Author: Greg Swann (page 4 of 208)

On Cleo’s first birthday, she ate a lizard.

The first time I took her for a walk, when she was but barely weaned, she ate a bug. I regarded that as a salutary accomplishment for a young apex predator, but the lizard was a quantum beyond mere bugs: She saw it, captured it, conquered it and devoured it – very slowly.

My joke now, about food she likes, is that it’s made out of genuine lizard – worth the chewing. Everyone else Miss Chioux knows thinks that a girl dog is a girl, where I know all dogs are dogs. I can make them squeal simply by saying, “Remember: Nothing builds bones like bones.”

There’s more: Tuesday, late afternoon, I took Cleo over to our new place, to start getting her acclimated to it. All transitions are disruptive to toddlers, but gradual transitions become adventures. I had some of her toys there, and the house it empty for now – just another gym to Miss Chioux. The back yard is circumvallated – it has a block wall – so we played outside, too, with her dodge ball and with tennis balls.

But there was (is?) a rabbit trapped in the back yard. Cleo scared it up and the race was on. The bunny was fast, but Miss Chioux is, too. He managed to find a place to hide, but Cleo could not forget him. I took her inside, hoping the rabbit would find a chance to escape. No joy. When we went back out, she scared him up again. One, two, three times around the yard and she had him, pinned to the ground with a mouth full of fur. I pulled her off by her harness or that bunny would have been dinner – to a roly-poly little bloody-faced girl.

I took her back in to what will be my office, but she was crazed, yipping and barking, Read more

“Showing causes damage.” I said that to a seller last week, in support of taking an early cash offer, in preference to waiting through the weekend to see if financed buyers could try to beat it.

Fun, then, to see Redfin.com – America’s highest-tech national database of Pending listings – promising to double sellers’ unvetted showings.

Want me to sell you on Buyer’s Brokerage? Someone has met the buyer, has run his credit, has photocopied his driver’s license.

Redfin is bragging that it is adding security to a stupidly insecure process, but so what? Will double the showings surface the best-qualified buyer? No, that’s the all-cash offers that come in without showings on the first day. Will it result in less damage to the property? Will unsupervised access get some houses trashed, others burned to the ground? Hide and watch.

What’s most interesting about big-talk technology in real estate? Everything it says to the marketplace is nuts – and all of its “listings” are Sale Pending.

In other news:

Brad Polumbo: #MintTheCoin: Economist Explains Problem With Just Minting $1 Trillion Coin to Pay the Government’s Bills.

Sharyl Atkisson: America’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal: ‘It’s even worse than people know’.

Roger Kimball: Is this the beginning of the end of the Biden administration?

So you know: The physical addiction to caffeine can be shed with only three days of excruciating headaches. True fact. There are other ways of getting there without the pain, but if you want to be done, the quick way is three endless days of absolutely no fun.

I’m guessing ditching Facebook would be even easier…

In other news:

CNBC: Even with low interest rates, mortgage payments are increasingly unaffordable.

City Journal: Unsustainable: The Biden administration’s new immigration-enforcement guidelines will have bad practical and political effects.

Legal Insurrection: AG Garland Weaponizes FBI Against Parents Protesting Critical Race Theory, Mask Mandates.

I would hate to have to have a job, but there is a benefit: You get to see the same places at the same times every day: You get to watch the world change: You get to see it costumed by the ever-changing light.

That’s not just warm beer, it’s warm near-beer. But in the age of the internet, if you want to be in business for yourself, you have to do something the internet can’t do – at least not without your help.

Mere brick ’n’ mortar won’t cut it: We’re talking blood, sweat, toil and tears. If something can be bought or sold remotely, it will be. If a task can be effected remotely – or robotically – it will be. What remains are jobs that can only be done on-site, in-person, by laying human hands on real stuff.

That’s a lot of scut-work – what we used to call craftsmanship – but it’s also all of art. Human beings are built for better things. We educate people terribly, for now, and Ci makes a hell of school, of work – of everything. But if we are to be relieved of everything machines can do, it is so we can do the work they can’t.

