If you follow the news, you may think of the National Association of Realtors as being a hotbed of sex crimes, expense-account embezzlement scams and uncanny legal ineptitude. But before all that, the NAR is and has been since its inception one of America’s best enemies of the everyday human liberty this country was founded to protect.

The NAR is the reason not just for the real estate broker’s license but for every occupational license. Until the NAR, you did not have to beg permission from the state to earn a living.

That much is awful, but blame the state and its courts. But by making itself the source of the legislation, the NAR has made war on the rights of private property owners since it began. There is good reason to hate every bit of the progressive political movement in the early Twentieth Century, and the NAR had its greasy fingers in everything – and in every anti-economic crime since then.

Closer to home, where my own ox is gored, brokers in Phoenix are just that close to being rid of the NAR. Since 1994, it has been completely NAR-rules-complaint for local associations and MLS systems to offer MLS-only access to brokers who wanted it. Who did? New-home builders, mostly, who wanted to list into the MLS but not shop into it.

I looked into this in 2020, when the NAR launched its speech code – they snuffed a broker with it last month – but the cost was prohibitive then and the forms used in Arizona are published by the AAR – that is to say, by the NAR.

So since 1994, while it has been possible for metro-Phoenix residential resale brokers to break free of the NAR while retaining the MLS, it has not been practical. By way of the AAR forms, the NAR was able to use MLS-access as golden handcuffs on residential real estate brokers.

That would be forced association leading necessarily to forced speech, all in pursuit of bright-line, bald-faced restraint of trade. You know, the good old American way…

Enter the Phoenix Association of Realtors, which, putting two and two together, realized that it could make MLS-only access available to brokers who want it, supporting them with its own new set of transaction documents, which it calls MLSChoice. I am never an early adopter of anything, but I hate, hate, hate the NAR, so I am among the first cadre of MLSChoice brokers.

I list and I lease, so losing the AAR forms is not the end of the world for me – and the MLSChoice documents are better, anyway – better as to statute and case law and better with all of the ticky-tack addenda needed to post a listing or to make an offer. MLSChoice is a better standard of care for sellers, buyers and their brokers from day one, likely to result in dramatically fewer conflicts. From a fiduciary standpoint, that seems kind of important, doncha’ think?

In any case, waking up with a hangover from yet another sex crime on the expense account, the NAR has suddenly realized that if brokers can escape its clutches… they will…

So very late in the process – MLSChoice starts January 1st – the NAR decided to pick a fight. This is news, and plausibly you already know as much about it as you want to. But the beef boils down to this: MLS-only access to ARMLS has been NAR-rules-compliant since 1994. Making that option attractive to residential resale brokers is anathema to the NAR simply because the NAR is odious to a significant portion of its coerced membership. Take away the coercion and you take out the NAR.

And good riddance. Crime is the opposite of commerce. There is nothing of peaceful social intercourse that is improved by coercion, compulsion or de facto price controls. The NAR is odious to its members and to all Americans because it is an enemy to liberty as such. It cannot go to hell fast enough.

Geno Petro has passed away. He was one of the best writers to work with us here over the years – and I have the proof.

Cura ut valeas, frater. Requiescat in pacem.

Seventeen years… And how many billions will the NAR have pissed away fighting a rear-guard action to get to where BloodhoundBlog was seventeen years ago…?

This amounts to a brag on BloodhoundBlog’s part. Out of seventy-ish contributors, only Brian Brady and I have written here lately – not very much and not very lately. Our whole server gets hammered when I blog here too frequently. But the blog of the dawgs endures, as witness. Because there is ALWAYS something to howl about.

How bad is your listing agent?

I’ve spent much of this month documenting how ineptly Redfin.com lists homes for sale. It wasn’t something I set out to do. I’ve been dour about them since I discovered CEO Glenn Kelman’s racist staffing policies, but I had never paid any attention to them with regard to real estate. They have mattered nothing to my business: I’ve never had a Redfin showing, never shown a Redfin listing.

