Category: Real Estate (page 7 of 266)

I rhapsodize church, but I don’t go to church. But: I do go to Fellowship Hour, as valet and manservant to Miss Cleopatra Chioux, church dog. I’m perfect for the job: I don’t want to go to church and Cleo can’t. But receiving her vast and adoring fan club is the cherry on the sundae of her Sundays.

Until this Sunday. I am steadily more vertical in my pursuits, but not reliably so. I am no kind of dog-scooper, for now, and I’m completely useless as a poop-scooper. Miss Chioux stayed over Saturday, like usual, but she was hugely disappointed in me: I wasn’t playing right. Cathleen was a hero in every way, but I wasn’t good for much until Sunday morning. And, of course, there was no way I could take her to Fellowship Hour.

BFD? It matters to me. I’m trying to figure out what she can figure out, and the reliability of her weekly routine matters to us both. If she was clocking her weeks on the bright spot – Fellowship Hour – then I threw out more than my back. But it matters just because I love her and I want for her to have as much as she can of everything she loves.

How she’ll deal with this exception, I don’t know. I may be expecting too much from her – each day a brand new surprise, too many to keep track of. And yet I know she can clock her days, and many of our other dogs could, too. Ophelia, a Redbone Coon Hound, would come with her lead when she knew by the late-afternoon light that it was walking time – and so she would show up at 11 am on cloudy days.

All dogs – all mammals? all organisms? – live by the sun. Cleo is very playful for a French Bulldog, and we have worked hard to keep her busy – to not let her slip into that lazy torpor that defines too many dogs’ lives. But it’s been fun to watch her sleep cycle Read more

I’m an atheist, but I really like the idea of church, and I wish we had better ways of doing church. In the same kind of seemingly schizoid way, I hate the public schools, not alone because they are tax-funded, but I love charter schools, even though they are tax-funded.

Here’s the why for both: Ds civilization is a friendly competition among fathers to do everything better – especially fatherhood.

When a lot of Ds and Cs dads live near each other – in what we used to call a neighborhood – their awareness of each other leads each of them to better and better performances as fathers: Better providers, better homesteaders, better handymen, better coaches – better at everything at home and therefore better for everyone at home and in the world at large.

Better for their wives and children, too, it should go without saying. Moms compete with other moms when they can – meaning when dad has provided so well that mom can stay at home for kith and kin. And dance lessons and little league and summer camps and soap-box derbies are all made possible by Ds and Cs dads – prosperous enough to pay for it, loving enough to stay for it.

Churches and charter schools recreate that good-neighbors environment without the neighborhoods. By their being, they engender communities of like minds in which dads, moms and kids can all strive to do better together.

Churches are families of families, the fallback for failing families, much as the family is the fallback for failing individuals. Plus which, your church is the ideal place for your kids to meet their lifelong mates: Opposites might attract, but it’s shared values and expectations that go the distance.

And shared values and expectations are what unite kids from charter schools: All of the parents are serious about education, the curriculum itself is sound, and results matter, since the stock-in-trade – the children – is fungible. Good charter schools have branch locations all over. Bad charter schools get bought Read more

In the years immediately after World War II, the United States imported scads of German intellectuals. Nazi envy? The fear that we’d vanquished the lesser enemy? Or just plain old ‘aw shucks!’ American suicidalism?

Yes, we scooped up Werner von Braun and all his little Braunies – putting the U.S. weeks or even months ahead of the Soviets in space exploration.

But we also infested our universities with all of the Frankfort School, the neo-Marxist cabal who vomited out Critical Theory, among other intellectual atrocities.

Yes: The rampant Marxism that is destroying the world by way of America was brought to America by the American government. Who made your kid irredeemably obnoxious? Well, you did – but Uncle Sam provided both the noxious vocabulary and the inescapable intellectual straight-jacket.

The idea of ‘narrative’ is essential to the modern way of (none-dare-call-it-)thinking: The truth is what we say it is – or what the powerful say it is, or what we can make the powerful say it is with the right combination of flattery and torture. If I’m getting it all wrong, fear you nothing: There is no way to get it right except to swallow it whole with no objections – none, ever – by donning that straight-jacket yourself.

