Whiskey's Place

The Chuck Finale: What Network TV Tells Us About Love and Marriage

2012-01-28T19:17:00.000-08:00

Most people don't go to church anymore. Charles Murray notes that regular religious attendance is pretty restricted to the White Upper Class. But people, still, even with network audience erosion, park themselves in front of the TV every day. Television, and the attitudes it both reflects and helps create, in a feedback loop, is very interesting. It is a giant, two-way mirror into both public attitudes and elite opinion (nothing on TV, overwhelmingly, reflects anti-elite opinion) that if examined closely can predict trends and emerging opinions.

The Series Finale of NBC's "Chuck," one of the most unusual shows on the air, certainly helps the argument that TV's messages are worthy of examination. They also reinforce the observation of David Mamet, who in "the Secret Knowledge" said that years ago, love stories consisted of two people who loved each other intensely, and overcame barriers to be together. Today, love stories consist of people who don't really like each other, but decide for outside reasons to make a go of a relationship. Telling, that is. There is a reason for it. And another.

The first reason is of course, that today's society has absolute freedom. Freedom to be with whoever you choose. There are no Scarlett Letters anymore, nor forbidden love. Heck even Gays can marry, if not in say, South Dakota, then certainly California, or Hawaii, or Massachusetts. Gays can cohabit as partners anywhere. Openly gay personalities are beloved on TV, from Ellen, to Neil Patrick Harris, to the entire cast it would seem of Fox's "Glee," beloved of tweens, teen girls, and their moms. Almost any kind of relationship is possible, which is why Hollywood mines the past, ala Jane Austen, or various disabilities, such as The Surrogate where a man in an iron lung loses his virginity to a sex therapist played by Helen Hunt.

There are no real barriers, that are believable, so the barriers Hollywood uses to amp up tension, are two people who have their own internal barriers: at least one does not like the other, and there is no mutual longing found fairly quickly. Instead outside forces combine to make people stick together. Generally involving one or more of the following actors and actresses: Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up, the Ugly Truth, 27 Dresses, Life as We Know It); Gerard Butler (also the Ugly Truth, the Bounty Hunter, PS I Love You), Sandra Bullock (While You Were Sleeping, the Proposal), Matthew McConaghey (Failure to Launch), and any Jennifer Aniston movie. "Chuck" definitely falls into this category.

This is generally Hollywood's formula now: two people meet, one falls for the other, the other not. Outside forces (drunken one-night stand pregnancy, morning show stunts, immigration enforcement/deportation, a "spy assignment" as an asset handler) force the (almost always the woman) to put up with the obnoxious guy and over a period of being exposed to his "real" good qualities and inspiring better, more adult behavior, leading to finally a "real" relationship. Almost always, the deck is "stacked" by having handsome, virile men play the man-boys, Josh Duhamel, Butler, Owen Wilson, McConaghey, Ryan Reynolds, or "Chuck's" own Zachary Levi. Heigl famously objected to being paired in the movie "Knocked Up" with fattie Seth Rogen, which was just a performance. Even professional actresses doing a performance for a movie soon forgotten by everyone involved, object to being "insulted" by being paired on-screen with a less than A-List Alpha A-hole. In their minds it makes them look ugly.

The second, more hidden reason is that Hollywood itself has little confidence, reflected in both its own hot-house relationship failures, and ugly power dynamics, and the larger outside world, in any lasting, real relationship. This is particularly true in entertainment aimed at women. This is what guys tend to like:

Dr. Pepper Ten? Well it is funny, "not for women," chiefly because of the total absence of any kind of relationship drama.

Hollywood relationships don't last long. This has an effect particularly on writers, who tend to reflect this difficulty in what they create because they see it and know it well. The demands of catering to "ups and downs" in a TV or movie relationship, aimed at attracting women, makes this an easy short-cut as well. This caters to what blogger Dalrock calls the Endless Courtship Fantasy, such as the "Christian" movie "Fireproof," where the husband has to win his divorcing wife back all over again, constantly. Or the Vow (where a car accident leaves a wife with no memory of a husband who must woo her all over again). It is the fantasy of being eternally young, eternally pursued, eternally not having to make a choice, eternally the center of a man's attention. A roller coaster, and a proven way to attract women, either as a Pick Up Artist (that's a classic technique -- push/pull attraction, designed to elicit high highs and low lows of feeling that women get hooked on) … or a television or movie script writer. Offering the same thing. Because it works.

In short, Endless Courtship is the female immature version of playing WoW all day. Or slacking through life. No way to build a lasting relationship, that is critical for creating and sustaining a family. Creating and sustaining a family requires an adult moving-beyond passion, ups/downs in emotions, in favor of stability and sacrifice that kids need. That is what the nuclear family is all about, being more than just two people feeding the need (of one) to create intense emotion(s). Rather, mature and stable self-sacrifice and mutual dependency that raising healthy kids demands. Increasingly, both on-screen and in wider life, that sort of mutual self-sacrifice is just not in the cards, save for the few genetically blessed or the upper classes.

Not when ultimate freedom means walking away. How sad is that? That love stories depend on shadowy government agencies, or threats of deportation, or some bounty hunter, or taking care of a friend's baby after they die, to fall in love and get married? But that is the state of romance in movies and TV today, reflecting the reality of ultimate freedom. Anyone can and will walk away in a heartbeat. Sickness and health? More like, "Not happy, see you, bye!" Increasingly, relationships are defined by movies, TV, and real life, as endless courting not mature devotion. The attitude of endless courting, following an obvious "Happy Divorce" metaphor, and no actual mature relationship, characterized the finale in "Chuck."

Which is a shame, since there were many things that made "Chuck" unique: observations on relative advantages in intelligence in men and women; how truly repulsive omega males are to women (and how that is behaviorally based), and why Omega males stay that way; the idea of "improvement" of a beta male into a credible Alpha, with the help of family, friends, and (naturally) a hot, tough, but underneath sensitive woman. Certainly the show encapsulated the idea that it took an act of God (or his replacement: the Government) to put a man and a woman who obviously belonged together, well, together.

One of the really unique observations in "Chuck" was intelligence. The Bartowski siblings, Chuck and his older sister Ellie, are both highly intelligent, and attractive, tall people. Their father was depicted as a super-genius (and played by Scott Bakula). But Chuck's intelligence is consistently played as one reason for his lack of confidence and success with women generally, and the beautiful spy-handler he falls for in particular (Sarah, played wonderfully by Yvonne Strahowski). Star Zachary Levi does a great job portraying fumbling nervousness because he can imagine, in painful detail, the rejection, the mistake-making, the obvious disadvantages that his character's real persona (as opposed to his spy alias) create for him. His sister, who is shown to be equally as intelligent, and a Doctor, has no such problems. She is the pursued, and had been won by a guy who is both a Greek God (Ryan McPartlin), and a fellow Doctor. For her, intelligence was a plus, her brains plus beauty won her the top guy, who Chuck and best-pal Morgan (the incomparable Joshua Gomez) nickname "Captain Awesome." Because the guy is indeed, awesome.

Time and time again, Chuck over-thinks things, in approaching women, like he would approach a video game, or computer program, or any other highly technical problem. He also obsesses over particular women and gets one-itis, shown as a weakness on the show repeatedly. His great strength (sustained focus) thus becomes a hideous weakness, one that in the series pilot shows him bailing out of his own birthday party to avoid the inevitable humiliation around girls. This quandary is familiar to any guy who has been around high-IQ men and women. The women have no real problem, for the most part, in social settings, while the guys around women are ill at ease. Because all their strengths: obsessive focus, over-thinking, attacking complexity, produces failure after failure. And they don't know why. After all, it brings them success in work.

Also fascinating was the Beta Male/Omega Male hang-out of the "Buy More," a retail hell based loosely on Best Buy (with elaborate parody clothing and sets). Clearly the writers had worked retail, and the stupid employee hijinks ('Mystery Crisper' where best pal Morgan eats blindfolded long-lost employee lunches in the break room fridge) ring true for any who have ever worked retail. As do the Omega Male characters, particularly Lester and Jeffrey (Vik Sahay, Scott Krinsky, comic gold). Two guys so low on the totem pole they can't even see up, and who consequently lack any ambition or motivation other than to be difficult and destructive. "Chuck," as the leader of the group of Omega Males, is shown as their check from disaster,as a natural leader, but one whose lack of any woman in his life leads to "Going his own way" which amounts to going nowhere. A man who opts out of society, who has no hope of girlfriend or family life, easily ends up like Lester or Jeffrey. As Jeffrey put it, "Off by eight. Hammered by eight-fifteen." That's clearly where Chuck is headed, before Sarah shows up.

Slowly but surely, Chuck helps pull not only higher Omega male pal Morgan, but even Jeffrey and Lester out of Omega-dom, and for Morgan into an actual, real, sustainable relationship with a decent girl, and Jeffrey and Lester into some semblance of human functionality. That was a nice touch, though for much of the series, female fans found Jeffrey and Lester predictably appalling instead of funny. If you were a guy you understood. They were just difficult. Because they had no motivation to be otherwise.

Also interesting was the growth of Chuck as a character into a more commanding, assertive, confident, and important man, therefore worthy of sexiness. The deck was stacked again, with Zachary Levi's height and good looks helping things along, and his native intelligence shown to be an asset in "work" be it the useless "Buy More" retail hell work, or "spy work" (which bore as much resemblance to reality as Get Smart or Man from UNCLE). This the female fanbase liked. There are, after all, only so many Alpha males. And everyone likes a fixer-upper, as long as it is not a complete gut job. Merely a coat of paint, some new floors, and you're done! So too was the frustrations of the super-spies (Strahowski's "Sarah" and Adam Baldwin as "Casey") with the retail hell idiocy of a strip mall environment, though Baldwin's character dealt with it better, being a man. As dominant and assertive and comfortable as the spy Sarah was in colorful and exotic settings, the mundane world was a challenge and a mystery to her. The show clearly depicted the mundane, boring, grindingly meaningless life at the "Buy More" as better tolerated by the men, who could put up with it better, than the female characters.

But the center of the show was basically the observation of David Mamet, that two people who had no real love for each other try and make a relationship; again with the Government instead of God putting them together. The relationship was unequal, of course, and in the "Knocked Up" mode instead of the "female pursuit" mode of say, "the Proposal" where the chick pursues the hot guy. Here it is the guy pursuing the hot chick. Endlessly. And unequally, since the show took three seasons for the girl to even acknowledge she loved the main character, and another after that for her to marry him.

And … if that is the view of Hollywood, on what makes romance? The view preached to every woman (and gay) watching at home? [Chuck did skew somewhat male, as this post shows, being number 4 in male skewing in 2010.] Well the nuclear family is doomed. At best, one can be a hot and intelligent woman and find herself courted by a semi-Greek God and fellow med-student. But at worst, the intelligent man finds he must constantly be proving how Alpha he is, and how "romantic," by courting the woman endlessly, forever. Even after marriage. All that time on romance means no time for family formation. Ever. If you want to look at declining birth rates, one need only look at the social dynamics created by absolute freedom. It pretty much demands all available effort be put into constant courtship and romance, at the expense of starting a family for all but the most Alpha of men.

In the show's finale, Sarah, reverts her to the cold, hard, tough assassin she started out as, via the hackneyed ("the Vow" movie) device of memory loss. She does not regain her memory, and she shares only a kiss and some laughs with the hero, before the show fades out. Given that the show required three years for her character to even have feelings and act on them, and another year to marry the guy, what is shown on-screen is a "Happy Divorce" where the girl, now back to where she was, but with more human emotions, moves on with her life. While the guy, stuck again with a super-computer in his brain, has no money, no future, no motivation (lacking critically the girl), and now no extended family/friends, since they've all moved on to other things. Given the lack of warmth, trust, or any sign of "love," by the Sarah character, the show seems to say that even when made into a credible Alpha, any real difficulty means at best a happy Good-bye (the show is titled, in typical Chuck fashion, "Chuck vs. the Good-bye.")

Fan Opinion was mixed, some loved, it, others not so much. [Most of the commenters there are obviously female, and thus a useful peek into how they saw the show.]

The whole finale was of course, a thinly-disguised metaphor for divorce. The heroine loses all feelings and happy memories for the hero, is manipulated by an outsider villain (who resembled a fat, sleazy divorce lawyer), is cold and resentful to the hero throughout, never trusts or believes in him, removes herself from his family and friends, leaves several times, and in the end shares some happy reminiscence of good times past and not well recalled. A "happy divorce," but a divorce nevertheless. You could say that the shows writers and creators did not even buy the show's emotional premise -- that the two leads belonged together and would end up together. A fairly compelling portrait of Marriage 2.o, in Health but in Sickness, for richer but not poorer, to have but not to hold, requiring endless courtship, could not have been better constructed on any show in Hollywood.

And what is frustrating is that emotionally, psychologically, this is one big fat lie. Particularly to women, who end up believing it. Does Demi Moore look happy to you? Doing "Whipits" and K2 Spice (the former is the nitrous oxide from Whipped Cream cans, the latter some synthetic weed) is not the act of a happy woman. Particularly not indulged with one's grown, 23 year old daughter. The Daily Mail reports she is being treated for anorexia and other issues after suffering convulsions from Whipits and K2 Spice. Once one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, she now looks like the picture above. Madonna, and other former beauties all share the same fate. Meanwhile soon-to-be ex husband Ashton Kutcher has no worries. Stepping right into the Charlie Sheen shoes on camera and in real-life, he's more popular than ever and has been asked back to co-star in "Two and A Half Men."

Both dramatically, and in real life, the challenge of ultimate freedom, and choice, where women and men can walk away from marriage, at any time, for any reason, makes the selection of the best, most faithful and loyal partner one can get, critical. Women in particular, since they lose attractiveness far quicker than men, walk a razor's edge. One false move, one bad choice, and there is no Second or Third Act for them. Their romantic lives are ruined, and with them the chance for most (save the wealthiest celebrities) at any possibility of a happy family life. This ought to be the real driving dramatic choice, and matching one in real life? How do I know that the last best hope I have for a guy who will stick with me when I get old and ugly is not walking past right now? That is the dramatic situation women ought to be given, by the Church of Television.

What was once the norm, the ordinary, the White Picket fence and nice suburban home (shown endlessly this final season of Chuck as the just-out-of-reach fantasy for Chuck and Sarah) is now out of reach for all but the most blessed, and shown so repeatedly on TV. The smartest of women who get won by guys like "Captain Awesome," but not those "married to their careers" (such as Sarah). Indeed the crutch of career-ism for women, and the dead-end (quite literally) that it implies, was a major theme on "Chuck." That's contrasted of course by a career. Chuck's sister Ellie, first engaged, then married, to a fellow doctor she fell for in med school, certainly has a career. But it does not consume her, rather family matters of her own, her luckless brother, desire for a kid, desire for the best for her kid when she has her, all drive her endlessly. Her job is just her job. Important but not the dominant feature of her emotional landscape. It is merely how she earns money for her family, not the endpoint of all ambition and feelings. This is why Ellie, is happy and Sarah is not. SHE has a husband, and a baby, and a career where her native intelligence and caring wisdom matter. One that requires neither coldness, nor "just following orders brutality," nor constant lying and manipulation.

Because freedom cuts both ways. And absolute freedom, and the propensity to walk away, creates Lemon Markets. One that hurts both buyers and sellers, and creates a degraded, debased market:

Akerlof's paper uses the market for used cars as an example of the problem of quality uncertainty. A used car is one in which ownership is transferred from one person to another, after a period of use by its first owner and its inevitable wear and tear. There are good used cars ("cherries") and defective used cars ("lemons"), normally as a consequence of several not-always-traceable variables such as the owner's driving style, quality and frequency of maintenance and accident history. Because many important mechanical parts and other elements are hidden from view and not easily accessible for inspection, the buyer of a car does not know beforehand whether it is a cherry or a lemon. So the buyer's best guess for a given car is that the car is of average quality; accordingly, he/she will be willing to pay for it only the price of a car of known average quality. This means that the owner of a carefully maintained, never-abused, good used car will be unable to get a high enough price to make selling that car worthwhile.

Therefore, owners of good cars will not place their cars on the used car market. The withdrawal of good cars reduces the average quality of cars on the market, causing buyers to revise downward their expectations for any given car. This, in turn, motivates the owners of moderately good cars not to sell, and so on. The result is that a market in which there is asymmetrical information with respect to quality shows characteristics similar to those described by Gresham's Law: the bad drives out the good (although Gresham's Law applies to a different situation).

"Lemon market" effects have also been noted in other markets, such as used computers . There are also parallels in the insurance market, where, unless those least likely to need insurance (i.e., those least likely to get in accidents) are forced to buy insurance, it is those most likely to need insurance compensation who tend most to buy insurance.

If you look at modern relationships, outside those of say, Ellie and Awesome in "Chuck" (akin to the Upper Class, i.e. both are "vetted" as medical students, intelligent, highly disciplined, high impulse control, and put together by an institution, in their case med school), information asymmetry, rules. People don't commit, because the cost of getting burned is high, i.e. lost time (particularly for women who have less of it) with someone else. Since it is hard to tell if a man is quality or not, superficial attributes such as styling and "hotness" tend to dominate. But over-committing to the "Lemon" (say, Ashton Kutcher), leads to disaster. Meanwhile, a car looking beat up superficially, but sound in all other aspects, tends to get devalued because the soundness in other aspects is basically, undiscoverable absent commitment.

That is the conundrum that Hollywood tries to solve in Romantic Comedies. The women don't commit, because even though the guys look like say, Ryan Reynolds, or Josh Duhamel, or Gerard Butler, or Zachary Levi, they've been burned before, are skeptical of the "market value" of the prospective mate, and approach romance like a used-car buyer while consumed with careerism to fill an empty romantic void. [Really, it is remarkable how often Hollywood shows this.] In a very real sense the female leads of romantic comedies are in a used car market. Gone are the intermediaries, such as relatives, (or med school in the case of Ellie and Awesome), friends, churches, and the like in such a highly mobile and anonymous society. Therefore, how do they get together? Their mutual best friends die in a car accident (how romantic!) and they have to raise their orphaned infant together. The INS will deport a female big shot exec unless she engages in a sham marriage. A one-night drunken stand regretted instantly by the woman gets her pregnant. A driven super-spy must provide protection and handling to the CIA and NSA's only spy-supercomputer in human form, one nerdy guy with sexy Alpha potential. The two are driven together until the real value of the (generally guy) is apparent. A girl's value is easily sussed out here: attractive, intelligent, faithful. Not much needed to discover. The man is not so easily discovered.

The show's creators understood this, since they milked it for years, as the Sarah character slowly through forced interaction with Chuck found his true market value, and fell in love with him. Obviously budget concerns plagued the show (pushing to flash-backs to save cash), as did the writers falling in love with symmetry, the Chuck character taking the lead on the beach to match Sarah in the pilot, as she not he struggles with a new situation -- marriage to a guy who loves her but for who she feels nothing, and does not believe in as a man, a spy (critical for how she evaluates men), or her husband. Laughs and a kiss as they say good-bye, so Chuck can woo her all over again. Maybe.

And that is just a lie. In a society where men can also choose at will, and walk away, with freedom just a lawyer and financial sacrifice away, re-courting is a fantasy. There is always a woman younger, hotter, and prettier, with less baggage and emotional instability, to be found by any man worth having (i.e. that other women want). Endless courting just means men won't put in the effort, and bounce around in semi-slackerdom ala Lester and Jeffrey, or PUA douchery, perhaps one interspersed with the other.

It was a cheap and easy out, for the show's writers and creators, and like all cheap and easy outs, revealing in how it exposes Hollywood's true beliefs. Fundamentally, Hollywood seems to believe that yes, there is something wrong with how men and women (largely don't) come together as they should. But its solution is endless romance, which prevents family formation. That furthermore only a blessed few, as signified generally by "correct" occupations (Doctors are seldom villains) can achieve marriage and family, without falling into the trap of Endless Courtship to validate (oh so obviously) poor self-images of their female audience.

The show did alright in the ratings, but nothing like it did once just a few years ago (which was around 2.0 in 18-34 Adults). Clearly the endless romance focus, and lack of "seal the deal" stuff with the Sarah character, turned off the nerdy guys who wanted Yvonne Strahowski as their fantasy girlfriend, without bringing in any women who wanted Zachary Levi as their perfectly acceptable "fixer-upper Alpha" to cover the loss, let alone improve upon it.

I can't remember a show before that depicted a nerdy, geeky guy as the hero. One who (for a while at least) credibly got the girl. And one that depicted the retail-hell underside of "Going your own way" which amounts to going nowhere, though in very male style. The show at its best was funny, with a lot of physical humor based on humiliating (and therefore hilarious) retail outfits the sexy female super spy Sarah was forced to wear as part of her cover. I'll miss the show, and the fantastic performances by gifted actors, who were better than the scripts most of the last few years: Adam Baldwin, Yvonne Strahowski (terrifically funny in a slow-burn way), Zachary Levi, Joshua Gomez, Ryan McPartlin, Sarah Lawrence (criminally under-appreciated and under-used), and the great Scott Krinsky and Vik Sahay.

But its failures are instructive. It shows that Hollywood still does not have a handle on romance, in a world of endless freedom and eternal choices. Nor, sadly, does much of America.

The Strange Politics of TV's Alcatraz and Person of Interest

2012-01-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

There is only one institution in America with any reach. Only one that really shapes culture. Only one that reflects, and changes it. No, its not churches. Hardly anyone goes to Church any more. Nor is it politics, unaffiliated people are growing and will soon outnumber Republicans. There is only one institution that matters. That is television. True, it does not have the reach it had with only three networks, and no cable tv. But there it is, 17 million people watched the Golden Globes. It is, outside sports and a few other live events, a mostly female-gay ghetto. But it still shapes the attitudes and cultural assumptions of most women. Which brings us to Fox's Alcatraz and CBS's Person of Interest. Both are shows with somewhat strange politics. Alcatraz wants to indict the White male America of the past, for well being White and Male. Not sufficiently multicultural. Meanwhile Person of Interest posits that icky White beta males are the main threat to personal security in NYC, and Black men and women NEVER EVER commit crimes. Why? Because their viewers are nearly all female, and that is what that audience wants.

First, Alcatraz. seen in the trailer below:

Basically, a young White girl with a pixie haircut, and no discernible man in her life, but "hot" (this IS San Francisco, after all), is recruited by a semi-evil cranky old White guy, to work with a "diverse" team of well, a fat Mexican comic book fan and "Professor" and some Indian chick to solve the mystery of why everyone disappeared from Alcatraz. Sub-plots include the wicked, bad White guy who killed her first, less fat Mexican cop partner, who is her ... grandfather! And also the Indian doctor being a time traveler or something, she shows up in a flashback in 1960 in Alcatraz.

The whole thing is laughable, with hard-case WWII vet and Alcatraz con meekly doing what "they" (a voice on a telephone) tells him to do, because well that's what bad, dangerous White guys do. Or guys from 1963 suddenly knowing that they are being watched by video surveillance cameras. Or that time-travelers would use that to ... hire hitmen. Of course!

It is naturally, chick crack. Women love this stuff, the good (puzzles, women love puzzles as any Agatha Christie fan knows), and the bad (basically the semi-lesbian, fat Mexican guy, and the cranky old guy have to chase down evil White male America from 1963 and imprison it). There's a metaphor there, and its very obvious. The shows creators feel the old, straight White male working man's San Francisco is an affront to reality, and want to bring it back to life just to imprison it. Again, chick crack: importance and unraveling the mystery without any responsibility or duty. To country, justice, family, or anything. Or sorting that out. Nope, just easy moral victories over cartoon bad guys. Because everyone knows, that in San Francisco, the most horrible crimes are committed by ... White guys.

Nope, the words of SFPD Captain Michael Biel on the causes of San Francisco's 11 murders in 2011 are:

But police Capt. Michael Biel told the board’s Public Safety Committee the killings are unrelated and do not represent a specific crime wave. Biel said only one of the 11 homicides committed so far this year has been gang-related. Most of the rest, he said, involved social acquaintances and ongoing disputes over money or drugs.

Now, what sort of person kills casual acquaintances in disputes over money and drugs? Oh I know, I know! White guys. Usually icky beta males or lower class blue collar guys. After all, we all know the crime waves WWII vets committed (one of the bad guys in Alcatraz is a WWII vet who stole to feed his family).

Person of Interest, after an interesting start, has followed the path of pandering to the female audience's prejudices. While the pilot played with expectations, the icky beta male White guy being the victim, the "hot" woman being the killer, the main plot, bad corrupt White cops framing innocent Black victims had a noticeable subtext. All the cops were fat, bad looking ethnic White guys, Italians, Irish, and not the handsome good guys.

The most recent episode was the most laughable, embodying Eric Cartman's South Park Dictum that Black people can do no wrong. The character, the person of interest, is a beautiful Dominican woman who is a struggling lawyer, trying to free innocent Black cons wrongfully sent back to prison by their corrupt (again fat and unattractive Italian) parole officer. So the person at Child Protective Services can get a kick-back on falsely claimed kids cared for by the foster parents. The conspirators? A middle aged White couple and ... yes! An Icky White Beta Male. The "twist" is we are supposed to suspect, briefly, a noble Black woman who runs the place. Not the icky White beta male who expresses a romantic interest in the beautiful Dominican woman.

Why that plot point? Because it confirms what most of the White female audience "knows" with religious certainty. ALL Black people are noble and good, and never ever EVER commit crimes, it is racist to think so. The REAL threat is icky White beta males who might even **GASP** ask them out. How awful. Of course they are murderers and corrupt.

How does this willful denial of reality exist? Because most White women have no real contact with actual real, Black male criminals in urban areas. Or noble Hispanics. Those who do, like Alexandra "Asians in the Library" Wallace are not real happy about being second class citizens at best, harassed and threatened at worst. Black ex-cons are not in reality, noble guys trying to "turn their life around" for their son. They are in fact, brutal and dysfunctional and totally without much hope for anything else but aging out of violence. Productive and trustworthy members of society they are not.

This makes the show far different from the 1980's "Equalizer" which was also set in NYC. There, brutal Chinese kidnap or Dominican drug gangs ruled places, or organized crime, or various drug rings. While there were plenty of evil White guys, the beta male White guy was often the one the Equalizer (the incomparable Edward Woodward, sorely missed) protected. Heck even glamor-show "Miami Vice" had no problem in depicting the reality of the drug trade then, mostly Columbian drug lords. But back then, more men watched television, and therefore pandering to female-led PC was not the main concern.

One of the subtexts is that the bad guys are really bad because they are ... racist. "Framing" Black guys for committing the crimes that evil Blue Collar White guys of Ethnic Origin or Beta Male White guys do. I've seen that particular plot point three times on the show this season. That's no accident, undoubtedly the audience responded and it got repeated.

If you don't like PC, you have to destroy TV. Period. Or remake it into a place where shows fear offending .... beta male White guys, and Blue Colar guys of Ethnic Origin.

Either destroy female-led consumerism (by promoting female thrift and value-buying) or start suing the hell out of these production companies and networks for defamation of class. Sue and sue and sue and sue. Sue till the cows come home. And then sue some more. Attrition warfare against an enemy with limited time and money. Force them to abandon the shaping of culture to feed the White female professional viewpoint at its worst not best.

Puzzle stuff? I'm with the female viewers on that one. Its fun! Why not? Character development (but not by icky sex or "shocking" turns to "evil" out of comic books and soap operas) are also a positive development due to women viewers. But lets have an end to the chasing down and imprisonment of the Straight White male past, and icky Beta Male or White Ethnic guy as villain wrongfully framing innocent Black ex-cons. I'd rather watch vampires, witches, and fantasy characters out of "Grimm." Its more believable.