But I was simply amazed by what I found. Just as with iBuying and the carrying costs of owning non-producing housing, every experienced broker knew that salaried agents would not produce. But even so, I was unprepared for what I found: Multiple bone-headed deal-killing errors in each listing, with those errors repeated in listing after listing. Since the MLS listing is the gatekeeper to showing and every succeeding step in the purchase process, if the listing repels the buyer, the home cannot sell.

And they don’t. Many listings Close over 90 days, some over 180. They have a lot of Cancelled and Expired listings, as well, with many of those at huge DOMs. Strangely, a significant number of these sellers relist. Having already lost six months and 20% of the property’s value, why not truly go for broke?

Oh. Nevermind.

And that would be the real problem. Redfin makes a point of not understanding real estate, so their plan is to recruit an agent who no longer exists – the top producer. The team leaders and rainmakers who actually sell homes are working at 95% to 100% splits – but the number of people involved runs from five to fifty. The idea that any successful agent would trade away his independence for less money and corporate chicken guano seems a stretch to me.

Instead, as before, Redfin will appeal to agents who want to coast. Somewhat better incentives imply somewhat better efforts, but nothing motivates like the specter of starvation, which is why straight commission sales works so well at surfacing people who can actually do this job: You either brought dinner home or you didn’t.

Kelman’s post is full of lies, of course, but the big lie is that becoming a traditional brokerage is a recruiting tactic. Redfin got a new funding commitment on Tuesday, so Wednesday’s announcement that incentives work looks to me like the dowry for that marriage. It won’t help. Redfin will still be inept. It’s still salaried everybody, with slightly better bonuses on anorexic commissions for the licensees.

But even allowing for every fantasy about turning the listings over faster, Redfin’s most fundamental problem remains: Its client base.

They went out of their way to recruit clients just like Redfin’s founders: Highly analytical people, confident in their knowledge, incapable of quick decisions, impervious to practical advice. As much as I am aghast at how ineptly Redfin sells its listings, I know that a significant part of the problem is the sellers.

Redfin took amazing technology and deployed it in pursuit of the worst available customers. It’s a marketing blunder for all the ages, the blunder that launched thousands of botched transactions. They started off by cow-birding other brokers’ listing agents, then moved on to stiffing other brokers’ buyers’ agents. Now that he has successfully killed buyer representation, Kelman needs new agents to vampire: His own.

Bad news? Good news? You decide. Either way: It won’t work.

As much as Brady wins, like it or not, not winning is a part of competing.  He said as much yesterday, on his podcast:

“It’s interesting because you would think, ‘Oh, well, why is he still playing?’ Because all you want to do is win, and that’s all sports should be about is winning. And I agree it should be about winning, but it’s also, I’m looking at it like, no, what am I learning? What am I learning from putting a similar amount of energy in over the last couple years and not winning? What is that teaching me?” Brady said Monday on his SiriusXM podcast, “Let’s Go!”

This was the money line:

“You know, why should we feel like we’re just entitled to win all the time? We’re not. That’s not what life’s about.”

I know you have heard this Nelson Mandela quote, “I never lose; I either win or learn”.  It may be trite but it’s true.  Don’t use the word “lose”, ever again, when talking about business opportunities.

I have been self-employed or selling on commission since 1992.  I am not kidding when I say that, in the past 30 years, I have never received a biweekly or monthly paycheck.  I have been issued 1099 forms, each January, since 1997.  It hasn’t always been easy but I have paid health insurance, paid car insurance, sent my daughter to private schools from Kindergarten through her senior year in college, and maintained two houses:  one in San Diego and one in my present state of residence, Florida. I am bragging a bit but I am bragging to illustrate this point;

I don’t always win.

