If you’re not following the GameStop saga, the first link is a better summary than you will find in the mainstream media. The whole episode is yet another sweet opportunity for the Ruling Class to expose itself as the Predator Class: They prey on you, fair game, but if turnabout is for once fair play, that’s “HATE SPEECH!”

In other news:

Patriots.win: On Gamestop, Why Hedge Funds Are Not the Good Guys, Why Redditards Are An Ally in this Particular Fight, and How MSM is Lying to Us (Again).

CNBC: The Fed won’t keep interest rates near zero forever — here’s what to do now.

Redfin: West Palm Beach Luxury Home Sales Soar a Record 116% In Fourth Quarter as Wall Street Moves South.

NOQ Report: Don’t be distracted by the ‘impeachment’ drama. The real threat to our republic is H.R. 1.

Angelo Codevilla: Dismounting the COVID Tiger.

The National Pulse: Trump Can Turn The Impeachment On The Insiders And Put Congress On ‘Trial’.

I had a run in with a Doctor of Education who could not reliably distinguish ‘affect’ from ‘effect.’ This is not rare, but it should be among people who think degrees matter. Plus, the answer is right there from the Anglicized Latin: A-, Ad- verbs are accusative in English; E-, Ex- verbs are ablative. I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I just said, “It’s easy. Just remember that ‘affect’ is accusative and ‘effect’ is ablative.”

That didn’t help. Probably didn’t help you, either, but my take would be that you can’t make sense without grammar and logic – the acquisition of either of which is likely to get you kicked right out of any American school of education.

Schoolteachers are dumb, as a rule – and dumber by the day in underfathered America. But wafting in on the breezes with all the imaginary coronavirus droplets is some good news: Because schoolteachers are too dumb to keep their jaws on the prey, some students are managing to escape their stultification.

You can lament that too many are still caught in the awful trap of public education, and I’ll join you in that. But I can celebrate that some slaves, at least, have made it to freedom.

In other news:

Zero Hedge: Home Prices Soar At 4.5 Times The Fed’s Inflation Target In All US Cities.

Housing Wire: Rising mortgage rates push applications lower.

CNBC: America’s top-tier malls were resilient, but values are now crumbling, down 45% from 2016 levels, Green Street says.

J.D. Tucille: As Teachers Unions and Bureaucrats Battle, Families Choose Alternative Schools.

City Journal: Narrative Before Facts: When will the media acknowledge their role in spreading false and inflammatory stories about police shootings?

Just don’t breathe.

That would be the advice of Dr. Fauci, who could be laughed off the planet tomorrow just by changing his political party registration.

Remember all the bullshit last Summer about how a drug saving lives all over the world could not be used here due to a lack of clinical trials? So why does a man who stood to profit by more expensive drugs now advise using two masks? “It just makes sense.”

To whom?

America is a Cs nation led by Ci cargo-cultists. We are not as good as Canadians at following orders, but we’re just not that Cs. Even so, the doofuses you see now driving while masked will soon be double-masked.

And traffic fatalities will soar, just as heart attack, cancer and suicide fatalities have soared while we stupidly listened to Dr. Fauci.

You can fault the Utilitarian calculation – “If it saves just one life.” Better yet, fault the gruesome inversion of that calculation: Kill two to save one – very temporarily. But best of all, fault the stupid “reasoning” that celebrates its mastery of one false proxy signal while the rest of the world goes up in flames.

Dr. Fauci is not evil. He’s just Ci in power. Disaster is baked in the cake.

In other news:

CNBC: November home prices rose 9.5%, one of the highest gains on record, Case-Shiller says.

Housing Wire: Zillow: Expect another record year for home sales.

Eye On Housing: The Missing Middle: A Solution for Adding More Housing.

Breitbart.com: Tech Workers Flee San Francisco.

Joel Kotkin: Making America California: The Biden administration seems determined to run the country on the ruinous model of the Golden State.

