes are depressing the housing market.

American Thinker: The Future: It Ain’t Gonna Be Pretty.

Margot Cleveland: Is The United States Too Big To Save?

One of the awful consequences of the Deep State’s deep aversion to Donald Trump and his supporters is the deliverance of Hong Kong in to Red China’s bloody clutches. Perhaps Trumps could have done nothing – or perhaps he will do something yet – but America, Hong Kong and the whole world suffered while the leader of the free world was being swarmed by gnats.

When the heroes of Hong Kong were protesting, we longed to be the Americans they imagined us to be. This week we get to find out who we really are.

In other news:

Joel Kotkin: Can California stop Big Tech from decamping for cheaper places?

The Federalist: Radical Democrats Are Turning Minneapolis Into A Violent Wasteland.

AND Magazine: She Painted The Pavement And Failed Her City.

Roger Kimball: Who Will Be Inaugurated?

Stella Morabito: Ignoring And Ridiculing Election Fraud Concerns Will Not Make Them Go Away.

Vivek Saxena: Peter Navarro to release full election report ‘The Art of the Steal’ on Monday. Here’s what he alleges.

David Solway: January 6, 2021: The Day of the Electoral Epiphany.

American Thinker: Why the Left Always Wins.

And here’s a song, lately sung in Hong Kong, I hope to be hearing a lot over the next few days:

The caravans of Trump supporters are on the move to Washington, to converge there on or before 9 am on Wednesday, January 6th – the Feast of the Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas.

I don’t know if their transit will be news, but their arrival will be: We made a stout point of ignoring all the rioting, looting and destruction committed by Antifa, BLM and other arms of the DNCCP last year. Two million or more very neat, very orderly taxpayers will be decried as bloodthirsty terrorists.

The real question: Does Trump have a plan beyond massed Sullaism – a vast, intimidating mob? We shall see…

In a world without real estate news:

Sacramento Business Journal: A multibillion-dollar f-you.

The Atlantic: The Pandemic Disproved Urban Progressives’ Theory About Gentrification.

The New York Post: Say a prayer for New York City.

Forbes: As More Americans Move To No-Income-Tax States, More Lawmakers Move To Phase Out State Income Taxes.

The Washington Examiner: 2020 was the point of no return for establishment media.

Michael Goodwin: President Trump is set for his last stand.

Sundance: January 6th Ted Cruz Has a Rare Second-Chance At Redemption, But Don’t Expect Him to Take It…

Daniel Greenfield: Frontpage Person of the Year: The Disenfranchised American Voter.

Cheryl Chumley: Fear is the socialist, communist, collectivist left’s greatest weapon.

The seven rules of The Church of Splendor are mental- and moral-management strategies for an appropriately-prioritized anarchist egoist life – that being mine. You’re free to make free with them:

1. I don’t go to your church.
2. I am not arguing with you.
3. Don’t be an asshole.
4. Butthurt is not contagious.
5. Never play the other man’s game.
6. Keep your own counsel.
7. Look out for your own.

The one that matters most right now? Rule #7.

My perennial New Year’s admonition: Want to be a better, more-perfect version of yourself? Master something difficult this year. My bite of the apple: I already know how to play the ukulele, so this year I’m going learn how to work the supply side of the real estate market.

In a world without real estate news:

The New York Post: Portland kicks off 2021 with a riot for the new year.

Glenn Greenwald: The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny.

FEE.org: The Fight to Keep Schools Closed Has Proven Thomas Sowell Right About Teachers’ Unions.

Michael Barone: The Year America Went Crazy.

The National Pulse: The Senior U.S. Officials Taking CCP-Subsidized Trips, Dinners For ‘Favorable Coverage’.

The New York Post: 2020 was an absolute bloodbath for box offices.

Fender.com: 7 Reasons You Should Play the Ukulele.

Inspiration:

“Give me a lever and firm place to stand and I will move the earth!”

So said Archimedes. Here is a simple lever to fix everything that is wrong in civil society – in due course:

Change your state’s Family Law to default to residential custody to the father regardless of marital state.

Right now, the incentives are intentionally inverted toward family destruction. By returning to default custody to the father, you eliminate virtually all divorce and most out-of-wedlock births. In five years, children will be able to spell again. In ten, they will have recovered the ability to make change. In twenty years, there will be a lot more children around. And in fifty short years we will be back to 1970 – where we were when the war on the family began its final assault.

Everything you want changed in laws and constitutions requires the long-range vision of fathers. But everything you want in everyday life – honesty, trustworthiness, reliability, follow-through – all of those are brought to the world by fathers, too.