In fact, I win less engagements than I don’t win but, whether I win or don’t, I learn.  I compete against smart people and many of them have more resources than I do.  I compete against firms with lots of capital at their disposal, better advertising, more recognizable brands, and a multi-media presence which dwarfs mine.  They win more often than I do but I learn from what they did…and then…

I win, too. 

I know that my batting average, against the big guys, would barely keep me on a Major League Baseball team but I know that, to win, I need more “at bats” than the bigger guys do.  That’s what I do– prospect harder than the competitors at the big banks and Wall Street-backed lenders do.  That gives me more at bats than they get.

That’s how I win…

…or learn.

How did I parachute into Florida and build up a profitable mortgage brokerage business in 15 months?

1- I worked my inactive client database.
2- I added Florida agents, whom I met at industry happy hours, to my weekly email list
3- I try call 5 inactive clients and 5 agents daily.  Few people answer their phones now so I usually end up leaving messages.

Last year started off really well.  Our Florida purchase volume was about half of our California purchase volume.  My goal for 2022 was to have our Florida volume to exceed of our California volume. 2022 was shaping up well until St Patrick’s Day-volume got weaker through Memorial Day, then even weaker by Labor Day, then it damned near dried up through now (Thanksgiving).

A month ago, I decided to try something different.  Calling agents and inactive clients is still a daily discipline but it gets depressing when few calls are answered.  I decided to do some “in-person canvassing”, one day each week, to meet business owners in and around St Petersburg.  Pinellas County is a hodgepodge of independent businesses so I decided to make a goal of having 25 conversations each day, each time I went out.

First, I went to the charming seaside village of Dunedin.  The local Chamber of Commerce gave me a map of 145 businesses within one square mile.  I met:

-8 real estate agents,
-6 bar/pub/restaurant owners, and
-13 shop owners.

16 of those people owned a home and 2 owned investment properties.  12 people gave me permission to email them a bi-weekly newsletter.  4 of them said they would like to own investment properties.

Last week, I visited businesses in Clearwater Beach, Indian Rocks Beach, and Madeira Beach.  I met:

-3 real estate agents,
-9 bar/pub/restaurant owners,
– 17 shop owners.

9 of those people owned a home and none owned investment properties.  8 people gave me permission to email them a bi-weekly newsletter. 3 of them said they would like to own investment properties.  One homeowner asked how his daughter could buy a condo with his help.

Today, I visited businesses in Treasure Island and St Pete Beach.  I met:

-4 real estate agents,
-10 bar/pub/restaurant owners,
-12 shop owners.

13 of those people owned a home and 4 people owned investment properties.  16 people gave me permission to email them a bi-weekly newsletter. 6 of them said they would like to own investment properties.

Next week, I plan to hit Downtown St Petersburg then it’s back to San Diego for the holidays.  Here is what I accomplished in 24 hours of “in-person cavassing” this month:

I met

-82 people,
-37 homeowners,
-6 investment property owners, –
13 people who want to buy an investment property.

36 people gave me permission to email them a bi-weekly newsletter and I had a ZOOM meeting with one business owner’s daughter.  I am betting that, after next week, I will have permission to market to 50 people, none of whom I knew on Halloween.

It’s humbling to be “canvassing” after 27 years in this business but after the grain is in the silo, you have to plant seeds for the next harvest.  Frankly, it feels good to get some fresh air and meet people.

“If a slacker employee was mysteriously transformed into a house for sale…”

“What happens when the market turns?”

It would be charitable to argue that the iBuyers actually thought this mishegoss would work. Perhaps that’s so: They’re flippers, except they are very bad at every part of the flipping process. And they’re pawnbrokers – buyers of last resort – except they buy first, not last, paying top-dollar for the honor, then cling to their assets like precious prodigal sons.

Brokering real estate works for almost nobody, but it only works because the broker does not own the asset. Owning non-producing assets as “investments” is insane. It can only work if you buy at deep, deep discounts – like flippers and pawnbrokers do, and like OpenDoor apparently cannot do.

