BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 61 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

May 22, 2010

Everything the ancient Greeks warned us about democracy has come true in modern Greece — and right here in River City as well

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Mark Steyn in Macleans:

Traditionally, a bank is a means by which old people with capital lend to young people with ideas. But the advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are in effect old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to bail them out. And the idea that it might be time for the spendthrift geezers to change their ways butts up against their indestructible moral vanity. Last year, President Sarkozy said that the G20 summit provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.” European capitalism may have a conscience. It’s not clear it has a pulse. And, actually, when you’re burning Greek bank clerks to death in defence of your benefits, your “conscience” isn’t much in evidence, either.

Let us take it as read that Greece is an outlier. As waggish officials in Brussels and Strasbourg will tell you, it only snuck into the EU due to some sort of clerical error. It’s a cesspit of sloth and corruption even by Mediterranean standards. On my last brief visit, Athens was a visibly decrepit dump: a town with a handful of splendid ancient ruins surrounded by a multitude of hideous graffiti-covered contemporary ruins. If you were going to cut one “advanced” social democracy loose and watch it plunge into the abyss pour encourager les autres, it would be hard to devise a better candidate than Greece.

And yet and yet . . . riot-wracked Athens isn’t that much of an outlier. Greece’s 2010 budget deficit is 12.2 per cent of GDP; Ireland’s is 14.7. Greece’s debt is 125 per cent of GDP; Italy’s is 117 per cent. Greece’s 65-plus population will increase from 18 per cent in 2005 to 25 per cent in 2030; Spain’s will increase from 17 per cent to 25 per cent. As lazy, feckless, squalid, corrupt and violent as Greece undoubtedly is, it’s not that untypical. It’s where the rest of Europe’s headed, and Japan and North America shortly thereafter. About half the global economy is living beyond not only its means but its diminished number of children’s means.

Instead Read more

May 20, 2010

Rand Paul’s take on private property rights is correct — and daring to tell unfamiliar, uncomfortable truths to voters is laudable.

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Well.

I’m thinking that “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” has brought us a nearly universal display of cowardice from the RE.net. If I am mistaken in this, I will happily amend my error with a link and a courtly bow. But I expect there is even more room for quivering, quibbling, cowering, caviling cowardice on this fine and perfect day.

Like this: The position Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul took on property rights yesterday is correct — not just as regards property rights, but as an expression of the errors we need to correct in the body politic if we are to reemerge, eventually, as something resembling a civilized society.

The left is attempting to smear Paul as a racist for insisting that private property owners themselves have the moral authority to be racists, even if Paul and virtually everyone else find that position to be morally-repugnant. This Two-Minutes-Hate campaign doesn’t seem like a winning strategy to me, in the age of the internet. The left will have no trouble finding reasons to hate Rand Paul, but his own tea party admirers may find in his principled arguments even more cause to admire him.

But mainstream Republicans are in full-reverse mode, backing away from Paul as quickly as they can. This seems to me to be a mistake. The tea party movement is an artifact of the age of the internet. At the least, tea partiers check up on the things they are told by the mainstream media. And it seems plausible to me that many of those folks are aware that the United States has been pursuing the wrong policies — as a matter of philosophy — since the end of the nineteenth century, at least. Anyone seeking greater human liberty has to regard this present moment as an incredible opportunity to get ordinary Americans thinking about ideas they might never have considered before. For Republicans to race away from the actual philosophy of liberty seems to me to be hugely stupid.

So let’s start here: Racism is by far the stupidest and most morally-repugnant form of collectivism. This is completely obvious to any thoughtful individualist, Read more

May 20, 2010

“Jihad, Las Vegas!”

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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“C’mon, Sahib,” the Cabdriver said. “Let’s get rollin’.”

Sahib said, “Again I must remind you that my name is not Sahib. And also I must ask you again to wait. Even now I am about to win the jackpot.”

Sahib was sitting at a penny slot machine in the casino of the Stratosphere, in fun-filled-Las-Vegas-Nevada. Max coins, no less, a real player.

“Jeesh!” said the Cabdriver. “Your jackpot’s a hundred freakin’ bucks!”

“No, you are very much mistaken. The colossal-grand-jackpot on this machine is ten thousand American coins.”