In other news:

City Jounal: The New Secession Movement: States increasingly look to ban travel and business with other American locales.

Roger Kimball: The January 6 Insurrection Hoax.

California Globe: Homeschooling Inquiries Skyrocket After Gov. Newsom Announces Statewide Student Vaccination Mandate: Statewide mandate ‘final straw’ for some parents on fence about homeschooling.

The fate of big cities is to become Grasshopper ghettos: Working-from-home was happening anyway, but it was vastly accelerated by the virus, and soon Elon Musk will inaugurate working-from-anywhere. Meanwhile, the worst of urbanity becomes more-concentrated as the Ants withdraw. That argues that big-city demographics, going forward, will skew toward dissipates and welfare slaves – and the predators who profit on them.

This coincides nicely with the current urge to secede, apparently held by virtually everyone. As discussed, the United States cannot split up. But it can make the big cities – red blotches of pustulant Marxism pock-marking an otherwise healthy country – “sovereign nations” – you know, just like the Indian reservations. All the fun of being a “nation” – with none of the pesky responsibilities. As Willie foresaw, they could even have casinos, just like the other red Americans.

What they can’t have are weapons of war – you know, just like the Indian reservations. Lose the nukes, keep the kooks? That will sell in Manhattan. Lose the kooks, keep the nukes? That works just right for Manhasset. Problem solved.

We may have a basis for splitting up, but the Grasshoppers do not occupy whole states but only major metropolitan areas – and not all of those. As noted above, this self-sorting will continue, as Ants realize they have fewer and fewer reasons to remain in Grasshopper cities. Split away those Marxist metros, giving them all the power and dignity of an Indian reservation, and all the conflict is gone from our midst.

Are Grasshoppers wrong in their life choices? I would say yes, as would any Ant who dares to speak, but Grasshoppers are not at all shy about criticizing Ants. So be it. Different strokes for different folks, and each man to his own saints. But: Ants do not live comfortably among Grasshoppers – and now they don’t have to.

Big cities will become Grasshopper ghettos. Were they wise, they would defuse the Civil War talk and assure their own Read more

I studied Latin as an adult, in pursuit of nothing but self-improvement, which might-could tell you something: I spent my time and my money – costing myself earning opportunities – and, accordingly, I studied. I learned Latin well enough to teach it, and my study guides earn me plaudits from young Latinists all over the world – when midterms and finals roll around.

The other students were mostly kids, but all of them were taking Latin as a course required by their majors, not because they wanted to read De Bello Gallico in the original. As a result, they discovered real studying for the first time in their lives. They had all just been shining it on, all along – class discussions and rambling essays and group projects – even in math classes! They found the wall in Latin class: If you can’t keep up, you will be left behind.

The teacher graded from A to J – and even an F was once worse than an E. The point she was getting across is that there is a lot to get wrong, and she was kind enough to point out everything. If you studied, you were fine, but you had to give the work as much time as it needed – every day – or you were instantly overwhelmed. The class went from 40 to 20 students in three weeks.

No one lives or dies on discriminations among semi-deponent verbs, but everything we rely on relies on people who know what they are doing. A middle-school in Minnesota proposes to eliminate the F grade – to combat the ‘systemic racism’ known as academic excellence – which notion deserves a grade lower than J.

I realized when I was a young scruffian in New York than the welfare system replicates the plantation system – “the second time as farce.” It is funny but not fun to watch people attempting to erect an aristocracy of the inept. But it won’t be funny at all when you tender you life into the Read more

So the house I’ve been rehabbing for the past month sold for $20,000 over list in around twelve hours. It’s a good time to list houses, to be sure, but fortune favors the prepared mind: I knew just what the house needed to attract the offers I wanted. We spent a lot to get there, but we made a lot more by doing the work than we would have by leaving it for the next guy.

