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.

Buck Phiden graced me with five new jokes this morning, in the first hour of my day – which starts for me sometime in the dead of the night. This is ephemera on ephemera, fleeting snark on a platform where I am already suppressed. Fun for me, which is all that matters, but a clinic for you, too, if you like, in how to write graffiti.

We think of it as Roman art – graffiti and satire itself – but the Loki joke is as old as Loki, and the best exemplar of Loki in classic lit is Homer’s Odysseus, whose canine presence here graces us with a joke of his own every day.

A joke has a seller (“Knock-knock”) and a buyer (“Who’s there?”). A Loki joke has a seller, a buyer and a target – and the joke consists of the unexpected pain inflicted on the unsuspecting target.

Graffiti is a Loki joke made anonymously, ideally against a powerful target. The power of the joke comes less from the underlying humor than from the risk of crossing the powerful. Accordingly, reading and especially reacting to graffiti is also risky – and, in that respect, anyone who is presumptively forbidden from laughing at graffiti is also the target of the joke.

But laughter is a mammal brain phenomenon. It races ahead of the thinking brain’s plodding clerical efforts, so a chuckle can slip out before studied propriety can suppress it. Knowing in detail that we are organisms does not make us not-organisms, so our failures at the suppression of irrepressible biology are funny, too.

If one man laughs at the wrong moment, it might cost him his job – or his life. If a nation laughs when it has been ordered not to – another dictatorship has fallen.

It took a while, but Odysseus won everything in the end – and, of course, the world ends and begins, over and over again, because of Loki and Sigyn. And Marxism in power is always a pageant of ineptitude, a bulging balloon of sanctified buffoonery: Humorless Read more

“One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy” – the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people – than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.” –James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism.

Although he claims to come from Scranton, PA, Sleepy Joe Biden apparently has yet to meet the Cumberland Strain of American patriots. Joe Bob Briggs wrote a wonderful send up of the Cumberland Kind, and you should read it, but here’s a key incident to illustrate the idea: When the federal government turned on redneck distillers west of the Cumberland (ahem) Gap – The Whiskey Rebellion – some folks paid the new taxes, but the Cumberlanders moved out of reach of the revenuers and proceed to invent Bourbon and later stock-car racing.

If you put yourself on the freeway and set the cruise-control for four miles-per-hour above the speed limit, everyone who is passing you is a Cumberlander in spirit – a taker of no shit. The ones who honk at you could find a way to shoot you, if you get too much in the way.

These are the people Sleepy Joe intends to make war on…

In other news:

Housing Wire: Fannie Mae’s rental payment change worries some.

CNBC: U.S. judge denies landlords’ request to block CDC national eviction ban.

CNBC: U.S. Supreme Court strikes down part of New York’s eviction ban.

KOMO News: Seattle police’s response times reach over 60 minutes as staffing shortages continue. Ahem.

Scott McKay: Toward An American Revivalism: It’s time to say “goodbye” to conservatism. CTRL-F ‘fatherhood’; not found.

Human Events: The Biden Justice Department Can’t Seem To Produce The Evidence It Supposedly Used To Indict The January 6th Protest Cases.

Julie Kelly: The Justice Department’s ‘Troubling’ Discovery Delays: January 6 defendants appear to have practically no shot at a fair trial in Washington, D.C. Some judges are finally pushing back.

Here’s a fascinating fact, at least for everyone resonating between my ears: Miss Cleopatra Chioux, the French Bulldog to whom I am valet and Dutch Uncle, does not know how to jump down from chairs or sofas.

She jumps masterfully, mind you – on terra firma. But she has always feared and doubted jumping down from a height, and I have done nothing to amend this aversion. Instead, I am happy to constrain her movements whenever I need to. Our conversation pit is her hamster trail: Room to roam, nowhere to go. In the mean time, I am waiting to see what she works out on her own.

And yes: When I am not selling and managing real estate, I am playing with a puppy to figure out how she knows what she knows. I’ve been writing little things like this at Facebook forever, typically precedent to writing something more momentous, but that’s a habit I have to break.

Here’s the fascinating part: Much like infants, dogs know almost nothing when they’re born. The snake-brain stuff works, but that’s more process than knowledge or even awareness. But instinct or race-memory or anything like an in-born wisdom of the workings of the world outside the womb seems to me to be utterly absent.