“It’s a freakin’ penny slot! Ten thousand pennies is a hundred bucks!”

“Even so, I have every confidence that I must certainly hit the jackpot. By now I have eliminated nearly every other possibility.”

“No memory.” I said that. I was at the bank of machines behind theirs, playing video poker.

Sahib said, “I regret that I must ask you to repeat yourself.”

“No memory. ‘The wheel has no memory.’ Blaise Pascal. Inventor of roulette. Also of probability theory. There’s a random number generator inside your machine. Sixty times a second it spits out a new random number. Doesn’t remember the last one. Doesn’t care about the next one. When you hit the max coins button, you get the current number, and nothing you did before, nothing you’ll do later will change that number.”

The Cabdriver leaned over to murmur in my ear. “Freakin’ fascinating,” he grumbled, “but I’ve got to get this clown out of here!”

“In addition,” Sahib continued, “a young woman has promised to bring me another one of these very appealing citrus beverages.”

“Margarita,” I said.

“Again I must beg your indulgence in repeating yourself.”

“It’s a Margarita. Lime juice and tequila, plus Triple Sec or Cointreau or Grand Marnier.”

Sahib was aghast. “Promise me, sir, that I am not consuming alcoholic spirits!”

“Not here. Not by half. Here they make ’em with lime-ade and monkey-puke.”

“Thanks be to Allah,” he sighed. “I am very much enjoying my monkey-puke.”

The Cabdriver was seething. “Sahib! Hadn’t we better go about assembling your freakin’ bomb?!”

To the Cabdriver I said, very quietly, “This is Las Vegas and it’s all about fun, but since nine-eleven I Read more

May 19, 2010

How the bank robbed Bonnie and Clyde

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Stick ’em up!” said Clyde. I swear that’s what he said.

My first bank robbery. I was right behind Clyde in line, so I saw it all. It wasn’t what I expected…

Behind the teller’s cage was Hello-my-name-is-Annabelle, the world’s most unflappable teller. She said: “Do you have an account with this bank?”

“Huh?! Lady, this is a stick up!” Clyde had one of those cheap little .25 caliber pistols, the kind that are guaranteed for three armed robberies or one family brawl. He was wearing nylon hose over his head so it was very difficult to tell that he had brown hair, brown eyes and a pitiful little attempted moustache. I don’t think his nose is really that flat.

“I understand that,” said Annabelle. “I asked you if you have an account with this bank.” The prim people worship Annabelle as a goddess: she is primness personified, right down to the last tittle and jot. Her mousy-brown hair was wound up in a tight little bun and her little half glasses rode half-way down her nose. She wore a forest green dress with the tiniest white polka dots. I couldn’t see her shoes, but I’d bet they have buckles.

“Oh, just put the money in the bag!” commanded Bonnie, Clyde’s moll. She’s an unbearably thin woman with bleached blonde hair and greasy jeans. She didn’t bother with a disguise, since the downtown of every city that has a downtown is crawling with unbearably thin women with bleached blonde hair and greasy jeans.

“I would like to do that,” said Annabelle. “But first I’ll need your account number.”

“I don’t have a damn account!” said Clyde. “Okay?! If I had money, why would I be robbing the damn bank?!”

“Well, if you don’t have an account, I’ll need eight dollars.”

“Eight dollars! What the hell for? If I had eight dollars, I could wait until tomorrow to rob the damn bank!”

“Non-depositor’s transaction fee,” said Annabelle. She tapped her pen on a little sign mounted on the counter: “If you don’t have an account with First American Interstate National Trust, we will be happy to process your Read more

May 18, 2010

Cooler than a corpse…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“I… uh… I thought we’d be meeting with the brands committee.” Manny Kant said that. He gnawed at his lower lip.

The Big Boss lowered his girth into the chair at the end of the conference table. He took his time, and Manny accommodated him by breaking out in a sweat at the temples.

“Naw,” said the Big Boss. “I don’t need no ass kissin’, no blame shiftin’, no idea snatchin’, no duty skirtin’. Not today. Today I need an answer, so I come down myself to see what you got to say. What you got to say, boy?”