Seth Barron: Can New York Find a Better Leader?

Reason: Parents Who Opt Out of Public Schools Don’t Deserve Smears From Teachers Unions.

Just breed.

Come what does, the winners of he battle for civilization’s future will be the folks who out-bred all the others. I foresee that as being Ds – the only people left who choose to reproduce propitiously, given the choice – while I marvel at Ci’s ongoing self-extinction.

But: Prediction only gets you as far as yesterday. What matters is that men who want to preserve the West must meet, mate, marry and meld with the mothers of their children. The philosophical content of a Testudo dad’s teachings matter less than that he shields his family from the enemy’s noxious notions.

A viable culture is reproductive not just of its people but of itself: It is sustained across generations by generations of people who see it as being worth sustaining. That happens because sons admire their fathers – and because they don’t want to shame them. However you find it, that’s what you’re looking for.

In other news:

Joy Pullman: How To Stop Using Google Search On Your Computer And Phone.

Tyler O’Neil: Tulsi Gabbard on Dems’ Terror Law: ‘We Don’t Have to Guess About Where This Goes or How This Ends’.

John Tierney: The New Censors: Journalists celebrate the destruction of freedoms on which their profession depends.

Nick Gillespie: Glenn Greenwald: ‘Journalists Are Authoritarians’.

Josh Hawley: It’s time to stand up against the muzzling of America.

Victor Davis Hanson: The River of Forgetfulness.

Sebastian Gorka: Trump Will Return.

Kelli Ward was reelected as the Grand Poobah of the Arizona Republican Party last night. Local news with national importance: Against heavy opposition from the Cindy McCain wing of the Deep State, pro-Trump forces retain control of the state party. That argues that we may see electoral reform over the next two years.

I don’t know that it’s possible to get out of this mess without bloodshed, but, if it is, we need electoral reform in every state – by legislation where possible, by Federal civil rights suits in Marxist strongholds.

In other news:

Zero Hedge: People In These Five States Say ‘Get Me Outta Here’.

OutKick: Jeff Bezos, Amazon Refuting Mail-in Votes For Unionization.

Charles Hurt: Charles Hurt: Trump Feared More Now Than Ever.

Salena Zito: Why the US Hispanic conservative movement is surging.

American Thinker: ‘Moving on from President Trump’ is a Failing Strategy for the GOP.

Matt Taibbi: The Echo Chamber Era: Trust in media is down, but if journalists don’t listen to critics anyway, why should they care?

As expected, the Coronavirus hysteria can now safely abate, since fomenting terror is no longer useful for preventing voters from having their choice as president.

You just watched the Ruling Class pull out all the stops – lying blatantly about everything associated with the virus, destroying the world’s economy, impoverishing billions, killing millions – to prevent, disrupt and corrupt the election. You know that’s true, just as you knew all along that Hydroxychloroquine is an effective therapeutic and prophylactic.

I foresaw the deliberate crashing of the economy – and Trump’s aborning new center party – coming on five years ago, but I am proud to say that I did not envision the craven sociopathy of it all: These people are indifferent to all life. They literally let millions die from what is very probably a Marxist bio-weapon to put down the President Fallguy who was too good at being president to fall on his own, like a Republican should.

So: When it turns out that the rushed, untested vaccine is most effective at inhibiting pregnancy, please don’t pretend to be surprised. They’ve already made it plain they want you gone from the earth.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Real Estate Agents May Work Against Buyers’ Interests With Shortened Contract Contingencies.

In other news:

Housing Wire: 2020 home sales hit highest level since 2006. Nothing scary about that headline…

CNBC: Former Cisco CEO John Chambers says his start-ups are skipping over Silicon Valley.

Jordan Davidson: Woman Behind Bernie Sanders’ Iconic Mittens Quit Making Them Because High Taxes Killed Her Business.

Don Surber: The impeachment is about legitimizing Biden.

Charles Hurt: With Impeachment, Congress Trying to Overturn Future Elections.