My take is that Cleo does not know anything that she has not learned from the world of experience. She has no thinking brain, but since all mammals are easily-trained, we know she has the ability to connect dots: Not A to C, but A to B on her own, all the time, and A to B to C with training.

I think much of what is denoted as instinct in mammals is actually learned, emulated behavior: Otters teach their young to swim and male dogs who don’t grow up around leg-hikers pee like girl dogs for life.

Cleo is two treats away – one for the jump down, one for the jump back up – from being mistress of the sofa. But she doesn’t know she can do it, even though she never couldn’t, Read more

This is me seventeen years ago, writing about a cat who cheated death for as long as she could:

Anti-evolution asserts itself…

Understanding anti-evolution, step-by-step:

1. My wife Cathy has been feeding feral cats in our neighborhood, depriving them of the natural evolutionary process of starvation. Denying them, even, of the opportunity to prey on some other sucker. She did not try to adopt the feral cats, to her credit, first because we already have seven cats, and second because they’re feral–which means skittish and really good at drawing blood.

2. One of the feral kittens, to get warm, climbed into the fan housing of my wife’s car.

3. The next morning, Cathy thumped the stuffing out of that kitten while trying to start her car.

4. Greg, the strong, silent type, wrestled the ding-dong kitten out of the fan housing.

5. Greg, because he really, really likes having sex and wants to continue having sex, did not strangle the kitten, even though it was sliding right under death’s door.

6. Instead, Cathy rushed the thumped-up kitten off to the vet.

7. The vet didn’t kill the kitten either, even though he doesn’t get to have sex with my wife.

8. Many weeks and many, many dollars later, the kitten was released from the veterinary hospital.

9. Because it is a feral kitten, completely unsocialized, my wife spent a lot more money on it on the way home from the vet.

10. Then she fell in love with it and gave it (her) a name: Nero Marquina.

11. Now we have eight cats.

12. Even so, the free food continues for the neighborhood feral cats, more and more of them every day…

Miss Chioux is helpful to me, at least. I have worked with her to do things as procedures, and she delights in knowing and doing what comes next. Death is what comes next for Marquina. All of us, including the little yearling Cleopatra Chioux, are lucky she was able to hold it at bay for so long.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates rise to 2.87% after jobs report.

CNBC: Rental bidding wars Read more

The Federal government has no Constitutional power to police commercial transactions. Per the Founding Fathers, the Federal government has no police powers over the citizens of the sovereign states at all.

This matters because it seems likely that today or someday soon, Sleazy Joe Biden will try to impose a national lockdown, a national mask mandate or a national masks-in-schools mandate. All of these would be unconstitutional – you know, like the CDC eviction moratorium.

The Fedly intrusions on individual liberty over the past 90 years were made possible by a deliberate misunderstanding of the “commerce clause” – reinterpreting the word ‘regulate’ to mean micro-manage, where the Founders and everyone until then knew that ‘regulate’ meant what faucets do to water.

There are all sorts of Supreme Court decisions I would like to see reversed, but the decisions that created the Federal leviathan are by far the worst. In the American Thinker link below, John Green tells you how much worse the Supreme Court has gotten, but I invite you to consider how much better everything could be – if we only had the Constitution we were promised.

What Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Cross-Dressers teach us is that dictatorship is always caprice, and caprice is the death of everything worthy. With one reversal, the Court can get rid of all the awful alphabet agencies – including the property-usurping CDC – and give Americans back the limited government they were promised.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage applications up 2.8% amid jobs gains.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand hints at return of the first-time homebuyer.

Joel Pollak: Major Landlords Sue L.A. for $100 Million over Eviction Moratorium.

Jordan Davidson: It’s Only A Matter Of Time Before The CDC Shuts Down Your Child’s School.

City Journal: Individual Choices, Not Lockdowns: Most people don’t ignore risks, and they can react more quickly than governments.

American Thinker: The Supreme Court has Become a Council of Kings.

Daniel Greenfield: Cuomo Quits Over Cuomosexuality, Gets Away With Cuomocide: Nursing home patients who choked out their last breaths still await Read more

As I mentioned, I got thrown off of Facebook for three days, giving me time to think about what I want to do with them.

(Would-be closers take note: Giving the customer time and reason to think about killing your deal is contra-indicated.)

When Amazon shivved Parler, we had to rethink them, too. We can’t get all the way rid of them, so we cut our annual spend by around 90%, moving those purchases to other vendors.

I think I’m going to do the same with Facebook. I like the families and pets stuff, but I’m going to move everything else here or to Gab.

