There’s always something to howl about.

Month: March 2010 (page 1 of 4)

The sad story of how my wife, my family and my own life were devastated by the the unhappy effects of… sad stories…

At a certain age, you come to feel you’ve got a pretty tight bead on things. Wife, home, kids, job — everything just seems to come together. But then you find out that you’ve built your life on solid quicksand.

I’ll tell you my story. I don’t expect you to believe it, but it’s as true as last night’s TV news. You see, my whole world came crashing down around my ears because of a peril I had never thought to fear — until it was too late.

That peril? Anecdote addiction.

There I was, Joe Normal, watching re-runs and waiting for the game to come on, when my wife would relate some juicy bit of gossip she’d heard at the beauty parlor. Only to her it was more than that. Not just a story — a symptom, a syndrome.

First it was just an anecdote now and then. Always blown way out of proportion, but, hey, it’s just small-talk, right?

But then the stories started coming thick and fast. And they always seemed to be connected, somehow, in my loving wife’s fertile mind. And before you knew it, she started coming up with solutions, prescriptions, Rube Goldberg contraptions that, she thought, would ameliorate these imaginary syndromes.

Well, kitchen-table schemes are one thing, but, before long, she had graduated to movements, slogans, web sites, bogus academic studies buttressed by bogus academic conferences — the works.

And through all this turmoil, our mariage was going straight down the tubes. We went from home-cooked meals to frozen food, thus to leave her time for picketing and activism. The children learned to dress themselves from the dirty clothes hamper, their mother was so distracted. And as for our sex life — well, you do the math.

And yet through all this, I was in denial. “Where’s the harm?” I would ask myself. After all, the entire country is addicted to anecdotes. We’ll stare cold, hard facts right in the face, denying them utterly in preference to a carefully-crafted sob-story. If it weren’t for treacly anecdotes, there would be no news business, no entertainment industry, no politics in America.

And, of course, it was Read more

Sequim Real Estate Blogger Dumbs Down America

I am a serial blogger and an Internet aficionado, but I had to read a book in print (yes they still make them) to learn that I am a member of an evil clan of bloggers who are dumbing down America.  In fact, according to this book, all who blog on this site are guilty of dumbing down American.  More than that, after reading only the Preface to the book, I began to realize that bloggers (that would be me) are responsible for the destruction of America, since America’s great structure of freedom is built upon the foundation of a free press of objective and independent journalists.  Since learning this from on high via the great journalists Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in their authoritative work, The Death and Life of American Journalism, I commenced a concerted effort to reconcile myself to the sacred truths of journalism.

While prostrated in prayer on my knees encircled by burning candles late one evening, I fell asleep during my meditation and managed to bruise my elbow in the fall.  Fortunately, my elbow didn’t hurt, since I had also burned myself on the open flames of several candles and that hurt worse than the elbow.  The burns from the flames, however, were relatively minor in comparison to the greater discomfort from the hot wax that splashed all over my neck and face.  Since then, I have begun to consider the possibility that McChesney and Nichols may be incorrect.

I went back to their book.  Here are two true professional journalists with resumes longer than my life, writers for major newspapers, professors of the world, and experience that made my head spin, so who am I to question their wisdom and penultimate conclusions.  (Sorry, I just like to use the word “penultimate.”)  Here is how these objective journalists started their book.

In each of the first three paragraphs of the first page of the Preface, they praise President Obama for various things.  One gets the idea that they believe he is not only the savior of the world (little “s”) but the savior of journalism.  Yet was it Read more

Ten million iPads to be sold in 2010? It could happen…

You heard that right. Morgan Stanley is predicting that as many as ten million iPads could be sold in 2010. A boatload of them have already been sold, and the iPad doesn’t even ship until April 3rd.

iPad news abounds, of course, and no one needs to be reminded about pudding and eating, all those caveats. But, as with the iPhone, nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. We’re going to see a paradigm shift in computing even if the iPad “bombs” by selling only five million units. My 88-year-old mother-in-law is texting on her iPhone, and, no-doubt, will soon be trolling Facebook for friends and grandchildren. A whole new population of punters is about to join the online world.

Not convinced? I can but smile. We haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet, because the insanely great iPad ideas will require a few months of hands-on time. Meanwhile, Apple has posted some guided tours to the iPad so you can see what you’re missing.

