The Crowhill Journal

I was telling a foreign friend about the upcoming appraisal on my mom’s house, and how I need the property to appraise above a certain amount. He said he didn’t understand how appraisals work in the home-buying process, so I tried to explain. Here’s what I said.

“Most people in the U.S. buy homes on credit. The bank doesn’t want to loan more than the house is worth, in case they have to foreclose and sell the property. The appraisal is to ensure the bank that it’s safe to loan X amount of money for a given house.

“At least that’s the story. The reality is that when a bank forecloses on a property, they let it sit for months, or even years, unoccupied, during which time the pipes freeze, burst, and flood the basement, mold grows on the walls, animals make nests in the attic, etc.

“Bank foreclosure properties sell for cheap.

“So I’m not really sure what the actual purpose of an appraisal is.”

It seems as if the appraisal is a kind of financial fiction.

I don’t think Trump was 1/4 as bad as people like to pretend, but … fine. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that he had to go, and let’s also agree that Biden was the best possibility to get that done.

Okay. The deed is done. “Orange Man Bad” is gone. You can come out from under your bed.

But now you’re faced with a clearly incompetent person in the White House. That is not good for America.

Can you imagine any self-respecting president with one functioning brain cell and one molecule of testosterone allowing his staff to give him cards to tell him who he can pick to ask a question at a press conference? That’s how you treat people with dementia.

This is miles past acceptable. The man simply does not have the juice to perform the job, and he has to go. The sooner the better.

I chanced on this book on Amazon — Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What They Wanted Has Made Women Miserable (which reminds me of a recent P&C episode) — and listened to a little of the audio sample.

She says “Men, don’t try to understand women. Women understand women, and they hate one another.”

That’s obviously an exaggeration and a joke, but … it is funny.

He’s clearly an incompetent old fool, and now some of our Marines are dead because of it. This is an escalating catastrophe that is entirely Biden’s fault.

The trouble is, if you get rid of Biden, you get Harris, and if you get rid of Harris, you get Pelosi. I have no reason to believe they’d do well dealing with this.

Who can we put in charge of Afghanistan? Are any of the generals of any use, or are they too busy reading up on how to make the military woke?

Update: P&C dedicated last night’s show to the Afghan mess. 157: Biden’s Afghanistan Disaster

… we need a better approach. There comes a time when you have to realize that lecturing and hectoring and wagging fingers just isn’t cutting it.

Yesterday I listened to an interview with an environmentalist who (to her credit) finally came to the realization that environmentalists have been preaching the same message for years (cut your carbon footprint, use less, change your lifestyle, suffer), and that another strategy might be better. She’s now an advocate for nuclear power.

That seems sensible to me. If people aren’t responding to your cries and pleas and moral harangues, maybe it’s time to try something different.

It’s like when the patient won’t quit smoking, and the doctor says “can you at least smoke filtered cigarettes?”

A lot of people have questions and worries about the vaccines. The people in charge don’t seem interested in addressing those concerns. They just want to pressure people into compliance.

“We’re the experts. We know best. Do as you’re told, peasant.”

That strategy isn’t working, and I pray it will never work.

The vaccine skeptics have lots of reasons to be skeptical, and underlying all of them is the idea that the public health authorities have not been honest with them. Which is true.

So why not have it all out?

It’s too much to ask Sleepy Joe to do anything sensible, but why doesn’t whoever is in charge organize a debate? Pick a Saturday and devote the entire day to airing out the arguments. Present all the views, and the responses.

There may have to be a limit on “all the views,” since some of them are crazy. But the important thing — which some people don’t want to admit — is that a lot of the vaccine worries and concerns are not crazy. Intelligent, credentialed, sensible people have concerns. And when those concerns are ignored, or, worse, suppressed, it only feeds the idea that people are lying to you.

So let them have their say, and then let other people respond.

I know the woke left hates the idea of giving someone they disagree with “a platform,” but they’re morons. If a position is right, it should withstand open inquiry.