What makes a happening hotspot work? Everything has to work. What makes it fail? When the people who once thought it was hot decide it’s no longer working. Driving away reliable content creators is how Facebook will join MySpace, in due course.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Soaring home prices are spooking buyers.

Mike DelPrete: iBuyers: Paying Above Market and Reselling For More Upside.

Helen Raleigh: Suni Lee’s Olympic Triumph Is More Evidence American Meritocracy Works.

City Journal: Costly and Counterproductive: An executive order to mandate electric-vehicle sales presents economic and environmental problems.

The Heritage Foundation: Judge Defends Equal Justice Against Tide of Critical Race Theory, Disparate Impact.

Aboriginally, Marxism is patricide by proxy. Fathers with Cautious need as their first or second priorities – recalling that much of the post-Calvinist West is Cs at home – tend to produce rebels or replicas. Guess which Marx was? Both as expressions of their individual upbringing and as the motive of their movement, Marx, Engels and all of the Marxist theorists aim to rid the world of sternly disapproving Cs, Cd and Dc fathers, themselves becoming living saints of Ci theocracy.

Frustrated displays escalate and amplify. Underfathered Marxists (like every underfathered child) act out in dire quest of boundaries that never come. Accordingly, sources of disapproval multiply and the Marxism that was patricide aborning is genocide full-grown: Marxism is genocide by proxy.

And it seems to be turning out that any genocide at all will do. Ants are to have been devoured by Grasshoppers, yes, of course – eventually. But for now, apparently, it will do to designate Unvaccinated Americans as the counter-revolutionary wreckers of the microsecond.

They’re not wrong: Anyone who refuses to be a replica of Ci is a rebel against the perfect order of everything. Don’t you ever dare doubt it: Heresy, not hubris, causes famine.

And who could be more worthy extermination than heretics? We can’t run out: The FBI is always whipping up more. And yet at some point, if only at gun-point, we can face facts: Marxism is genocide by preference.

In other news:

Redstate.com: Like Locusts, Hollywood Stars and the Tech Elite Are Swarming on Austin.

Don Surber: Leave the unvaccinated alone.

Heather Mac Donald: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2).

Pedro Gonzalez: ‘Defund the Police’ Is a Problem. Not Prosecuting Criminals Is Worse.

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

Mark Twain is reputed to have said that, and, if he did, it pays to remember that he was in the book-selling business. That’s why you used to see that quote so often in bookstores.

We repeat it like a dietary admonition: Good advice we have no intention of following. But I can go you one better, because I live it: To fail to write is to fail at being human.

Most of the credit we give to the thinking brain actually belongs to the mammal brain; in my spare time, I am demonstrating this with a French Bulldog named Cleopatra Chioux. What the thinking brain actually does, discernibly from the mammal brain and the snake brain, is make abstract connections – precisely what your dumbass dog can never do.

Qua telos, thinking rationally – in proportion to the facts – is our job – and for the most part we suck at it. Reason requires rigor, and rigor is meaningless if unmeasured. I am apt to say that discursive prose is thinking, but that’s not literally true. What is true is that if you expect me to believe that you have engaged in thought, you’re going to have to show me some proof. This – writing – is how that’s done.

Yes, you were cheated in school, and no, you’re not doing well at hiding that fact. But ignorance is everyone’s curse – we’re born that way – and it has never been more-easily exorcised.

The internet is very much your friend in this regard: It puts all the world’s facts at your fingertips, but it also drops you into little text boxes where you can make your ideas real by putting them into words.

There is nothing bad in this. Even belligerent assholes become better writers and thinkers, over time, by writing every day. And if you apply yourself honestly – never making persuasively-invalid claims, never indulging your biases, never attacking people when your Read more

So it seems me and Facebook are parting ways. I posted this photo yesterday:

Pretty pithy, no? Turns out, Facebook hated it. You’d think they’d hate it because it’s about their staff – pudgy college-bred Marxists who are begging to live La Vida Deathcamp. But no. The problem is their AI software thinks the photo is advocating eating disorders or something:

It’s hard not to agree with them that Marxism is suicidal – but only incidentally. Marxism is genocide, and Facebook is complicit.

Since this is the third time I’ve been caught out telling the truth on Facebook, I am banned for three days. In addition, they imagine that I would ever think of giving them money again, so they won’t “let” me advertise for 30 days. There’s more, but we care a lot.