Libertas Bella: China Owns Us: How the Chinese Are Buying Up America.

Jeffrey Lord: Joe Biden: The New George Wallace.

I address the idea of scaling in “Nine Empathies” – the empathy for the idea itself that enables us to grow so far beyond other animals: To farm is to feed your family, but to teach farming is to feed millions, and to master and teach the theory of farming is to feed seven billion bellies every day.

Much warned since the days of the Robber Barons, we have arrived at scaled humans: Jack Dorsey can silence the President of the United States, who in his turn can do – what? Jack squat. The tech oligarchs, at least, and perhaps all billionaires – minus Trump – have scaled: They can destroy anyone at will, and no one – not even the man who brought Kim Jung Un to heel – can do anything about it.

In the links, Charlie Kirk is begging Elon Musk to save-us-obi-wan-scoobydoo!, and he thinks he’s just making entreaties among everyday crime bosses. Why Don Corleone is the preferred mafioso – and why he, too, won’t turn on Turning Point – is a mystery, but here’s worse news for Charlie:

Elon Musk has scaled on the tech oligarchs. He has the high perch and the ability to fake meteor strikes – garage-band ‘rods from god’ – and soon he will have nukes in space. At the moment he is sui generis – homo novis, 3G-humanity – and if he wanted to take over everything right now, he probably could.

Damn one dam and it’s a brand new day – for somebody. Swallow hard on that…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Housing starts hit highest pace since 2006.

Redfin: Housing Market Update: Homebuyers Undeterred by Declining Listings—Pending Sales up 32%, New Listings Down 10%.

Housing Wire: Hispanic households to grow the most over next 20 years.

The Epoch Times: Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn.

Charlie Kirk: Elon Musk Should Build Us a Better Internet.

Christopher Bedford: The Fracturing Of America: A Weak Government, Complicit Media, And Radical Silicon Valley Might Have Finally Set It All Off.

The year 2020, by far the most momentous since 2001, was eclipsed in its entirety by yesterday, when these unthinkable events transpired:

• America, the land of the free, and all of its people and assets were sold into slavery to the Red Chinese.
• Even more amazingly, America’s national security apparatus, America’s military arsenal and all its military secrets were ceded to the Red Chinese.
• Hong Kong is to have fallen.
• Taiwan is to have fallen.
• And the entire network of American alliances – from Nato to the Five Eyes military intelligence compact – is compromised.

Entirely on script, the first suicide bombing in Baghdad in (ahem) four years took place yesterday. Too much peace. Too much plenty. America got tired of all the winning.

What happened yesterday was Ci reasserting itself. It had an awful 2020, but the entire Trump phenomenon – hugely Ds at the grass roots – has been awful for Ci.

Here’s the good news: Ci is inept in practical realty. It can’t change its own tires, much less its own oil. It depends eternally on people who are not Ci to effect its aims – typically Cs in an ordinary stable theocracy, anyone it can enslave in our current unstable technocracy. What happens when a queen bee is abandoned by her drones. She dies – outraged but nevertheless inept.

Here’s the bad news: Ci in power slaughters thousands and millions of innocents on its way down.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates hold steady at 2.77%.

CNBC: Spike in lumber and land prices causes homebuilder confidence to fall from epic high.

Redfin: Out-of-Towners Moving Into Nashville, Atlanta and Austin Have More Than 30% Bigger Homebuying Budgets Than Locals.

Angelo Codevilla: Clarity in Trump’s Wake.

Frontpage: Capturing the False Flag: What really happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6?

Frontpage: Thank You, Mr. President: You were magnificent.

American Thinker: The ruling class against Trump.

Tristan Justice: Welcome To A Biden White House, And The Next Chapter Of The Trump Era.

John Hinderaker: Trump Fought The Swamp and The Swamp Won.