The Inexplicable Decline of Women's Tennis

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

For some reason, totally unknown to marketers, women's tennis has inexplicably declined both in quality, as observed in The New Republic, but also passion from the public and sponsoring revenues. Pay for tennis executives is declining, between 8 and 22 percent, as sponsorship also declined. The Women's Tour (WTA) is losing Sony Ericsson, at $88 million Tennis's biggest sponsor.

Women's tennis has fully embraced the Williams sisters, and as seen above and below, they are not exactly the model of feminine attractiveness. More like linebackers in a dress. Meanwhile, more attractive players like Maria Sharapova (tall, blonde, speaks English) are not doing well on the tour, with few wins and lower recent publicity.

Tennis is not a sport like say, Basketball, which appeals to ever-narrower groups of Americans (the NBA under David Stern failed miserably in expanding in Asia, Chinese are happy to wear pirated Kobe Bryant jerseys, not so much at paying for games or visiting NBA stars). Basketball is a sport of individual athleticism, basically a dunking contest and nothing more. Any notion of team or cooperation has long left the building, around the time Elvis checked out. Nor is Tennis a sport like Football, a brutal endeavor of tough guys lining up against each in a literal battle over turf.

Nope, Tennis is a sport with pretensions still, to gentility and good sportsmanship, of tradition and grace. That goes doubly for Women's Tennis, which is basically a competition to find the most graceful and athletic princess. The women who were truly embraced as Tennis Champions, were not ugly Eastern European Lesbians, or linebackers in a dress, who overpowered opponents like Godzilla squashing Bambi, but athletic, blonde, pretty, "nice" in deportment (on camera anyway), who every little girl wanted to grow up to emulate, and won the approval of every middle class father.

Women's sports are different from men's. Not a competition to find the toughest guy who can take on the most brutal punishment, and dish it out too, or cooperate with other men in defending turf, or engaging in one-on-one displays of athletic dominance. Nope, it is at heart an exhibition of feminine resilience and endurance matched with grace. Certainly physical, always demanding, women's sports requires the admiration of millions of middle class (White) girls who would like to be known for prowess in something as well as just beauty. This is why Chris Evert, and Tracy Austin, and Katarina Witt are remembered fondly, while Martina Navritolova, and Tonya Harding are not.

Women's tennis has embraced the Williams sisters. Who undeniably have athletic dominance. But that has led only to the decline of the sport. Does anyone really think that millions of Middle Class White girls dream one day of looking like Serena Williams? Really? All their athletic dominance, their power, their brutal efficiency, mean nothing as it meant nothing for an Eastern European Lesbian before them.

Women's tennis exists to sell their stars, as the kind of women little girls want to be when they grow up. This reality gets clouded by executives excited about "breaking new ground" or the pure dominance of not very feminine women's players. Be they Lesbian or Linebacker. Sometimes people cannot even see the obvious.

Would an alternate universe WTA where say, Sanaa Lathan or Gabrielle Union, more traditionally feminine and attractive women, were dominant champions have this difficulty? My view is no, they would not. At least, not in this degree. People do however like looking at, and following those, who resemble an idealized, younger, stronger, more attractive version of themselves. Black men and women are not racist for figuring that Woody Allen movies and Seinfeld are not for them. Nor are Hispanics racist for thinking Country Music, Larry the Cable Guy, Sundance, and the IFC Channels are not for them either. There is nothing wrong with Black people preferring Tyler Perry movies, and Rap Artists like Jay Z, to Dogme 95 movies by Lars Von Trier, and Justin Bieber. And there is not anything wrong with White girls (and their parents) preferring a White tennis star to a Black or Hispanic one. Wanting to see someone like yourself onscreen is not being one step away from a Klan rally. That this has to be said speaks to the pathetic nature of today's society, and terminal PC which masks an obvious hatred for "the Wrong Sort of White People."

At any rate, Women's Tennis will continue its decline until another Middle Class White Princess is found. Not Linebackers and Lesbians.

Charles Murray and the White Class Divide

2012-01-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

Charles Murray has an article in the WSJ outlining America's class divide. Murray notes the emergence of the "Super Zip Codes" that all go to the same elite schools, hold the same elite jobs, live in a very few elite cities, and live a life very different from that of the rest of the country. While at the same time among Whites, a lower class has emerged that is outside the cultural traditions and values of this country. He calls it the "Super Zips" vs. "Fishtown" (a White working class part of Philly). Arguing that both have become hereditary stations, for a number of reasons, and for an informal moral campaign to change that.

While Murray is superb in describing the situation, he shies away (from Political Correctness, ingrained chivalry, or other reasons such as fear) from accurately describing the reason for the emergence of two hereditary classes, and the action needed to break them apart, and increase personal social mobility.

Why the Super Zips Emerged

Murray notes that the United States has always had an elite. But that only recently have the payoffs for being "smart" been so large, and permanent. This is a familiar argument, one made many times in the Financial Times, and one not very intellectually rigorous. Simply because the elites are characterized by heredity, not smartness. Indeed, the dirty secret is that the elites are not very smart at all.

Elites are concentrated in the media, entertainment, the law, politics, government, "activism" and a few other areas where heredity, being born to the "correct" parent(s), personal connections, wealth, and "proper" opinions on a whole host of issues is everything. Not cognitive ability.

You will find almost no elites in professions such as engineering, computer science, entrepreneurship, and the like. Apple Computer, Dell, Starbucks, Oracle, were all formed by non-elites from middle class backgrounds or worse. Microsoft remains the only major technology company arguably founded by a child of the elite. Elites do not work as petroleum engineers, geologists, physicists, electrical engineers, and medical researchers, all highly demanding cognitive professions.

Angelo Codevilla argues in the American Spectator that the Ruling Class of America, Republican and Democrat, all go to the same national schools, share the same interests, intermarry, and form the same social class:

No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

The Ruling Class, or the Super Zips, are not very smart. They have managed to run America into the ground, while in search of temporary votes to keep out those who they HATE HATE HATE (Average White middle class and working class Americans) of any power, courted disaster. Detroit is 47% illiterate, among adults. Hispanics do little better, and remain like Blacks utterly dependent on money transfered and opportunities taken from White middle and working class people to well, non-Whites.

In other words, the entire Elite political system is dependent on, sustained good times for everyone to smooth over the massive transfer of wealth and opportunities from average White people to non-Whites (and elites). And given those demands, the elites have made economic recovery impossible — no oil drilling, no oil pipelines, green dreams of failed solar manufacturing, strangling business regulations, and crony capitalism. When faced with the obvious danger — a White middle/working class populist revolt, the elites, the Super Zips, the Ruling Class, did little to avert it. Not even allowing victories and military dominance (that gives relief in cheaper oil if crushing the Iranians) to satisfy the pride and desire of the populists. Arrogant over-reach characterizes the elites. Who ran sub-prime into the ground, and with it the Nation, from which state it is unlikely to recover for decades.

Codevilla argues implicitly that Murray's answer to the Super Zips rise is "schlock sociology" worthy of Thomas Friedman and David Brooks:

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a "newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy." In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.

Codevilla compares the US elites unfavorably to France:

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

Where Codevilla goes wrong in describing the emergence of the Ruling Elite, the Ruling Class, the Super Zips, is describing the emergence in political terms, i.e. being merely the heirs of Wilsonian upper-crust elitism. But the elites of today are nothing like those of Wilson's day, holding attitudes towards race, sexual mores, nationalism, crime, punishment, wars, and everything else that are at opposite ends of the spectrum from the old Progressive Elites. Yes elites have always entrenched themselves in crony capitalism and regulations, tension between them and the ordinary people being as old as the Whiskey Rebellion.

He describes the hatred of traditional religion, of marriage, and the family, and the worship of big government. Which is held to be able to re-order society at will, but never win wars abroad.

There is a word for people who hold such views. The natural basis for the Super Zips. The Ruling Class. The New Elites. We call them ... women.

Specifically, White professional women. A new class, never seen before in America's history. With lots of money, lots of disposable income. Hostile to traditions and values of the "old America" and in particular, the military. Desirous of a New America, multicultural, multiracial, united in opposition to "Dead White Men" and icky, horrible, Beta White males. Fond of eternal apologies (name any elite dominated by men fond of apologizing itself, name any group of women not fond of ritual and thus meaningless abasement).

The growth of the New Elites, the Super Zips, the Ruling Elites, and their attitudes has been one that has been driven by the emergence of women into new territory. It is a fundamental truism that everything has its cost. Liberation of women from drudgework, from early marriage and early deaths (often in childbirth), from non-participation in the nation's affairs, from entering into and being amply rewarded from the workforce, has helped create a modern West (in the US and Europe) that is more robust, more wealthy, and more fair in many ways. But everything costs, and the cost of the emergence of women has been the creation of a hereditary elite, a ruling class of princes, kings, queens, princesses, dukes, and what not. The Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Disney-esque fantasy, complete with adult Oprah-ized "Wise Black Woman" companionship, pushing the interests of White Professional women to the exclusion of everyone else outside the female-Elite coalition.

That is what all that wealth, power, and stability cost — long term instability by a Ruling Class driven entirely by feedback loops of making Upper and Near-Upper Class White women happy. After all, the Ruling class as Codevilla notes, appeals to be "smarter" and more "moral" than the other guys. That's an appeal to female tastes. Name a football coach who pushes that he's more moral than his opposition, or "smarter" in terms of dress, comportment, and so on. Cleverness, devious tricks, and such like (when employed for your side) appeal to men in sports, business, and the military. Appeals to moral authority and general intelligence do not. Which is why Patton ironically meant as a hit piece is popular among conservative men and "the Help" among SWPL, Professional White women. It is why tough old football coaches are beloved by male sports fan and Oprah by White women.

The Super Zips emerged because the class that provided the support, the balance, White professional women, emerged. Yes Welfare made things worse, as did crony capitalism and credentialism. But the key had always been, the post-War emergence of White professional women, newly liberated, hostile to the old ways that kept them out of power, eager to embrace personal sexual liberation, disdainful of male peers who lacked sexiness (nearly all of them, because they were equal) and thus enamored of anything and everything foreign and non-White. "Authentic" came to mean foreign and exotic, and "White" a synonym for "boring" because newly liberated White women found them so, and through massive consumerism driven mostly by their buying decisions, shaped through advertising the culture to what it is today.

In the early 1960's, commercials ran on national television wherein housewives, even of working men at factories, agonized over the quality of their coffee. Today you have commercials where rock-climbing professional women eschew marriage for outdoor adventure. With their "boyfriend." And no one says anything. Because the culture changed so much. Organically, all around the West, all at the same time.

The Super Zip emergence is probably best shown by the old WB/CW television show "Gilmore Girls," and the current CW show "Gossip Girl." Both appeal to young women, the former depicts a glamorous young single mother and her hot young bright daughter, who gets into Yale. The mother dumps her long-time devoted blue collar hunk boyfriend for the guy who got her pregnant at 16, and never did anything for her or her daughter, but is rich and arrogant and an Alpha jerk. The daughter tellingly dumps a younger version of said blue collar guy, who worships her, for a rich and drunk jerk after he humiliates the blue collar guy. The female audience went NUTS for this, and could not get enough of it. They loved the rich, arrogant bastards because they were rich and arrogant. Inherited money too, which was the best kind. "Gossip Girl" does away with even the pretense of small-town-ish life, with glamorous soap opera hook-ups among the spoiled rich kids of Manhattan.

The very things that enrage the mostly White male non-elites, makes the elites extremely attractive to the female White professionals. Who under the elites have done well, to the point where income, education, and other status-markers are higher for White women than men.

Black voters will reliably vote Democratic (Elite) about 98% or so. Year after year. Hispanics vote around 70% for elites. White men and blue collar White women, on the short end of the stick, vote 70% non-elite (or against the most elite candidate). Those who swing, significantly, from elite to non-elite, are White professional women. The good news is that they can be persuaded to vote against Dems (always the elite candidate) some times. The bad news is that they require elite characteristics in candidates to do so: Scott Brown, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush. Handsome and tall are best, at least not "angry" or "ideological" which is a Beta Male turn-off. Women voters outside the White blue collar group want fairy tales, handsome princes, and tales of hierarchy and aristocracy. In real life as in stories of vampire queens, kings, and princes. That is why the elites emerged.

Neither Codevilla nor Murray get that.

The Emergence of Fishtown

Murray notes that "Fishtown" or the hereditary lower class White hangouts have decisively rejected the idea of regular church attendance, marriage before kids, education, and males in the workforce. What Murray does not get, because perhaps he is an older male with attitudes and chivalry formed from another country (the past) is how the sexual revolution impacted all these things.

Just as most White professional women (seriously, lurk about on ANY Television discussion forum, to see the attitude) HATE HATE HATE Christianity because of its cultural limits on female sexuality, so too do lower class women. The modern era after WWII, with cheap and easy contraception, anonymous urban living (less so now with Facebook and Twitter), high personal mobility, radically increased income and freedom for women, meant a sea-change in how women viewed sex, love, marriage, and kids.

Basically, any woman that wants sex, and is half-way attractive, can have sex any time she wants with an Alpha male. Commitment and love is another thing, but sex is not. Sex with the most desirable of men (aggressive, dominant assholes) is there any time. The only threat is Christianity. Islam is a distant fire, limiting only Muslim women (who most White women don't really care about anyway) as they see it. Some pastor saying "don't be slutty and stupid" is a direct threat, because their parent(s) might echo it. No one wants to be shamed like Snooki. The popularity of Jersey Shore is as a vehicle for White women of all classes to laugh at Snooki and how stupid she is. She is the guido version of a minstrel show. Appealing mainly to women.

Of course lower class women don't attend church. Who wants a lecture on staying away from bad boys, when they are so, so sexy?

Marriage for kids is for losers, among White lower class women, not because of welfare (though it hardly helps) but because of sexiness among men. The sexiest of men, are those who are aggressive, dominant, hyper-masculine, and so naturally women want kids by them. There is not enough reason to hold out for commitment (the sexy men won't commit) and the non-sexy men who offer commitment just are not sexy enough. It is not welfare (most White blue collar women in Fishtown work, and quite hard too). It is their own income plus no social pressure (because of anonymity, and independence of income) to stay away from bad boys that drives high rates of illegitimacy (and low rates of church going).

In times past, women would compromise because lowering the bar on acceptable sexiness was the only way to have a family. Now they can earn enough, with marginal government assistance, to have kids by sexy bad boys all they want. That's better, as Roissy notes, than a lifetime of a beta male's devotion. As the proprietor of Heartiste notes, "five minutes of Alpha beats five years of Beta."

Education, and males in the workforce, are directly related to sexual rewards on the lower class. Bad boys who work part time, deal casual drugs, engage in fruitless endeavors to "make it as a musician" and layabout, get the best women. The most beautiful, the youngest, the most fertile, the most willing. Often some of the most intelligent too. Bad boys, casual criminals, are sexier. That is why they dominant fantasies oriented towards women, be they vampires or warlocks or whatnot.

The path to sex, and fatherhood, is based on not life in the work-force and provider beta loser-dom. But rather pure male sexiness. This is the model in the Black ghetto and Mexican barrio. It is how most of the world orders itself sexually and socially. It is how most families are formed, and have been formed, in human history. It optimizes for female satisfaction, at the expense of wealth formation for all but a few.

A man who observes the behavior of the women around him, from an early age, at Fishtown, learns hard lessons. Regardless of what women say, the most beautiful and desirable of them, those who can have any man, give themselves to the casual, bad boy criminal lay-abouts. What you reward, and perhaps no reward is worth more, you get more of. What you punish (dutiful providership and steady blue collar work among men) you get less of.

What Murray misses is the sexual component. Late marriage by a woman in her mid-thirties with many, many sexual partners (between 30 and fifty is not out of the question), kids by another man or men, often ending in divorce, is not the same as the passionate devotion of a sixteen year old beauty, a virgin or near virgin, who only has eyes for you. And will happily bear you a child. Newsflash, young women are more beautiful than the older ones.

This is borne out by Murray's own statistics. The Super Zips live 1950's lives. They might have "only" $10 million dollars, and rest assured the drudge on Wall Street is not sexy, as being sexy takes hard work (George Clooney basically works all the time to be sexy, as does Brad Pitt, and your local drug dealer). There is not enough time for Wall Street mid-level honchos to be sexy, they are busy making money. But as "the Nanny Diaries" showed, "enough" money to buy say, a Summer home in the Hamptons, or at least rent one in the Summer, and all sorts of social settings, can mitigate un-sexiness among husbands. Can cause at least regular church going (the women have already sold out sexy for the Hamptons and society) and legitimate child-birth.

For the super-rich, well the money is no object, so marriages don't last long and like Hollywood demonstrates, illegitimacy is no barrier. The Middle class is increasingly sliding towards the sexy vs. money side of things. The lower class has no hope of upward mobility (here illegal immigration has taken its toll on White blue collar wages). So that's a problem.

Women WILL trade sexy men for men with money. Will sacrifice that sexiness, that thrill of danger, that pure excitement (and even real danger, as Rihanna again pursuing Chris Brown for another Ike Turner style beat-down shows). But it takes money. Real money. Even for the Middle Class, a nice condo is no longer enough. Not even a nice house. All that frenzy over marble and granite counter-tops was really the frustration of the middle class wife or girlfriend over her man's lack of sexiness. Drowned with status consumption.

In the current situation, it takes a house (at least rented, preferably owned) in the Hamptons or about $10 million or so annual income to keep the nuclear family intact. That's the amount of money most, though certainly not all, White women require for monogamy and abjuring sexy men.

[Note, I am sure "not all women are like that." Who cares? I am describing the collective actions of White women as a whole, in society, for both good — such as increased wealth, productivity, resiliency, and stake-holders, and bad — collapse of church-going, the nuclear family, men in employment, and the rise of the elites, the Super Zips in strangleholds on most institutions of this nation. This is not a conspiracy, or the actions of "devious Jews" or "Gramscian Frankfurt School theorists" making a "long march" through institutions, nor even "women are evil." Because they are not. However, neither are women comprised of pure good and supernatural wisdom, collectively. Women, like men, respond to incentives, for either society's good or bad. I would not say a woman pursuing a bad boy and having kids with him outside marriage is "wrong" individually. In a free country it is her choice. But the social cost is horrendous, when normalized and free of stigma.]

Solutions

Murray rightly eschews Big Government solutions to this problem. Though he notes correctly that America should reform Welfare to remove incentives to single motherhood. He is correct for a campaign to make the old, church going, nuclear family, men in the workplace, value education America return to Fishtown. But he leaves Super Zips alone.

Murray is only partly right, in the solutions because again he does not understand the cause — the sexual liberation of women, and the concentration of wealth and power among Upper Class White women, who switch votes based on personal attributes of candidates. Thus, getting their way, more often than not (the power of being the deciding votes).

Fishtown won't embrace those old virtues, unless the sexual liberation of women is matched by social stigma for choices that while maximizing individual happiness for the woman, causes disaster upon society. It must be a campaign directed by women, for women, with perhaps the involvement of a few Alpha males. Beta males must and should stay directly out of it. The Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) campaign is a good one. Women respond to this social pressure and stigma very well, perhaps because being part of the group is far more important than for men. Everyone knows "loner" men and they form the backbone of male oriented entertainment from John Wayne to Jason Bourne. Women on the other hand are never depicted as loners in anything directed at them. They might form their own groups, but never set themselves off deliberately and permanently the way loner men heroes in movies do.

The solution is simply on the behavioral front, "don't be slutty. Don't be Snooki." Delivered by almost exclusively women, with a few sexy Alpha guys. That's it. A simple message. But one powerful given women's group behavior. [Which is both a weakness, and strength, forming the backbone of the Temperance and Prohibition and Civil Rights and Feminist and Environmental movements.]

On the incentive fronts, blue collar White guys, and White collar White guys, need to have incomes raised. Women will understandably fight tooth and nail to deny any reduction in their wealth (I would too) so that's a non-starter. But concrete action can be taken to increase earning power of White guys: deport illegal aliens (and their kids); increase military spending particularly ship and plane building; eliminate most legal immigration (and H1-B visas and variants); put import quotas on (increase local factory production); increase the ability to file and make money off patents (money to backyard tinkerers). Oil and energy production must be increased, vastly, and spending on various government make-work stuff killed.

These are all things that are difficult, but achievable. None will happen overnight, but all have the possibility of being enacted.

The most important strategic objective, however, is destroying the Hereditary Super Zips. A few observations are in order. Hollywood used to be filled with guys like Mel Brooks. A guy from nowhere, who rose to fame on writing really funny things, and pushing the envelope, not in just dirty words or taboos violated ,but form. "Get Smart" was the first zany sitcom, based not on a family but a complete idiot who parodied the James Bond smooth spy guy. Don Adams is another out of that mold, a guy who survived Guadalcanal and was a Parris Island Drill Instructor. Nowadays, comedy in Hollywood is very restricted to the Harvard Mafia. Want a job writing for the Simpsons, or Conan O'Brien? Better have graduated from Harvard. Only South Park, created by a couple of guys from Colorado, fits the old Brooksian Hollywood open to new talent that produces.

To destroy the Super Zips, it is necessary to destroy its ecosystem, the female driven consumerism. And all that is needed to do that is frugalism replacing consumerism. Buying only when needed, and on value and price, not status. The dirty secret of the Super Zips is how dependent either directly or indirectly they are on female-driven consumerism. Network and Cable TV, much of the movies, advertising, marketing, and whole swaths of government depend on either direct expenditures or indirect revenues and taxes derived from that. If Americans and particularly American women just bought say, 40% less, entire major portions of the Super Zips would collapse. Others, particularly Hollywood, would rely on entertaining people rather than just a profitable sub-group (see "the Help" the book and movie, and Oprah's career).

For the Super Zips will not go away quietly. They are happy to wreck America to get one more day in power.

Newt Gingrich, Anti-Patriot, Scam Artist

2012-01-22T23:19:00.000-08:00

A true patriot, puts his country's interest before his own. Will subordinate whatever fame, fortune, and applause he will get out of book tours, personal appearances, and fund-raising, in a certain doomed effort, for the good of the country. Newt Gingrich is not that man. Instead, he is a man who is already selling America short, dooming it to destruction to Obama, should he win the nomination. The facts are clear, Newt Gingrich cannot win a general election against Obama. For the good of the country he should withdraw, and endorse Romney. Who is no sure thing, but has the best chance of beating Obama.

Sure, I know the objections to Mitt Romney. He's a Mormon. He's rich. He's handsome. He's distant, and not engaging and dominating on TV. He's a RINO. And all that. Sure, point taken. But the very things that make Mitt Romney unpalatable to much of the South Carolina Evangelicals, and Conservatives, make him the only one running to stand a chance against Obama. Newt Gingrich hands Obama a near 50 state victory. One of so massive proportions that Nancy Pelosi returns as House Majority Leader, and Reid has only 40 at most Republicans to deal with. Perhaps less. Newt is total disaster for America, and hands Obama victory.

Because he's repulsive, in every way, to women. Period.

Rasmussen has Obama and Romney tied at 44% each while Obama leads Newt:

Today’s numbers show Obama and Romney tied at 44% each while the president leads Gingrich 47% to 40%. Romney leads the president by four among unaffiliated voters while Gingrich trails by seven. Romney also does a bit better among Republicans, picking up 79% of the GOP vote while Gingrich attracts 74%. This is consistent with results found throughout the campaign season that Tea Party activists are willing to support whoever wins the nomination while more Establishment oriented Republicans are less likely to make such a commitment.

Santorum, in a poll released today, by Rasmussen, trails Obama by ten points, 48-38.

Let us dispense with magical thinking, what Ann Coulter said was a trade of insults at Obama and the Media for Obama's re-election.

Obama has many strengths. The Media adores him, as Jesus 2.0 literally. So most low information voters, who don't care about politics, and make choices based on the media, which is most White Professional Women, are inclined to Obama anyway. Then again, he's Black. That's a built in advantage for him, again in getting White female votes. That demographic group feels "White male = boring" and fairly icky, while Black is viewed as dynamic, positive, masculine, and good. That is not fair, but that's life.

Obama has $1 billion to run negative ads, and will doubtless raise more through independent PACs run by unions and Hollywood. EVERY celebrity worthy of the name endorses him, and yes that again counts for a lot.

America is not a Center-Right nation. That ceased being true at the end of Reagan's second term. America is a place where Gays serve openly in the military, gay marriage is the law of the land in most places, Whites have no Civil Rights (according to the first Black Attorney General), Black Panthers can run voter intimidation campaigns with impunity, illegal aliens can vote in many places, and get preferential admission and tuition rates, along with college financial aid. That's not a Center-Right nation. That's not a Center nation. That's not even a Left Nation. That's a Hard Left Nation. And that's America. Today's America celebrates non-Whites, views White guys as inherently "racist" (unless they are a dominant, Alpha A-hole hottie) and engages in regular PC jihads.

Newt Gingrich will at best wage a Banzai! Kamikaze attack and go out in a blaze of glory with what is left of the old America. For those wishing to follow the path of Bushido and Yukio Mishima, the gay Japanese Ultra Right Nationalist, well Newt is your guy! Go right ahead, recite a poem to the emperor, tie on that suicide bandanna around your head, and head for the nearest ship screaming "Banzai! Banzai!"

The rest of us have to live here.

Romney's poll numbers are no fluke. Poll after poll after poll shows him being the closest to Obama. Its not a sure thing, not with the media, the innate dislike of White guys and admiration of Black guys by White women professional voters, and the enormous amount of money and (voter fraud) that Obama promises to bring to the table.

No, Newt won't "destroy" Obama in a debate. Yes Newt is a Master Debater. He's also detested by most women. Obama will remind them of this, and Newt can't go after in person that "nice Black President" who will sit there and smile with his poop-eating-grin. Any "debate" will have Anderson Cooper or Juan Williams or Al Sharpton or Jessie Jackson or Al Roker or Brian Williams jumping on any grenade that might threaten Jesus 2.0. This is reality.

In a debate, Newt will look fat and old, because he is fat and old. He will look White, because he is White. He will look ugly, because he is ugly. These things matter. Women voters make their choices on them. It is why JFK beat Nixon, why Scott Brown beat the Kennedy Machine, why Reagan beat Carter. Why Clinton beat Bush. Why Bush beat both robotic Al Gore, and weirdo John Kerry "Reporting for Duty. REEEEEEPORTING for DUUUUUTY!"

He will also look like a guy who being fat, old, ugly, and White, wanted an open marriage and cheated on two wives with mistresses. Yes that matters, if you are a Republican. A Democrat can do that, and get away with it, because the Media covers for them and pushes them as Alpha males. Newt will be portrayed as the ickies of icky beta White males.

No, Obama does not have it all his own way. Mitt Romney's argument is that being rich, he's got a stake in America. He's put his own money on the line, and is betting for America. Not selling it out in any of Obama's shady deals for cronies. Reminding voters he's rich plays to women.

Newsflash. Women LIKE rich guys. A lot. Even better when they are tall, handsome, married to the same woman for years, and are somewhat distant, stand-offish, and remote. That's Chick Crack 101. Straight out of Roissy's pickup advice.

What women do NOT like is "hot" guys who are angry, intense, and come off like this guy:

That's Newt Gingrich. "You Talking to Me?" Recall in the movie, Robert DeNiro did NOT get the girl. She found him repulsive. Don't be Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver. That's another way of screaming "Banzai!" on a kamikaze attack. No matter how good it feels.