My posts on the iPad (so far):

I Bet Many of the Cool Kids Are On the Verge of Greatness

I’ve always loved the Cool Kids (CKs). I’ve never been a cool kid, but the kinda sorta quasi-cool guy who seemed to think differently, while simultaneously remaining under most folks’ radar. I’ve been the poster boy for Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours principle, which says we don’t become excellent at something ’till we’ve logged that many hours doing it. The CKs in the ethereal world of 2.0 real estate come and go, but the ones who’ve remained, some hangin’ by their fingernails, are the ones still puttin’ in those first 10,000 hours in the fields. That’s hopefully a diplomatic way of sayin’ they’re still mostly theoretically based and not so much empirically experienced — but gettin’ there.

A few of these CKs are gonna rise one morning realizing they’ve figured out where that last piece to their particular puzzle goes. When that happens we’ll all benefit wildly. ‘Till then? Let’s stop fallin’ in love with all the ‘can’t miss’ marketing ideas tossed at us as if they’re just as reliable as gravity and Grandma’s raisin-bran muffins. It just ain’t the case. If so, most of these kids would be livin’ the life of Steve Jobs, a CK himself, who actually put in the 10,000 hours and leveraged it to the max. Then he kept adding more 10,000 hour blocks to ensure the excellence of results.

What I’m tryin’ to say, and poorly at that, is that the CKs need to keep plowin’ their fields without ceasing. It’s like gettin’ in shape. You begin with a jelly belly and become discouraged after a week cuz you don’t look like Adonis yet. Rely on the universal principles at work — the most important of which is putting in your time. There’s simply no substitute for that part of the process. When working out consistently for a year, our jelly bellied friend is now slim ‘n trim, and wearin’ tank tops whenever possible. 🙂 Meanwhile, the others who haven’t unambiguously logged the hours, day in and day out, failed — but they’re still CKs, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m about to complete my eighth 10,000 Read more

SplendorQuest: Redemption is egoism in action

This is clipped from a book I wrote in 1988 — a book I really need to write anew. It’s an epistolary novel, so the writing is kind of affected. I expect you can worry your way through it. “Madness,” as the term is used here, is an attempt to claim, as knowledge, a proposition the proponent knows in advance is invalid. –GSS

 
Redemption Is A Being Aware.

Redemption is finding Splendor in Rectitude. But much more importantly, Redemption Is Egoism In Action.

Egoism is the worship of the self by the self, all the time, for all time. Egoism Is A Being Aware of who he is and what he is doing and why — all the time. It is the pursuit always of values and never of disvalues, always of pleasure and never of pain, always of Truth and never of Madness. Egoism is the recognition that the fullest value of the self is realized through the fullest knowledge of the self.

Egoism is knowing and doing the good through time. It is a set of ideas, but ideas devoid of meaning if they are not put into practice. One can know Splendor by taking those actions one thinks are right. But one cannot know it by merely thinking about what is right, without acting upon it.

Redemption Is Egoism In Action, in the real deeds of your real life. By your self-loving actions, you redeem the errors of your past and make of them the achievements of your present and future.

It is not impossible to avoid doing this. Most people waste their whole lives trying to pretend that past errors need not be corrected. But neither is it possible to avoid the consequences of failing at redemption.

The future is open to change, but only by choice. Any person can take what he has and make of it what he would. If he is willing to make the effort. But he will not have his desires without fighting for them, without mothering them into being. The soul he creates for himself is the one he acts to create. If he fails to act for Read more

SplendorQuest: My plan to stage a graceful exit from life when the pursuit of Splendor has become impossible to me

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
‘Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.’

      –Robert Louis Stevenson

This is important: Everything that matters in human life is to be found to the right of the zero on the number line. Zero is never greater than one, so concentrating on the zero or on negative values is necessarily anegoic — contrary to the true interests of the ego.

Can it sometimes be needful to attend to negative values? Yes. I speak of eradicating bugs all the time, since this is a useful metaphor for understanding the actual meaning and importance of disvalues. If my food is being devoured by ants, I need to to exterminate them. If there is a scorpion in my home (it happens here), I have to crush it — grind it to a gooey pulp. If a two-legged predator attempts to confiscate my wealth, I must be prepared to defend myself.

But this is not what human life is for. Some days are cloudy, but if I focus on the clouds rather than on the illimitable sunlight I can produce by using my mind to its fullest, I am throwing away the only life I will ever have in pursuit of nothing.