Heather MacDonald: Words of Division: Cloaked in an appeal to unity, President Biden’s inaugural speech hit all the expected themes of racial resentment and Read more

The headline is not quite true. The Hoplite Greeks who birthed our earliest ideas about human liberty won their freedom not in battle but in neglect: At the furthest fringes of a contracting empire, they were left without overlords – but a country boy can survive. The fathers banded together as equals and developed weapons and tactics that kept their land free of brigands and emperors for centuries – long enough for Ds ideas about family and civil society to grow deep roots.

Dc liberty is all we ever hear about: Bigger, faster, more, more, more. But Ds liberty is borne of the dignity of human autonomy: Not what it might do, but that this is what we are – self-responsible free moral agents. Humans thrive when they are free. Enslaved, they wither and die.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Listing and Selling A San Diego Home The Bloodhound Blog Way. If you list, read this: Brian delivers a brilliant idea for making appraisal contingencies vanish.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications decrease as rates move higher.

Mortgage News Daily: The Real Story Behind The Past 2 Weeks of Mortgage Rate Volatility.

Housing Wire: In defense of the individual real estate agent. I’m a treetop flyer. Born survivor. Usually work alone.

Housing Wire: Yellen vows economic shakeup if confirmed for Treasury.

Joy Pullman: Democrats Are Framing Americans As Domestic Terrorists So They Can Do To Us What They Did To Trump In Spygate.

David Marcus: Don’t Worry, It’s Just Corporate Fascism.

City Journal: Crime and Diminishment: Rising violence may undercut New York’s efforts to rebuild its economy.

Roger Kimball: A Party of Faction and Fantasy.

Every listing is a clinic for me. I don’t list a lot, so I have the time to study things – but I’m the type who studies things, anyway. My goal is to improve my listing praxis, house-by-house, steadily approaching perfection.

I talk about this a lot here, of course, and as with everything else I have to say, nobody listens. But I know I’m getting better, and I know why I’m getting better – this being the entire point of working by praxis, by a mutually-informative collaboration between theory and practice.

So: As a Listing Agent, my objective for my Seller is to identify and contract withe the highest, safest, soonest offer, in that order of priorities. The theory that gets me there is radical transparency, but the practice in the trenches is simply salesmanship: I’ll show you my secrets if you’ll show me yours. I will tell you what to beat in the MLS, but if you phone or text me, I will tell you exactly how to beat the best offer I have.

So here’s a secret for Buyer’s Agents: A over-list offer is not impressive if the appraisal contingency is not waived. Inviting the seller to gamble with his own money can make sense in a down market, but now it’s just pathetic. And yet it’s the go-to move, offer after offer.

What should you do, instead?

You can’t impress me with money you can’t back up, so get to the highest number you can defend, but then fix your focus on safest and soonest.

Those are the places cash is already best, which is how it gets away with discounting, relative to financed offers. Accordingly: If you can beat the cash number and take away the Seller’s fears, you can make a closable deal instead of a deferred disappointment appointment.

So: Waive the appraisal and waive repairs. You’ve still got the ability to cancel, and, since competent adults can contract to any lawful purpose, you still have the power to negotiate about either later on, waivers notwithstanding: Falling out of Read more

It turns out that the funniest thing about this stolen election is how many overseas military ballots were swapped from Trump to Biden. The entire owl of the Capitol complex is now set up as a giant roach motel, guarded by 30,000 troopers. Funnier still, the Pedophile Reject has ‘disarmed’ people who are trained in every form of mortal combat.

If you’re looking for good dads, the National Guard is full of them. Biden is afraid of his Secret Service details, too, with good reason. In truth, though, it is the good fathering of the men assigned to protect him who have kept China Joe alive all along.

In other news:

Rob Hahn: Why Jenna Ryan Is a Test for NAR. Stupid is as stupid does. Brokers supervise. DA’s prosecute. Babbitts should stick to babbitting.

Lee Smith: It’s Not Censorship, It’s a Coordinated Effort.