So: Closed Sale Price compared to Original List Price, on average: April -$9,537, May -$16,935, June -$31,698.

Those are from Phoenix. Perhaps they’re doing better in other cities, but this is their primal market and ground zero for all things iBuyer. I think we’re seeing how they work.

The trend on Days-on-Market is not great, and I would expect it to get a lot worse: April 41, May 40, June 48. By June the market had well and truly turned, but in April they should have been moving everything in single-digit DOMs. That they were not – and that they score so few winners in pricing, amidst so many huge losers – tells you how they will do, going forward.

The problem, as I have been saying for years, is that even if they bought right, which they don’t, and even if they rehabbed and marketed right, which they don’t, they would still own the “investments” far too long, resulting in killer carrying costs.

The delusion in iBuying emerged from two ploys from the Federal government, suppressing interest rates for home-buyers and also for Wall Street. Yippee! Practically-free money to buy assets that seem only to go up in price…

Ahem.

Imputed losses per “investment” will get uglier by the day – and I’m not even taking into account the inversion of both erroneous signals, with housing prices falling as borrowing costs rise: April -$50,310, May -$56,695, June -$75,215.

Sometime soon, I’ll take on a dozen Closed listings in sequence, to explore everything they are doing wrong. But if you peer into my spreadsheet for this post, you can bespy many six-figure losers – not including the carrying costs.

The iBuyers are the poorest marketers in every market. We are all about to discover just how poor…

Sticks and stones might make a home, but money makes all the difference…

This is all Trump, so you know. Four or five years ago, investors decided that not only would right about now be a good time for new housing, the times would still be good for cashing in on opportunities planned for five years out.

You may think them unwise, but risk is what makes horse races. Moreover, had Trump retained the presidency, the bets would have paid off handsomely.

Things may be different where you are. It’s very easy to build in Arizona, compared to other places. Even so, you have your Trump-promise investments – in sticks, in stone, in steel – and you will have the opportunity to see how things work out locally.

I am beyond dour, for what that’s worth. We are on the cusp of global famine, and how tight belts will get in America remains to be seen. From borrower activity, we know the market has well and truly turned, and yet I suspect people still in the market are underestimating how bad things will get.

Will prices go down? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Since Reagan gifted us with Volker, we’ve treated housing prices as a bellwether to market trends – in real estate and everywhere. That will be a lot less useful as the market tries to find dry land, when it is awash in funds that are 80% newly-counterfeited. The tale going forward will be told by Days-on-Market – from single- to double- to triple-digits.

And yet: Isn’t there a housing shortage? There is here. How about Seattle? No one there will tell us, but the Great George Floyd Migration created housing shortages mostly where bus lines don’t run, leaving locales well-served by rioter-movers hugely vacant. We can expect rent-seekers to fill the most-vacant of that housing with Fiasco Joe’s illegal immigrants – but there was a lot of vacant housing left over from the recession, and by now there is a lot of vacant office space that also needs taxpayer subsidies. Add to that excess mortality from the vaccines, and I think there is good reason to suppose that, nationally, we have a surplus of housing.

Regardless, that is not what I said in the headline: “Glut of unsold houses.”

Lots of families will be doubled- and tripled-up in two years. I am hiking rents by big jumps, and I know some of my families will be moving on. This will accelerate with the rate of inflation. Meanwhile, interest rates will price most buyers out of the market. Accordingly, many of the homes I see in some stage of construction will not be finished, not for now: Approved spec homes will not proceed, and many signed purchase contracts will be cancelled, forfeiting the deposit.

Notices-of-Default are up, loans apps are down and resale inventory is softening faster than custard in the sun. Soon there will be more houses than buyers, especially in new-home developments – hence my prediction.