Manny swallowed hard. “Well, I, uh… I… uh…”

“Go ahead, boy, spit it out. I ain’t gonna bite you!” He laughed from deep in his belly and the laugh turned into a crackle in his throat and the crackle turned into a cough and the cough turned into a fit. When he was finally able to stop coughing his face was florid. He chuckled and shook it off and fished into his breast pocket for a cigarette. He coughed again with the first puff of smoke but he was able to contain it.

The Big Boss was big. He was a commanding presence, and, now that I’ve seen him, he’s even a commanding absence. He was fat and fleshy and pink, but there was a power in him, a strength of purpose and a physical strength buried beneath the fat. He wore a blue seersucker suit and a starched white cotton shirt and a red bow-tie, a letter-perfect son of the South. He was bald with just a fringe of white hair at the base of his scalp and his eyes were small and dark and beady. They were overwhelmed by the flesh of his face, like a pig’s eyes.

Manny presented a nice contrast. He wore an Armani suit in a dusky plum color and a collarless linen shirt open to the third button. His slick black hair was pulled back into a pony tail and he had a tiny little triangle of an imperial mustache beneath his lower lip. Indoors, in a Read more

May 15, 2010

The Desperation Waltz

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Hey, Tommy,” Jimmy said without looking up from the newspaper he had spread out on the bar, “what’s Reubenesque mean again?”

“Jeesh! It means ‘fat’. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

“Statuesque?”

“Fat.”

“Weight proportionate?”

“Fat.”

“Full figured?”

“That means really fat. Whaddaya doin’ that for? We got a whole club full of babes here. How do you expect to get next to a girl in the personals?” He thumbed his own chest. “Tommy Klein, he knows better. Tommy Klein is an operator. You just stand back and watch me work.”

This is the truth: I don’t even like bars. I can go for years at a stretch without taking a drink, and the last place I’d be tempted to drink would be a bar. But I had come to a club that is not but ought to be called Desperation to see a singer and songwriter, a chanteuse named Celia Redmond who is making a name for herself.

Desperation is her name for the dumpy little country bar stuck right in the heart of the big city. The real name is “Country City” or something equally forgettable. It’s a costume bar, really, as phony in its way as a gay bar or the tap-room at the American Legion Hall. Country transplants and the children of country transplants and would-be country transplants put on clothes they don’t wear all day, speak in an affected diction and dance and drink until the house band strikes up “The Desperation Waltz” at midnight. Desperation is a place to escape from the real life of the big city: Office work, factory work, construction work — and unemployment.

Jimmy and Tommy were not untypical of the crowd, just more immanently pitiful. Jimmy’s a gentle giant of a man, as broad as he is tall. His hair was cut down to the scalp and he had a fringy little mustache and his neck was very, very red. Tommy was dapper. If Jimmy had asked me what dapper means, I would have told him: “Short, and overcompensating for it.” He was trim and toned without actually bearing muscles and his Read more

May 15, 2010

@tcar’s manifesto: “Toothy chumps of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your brains.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Witness: “The next big project from 2nd Century will be Realtor University. A fully accredited educational institution[.]”

I do not for one second hate to say I told you so:

We know sheep will follow a Judas goat to their slaughter, as will cattle. Now the NAR is testing the idea on lemmings…

Todd Carpenter becomes one with the Borg and the charming little lemmings elbow each other out of the way to dive off the cliff head first.

One of two things will happen: Todd will discover he’s made a terrible mistake and will quit this job with dispatch — I hope very loudly. Or: Todd will deliver us to our slaughter.

Anyone who expects anything other than evil from the National Association of Realtors has either not been paying attention, or, much worse, embraces that evil.

In any case, this is not something to be celebrated, not even to affect to be “nice” in chorus with the rest of the lemmings.

The NAR may want to infest our world in order to destroy it. More likely, they want to take it over.

What they certainly do not want is to approach the public as we do — openly, authentically, concealing nothing. The entire edifice of residential real estate is founded on secrets and lies, and, as long as it is, the NAR will be nothing but a cesspit of tyrannical motives and vendorslut con games.

And — more is the pity — Todd Carpenter cannot take their money without being their shill and their Judas goat — or worse.