Charlie Martin: Why Was Parler Censored by Its Competitors?

Michael Barone: The left now just wants to silence conservatives — all of them.

Daniel John Sobieski: Trump’s Silenced Majority – The Voiceless, Voteless, And Canceled Governed No Longer Consent.

Andrea Widburg: As Trump exits, the left doubles down on the White supremacy lie.

The Federalist: Minority Parents Fight The Educrats Erasing Gifted Education In The Name Of ‘Antiracism’.

City Journal: What King and Others Wrought: The titanic achievements of America’s civil rights movement refute claims by the Left that the country remains “systemically racist.”

All social hierarchies run from Irreproachable (cannot be injured from below, can injure anyone below with impunity) to Untouchable (cannot injure above, can be injured by anyone above without recourse). Not just true of people – all social organisms – and if you watch for snubbing and supplication behaviors, it’s easy to tell who is whom.

If you can see with your eyes and not your ears, you know that Donald Trump as president was Irreproachable ex officio, by virtue of the office, but was in fact America’s first Untouchable chief magistrate. He was and is a man without friends, betrayed by almost everyone eventually. Moreover, and measuring, as above, by the simplest of scales: Many of his erstwhile allies have been arrested, tried, convicted and jailed, but only one perpetrator of the continuous coup against Trump has been tried – so far.

What you are seeing now is Trump’s supporters being transformed – by the magic tar brush of ‘racism!’ – into Untouchables. Marxism is Grasshoppers devouring Ants; race is a proxy war, like Vietnam. But all Ants are ‘white supremacists’ – even the black, brown, red and yellow ones – since ‘white supremacist’ turns out to mean, by repeated ostensive definitions: A persistently good person, worth hiring or working for, a good neighbor who always holds up his own end. In other words, a ‘white supremacist’ is an Ant – and Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers.

So we are all Trump now. When they injure you, that’s ‘law enforcement’ – or, at a minimum, your ‘intersectional’ just desserts. When you resist being injured, you are an exponent of a violent reactionary racist nationalist terrorist group.

How can you tell you’re Untouchable and they’re Irreproachable? First count your wounds. Then tell me what you did about them.

In other news:

CNBC: How Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is luring tech players from Silicon Valley and New York.

Salena Zito: Poll shows New Yorkers want their new mayor to fix NYC — not spout ‘wokeness’.

Jordan Davison: Anti-Science Teachers Unions Push To Keep Kids Out Of Read more

Since 2014, I’ve playing with a contrarian listing praxis born out of my own frustrations representing buyers. Bidding in the dark is dumb. Being coy about what the principals will or won’t do is dumb. Paperwork for its own sake is dumb.

What I do by now is radically transparent and as frictionless as I can make things. I price to the market in round numbers – no screwing around from square one. I disclose when offers will be reviewed, and then I disclose the best offers in the MLS as they come in – Cash, Conventional and FHA. I work by text and phone with the strongest offers, telling the agents exactly what they need to do to beat the other guys. Then I tailor the offer I like by Addendum – not by Counter Offer; a Counter is a rejection and I am all about affection. Then we close.

It’s easy to be a lister now, but try this seven years ago. Even so: It works. If the price is right, you’ll show. If the value is right, you’ll get offers. If you accelerate negotiations by transparency and salesmanship, you’ll find the buyer you want before they find another house they want more.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Criminal charges filed against Texas Realtor Jenna Ryan.

Housing Wire: How Biden’s $1.9T stimulus plan impacts housing.

Reason: The 2020s Will Be the Decade of Deficit Doomsday.

The Daily Mail: Hay big spender! Farmer Bill is now the biggest owner of agricultural land in the US – billionaire Gates buys up 242,000 acres across 18 states.

CNBC: NRA files for bankruptcy, says it will reincorporate in Texas.

John Hinderaker: Did The Democrats Steal The Presidential Election?

Jame Bovard: Collective Guilt And The New Witch Hunt.