Brian Brady is teaching you how to survive the coming shitstorm, but it does you no good to gaze into the future with rose-colored glasses. If you’ve been in residential real estate for less than ten years, you’re finally going to get to learn how to sell…

Today, 66% of this population report that they plan to age in place. Little changed from 2016, when 63% said the same. Given their reported financial gains in the past five years, however, they may be more equipped to do so.

When asked when they expect to move next, 27% feel confident they would move again, while 36% believe they will not move and 37% simply don’t know. These data suggest this population is in no rush to leave their current homes.

Regardless of their plans to move or age in place, 66% of survey respondents say they expect their home to need some degree of renovations to make the space livable for the long term if they were to age in place. Between personal savings and longer-term retirement and investment accounts, those who think they would need renovations to age in place say they are confident they could afford them.

This is both a problem and opportunity for real estate agents and brokers.  Boomers own many of the “move-up” homes their children covet but can’t afford.  Millennials might love to sell their $500,000 homes, and trade up to a $700,000 home but are locked in to sub 3% mortgage rates in a 5.5% mortgage rate environment.    Let me break down the sticker shock the millennials are facing:

Millennial family buys a home for $350K, in 2016, with a 4.75% FHA mortgage rate and a monthly PITI of $2400.  In 2021, they refinanced that mortgage to a 2.75% conventional loan with a monthly PITI of $1700, retaining over $200K in equity (which could be used for a down payment on a $700,000 home.  There are two problems today:  that $700,000 home is now $800,000 and mortgage rates are at 5.5%.  If they sold their smaller homes, used their home equity as a down payment, the “trade-up” home would have a mortgage payment of $4400 rather than the $3000/mo it would have cost, when they conceived the plan a year ago.  The higher price and mortgage rate added over $1400 in payment shock.

This is going to be an ongoing problem unless the Boomers start downsizing.  What can agents do to list and sell these “move up homes”?  Reverse mortgages might be a solution for those 2 out of 3 Boomers.  Essentially, Boomers can “cash in” their equity on the bigger home (assuming it’s paid off), plunk $250,00 down on a $500,000 retirement home with a $250,000 reverse mortgage, and add  some $500,000 to their investment accounts.  The Boomers won’t be required to make a mortgage payment, as long as they live in the retirement home and add liquidity to their net worth.

This is a simplistic illustration of how a reverse mortgage works.  Whenever we speak to mature Americans about the reverse mortgage solution, we either ask them to read the book “Understanding Reverse” and/or buy it for them before scheduling a Zoom meeting.  Reverse mortgages are a much maligned and often misunderstood mortgage product which requires deliberation, research, and a competent mortgage loan consultant to introduce, explain, originate, process, and fund the loan.

The Dallas Fed is worried that housing is overvalued.

Our evidence points to abnormal U.S. housing market behavior for the first time since the boom of the early 2000s. Reasons for concern are clear in certain economic indicators—the price-to-rent ratio, in particular, and the price-to-income ratio—which show signs that 2021 house prices appear increasingly out of step with fundamentals.

Zillow predicts continued housing price appreciation

No, and in fact, the expectation of another crash could contribute to keeping homes so unaffordable. Builders have been firing on all cylinders, and with more homes under construction than any time since 1973, they understandably feel exposed in the event of a housing downturn. If they trim their construction plans out of caution, we will miss out on one of the best hopes we have for net new inventory on the market, and the inventory crunch that’s helped push prices up will persist for longer than expected.

Pick your poison but keep these two things in mind:  The Fed created this housing “boom” and Zillow executives aren’t practicing what its economists are preaching

This is no surprise to me.  Mortgage rates doubled in the past 6 months with a big move upwards in the past 60 days.  That, combined with the rapid increase in home prices since the pandemic started has severely impacted housing affordability.  With less buyers buying, and sellers looking for unrealistic prices, agents are pleading with sellers to drop their listing price.  You can offer your seller a couple of options BEFORE you drop that price:

1- If the home is secured with a low-interest VA or FHA mortgage, you can highlight that those loans are assumable in the marketing remarks.  This Safety Harbor listing offers an assumable loan, at 2.25%–half of what most lenders are offer today.
2- Offering a seller-buydown of the mortgage rate could save the seller some money.  I run through the numbers of a seller-buydown in this video.  This is a great response to a low offer.