Steve Sailer has pointed out many times, Blacks vote Democratic, year after year, 98%. Latinos around 70%. White men, around 70% for Republicans. No surprise there, the Democrats are the anti-White guy party and Republicans by default, the White guy party. Blue collar White women, the so-called Waitress Moms, vote Republican about 70% of the time. They get little Affirmative Action, the welfare they do get is rubbed in their face by elite Whites and the Blacks/Hispanics they deal with at social services. Meanwhile they face daily harassment from non-Whites, for being White. [Pretty much most of the horrific anti-Black violence, North and South, and anti-Chinese violence in Old California, was motivated on the principle of horror deters attacks on White blue collar women. White upper class women having servants and armed men around them to deter such a thing. In other words, defense of the blue collar, White underclass family. No wonder the violence, in places like Detroit or New York City.]

Who is in play? Why White Professional Women. Who have a foot in either camp, and trade off votes based mostly on personal preferences for the candidates. That is why candidates matter, and party and ideas do not.

All politics is mostly spoils. Who and Whom? As Lenin remarked. Who gets the goodies and who gets the shaft. White Professional women get some stuff, but not a lot. They get some welfare, but that's not enough for long. It won't allow them to live the life they want and need, and mostly live. At best it is short term safety net. Nice but not a sinecure. Most of the goodies in government, the media, non-profits, and the like, including corporate America, get hoovered up by the elites. Next come Blacks and Hispanics. White Professional women are nominally part of the anti-White guy alliance, and they HATE HATE HATE Beta White males with a passion (not the least for insulting them by asking them out). But they are very junior members. Very low on the totem pole. They eat last.

Republicans don't offer much to them. [A strategic mistake, but one dictated by their ad-hoc alliance of mostly anti-Government-Elitism and defacto White Guy party.] There is no compelling reason for say, a woman who works in HR at H-P, or accounting at Apple Computer, or marketing for Nike, to vote Republican. There is no big reason against it, just not for it.

So it comes down to which candidate is the Alpha male. The way it always does. With women. Yes in 1940, before the dawn of TV, a desperate Party picked Churchill. He lost in the first major election after the War was won. Because, news flash, women don't like fat old White guys. When they had their say, they tossed him.

Unmarried women voted Obama over McCain, 70-29. Married women only 50 to 47 percent voted McCain. Yes ... HUNK MATTERS! That is how women vote! Women voted 56% to 43% for Obama in 2008, while Men voted 49 to 48% for Obama. That is the gender gap. If "Marriage is just for White people" then the overwhelming majority of married White women, voted McCain only by 3%!

Rule #1 for Republicans: No old guys, White guys only if Hunk, no weird or conservative women. Women don't like that. Any of it. See Sarah Palin's favorables (women detest her, even among just Republican women).

Newt Gingrich has already has his image cemented in the critical terrain of 2012. He's an icky fat old White guy who cheated on his wives, and then threw them out for younger models. He'd be lucky to carry 30% of the Married Women vote. This is reality.

Mitt Romney is the selfish bastard who fired people, and made lots of money, and is handsome, and somewhat cold. Good God! He's the older, silver fox version of every glittery gay vampire hero, "cold" anti-hero that women love to hate and have lots of icky sex with! He's chick magnet.

Women don't care about political passion. To them that's Travis Bickle territory. One step away from asking "You Talking to Me?" and a pyscho shoot-out. [That Bickle actually was the only one to care about a pre-teen prostitute and do something about it escapes them. Because its never about the action, it is about the being and being seen. A sad but hard truth of human nature regarding how women in aggregate act.]

Yes, for the statistically illiterate, there are women who like Newt. Who are unmarried. Some Black unmarried women doubtless love Newt Gingrich and will vote and campaign for him. So what? Obama will still carry the Black vote at 99% or so, and Black women at 99.999%

Republicans have a choice. Engage in a fruitless, pointless rebellion and pick the guy who sat next to Nancy Pelosi, endorsing global warming. The guy who made millions off Freddie and Fannie. The guy who was so inept that he lost control of his Speakership and got convicted on ethics charges [Those details WILL be released, because that's how Obama operates. Period.] A guy so bad at politics he could not even keep his own Party on his side. A guy arguably worse at being Speaker than ... Nancy Pelosi. Who is as corrupt, but better at keeping her folks in line to protect her. A guy who can't get on the ballot in Virginia. A guy who is detested by most women. A guy who is fat, White, and old, just like McCain. Plus ugly, like McCain. A guy who praises Al Sharpton, and has regular lunches and dinners with media figures. A guy with a wife who needs bribes to stay in the race, with spending $1 million at Tiffany's (his latest mistress/wife). Aguy who threw a temper tantrum because he was left off Air Force One and shut down the government in response. That guy. That's who Republicans want to go down screaming "Banzai! Banzai!" with ... Newt Gingrich.

Obama has a miserable record. Nothing to run on and terribly vulnerable to events, like war with Iran, another jihadi strike, more economic collapse, oil prices spiking, and so on.No good news for him is on the horizon. But he has a way of working, that ought to worry Republicans.

Obama has consistently won by "cheating." By rigging the contest so he faces no opposition, or Alan Keyes.

Newt Gingrich is Alan Keyes. Times ten. He knows in his heart he can't win, just like Paul. He's running to sell books, and bump up his personal appearance fees after an easy Obama victory. He sat on the couch before with Nancy Pelosi. He's doing it again. Alan Keyes. Romney is at least not Alan Keyes.

Martin Luther King: The Return of Otto von Bismarck

2012-01-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A day for maudlin celebration of a plaster saint, instead of the very real political genius who shaped, for better and worse, today's America. But just like Martin Luther King Jr. is regarded as Jesus 2.0, the new improved version, and the achievements and failures of the actual man who lived is lost, his actions continue to move America along the path he envisioned. And just like the Iron Chancellor, King's great triumph has sown the seeds of his own disaster, coming long after his death. Therefore let us examine both men as Machiavelli advises and admire them in as much as their actions and abilities are admirable.

Otto Von Bismarck created modern Germany. Basically out of whole cloth. A staunch practitioner of "Revolutionary Conservatism" in which he put power into the hands of the Kaiser and aristocratic Junker elite, fought Catholic culture and influence (the KulturKampf) to preserve Lutheran power, and instituted the Welfare State. From the situation wherein David McCullough, writing about John A. Roebling, escaping turmoil and government oppression in Prussia, noted that most Germans of the era mistrusted the various German states that drafted their sons, spent their lives like water, paid them nothing, and engaged in predatory taxes to fund extravagant lives, Bismarck produced safety, security, order, very limited wars (with easy victories), balance of power diplomacy, and instead of just taxes, checks from the Government. Bismarck produced a Germany, for the first time since perhaps Charlemagne, that worked. Worked for most men and women, most of the time.

But his success was his downfall. By focusing absolute power onto the Kaiser, Bismarck was left alone in desiring a status-quo power, preventing any alliance from forming against Germany by skillful diplomacy. Kaiser Wilhem, wanting an aggressive expansion of Germany commensurate with its power, sought alliances, particularly in the Balkans. Bismarck had once remarked that the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Prussian Grenadier, but the Kaiser was the Kaiser. Bismarck was dismissed, Germany sought to prop up failing Austria-Hungary, and prepared for not a limited war against an isolated enemy with no friends and little ability to fight back (Denmark, Austria, and France respectively) but a combination of great powers: England, France, Italy, and Russia. With only the dubious contribution of Austria and the Ottoman Empire in return.

Bismarck created and wrote the destruction of modern Germany. He made Germany work, as a mostly honest, efficient, and productive place to live. But in preserving his vision of aristocratic Lutheran society, he left no one to check the Kaiser and the Junker Officer Corps who produced unwise expansion of German military interests and an even worse alliance (with collapsing, corrupt Austria-Hungary). And that without buying out either France or Russia or England, as Bismarck surely would have done. Perhaps all three. By the late 1890's, however, things were radically different from Bismarck's declaration:

Bulgaria, that little country between the Danube and the Balkans, is far from being an object of adequate importance... for which to plunge Europe from Moscow to the Pyrenees, and from the North Sea to Palermo, into a war whose issue no man can foresee. At the end of the conflict we should scarcely know why we had fought.
…
One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.

Bismarck's great triumph thus led to his great tragedy. Dismissed in 1890, by a Kaiser surrounded by syncophants, and clueless militarists, Germany drifted into a war it could not win, as opposed the short and easy wars under Bismarck.

Still one has to admire his political genius. He took enemies one at a time, and did not allow foreign enemies to collect in one grand alliance. He maintained as much as possible the traditional alliance of the Three Emperors of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, manipulated socialists, liberals, and nationalists to achieve political unification of Germany under Prussian terms, and produced a nation of mostly sober, not very corrupt, and able technocrats. His eyes were on the prize, of German unification and prosperity. While he switched tactics, focus, allies, and means, he never wavered from those ultimate goals.

Dr. King was much the same. A man of considerable political genius, whose signal accomplishment: Affirmative Action, also contains its downfall. Homer Plessy was a brave and able man. But his legal challenge to the laws of Segregation failed, where Martin Luther King succeeded. Although of dubious scholarship (his Phd dissertation had been partially plagiarized) and numerous infidelities, allegedly often with married White women, King was a political genius. From his time at Boston University, he knew well Whites and particularly elite Whites in the North. He understood the power of media and particularly television. He knew well too, the political weakness of the thin remaining part of the Tidewater Aristocracy in the South and the low quality of intelligence and agility on the part of White political leadership, the so-called "Ascendancy" that David Fischer ascribed to backwoods, rural Southern leadership in "Albion's Seed."

King's genius was in realizing that because the private car and TV had led many Whites to already leave urban areas with Blacks, for the privacy of their own home and living room, he could leverage the combination of distance and graphic pictures into a "moral crusade" by Northern, Puritan-Quaker elite Whites, against those they HATE HATE HATED, Southern Whites. His strategy was not to mount legal challenges, but provoke TV-friendly confrontations, and explicitly ask elite, Puritan-Quaker Whites, to join him as God's Drum Major for Justice, in a moral crusade to "save America."

When Bull Connor turned the police dogs and water hoses on peaceful marchers, he played right into King's hands. A bullying, "cruel" action against peaceful, non-threatening Black and White marchers played out across America's living rooms. They'd never seen anything like it. King made it all up, far more than Alinsky, by actually accomplishing his goals. By provoking attack after attack, and allowing Northern Puritan-Quaker Whites from the New England, Mid-Atlantic, Upper Midwest, Pacific, and some Western states, to do what they wanted to anyway: punish those wicked Southern Whites, King got his victory. The Civil Rights act rested upon the conviction, that to pass it was a basic requirement for simple morality by suburban, mostly Puritan-Quaker White America. Northern "Romney Republicans" such as Michigan Governor George Romney, father of Mitt, were those leading the way for the passage and support of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

What abolitionists, what extreme Reconstructionists, what W.E.B. Dubois, what George Washington Carver, could not accomplish, Martin Luther King Jr. did accomplish. At great personal risk, and through nothing more than publicity stunts designed to get media coverage. No one before (or really, since) had done such a thing, and as at was audacious and bold and altogether new, it deserves, like Bismarck's unification of Germany, to be admired.

But … King left within his own accomplishment, a poison which would ultimately destroy his goal as it accomplished it. Just like Bismarck.

Conservatives claim that Martin Luther King Jr. wanted a color-blind, non-racial society. It is true that King was against discrimination … against Black people. He was in favor of it when it came to White people. So say Jessie Jackson, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, all agree, as part of King's inner circle, that his "Dream" speech where he wanted his four little children to be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin, was boob bait for bubbas. Something King never meant, in any other way, than they should not be discriminated against for being Black. By contrast, there is ample evidence of King's commitment to Affirmative Action, or anti-White discrimination.

The exploitation of King's name, the distortion of his teachings for political gain, is an ugly development. It was Dr. King himself, as chair of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who initiated the first, successful, national affirmative action policy in the U.S.-- "Operation Breadbasket."

In Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, among other cities, King staffers gathered disparity data on corporations doing business in black communities. King was so encouraged by early affirmative action efforts, he wrote: "At present, SCLC has Operation Breadbasket functioning in some twelve cities, and the results have been remarkable ... 800 new and upgraded jobs several covenants with major industries.''

King was well aware of arguments against affirmative action. Even in 1964, in Why We Can't Wait, he wrote: "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."

Dr. King -- who launched Operation Breadbasket in 12 American cities -- supported affirmative action because he never confused the dream with American reality. As he put it, "A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro" to compete on a just and equal basis.

In 1965 King compared affirmative action to the GI Bill. "Within common law we have ample precedents for special compensatory programs ... And you will remember that America adopted a policy of special treatment for her millions of veterans after the war." (Affirmative action for veterans is still in place today, and many qualified women are often passed over by male vets on the basis of "veteran preference").

King's quotes regarding Affirmative Action and Multi-racial society include:

"A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro ..."
-- Dr. King, quoted by Stephen B. Oates: Let the Trumpet Sound

"There is no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster, that does not share power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity."
-- Dr. King, Where do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

"Integration is ... mutual sharing of power. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of society. This is a multi-racial nation where all groups are dependent on each other."
-- Dr. King, Where do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? in A Testament of Hope; Essential Writings

"Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."
-- Dr. King, Why We Can't Wait

All quotes found here.

In all practical terms, this meant 100 years or perhaps 200, or more likely forever, discrimination against White people in order to help Black ones. Expanded to include Hispanics, and perhaps other non-Whites against Whites. Just as Bismarck successfully unified Germany under a Prussian model of absolute monarchy and Junker control, so too did King end Jim Crow with discrimination against (the wrong sort of ) White people. By allying the Puritan-Quaker "Progressives" against Hillbillies, and various unpopular White people in the North. The people of South Boston in particular were made an example of, as the "wrong sort of White people." Too poor, too ethnic, and most importantly culturally not Puritan-Quaker "Progressive." Proud of being working class, contemptuous of education, and politically impotent, forced busing, block-busting, and other methods (including outright ethnic cleansing as in Detroit) made the punishment of those on the outside of the Black-Puritan-Quaker/Progressive alliance a reality. One that created permanent enemies.

Just as Bismarck's dream foundered on the incompetence of Kaiser Wilhelm, a man he himself raised to absolute power, so too King's vision founders on the inability of Blacks to create wealth, and the need for ever expanding burdens of Affirmative Action and wealth transfer from ordinary White people to pay for those who cannot survive without out it. All the while as Whites become a minority in their own country, and can look forward to treatment approximating that of a Black man who is "uppity" in Mississippi, circa 1950.

It cost Whites in the suburbs little to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Way to stick it to those evil racist White guys, beating people with batons, and using attack dogs on them. Nobody had to live around Blacks in the suburbs. And if they did, well an expanding economy and highly mobile nation, with cheap gas, meant there was always another suburb, right over the horizon. White flight in a nutshell. There was not much wealth transfer either, as welfare was limited at first, Mexicans were season workers sent home, with no rights or permanence, and limited presence at that.

But the logical outcome of King's Dream is the first Black Attorney General of the United States, appointed by the First Black President (or was it the second?) telling Congress that it was "an insult to my people" to suggest that Whites had Civil Rights. And that, furthermore, straight White guys could not be by definition, victims of a hate crime, and that hate crime legislation in no way protected them or acted to avenge them. The logical outcome of King's Dream is Detroit, controlled by Blacks, run by Blacks, after riots in 1943 and 1967 that ethnically cleansed Whites. Detroit is the culmination of King's Dream. Which in the end is a nightmare. A place where only endless amounts of White money, can prop up a people who remain 47% illiterate (and that's adults).

Just like Bismarck's Germany ultimately fell into disastrous militarism (by picking fights with multiple enemies it would be unlikely to defeat in concert), King's Dream depends on continuing White flight, continuing White wealth, continuing economic growth, and continuing domination of "the wrong sort of White people" by Puritan-Quaker-Progressive elites. The temporary had to be permanent, and that never happens.

As much as King was a tactical political genius, he was a strategic moron (like Bismarck). White guilt and status powers among a certain set of White people was powerful, but not all encompassing. As soon as mobility stopped, Blacks would make enemies. Permanent ones. Moreover, anti-White discrimination was far more hurtful, and felt directly, the more Whites declined as part of the population. Harm and hurt was spread over fewer and fewer who felt the lash harder and harder. Jobs that went to unqualified Blacks or Hispanics. Preferential admission to colleges and universities, the ticket to the good life, going to unqualified Blacks and Hispanics (that is the whole point of Affirmative Action -- that Blacks are not qualified and so must be favored). All these things make enemies. Under the media radar, to be sure, but the media while powerful is not the be all and end all of social power.

Moreover, come a sustained period of economic hardship, let alone sustained decline, continued mass migration, and the "Multiracial Democracy" that King envisioned will not be a bunch of rich White people sticking it to "the wrong sort of Whites" to help non-Whites. It will be an overt Hobbesian war of all against all, particularly as elites Whites are increasingly asked as Michelle Obama demands, to give up their power so non-Whites can have it.

The whole point of the Civil Rights movement was to help Blacks by sticking it to people who live in South Boston, or Detroit, or Birmingham Alabama, and were the "wrong sort" of White person. And that just creates ever larger groups of enemies, as demands for helping non-Whites grown and the "wrong sort" of White person grows and grows. White flight is turning already to White fight. "Racist" is now a joke word, as Cartman on South Park said, "in this day and age Black people can never be wrong." And -- "Black people are the one group no one can mess with. Ever!" That status, is solely the province of Black people as a magical totem of morality by White elites. Who in turn have lost the confidence of most ordinary Whites by screwing up the economy and making most Whites discriminated minorities in their own hometowns.

That in turn has Hillbilly-ized much of America. If all the Welfare goes to say, Detroit, or Mexican illegals and their kids (fully 85% of Santa Ana Unified School Kids qualify for the free and reduced lunch program, to the point where SAUSD got a waiver from the USDA to provide all students with free meals), then by definition there is little to help Whites in need. In time of economic distress. The King Model, which amounts to "Blacks sit in the front of the Bus, Whites stand in the back" is sure to produce a fight among Whites, who will get nothing from government but taxes they will evade, Italian or Greek style. Meanwhile those who slip from Elite to ordinary status are likely to be demanding aid for them, at the cost of that towards Blacks and Hispanics.

Already, in a deep recession, the First Black President offers no help to struggling Whites other than celebrating big parties, lavish vacations, and lectures from a First Lady with the biggest ass on a non-clinically obese person, on eating one's vegetables. While she downs lobster and Kobe Beef sliders. Meanwhile the borders have been thrown wide open and preference given to illegal aliens in admission and financial aid to universities and colleges, ahead of residents of other states and in-state Whites. That is the logical fruit of King's Dream -- discriminating against native Whites to help illegal aliens from Mexico.

King notably said:

"Integration is ... mutual sharing of power. White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of society. This is a multi-racial nation where all groups are dependent on each other."

But other than minstrel type chest beating in college and professional Basketball and Football, Whites have no needs that Black people fill. Whites are not dependent on Black people, for anything other than Rap thuggery and chest beating athletes with many illegtimate kids:

Black people and Hispanic people are dependent on White people (welfare money and other income transfers), but not the reverse. A few rich White elites depend on Black people as moral tokens and status objects, but not the rest. White America has already lived through radical restructuring of society, to its detriment. As it has become poorer, more violent, with less social and upward mobility, less physical mobility, and numerical inferiority in many places to match legal inferiority. As the only non-protected class that exists. King's folly, like that of Bismarck, was to not realize the entirely foreseeable future. That Whites in a crisis would throw out status moralizing, that parts of the Puritan-Quaker elite having fallen, would prefer to have more money/power/status for them, rather than an ever expanding non-White population. And that White flight would be endless. That White fight would never occur. Because the power of TV and status-mongering elites would last forever. Just as the wisdom of the Kaiser would always forestall unwise military action in the Balkans.

So let us remember the real man. One of unquestioned physical courage, a great gift for political tactics, one with keen insights into White social and political dynamics. Not the plaster saint of no real faults and virtues. But the real man. And while we take a moment to admire his real political genius, and courage, recognize his dream, no less than Bismarck's, has become a nightmare. And let us hope and pray it does not turn out to be ashes the way Bismarck's ultimately did.

Orange County's Illegal Alien Serial Killer: How the Dream Act Murdered the California Dream

2012-01-15T15:42:00.000-08:00

In Orange County, a series of murders of homeless, aging White guys (that's them above) had everyone on edge. One even took place outside a local library. The latest one involved a man, ironically, featured in the LA Times being warned about the killer by local police. Bystanders chased the man down. He is, police say, the killer: twenty-three year old Itzcoatl Ocampo, brought (illegally) to the US at age 1 from Mexico, reportedly kicked out of the US Marine Corps, and 2006 graduate of Esperanza High School. His last victim was a Vietnam Veteran.

This is pretty much the Death of the California Dream, and the birth of the Dream Act in miniature. Ocampo (that's him above), the poster boy for "diversity" and "multiculturalism" hunts down and kills the most helpless, elderly or aging homeless White guys. Including a Vietnam Vet.

Even lunatics like Ocampo have people in his corner. A zillion relatives, the League of United Latin American Citizens, MeChA, La Raza, the US Department of Justice, the media (which has been careful to suppress that he came to America illegally and is Mexican), and the police. Unlike say, White, homeless and schizophrenic Kelly Thomas, Ocampo was not beaten to death (by a mixture of cops including one Mexican-ancestry cop). Unlike say, Douglas Zerby, Ocampo was not shot to death for holding a garden hose (by a Hispanic and White cop respectively). Nor was Ocampo given an elbow on the head, as a White, mentally disturbed, homeless (and retarded) woman got, caught on video and shown on local news.

Cops can and do deal out whatever they want to Whites without connections and power. Meanwhile they tread carefully around Mexicans, Blacks, Asians, and other non-White groups. Why?

Is it Anarcho-Terror, the idea of punishing ordinary Middle Class people while allowing thugs to do as they please? Nope, as that does not capture the racial and class component. As historian David Fischer noted in Albion's Seed, there were four basic folkways/cultures that settled and shaped America. The Puritans, the Quakers, the Virginia Aristocrats, and the Hillbillies. The Puritans and Quakers have long since combined, and the Aristocrats rapidly disappeared after the Civil War. Leaving an eternal war between the noxious combination of the Puritans and Quakers, and the Hillbillies on the other side.

It was not always so. Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens, was part of the "Quality" of the Hillbillies, and worked as a River pilot as a young man (akin to being a 747 pilot today). He disliked intensely, many aspects of Hillbilly life, as seen in Huckleberry Finn: the pointless feuds, the cruel superstitions that caused unreasonable fear among children (the description of the Death-Watch beetle is obviously a personal one), the sudden mob violence, the credulity and cruelty, and the casual regard of Black people as less than human. Twain famously settled in Connecticut, and his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is basically a long explanation of why he disliked the Hillbilly culture so much, and preferred the Puritan one. The book was not about Dark Ages Britain and the resistance to pagan Saxon invaders, but about how much BETTER settled, ordered Connecticut was than violent Missouri.

On the other hand, Richard Brautigan, culturally a Puritan (raised in the Pacific Northwest in poverty) romanticized Confederate rebellion, with his first novel "A Confederate General From Big Sur" exploring an internal secession from the ugly Puritan reality, continued in books such as "The Hawkline Monster" and "The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966." [Brautigan is unjustly forgotten, and was a unique and gentle critic of modern American life, in favor of the "old, weird" America.]

Be that as it may, the mingling of the utopian, pacifist, and universal Quaker viewpoints (all are beloved of God and God's Children, people are all the same, pacifism is the answer) and the Puritan ones (a select group of pre-ordained saved, a terrible unity enforced with violence, a lack of will to do anything but God's pre-ordained plan, everything wicked outside, and the tiny group of faithful inside) was inevitable as the two expanded Westward, particularly after the South and Hillbillies and Aristocrats were crushed in the post-Civil War era. The two groups became intertwined, and in conflict with the only remaining outsider White group: Hillbillies.

For while Twain's criticisms of Hillbilly life and culture were undoubtedly correct, Hillbillies remained as they were. Viewing government as something used to oppress them, by distant people. Trusting only themselves and neighbors who were related in some way. Independent, highly mobile, and disdainful of education. Filled with folk ways and superstitions, willing to fight, and taking pride in martial prowess of America. The only government they liked was the military, and foreigners were viewed with suspicion at best and hatred at worst.

Meanwhile Puritan-Quakers viewed themselves as the "only good White people" and that Hillbillies were cursed with "original racial sin" and responsible for all the bad things in history that had ever happened. Non-Whites were viewed as not merely God's Children but uniquely blessed with magical, spiritual qualities lacking the "innate racism" that plagued Hillbillies and the uptight conformity that drove Puritan achievement but made life "boring."

As time went on, various Ethnic Catholic Whites: Irish, Poles, Italians, Germans, and so on were lumped in with "the wrong sort of White people" and various attempts like Prohibition were made to control and eradicate them. Progressive Eugenicists in the US such as Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and David Starr Jordan, peace activist, director of the Sierra Club, President of Stanford University, wanted the "wrong sort of White people" sterilized as much as non-Whites. "Defective" Whites, mostly Hillbillies and various ethnic Catholics, were sterilized in Puritan-Quaker states such as California, Oregon, Washington, and Maine along with non-Whites.

Anarcho-tyranny is just another name for the long-running struggle among White people, over how the world works, how it will be organized, and what the definition of the good life is. Puritan-Quakers believe, in an ironic twist, in a universal (i.e. Medieval Catholic) conception of mankind. One without God, but with Gaia. Forming the same function, the desire to create a universal, nationless world ordered by a universal priesthood (made up of them, naturally) for a universal good in harmony with Gaia's will. If not God's. Meanwhile Hillbillies and various Ethnic Whites (mostly but not exclusively Catholic) hold to nationalism, intense devotion to place (Philip Larkin's "Little England") and heritage. They reject universalism in place of localism, and you can see this from say, Tolkien's Shire (heaven is Lancashire, England or the Lake District or the Cotswolds), to Joss Whedon's "Firefly" (the Confederates are the GOOD guys). Perhaps the most liberal guy in Hollywood made a TV show and movie advocating localism and separatism.

For Hillbillies, tradition matters. For Puritan-Quakers, it is something to be abolished because it's "racist." Or something. Hillbillies revel in sin, and then ask forgiveness on Sunday morning. Puritan-Quakers believe all (Whites) but them are filled with sin, and therefore must be punished. Hillbillies want a nation, and Puritan-Quakers a world-order. Hillbillies want to enjoy sin, and Puritan-Quakers want to enjoy virtue. Drinking, smoking, eating bad but delicious food, versus outdoorsy exercise, "serving the community" by walking for AIDs or something, and virtuous abstaining from bad foods. These are fundamental differences in how to live life, how to order people in a group, how to create for the future (or not). There is no compromise, and in one sense this has been the central fight since the universalist, Empire-building Romans fought the particularist, individualistic/localized Celts, in Spain, Gaul, and Britain, starting in the 3rd Century BC.

Thus, the death of the California Dream and the birth of the Dream Act. For now, the Puritan-Quakers have won. Holding the commanding heights of the media, law, politics, and in explicit alliance with anti-White groups such as La Raza and LULAC, the Puritan-Quakers have helped ethnically cleanse the White Middle Class (uncomfortably Hillbilly) and the Beach Boy's California Dreamin' out of California. In favor of illegals, at least one of whom found it necessary to hunt down and kill elderly homeless White guys.