But: Even so: I can foresee that there will come a time in my life when the pursuit of Splendor will no longer be possible to me. Until lately, I thought the most likely scenario would be that the accumulated effects of aging would render me incompetent to continue to thrive at a fully-human state of being. Given the resurgence of Marxism under President Obama, it seems plausible to me, of late, that I might be imprisoned for my philosophical positions. And there is also the possibility that I might someday find myself unable to produce more wealth that I consume. The most likely cause of this would be the government’s progressive destruction of Read more

Adorn that russet Bloodhound in Redfin red: Today we make common cause against stupidity, cupidity, stolidity and inertia in the real estate industry in behalf of the consumer’s right to a fully-informed, financially-sound and fun real estate experience.

Redfin.com is coming to Phoenix today — 6 am PDT, to be precise. And they’re coming as a VOW, which strikes me as being a potent marketing advantage, at least in the short run. And the news that might be most of interest here: BloodhoundRealty.com is coming along with them.

As I wrote in February of 2009, Redfin is entering new markets with referral agents as well as its own employees. Cathleen Collins, my wife and business partner, and I will be handling one quadrant of the referred territories.

From Redfin.com’s press release:

Redfin today expanded to the Phoenix metropolitan area, increasing the number of listings available on Redfin’s website by 8%. Phoenix is the third market Redfin has opened since December 2009, and the twelfth overall. Separately today, Redfin is announcing upgrades to its listing service, and new support for short sales.

With this launch, Redfin’s site offers customers the photos and marketing materials used to list properties that recently sold, information previously limited to real estate agents. No other website offers this data, known in the industry as Virtual Office Website (VOW) data, to Phoenix consumers. The new data, which consumers can use to develop their own market analyses, became available last year as a result of an agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Association of Realtors.

Redfin has access to the real-time database used by brokers to list homes because Redfin is a broker that represents customers buying and selling homes. In Cave Creek, Fountain Hills, Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler and Gilbert, the company provides direct service, employing its own real estate agents. In the East Valley and the West Valley, Redfin relies on partners. Redfin’s search site covers all of Maricopa and Pinal counties.

Cathleen wants the business. We’re growing fast, and she wants to grow still faster.

Greg wants to be an even-more-disruptive disruptor.

But among many other things I might talk about, there is this: Redfin’s internal praxis actually does impose a performance bar on practitioners. It’s the kind of corporate pencil-pushing I’ve always been lousy at, but Redfin tracks and measures everything. Not for pencil-pushing reasons, but in order Read more

My kind of doctor: “I am responding to the situation created by this new law by exercising my right not to participate in any health insurance program.”

A letter from a sane doctor, posted at The Corner on NationalReview.com:

March 23, 2010

My Dear Patient,

As you must know, Congress has just passed extensive legislation governing health care delivery and insurance systems. Whether you agree with what it does or not, we are all now subject to this law and its sweeping changes.

I have always conducted my medical practice with my patient’s best interests as my first priority. Although not legally obliged to do so, I have routinely provided you with a receipt that has all the codes necessary to bill your own health insurance company for any reimbursement to which you are entitled. Until now, that insurance company was a free enterprise despite the fact that it was heavily regulated by state and federal laws. Now the situation is quite different. Through the new law’s mandates, regulatory powers and reform, health insurance is and will be largely a government activity which will have an ever larger jurisdiction over how doctors practice, make clinical judgments and are paid.

The new law provides for about 150 new government agencies, many of which are designed to be ‘oversight’ bureaucracies which will have the right to decide what medical care is legal to provide through insurance. Among other things, they will have the right to review my medical care of you and read your medical record. Now, as soon as you submit our economic transaction to your insurance company for reimbursement, you have involved me in these regulations and put me in the jurisdiction of government for my activities, decisions and behavior as your doctor.

No one can have two masters. Either I can serve you as my patient or I can serve the government. Either I can continue to make your welfare and health my only concern, including the protection of your privacy and medical records, or I can abide by ever-increasing amounts of government regulations and dictates to my decisions. I can’t do both. I choose to continue to follow my conscience and practice medicine to serve you.

For this reason, I am responding to the situation created by this new law by exercising Read more

BloodhoundRealty.com’s Greg Swann and Canadian real estate investor Bill Chipman featured today on an NPR Radio story on Phoenix rental-home investing for buyers from Canada.

Click on the embedded audio player below or read the story on-line. Reporter Peter O’Dowd — a genuine born-here Phoenician and a Brophy Prep alum — spent about four hours, total, with Bill Chipman and me, an amazing commitment of effort. And that photo above? That’s what paradise looks like. We have plenty to go around…

Cultivate your garden

There’s a lot of caterwauling these days. I used to be a libertarian, and still have many friends who hew to that line of thinking. In recent days, my Facebook page has been awash in complaints and claims that the country has turned a corner, that the best years are behind us, and on and on. I had to chuckle.