I will be hosting a Realtor Happy Hour, in St Pete Beach, FL, on Thursday May 12, 2022.
I am hosting an Agents Helping Agents event, in Tampa, FL, on Wednesday, May 18, 2022.
Stay tuned if you are in San Diego.  I will be hosting an Agents Helping Agents event in mid June.

We think you can be more proactive than that.  Here are five tips for Realtors about how to use a great lender to get your offer accepted:

1- Use a reputable mortgage broker, not a lender.  (see why here) Both the originator and the mortgage company should have review pages, whether they are on Yelp, LinkedIn, or Lending Tree.

2- Use a loan officer with exceptional communication skills.  If you want to test those skills, call him/her.  If he or she doesn’t answer the phone, leave a voicemail and send a brief text.  If you don’t get a text back or return call within an hour, you have the wrong guy or gal.  That includes weekends.  YOU work on weekends; so should loan officers.  You should expect the originator to be responsive, Monday through Friday, 830AM to 7PM and 12PM to 5PM on Saturdays and Sundays

3- Make sure your buyer is pre-approved rather than pre-qualified.  This means that the credit has been pulled, income and assets were analyzed and verified, and the file has DU approval findings in it.  The pre-approval letter should address all of those issues in the body of the letter.

4- Have the originator call the listing agent and offer to do the following:  speak with an originator the listing agent trusts, to review the loan approval or, if desired, speak directly to the seller.  The originator should speak frankly and honestly about the contingency removals iin the contract and explain which ones might be difficult to meet.  Be wary of the originator who makes promises which he/she knows can’t be kept.  Underwriting approval time is easily determined but the originator has little to no control over the appraiser.

5- Have a plan to deal with a low appraisal and have the originator communicate that plan with the listing agent.  That plan doesn’t always have to be “bring more money to the table”.  We had a transaction where both the listing agent and selling agent were local experts.  Debra and I had made over 100 loans into that zip code so we felt pretty confident in our valuation skills as well.  Nonetheless, the VA appraiser issued a Tidewater Notice, and we had a plan.  The listing agent and I considered some additional comparable sales and presented them (within 3 hours) to the appraiser with numerical values for adjustments— the appraisal came back, one day later, above the contract price

This is a tough market for buyers.  A good loan originator could be the most important player on your team when making an offer.  Choose one carefully.

In any case: You can see me defending the headline here.

Meanwhile, I have nothing, and even the story I have seems like so much embroidery on the void. That the Ruling Class is exterminating we hoi polloi is a rebuttable presumption, but which way are you betting in your planning for 2022 and going forward?

Here is what I can offer for more-sanguine spirits: The leadership you’re looking for is Ds – Driven first, Sociable second. (If you haven’t mastered DISC-my-way, that’s your mistake, easily corrected.) This matters, because every other sort of leader will betray you in due course – you’re soaking in it.

I don’t know of anyone in public life who fills the bill, but your best option, in any case, is to be the leader you’re looking for – the person who can be depended upon not to turn on or prey upon innocents.

“How sad would it be to be the only puppy in the litter?”

So what to make of the new Moronic strain of CoronaVirus? If you swear it’s more virulent, I want to know if it’s software. But if instead you tell me that the objective is to hide inflation by crippling demand, ideally long enough to steal the next election, you will have landed in a place where your claims make sense to me: The entire purpose of the virus is political – and plausibly genocidal.

We are as gods? Nonsense. We are far beyond gods. What god, be he ever so potent, would deliberately undermine his own nature? What god would intentionally self-annihilate?

In other news:

Zero Hedge: A Scared Nu World: Here’s What We Know About The COVID “Omicron” Strain.