Itzcoatl (the name is derived from some Aztec warrior-chief) Ocampo is the very person the Dream Act is supposed to help. Grant citizenship to an illegal who went to school in the US, regardless if he was there legally or not. Certainly grant him citizenship if he serves in the military. While the media ties itself up in horror over (White) Marines peeing on dead Taliban, it ignores a real Mexican ex-Marine seeking out and killing White guys who were helpless. That is the Dream Act.

It is nothing less than a war of extermination, of annihilation, by the Puritan-Quaker group against the Hillbilly-Ethnic group. It is as old as Caesar's massacres of the Gauls. The California Dream is dead. The one place, where White middle class people of no particular connection or advantage (in a word, Hillbillies or Ethnics) could live, and achieve for themselves a higher living standard than their parents, and their kids still higher than them, is dead. Killed by mass immigration (nearly all illegal) from Mexico, notions of original White racial sin, ethnic cleansing of Whites by the mass immigration (through pricing out of ordinary people of limited desirable places to live), and what Steve Sailer called "the High-Low" team-up of rich White elites and poor non-Whites.

Instead of the California Dream, and the Beach Boys, we have the Dream Act, and the Mexicanization of California and the US, complete with a Mexican guy killing homeless White guys. Said Mexican guy being the very person the Dream Act was designed to help, killing those who are disposable. Old, sick/crazy White guys.

Very soon, we will have an outright conflict, in the open, over these matters. Particularly if the predictions of scarcity, and even more centralization, are accurate, the Hillbillies and Ethnics will start fighting. For now, the Puritans-Quakers have had it their way (mostly by peeling off professional White women by patronage and status). That is not likely to be permanent. The California Dream was murdered by the Dream Act. While Illegal Aliens were the trigger men, the ones who paid for the hit were Puritan-Quakers. And like all murders, the killings will ripple out. Hillbillies, as Mark Twain observed, are good at feuding. They've had about 4,000 years of practice, against Celts, Picts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and other Vikings, Normans, Scots, and the English.

NBC's Bet on Chelsea Handler: The New Supertrain, or Pink Lady and Jeff?

2012-01-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

NBC seems betting big on "Girl in the City" type sitcoms, along with Fox (the New Girl with now newly divorced Zoey Deschanel, sister to Bone's Emily Deschanel, and yes daughter of famous cinematographer and director Caleb Deschanel), and CBS ("Two Broke Girls.") "Are You There, Chelsea?" based on late night talk-show host and comedienne Chelsea Handler's book, "Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea!" The bet seems weird, akin to the old "glory days" of not just bad, but wretchedly bad NBC programming. The only question is, will the show be more Supertrain (a late 70's NBC show about an atomic powered train, no I'm not making this up either), or Pink Lady and Jeff (a similar era show featuring a stand up comic and two Japanese singers who did not speak a word of English).

The series, starring Laura Prepon as the young Chelsea Handler (Chelsea Handler can't act) with occasional guest spots by Handler as her "super-judgy" older Christian Sister, opens with a bang. Handler's character is convicted of a DUI. That convinces her to … find an apartment within walking distance of her job at a local bar. The plot revolves (as in the book by Handler) drinking, having sex, and passing out.

This version of Handler's life opens with Chelsea in jail on a drunken driving charge, praying to vodka for help. Released, she vows to change her life — not by reducing her drinking, but by moving closer to the bar where she works so she won't have to drive.
That contrivance is enough to set up the show's two main locations: The bar, where she works with her best friend Olivia (Ali Wong), and the new apartment she and the equally wild Olivia share with the naïve, virginal Dee Dee (Lauren Lapkus). And oh, the fun they have making fun of Dee Dee's virginity.
Vulgarity and lack of taste aren't the issues here as much as a deadening single-mindedness. Almost every joke that's not about Chelsea's desire to drink is about her desire to have sex (or, if a red-haired man is involved, not have sex). It's enough to make CBS' Monday lineup look classy by comparison.

Note of course the red-hair stuff. Red hair on women is generally attractive, on men not so much. British actor Damien Lewis ("Life," "Band of Brothers," "Homeland") pretty much mostly plays villains (because of his red hair). It accentuates paleness which the modern female audience finds distasteful in men as much as it is desirable in women. Of course to have the one you must have the other, a fact with which sadly, the modern female audience does not understand.

As another review put it, drunken behavior leading to a DUI and no ambitions beyond working in a bar, drinking, and hooking up would label a male character a failure. But not a female one.

But still, the trainwreck is interesting. First, that NBC thought a show with no laughs would work. Second, that Handler herself would be a desirable model for women (who make up approximately 85% of the sitcom audience) to tune in to watch. Oh all the high-points are hit. Virginity (generally making a woman more, not less desirable, and certainly more desirable than a woman with a high partner count) being mocked … by other women? Check. Glorification of the bar-slut scene? Check. "Super-judgy" older sister (who presumably thinks drinking till one passes out and random sex with strangers is not a wise move) check!

And for aging cougars with a booze problem, this will undoubtedly be a DVR hit, if only they manage to record it in the first place. There's that vodka problem. As amusing as the play on a Judy Blume novel called "Are You There God? Its Me Margaret" the amusement tends to fade after quickly glancing at the book cover and moving on. Handler's first book was titled "My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands" which is pretty one note. [Handler is probably best known for "oops accidentally" released sex tape and dating 50 Cent.]

Commenters on the LAT story, since removed called her "leathery" and noted she was probably hot ten years ago.

Chelsea is not presented, professionally, as a version of her original — not an aspiring comedian, writer, TV star or a person with any clear ambition beyond drinking and sleeping around and hanging out in the New Jersey sports bar where she works, and drinks, and picks up men.
…
We are, you may have noticed, or heard, in a TV season characterized by shows driven by strong female characters, though the history of television comedy is hung on a long line of unconventional women. Still, this is not exactly Mary Richards' search for love. "Are You There, Chelsea?" takes the intemperate habits that were long the province of the crazy sidekick and gives them to the lead. The flip side of this emancipation — ewomancipation? — is comedy that seems to celebrate binge drinking and its attendant unintended consequences.

"Chelsea" begins, weakly, with its star in jail for DUI; the main development in the pilot is when she rents a room in an apartment within staggering distance of her job. If these attributes were transferred to a male character, you'd get some hopeless loser, or Charlie Sheen. This is a funny idea of progress, but it is a kind of progress all the same.

The show of course will fail. What is mildly amusing in a little-seen talk show on E! (Chelsea Lately) is not likely to work as a weekly sitcom. First, its not funny. Secondly, leads have to be a calm center, not "zany," even the great and missed Don Adams had a calm center to Maxwell Smart, never going "zany" and acting like he was out on a limb. The zany stuff only works in small doses: Seinfeld's Kramer (Michael Richards), or George Costanza (Jason Alexander). If the jokes come all the time, the audience can't catch its breath, and just surrenders switching the channel. And one-joke shows generally don't last that long. Nor do unlikeable leads (ask Jay Mohr about "Action!")

But more importantly, the female audience does not crave a life of binge drinking and one-night stands. Seinfeld worked because guys wanted to be Jerry (the sane one and one with a modicum of fame and money) and women desired him. Sitcoms with a female lead, have to have an end-state. After all, Handler herself is minor in the Hollywood fairy tale pantheon next to the endless tale of tabloid tangles that Jennifer Aniston (the wronged woman), Brad Pitt (the desirable hunk), and Angelina Jolie (that man-stealing bad girl!) spin every week for their female readers. Don't believe me, just look at them next time you buy groceries.

Chelsea Handler's life in the show, is not very funny. Because it is sad -- a woman wasting her looks and desirability, both limited, on what? Drunken boozy hook-ups that lead nowhere? To no love, no romance, no possibility of kids by a fantastic, great man?

Slate did not much like it either:

It is difficult to situate the fictional Handler in terms of class. Blue-collar isn't quite the word. Rather, her social station is typified by the deep V-neck collar of the t-shirt that clings fondly to her as she waits tables at a New Jersey sports bar. This is not a service-industry gig held in the spirit of a middle-class slacker or a working-class striver, but of a career party chick. We might compare Chelsea’s life as a real alewife of New Jersey with that of her friend and roommate Olivia (Ali Wong) who has gone to college to become a journalist, God help her, and who has designs on an internship in Manhattan. Chelsea, in contrast, is going nowhere, professionally or emotionally. To underscore the latter point, the series offers her a second foil, an innocent soul named Dee Dee, played by Lauren Lapkus, who, with her round eyes and wiggling limbs, reads as a hybrid of Zoe Kazan and Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl.

Nevertheless it is interesting to see that NBC actually moved this from pitched script, to shot pilot, to production. Believing that a boozy life as a female "bro" akin to perhaps Snooki (who functions as a laugh point not heroine since people laugh AT HER not WITH HER) will be a success. Because Jersey Shore got lots of publicity. And people like to laugh at Snooki. [They do, and they do because Snooki is a lower middle class Guidette who gets her comeuppance regularly on the show. If nothing else, America is obsessed with status since status as Seinfeld amply demonstrated, determines EVERYTHING: your love life, employment, treatment on the street, everything.]

If nothing else, this show is indicative of how broken NBC really is. How little Comcast has fixed that broken-ness. Chelsea? The only question is: Supertrain? Or Pink Lady and Jeff?

Hollywood Bets It All on Stupid

2012-01-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

Nowhere is the continual stupidity of Hollywood more visible than in the LAT's section "the Big Picture" by Patrick Goldstein. Goldstein swallows whole the lunacy that Hollywood is following: trying to make money by producing (mostly) American financed/starring movies designed to appeal to foreign audiences. This is self-evidently stupid policy, because "explosive growth" audiences don't have money, don't respect intellectual property (piracy), don't pay for films, and don't really like "American" content much. Meanwhile it is pretty easy for locals to create their own content.

Hollywood is betting it all on stupid, because they simply cannot make movies that appeal to American audiences. Hollywood can't make films that Americans feel like paying for to see in a theater, so the fantasy of magical thinking is that the studios can make movies for foreigners who will lap up anything and everything.

To see how stupid this is, just look at China. China is filled with film piracy, and just recently the ban on "Westernized" entertainment on TV and movies pulled many programs and films off the air or theaters.

When Chinese leader Hu Jintao recently warned his nation's ruling Communist Party of an imminent risk from the West, he wasn't talking about the United States boosting its military capabilities in East Asia. He was alluding to things such as video games.
"International hostile forces" use thought and culture "to Westernize and split" China, Hu stated in a speech publicized in January in the party magazine Seeking Truth..
At least China's embattled youth can strike back at the West come May when Glorious Mission, a civilian version of the Chinese army's first training simulation game, goes on sale, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper. Co-developed by the People's Liberation Army, the online, first-person shooter game allows players to destroy enemies that resemble U.S. forces.
Glorious Mission and other "serious games" supported by Chinese authorities form one front in Beijing's multi-headed cultural offensive, launched last fall. There's been fighting talk from Hu's likely successor, Xi Jinping.
China's universities are "a key ideological front to equip our youth with the core values of socialism," he told the country's deans last week . Xi, 58, is likely to succeed Hu, 69, as party general secretary this year.
Through massive investment, and countless censors, the Communist Party aims to boost China's "soft power," or cultural influence, abroad and shore up "cultural security" at home by reinforcing state control of the sector and guiding audiences back to "socialist core values." Neither goal will come easily.
...
State censors launch regular crackdowns, sometimes with bizarre targets: Last year, authorities restricted time-travel TV dramas and banned downloading of certain foreign pop songs, including The Backstreet Boys' seemingly non-political 1999 hit I Want It That Way.
In recent weeks, the government has stripped two-thirds of entertainment programs, mostly talent, talk and dating shows, from the schedules of China's popular satellite stations. Citing "excessive entertainment and a trend toward low taste," regulators have forced satellite channels to switch to programs promoting "traditional virtues and socialist core values," the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

I don't know about you. But my money is on China exerting more control over entertainment, and basically banning Western stuff out of Hollywood in favor of their own domestic stuff. What does it take to make movies in China? Not much. China does not care about Hollywood, they don't make money off Kung Fu Panda, so guaranteed they'll close that down, dole out their own movie-making patronage, and be happy to run off pirated copies of Kung Fu Panda 10 like hotcakes.

South Korea, Russia, and Brazil all have their own burgeoning film industry, which will assuredly demand protection from Hollywood. Eager to win patronage and screw over foreigners, local leaders will happily oblige. Already foreign film distributors are taking baths, many exiting, because it is hard to make money distributing Hollywood films. So much piracy, so much theft, so many theaters not paying the full amount of admissions they are supposed to pay. After all, law in most of these places doesn't exist. Unless the distributor has paid off the government and has enough juice to get guys with guns to visit the offices of the distributors, reality is that they will get only what the exhibitor feels like paying.

Goldstein swallows whole the following fantasy:

This focus on foreign markets is clearly changing the way studios assemble their feature film slates. Nowhere is this more evident than at Paramount Pictures, Hollywood's market-share leader in 2011 with 19.2% of the overall business. In 2007, when the studio also had the largest share of the market, Paramount did roughly the same amount of business in the U.S. as it did overseas — $1.5 billion domestic versus $1.6 billion international. In 2011, the studio's films grossed $1.9 billion in the U.S. But they made a whopping $3.2 billion overseas.

If you believe those numbers, let me interest you in an outstanding investment opportunity with John Corzine and MF Global, in European bonds. Does anyone think Paramount ACTUALLY did that amount of business overseas. Or is that just a number "booked" from a distributor, of which they will get something like 30-40%?

Hollywood studios want people to believe (they are called suckers er investors) that they have some magic formula. Don't worry, they say, even though AMERICANS have decided that "the Hangover 2" or "New Year's Eve" can wait till next year as a Redbox or Netflix rental, or streaming, foreigners are stupid, moronic gits who can't tie their own shoes, and will reliably stream into movie houses at full price. Like poor people in India, China, Pakistan, Brazil, and Russia (that's most of the population) will be paying $15 a person (in their local currencies equivalent) to see "Mission Impossible 7" or "Xenu's Revenge" or what have you.

Meanwhile the studios claim, their magic formula involves making movies aimed at hipsters ("Young Adult") and tweens (Justin Bieber's movie) and such. Yep, that's their strategy: stupid foreigners paying full price, and hipsters and Bieber fans.

Does that sound like a plan? Or mutually assisted suicide?

This situation seems to echo the late 1960's and early 70's, when Hollywood could only get people into to see movies like "Towering Inferno" or "Earthquake" or "the Sting" until Star Wars and Jaws came along, and showed how to make movies everyone would enjoy.

Movies are still a MASS medium. To make money off them, lots of people need to enjoy them and pay top dollar to see them. Crummy movies aimed at small slices like tweens or hipsters will never be cheap enough, NEVER to cover Hollywood's fixed costs. Very rapidly now, Hollywood will start to fail. Like GM at the end, there is not enough real payoff to fund their capital needs.

Hollywood's model, like that of Blue States, is one that is self-destructive. As long as there was money being made selling off library/catalog on DVDs, and good times had customers buying, Hollywood could afford the reality that most of their current movies sucked, and badly at that. With little popularity and their few blockbusters requiring hideous amounts of capital, with many failing. Rather than go back to the drawing board, and make movies everyone could enjoy, Hollywood doubled down on stupidity and arrogance, figuring foreigners will bail them out.

Matthew Yglesias on Slate boasts that Hollywood still has more cultural reach than China, while Business Insider notes:

"A recently implemented rule has effectively curbed the ‘excessive entertainment’ trend as two-thirds of the entertainment programs on China's 34 satellite channels have been cut, according to the country's top broadcasting watchdog. ‘The total number of entertainment shows airing during primetime every week has been reduced to 38 from 126 at the end of 2011, marking a 69 percent plunge as the new rule came into effect on Jan. 1,’ said a statement issued Tuesday (3 January) by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).
"According to an SARFT directive last October, each of the country's satellite channels would be limited to broadcasting two entertainment programs each week and a maximum of 90 minutes of content defined as entertainment every day during primetime -- 7:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. The directive also required channels to broadcast at least two hours of news programming. Between 6 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., they must each broadcast at least two 30-minute news programs.
"The restricted programs on the SARFT list include dating shows, talent contests, talk shows as well as emotional stories that were deemed 'excessive entertainment' and of 'low taste.' However, popular dating shows like ‘If You Are the One,’ produced by Jiangsu Satellite TV, and soap operas, such as ‘Li Yuan Chun,’ presented by Henan Satellite TV, will still be aired during weekend primetime hours, according to the statement.
"It said that the satellite channels have started to broadcast programs that promote traditional virtues and socialist core values. The newly-added programs among the satellites' revised broadcasting schedules are documentaries as well as cultural and educational programs, it added. The SARFT believes that the move to cut entertainment programming is crucial in improving cultural services for the public by offering high quality programming."

Contrast that with the fatuous stupidity of Yglesias at Slate:

This is one area where the rise of the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut hasn't impaired America's leading role at all. If anything, the reverse as a more prosperous China serves as an increasingly lucrative market for American firms. But Chinese President Hu Jintao is none too happy about it, kicking off the New Year with a magazine article complaining that "[i]nternational forces are trying to Westernize and divide us by using ideology and culture."
The talk coincides with the implementation of a regulation announced in October that aims to clean up Chinese television by restricting networks to offering no more than two "overly entertaining and vulgar" programs per week. That kind of strategy strikes me as unlikely to succeed, but I would welcome more robust efforts by the PRC to strengthen the quantity of cultural outputs that are up to international standards. I really enjoyed Red Cliff, for example, but we just don't see that many Chinese war epics.

PC makes you stupid. And stupidity kills. Even, eventually in Hollywood.

I believe none other than that great philosopher Charlie Sheen called it "Winning."

TV's Bad Boys and Violence

2012-01-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

TV is more violent than ever before. Violent deaths, assaults, and other brutality fill the screen. At a time when TV has never been more oriented towards the female viewer? What gives? The answer of course lies in the type of violence. Women viewers in general don't like the masculine violence, seen in movies like "the Wild Bunch" or any realistic combat movie and series (such as HBO's "Band of Brothers.") Women DO like violence that establishes the main male character as dominant and therefore sexy. And it seems that Hollywood is happy to oblige, almost to the point where it has become an exercise in picking middle aged, not particularly sexy character actors and making them hot-damn! sexy symbols on TV. Call it TV producers inside joke.

Cue the Sopranos James Gandolfini. Not exactly a Brad Pitt look-a-like, his characters brutal and violent behavior, including the on-screen murder of a pleading woman (the secret informant girlfriend of his protégé) made him more not less sexy. As did later murders of his protégé, and numerous other characters. Bryan Cranston ("Walter White") of Breaking Bad is not exactly the stuff dreams are made of either. But the characters arc from nebbishy suburban husband to super-bad nascent drug kingpin and killer took him from chump to champ, in sex appeal. You see the same thing with Rescue Me's Dennis Leary, playing a "bad" firefighter who does awful things (like rape his ex-wife onscreen) and becomes even sexier. Showtime's "Dexter" about a "good" serial killer (who only kills other serial killers, sadistically) is par for the course. The whole point is that the characters brutal violence makes him more sexy not less, to the female audience (which is who watches Dexter, mostly). Michael Chicklis in "the Shield" is another such character. Boardwalk Empire's Steve Buscemi who portrays a character that is on-screen violently brutal and murderous, is probably the outer boundary of physical unattractiveness combined with physical dominance to see how "sexy" and physically unattractive a character can be and still play among the female audience.

Quite clearly, producers and writers are well aware of the female audience's desire for brutal and unrestrained violence among "sexy" and "bad" male characters. And they are giving the audience what it wants, full throttle. Sexy bad boys not limited by anything, not conscience, mercy, ties of family, patriotism, anything. Damien Lewis in "Life" played a guy who could be brutal but had definite self-imposed limits when it came to revenge, and a bit of compassion. No doubt those character qualities made the show a failure with the female audience. Playing a variation of the same character (one long and unjustly imprisoned) but with no patriotism, conscience, remorse, or even independence (he is dominated by a stronger, more charismatic jihadi) … the character has gone over like gangbusters.

Why is this? Well like the demand under Prohibition for ever more of the hard stuff, because casual drinking legally was impossible, the demand for "sexiness" in brutal dominance including the ultimate taboo, murder, being violated left and right, is nothing more than a reflection of the lack of sexiness in men around them. If most men were "sexy" then women would not want this hard-stuff.

Ultra-machismo Mexico and Columbia produce telenovela after telenovela that feature hard-working, often "ugly" women who become beautiful, powerful, and successful and snag that Alpha male. Who is the traditional "Fabio" type of character, strong and successful, but not violent. Ugly Betty is well within the range for that type of entertainment, wildly popular throughout Latin America. Men in those countries are plenty violent, women there don't need a fantasy of violence to get their thrills. They can see decapitated bodies, others hung mutilated off bridges, to what the real violence is. Instead their fantasies run towards being rich, famous, powerful, and with a devoted but hot/desirable husband who is "sophisticated" (think Fernando Lamas, not Lorenzo Lamas).

You can see this at work in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" where gee, give Apes the power of human intellect and speech, and they are "superior" and rule because modern (White) men are just too wimpy to fight back. Yeah, right.

Ordinary White women in sheltered, suburban America, have no idea of what any man is capable of, and tend to judge off superficial posturing. Equal and status-quo feminism in the workplace, in schools, in larger society, leave most women judging wrongly that only a few men are sexy, because they posture overtly as dominant, violent, or both. Hence the hunger for fantasy dominance through ultra-violence. Not impersonal violence showing people blown apart, but personal violence showing the male character is one without any limits and able to dominate other people and make it stick.

If we ever hit sustained, violent hard times (which is likely, to my horror, I am a comfortable middle class American, with much to lose) then obviously the female audience won't demand fantasy violence. They'll have real ones at their doorstep, or more, every day. Even if America degrades, slowly, as the "best option" then things will soon sort themselves out. Women who face being hassled every day by gangs of illegal aliens congregating on street corners for day labor, do not find fantasy violence arousing. Nor do women who live in real fear of being assaulted, robbed, and killed, at home or going to and from work. Nor indeed do women who must deal paying the rent or buying food or buying gasoline to get to work.

The desire for fantasy violence comes from the illusion of control, safety, security, and stability. Seen on First World Problems:

“Exurban growth has led to people I used to think of as hillbillies being socially promoted to mere hicks.”

[Yes elites HATE HATE HATE the "hillbillies."]

Not enough "sexy men" in the cubicle next to you? Too much deferential "niceness" and boring behavior? Not enough dominance and control in the men around you? THAT is a First World problem, soon to go away with the First World itself.

Look for this sexy bad boy killer trend on TV and movies to go away. Soon.

Why Women Are Not At The Top (of Politics, Business, and Culture)

2012-01-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

Women have more freedom, power, and control over their lives in the West than any group of women ever, before. Women today have more wealth, freedom, comfort, and stability than any other group of women before. And yet, still they rarely occupy the highest rungs of power, being absent from political leadership, commercial leadership, and cultural leadership. A Black man was elected President of the US before a woman. Why?

Because women won't sacrifice the … sexiness in men. And no sexy, dominant Alpha male will put up with a woman having a career and power greater than his. That's why they are Alpha males in the first place. For a woman to advance to the top, she has to be … Margaret Thatcher. Or Leslie Blodgett of Bare Escentuals. Or Carly Fiorina of H-P. Married to a "boring" beta male who is supportive and stays out of the spotlight.

Lucy Kellaway at the Financial Times was the first to make this clear:

The biggest reason that alpha women don’t become CEOs is that they have made the common, yet fatal, error of marrying an alpha man.
My evidence for this is based on long observation of the women I know. Some of them did brilliantly for a bit, but then their careers stalled. The problem was not that they had had too many children (successful women seem to have lots of them) but that their alpha husbands insisted on putting their own careers first.
Until last week this was just a vague prejudice. But on Wednesday I sat down with the FT’s list of the 50 top business women and Googled each one, searching for information about their home lives. Annoyingly, some of them have succeeded in keeping their private lives private, but with the rest I found my theory spectacularly well borne out. Nearly all have children, but I could not find a single one with an alpha male husband.
The only whiff of an alpha mate came from the household of Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon, whose husband was the CEO of Bloomingdale’s. I use the past tense not because he lost the job, but because he lost his wife – the marriage didn’t last.
…

Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi and the world’s most powerful businesswoman, is married to a man who quit his job and became a consultant to fit in with his wife and children. Ditto with Irene Rosenfeld at Kraft, whose husband decided to be self-employed 20 years ago to help her. Ditto with Ursula Burns at Xerox.
There are three pretty obvious reasons an alpha husband is a problem for the aspiring female CEO. First is logistics. If you want to be really successful you need to be mobile. You need to have a husband like Gregg Ahrendts, who wound up his construction business so Angela could move to London to be CEO of Burberry. You also need to have someone who is prepared to see the children occasionally. And above all you need a bit of encouragement. If you have spent all day competing with men at work, you don’t want to go on competing at home. You want someone like Lloyd Bean, Ursula Burns’s husband, who worked at Xerox long before she joined, but who claimed delight when his wife whizzed past him in the fast lane. Or like the husband of the Indian banking supremo Chanda Kochhar. She says he is “genuinely happy about my progress”.
The lesson for a future female corporate queen is to give more thought to her choice of spouse. She should go for someone who is mentally her match, but who is happy to play a supporting role. In other words, Mr Right should be a male Kate Middleton.
Alas, there is a problem here in both demand and supply. High-flying women are programmed to go for high-flying men. Most men aren’t attracted to women who are more successful than they are. And until those things change, there is not going to be more than the odd sprinkling of women emerging from the sticky yellow marzipan into the glorious royal icing on top.

As Business Week noted:

When Carly Fiorina became Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) first female chief executive officer, the existence of her househusband, Frank Fiorina, who had retired early from AT&T (T) to support her career, was a mini-sensation; now this arrangement isn’t at all unusual. Seven of the 18 women who are currently CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—including Xerox’s (XRX) Ursula Burns, PepsiCo’s (PEP) Indra Nooyi, and WellPoint’s (WLP) Angela Braly—have, or at some point have had, a stay-at-home husband. So do scores of female CEOs of smaller companies and women in other senior executive jobs. Others, like IBM’s (IBM) new CEO, Ginni Rometty, have spouses who dialed back their careers to become their powerful wives’ chief domestic officers.
This role reversal is occurring more and more as women edge past men at work. Women now fill a majority of jobs in the U.S., including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional positions, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Some 23 percent of wives now out-earn their husbands, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center. And this earnings trend is more dramatic among younger people. Women 30 and under make more money, on average, than their male counterparts in all but three of the largest cities in the U.S.

However, for most women, that trade-off, a supportive house-husband screams "Kitchen Bitch" and thus, poison. Most women would rather their husbands be high-flyers, than themselves. Because their reflection of self-worth is based on their sexual marketplace value (sad but true for most women, sad because that is so transient like a flower), and their sexual marketplace value is based around how much of a dominant, sexy Alpha asshole they can land.

Women don't go further in politics because they are unwilling to marry Denis Thatcher. An amiable businessman who kept his mouth shut and loyally supported his wife. They have fantasies of being Hillary Clinton, who did not sacrifice the Alpha Asshole Male, and still got to be a Senator and Secretary of State. [This is why many women love Hillary -- she got the Alpha Asshole, and the power, at least in part.]

Men who rise, mostly do so by either blind luck and opportunity, plus "seize the day" aggression and vision (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg), or grind-it-out steady rises like say, Howard Schultz generally require a supportive spouse. Business and politics are high-stress careers, and supportive advice and comfort are generally a requirement for those grinding it out, a decade at a time, to rise to the top. This is true for both men and women.