This is all nonsense. First, it’s a narrative awash in nostalgia for a period when, presumably, peoples’ individual liberty was more or less respected, when the free market more or less reigned, and when the government was small and limited.

Let’s be clear. This country has never had a truly limited government, and if you think so, you should tell it to the victims of chattel slavery, to the men conscripted into armies to fight wars, to those who lived in the Jim Crow south, to those interned at places like Manzanar.

And before you start on about how universal health care is a diabolical plot to destroy your liberties, please take a moment to think about the hundreds of thousands of human souls confined to American prisons for the crime of selling, transporting, or using what politicians have defined as “controlled substances.”

Or the couple hundred thousand held in detention this very day because the U.S. government says they crossed a political border to earn a better living for them and theirs.

There are a lot of injustices in the world. Universal health care, however corrupt and ultimately ill-fated a project that may be, falls pretty far down my list of crimes. Your mileage may vary.

I got out of libertarian politics because, it seemed, a lot of it was built around a commitment to protect a set of institutions that privileged a certain middle class, bourgeois status. Libertarians would go on and on about the horrors of the capital gains tax, or the injustice of Social Security, or stupid regulatory rules.

But while many of them would give lip service to the idea of ending deep injustices – like the war on drugs – so few Read more

Historian Robert Higgs: “Citizen, be careful what you wish for; the government just might give it to you good and hard.”

Nothing Outside the State

by Robert Higgs

A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). I recall this expression frequently as I observe the state’s far-reaching penetration of my own society.

What of any consequence remains beyond the state’s reach in the United States today? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life.

One might affirm that the state still keeps its hands off religion, but it actually does not. It certifies certain religious organizations as legitimate and condemns others, as many young men discovered to their sorrow when they attempted to claim the status of conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. It assigns members of certain religions, but not members of others, as chaplains in its armed services.

Besides, isn’t statism itself a religion for most Americans? Do they not honor the state above all else, above even the commandments of a conventional religion they may embrace? If their religion tells them “thou shalt not murder,” but the state orders them to murder, then they murder. If the state tells them to rob, to destroy property, and to imprison innocent people, then, notwithstanding any religious strictures, they rob, destroy property, and imprison innocent people, as millions of victims of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and millions of victims of the so-called Drug War in this country will attest. Moreover, in every form of adversity, Americans look to the state for their personal salvation, just as before the twentieth century their ancestors looked Read more

Originator Compensation Overhaul to Cost Consumers

I said new legislation would benefit mortgage brokers to the detriment of direct lenders.  In the comments, I feared something insidious might happen (responding to Wayne Long):

WAYNE: “It is interesting that the new rules benefit the broker vs. the direct lender”

BRIAN: It wasn’t by design (which is why I expect legislation that “forbids” my expert opinion on whether a borrower can be approved)

The government-banking complex doesn’t want negotiated rates for any consumer loans.  The government wants to “set” the rates, according to its whim.  That’s price fixing . 

Don’t believe me?  Look at the prestidigitation that just happened in the health care bill.  While you were arguing about the hijack of the health care industry, the Federal government quietly nationalized the student loan industry.

“Good.  Lenders are all thieves anyway!” you snort. 

Think again.  San Diego had a thriving student loan industry until last year.  Thousands of jobs were eliminated with this bill.  Moreover, Grandma can’t buy securities now, collateralized by those student loans, in order to juice up the yield on a portion of her portfolio.  The student loan industry nationalization is just one more way to buy party loyalty from young voters; the base of this Adminstration’s voters.  Loan “grants” will be the “new moniker”, designed to portray the Federal Government as the “kinder, gentler” nanny.

Shall I continue?  When rates fall again (sometime way in the future), the hordes of private companies, wanted to offer graduates a chance to save money, by refinancing or restructuring their student loan debt, won’t be there.  Graduates will be stuck paying above market interest rates, to retire debt.  Forget that the federally-guaranteed student loans inflated college tuitions, this provision raises the overall cost of a college education (the value of which is debatable anyway)

But I digress.

As quickly as you could say “expansion of the size and scope of Government“, did the left hand start new projects, to get you to stop thinking about the right hand’s health care hijack.  Immigration reform is the larger scaled sleight-of-hand but, hidden in the bowels of the Fannie/Freddie takeover, is the anti-consumer price fixing that is being proposed.  Read this:

Geithner called for aligning incentives Read more