City Journal: Guaranteed Murder: From Waukesha to New York, lax bail assures homicides.

Jim Brovard: The Biden Crackdown on Thought Crimes.

“Why is the ‘Dog Show’ more people than dogs?”

Fun to see from the commercials that all American families are black, and all black families are possessed of a scruffy male adult who dances madly and pretends that’s fathering. Amazing to watch American commerce shit all over the money – in pursuit of what, exactly? Paychecks for white voiceover actresses must be down by 90%, post-George-Floyd-sobriety-day, but is anyone measuring the consequences at the cash register of everything being sold by hectoring black women issuing treacly nursery rhymes?

If there is any such thing as a science of marketing, its iron law for the 21st century is simply this: Get woke, go broke. None so deserving. None too soon.

In other news:

American Thinker: Leaving California.

Newsweek: Salvation Army’s Donors Withdraw Support in Response to Racial ‘Wokeness’ Initiative.

Zero Hedge: ESPN Hemorrhaging Subscribers, Down To 76 Million As Disney Scrambles To Stem Tide.

“I like the vet. He knows how to play rough.”

That would be health care for the self-employed – self-insured for all but catastrophes – but I would go to him, anyway. I trust him to see reality for what it is and not to lie to me about it. He may be the only doctor I will ever see again.

Certainly I am done with all vaccines. Whatever the net lethality of the COVID vaccine turns out to be, it is by now obvious that anyone who presumes to speak in an “official” capacity about public health is a liar pursuing unknown objectives.

Nice going, dipwads. Your reputation was nothing but good, and now it’s shit – probably never to recover.

Meanwhile: Find a doctor you can trust. Otherwise, you’re on your own…

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Home Prices Hit a New All-Time High, Giving Sellers Much to be Thankful For.

Seth Barron: Voting Is For Citizens: New York City’s latest effort to extend the franchise to legal permanent residents would devalue citizenship and dilute the power of the vote.

John Daniel Davidson: Your Default Assumption Should Be That Everything Corporate Media Says Is A Lie: The media’s deluge of lies about the Rittenhouse case is a disturbing reminder that the corporate press lies about everything all the time.

“Blah. Blah. Blah. The Kiddie Table is where all the dropped-food action is.”

In other news:

Redfin.com: Rental Market Tracker: Rents Up 13%, Outpaced by 17% Growth in Monthly Mortgage Payments.

City Journal: Strength in San Diego: The city’s triumvirate of police chief, district attorney, and mayor has not given in to disorder.

“What do you call a dog who is good at guile? The Imaginary Dog.”

Accordingly, to speak with me is kind of a shit test: I can tell right away if you are actually listening to me, since you won’t get the jokes if you’re not. The good news is, if you are listening, I know you will be listening when we get to the parts of the conversation that are not deliberately inverted for comic effect. But before even that, there is simply this: People who are awake enough to laugh at the world are awake.

Last night on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Kyle Rittenhouse issued an unintentionally-comic national shit test: “We all know how the FBI works.” He wasn’t being ironical, alas, but everyone who laughed knows he is telling the truth.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Cooled in October, But Relief For Homebuyers Was Short-Lived.

TheHill.com: Electric car chargers to be required in new homes in England.

Andrea Widburg: Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kyle Rittenhouse is fascinating.

Seth Barron: Trial By Jury Needs No Fixing: Outraged by the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, the Left claims that the American justice system is illegitimate.

“French Bulldogs are dutch babies – simpering pseudo-sucklings. Prove me wrong.”

That’s a claim I would normally dispute: Popular music – and all music with a lyrical or performative component – is narrative first, with the music serving in supportive, ornamental or incidental roles. No story, no opera. No story, no ballet. Grieg wrote music better known than the play he wrote it for, but this is very much the exception, not the rule.

Cathleen’s complaint is that John Hiatt has lied about the lyrics, but in the end, I don’t care. Much as with Wagon Wheel, the music is so much better than the lyrics, I just don’t care. Plus which, my love is fifty feet tall.