Men, more than women, tend to realize this and trade off on Alpha sexiness. This is particularly true when men are younger and less powerful, and thus less attractive to women, they will often settle and marry the best woman they can get. Sticking with her for the most part means no costly divorces, no emotional upheaval, and the perception of stability and sensibility, that boards of directors prefer. No one wants say, a Mark Hurd. A guy who is a walking lawsuit machine.

Women on the other hand, feel that settling is both a betrayal of their natures, and a slur on their very person. Saying basically that they are so ugly and unsexy that the best they can do is some "supportive" aka "kitchen bitch" beta male instead of the sexy bad boy Alpha asshole they crave.

Thus women are trading off opportunity for sex. This is entirely predictable, since eggs are expensive, and sperm cheap, women generally prefer less perceived risk and men more, comparatively speaking. Women will trade off the opportunity to become a top leader, for sexy times, most of the time.

It is the unwillingness to trade away those sexy times, in favor of beta male "kitchen bitch" supportiveness, that keeps women from occupying half or more of the CEO suites, upper reaches of political leadership, and the cultural power centers (such as directing, producing, and so on). Rising up that way requires generally guys women just can't stomach.

The goal of feminists is to have it all -- the sexy bad boys AND the power. Like most fantasies, too much of it tends to be destructive. Because real problems are never solved by ghost-dancing fantasies and fairy tales.

The Modern View of Marriage

2012-01-08T05:00:00.000-08:00

A recent Citibank commercial exhibits the modern view of marriage found in the young, White professional women who are the target of Citbank's rewards program. The commercial features an attractive, athletic woman who says, "My boyfriend and I were going on vacation ... we talked about getting a diamond, ... but with all the points I earned ... I flew us to the rock I really had in mind."

The guy, is never shown in detail, and is a lesser rock climber than the girl (who goes first and stands alone on a towering, dangerous spire). Complete with faux-tribal yodeling and grrrl power! singing, its almost a SWPL parody. One might ask why marriage has become less attractive, to the point that Citibank (which only cares about getting consumers to sign up for its rewards cards program so they can reap fees off it, in the essentials) points out that its target young White female professionals can use the card to go rock climbing instead of getting married?

Let me repeat this. The commercial says flat out that the card allows women to avoid marriage in favor of "exciting" rock-climbing. The "rock I really had in mind."

How has marriage come to this?

It came to this, because in essentials, most White women find their men not very sexy. After all, modern life provides a lot of comfort and security. But the essentials of that security and comfort can only be provided if the men trade-off sexiness for reliability and agreeableness and cooperation. Women don't find happy, smiling men attractive, as any reader of Twilight or its "Teen Paranormal Romance" spawn (that's a genre inside Barnes and Noble Bookstores, no lie they have an entire section devoted to it) would know.

More than a thousand men and women were shown pictures of faces making various expressions and asked to rate them for attractiveness. Some pictures of a neutral face were also included.
The women were least attracted to the smiling happy men and most interested in those whose head was held high with pride. They also found the men who looked ashamed rather attractive, the journal Emotion reports.
Researcher Jessica Tracy said: ‘Pride may signal a man’s competence and ability to provide for a partner and offspring.’

Just as Satoshi Kanazawa's work showing that Black women were the least attractive to men of all races (which earned him a PC defenestration and forced, Gallileo-like apology after a PC inquisition) has not been disproven, just shouted down as not following the dogma of PC, this work and others are sure to generate lots of PC heat.

Is this assumption accurate, i.e. the cooperative, happy, smiling men who are "nice" and mostly equal to most women, are less attractive, than bad, broody guys, and thus account for the decline of marriage (because that is the supply essentially of prospective grooms -- agreeable "nice guys" for the most part)? Probably a lot more study is needed. It might very well not be. But then again, it might.

Does it make sense, or this another History Channel "Ancient Aliens Were At the First Thanksgiving (Hunting Bigfoot)" series?

In my view, there are reasons to suspect something along these lines. Every pundit from John Derbyshire, to Spengler at the Asian Times and Pajamas Media, to Theodore Dalrymple, to Mark Steyn, has remarked upon: plummeting birth rates in the West and places where women have better conditions and status and earnings and independence. Also, decreased marriage rates. Also, vastly increased female preference for "bad" i.e. abusive, violent, and dangerous men. Also, among women, vastly increased display of skin and figures, i.e. "slutty" and ultra-revealing clothing. Also, as Steve Sailer once noted, prevalence of tattoos on young women to indicate an easy attitude towards sex. The Daily Mail has shown series after series of drunken young British women stumbling around in next to nothing looking for sex on the weekend nights.

All of these things are well known. But no pundit has ever said why. The best they can come up with is … well these things just happen as a rule, because well that's what modern life is like. But why is that?

In my view, the reason for the disdain for marriage, the dislike of Western Civilization, the preference for bad boys, and all the rest is the profound dissatisfaction with "Kitchen Bitches," that is equal or mostly equal men who are smiling, agreeable, cooperative, building wealth and security and comfort but providing no sexiness. No danger. No excitement. And no pure, powerful arousal.

Joran Van Der Sloot after all has aroused many women Straight-A, Bible Study Natalee Holloway wound up leaving the disco with hulking, six foot four Van Der Sloot. She was never seen since and Van Der Sloot admitted on TV her murder. Another woman in Peru went with him to his hotel room (and her death). Van Der Sloot apparently used his notoriety to cut a wide swath among women in Asia. As did accused wife killer (yes plural victims) Drew Peterson, a former police officer in Ohio, well into his fifties, with coeds from local colleges.

In the early days of his detention, the Lima papers were full of reports about him reading reams of letters from women who claimed to be in love with him. “I get more letters every day,” he bragged to the downmarket Dutch paper De Telegraaf. “One of them even wanted me to get her pregnant.”

Even a Florida Doctor, a woman in her fifties, was not immune to his spell, spending considerable amounts of money to see him, and hiring attorneys.

What is this? Nothing but market failure. Modern society requires men to be agreeable, smiling, and cooperative. And that coupled with their near equality, makes them sexless. Causing in turn a desperation among women for sexiness no matter what. This is not evil, or a reflection of "evil women." It is simply an adjustment that women need, a set of proper incentives and investment.

Women won't value marriage (to Joe Average) if the trade-off is no sex and excitement. Game, being a PUA, working on sexiness, will all help to some degree fill that market gap, but there are limits. A man can't neglect his job, his other duties, simply to be sexy all day. No group of men spends more on being sexy and dominant (primarily through ultra-thuggery) than Black men in the ghetto. Optimizing for sexy men means minimizing for wealth and security and comfort.

The problem is one of incentives. Women are essentially, among both White working class (illegitimacy around 40%) and the White professional class (illegitimacy around 20%) betting it ALL on a continued long run of prosperity, safety, security, and comfort. Where life is so risk-less and "boring" that rock climbing, and other thrills (named Mr. Sexy Bad Boy) are required just to feel alive. Starving women in the Third World feel no such requirement for adrenaline fixes nor bad boy parades. They'd be happier if their husbands did not patronize prostitutes, drink the family money away in bars, and did some actual work at home and outside.

Women need to know that the comfort, safety, and stability of the West is an illusion. All those disaster movies, the end of the world movies, the zombie movies, and so on have played upon the fears that indeed, the surface stability and safety is just such an illusion. One destined to be shattered. There **IS** a cultural awareness that the West is not all powerful, and can be shattered at any moment. For a long time after WWII, this was centered around the Cold War and nuclear annihilation. Now, bio-terror, or zombies, or aliens, or ancient prophecies, or "climate change" nonsense articulate this fear. Which is the "entertaining" version of the real risk -- social pressures and competition for limited food, water, and other resources in a global oil shock, or global famine, or any other threat (like a failure of the Euro and a global banking shock).

Forget the fantasy of zombies or aliens landing. If gas goes to $10 a gallon, there are roaming packs of inner city marauders, looting the suburbs, a "Kitchen Bitch" with a shotgun who sticks with you looks better than fabulous rock climbing and a bad boy who does not stick around. No matter how moody and thus sexy he is. It is all a question of incentives. Women and Men behave EXACTLY as incentives push them, in the mass. [Individuals can and do vary, but the mass is what we are concerned with. It does society no good to have a few wise women choose security and the nuclear family when most abjure it for risky single motherhood.]

Marriage does not work for women, now, because they assume the stability and power of the West is eternal. Never threatened, always "boring." This is a poor bet, and likely to work out disastrously in fairly short order. Food, oil, and other resources are tight globally, and an external shock (and there is ALWAYS an external shock) in the global system will push everything over. Not aliens invading, or zombie apocalypse, or Mayan prophecies, but a corn harvest failure in Brazil, or a Wheat harvest failure in Russia, the Ukraine, and Australia. The closing of the Persian Gulf to oil shipping for six months or longer. The Euro collapsing. Perhaps all of these, are enough to send the economy into a nose-dive and mobs of hungry people from the urban centers into looting marches on the suburbs. With a paralyzed and inept bureaucracy unable and unwilling to use force to stop it. In other words, the LA Riots writ nationally.

Hipster rock climbing instead of marriage is all well and good, but a woman's "boyfriend" is not going to display the same sacrifice and courage in fighting off intruders as one's husband.

Where the Jobs Aren't: the Growth of the Craigslist/Moonshine Economy

2012-01-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

Recent data released by the Labor Dept. purports to paint a rosy jobs picture. An estimated 200,000 jobs were added in December, preliminary results. Unemployment is down to 8.5%, though that reflects a lot simply dropping out of the job market. There are still 13 million jobless, and Blackrock and other Hedge firms predict decades of de-leveraging for the US consumer, still heavily in debt with little job and just as importantly, wage growth. Indeed inflation in 2011 was 3.4%, while growth rate for the US was only 1.8%, barely on the plus side. All the rhetoric from Obama on the rosy jobs picture, intended to sway the critical swing voters (White professional women) can't conceal the fact that the US is heavily in debt in the consumer area, along with state and federal debt, has little job growth and even less wage growth, while facing inflation fed by the Fed printing money to cover the debt, and rising Chinese demand.

In short, even White professional women pay more every month for food, clothing, gas, and other expenses, while their paycheck does not increase. There is a reason for that. Just as mass immigration from Mexico has led to below living cost wages in most entry level and even skilled labor for the White (and Black) working class, so too has outsourcing and foreign investment by US companies led to the decline of the Knowledge Worker. As usual, the Wall Street Journal has shown itself to be a fantastic source of news, but not overtly. One has to read the back pages of the Marketplace and Business and Finance sections to find the real news.

For example, did you know that most Apple Juice in the US comes from China?

Like many other products sold in the U.S., apple-juice concentrate is usually made in China. Producers in that nation provide an estimated 70% of the concentrate used in the U.S. annually.

Indeed the Minneapolis Grain Exchange is gearing up to create a market in trade-able Apple Juice futures. Just like the Orange Juice futures (featured in the movie Trading Places). You'd think "Most Apple Juice Sold in US Comes From China" would be front page news. But again the news media is in the news suppression business not news business. However the Wall Street Journal, and to a lesser extent the Financial Times, must provide business news and thus real information, not lifestyle affirmation, to its readers.

Again the Wall Street Journal, in an aside, provides the real reason Americans at all levels (save the ultra-rich and connected and famous) will not find job growth: foreign competition. The story about Mu Sigma landing big investment money is a perfect example. Mu Sigma is a data analytics company that raised $108 million in venture capital, led by Sequoia Capital (raising its current stakes). Mu Sigma provides analysis of the enormous amounts of data large companies collect. Its first customer, Microsoft, hired Mu Sigma to model the combined search marketplace for Microsoft and Yahoo (the two are partners in online advertising).

This should be excellent news for smart people in the US, correct? WRONG! Mu Sigma is an … Indian Company.

Mu Sigma helps some of the world's biggest corporations make sense of the vast amounts of data being produced online. The company, which is headquartered in Chicago with most of its analysts in Bangalore, employs about 1,500 people, up from about 1,200 in June.
…
The company specializes in problems involving marketing, supply chain and risk analytics across nine industries.
"We believe we are painting on a very large canvas," Mr. Rajaram said. "There cannot be any business that will not be impacted by analytics and decision science."
The company hires people who have attended the best schools in India or the U.S. and puts them through a three-month training program called Mu Sigma University that teaches the basics of consulting, applied math, data modeling and statistics.
These employees then help Mu Sigma's corporate clients learn to use the data their companies are generating to run their businesses more effectively.
Mu Sigma claims more than 50 Fortune 500 clients—it has helped a pharmaceutical company identify the best price points for drugs, and a cable company identify the best ways to retain customers and still make money, it said.

Income recovery and income growth are not going to happen in the US in the formal labor market. Places like Mu Sigma don't hire Americans, they hire cheap Indians and put them to work in a pro-forma (three months!) training course in Bangalore. But hey … they are CHEAP!

[Microsoft kick started Mu Sigma into business. Along with the Gates Foundation scholarships being open only to "people of color", i.e. ONLY: Black, Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, more informed people might want to consider using a Linux distribution of your choice rather than Windows. Given that Windows as it stands is mostly the work of H1-B Visa holding Indian/Chinese emigres with little stake in the company or their work product.]

Eventually even high-income jobs like nursing (experienced nurses can earn over $130 a year with overtime), doctors, and other professions will find the same pain as information technology, engineering, and professions. The influx of Pakistani doctors into Britain, under the National Health, to create cheaper labor and thus more opportunities for political graft/featherbedding, is responsible for those same doctors ramming their on-fire car into Glasgow's airport terminal. After blowing up cars outside London nightclubs. They were brought in to be cheap labor. Even if ObamaCare were abolished, for-profit hospital groups and taxpayer funded hospitals and charities would all press for, and get, mass importation of cheap third-world nurses (already happening) AND doctors.

Globalization inevitably means that all but the most connected elites have income falling towards (if not at) the level of a Pakistani bricklayer.

ANY, and I do mean ANY broad income growth in the US labor market will be through the Craigslist Economy. Off the books. All cash. Dependent on off-hours labor, done quickly and cheaply and without reporting. If you wanted to deliberately make most of Working White America innately hostile to the government, and with the attitudes of hillbilly moonshiners, you could not do a better job.

Hillbillies made shine, because it was the only way to put dollars in their pockets. Their labor was viewed as value-less, no one paid much money for it. Work was intermittent, and holding onto a small piece of land meant subsistence farming, intermittent labor for hire, and moonshining. Since there was no margin for taxes. The same sort of pressures, in most of working White America, are now repeating themselves. It was the political genius of FDR (the man had the economic instinct of a turnip, but political genius) to make Hillbillies his voting block edge by throwing patronage around. Massive development projects that used local labor, and electrified areas that private investment would not touch (because it would be a money losing proposition). Using government built dams generating lots of electricity to subsidize manufacturing (repeated in the Pacific Northwest) that used all that power, creating jobs and ending much of moonshining because it was far more trouble than simply getting a factory job.

A few seasonal jobs in December does not a recovery make. Consumers don't have suddenly a lot of money in their pocket. There is no big hiring spree. No massive ship building program as in Reagan's early defense budget. No cheap oil promoting economic activity. No gas price and electricity price drops putting more money in consumer's pockets. Indeed the EPA's rules on coal plants promise to raise electricity rates dramatically over the next few months. Restrictions in fracking over "earthquake concerns" (the Greens have sold the next bill of goods, that fracking causes Earthquakes: Charleston suffered a 7.3 earthquake in 1886, presumably because someone took a time-machine back there and did fracking-drilling for natural gas) promise to make Natural Gas (and US drilled oil) far more limited and expensive.

Any recovery at all will be done through Craigslist. Selling expertise, one bit a time, and pocketing the cash money. Business expansion will be in places like Bangalore (of dubious quality but hey, they're CHEAP). Not the US.

Incredibly Emo and Extremely Effeminate

2012-01-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

Pop culture today offers nothing of real value to young boys contemplating what kind of man they wish to become, and even less for young women trying to sort out the straw from the gold amongst young men. Witness, the trailer for the movie "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

Emo kid after his father's murder on 9/11 in the Twin Towers goes on an emo quest to find some key. Not avenge his father, not even express anger at those who murdered him. Because above all we can't have a White boy expressing anger or even worse, hatred for those who murdered his father and ruined his life. Instead we get a boy who will grow up Extremely Emo and Incredibly Effeminate.

This is by design. The creative and business people inside Hollywood simply cannot allow the ideas of revenge and hatred to exist. CERTAINLY not among White men, witness Steven Spielberg's "Munich," about the self-loathing of those who were tasked with hunting down the killers of the 1972 Munich Massacre, or the recent film with Helen Mirren, "the Debt." Of course the real hunters of the Munich Massacre, including Ehud Barak, have no such self-loathing. To a man they feel proud and justified of their work, as do the Navy SEALs who shot or helped shoot bin Laden.

At least in part, many women today find that open masculinity among average guys threatening. Among other things, it suddenly puts them in a lower place relative to guys working across from them in a cubicle, who 99% of the time are amiable work-mates, by reminding of them of the endless depths of male violence and the capacity for brutal revenge among even the most placid of beta males. There certainly is not much of a market for that sort of thing. The "higher beta male wronged" in NBC's "Life" (played by Damien Lewis) failed to find an audience. Meanwhile, a variation of that character played by Lewis, only as a "bad, damaged" bad guy who is a traitor, finds female viewers aplenty (Showtime's "Homeland.")

A 9/11 movie is made. And the kid whose seminal event in his life is the murder of his father by Osama bin Laden is not allowed a second of anger and hatred for the murder. Instead we get a twee, precocious (not in a good way), "Billy Eliot" sense of total lack of testosterone and masculine behavior. That's not how boys act, or speak (in complete, fully articulated sentences and flowery language). It is a gay man's or a woman's idea of how a boy should speak. Or act. Absent all the messiness, the ugly behavior, the rebellion, the anger, the violence, that are part of every boy's growing up (and indeed the need to control that chaotic energy).

Mark Steyn noted that the War on Christmas is a signature marker of the failure of the West. I'd argue that this movie just as easily fits the bill. But the question is why?

My answer would be a sexiness deficit among men. It is admittedly a just-so story, but my thinking goes like this: the sexual revolution, fueled by technology, rising female income, anonymous urban living, and critically, female-oriented entertainment dominating the culture, led women to untrammeled sexual freedom, never before experienced by any group of women for any sustained length of time (and it is most attractive, Western women who enjoy this total freedom). At the same time, their rise meant that men who would have been considered sexy and attractive, when most women were secretaries (hence the popularity of Mad Men on TV), are now considered beta male drones.

And women began to dial up the asshole desire to unsustainable levels. Desiring ever more asshole behavior and dominance from men. Punishing those (and the culture) that does not deliver. This is why the war on Christmas (which is a secular, social tradition at least as much if not more than a religious one). And why this kid is an emo-kid, devoid of masculine behavior.

Traditional culture, traditional masculinity, don't cut it any more. Instead we've come to a bifurcated sense of masculinity. A few, exempt from all the rules Alphas, can do as they please, as long as the dominance and power are ramped up to unsustainable levels (because eventually they provoke a violent male response). Meanwhile any challengers/interlopers from the old culture are headed off at the pass.

Bottom line, a male dominated audience and movie industry would make a movie, where the kid is angry and crying, over the loss of his father, and then you see him as an adult (fade in) in a helicopter. Gearing up. He shoots various Muslim bad guys. Cut to training missions, and then a top rank general walks in … "it's a go. We're going to get him."

Shoot-outs and bad guys (and some good guys) dying. Voice over (kid's voice): sometimes you wait your whole life to get even. This is for my father, and all the others.

THAT would have been the movie made if Joe Average White Guy and his money dominated the movie industry. That this movie has no testosterone whatsoever is indicative how skewed towards the female audience Hollywood has become.

Obama's Military Cuts: Stupid or Hate America?

2012-01-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

With Barack Obama, it is always a question of stupidity being the main motivator, or the usual "Hate America" found in liberal, Black, and other circles. The man after all bragged he hung around gays, Muslims, Black radicals, feminists, and others in College. Does that sound like any normal young (straight) man you know? At any rate, Obama has announced cuts of about half a million US Army and Marine troops, ending the ability to fight two wars at once while declaring, "the tide of war is receding."

The phrase "the tide of war is receding" is guaranteed to go down in history as one of the top ten stupidest things ever uttered by a Western leader, along with "Peace in Our Time!" and "We can do business with Mr. Hitler."

Obama surely reads his daily briefings. Outlining the dangers from Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and China and Russia behind them. Obama is either monumentally stupid, a low-IQ Black man who had "smoke blown up his ass" his entire life for the ability to speak in standard English not Ebonics for extended periods of time by disingenuous White Liberals who hailed him a genius, and as a consequence continues to fail miserably at elemental, gut-level tests of competence Bill Clinton could pass, or he simply hates America as the epitome of "evil White people" so much he wants to punish them and America. Of course, he could be both. In any event, his words "the tide of war is receding" will be flung back in his face time and time again. It is guaranteed. Because having a strong military is like having insurance, it is costly until you need it. And you always need it. Not having it invites disaster. A man who rammed through ObamaCare to cover illegal aliens and others with health insurance ought to know that.

Having the ability to fight two major conventional wars at the same time is critical. It is critical because America's current enemies, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, China, and Russia are sure to act in a conventional manner to destroy American security objectives dating back to FDR, when America is occupied fully with ONE existing conventional conflict. Which is sure to break out any day now.

Why? Because the international situation is uncertain. And it is uncertain because America is weak, divided, disdains military power, and has been proven without a doubt for the past thirty five years or so to be bullied with little risk. George W. Bush bought America time (though he did not understand what he did, and handled the Iraq War poorly) by making an example of Saddam. To encourage the others. That time is now up.

America faces two fundamental problems. The first is energy scarcity, which can be managed long-term by fracking/drilling in the US and using unconventional techniques, at the expense of Green purity and throwing out green/renewable fantasies of windmills and solar panels powering a modern industrial society. Note: managed. Not solved. Demand for oil and natural gas and coal, too, will keep energy costs high because China, and to a lesser extent India, Brazil, and other developing countries want nice things too, that cost energy: clean water, sewage systems that work, power that goes on and stays on, not just for two intermittent hours a day, hospitals that are clean and sanitary, and a modern industrial base to power all that.

The second problem is related to the first. Food. Zerohedge reports that as Spengler at the Asian Times and PJM has noted, food prices are set to go up indefinitely as arable land declines, petroleum goes up (the two are related, think about it for a minute, no one uses horses to plow fields), and Chinese demand intensifies. Made worse of course by bio-fuel subsidy madness in the US, turning food into fuel.

This is causing a crisis. As Zerohedge points out, in another post, Iran depends on sky-high oil and imports most of its food. Like Tunisia, then Algeria, then Libya, and now Syria, the main cause for discontent is people not being able to eat. As Spengler noted, Chinese peasants will eat before Arabs (and Iranians). Because the Chinese can pay more for food. ZeroHedge notes:

It has been estimated that the Iranian theocracy cannot fund its bloated bureaucracies, military and its welfare state if oil falls below around $40-$45/barrel. Drop oil to $25/barrel and keep it there, and the Iranian regime will implode, along with the Chavez regime in Venezuela.
Saber-rattling actually aids the Iranian regime by artificially injecting a "disruptive war" premium into the price of oil: they can make the same profits from fewer barrels of oil.
The way to put them out of business is drop the price of oil and restrict their sales by whatever means are available. They will be selling fewer barrels and getting less than production costs for those barrels. With no income, the regime will face the wrath of a people who have become dependent on the State for their sustenance and subsidized fuel.

Of course, easier said than done. China has lots of money, needs to keep the power on for its own internal stability, and will reliably prop up the price of oil to keep feeding its people, and paying for their food. Rarely is something simple easily attainable. Like losing weight or playing a musical instrument, it takes work and struggle.

This is precisely WHY the US needs a military that can fight two conventional wars at the same time. Because regimes like Iran and North Korea are hit hard by rising food prices, as well as Pakistan, and want War as a release from forces that threaten to overturn them as in Egypt, and Tunisia, and Libya, and probably Syria. No one wants to end like say, Khadaffi, stabbed in the buttocks with a knife, to death. There for everyone to glory in, on Youtube.

Thus, of course Iran wants War. They crave it, as the only thing that can push oil prices high enough to pay for food, and at the same time allow them unfettered ability to kill all domestic political opponents. It does not matter if they take terrible losses, they've had them before. A swarming attack, against a carrier battle group, preceded by days of false moves and provocations to wear down attention and attentiveness, can easily sink a carrier. Many in Iran think that doing so will cause the US to simply turn tail and run. Under Barack Obama, they may be right.

At the very least, they can smuggle out oil at $200 a barrel, closing the Straight of Hormuz through mobile missile strikes and mines and such, perhaps also launching attacks on Iraq taking out its oil facilities and even the Saudis and Kuwaitis and Omanis. China, and many other countries, would be happy to buy oil at those prices under those circumstances.

Meanwhile, North Korea starves to death, under a new leader even more despised and incapable than the last. One who is young, prone to torturing small animals as a child, and fat and unattractive at twenty eight. Kim Jong Eun has one play, only and that is war. War with South Korea and the US. Not to win, but just not to be overthrown.

Particularly if the US is occupied elsewhere, say the Persian Gulf, and thus all sorts of gains can be seized, even perhaps ALL of South Korea and even Japan. You don't have to be a giant if your enemies are all midgets. Neither country has much of a military, much less military age young men, much less any ability to sustain a long, ugly war. Without the US ready to fight, prospects look a lot better than ending up like Khadaffi. Since Jong Eun is even less loved than the Colonel.

Likely at this point, both Iran and North Korea are playing a game of "after you, Alphonse." Since the second mover has the advantage -- no US forces to confront him.

Obama's cuts to missile defense, his ongoing cuts to nuclear forces, and a reliance on drones (easily hacked, as even Iran was able to do) is a fantasy strategy. Since the US from FDR onward has relied on US Naval and Air dominance in the Persian Gulf to control the world price of oil. To the US liking. And disadvantage in particular of Russia, which has nothing else but oil to offer.

Russia and China are sure to challenge the US dominance, if for no other reason than to order the world to their advantage and the US disadvantage. This is normal politics, Russia can only survive in a world where oil is hideously expensive. China can only survive the onslaught of all those men without any female counterparts because of selective sex abortions, and a slowing economy beset by corruption and cronyism, by dominance of neighbors and ultimately the entire Pacific. Otherwise all those resources (including yes women) don't flow into China to keep the social peace and the folks at the highest levels end up like Khadaffi. No one wants a knife up their ass.

Nor are the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, and the Pakistanis (who are fully nuclear, have a disintegrating populace and state, are beset by Jihadis, and under siege from rising food prices) stupid. They know that a limited, cut to the bone American Military might not even be able to win in one place, and surely will not in two or more. Hence the move to create two or more crisis by pouring fuel on any regional crisis set afire.

In my opinion, at some level Obama understands this and welcomes this. All those decades of "hate America" along with the "hate Whitey" rhetoric of Rev. Wright and Louis Farrakhan (a frequent visitor to the White House according to logs, unsurprising since Obama was a neighbor of Farrakhan's in Chicago) had to take their intellectual toll. At some level, Obama constantly strives to make all those sermons he heard from Wright come true. That is Barack Obama. You don't spend twenty years listening to Rev. Wright (and likely Louis Farrakhan) and not want to make their dreams come true.