I’m saddened by this, because of all the gutless big-name real estate webloggers, Todd has more guts than most. But nothing good for us will come of this, and the only good that can come of it for Todd is for him to escape with his scruples intact as quickly as he can.

Too late for that now. If you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound.

Four years ago, almost, when I started this little project, I had huge hopes for a newer, cleaner style of real estate, one based on integrity and transparency. I’ve watched as Read more

May 14, 2010

Unchained melodies: You either get Glee — or you will.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A fun bit from Mother’s Day was agreeing with my mom, on the phone, about the intense and comical excellence that is Glee, the FOX-TV musical teen melodrama. The melodrama is hugely repetitive, but still very rude and pomo, but the music is often simply breath-taking.

There is this: They harmonize the voices, so everyone sings with perfect pitch in a slightly mechanical tone. But the song choices — coupled with the dancing, the meta-melodrama, and the incredible quantity of incredible vocalists — serve to deliver the aural equivalent of a Broadway musical every week.

But that’s not right: I hate Broadway musicals, and I love Glee. The whole thing just works. I make time for it somewhere in my week, every week.

Here’s a fun contrast, playing off of last week’s episode. First up is Total Eclipse of the Heart, as recorded by Bonnie Tyler. This song was written by Jim Steinman, who wrote all of Meatloaf’s hits. The tune has melodrama of its own to spare, but it’s still a totally killer rock ballad, maybe the last chapter in the story of The Seventies.

Glee took this song and wove it into its plot — not without consequences. Take this, for example, from the original lyrics:

Once upon a time, there was light in my life.
Now there’s only love in the dark.*

That’s painfully simple, but it works as poetry because it’s so excruciatingly full of pain. But to make Total Eclipse work in the context of the Glee story arc, that lyric was cut.

Not cool. But still… This is a searing cover of the song. When Rachel soars upward on her second time through the chorus, I’m ready to take flight with her.

Sadly, my mother doesn’t love South Park, my other weekly TV obsession. But if you will give Glee a chance, it could be you’ll see why so many seemingly sane people are raving about it.

 
*She sings it right in this video. A mystery…

May 4, 2010

HDMI and me: A Mac mini turns out to be the ideal TV set-top box

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I’ve known this was doable for quite a while, but last Friday I finally got around to doing it: I took an old Mac mini we had lying around, remapped it to OS-X Snow Leopard and then set it up as an HDMI set-top box for our very small big-screen TV.

Why? Because I hate TV — the censorship, the editing for content and for image size and especially the commercials. Lately, most of our TV viewing time has been either movies on-demand from Cox Cable or DVDs from Netflix. We’ve both watched Netflix on-demand, streaming movies to our desktop or laptop computers, so going the HDMI route was not a long leap.

What do we get for our trouble? The cabling is kind of a kludge, and for now I’m using a wireless keyboard and mouse to drive the Mac mini. But shortly I’ll use Rowmote on my iPhone to control the computer, connecting via Bluetooth. But by using the Mac mini as a de facto set-top box, we gain access to Netflix’ library of on-demand movies, along with the on-demand services available from shows like South Park and Glee.

That is: We get to watch only what we want to watch, only when we want to watch it. We can stop and start at will, as calls from clients and calls of nature demand. And we suffer neither censorship, editing or commercials.

The cost? I bought pricey cabling from the Apple Store, but you can do this for twenty or thirty bucks. And the Netflix subscription? Ten bucks a month, both for the DVD ping-pong and for unlimited on-demand streaming. The video quality is not Blue-Ray perfect, but it ain’t bad for ten bucks.

Plus which, we have a Macintosh driving our TV. If I need to look at an email or a web site, I’m there. If I want to play games from the sofa, I’m there. If I want to kill spam comments on BloodhoundBlog — Zap!