The supply-chain crisis is real. We bought a new Arcadia door for this home, and getting the glass to the window-maker took three weeks. Some things you just can’t get around, but I’m more than usually jaundiced about glass, cabinets and countertops. Paint, flooring and blinds, on the other hand…

Cosmetic flips are easy for us, and effecting Diamond Jubilee upgrades on postwar tract homes – block and shingle, built to last – is an eminently doable business. Cathleen would love do The Dowdy Scottsdale – updating a dated luxury home – but I’m not that greedy.

But: I need to move to the other side of the table. Controlling the listing is everything now, and there is no better way to control the listing than to be on title. Here’s fun: If I do this, I may ditch the MLS and “list” on Zillow, as I do with rental listings. Buyer’s brokers take heed: Ain’t no way to go broke like no co-broke.

In other news:

Real Clear Policy: Democrats Want to Hand America’s Failed Public Housing an $80 Billion Slush Fund.

TownHall.com: Between Afghanistan and Immigration, Have We Ever Had a Less Competent President?

American Thinker: Faux Capitalism.

Jordan Davidson: Leftist School Boards Association Begs Biden To Use Domestic Terrorism Laws To Target Concerned Parents.

It is your thinking brain that languidly declines Latin nouns and categorizes and conjugates all those vigorous verbs. Whatever else it does, the thinking brain is an amazing database engine – the source of the information that makes informed discretion – free will – possible.

And yet: You as a human being can manage a truly sociable social network of only around 150 people – 15 or fewer you know and love as family, with the rest being those people about whom you can speak in loving detail of recent memories. As new close relationships are added, older, more-distant ones drop away, since 150 or so is all you mind can handle.

But consider: This is also true of your dog: He knows and trusts dozens of people – and other dogs – but it’s only family he treats as furniture. If you watch your dog interacting with people he knows, you will see graduated expectations based on past experience – for instance, who shares food while eating and who only afterward? That is: A database of memories of past interactions with particular people.

Evolution gave us the need for the thinking brain – too many freakishly difficult survival problems all at once – but the Greeks wrote the manual. But they – and we – are blinded by our own brilliance: We refuse to see what we had to have seen first, in order to have seen anything at all: All mammals are amazing adaptations with astounding brain power. They can’t connect dots, but they never, ever have their postulated ducks out of alignment.

It seems obvious to me that dogs and people manage personal relationships in about the same way because they are doing it with the same hardware: The mammal brain. Do recall, all other mammals are solving their own social problems without the thinking brain; unlike proto-humanity’s survival crises, the need pre-existed the hardware upgrade. This is very alien to the Greek way of thinking, where “dumb” animals are regarded as animate rocks, surprisingly variable deterministic Read more

John Hinderaker asks if electric cars are a joke, but I can think of something even funnier: Electric motorcycles.

Scooters, Vespas, mo-peds – battery up; no one cares, least of all fertile women. But the purpose of a motorcycle is to be showy and obnoxious – to be showy by being obnoxious. Remove the obnoxophone and you have removed the marketing appeal.

These are the purposes of a motorcycle in America:

• To be obnoxious at start-up and shut-down, especially when everyone else is sleeping.
• To be obnoxious at stoplights.
• To be obnoxious in traffic.

In fact, this is all about Incandescent need – and the excessive displays necessary to catch the attention of preoccupied strangers ensconced in cars and enmired in traffic. But how are you going to distract them with your presence without the boom-boom-boom of that VRROOM-VRROOM-VRROOM?

Like NASCAR and the NFL, is the motorcycle business trying to replace its customer base? Seems equally wise to me: Hating the people who love you will not inspire the love of people who hate you. But, as with corporate weenies everywhere, there is an incandescent need even more important than VRROOM-VRROOM-VRROOM. Who cares if it kills the business?

In other news:

The Federalist: Of All The Third-World Cities I’ve Lived In, Baltimore Was The Worst.

WKBN.com: Vans operating as illegal Airbnbs in NYC impounded by NYC Sheriff’s Office.

Thomas Lifson: Schadenfreude to start the week: Biden and the Dems’ plans are collapsing.

Roger Kimball: How It Might End, Act I: It seems to be that we have alarm bells going off all around us. The oddity is that so few people seem to hear them.