Ultimately that is a stupid move, since leaders rarely prosper by punishing their people. Nor is the model of most Muslim tribal nations (raise up a tribe of favored few, like Saddam's Tikritis, and punish the rest) likely to succeed in a nation as big and as powerful (in the sense that ordinary people are not beaten dogs, but individuals jealous of their liberties, mostly) as America. Obama's likely destination is impeachment and conviction, with a long jail time as an object lesson. Being the first President to deliberately lose critical wars in disastrous fashion that degrades life for the average American (oil and food at unaffordable levels for years until drilling and growing are refashioned) pretty much guarantees that. But for years, Obama was never punished politically, socially, or economically for associating with odious figures like Wright and Farrakhan, so it is no surprise that he deliberately wants to harm America.

The alternative of course is not endless Wars for Democracy in Muslim lands. But rather a military able to dominate the Pacific and Persian Gulf at the same time. Withdrawing troops from Europe is a minor savings, but closing bases there leads to a lack of forward positioning in the area and increases US dependence on … Israel. As the only friendly country in the area with ports, airbases, and a population able to support force projection. While Germany, Italy, and England are not close to the Middle East, they are closer than Arkansas or Georgia, and provide "good enough" ability to stage and marshall forces bound for the Middle East. While troops can and should be withdrawn from many areas, the bases should remain.

Drones, easily hacked and dependent on an increasingly vulnerable satellite system (now even Iran has the ability to shoot down satellites, joining Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan) are no substitute for US air power with the best air superiority fighter (the F-22, canceled) and the best ground support airplane (the A-10, canceled). Cyberwarfare is no match for US naval forces able to punish enemies and control the seas (including keeping the Straights of Hormuz open for shipping). These all cost, and the costs seem high. Until say, Iran and North Korea and China and Pakistan (and perhaps even Venezuela) all launch attacks hoping to achieve regional dominance cheap and easy at the US's expense.

If you liked your life with gas at $5 a gallon, wait until it reaches $10 per gallon. See how much social peace is bought then. The US too, is not immune from the social changes around the globe of Chinese peasants eating a lot better than they did before.

Sexual Competition in Britain: A Case Study in Sadness

2011-11-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

The Daily Mail has another story on scantily clad, drunk, and sad women in Britain. Courtesy of Roissy/Heartiste, the pictures and comments are revealing as to what they show unrestrained sexual competition among women for the few dominant A-holes they find attractive works out to in real life. Its not an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, or a showing of Twilight. None of that glamorized idealization of choices without limits (or crucially, guidance). Rather, complete and total sadness and desperation.

The story gives away the reason, though the writer Tanith Carney refuses to see it:

The standard uniform — micro-miniskirts, sky-high heels and low tops — was once worn only by prostitutes on dingy street corners. Now it’s a mainstream style adopted by almost every female clubber and party-goer under the age of 30.

Why do they cheapen themselves so — especially at a time when young women have never had a greater opportunity to reject crass sexual stereotypes of old.

After all, girls are outperforming boys at every stage of schooling. In the workplace, female employees are starting to out-earn their male counterparts.

Why is it, then, in an age of true equal opportunity that so many women are dressing in such a demeaning way?

Well, color this under the obvious. The women are competing for the few men they find attractive. Make most men their equal or worse in status, i.e. girls out-performing boys at every age of schooling, in the workplace, in social status, well they turn into sluts. Inevitably. Because being a slut is the price women have to pay to get attention and sex from the few dominant, Alpha assholes they find attractive.

Women, almost exclusively, will feel no sexual attraction whatsoever for guys who are their inferiors, socially, and not much more for those who are their equals. Equalization in status and earnings and everything else just serves to make nearly every guy sexually invisible and undesirable for most every woman. Save those on the very bottom of attractiveness. A socially egalitarian society alone, let alone the current one where women do better economically and socially than men, guarantees a society of sluts, a few Jersey Shore Alpha males (think the Situation), and most guys opting out for porn and X-boxes.

Why DO young women go out dressed like this? We meet nightclubbers in four major cities to find the surprising and unsettling answer to the question despairing mothers are asking
...
Tonight it’s Hannah Lawson’s 18th birthday and she’s out on the town with five of her college friends after spending three hours getting ready. Teamed with leopard-print ankle boots, her outfit lends a whole new meaning to the term ‘Little Black Dress’

As she and her identically dressed friends line up, hands on hips, only the mottled skin on their naked legs hints at the six-degree temperature. But Hannah proclaims it’s worth it to give them that all-important quality: ‘confidence’.

‘Male attention is good. Then you know you look good,’ she says.

‘Yeah, guys wink and make sly remarks,’ chips in her friend Eleanor, 17. They have only just hit the streets, but already they know that their skimpy outfits have made an impact — another group of girls has branded one of their number ‘a slag’.

‘They’re just jealous because we’re beautiful and look young!’ says their friend Ruby Crowther, 19.

"Slag" from another group of women? Spending three hours getting ready? Extremely revealing clothing on freezing nights? That's all competition for the male gaze, and of course the male gaze of the few men women find attractive. There are plenty of guys to go around, but they are either equal or slightly lesser in social stature, so the young girls, in the prime of their beauty, have to dress extremely revealing to gather the attention of the few dominant A-hole jerks they find attractive.

Joanne Avery, 23, is a clerical assistant from Chester-le-Street, Co. Durham, out clubbing in Newcastle. Her £45 Playboy skirt sits low enough to reveal a white thong, above it is tattooed her personal motto: ‘Couldn’t give a f***.’ It’s accessorised by another on her upper arm that reads: ‘Raw Sex.’

Joanne’s extensive wardrobe back at home — which includes 25 pairs of high heels — is made possible by the fact she still lives with her family. Indeed, it is her father who lends her money to help fund her £500 a month eBay shopping habit.
...

Joanne has no qualms about sharing the reasons why she is dressed so provocatively tonight. ‘I’m looking for a bit of totty. You have to dress in a certain way to get attention.
‘If you’ve got t**s, it helps. It does make me feel more confident. I’m a slut, but it’s OK to be a slut as long as you use protection, which most people don’t.’
For Joanne, it is simply not an option to dress more tastefully. ‘I’d never dress in jeans. I just wouldn’t like it. I always want to wear slutty clothes.’

One reason for tattoos among young women is to advertise sexual availability (to the dominant Alpha A-hole they crave, of course, not to the "icky" Beta males who are their equal or below). Hyper-competition for the few desirable men creates basically, a buyers market (among the few A-hole jerks women crave). Thus women in societies where they have unlimited freedom and a higher social position than their male peers have to slut it up. Just to gain sexual access to the few men they find sexy. If nearly every male peer were sexy, you would not see the tattoos, the revealing clothing, and the drinking.

Naomi Maxfield, an 18-year-old musical theatre student from Chesterfield, was out on the town in Newcastle.

‘I like getting male attention. If I didn’t, I would think: “What’s wrong?” ’ she says. ‘It’s quite a nice feeling. It makes you more confident. Guys smile at you, wink, whistle, try to chat you up.’

Natasha Parish, 19, a hairdresser from Newcastle, has taken an hour and a half to apply her fake tan, lashes and make-up. Once again, she cites the need to feel confident for her choice of clothing. ‘I think dressing up is a part of being a modern woman. I’m OK with how I look.

‘It is nice to get a bit of male attention, not too much. It makes me more confident if I know that I’m looking attractive.’

Again, of course, the only male attention that counts is from jerks. A-holes. Bad boys. Alpha males. The girls can get plenty of attention from their male peers, and without dressing in hyper-revealing clothing. They just don't want it. Because they find beta males unsexy. Or, alternatively they HATE HATE HATE Beta Males.

Given the acres of limbs that are exposed, you might assume that these girls are proud of their bodies. Quite the opposite.

It emerges that in many cases their outfits — and the male leering it provokes — are often a way to bandage up their insecurities in a world where they can’t match up to the oh-so-sexy, celebrity stereotypes of womanhood.

It doesn’t always work out as they hoped, as Sian, an 18-year-old carer on a night out in Cardiff, admits. Her insecurities about showing off her figure in such revealing clothes are so profound that she admits to drinking spirits with her friend to work up the bravery to leave the house.

‘We looked in the mirror before we left the house and were so upset that we necked half a bottle of vodka each.’

Her friend Beth, a student, is wearing suspender-style tights, made popular by celebrities such as Rihanna. She says she didn’t buy them to look sexy or fashionable, but to cover up her legs, which she describes as ‘vile.’

‘There’s lots of pressure to look good. Boys always want that perfect person and other women all look amazing.’

Natasha Parish also ‘hates’ her legs — though you would never guess it from the scarlet and black micro-mini she is wearing in Newcastle city centre.

‘I wish girls wore a bigger variety of clothes going out,’ she says. ‘That’s why I wear dresses — everyone else does, so I would look stupid if I wore a longer skirt or trousers. I do wish it was easier and that I could go out in less revealing clothes.’

When Amber Davies, 21, a full–time mother from Bristol goes out in Cardiff, she wears her full armoury including a push-up bra and false eyelashes. But she has the self-knowledge to realise that ultimately it’s not a very convincing mask.

‘The only problem is that this isn’t what we really look like. In the morning, you’d be there without your hair extensions, make-up and false eyelashes, or your body-control pants — and you’d look completely different. Nobody knows what you really look like when you’re dressed up like this.’

It does not get more explicit than this (note the full time mother going out for random hook-ups and worrying about how she looks to her random partner in the morning). Women have to show the goods to get the sex from the few guys they find sexy. The cost of feminism, of female sexual liberation, is hyper-competition among women for that hot guy.

As Charlene David, 25, and Stacey Leonard, 27, stop to chat, two male bystanders come up behind them, put their hands around their waists and tell them they look beautiful.

Far from brushing them off, both girls said it illustrated the usual reaction they provoked from men — and asked for the compliments to be recorded.

Other girls were also seen being touched and having their bottoms squeezed by men coming up behind them — or being forcefully coerced into bars. Because they were barely able to walk on their stilt-like shoes, many couldn’t stagger away, even if they wanted to.
It is Leanne McGinley, 25, a mother-of-two in a leopard-print dress, who sums up the contradiction. ‘I do find the male attention irritating. But it would feel a bit weird if there wasn’t any.’

Yes of course. Male attention from icky Beta Males? Irritating. From the dominant Alpha A-holes who coerce them into bars and grab their behinds? Desirable. No one is putting guns to their heads, they spend an awful amount of money, often subsidized by their parents, to gain attention from the Alpha male. Hyper-competitive environments produce such reactions.

It’s a contest that can spill into aggression and even violence. As the evening goes on, the alcohol flows and the pairings start to happen. Catfights break out, with competing tribes of girls shouting ‘slag!’ at each other from opposite sides of the street.
It comes as little surprise to discover that the more the women dress like strippers, the more men treat them that way. Among the men we spoke to, one described the women out on the town as ‘eye candy for free’ — and a chance to ‘window shop’.

Toby Harris, 29, a project manager from London, says he likes women dressing in barely-there clothes ‘because you get to think whether you want to sleep with them later’.

‘It’s a certain sort of women who dresses that way — easy chicks,’ he says. ‘They’re definitely not a long-term prospect because they are easy.’ In many cases, that sexist view may well be crass and unjustified. After all, shouldn’t women be free to dress as they please without being judged? But whatever their motivation for dressing as they do, there is no escaping how the micro-skirted mob are perceived by men.

Tom Jones, 23, a landscape gardener from Cardiff, says: ‘It’s good to give the game away and know what you’re getting. The less clothing the better.’

For Lewis Quinn, 23, an electrician from London: ‘Being around all these women is like being at a funfair with glaring lights in your face — but they’re not the sort I go for as it’s too revealing for me.’

Yes, of course average women can "win" by having sex with Alphas they would otherwise not have, in today's liberated, feminist, equalist society. But they don't get commitment from the Alpha males, even if they do get casual sex.

Some girls reported that their mothers checked their outfits before they went out and said they ‘looked nice’. Others said their mothers sometimes accompanied them out clubbing, envied their figures — and even borrowed their clothes.

Psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos, author of the Home Office Review on the Sexualisation of Girls, believes society has become so influenced by porn culture that no one knows where to draw the line any more.

‘We are inheriting more from the porn culture than we realise — everything from fake nails to fake tans. Porn has become mainstream.

‘The sad thing is that the confidence of these girls has become directly proportionate to how they look. It doesn’t come from what they have achieved or what skills they have learned. It comes from how much attention and looks they get from men.

‘Of course, there’s nothing new about wanting to be desired and complimented. But with these young women, it’s not just that they like compliments. They crave them.

‘The problem comes when your only desire is to be desired.’

The problem is not porn. There are plenty of men, in fact most of their male peers, that would have been happy with them. Girls age 17, 18, 19, at the peak of their beauty, can dress in a barrel and get male attention. If women were picking from the mass of their male peers, you would not see the hyper-competition for just a few guys, the ones they find sexy, occurring. Hence the drinking, to degrade themselves essentially in pursuing men they have no real chance of staying with, and can only get fleeting sexual encounters with. Including a number of "full-time mothers" in the story.

That is not a particularly happy set of circumstances.

What women need is ... information. Information about their realistic chances at landing an Alpha and keeping him. It is pretty easy for any woman who is reasonably fit, breathing, and under 45 to have sex with an Alpha. Alpha males are not particularly picky about who they have sex with. Look at Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, Herman Cain, John Edwards, and so on. For an Alpha, life is a buffet with sex from McDonalds and Nobu in NYC, at any time. Almost any half-way attractive woman can have sex with an Alpha.

But she won't keep him. Did Tiger Woods marry Rachel Uchitel? Did Bill Clinton leave Hillary for Monica Lewinsky? Did Herman Cain leave his wife for Ginger White?

For most women, they have a choice. Career wise they need to have the power to earn money, and think about the future, including what they will do if say, tragically hip careers in fashion or marketing or PR go belly up. Romantically, women need to be told, over and over again, from an early age, that they are extremely unlikely to keep an Alpha male. Even if they do, that Alpha male will almost certainly cheat.

If they want faithfulness, companionship, and someone to stick around after their parents inevitably pass on, they have to compromise, and do so carefully. They cannot wait too long, all the men just the few rungs below the Alpha males will be taken, or have done whatever they could to convert themselves into Alpha A-hole jerks. A woman at age 35, who rode the carousel of many Alpha lovers, is no real prize and increasingly the men she can choose from at that age are X-boxen bound slackers who've opted out for porn and amusement, or greater Beta Males who found Game, PUA-driven study, and have turned themselves into Alpha jerks pursuing casual sex with significantly younger (and fewer partners) women who have the advantage of greater beauty associated with youth. Even the most beautiful 35 year old woman, after all, is no match for a fit and ordinary 22 year old woman.

This means society must be honest with women. Let them know, their beauty will fade, often quite rapidly. That the few men they find attractive will not stay with them. That if they wish a relationship, one that has the promise of lasting, they need to carefully, as in Jane Austen's day, consider a man's character, his friends, his family, his habits, everything that reveals him as either trustworthy or not. And further, to not reject out of hand those men that on the surface can seem cold, remote, shy, unsexy, and look carefully at somewhat older men who have achieved some measure of success, without becoming either bitter or players in reaction to female hypergamy unrestrained.

Further, society needs to hammer home the message to women that they cannot in fact have it all, since no one can. Choosing to pursue sex means that for most women, they will never have a husband. If they want marriage or its functional equivalent, they must abjure pursuing exciting sex in favor of careful courtship among those who are at least somewhat sexy (though not as sexy as the A-holes in the clubs and bars that demand hyper competition from hypergamous women) and have the makings of good life-long partners.

Every woman and girl ought to have the right to choose her own destiny. Should she wish to pursue the life of Samantha from "Sex and the City" that should be her choice. But it should be an INFORMED choice, one made freely in the knowledge that she will give up any realistic chance at a life-long mate and will likely have kids by herself, with all that implies (emotional and financial hardship as the Welfare State ends, under mass immigration and running out of money; and sons bound for prison, daughters for the stripper pole).

Most women don't like this compromise. They know they've been cheated, and their pursuits are somewhat fruitless, hence the drinking of bottles of vodka to screw up their courage. Nobody gets drunk for a night on the town ... before they go out, unless they dread the prospect. Men don't get drunk before sitting down to play Call of Duty. They enjoy it.

Women as much as non-Alpha men get cheated by the current system. Women get told a pack of lies, that sexual freedom does not require a knife-edge caution, that disaster romantically can occur at any moment, and that a lifetime of happiness is just one mis-step from slipping away un-noticed. No, today does not resemble Jane Austen's in the repression of women, limited opportunities, and such. But it does in that only a few men can make satisfactory husbands, and every woman is in competition with every other woman. Even worse, marriage does not end the competition. For Alpha males at least, who will continue to screw around no matter what. They're Alpha males, after all!

Total freedom requires hyper-vigilance, among women themselves, to get and retain a proper mate. There may be no "shame" as in Austen's day, but the stakes are just as high. Having a husband/mate to guide child-rearing and companionship, or none at all. Instead women are sold fairy tales of taming magical bad boy vampires, in either glittery gay (Twilight, Vampire Diaries) or brutalesque (Buffy, Tru Blood) versions, or other variations (Mad Men, Sex and the City, etc.) No wonder they're sad. They've been cheated.

A Tale of Two Pepper Sprays

2011-11-29T17:10:00.000-08:00

Two recent pepper spray incidents in California reveal the two differing standards for Whites and Latinos. The UC Davis incident in which a UC Davis campus police officer pepper sprayed students who refused to move when ordered, has resulted in the Police Chief's suspension, an apology from the UC Davis Chancellor, and the suspension of the police officer as well as a full-blown investigation that could result in his firing and even prosecution. Meanwhile, in Porter Ranch, a woman who pepper sprayed fellow Black Friday Wal-Mart shoppers to get an X-box has not been charged and according to reports, is unlikely to be charged at all by the LAPD.

The difference? The cop at UC Davis is White, and the woman who pepper sprayed her fellow shoppers is Mexican.

The Wal-Mart pepper sprayer bragged to fellow shoppers that she would pepper spray other shoppers to get to the X-boxes on sale. She did in fact do so, and grabbed an X-box, paid for it, and left. She was caught on cellphone video with the pepper spray, and was clearly identified. A number of shoppers had to be transported to local hospitals with difficulty breathing and seeing.

America has now, two distinct and separate politicized justice systems, matching that of the political breakdown. One for connected, famous, and rich White elites, non-Whites, and such. And another for ordinary White guys and gals. Shades of "the police acted stupidly" by Obama, we have preferential, specialized treatment for one pepper spayer (because she is Mexican) and a virtual jihad for another, arguably in pursuit of his duties, and operational procedures as he understood them, because the latter is White. Certainly a Black or Hispanic officer at UC Davis would never have been suspended, in fact the whole thing would never have been an issue.

Is this sustainable? Very likely not. It is one more aspect of the eternal spoils struggle between Democrats, party of the anti-White folks (rich White elites, professional White women, non-Whites), and Republicans (against their will morphing into the White party). As memories of the Civil Rights era fade (NY Magazine had an article detailing Jessie Jackson meeting with the Occupy Wall Street goofs, Jackson asked them what LBJ meant to them and they answered Vietnam, he responded with Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and more) and with it whatever residual White guilt among middle and working class Whites, this spoils system for justice becomes less tenable. Certainly as Whites fade into a minority, suddenly, in their own country, by being forced to accede to Mexican Mass Immigration (because the Mexicans doing the mass immigrating are given special, race-based preferences) and White second-class citizenship, while paying for everything, and getting essentially nothing, well that is nothing more than a pre-Revolutionary condition.

How and when this will explode is uncertain. But explode it will.

Best Free Fonts

2011-11-29T05:00:00.000-08:00

For a lighter change of pace, check out the best Free Fonts available on the Web. I've tried them with good results. The prior post was written in Vollkorn, from Friedrich Althausen and it is simply beautiful. Containing pretty much everything you'd need in terms of glphys, kerning pairs, accented characters (naturally for a German) and special characters, it reads delightfully on my screen in Ubuntu 10.4 Linux and Abiword. This post is written in Antykwa Poltawskiego, which is a revival of a Polish font used in the Twenties and Thirties done originally by the designer of that last name, and revived by the gifted Januz Marian Nowacki. It too looks beautiful, link here.

The first link, here, will get you to URW free versions of Palatino (done by the incomparable Hermann Zapf, yes the guy behind Zapf Chancery), as well as Goudy versions, Bembo (called Cardo), and of course (at the URW link) Garamond. One of the more hopeful things is the enthusiasm by type designers for reviving and preserving the old type faces, particularly those of the Renaissance and early printing, as well as "National Fonts" that preserve the unique smallness and locality of the nations they represent.

Vollkorn is beautiful, but retains enough of the German "Blackletter" aka Gothic/Schwabacher character to be interesting, while still highly readable. Poltawskiego looks like it came off a book from 1928, and is quite beautiful in a Beaux Arts Way.

Pride in the greatness of European heritage is not yet entirely dead. Against the Occupy people literally pooping at St. Paul's Cathedral is the enthusiasm of middle aged, middle class men for reviving the great type faces of the past. Heck one man even wrote a book about it, even if he does spend far too much time lauding Barack Obama in a way unbecoming for an ostensibly straight man.

Often it is the little things that tell you much about a person, or a society. This is one thing that is quite hopeful.

The Sadness, American and British Versions

2011-11-27T20:06:00.000-08:00

For all of the Twilight movie frenzy, with Twilight Moms and tweens camped out, and "You Go Girl" positivism from Oprah, every White woman's Black Best Friend(tm), women in today's society are beset with sadness. For they have very little to be happy about. The Huffington Post has an article about women divorcing in their twenties. The Daily Mail has an article about women drinking themselves into oblivion. Both reflect a cruel irony.

In no place or time, have women had more choices, more wealth, more power, and more opportunities to be whatever they want to be. To decide for themselves what their lives will be. And in no time, place, or society have women been left to themselves entirely, without guidance, help, or advice on what real life boundaries will limit their choices. You might even argue that women have only one fleeting chance, often, at happiness, and can see it go by without even realizing it. This is why vampires are so popular, real life men disappoint them, and like the male geeks retreating into dreams of hot Vulcan or other Alien babes, women retreat into a fantasy of hunky dominant, violent guys fighting over them and for them. But the reality is sad. Above all else.

The Daily Mail piece has such things as:

Midnight on St Mary Street in Cardiff and everything is exactly as expected. Half a dozen young women slump in a gutter, men urinate outside a health-food shop and, as hordes stagger between nightclubs, someone lifts up a blow-up doll with a sex toy protruding out of it.

The street smells of urine and lager, police struggle to break up a fight outside the Walkabout bar and a paramedic bundles a comatose girl on to a wheelchair. But it's a quiet night for 20-year-old Naomi Jenkins. She has 'only' drunk three shots of peach schnapps, cider and three shots of Jagermeister (during a drinking game called I Have Never) and still feels 'a bit sober'. Her friend Hannah Freeman, 19, was punched in a fight and stumbles about swearing and searching for a bathroom.

'We only do embarrassing things when we're really drunk,' Naomi says. 'I kiss random men in the street and Hannah has had sex behind a chicken coop.' She screams with laughter as Hannah lurches unsteadily in the stairwell of Charleston Bar and Grill on Caroline Street (known locally as Chip Alley) and unashamedly urinates in front of us.

Amazingly, none of the 80-strong throng of passers-by seems to notice –or perhaps care. Hannah rearranges her minuscule dress, steps over her own urine, shouts 'f*** off' and the pair stumble back to Walkabout. It's only midnight, after all.

Obviously, kissing random men in the street, and having sex behind a chicken coop, are not the antics of happy women. Nor is the massive amounts of alcohol needed to lower inhibitions to engage in these acts in the first place. What's wrong, is that modern media gives women access to all sorts of hot, hunky, dominant Alpha men, and even an only middling attractive girl can often gain sex from an Alpha. But not commitment. [See Monica Lewinsky.] Even the most beautiful women cannot get faithfulness, see Elin Nordgren and Tiger Woods, or Elizabeth Hurley and Hugh Grant.

In days prior to the mass media attaining its critical mass (and just as crucially, its orientation almost exclusively to female consumers), women might occasionally brush past a hot, hunky Alpha male. But they would have little interaction with him. Now, particularly in female-dominated professions such as public relations, infotainment aka journalism, corporate finance, human resources, and such, women have much closer access to Alpha males. Think Monica Lewinsky again or the late Chandra Levy. Even more of course can see them every night on TV, or at the movies, or in the latest book. There's even a new category at Barnes and Noble (not making this up, nope) "Teen Paranormal Romance."

None of this of course makes women any happier. Indeed the fatness epidemic amongst British women is likely the substitution of food for love.

But as I found out on the streets of Cardiff after midnight, many of these women are –by day at least –well qualified pillars of the community. Among them I met teachers, nurses, occupational therapists, personnel professionals and full-time mothers, all determined to shake off responsibility and have fun in the only way they know how. By getting 'smashed'.

Every week, the ritual is the same: Groups of between four and six girls congregate to dress up and competitively drink bottles of cheap wine or sickly shots. Competition ramps up over who can wear the tiniest mini-dress, the highest heels or the reddest lipstick. Drinking carries on during the bus ride to Cardiff (many young women travel from the surrounding Valleys) and continues in bars between 9pm and 11pm, or until they feel bold enough to dance.

Condom in purse and telephone number for a pre-booked 3am taxi in handbag, they stagger between nightclubs. The ritual continues long into the morning when, dulled by hangovers, they congregate for McDonald's or fried breakfasts to giggle about the drunken 'fun'.
…
One rather more honest 18-year-old from Caerphilly admits that she decides what to wear depending on whether she is on the prowl for a partner. Tonight –in a transparent Primark blouse and black bra –she undoubtedly is. 'I wouldn't wear this if I had a boyfriend. He'd be like, “You ain't wearing that,” ' she says.

The desperate search for sex, with only the most guido-esque able to apply, is characteristic of a society that does not lay out, starkly and honestly, the choices and consequences for women, directly, starting in the teen years. Now for many, the way is clear: Snooki. Gym-Tan-Laundry, is the mantra, with the unspoken need to get out there, as drunk as possible, to have a hook-up and some sort of human connection. That is not happiness. Just look at the pictures.

Meanwhile, US women are not happy either.

A previous relationship left them heartbroken. They say you never really get over your first love. Tara, a 26 year-old freelance writer from North Carolina admitted during our interview, "I didn't think I would ever fall in love again so I figured it didn't matter who I married."

I can relate. Breaking up with my college boyfriend left me devastated. He wasn't just my first serious relationship; he produced the beats to my heart for years. I never thought anyone could ever make me feel that way again, so I settled for the memories and pledged my honor to someone with whom -- wait for it -- I was in a convenient relationship.

Madison also attributes a past heartbreak as a reason why she became Mrs. to Mr. Wrong. After being told over the phone by her first fiancé, "I have cancer and can never see you again," Madison had an understandably hard time trusting love. She married her ex-husband because "We were both financially stable and could have a good life. I loved him, but I'm not sure about actually being in love with him. I felt that I would never be hurt by him as long as I didn't give my whole heart."

"Celebrating" Divorce in your twenties is a coping mechanism. At best. Many simply never got over the hot, dominant Alpha male they could not keep.Because no one told them they were not hot enough, and young enough (compared to the guy) to keep him. That say, Annette Benning can keep her hot, dominant Alpha male because she's about thirty years younger than he is. That at best, even a beautiful woman the same age as a dominant, Alpha male producing the beats to her hearts, can only keep him for a moment.

