There’s always something to howl about.
“Blah. Blah. Blah. The Kiddie Table is where all the dropped-food action is.”
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.
“What do you call a dog who is good at guile? The Imaginary Dog.”
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.
“French Bulldogs are dutch babies – simpering pseudo-sucklings. Prove me wrong.”
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.
“Judging solely by appearances, bull dogs are spoiling for a fight, while hound dogs are praying for absolution.”
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.
“If you only bother to train two out of every one-hundred puppies – leave your shoes outside.”
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.
Joel Kotkin: America Is Built on a Great Culture. Progressives Want to Abandon It.
“Sadly, naps are blank pages in a journal that should be bursting with adventures.”
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!]
Julie Kelly: Terror in the Capitol Tunnel.
“Dogs have brains but not minds. Never wise, always diligent.”
“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.
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.
“Who is intimidated by a stuffed Dobermann?”
I told you in July of 2019 why this must be so: A retailer without a discount rack must discount all the goods in lockstep, ultimately creating a market-wide slashscade. Zillow is at least stanching its exsanguination. The other big iBuyers still have their noses wide open.
Nothing will save them when the market turns: The insuperable pitfall in flipping is owning the property for too long. The carrying costs already eat up every other iBuyer inflow, and this will only get worse when prices decline and Days-on-Market surges.
But here’s a way around the discount rack problem, at least: Do as they do with cars and guitars: Rebrand. For example, if OfferPad – voted the iBuyer most likely to master arithmetic someday – has an overpriced turkey it needs to unload, it could relist it with its alter-ego brokerage, MakeItGoAway.com. They’ll still be losing money on every sale, but the big loser won’t be pulling down all the mini-losers.
All of this is stupid, of course. There is no business here, other than the business of gulling Wall Street investors. If they’re happy, god help ’em, but I see zero evidence that Wall Street-funded tech ventures have made any difference to the real estate business at all. Zillow put the freebie supermarket magazines out of business, but life in the trenches goes on as before.
Am I mistaken?
In other news:
Brad Polumbo: St. Paul Just Implemented the Nation’s Strictest Rent Control Law. It’s Already Backfiring Tremendously.
Andrea Widburg: Kyle Rittenhouse’s attorneys allege that the prosecution hid evidence.
City Journal: Cold Comfort: Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s appeals to “systemic racism” don’t do much for Chicagoans in high-crime neighborhoods.
Steven Malanga: Free-Speech Entrepreneurs: Growing tech censorship continues to spark rapid gains at alternative platforms.
Daniel Greenfield: Democrats are Destroying Public Schools. Republicans Should Help Them.
Michael Walsh: COVID Panic Will Only End Through Civil Disobedience and Mockery.
“Punish the good dogs and reward the bad ones? That is literally the recipe for making yourself dinner.”
There is more to the Rittenhouse trial, of course: Undermining everyone’s right to self-defense and putting other earnest men of good will on notice: Being a Brownshirt is heroic. Stopping Brownshirt rioting is the crime that is to be punished.
If you’ve been watching the news, you’ve heard one blabbermouth after another tell you how surprised they are to have learned the facts of this trial. Take them at their word: They are just as well-informed about everything else they spout off about.
Ultimately, though, this is the Kyle Rittenhouse news as his case goes to the jury: In a riot full of truly shitty kids, we’re crucifying the good one. I may have heard that story before…
In other news:
Jonathan Turley: Rittenhouse Goes To Jury After Case Collapses in Court.
Andrea Widburg: The Rittenhouse trial lawyers had their final say and the jury has the case now.
Peachy Keenan: Unfortunate Son.
City Journal: When Demography Isn’t Destiny: There’s nothing inevitable about American immigrants joining the progressive coalition.
John Tierney: The Covid Children’s Crusade: Against ethics and evidence, public officials push vaccine mandates for kids.
“Fat is as beautiful on people as it is on dogs.”
Among my earliest memories is the JFK funeral on TV. I had just turned four years old, so what I saw was more dots that connections. An example: The broadcasters kept talking about the body, so I wondered what had happened to the head – a puerile false distinction that turned out to be an impossibly prescient conspiracy theory!
And as it turns out, the Kennedy assassination marked the end of authentic America, the country rhapsodized in the textbooks of the era. The Deep State put everyone on notice – oppose us and die – and nothing about the Federal government has been uncompromised since.
It is right to say that the 2020 election was overtly and obviously stolen, but it is more right to say that no American election has mattered since November 22, 1963.
In other news:
City Journal: Buttigieg’s ‘systemic racism’ claim is the leftist myth about Robert Moses. Moses prototyped many Deep State ideas in New York State. He is the archetype of the Ci intellectual-tyrant.
Steven Malanga: States Versus Cities: As local officials plunge into controversial policy areas, they clash increasingly with governors and legislative leaders.
“Some questions betray a complete lack of nasal awareness.”
She’s not a problem, she’s just awkward and uncertain how to proceed. Usus est magister optimus, and she just isn’t around dogs enough.
Until now. Moving back to Sun City puts us back into Duffeeland Dog Park, about which I have written much in the past. It’s a great place for her: There cannot be any bad dogs in Sun City; they get trained or rehomed. All of the dogs are pampered, and quite a few of them are overfed.