What’s wrong with the ‘narrative’ idea? How about Fiasco Joe? The ‘narrative’ needed a worthy opponent to take on Trump, so Sleepy Joe was literally ‘nominated’ – named – that epic hero.

Amtrak Joe is a cargo cult, and this is “no accident”. All of Marxism is a cargo cult: By stealing this wealth, I will also have stolen the attributes of character that created the wealth. Marxism is patricide-by-proxy, but the underlying crazy might be a sort of imagined post-mortem summing up, son-to-father: The triumph of vice over virtue at last!

If you watch for it, you’ll see that kind of snickering among all sorts of screw-ups, most notably Sleazy Joe himself: He gets off on getting away with things. That’s the reason for all of the very public child-molestation, too.

But now China Joe has his nuts Read more

I am circumscribed, written into my corner, temporarily. I threw out my back yesterday, so I am leaving you to our own devices with the news – with some commentary as we go.

My big problem is a matter of reliability: Miss Cleopatra Chioux, the French Bulldog I valet for, does not know that her social hour at church is not a fact of nature but is instead a matter of follow-through by a lot of people – mission-critically: Me.

I don’t know that she can really clock her whole week, but, if she can, visiting with her fan club is the cherry on the sundae of her Sundays.

I don’t want to let her down.

In other news:

The National Review: Supreme Court Strikes Down Biden Eviction Moratorium. Great news! The Supreme Court rushes in to protect the right to property – only a year late. How many lives were ruined? Who cares? Procedure matters more!

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates hold steady at 2.87%.

CNBC: ‘They were snatched up in 12 hours’: First-time homebuyers face stiff competition and high prices.

Business Insider: A real estate CEO appraises the home ownership inequality problem in the US — and how to fix it. What to make of Glenn Kelman? Is he really that red, or does he just spout Marxist jibberish to hang onto his job – and his head? Business Insider is captured, so it’s hard to tell how red Kelman actually is. He says the poison of government is so bad for housing that we need a lot more poison – but all corporate weenies talk like that. Here’s hoping the First Class section in the boxcar to the gulag is worth all of these compromises with undoubted evil.

Joel Kotkin: Big D Is a Big Deal: Dallas–Fort Worth is becoming the de facto capital of America’s Heartland.

City Journal: The Moralistic Corporation.

I’m going to give you a brand-new term: Black-washing.

Black-washing is racially-motivated white-washing.

The term ‘diversity hire’ is a ‘dog-whistle’ denoting a persistent beneficiary of black-washing. Consequential errors by people of preferred racial categories are dismissed, ignored or lied about. To address the error as would normally be done would call both the original hiring decision and the very idea of ‘diversity hiring’ – racial preferences – into question.

You’ll be able to see an example of all this tonight on television, I expect, as ‘diversity hire’ Lester Holt interviews ‘diversity hire’ Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Leroy Byrd about Byrd’s murder of Ashli Babbitt – which turned out not to be criminally-negligent-homicide (we are told), and yet somehow is not an act of heroism worthy of a medal and a ceremony. In other words: Black-washed.

Yesterday, I wrote a list of questions Holt will not ask:

1. Did you once abandon your firearm in a washroom?
2. Did you observe strict trigger discipline until you fired your weapon?
3. Were there members of your own team in your line of fire?
4. Were you given seven medals and a banquet by Congress?

They’re not really fair questions, since I already know all the answers: Byrd did leave his weapon in a washroom some years ago, and, but for black-washing, should have been fired then. Byrd not only had his hand on the trigger the whole time his weapon was drawn, he was weighed down by freight – a huge pile of documents – in his other hand. Byrd fired without issuing any warning, and without any obvious reason for shooting, with his own teammates in his line of fire. And, of course, he was ‘exonerated’ without getting any medals, his identity concealed for months, because all of these crimes are being black-washed.

Walking away on his firearm might require a special black-washing effort, but I expect the others to be ignored. So what’s the point of doing the interview at all? Bryd risks self-Smolletting, after all: Drawing explicit attention to the black-washing by Read more

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.