Those unable to find a partner, tend to use food for love. Just look at any old picture of women in the 1940's or 1950's, particularly after wartime rationing ended. You won't see lots of fat girls or guys. Part of that is the "diversity tax" in which people retreat to the suburbs via private auto, or the internet, to avoid the inevitable crime that "diversity" brings. But a great deal of it relates to the atomization of society that does not any longer reliably match young men with young women. Everyone is on their own. With only the guidance of TV, movies, books, and popular celebrities to help advise on their love-lives. Which is to say, nothing at all helpful and positively harmful influences.

Most modern women in the US and the UK are profoundly unhappy. You don't see scenes like the above, or books "celebrating" what is a miserable failure — divorce in one's twenties, when it pretty much guarantees (for women) a much poorer position in the mating/marriage market.

I do not believe it is reasonable or even possible to restrict women's absolute and complete freedom to choose their life and their sex partners. Women however desperately need an honest, up-front, and direct guidance from other women (men will simply be ignored of course) about how choices early limit options later. Chase Alphas, and you'll be disappointed if you are not ready to be cheated upon. That is true for even the most beautiful of women, and the ordinary women won't even be more than a disposable object. In an endless choice, a menu of constant freedom, it becomes even more critical to select a guy for character and reliability, rather than pure sexiness. Choosing sexy guys carries with it, a fairly large cost for women. Cheating, unfaithfulness, risk of disease. But choosing a guy they have no feelings for sexually either is a one way trip to unhappy-ville, sneaking out to drink and hook-up with strangers in a desperate attempt to feel sexy in turn.

Society today is fundamentally dishonest with women, and cheats them out of a honest choice. It lies and says that freedom comes with no strings (it does). Society does not tell women that nearly unlimited freedom also means a very thin tightrope to find romantic happiness. That all that sexual liberation is a two edged sword, to be worthy of a guy they find attractive, they'll have to be significantly younger, with relatively few partners, be pretty, fit, thin, and with a pleasing personality. All things they cannot do much about except on the margins (eat healthy, exercise, refrain from casual hook-ups).

Society also lies in that very few women are aware of the risks of falling deeply for an Alpha — few other guys will compare. This is particularly true for the first guy, who remains perhaps the only guy in her heart. Not fun if he's with someone else.

It is not that women are choosing badly, though mostly they are. Rather, it is that women are being lied to, by a media-infotainment complex that feeds the worst delusions instead of the noblest instincts of women. Imagine a world where every guy watches endless Star Trek episodes featuring hot Borg Babes and Vulcan women fighting over some useless geek. That flipped on the gender, is the toxic environment women have to endure, and fight against every day, intellectually and emotionally.

The inevitable disappointment that most women endure, leads to over-eating to find love in food, partly, or binge drinking and useless hook-ups. Is Snooki happy? I think not. Nor do the women in the photos look happy. The road to happiness (and incidentally, women feeling positive not negative towards the West, and its civilization,and its people) requires honesty. About what a world of near total sexual and individual freedom requires. Which in turn is nothing less than constant vigilance and care, lest a woman's one chance at happiness slip away, without her even knowing it.

For the flip-side is, few men desired at all by any attractive women at all, needs to compromise. For many, a life of casual sex, and slacking will do just fine.

Why No One Cares About the NBA Lockout

2011-11-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

The NBA is in lockout. The players have called for decertification, having rejected the owners latest offer of a 50-50 split of revenues, down from the 57 percent split the players retained in the last contract, but up from the owners initial offer of 47%. David Stern is ready to cancel the entire season. And fans ... don't care. The comments section on the WSJ story on the lockout and loss of the season are littered with responses of "I'll watch Hockey" and "who cares." This was entirely foreseeable. The basic conflict is between owners who are viewing the books (the NBA claims not unreasonably that 22 out of 30 teams lose money) and players who see no reason to continue on as before.

The reason is fans. White fans. Who are ebbing away from the NBA. Buzz Bissinger (author, Friday Night Lights) saw this one coming, sort of. He noted the White fans have no one to root for:

I don’t think talking about any of this makes me a racist. I believe it makes me a realist. White fans want white superstars, or in the case of the NBA, at least one white American superstar. Unless the ghosts of Bird and John Havlicek and Jerry West return to the floor, that isn’t going to happen. And since it isn’t going to happen, the NBA will continue to struggle with an identity crisis that no one wants to publicly acknowledge.

Nor is there any way to change the reality since black players are better, stronger, faster, and have more basketball intelligence than any of their white counterparts. If anything, the percentage of white American players will continue to fall. The league is not going to move to the absurdity of a quota system. So maybe the best thing for whites to do, including myself, is accept the fact there will be no white hope, drop the work-ethic fallacy, and revel in a game that is embedded more than ever with beauty and grace and strength and acrobatics.

Except White fans cannot be guilted into "follow the NBA and put money in owners pockets or you'll be called a racist." That is effective one-on-one where White guys comply or lose opportunities with girls, jobs, and socialization. But it fails miserably where there is no penalty for not watching the NBA, not going to games, and not buying merchandise.

Whites do not really care to follow sports where they cannot identify with the players. Or let us narrow that down, White men (the sports fan base) do not care to follow sports that are nearly all Black and have all the superstars Black. Which endorse and follow the Black rap/hip-hop model. The owners cannot force the White fans to give them money. This is what the lockout is all about.

The entire sports complex is running out of money. The NHL had a season long lockout in 2004-5. The NFL had a Summer long lockout that killed the exhibition season. Money is starting to get tight. Cable rights fees are no longer able to sustain year-on increases because cable TV and sports are discretionary items for cash-strapped men. And sports featuring nearly all-Black leagues have little appeal. Yes, most White fans will agree that the Black athletes are superior to White ones. They just don't care that much. Not enough to keep paying cable or satellite TV fees to watch them. Even less to pay to see them in person, or buy their merchandise. The "Los Dodgers" have been forced into a sale, the root cause of which is that Fox which bought them in the first place was desperate to dump them to a charlatan. Who proved incapable of running the team and used it as a piggy bank as the demographic wave transforming LA made the stadium into a Mexican gang-ridden war zone.

The NBA has about $4 billion in revenue. The problem is that vastly inflated player salaries were predicated on: 1. The NBA making money in China which never happened; 2. Increasing money extracted from TNT and NBC (which never happened); and 3. Increasing arena admissions/revenue and merchandising money, which never happened. Costs are spiraling out of control and the NBA's "all-in" bet on 100% Rap and Black has been a poor one.

The NBA is basically stuck with a Black rap player base. Bissinger is correct, Black players at the extreme of performance are simply better. The best players will always be, nearly all but not exclusively Black. Which in turn is a major factor in White fan apathy. No one really cares, if there is not a nightly parade of huge Black men lumbering down the court, traveling, and dunking the ball and then beating their chest like rappers (the move was copied from Rap videos). White male fans just cannot identify. Besides Bissinger is wrong, while the NBA players have amazing physiques that demonstrate a rigorous diet and demanding workouts, most players coast through the season, and often the playoffs, Expending minimal effort in defense, no team play, and little sense of hustle. They coast on their talent and gym work, not skill and dedication. Shaq's abysmal free throw percentage is indicative of generally poor preparation for anything other than general fitness. Many other active players have similar bad stats for free throws, rebounds, defense, hustle and so on.

Besides, they're Black. Which means, a culture and identity far removed and alien (and also supremely uninteresting) to most White fans. They don't hate. They just don't care. Ordinary White guys in their own lives cannot boast and brag. They can't beat their chest when they do something they are expected, day in and out, to accomplish. They can't pose, mock opponents, and preen. The behavior and culture of Black athletes is as foreign and uninteresting to them as say, Eskimos or Mongolians. Black athletes aside from being a different skin color (it is natural and universal to prefer people of one's own race, a point made in Brown v. Board of Education in point of fact, regarding the "un-natural" desire of Black girls to play with White dolls, and the considerable effort of Bratz and Barbie to provide Black and Hispanic dolls), their behavior on-field and on-court is something White guys find distasteful. The virtues that White guys prize (because it is what they are expected to do): show up every day, work hard, don't complain, achieve and act like you always expected to do so, grace under pressure aka "don't choke," just are not there for almost all Black athletes.

White athletes who "act Black" generally find a chilly reception among fans. Tom Brady, known for arrogance, bling, glamorous wives/girlfriends, funny hairstyles, has not been embraced nationally the way say, Peyton Manning (Mr. Aw-Shucks who mocks himself) or Drew Brees or Aaron Rodgers has. And the man won three Superbowls. That's only one less than Joe Montana! Tom Brady is not just an excellent, but outstanding Quarterback, and White fans generally don't like him.

White fans give their love, and affection, to teams and players who embody their values and encapsulate their fantasy of what they'd like to be, if they were only stronger, taller, faster, and younger. Sports is a voluntary thing, no player, team, or league is owed a fan's money or time. Those that don't deliver, can get dropped. In favor of Call of Duty, or the latest movie, or an old one (on Netflix or Amazon), or an e-book, or a thousand different things.

The NBA is just going to have to live with its decision to go all-Black. A lot less money. The NFL would do well to pay attention. Though likely it won't. Quite likely, the season will be done. The owners will draft the college kids leaving school, a few retirees, club players, and foreign ones, and call it "your NBA!" Games will start next season, and players, not having a lot of money to fall back on, will dribble in. Taking a lot less money (which likely was the owners intention anyway).

The main beneficiary (ala Hugh Hewitt, you know who this benefits?) will be the outsider sports: MMA, Hockey, Soccer, and Rugby. Of them all, Hockey having the most games on (Versus and local hockey team affiliates) now will stand to gain the most. The sport is not that hard to pick up, is very fast paced (more so than Basketball), scoring is lower (so every goal counts), the players nearly all White, and team play paramount. Next in line will be the MMA, featuring mostly White athletes, lots of excitement, and a new higher profile on Fox having moved from Spike TV. Soccer of course has a SWPL connection, but has many teams like the English Premier League with a number of White players. Rugby is dominated by burly White guys with a smattering of Samoans. While the French soccer team is nearly all Black/North African, the Rugby team is all White. It is similar to American Football, but without pads or unlimited substitutions. Rugby is hampered by the division (confusing for outsiders and newcomers) between Rugby Union (for the upper classes), Rugby League (for the working classes, professionals), Australian Rules Football, Rugby Sevens, and so on. Plus, TV coverage is spotty and mostly limited to pay channels (limiting sampling).

Hockey seems the main winner, it is the easiest to watch on TV for most fans. Followed by the MMA.

Professional and amateur sports have a value in society. Given that so few other bonding institutions exist, to allow pride in one's culture and community, as Church attendance has fallen off a cliff, and voluntary associations like the Kiwanis and Elks Lodges have aged into irrelevance (no new members), professional sports are all that's left for many White Americans. Steve Sailer makes the argument that PC and Multiculturalism have made pride in White America something that can never be overtly expressed, lest the elites and PC enforcers punish you. Thus sports and professional sports figure into the only identities that are allowed to be expressed any more. You cannot be proud to be, say a White American from Chicago, but you can root for the Bears. That's a poor trade-off, and one that is not ultimately sustainable because eventually an all-Black Chicago Bears team turns off even the most avid White supporter, eager to express any identity at all. The growth of Hockey in places like Phoenix, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, and San Jose not to mention Anaheim which are not historic Hockey hotbeds reflects a search for a permissible White identity.

Either one of two things will happen. Either Whites will abandon any overt expression of any identity at all and retreat into cyberworld, a Facebook, Angry Birds, Call of Duty, Zynga Games driven existence, as the elites maintain total and complete control, or Whites will start to rebel as they did before, against elite opinion on how to act and live their lives.

And we know how Prohibition turned out.

Gays Vs. Jews: The Brett Ratner Defenestration

2011-11-15T16:33:00.000-08:00

The firing of Brett Ratner by the Academy Awards from the job as producer of the Oscar Telecast, and the fawning apology extracted from him by GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination) and other Gay groups, shows who really runs Hollywood. The female audience!

Ratner, the director of the upcoming Eddie Murphy/Ben Stiller action-comedy "Tower Heist," along with the "Rush Hour" series (starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker) and the final modern-day X men movie (X-Men: The Last Stand) was fired from the show after saying in an interview that "rehearsals are for fags." He then was forced to issue several groveling apologies. You can't get much more Jewish than Ratner, who spent High School according to Wikipedia in Israel. But Jews do not run Hollywood, rather it is gays, or rather the female audience that likes gays very much.

The CW actress (from the revival of "90210") Jessica Lowndes has released a song where she wishes she was gay. That's her to the right and above btw. Lady Gaga got her start, and rakes in tons of money, by appealing to gays. Katy Perry released "I Kissed a Girl," and Simone Battle released a song and video entitled "He Likes Boys" about an unrequited crush on a gay man. You could argue that nearly all Broadway shows, the X-Factor, American Idol, the Sing-off, the Voice, and all the other musical competition reality shows are big gay wonderfests aimed directly at women.

Even Tony Kushner is more gay than Jew. Kushner is very anti-Zionist, has advocated a single state in place of Israel and the Palestinians, and Zionists sought unsuccessfully to prevent him from being honored with a honorary doctorate at Brandeis University and there was an abortive attempt by City University of New York to revoke his honorary degree over anti-Israel statements. Barbara Ehrenreich among others rose to his defense. Kushner married Mark Harris, an editor at Entertainment Weekly, in Provincetown NY in 2008. Kushner's work in in the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's "Munich" is pretty much in accord with Queers for Palestine. Most gays are fairly anti-Israel and also anti-Jewish.

A goodly portion of the "alternative right" is mired in conspiracy theories, the main one being that the West fell into disrepair and despair, filled with PC nonsense, low fertility, mass non-White immigration, multiculturalism, and disgust at the culture and history and heritage of Western Civilization ... because of those "devious Jews!" In their view, those devious mind control rays just took over the poor helpless and defenseless West. Others hold that Gramscian Long Marches (the original was a desperate, fighting retreat not advance) through institutions allowed "mind control" by corruption.

I hold that either explanation, either "those devious Jews" or devious Frankfurt School intellectuals (Andrew Breitbart's view expressed on the Adam Carolla Show) are at fault, nor is some combination the reason for the West's decay.

Rather, it is broad social forces, moved by technological changes that impact marriage, family, spending, wealth, and other factors that has led to this state of affairs. In other words, history as it has always been -- broad forces affected in the exact wave by individual valor and cowardice, often in surprising ways. Individuals can and do make differences, both for good or bad, but cannot fundamentally change the tides. The way people marry, have kids, create wealth,consume wealth, make war, peace, and trade has the most effect on society. Not ideas that the vast majority including elites have only the most fuzzy grasp upon. If you went back in time and queried Castillian Grandees of the fifteenth century, on the Holy Trinity, only a few would have been able to understand it and explain it to you, and probably none what the Albigensian Heresy of a few hundred years prior had been. That's the elite.

Let us look at Jews in America today. Clearly, they do not run Hollywood, otherwise the concerns of Jews (assimilation versus losing one's identity and Jewish heritage) would be paramount in movies and TV. Every second movie would be Exodus and Steven Spielberg would have made "Munich" in the style of Sylvester Stallone's Nighthawks. Ratner would have won, not lost, the contest of strength against the gays. TV and movies would be filled with positive Jewish characters and positive portrayals of Israel and America. Movies like Yankee Doodle Dandy, produced by Jack Warner would predominate.

That moment has clearly passed, with gays now being the "new Jews." Most Jews today hold mildly anti-Israel, anti-Zionist sentiments (as evinced from the results of the efforts to punish Kushner) at best, awash as they are in the Yuppie mold of modern liberalism. The casual anti-semitism of modern liberalism as epitomized by Occupy Wall Street shows up in most Jews wishing that Israel would simply go away. Being as it is an embarrassing, working-class reminder of ethnic and unfashionable identity that is as "un-cool" as the battered easy chair of Frasier Crane's father on "Frasier."

Now, "Glee" features overt teen gay sex, and gay-themed characters and plotlines are everywhere. The GLAAD report on 2011 TV shows:

"While the number of LGBT characters is down, some of the most popular shows with critics and viewers such as 'Glee,' 'True Blood' and 'The Good Wife' weave storylines about gay and lesbian characters into the fabric of the show," says GLAAD's acting president, Mike Thompson. "... Americans expect to see the diversity of our country represented in their favorite programs and that includes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people."

FOX is the most inclusive network, according to the GLAAD study, with LGBT characters representing about 7 percent of the population on its scripted series. "Glee" has several prominent gay roles, and "Bones" and several of the network's animated comedies feature LGBT characters as well.

GLAAD counted 19 gay characters among the 647 series regulars on broadcast series set to air in 2011-12 (although that number could change a little as details about characters are revealed), along with an additional 14 recurring LGBT characters.

On "mainstream" cable networks (not including channels like Logo whose focus is already on the LGBT community), GLAAD found 28 regular LGBT characters, down from 35 in last year's study. The number of recurring characters rose, however, so the total of 54 is in line with 53 last year.

Why is this? Why are gays so popular? Why is GLAAD more powerful than Brett Ratner (who has a successful career and has given Eddie Murphy a job, a favor Murphy returned by resigning as host of the Oscars)? Its because of the domination of TV and movies by the female audience. Which is very friendly to gays.

Women find gay men interesting (and author "slash fiction" whereby straight characters like Captain Kirk and Spock have gay sex). And also, fabulous. Not being interested in them sexually they are men whom they can deal with on a non-stressful basis. The result of a vastly extended mate market, with women "on the market" and "available" for years and years, leads to fatigue with constant approaches by men they find sexually invisible. Gay men offer a relief from that, the niche filled by brothers and fathers when the nuclear family existed.

Gay men's appeal to women is at least in part driven by the failure of the nuclear family, and declining birth rates, leaving many women single children bereft of male relatives. Gay men offer the next best substitute.

Gay men further only have cultural power in the way that Jews during the Golden Age of Hollywood had cultural power -- by offering stories and themes and creations that appealed to enough of a mass audience. It is true that Lady Gaga made a fortune appealing mostly to gay men and women. And that Tyler Perry made the most money last year of anyone in Hollywood. But few White people go to see Tyler Perry's movies, and his formula for success is to make cheap movies that only Black people are interested in seeing. He's the only one out there competing for that audience, so he gets pretty much most of it no matter how poorly executed his films are. Lady Gaga in twenty years will be as forgotten as Debbie Gibson is today. The same for Justin Bieber.

Meanwhile Jews like Siegel and Schuster exerted immense cultural influence (even if they mostly got cheated for creating Superman). The same with Jack Kirby, or Stan Lee, and the other nearly all Jewish writer/artist creators of comic book characters. By offering tales of nerdy guys who never got the girl transformed into heroes, they found a fairly wide group of guys (nerdy White guys who never got the girl) who lived vicariously through these (often faintly ridiculous) characters. The current flipside is the Twilight phenomena, where girls and their Moms lust after sparkly semi-gay pouty vampires. Following an ordinary girl who gets the hunkiest man alive (and has the second-hunkiest fighting the hunkiest for her favors). Even his vampire babies! This from another "niche culture" (Mormon Housewife) author. Just as Louis Armstrong taught a lot of White kids to swing, because he provided dance music, in the Depression, as did say Duke Ellington, Jews and Mormon housewives when offering stuff that a substantial portion of the population loves, can transform the culture.

For Jews in Golden Age Hollywood or Comic Books, it was a Yankee Doodle Dandy story of assimilation and simultaneous embrace of immigrant roots. Superman WAS American to the core, because he was (basically a variant of Moses delivered as a baby to the Promised Land -- America!) For Stephanie Meyer it was the longing of everygirl to get that one guy every girl dreamed of. For White teens in the Depression, it was dance, dance, dance. When the need was met, the culture was transformed into the specific shape of the individual artist. Respect for a master musician who made you dance, and was Black. Embrace of America and the Flag, with a living super-Flag. Getting that hunky guy by being special and magic (OK maybe the last is not so healthy). The need when filled changed things. But the need had to exist.

Tyler Perry is not going to change the culture. Neither is Lady Gaga. Katy Perry might, because millions of girls like her and want to be her (not the least of which is Mr. Katy Perry, Russell Brand). Gays are changing the culture because they are filling the need of millions of women. Who want tales of effortless sex with hunky guys and fabulous fashion, a life of eternal singlehood and choice (Sex and the City, originally written by Gay men for a Gay cast). Or stories of vampires, rich kids, and other hunks to drool over. Or fabulous singing and dancing where your native talent overcomes plain looks to land that hunky guy (Glee). Egged on by a fabulous best gay friend.

Gays writing and creating just for Gays, on their own, would be like Siegel and Schuster creating "Gefilte Fish Man" who has the magic power to eat as much Gefilte Fish as possible. Of no interest to pretty much anyone outside of the creator's group. Gays exist as a power group, more powerful than Jews (see Ratner, Brett, and the defenestration of) in naked power struggles because they deliver more of the desired audience: women. Who very much like their gays, thank you very much, which way is the next showing of "Wicked?"

And all of this is really just a reflection of social reality. Nerdy guys made Superman a hit from the first issue, along with many other comic book characters, because he filled that need. As did Twilight. Gays only exercise more power than successful producers (who are also Jewish as it gets) because they are beloved of, and deliver to advertisers and producers, the female audience. Who cast in very long lasting singleton choice-hell, demand tales of hunks and guys who will never hit on them, but offer sound advice on how to nail that Alpha.

The solution then, given that gays tilt wildly left (and demand a general libertine undermining of society that is in direct conflict with not only straight White guys but social health for everyone) is to change the conditions that give them power. Gays are not powerful because of their numbers or innate fabulousness. They are powerful because the specific condition of millions of single or late married women make them so.

Women generally happy with their husbands don't care much about gays. Even if only children, they inherit in-laws, helpers with child-care, and a husband they care about and can confide in. They don't need fabulous consumption and fashion and girlfriends and endless courtship to get the emptiness inside filled up, family and husbands do that already.

The solution is thus blindingly obvious and tremendously difficult. The restoration of the nuclear family. Nearly all the ills of modern society, the decline of the West, would be arrested if not reversed by the restoration of the nuclear family. This means generally, women marrying at an age (around 19-25) when they can get the best man available. And staying married, for the most part. This is extremely hard, because modern society has enormous incentives for women to stay single as long as possible chasing Alphas. To the detriment (maybe) of the women involved and of society as a whole unquestionably.

Women giving this enormous power to gays is neither normal nor healthy. At no time in the past has this ever happened in the West. It bodes ill for the stability and wealth generation of the West.

Reconsidering Sexual Repression

2011-09-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Science Fiction Author and Blogger Eric S. Raymond has a post up on Reconsidering Sexual Repression. Basically his point is that we will likely have to give up two of the following three things: family formation, sexual equality (women equal to men in all legal and social and cultural forms), and sexual liberty (no restrictions legal or social in any way of women's sexual activity). Raymond believes that giving up family formation is out of the question, so that the other two must go, by giving up sexual equality, in the form of "submissiveness" to men. Raymond of course is quite wrong (and considers the question only from the viewpoint, and a skewed, "White Knight" perspective at that, of women). But still it is quite interesting to see an older man struggle with the obvious, that the sexual order of the day is simply unsustainable.

Now, Raymond is wrong because women have already given up family formation. Women, of all races, and classes, are bailing on the nuclear family and having single motherhood instead. Women are doing this by choice, deliberate choice, because women have pretty much complete control over their own fertility. If they don't want to get pregnant, condoms, the pill, the morning after pill (a girl of maybe, 15 was there with her mother getting it at my local pharmacy about a year ago, proud and giggling, Mexican of course), various patches (heavily advertised on TV), and more. Plus of course abortions. If women did want to have kids, there are plenty of guys out there who are husband material. They just are not as sexy as the bad boys.

No, women are choosing, in various amounts among different races and classes, but still broadly choosing single motherhood with bad boys over marriage with some boring Beta Male who does nothing but provide and lacks that sexy domination women crave.

Black women moved from 24% illegitimacy in the 1960's, to over 70% nationally today, and over 90% in the urban core. Hispanic women moved from 17% illegitimacy in 1980 to over 50% today. Charles Murray's talk at the AEI on the State of White America had the following highlights:

Women in the upper 20% of income still got married and had kids, illegitimacy was only 4-5% for this group.
Women in the middle 40% of income had a 20% illegitimacy rate.
Women in the lower 20% of income had a 40% illegitimacy rate.

Clearly, there are a bunch of things going on. If you have a lot of money, being Beta is not an impediment to marriage. You can still be "Alpha" and have all those unsexy qualities women loathe: idealizing or pedalizing your mate, telling her constantly you love her, never checking out other women, never instilling uncertainty about the relationship, never being that guy other women want to have ... all that and more can be done and a marriage maintained if you are in the upper 20% of income. Being even a mini-master of the Universe makes a man by definition, sexy to women. Even his wife! So she won't divorce him, and will marry him in the first place. Since other men defer to him, due to his wealth and power, he's sexy! Thus worth having.

And of course, being married to him means a summer cottage in the Hamptons, heck summer as a verb not a season.

For women in the middle class, that increasingly is not in the cards. Raymond is correct, women find men who are their equal ... unsexy. No woman, anywhere, wanted a man who was her equal. That's a ticket to palookaville. Or single motherhood. If women in the Upper Classes have their pick of the mini-masters of the Universe, middle class women have Joe from Accounting. And no one wants Joe. He does not intimidate anyone, he does not boss any one around, no one fears him, he's not made of money, and thus power. Nothing. Why bother?

Shame, social inertia, a desire for security, those things still have limited White Middle class women to "only" 20% illegitimacy. But the tide cannot be held back forever.

Consider lower class White women. The ones most in need of a husband, to add another income to the table, to provide help in child rearing, to provide an extra security level. These women have reached near Hispanic/Mexican levels of illegitimacy. Why?

One reason is, that the men around them are not equal ... they're inferior! And no one wants inferior men. The only men they find even remotely sexy are those men ... other men are afraid of, and for good reason. The thugs. The bad boys. The crazy ones. These seem to be the only guys White Working Class women find suitable for impregnating them.

And lets review, shall we? Condoms. The Pill. The Patch. The Morning After Pill. Abortion. No woman gets pregnant by a guy she does not want to be pregnant by, in a sustained and deliberate choice. The same is true for Black women, who actively choose the thuggiest of thugs, because that is the only kind of man they find sexy -- one that other men fear. Mexican women are the same, consistently choosing for fathers, not the decent and hardworking men around them, which yes there are many still who would make them excellent husbands and fathers, but the dangerous gang-bangers and thugs.

As Roissy points out, Anders Brevik, who killed over 70 people, most of them defenseless teens, is getting mountains of love letters. If Chicks Dig Jerks, and they do, they dig even more thugs, bad boys, and violent men. As Roissy put it:

As everyday observation to those with the eyes to see demonstrates, the primary motivation is women’s love for unrepentant, rule-breaking assholes. That is the elemental, core female hindbrain algorithm that governs all other lustful dispositions and is the catalyst for her mate choice decisions.

Women love assholes because they are assholes. Because it inspires in women those emotions that most delight their pleasure centers. And that, based on the reaction it engenders from civilized men and women alike, is the truth too scary to contemplate.

Women love assholes. Any perusal of Twilight, or the other vampire chick-lit, will tell you that. As will any Rom-Com. This is just hard-wired. But it is not what you think. Because women did not always have the urge for assholes.

When women had significant social inequality, but mostly full legal equality, most women did not swoon for jerks. Assholes and thugs did not make women aroused. The comment by "Bounder" on Roissy's post Chicks Dig Jerks: Prison Edition would have been from Planet Bizarro fifty years ago:

I’m an attorney (fuck you too) and this impulse is even more pronounced among the alpha lawyer women. Frequently female attorneys are caught sexing their scumbag clients.