When we robbed our children of their fathers, we robbed America of everything that had made it great. We can get back to where we belong simply by unmaking that awful mistake.

Christmas Brutality: How to slay dragons.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Greg Swann: Bloodhound’s end-of-year letter to our rental-property investors: Thriving by surprise.

Elsewhere:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates remain at record-low levels.

Daniel Greenfield: Democrats Destroyed All the Savings of Americans Three Times Over.

Tyler O’Neil: 5 Great Trump Victories in 2020.

The Federalist: Donald Trump Has Been The Most Illuminating President In Decades.

Victoria Taft: 5 Reasons Why You’re Not Crazy to Question the Election Results.

Reason: The Bipartisan Push To Gut Section 230 Will Suppress Online Speech.

My prediction for “The New Normal” is that the Chief Diversity Officer will dominate companies, going forward, overseeing the progressively-accelerating looting of corporate America – this being the best-case scenario, with Trump continuing as President.

But: It remains that entities like NASCAR and Walmart need a Chief Redneck Officer in their C-suites, to remind them who they work for as they preen their way into oblivion.

Christmas Brutality: Courtney at the speed of life.

After sunrise:

Housing Wire: How record-low mortgage rates changed everything in 2020.

The National Pulse: All Major Western Media Outlets Take ‘Private Dinners’, ‘Sponsored Trips’ From Chinese Communist Propaganda Front.

Victoria Taft: Tech Expert Shocks GA Election Fraud Hearing With News He ‘Got Into’ Voting System With WiFi.

The Epoch Times: Trump Team Wants to Present ‘Specific Evidence’ on Jan. 6.

The Epoch Times: Hawley Becomes First Senator Committed to Challenging Electoral College Results.

The New York Post: Walmart apologizes for now-deleted tweet calling Sen. Hawley a ‘sore loser’.

Don Feder: Anti-Trump Conservatives – An Army of Envious Dwarfs.

Jeff Jacoby: What Was Great About 2020.

And so you can start the New Year dancing, music from the most-profound lyricist in rock ’n’ roll history, Woody Guthrie:

The idea of a “police force” is ancient. Rich people needed security, but poor people had nothing to secure. The middle class needed what it couldn’t pay for, and the rich, as always, wanted someone else to pay its way.

Enter the police under various names, with politics, ultimately, turning on that bargain: Essentially the middle class making sure it is getting what it is paying for.

That’s what is not happening now. The oligarchical class is seeking to subjugate the middle class, so it is consistently and overtly reneging on the policing bargain: Not only will no one police crooks, when the crooks turn on the taxpayers, it is the taxpayers who are punished.

How does that story end happily?

Christmas Brutality: Finding visibility, absolution and closure at the choo-choo train at the mall on New Year’s Eve.

Outside the mall:

Housing Wire: U.S. home prices hit 14-year high in October. Firearms sales peaked in November. I wonder if there’s a connection…

Liberty Unyielding: Murder rate rose by 37% in U.S. cities in 2020.

The Post Millennial: Antifa activists take over hotel near Seattle as owner begs authorities for help. Remember that surly old police chief who really knew how to knock heads when the moment called for it? Now you know enough to miss him, at least.

The Federalist: The Top Five Most Suppressed News Stories Of 2020.

Glenn Greenwald: The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump.

City Journal: The West Should Not Abandon Hong Kong.

Michael Walsh: A Perfect Storm Seeks Destruction of the US.

I swear, you cannot make this stuff up. Seattle is being emptied by its riots, and Redfin notices by ostentatiously not noticing. As was noted in the comments here lately, this is by now arguably a matter of fraud – boosting their own home values as they too race away from the inevitable further consequences of Marxism.

My take, about which I may have much more to say later:

For freedom of trade to persist, trustworthiness should not just be assumed but never doubted. Accordingly, worthy traders must be more than simply non-predatory – they must be explicitly, overtly and vigilantly anti-predation.

There are far too many ways to get this wrong, but here is an easy way for Redfin to start getting it right:

Tell the truth – all of it.

Christmas Brutality: A future more vivid.

Outside the mall:

Redfin: 6 of the 10 Most Competitive Cities For Buying a Home This Year Are in Washington State. How’d that happen?

Reason: Will Cities Survive 2020?

Redfin: Housing Market Update: Home Prices Up 14%, Pending Sales Rise 34%. More about what the riots that definitely did not happen this Summer still aren’t doing to the real estate markets.