Christopher Rufo: The White Backlash That Wasn’t: Opposition to critical race theory is broad and bipartisan.

Who was looking ahead? This is me in February of 2019:

Marketing genocide:
Stage 1: Tax-payer-funded abortions for all!
Stage 2: Now free in nursing homes, too!
Stage 3: Stay put. We deliver!

If the virus isn’t genocide, if the vaccine isn’t genocide, the hunger for genocide remains. I wish I were joking. Australia daily proves the wisdom of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, but America is not yet that overt in its genocide: All we can do is pass laws permitting abortion until the baby is old enough to run away screaming – while sending cornucopias full of cornucopias, orchards of orchards, into combat.

Ci in power is always tyrannical, but when that power is challenged, pro forma niceties are dispensed with – and that’s when the bodies start to pile up.

The hyper-compliant have believed since they were toddlers that theirs is the only safe path to survival. As we are already seeing in Australia, Ci will vigilantly kill you – more in sorrow than in anger – to keep you safe.

In other news:

Bonchie: The Tyrannical Scenes out of Australia Grow Darker and More Disturbing.

American Greatness: Democrats Can’t Have It Both Ways on the ‘Great Replacement’.

Julie Kelly: Times Reveals FBI Role in January 6.

Linked below, there is apparently a TikTok video of a real estate agent accusing iBuyers of nefarious market brilliance. He’s in Nevada, where Florida goes to blow its reputation for probity, so that alone may explain his conclusions.

Mine are the opposite: The iBuyers are terrible marketers. They buy low from idiots, but they have cultivated a whole new garden of flippers who will pay more – and who have the iBuyers’ marketing to attract sellers. But to this day, the sell like REO agents – like intern REO agents: They do everything they can to leach the marketing value from their marketing efforts.

I’ve bitched about this before, in detail, but here’s a current example: OpenDoor has a listing on Coggins Drive in Sun City. A couple of months ago, a good gust of monsoon wind grabbed their yard sign and twisted the post 45 degrees in the ground. Yes: That much wind. Note also: Months ago. What’s fun is that the sign is still tilted that way. Nobody serviced the sign because nobody services the listings – the listings that sit on the market forever, just like any mis-marketed REO.

My take: If you got beat by an iBuyer, you suck and you belong in another business. They do, too, but there is no point in you racing them to bankruptcy.

In other news:

MarketWatch: Viral TikTok accuses Zillow and competitors of manipulating the housing market. Here’s what’s really going on.

Housing Wire: New home sales rise for second consecutive month.

City Journal: Ending Homelessness? No – just more of the same federal policy.

Michael Fumento: The Myth of ‘Long COVID.’ For all the twists and turns of the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps none is stranger than so-called “Long Covid.”

Andrea Widburg: A look at the terrible plight of one of Biden’s political prisoners.

Townhall.com: New Report: More Americans Are Choosing Charter Schools Over Failing Government Schools.

I link from here every day, and this blog has always been about linking out – not as link love or click bait but as further proof: For anyone telling controversial truths, a link is a footnote.

Even so, I never link to paywalled sites: That would be pointless. My first post at BHB was about the futility of holding ordinary information hostage, and, in a world where being-linked equals being-visible, making the links to your information non-functional is worse than pointless.

Ad-block-block, if you must, but now you must surmount my aversion to unblocking you – just this once – before I can even decide if I might want to link to you.

Wanna be unblocked forever? Just tell the truth, like the epilepsy-inducing circus poster that is The Daily Mail. Charging me money to tell me lies I can’t share is beyond stupid.

In other news:

CNBC: Mortgage rates rose sharply this week – and there could be more increases on the way.

CNBC: The Evergrande crisis may just be a ‘tempest in a teapot,’ says analyst.

The Washington Times: U.S. facing biggest homicide rate increase in 60 years.

Stacey Lennox: Voting With Their Feet: Parents Taking Their Kids Out of Traditional Public Schools in Astounding Numbers.

City Journal: Blame Biden, Not the Military: The president can’t dodge responsibility for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal.