I sing the praises of practical ontology because we live in a cacophony of lies: You either take personal responsibility for understanding what is actually happening around you, or you mimic the mouthings of professional mouthpieces. Do you see why? If you have no way of checking up on reality, you have no way of checking up on them, either.

So: Ignoring whatever might be the cause – which is most emphatically not the point – is the Earth warming? Or is it cooling? How could you tell, one way or another, all on your own, using only your own senses as your measuring apparatus?

Here in the Sonoran Desert, we are gifted in late Summer with a seasonal delight we call the monsoon. South Asians quibble about terminology, but the monsoon used to have an objective definition based on the waxing and waning of persistently high humidity (for us): Wet air for weeks with big storms in the late afternoons and early evenings.

The source of the moisture is the Gulf of Mexico. When the Gulf gets very warm in late Summer, the airflow moves from East – around Florida, up the coast and off to Europe, the Gulf Stream – to West – across West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, all the way to Las Vegas and Palm Springs.

That’s the monsoon, for the whole of the desert Southwest. England and France flock to the beaches in August because their bad weather comes our way for a while. In Phoenix, the monsoon used to commence around July 15th, ending around September 15th. That rule-of-thumb has been failing for a while, such that they revised the official definition to hide all the missing moisture.

What is happening, observably to the senses and apprehensible in secondary consequences – e.g., changes in barometric pressure put my guitars out of tune – is cooling, not warming. The Gulf gets warm later and for a shorter span of time, sending less moisture West and more East – not out and under Florida Read more

I wondered yesterday with Cathleen if the Texas abortion law would have an impact on migration.

I was looking at a photo of voluminously unmarriageable women demanding their right to abort the pregnancies they didn’t incur from the dates they didn’t have. Will they be moving to states friendlier to infanticide? I can’t see why.

But Florida is the new Texas in this way, too, and other states – like the Four Corners of the Mormonosphere – are likely to restrict abortion, too. Legislation is no way to treat your neighbors, but the Red/Blue division between the states just got that much more intense – now with a bright-line quality of life issue: Pro-family versus pro-career.

Have the corporate weenies and NCAA types weighed in, yet? “Relent or it’s nothing but rodeo and pro-wrestling for you!” Frankly, their better argument is free egg-freezing – the low-cost way to pretend you’re not throwing them away.

But that’s where the migration will happen: Not now, among very-well-planted women, but going forward, as young women plot their life’s plan.

Real estate is kids and dogs. I don’t like laws, but the long-term effect of restoring federalism to infanticide laws will be immensely beneficial in the places where kids and dogs are already thriving.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates stuck in a rut at 2.87%.

Housing Wire: iBuyer Offerpad goes public at $2.7B valuation.

American Thinker: Afghanistan fiasco may have been the result of blackmail. Or, you know, China Joe simply sold America and all of its interests to a foreign empire…

Hydroxychloroquine worked all along. This was obvious all last summer, through all the lying on TV. Ivermectin apparently works, too, given the chorale of hysteria against it. We have foreign news sources to tell us what our own propaganda stooges won’t, and we have their spitting-in-unison to paint a negative image of the truth: Everything they denounce is worth looking into.

So we’ve known all along that having a healthy immune system matters more than anything: Fit, not fat, sunlight, D3, zinc, minimal alcohol, real food. Advice from the choir? Silence.

Obvious but well-concealed is the enduring immunity resulting from recovery from the virus. Sweden was half-right by not locking down – why we never hear about them any longer – but the other half we all missed: Corona parties for the healthy: Get it, prove it, kill it with therapeutics, herd immunity kills the virus. Since we’ve heard nothing at all about this, not even hysterical denunciations, I’m wondering if it might have worked.

Here’s what we can safely infer from the Deep State’s well-paid choir of liars: The stop-gap approach to health is suicidal. The people who took these vaccines may be stuck taking “boosters” for life – and the suppression of reports of side-effects is yet another disturbing choral sound-effect – but the whole vaccinated approach to human life is failing us.

The people who will have thrived, when the Age of the Coronavirus is a piece of history, are the free-range humans: Hard to kill because healthy from within. The rest of us are stuck praying that we’re not taking the wrong advice.

In other news:

CNBC: Here’s why experts believe the U.S. is in a housing boom and not a bubble.

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: 9% Increase in Pending Home Sales is Slowest Growth Since June 2020.

American Thinker: Events in Afghanistan are about to destroy our American complacency.

I saw a tweet that perfectly expresses the tragic futility of Marxism, why it seeks only the impossible.

Vide:

nobody with a white mom should be happy. ever.

The racism is grandfathered in: Pretend-pissing on white people is every poser’s LoserPass™. As teleology, it’s just stupid; refuted in reality billions of times, as evidenced by the historical fecundity of the offspring of white mothers.

But what’s interesting is the open admission that the objective is the socialization of emotional states – which is not possible.

You don’t get to have my hare-brained happy childhood, and you can’t stick me with what you got. You can try to steal what I own, but you can never steal what I know, what I envision, what I’ll build when I’ve dispensed with you.

Marxists are miserable because they are at war with the good – in vengeance against their too-stern or too-absent fathers. By means of looting and cargo-cult costumery, they ape their victims – never doubting that the pose is just that.

Inadequacy fuels resentment, but that just makes things worse. The victims are ultimately just tokens, too. The cancerous conundrum for every Marxist is that you can’t steal any of the things that make life worth living.

In other news:

Housing Wire: US home price growth hit record level in June.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage-refinance demand drops as interest rates stall.

Brad Polumbo: Stanford Study: More Businesses Have Already Fled California This Year Than in All of 2020. California has regulated and taxed its once-thriving economy into a coma.

City Journal: Failure at Every Stage: What the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan tells us.

Helen Raleigh: Dr. Scott Atlas: Science Killed Itself Over COVID-19.

I expected Fiasco Joe’s resignation a week ago tonight. This evening’s good, too, and China Joe’s reputation sinks with every hour he remains in office.

But I am well-advised by myself to dismiss normality bias – the absurd belief that, since yesterday was good, tomorrow will be, too. We are the prized pets of a Diamond Jubilee Golden Age – that has now come to an end. Where once men who aspired to the ideal of honor made honorable exits, by now ‘governance’ comes down to lying about catastrophes and clinging to power by any means available.

So: What next? Who knows? Kamala Jong-un is as clueless as Slow Joe, without dementia as an excuse. What the Democrats have actually done, almost 250 years after this experiment began, is demonstrate how the U.S. Constitution can can be corrupted from within.

And, just like that, “What next?” is a much bigger question, isn’t it?

In other news:

CNBC: Homebuyers sign fewer contracts in July, as high prices chill the summer market.

Joel Kotkin: Jim Crow returns to California: The Golden State’s climate policies have enforced racial segregation.

City Journal: No Liberty? No Problem: Australians shrug at their government’s draconian pandemic response.

Michael Anton: Importing Enemies: The demand to resettle Afghan refugees brings the war home.

Charles Hurt: Biden’s War: Image of President in Fetal Position Has Enemies Quaking.

Just The News: Homeschooled children increased from 13K in 1973 to 5M in 2020, report finds.

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