Libby Emmons: The New York Times Using Its Reporting Resources To Weaponize Teen Drama Is A Scary Trend. This story is precisely why the NAR gave itself a speech code: Weaponized evil.

Andrea Widburg: Ukraine press conference explicitly ties Hunter and Joe Biden to corruption.

American Thinker: A Supreme Court in Hiding is Dangerous for Our Country.

The Federalist: A National Popular Vote Won’t Fix The Electoral College, But Smaller Government Will.

FEE.org: Compulsory Schooling Laws: What if We Didn’t Have Them?

Brian Brady fingered the link on brand new rental communities pitching detached apartments as SFRs for lease.

We have these in Phoenix, too, though I have never toured them. They look to be 1,200sf homes on 1,400sf parcels – except of course they aren’t parcels – yet.

When the market soared the last time, we saw hundreds of apartment communities file public reports to become condominium communities, instead. Whatever else cheap mortgage money means, it means that Wall Street is betting against dirt.

That suggests to me that the tiny houses on tiny lots will soon become condominium plats, thus subject to hypothecation – mortgage financing. The smaller the homestead, the greater the greater-fool? So it would seem…

Christmas Brutality: The true story of Christmas? Joseph didn’t dump the baby and ditch Mary.

Beyond Bethlehem:

The Epoch Times: Trump Signs $2.3 Trillion Relief and Spending Bill, Says More Money to Come. I am told this is more 4D chess. It had better be.

The Palm Beach Post: Housing market trend heading to Florida: Single-family homes to rent, not buy.

Calculated Risk: Ten Economic Questions for 2021.

Monica Showalter: Trouble for Democrats: Rebellion in the California suburbs.

David Marcus: Dr. Fauci Admits He Has Treated The American People Like Children.

The Hill: Five GOP senators to watch in next month’s Electoral College fight.

American Greatness: An Essential Man: In this climactic battle of our decades-long culture war, we need to win – or be prepared to lose in ways beyond imagining.

John Daniel Davidson: 5 Big Things We Learned About Our Elites In 2020.

Jeffrey Lord: Soviet-Style Media Propaganda in America.

Andrea Widburg: An 18-year-old boy’s terrible revenge on a girl who never harmed him.

City Journal: Tell Only Lies: Americans are increasingly afraid to express themselves honestly.

I saw a bunch of images decrying America’s gun culture, and it was amazing too me how much has changed in my own lifetime.

I got a BB gun for my eighth birthday. For my tenth, I got a 22 rifle and a 20-gauge shotgun – full choke, a pheasant gun.

Every boy I knew had his own arsenal, and no one thought twice about securing firearms: Children learned about gun safety by being around guns all the time.

Nobody was hurting, financially, but everyone hunted for game, and everyone spit birdshot out of their pheasant and duck at Sunday dinner.

All of this is fatherhood, not firearms. No one locked their doors when I was a kid – not even the doors of pick-up trucks with fully-stocked gun-racks. That’s important to note, because what will need fixing, when we finally grow up and get serious, is not this law or that constitution but fatherhood itself.

Christmas Brutality: Ladybug’s Christmas dismissal.

News from otherwhere:

Townhall: Schumer Wants Biden to Transfer Wealth From Auto Mechanics to Harvard Grads.

Andrea Widburg: Dr. Fauci justifies lies, saying Americans can’t handle the truth.

Daniel Greenfield: The War on Trump and the End of the Right to a Lawyer.

The Washington Free Beacon: How the Centers for Disease Control Went Woke.

Spiked Online: The year the ruling class got woke.

The Daily Caller: Dave Portnoy Rescues Small Businesses While Congress Snoozes.

It’s Boxing Day, which was not invented by Amazon, all the empty boxes notwithstanding.

We are obliged by the City of Peoria to separate our trash into one of two 80-gallon wheeled bins – garbage and recycleables. We generate one 13-gallon bag of actual garbage a week, but thanks to Amazon, we often fill that recycling bin.

Curbside recycling would be a joke even if it were not a lie: Adding in your uncompensated labor, the value of recycling does not justify its cost. Even if it were not a lie, it would be wasteful in se, literally more trouble than it’s worth.

Here’s what’s even funnier: Curbside recycling is just as real as Santa Claus. Because it is stupid and wasteful – unjustifiable by the only economic standard that matters, an entrepreneur willing to gamble on the stuff – there is no such thing as curbside recycling. Instead, carefully-sorted garbage is collected by two different trucks from two different barrels on two different days – and then it is all taken to the same one landfill.