The question is: What next? I like Facebook as an experience, but I hate the people behind it, and, as with Twitter, I knew it was going to have to go. It’s a self-destructive grace on Facebook’s part for them to work so hard to make an enemy of me: They need free content – it’s the draw – so pissing off content-creators one-by-one is just the kind of business strategy I like to see them pursuing.

Where for me? Here. I came back to BloodhoundBlog because I saw this coming. If you want to hear what I have to say, subscribe by email or CSS. If you want others to hear what the Bloodhounds are saying, you have to do the linking. I’ll be on Gab as @GregSwann going forward, but I have no following there, so far. I will continue to post the very rudest of attacks to LinkedIn, but they’ll throw me off in due course, too.

But that’s why you should be here: We tell the truth that gets censored everywhere else.

In other news:

CNBC: Renters are behind $3,700 in rent, on average. This map shows a state breakout.

Joel Kotkin: Garcetti’s Legacy.

The American Spectator: The Recycling Police Are Here, and They’re Not Happy With You: Government officials spy and surveil Read more

So my wife cooks with the big ugly pans, and she leaves them dirty because she know I don’t like for her to wash the big ugly stuff. But she leaves all the other dishes dirty, too, knowing that I can’t wash the big ugly pans until all the smaller stuff is out of the way. But the joke is on her, because I like doing the dishes when there are a lot to be done. I am Driven first, Incandescent second. The only jobs I like are the ones where I can literally see the difference.

I smile. We study logical fallacies and cognitive biases – and so we should: Truth is more than just the absence of error, but error is a malign infestation, always worthy of eradication. But even then we are haughtily Ci, or at best Cs. Every other way of looking at the world is lost to us – and everyone who doesn’t mimic or at least idolize Ci is entirely excluded from the conversations of civilization.

I am twice delighted to see public education blowing itself up. At its best it was an awful usurpation of parental authority. By now, it is simply state-sponsored Marxism. But parents seeking alternatives means that some huge fraction of the current generation of school-kids is going to learn to read. That’s a low bar, I know, but some is better than none. Better yet: Some huge fraction of the kids public schools routinely throw away will get a shot at an education, for an earth-shaking change.

If you think Ci gnome-scoffing is the only path to truth, put down your phone – which you owe to the inexhaustible Di energy of Steve Jobs.

Now that’s a man who made differences everyone can see – but think of what today’s public schools would do to him…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Homebuying Conditions Improve Slightly as Mortgage Rates Decline.

Housing Wire: Delta variant fears send 30-year mortgage rates to 2.77%.

National Review: Small-Time Landlords ‘Hanging On by Their Fingernails’ as Eviction Moratorium Drags On.

Fox Business: Realtor groups sue Biden Read more

They’re setting up another Reichstag Fire event. That’s what the taunting is about. With every new act of cultural destruction, the Marxists move the game their way. But their motive in baiting you is to get you to lash out in protest – so they can call you a terrorist.

When the new lockdown comes, many people will resist – as people are doing all over the world. The more kinetic their response, the better – from the Deep State’s point of view. Sometime soon, the F.B.I. will commit an enormous crime, which will be blamed on the “violent” anti-lockdown protestors.

Is the goal a national vaccine passport? Confiscation of firearms? They’ll take all the territory they can grab, under the cover of keeping the peace.

Accordingly, if you’re going to protest, you have to do it in the most inert, most abstract, most prostrate way possible: If anything you do looks like violence, you’ve already lost.

You don’t need a Gandhi, you need to be Gandhi: Just go limp. They can’t charge you for doing nothing, and I should think that simply turning off your phone – you and a few million friends – would be enough to give the Ruling Class the shits.

But if the resistance to the lockdown is not just peaceful but positively inert, the F.B.I. and its Antifa stooges will stand out even more than they did at the Capital riot.

Don’t let them blame their crimes on you.

In other news:

Pedro Gonzalez: Nation of Renters.

Zero Hedge: Tenant Stampede Results In Largest-Ever Surge In Rents.

John Daniel Davidson: With Biden’s Illegal ‘Eviction Moratorium’ Democrats Openly Embrace Lawlessness.

Paul Bedard: Gun sales already at 11 million, poised to break another record. Attn: #Redfin: I was wrong. Gun sales continue to surge. If vaccine passports blow up in big cities, expect further volatility.

Real Clear Politics: When Confidence in Our Institutions Collapses.