And think of this: Really good big-screen TVs are selling for $650. Mac minis cost nothing, and used Macs or cheapo Windoze boxes cost even less. Read more

May 3, 2010

This oil spill and the government’s belated response to it do not prove the value and efficacy of the government, but precisely the opposite.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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So I had a spam email from a state-worshipping zealot I’ve never met named Sara P. Miller. Apparently Sara P. Miller is the modern-age equivalent of those noxious creeps you used to find preaching the gospel of Jheeezuhs! on buses and subway trains, self-imprisoned in a never-silent pantomime of exhibitionism and self-loathing. I cannot be trusted to find the truth on my own, so I must have it thrust upon me by benificent busy-bodies. Good grief…

Anyway, here is Sara P. Miller’s argument, all spelling and punctuation errors faithfully reproduced: “As the sludge roles onto Louisiana’s coast, suddenly, the anti-government bashers are silent. [….] And this morning, as that horrible, poison sludge makes its tragic, putrid, photo debut, we will all believe in ‘big government.'” She defends this by making reference to a number of Rotarian Socialist statists, absolutely none of whom are anti-government. They are all exponents of the government — past or current office-holders.

And that doesn’t matter to me. I’m assuming Sara P. Miller sent this nonsense to me because I haven’t said anything about the oil spill in the gulf. “Cum taces, clamas,” say my Roman friends — “When you are silent, you shout.” Not quite. The topics I don’t write about are legion. Hell, the things I think about writing about but don’t constitute a vast library of unwritten prose. I haven’t written about this oil spill because I don’t care about it, frankly, and because I am busy.

But: The actual essence of Sara P. Miller’s argument, which she is not smart enough to make, could not be more wrong. This oil spill and the government’s belated response to it do not prove the value and efficacy of the government, but precisely the opposite. These events — and the cloying chorus of the Rotarian Socialists of both major political parties — do not argue for the glories of the state right now, but, rather, for its inglorious ignobility going back forever. The state is never anything other than crime, and the crimes being played out right now in the Gulf of Mexico are nothing other than further proof Read more

April 30, 2010

Welcoming a new contributor to BloodhoundBlog: Alex Cortez

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We’re adding a new contributor today, regular commenter and long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog, Alex Cortez.

Alex writes all around the RE.et, so you may know him from otherwhere. I’m mainly ignoring requests from people who say they want to write here, but Alex went beyond persistence in his campaign. More to the point, he’s already participating here.

Here’s is Alex’s brief self-description:

Alex is a real estate agent specializing in south Maui luxury real estate and investment properties. In his spare time, he enjoys being chased by his toddler son and wife, as well as learning to surf (even it if kills him, which is an inevitable fact).

We can put him to the test when first he posts. In the mean time, please make him feel welcome.

April 25, 2010

It looks like the dam is finally bursting on politicaly-correct self-censorship in behalf of Islamofascist rageaholics.

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You bastards!

The essence of Political Correctness is to get people to volunteer for their own self-imprisonment. In fear of offending some perpetually-offended jackass, the victims of Political Correctness come to be stunted, stilted, stifled — and ultimately silenced. But, alas, they never, ever manage to escape the snide, sneering insults of all those perpetually-offended jackasses.

Why? It’s simple: The sole objective of Political Correctness is to take power of other people — who are innocent of all offenses against anyone — by inducing them to to volunteer for their own self-imprisonment.

Heads up: If you don’t have the guts to stand up these cowards, these moral midgets, then you deserve what they are doing to you.

There’s more, and I’m loving it: Mark Steyn, Diana West, a wonderful unsigned manifesto, a kickin’ cartoon from Chris Muir, and, finally:

May 20th is everybody draw Mohammed day. This last strikes me as being a little over the top, since the objective would seem to be to offend Muslims, rather than simply to defend one’s own right to express oneself at will, without fear of a violent demise. But that distinction delivers precious little difference, and the time for phlegmatic reason in this particular dispute was three years ago.

I’m nobody’s artist, but I do love to make jokes. My poor long-suffering wife can tell you that I can make some raucously funny jokes about religion. Normally I don’t do this in public, because people have a right to believe what they want. But as soon as you or anyone tries to tell me I can’t make fun of religion — that’s when I’ll tell you why Bill O’Reilly says you should never, ever, ever cut Mohammed off in traffic.

This is bug-stomping, carrying out the trash, but it is absolutely necessary. Whenever exponents of savagery manage to stop denouncing the West, they commence comparing themselves to it, instead: “Well, the Incas invented the wheel.” “The Chinese invented explosives.” This is twice sad: It’s the most pathetic kind of collectivism — racism — and it misses the point of Western Civilization entirely. The West didn’t invent this technology or that Read more

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