Do you insist that’s not so where you live? Look into the facts. Chances are, your town’s fathers are lying to you about what happens to the puppies at the pound, too…

Christmas Brutality: Fifty Shades of Bubba: Christmas at The Sex Addiction Clinic of Misfit Celebrities.

Not much going on elsewhere, not counting the huge bombing:

CNBC: Tech was ahead of Covid curve at every stage, but it couldn’t bring the rest of us along.

John Hayward: 7 Ways Governments Used the Coronavirus Pandemic to Crush Human Rights.

New York Post: Majority of Americans hate socialism, reject AOC: survey.

Andrea Widburg: Nashville: A bomb blast unlike any other on American soil.

Parliamentary governments are incapable of sustained sanity. That’s why the CIA and the State Department install them, in the train of their wreckage, everywhere they go. It’s wonderful that the European Union has released the primordial Parliament from its foolishly self-inflicted bondage, but, sadly, there is no reason to suppose that Great Britain will come to be great again. Even so: Up your own organization! A free Britain at least can, someday, strive to do better.

Christmas Brutality: Christmas at the cemetery — with Bubba.”

In happier places:

Housing Wire: Merry Christmas: Mortgage rates reach another record low.

Karol Markowicz: Elite hypocrisy is killing small businesses.

Brendan O’Neill: Brexiteers, we did it. Don’t say Santa don’t come through.

American Thinker: What are the new SCOTUS justices thinking?

City Journal: Christmas in a Dark Time: Meaning and meaninglessness, and a year of trials.

Having punted once on the nation’s palpable election fraud, the United States Supreme Court has resolved to take another swing at the ball – two days after inauguration.

To all appearances, the entire federal government – minus Donald Trump – is already completely in the pocket of the Red Chinese. Chief Justice John Roberts has been voting their way all along, by crook or just by hook, and it now appears that he is commandeering the courts to frustrate Trump – to China’s ultimate advantage.

America’s founding myth turns on a pre-dawn raid the day after Christmas. I could stand to see something like that again…

Christmas Brutality: Cultivating oak trees – for Christmas: “Unbroken things can survive unbroken forever.”

In other realms:

CNBC: November new home sales fall more than expected, builder stocks drop.

Tucker Carlson: The slow, painful death of California.

CNBC: Ignore the tech naysayers — San Francisco isn’t dying.

City Journal: Doorway Denizens: San Francisco’s beleaguered business owners were hoodwinked into building makeshift housing for the homeless.

Tristan Justice: Trump Veto Of Defense Spending Bill And Blue State ‘COVID’ Bailout Is 100 Percent On Brand.

Frontpage Mag: Yes, It Was a Stolen Election.

Andrea Widburg: Overstock’s colorful founder has tales to tell about the Russia hoax.

The Washington Examiner: Supreme Court sets Pennsylvania response date in Trump election challenge for two days after Biden inauguration.

Here’s something that happens all the time: An HOA gets high-handed, so people start selling to get out from under it, pulling resale prices down. To stanch the blood, the homeowners elect a new, better-behaved board-of-directors. In due course, prices recover.

Hurray! That is successfully-self-correcting government, a phenomenon too-rarely seen at higher levels of high-handedness. Half of it happens – the exodus – but since it’s an exodus of Ants, the Grasshoppers left behind in places like Detroit – and now New York, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, etc. – don’t know what’s killing them – so they vote for more of it.

Alas, the Grasshoppers will always be with us. Liberty, what’s left of it, is the freedom of Ants to escape the predations of Grasshoppers.

Looking for a happier New Year? It’s easy: Take your business elsewhere.

Christmas Brutality: “Merry Christmas, Princess Peach.”

In other news:

Housing Wire: Existing home sales end five-month streak increase in November.

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications increase for second straight week.

New York Post: NY leads nation in population drop, could lose House seat.

Housing Wire: Movement Mortgage invests $200M into charter school network. Change the world? First, better fathers. Second, better schools.

Kyle Olson: Antonio Sabato, Jr. Launches Conservative Film Company to Produce Movies that ‘Support Our Country’.

Tristan Justice: A ‘Disgrace’: Trump Threatens Veto Of Pork-Stuffed Blue-State Bailout ‘COVID’ Bill.

Rachel Alexander: RINOs Should be Ashamed for Turning on Trump.

Newt Gingrich: Why I will not accept Joe Biden as president.

Paul Bedard: McConnell and GOP told to back Trump: ‘They all won because of him’.

Steve McCann: The Biggest Political Blunder in American History.

The Washington Examiner: 2020 exposed the teachers unions for the frauds they are.

Robby Soave: An Anti-Racist Education for Middle Schoolers.