Why does it work so well? You tell me. It’s not a song, not even a coherent chord progression. It’s a dirge with a bridge. But once I give it to my hands, it’s hard for me to stop playing it.

I like it when I find out I’ve been wrong, even if only by a little. Without any lyrics at all, Wagon Wheel is the perfect American work song, and if you play it enough it will sweep you back to the Irish reels from which it comes.

Take It Down has none of that music theory, and none of that pedigree. What it has is a pain that’s fifty feet deep. It’s easy to see why someone might lie about that…

In other news:

Pacific Research Institute: Los Angeles Is Gearing Up to Ban Wood-Frame Construction. Renters Will Soon Pay the Price.

Brad Polumbo: Here’s Everything That’s Wrong With the Build Back Better Spending Bill House Democrats Just Passed.

Ron Paul: It’s Time to Get the Federal Welfare-Warfare State Under Control.

“Judging solely by appearances, bull dogs are spoiling for a fight, while hound dogs are praying for absolution.”

Her person is a physician at Boswell Hospital, and he has grand Boerboel plans: He has land out in the sticks, and his goal is Boerboels abounding, with his breeding operation documented by a YouTube page. I enjoyed talking to him, not alone because he is operating from the premise that there will be a future.

My belief, defended solely by historical anecdotes and prejudice, is that all domestic dogs emerge from two prototypical breeds – Saint Hubert Hounds – Bloodhounds – and Mastiffs. Snouted dogs run down their prey where flat-faced dogs fight like big cats – well-timed leaps followed by close combat. Mastiffs pulled war wagons, and if you doubt that, put Cleo – twenty pounds of Mastiff-descendant – on a lead and see where she drags you.

She was intimidated by the Boerboel, who was in her turn intimidated by Miss Chioux. But later she demonstrated what that Mastiff form-factor can do: She ran down a Standard Poodle who started with a fifty-yard advantage. Cleo is fast, and people notice when she floors it. The Poodle didn’t know she was caught until Cleo raced past her.

And then, as every flat-faced dog must do, she panted for half-an-hour. As always, I had to carry her out of the dog park…

In other news:

Victoria Taft: How Unethical Were the Prosecutors Trying to Put Kyle Rittenhouse in Prison? Let Us Count the Ways…

Thomas Lifson: Kyle Rittenhouse Did NOT Get a Fair Trial.

“If you only bother to train two out of every one-hundred puppies – leave your shoes outside.”

I’m delighted that the railroading of young Kyle failed, dismayed beyond belief that it happened in the first place, and reconciled to the fact that this sort of persecution of the good for being good will recur: “My internal disquiet is caused by your disapproval, not by my own cognitive dissonance. I’ll feel better once you’re exterminated.”

We are sometimes reminded that almost all the violent crime in America is committed by a tiny percentage of the population. We are even slower to take notice that looting riots only happen because there is an extant looter population among us: People who are opportunistically-predatory graduate their predations with the inverse of their estimate of the risk of the consequences. A looting riot is a short period of consequence-free predation.

This is all more underfathering – Kyle, too – but we don’t have a civilization if we do not have good people, if fewer and fewer people learn in childhood why being civilized matters.

In other news:

RedState.com: The Rittenhouse Trial Shows Us Why Cameras in Courtrooms Are the Proper Move for Our Legal System.

The Federalist: LEAKED: Teachers Reveal How They ‘Stalk’ Kids, Sideline Parents To Pull Middle Schoolers Into LGBT Groups.

The Federalist: Thanks To Leftists, The Black Talent Companies Seek To Hire With Racial Quotas Doesn’t Exist: Lack of representation in corporate boardrooms is not because of mythical white privilege. It is due to the breakdown of the black family.

Joel Kotkin: America Is Built on a Great Culture. Progressives Want to Abandon It.