Cleo loves it, but she doesn’t know what to make of it. She races around to greet every dog, but she doesn’t stick around to play. By the time she’s run the circuit, she’s exhausted. No kidding: I have to carry her out.
It’s fun to watch her – all those dogs, all off-lead! – but I’m sure she’ll get used to it in time. But the dog park raises yet another epistemological question for me:
How does Miss Chioux know those other critters are dogs?
She didn’t know rabbits were prey until one ran away from her. How does she know that other dogs are dogs – and how does she know they’re not predators? Tail-signaling, of course, although Cleo doesn’t have a tail, but I wonder how – or even if – she knows that she and the other dogs are the same thing.
In other news:
Don Surber: 72% of office workers left Manhattan.
Andrea Widburg: January 6 prisoners evacuated on stretchers after guards gas them.
Monica Showalter: Bannon indictment: Joe Biden takes another political prisoner.
“You have to learn to pace yourself. The dog park should be more than just a few minutes of frenzy.”
The most significant factor in Zillow’s ignominious retreat from iBuying is that it was entirely a Dunning-Kruger exercise: Rich Barton and his devoted team of seven-figure eggheads actively and persistently refused to learn anything about real estate brokerage.
All of the iBuyers are lousy at real estate, as I’ve been pointing out for years, and none of them are interested in improving. But Barton’s explicit insistence was that Zillow would do best at real estate by not listening to anyone who has ever sold real estate, not even the Realtor “partners” they used as their hands and feet in their first two years of iBuying.
It’s awful that Rich Barton screwed up so badly – leaving damaged neighborhoods behind him nationwide. But it is much worse that he did it deliberately – by refusing to learn any better – even as his errors racked up by the millions.
If drunk driving is bad, then driving blind-folded is so much worse. Zillow CEO Rich Barton – very proudly! – drove blind-folded into America’s real estate market. He should be held to account for it.
In other news:
Joel Kotkin: California Dreamin’.
Andrea Widburg: One fuzzy drone image may send Kyle Rittenhouse to prison.
Andrea Widburg: The DOJ and FBI have combined to destroy Project Veritas.
J.R. Dunn: The Left’s Bungled Revolution.
“If you want diligence, get a dog. If you demand obedience, get a small one.”
I am lucky that I am able to make my way in the world without having to take shit from morons for money. I can’t imagine how awful it must be for people like me who still have employers.
I was thinking that we’re going to need a website – call it CommieDoxxing.com – to document which employers – and which doctors! – have gone off the rails, like every other Marxist loco motive.
What you need is a plan: If you are ambiguously-employed – if your boss is desperate to destroy the business to get ahead at dinner parties – figure out how to be otherwise-employed, ideally self-employed, ASAP.
There’s all kinds of good advice out there – get fit, pack the larder with protein, grow your own food – but all of it is about being independent. Accordingly: Work to make your future free from self-abnegating idiots who presume to hold your livelihood hostage to their mutiny against reality.
Your bosses are planning to choke on the smoke of their own incineration. Why would you want to get what they deserve?
In other news:
William Jacobson: The media framed Kyle Rittenhouse — and won’t come clean even after the prosecution’s case falls apart.
Seth Barron: What’s Really on Trial in the Rittenhouse Case?
Joanne Jacobs: Grading for equity: What if kids don’t learn?
“If you won’t pick up after your own dog – what does that make you?”
“The Incumbent” said everything it takes to get an “investor” ejected from my car – the clueless things people insist on when they have huge dreams and zero experience. The stupidity of the “business plan” was obvious to everyone who has brokered real estate, but it was this – the risk of wrecking the real estate market – that turned me against the iBuying “idea.”
Barton sold his bullshit as a benefit to consumers, of course: That’s how all bullshit gets sold. But his own high regard for his Presbytyrannical apple-polishing is betrayed by his ignominious exit from his “investments.”
Zillow bought thousands of homes from owner-occupants that will now be turned into rental housing – gradually degrading every neighborhood Barton betrayed. They have more than enough money to sell the homes retail, as intended, but they are cutting and running because that’s just what preening sociopaths do.
The Zestimate is the joke that dominates the conversation, but as anything other than a rapid-bankruptcy plan for inept agents, Zillow is a menace.
In other news:
Chronicles: California Exodus.
John Di Leo: Kyle Rittenhouse And The Streets Of Kenosha.
“Could it be your life is too simple? I know a puppy who love to play with her ball – in the spray of the shower.”
But many of the sellers who turn to iBuyers do so because they believe – correctly – that the iBuyers are idiots who will buy any pig in any poke. The seller knows everything he didn’t know about the property when he bought it – the negative externalities that make it sell consistently for 4% less than model-match comps – and he’s betting that the iBuyers will be too dumb and too rushed to see their pricing mistakes.
Gaming “Artificial Intelligence” will be the extreme sport of our young century. Whether or not there are actually any “machine learning” “pricing algorithms” behind the bloviating iBuyers, the sellers are gaming them astutely.
In other news:
Jonathan Tobin: If The GOP Wants To Remain The Party Of Parents, It Must Fight For School Choice.
The Los Angeles Times: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading. Daycare gonna daycare.