It starts early. HRC [Human Rights Coalition -- ed] has inmate letter writing campaigns and tons of female law students attend spending their 130+ IQs writing to 75 IQ scumbags. It is beyond fucking hilarious.

The female passion for thugs is one unknown, mostly, to men and women of about fifty years ago or more. It is entirely due to women being fully socially and culturally as well as legally equal to men. If not, in fact, superior.

Raymond is right, women find men their equal to be ... unsexy. Hence the "sexy" TV shows set in the 1960's, Mad Men and Pan Am and Playboy Bunny Club. Where the big shots are sexy master of the universe, and women compete to be his number one squeeze. Today Mr. Big would find a sexual harassment lawsuit, a workplace hostile to women finding, and all the men would be sexually invisible because they would not be the sexy guys higher up in the totem pole but men at the same position if not in fact, significantly lower down.

Almost no woman (with any options at all, any!) will find a man her equal even remotely sexy. None will find a man inferior to him sexy.

And as we've seen, no woman will have kids with a man she finds unsexy. But certainly will have kids on her own with men she finds sexy but knows won't stick around.

Raymond looks at it from the wrong angle: how can society get women a good husband? Given that women have now gotten the best of all possible worlds: maximum access to sexy men, and single motherhood with said sexy men. This is exactly what women wanted, because they in fact created it. They chose, actively, the men they slept with. And they chose to have kids with them, knowing them unlikely in the extreme to stick around and marry them and raise kids. Women, collectively, of their own free will, chose to trade sexy now and kids with sexy now over some guy sticking around. Figuring that they will be happier with kids by an Alpha, even dirt poor, than married and middle class with some icky Beta Male. Who lacks even the most tiny bit of sexiness.

Women don't want husbands ... of men who are equal. Nor are men bailing out of marriage. Women choose, and choose increasingly except for Upper Class White women (a tiny demo by the way) ... bad boys and single motherhood. Women are only interested in buying marriage if the man is sexy. Submission? They already have to offer that ... to the bad boys. Thats part of just admission into his bedroom.

Raymond's problem is his mental model. He assumes women want the things they wanted, in 1950, when significant but not unbridgeable social inequalities made most men fairly sexy to most women, and thus helped maintain the nuclear family and marriage. The men they would marry, were all relatively sexy, because they themselves while not subservient chattel, had significant social inequalities.

Now, women will NOT COMPROMISE ON THE SEXY. Not a bit. Men must be sexy to be considered for sex, and then marriage. All the re-jiggering of gender equality (and thus sexual freedom for women) won't address that, and is unlikely anyway. Women are no more going to demand, that they be now made socially unequal in any way, to their male peers. Why would they? What's in it for them? Having had a taste of the most Alpha of Alphas, be it the hipster jerk of Williamsburg for Middle Class White women, or the true thug for Working Class women of all colors, why would they go back? How can they go back? How can society re-make itself, depending on female consumer spending, so that most ordinary men are sexy enough for women to consider sleeping with and then marrying?

Please.

So family formation in the nuclear way is over. Family means, for Black women, a single mother and two children or more, each with different fathers (Black women lead the nation at more than 50% of all births of a second or later child to a different father than the previous). Of course, that makes for an interesting sibling dynamic, one fraught with rivalry more than love. But its damn sexy, dammit, for the women involved.

Family, for Mexican women, means basically the same thing, just not as much as quickly. For Working Class White women, it is closing in on the Black family model, and it is even for the Middle Class White women.

Which means just as in the Black demographic, you will see, rapidly growing, a lot of men who never married, and remain outside of both sex and reproduction. These are life's losers, and their way to "win" is to thug it up, as much as possible, because if other men fear them, women will love them. Yes, that is the equation.

Children, meanwhile, will live in a chaotic, threatening, and violent situation. One in which power is defined by the ability and willingness to deploy as much violence as possible as unexpectedly as possible. They will be poor, and their prospects very poor. The way in which people reproduce is the man becomes a sexy killer, and the most brutal of them gets the most beautiful girl. Men who are insufficiently violent, brutal, and ruthless get weeded out one or another from reproduction, only the most violent reproduce, and none take an interest or care in their children. This is the way in which most of humanity has lived, for most of its existence, and is a poverty-factory though one that produces for women some very sexy men. Men reliably more powerful and with higher status than themselves.

This is the ugly truth of it. Western Civilization is built upon repression. NOT as feminists say, half-truthfully, on female repression. But upon repression of women's ability to get the sexiest men. Western Civilization requires soaking up all those men who create violence and poverty into marriage. Into making them stakeholders directly into society, by giving them a small family, all their own, which they will mostly (not always but mostly) work themselves to death to keep and improve. Just as Napoleon ended the French Revolution and made peasants into ultra conservative Frenchmen by giving them small plots of land, so too did the nuclear family make most men into conservative, society improvers. Not ugly conquer-or-die gamblers.

Western Civilization means the end of sexy. The end of sexy men, anyway, as the supply of those truly sexy, the Alphas, who dominate other men and make them afraid, are limited in the extreme. And their ability to create massive harems is also limited. Thus, yes, Western Civilization does depend on sexual repression, but of unlimited choice by women of ultra sexy men. The supply of ultra-sexy men is limited, as are the options for Alphas, and women in Western Civilization have had the restriction on creating a vast pool of thugs, bad boys, and the like to choose from.

Moreover, if they had kids by these men, they'd pay the consequences (other men would not help them or help raise their kids). Lacking a husband, they'd starve, to put it bluntly. Critically, other women would not care, either.

Women were mostly free, to choose from any number of men, even though they could not create a vast pool of sexy men (rogues, outlaws, bad boys, thugs). They had far greater rights than that of other women, in other cultures, races, and places. Their rights increased, not decreased, over time, unlike that of say Muslim women. Women just had to choose wisely, for risk elimination as well as sexiness. Women had to trade-off on the qualities that made them aroused (violent domination of other men, or simply domination and increased status relative to them) versus those that would keep them clothed and fed: faithfulness, agreeableness, income, and ability.

What women could not do is create underwriters for the risk of bad boys, as the modern welfare state does today. Yes, in that sense women were suppressed, as people of Ancient Athens were suppressed by lacking Ipads and free Wi-Fi and streaming video. If a woman chose a bad boy, she chose all the risk. Women taking on the risk are quite capable of making informed judgments on that matter.

So what is likely to happen? More of the same. Birthrates will continue to fall, because women will chase sexy men, of whom there are either just a few, their bosses, the local thugs, Alphas who play in a rock band and have a drug habit, the handsome player. They'll choose single motherhood with the last Alpha guy they can have, fairly late, over marriage and family with a Beta Male fairly young. Thus guaranteeing small family sizes (another component by the way of single motherhood). Welfare is likely to collapse as Whites as well as Blacks and Hispanics demand it, under economic recession that becomes permanent. Creating a sudden drop-off of reproduction for all, as Welfare simply ceases to exist like the Roman Empire in the West around 400 AD. You can't have kids with bad boys, if there is on one to pick up the tab.

Life will get a lot more violent. For everyone. And there will be a race to the bottom for sexy, as delineated by violence. Since in an economic recession, the only way to make other men your inferior is to make them fear you. Men won't stop wanting sex, and the idea that women will return to social inequality no matter how small or marginal is quaint. And as dead as the England where Vicars get around on bicycles (instead of Mosques proclaiming Allah).

What will be interesting (in a Dark Ages sort of way) is the changes brought upon by birthrate collapse, all across the board. Now, the Welfare state subsidizes kids by Mexicans, and to a lesser extent Blacks. A birthrate akin to Whites (generally outside of Welfare for racial, cultural, and legal reasons) means social collapse. A Detroit writ large, ever more portions of cities abandoned to wilderness, smaller and smaller cities, less and less technology, and flight to security where ever "lords" may rule by utter violence. Just like the last Dark Ages.

Is this "all women's fault?"

No. It is no one's fault. It was not the Roman Emperors, nor the people, nor the gladiators, nor those who crucified saints, nor those who bribed Goths, or Vandals, or Huns, for the collapse of the Roman Empire. It just happened, because Romans stopped having kids, and many more died of the plague, of bad harvests and starvation, and so they could not hold onto anything. Bad Emperors came and went, and so did good ones. There just weren't enough Romans, as Roman women had fewer and fewer children, and the Empire became more and more slave and less and less free.

Women did not sit down and take a vote, to destroy Western Civilization. Women did not ask for the pill, the condom, the patch, and more to be invented. They did not ask for social anonymity, high mobility, and the destruction of social repression and cohesion (the two go together). Women did not ask for the modern consumer and media culture. Women did not ask for men to be brought DOWN to their equal or lower.

Yes women in the main agree with most or all of these things, but that is beside the point. Women just want what they want: men who are sexy, which means men who are higher than they are socially. That's hard-wired, it cannot be changed, it is part of women's innate biology. Women ARE flexible in how they pursue sexiness in men, just as men are flexible in how they pursue sexiness in women, for that matter.

The ugly truth is, no one man or woman is willing to admit, that wealth, power, and Western Civilization is built upon sexual repression. Not a total repression of women, but of Alpha men, women's ability to create vast pools of sexy Alpha men (in practice this means thugs) and the ability to get others to underwrite the risk of sexy men.

Western Civilization means NO SEXY MEN. Or damned few, at any rate. No wonder most women HATE HATE HATE Western Civilization. Who finds guys like Norman Borlaug, Jonas Salk, or Philo T. Farnsworth sexy? As opposed to say, Pele, Khadaffi, Carlos the Jackal, or Vladimir Putin? Western Civilization is the long slow grind, the constant search for new advantages, requiring massive amounts of nerdy, focused men who search for advantage because they like it, and are good at it, and need to ... feed their families. Thus nerdy obsessions turn to the Green Revolution, not World of Warcraft. Polio Vaccines not Angry Birds. The invention of Television not Magic the Gathering. Real technology to accomplish something of value, creating Western Advantage, not trivial past-times for men outside the mate market.

Netflix and the Big Mistake

2011-09-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

Way back in the 1980's, before he was a washed up politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger made a career out of spouting corny one liners.

In perhaps the greatest (Arnold movie anyway) movie ever made, "the Last Action Hero," Arnold told Claudius he made a "Big Mistake." Right now, Netflix is making a big mistake. The Christian Science Monitor thinks Netflix is creating Qwikster just to sell it. Again, Big Mistake.

America is not ready for streaming, and may remain unready for decades to come. Streaming requires cheap and easy bandwidth, which in turn requires a lot fat, high-capacity connections to the average consumer, already paid for and competing with other connections to offer low cost connectivity. Most internet service providers have usage caps, that impose fairly high fees past certain amounts of downloaded data. Heavy streaming of movies will blow past those caps and make the cost of connecting to the internet very pricey. That's a dubious proposition when people are buying cable packages without ESPN to save $30 to $40 a month.

America is a big, spread out country. Unlike mostly urban places where Netflix has expanded (Canada, Argentina, South Korea), most people in America still live in spread out suburbs. It will take a long time for high speed internet to be built out to those areas, and even longer for the data pipes to be fully paid for, and face competing connectivity offerings. Yes Amazon, and Google, and other people are thinking of offering their own data plans, but let us be realistic. Are they able to cover people in suburban Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis? Plus everywhere in between?

Then too, Netflix faces extremely high costs in signing content deals for streaming. While Netflix can simply go out and buy DVDs if it has to, and has done so (as has Redbox), for a fixed and limited cost, and rent those discs out, streaming the content requires very pricey arrangements with content providers. Who having rapidly diminished revenue streams from TV sales, DVD sales and rentals, no real bump from Blu-Ray, and not much from global ticket sales or 3-D, are not in the mood to do anything but raise prices or build their own streaming center. [This is short-sighted, and guarantees piracy the way the lack of Itunes in the fragmented, Napster era guaranteed widespread music piracy, but that is another story.] Hollywood needs to make money, and they figure on doing it through streaming one way or another.

Meanwhile, those people wanting high definition video, or 3-D (for those who have it) will find Blu-Ray discs far more friendly. You can stop it and watch when you want, there is no stuttering or jitter on limited bandwidth networks, no pricey bandwidth cap fees, and the family can watch as much as it wants before returning the disc.

Yes, the troubles with the Post Office make the costs of the physical disk market potentially higher, but far lower than the endlessly increasing streaming. In a far-flung nation like the United States, the advantage of delivering entertainment on a physical disk still outweighs that of a network.

Yes this is the old "floppy net" or "sneaker net" way of moving files around, on a physical disk hand-carried to device that can read them. In this case, not computer files but DVD and Blu-Ray discs. This business model still works, generates a lot of cash, and will for quite some time.

Reed Hastings is still living in the mini-dot-com boom. When Facebook and Groupon were valued at billions despite not turning a profit at all, apparently. People don't have the money, to spend on pricey streaming plans. No matter how convenient they are, business-wise, requiring almost no people. Hastings can obviously see, "hey no mailing centers, no people opening and sealing envelopes, very little in the way of employees, hey cost savings." That's diving for nickels and dimes and ignoring dollars on the table. Anyone can open a streaming business, heck why wouldn't content owners go with Hulu, many of which are still partners in the deal, or Amazon, or Apple, or Microsoft, or any number of partners who can give them a better deal?

Meanwhile Netflix already has loyal customers, who have liked and used the DVD by mail rental service because of its cheap price and wide selection. To get into that business requires opening up and training employees to operate mailing centers, regionally. It requires lots of publicity and marketing. Netflix has a lot of expertise running their mailing centers, which are the core of their business. None at all really running streaming which places like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Hulu know a lot better than Netflix.

Sometimes nobody here can play the game, as Casey Stengel said of the hapless Mets. Or, "Big Mistake." Maybe even, "Not to be!"

TV's New Fall Season: Hollywood's Sidebet

2011-09-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Washington Times has a post up about TV's New Fall Season and how it consists of mean women and weak men. To summarize the story (go ahead, read the whole thing), men are mostly weak and loserish, unless they are hot studs, and women are "sassy" and "empowered" who sleep around a LOT, with the few men who are sexy (dominant, assertive Alpha A-hole men). There is a reason for that. It sells. TV is basically a land of commercials, wrapped around a few minutes of entertainment. Oh, yes, basic cable channels, and HBO/Showtime/Cinemax (commercial free) derive most of their money from cable subscription fees, not ads. And the commercial free channels like HBO get all of their money from subscription fees. But that is changing. Time-Warner cable is now offering a package excluding ESPN that costs around $30-$40 a month, compared to around $73 a month. Continued growth will rely on not a bottomless pit of cable and satellite rights fees passed onto strapped consumers, but ads. Even P&G is prepared for the "hourglass" shaped consumer demographic, lots of really poor people and a few high-earning consumers.

What is wrong with America (and the West) is nothing less or more than its consumer culture, which based almost entirely on the female consumer has pushed bad behavior to the limit, while trying its best to eradicate the best of female actions.

Most women, most of the time, in the West, have been fairly conservative. Yes movements like the Temperance Movement, Prohibition, and the like have catered to the desire to tell other people how to live their lives, something of overwhelming emotional value to upper class White women in America. But most women most of the time were focused on saving money, preparing for household expenses, improving the lives of their children, and wanting a better life for their sons and daughters than they themselves had. This made women in the West a mostly conservative force, wary of great social change, and deeply invested for the most part in their children. Yes there were bad mothers, and bad fathers, but for the most part the nuclear family and very limited consumer spending held back the forces of rapid social decay. This at a time when most women did at least some work outside the house, and for farm wives in particular, labor alongside men in many times and places. In the Depression, women worked even more outside the house, part-time, to keep households together.

Here is what the Washington Times had to say about the new Fall Season:

Unlike their broke, wimpy male counterparts, the women on these shows are mostly strong and self-sufficient, and critics describe them with glowing words such as “assertive,” “edgy” and, heaven help us, “sassy.” However, what these women actually are, generally speaking, are utterly awful human beings. They may be inspired by “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw, but they act like Samantha, openly bragging about how badly they treat men. They make the sorts of crude jokes that are rightly decried when men make them on prime-time network TV, yet are celebrated for women as signs of emancipation. “Whitney,” “Are You There Vodka?” and “2 Broke Girls,” for instance, all have one-line zingers where the punch line is “vagina.”

The male characters are largely relegated to being ornaments, comic foils or villains. Those that aren’t wimps or fools are dashing rakes - embodiments, in a way, of the old virgin/whore dichotomy turned upside down. In Fox’s “New Girl,” which premiered Tuesday at 9 p.m., post-“Glee,” star Zooey Deschanel’s character has to find a new apartment because she catches her boyfriend cheating. Similarly, the titular “2 Broke Girls” become roommates only because one catches her “sleeps until 4:00” boyfriend cheating on her, and the other has a father who goes to jail for his Bernie Madoff-like crime.

TV’s women of fall, on the network sitcoms especially, are vain, selfish, shallow and controlling — a generation of “Mean Girls” grown, not surprisingly, into mean women.

You see this stuff because advertisers like it. And they like it because they have done quite a bit of market research showing that their female target audience, younger women, like it too. A lot. The ads on these network shows are in support of the idea that women are empowered, Sex in the City types, who can sleep around, with dashing rake-hell men, bond with lots of "you go girl" female friends, and dismiss the 90% of the male sex that lacks the sexiness required.

CBS's "the Good Wife" has a flavor of it, a glamorous depiction of the sexy betraying bad husband (but one that every woman wants) and an older woman still turning heads. A prime-time soap opera.

There is nothing wrong with consumerism, as long as it is not taken to excess. But the storylines blend seamlessly into the ads, of a society defined by consumption and where the type of consumption determines the type of person the lead (female) characters are: beautiful, glamorous, important, because they are consuming a particular type of man, or for the younger set, hot, sexy, desirable because they have the hottest bad boys and sleep around a lot.

The problem with all of this is that the consumption at some point has to end. No one save the very rich can live a life of consumption without saving. The entire "model for life" promoted by the entertainment wrapping the commercials does not work, for much of anyone outside of say, Mick Jagger, for very long. Sleeping around a lot guarantees sex with Alphas, but not commitment, and a life of single motherhood at best, not the fabulous families envisioned in Sex and the City. Most straight men are not falling over themselves to be the fabulous gay boyfriend of some new girl on the sexual marketplace. Most women who sleep around can get easy sex but little commitment from any worthwhile man. Most women past the age of forty don't turn heads, they make men want them to move, so they can see the hot young thing behind them.

Nothing in America's culture will change until and unless its consumer culture changes. This means ad-supported TV, which influences pretty much every part of society due to its massive reach and its stature of the bread and butter of Hollywood (movies are glamorous, TV production pays the bills). All that is a chicken and egg riddle.

Women in the past were naturally conservative because life revolved around marriage, kids, family, and above all, saving for that life. Savings, and the most prudent, cost efficient consumption meant women were an innate force for conservatism. Seizing the "Commanding Heights" of culture and politics and society: Professional White Collar White women, is not easy given the profound shift to consumption and not saving.

Steve Sailer noted this commercial:

"Suzanne Researched This," about how buying a McMansion is possible by bullying your fat stupid and weak husband. Notice there is nothing about value and saving. Indeed the consumption is all about overcoming the dumb husband, who is not able to see how cool the granite counter-tops are.

In some ways, this culture is the bill due from a near 70 years of uninterrupted peace and security, built through the Cold War duopoly of nuclear weapons and force, the stability from two coalitions desiring to minimize conflict. Allowing consumption to run rampant. The sort of broad social change brought about by television, rising wealth levels, easy contraception, urban anonymity, and highly personally mobile society. All of which seems to be coming to an end.

What is interesting about the CBS show "Person of Interest" is not just how masculine it is, but how it points out that the very technology that allowed anonymous, urban living is now taking it away. Surveillance cameras, massive government and commercial databases, plus of course Facebook, Google, and the rest leave bare most lives to anyone with any determination to pry them open. For any purpose, any time.

Yes there is the obligatory "Good female Black cop" to meet diversity quotas, but she's mostly irrelevant (and shown to be fairly useless, as she does nothing to stop crimes from happening). The producers, JJ Abrams and the brother of Chris Nolan, Jonah Nolan, talked about the approach in London and New York.

Which brings us to the latter show, "Person of Interest." Much is made, fairly directly, of the impact of 9/11 and how the attack made people aware that their lives were not as safe or secure as possible. While there is no footage shown, 9/11 changes the lives of the two male lead characters forever. And the technology used to combat terrorism is inevitably used (in the show, for good) to combat lesser crimes, in fact stopping them before they start. With two completely disconnected from society men, aiming to "be there in time." While flawed in execution, the concept and what the show is about, is so striking.

Inevitably the society of the Good Wife, 2 Broke Girls, and Are You There Vodka, Its Me Chelsea cannot co-exist with that of Person of Interest. Something has to give. And what will give is which ever notion is proven strongest. By ongoing events. TV currently holds that the future is mostly known. More of the same, a big fabulous party thrown for everywoman who can pursue granite countertops, or a fabulous life in the big city, or be sexy well past forty, if she's just fabulous enough. Because security and safety and things like water, power, electricity are all assumed. And that therefore there is a large appetite for shows depicting fabulous consumption in fabulous manners by fabulous women.

The minor side bet, made by some interesting people in Hollywood, is that this is not the case. That society will enter into a prolonged period of shortages, of water, of power, of food, of basic safety, and there is an appetite for shows about broken men finding redemption and meaning (and lawful revenge) by stopping worse things before they start. Basically a whole-hearted endorsement of pre-emption in crime and anything else because … technology gives us the tools to understand and predict behavior much more thoroughly.

Color this the Moneyball of Crime Dramas. The show is not about consumption, or money, sex and power. It is about above all an idea, that imperfect though it may be the way to stop horrible things (and take a moral revenge for 9/11) is to intervene with all the tools used to fight Al Qaeda. Not to put them aside in favor of Hope, Change, and fabulous girlfriends and clothes and men. But to use them, wisely, because there are many, many bad people out there.

That this show was made at all, much less that CBS put it on, is staggering. Yes Hollywood is mostly betting on Sex and the City. But it has made some interesting side bets.

A New Hollywood Creative Paradigm?

2011-09-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

Hollywood is still mostly trapped in its view of itself and society. A stale, 1960's era view of themselves as the good enlightened, struggling against a repressive, McCarthyist people and populace. A group of the true saved enlightened saints, against a dark and evil American people. But recently a glimmering of change is sprouting through Hollywood. Oh don't worry … they still hate America and Americans. But their attitude about themselves is changing. Partly this is due to economics and technology, but partly because of how they see themselves. The change is mostly in the ranks of producer/director/writers, not actors, of course, but it is quite interesting.

The change is that instead of seeing themselves as the new Puritans, "saints" who persevere against a repressive, sexually and politically, "evil White male" regime, the new crowd sees themselves as Batman. Who everyone wants to save them, by extreme violence, while condemning them for doing so if they ever get caught.

Mostly, of course, I'm talking about the Nolan Brothers, and JJ Abrams. The Nolans are famous for the Batman movies, which endorse pre-emption and snooping and all sorts of vigilante violence. Abrams has joined with Jonah Nolan, Christopher's brother, to produce "Person of Interest," perhaps the most unsettling and for what it is, revolutionary conservative show on television.

Nolan's Batman, famously, exists in a world and a city that has failed. Gotham is a pit, decaying into corruption. The cops, save one man, Gordon, are corrupt. Criminals run everything. The few honest District Attorneys are slaughtered, or driven insane, and cannot function. Judges routinely send criminals into a revolving door nuthouse. Nothing works, which is why Batman is needed. He exists because no one else will save Gotham. Leaving it to him, and whatever methods he himself finds appropriate or not. The only lines he follows are ones he draws himself.

You can immediately see the appeal for Hollywood's creative people. All their institutions are failing or have failed. The Studio system that gave them money, a budget, people, and told them what to do are long gone. Have been for nearly forty years. What replaced them, the Agent system, is failing. People are not buying DVDs anymore, nor are Blu-Ray sales fixing the deficit. TV rights are down, foreign sales have been no help with massive piracy, and 3-D is a gimmick whose time has now definitively passed. As Chris Nolan says, film-makers and audiences have spent nearly a century getting ordinary films right, and knowing how to see them. You can't watch 3-D with vision problems (most of the audience), on an Iphone or Ipad, or on ordinary TVs, where people most want to watch movies.

Nothing has worked, and so a few creative people have cast themselves as vigilante heroes. Determined to save the city (Hollywood) from the forces of darkness and violence (foreclosing on the Malibu beach-house) by whatever means required (appeasing the audience with traditional heroes). This earns them disdain from the populace (Hollywood's in-crowd) but they are extra heroic and mavericky.

I'm sarcastic, but that is the process. And more are joining them. Captain America and Thor, no matter what their problems, were straight ahead super-heroic. Therefore, ultra-mavericky when everyone wants to be the hip new happening guy who is the toast of the town and ticks off audiences. Fear, desperation, and a desire to stand out have led the Nolans and others to make movies that appeal to ordinary people with heroics and a distance from the Hollywood mores of "you stupid hicks, your 1950's values stink!"

Person of Interest takes that even further. It is astonishing that a conventional liberal like Abrams is even associated with it (he executive produces). In a key scene, the character Finch explains to the character played by James Caviezel, what he did for the government. Finch, he tells the man he hopes will work with him, developed a software system that would sift through everything. All the phone calls, emails, bank account activity, surveillance videos, supermarket purchases, everything, in daily life, that records activity in a database. And it would look for things, to predict violent acts about to happen.

The public, he says, wanted no more 9/11s. They just did not want to know how it was done. The government having given itself permission to read any e-mail and listen to any phone call, after 9/11, used his program to find out terrorist plots. But he tells the Caviezel character, there was a problem. The program found other things, mundane murder plots not associated with mass casualty terrorism. So he threw those away, but later came back and had the system send him just the social security numbers, of those people who were of interest. They could be the killers, they could be the victims, he could not tell because all he could safely send himself was the social security numbers.

Here there is another failure. The government could, if it wanted to, stop the murders from taking place. As the Finch character tells Reese (Caviezel), while crimes of passion or the heat of the moment cannot be prevented, those plotted over days and weeks and months, often can, because the plotters leave clues that his system can spot. But the government only cares about mass murder terror plots. Because that is the only concern of the public.

Caviezel's character is a former CIA man, presumed dead, who killed a lot of terrorists and enablers after 9/11. He himself, like Batman, decides where he will draw the lines, and what he will or will not do. He does not like killing people, but is good at it. A burnt out and bitter man, he finds redemption in saving people who can be saved but the system lacks the will and ability to save.

The pilot was based on a screenplay developed by Abrams and Nolan, and is pretty revolutionary. The government, far from being an omnipresent fascist state, does the bare minimum to protect a public that wants to pretend it doesn't know what is being done. Again into the gap of failure, by the government AND the people, rush the heroes using new technology and will power, to "be there in time," to stop murders. The pilot tested off the charts, the highest of any drama pilot in 15 years, with "crazy broad appeal you don't usually see," so much so that CBS moved CSI aside for it, and won its timeslot in the premiere with 13 million viewers.

What Hollywood is very cautiously nibbling around the edges of, is that PC and Multiculturalism and restraint and all that, don't work. More 9/11s don't happen because lots of people get killed by drone strikes, combat patrols, and the like aided by outsourced torture, lots of software sweeps of bank accounts, phone calls, emails, travels, airline tickets, and more, plus human intel from forces needing US help/protection/assistance against enemies. Not by a heavy dose of hope and change. More like lots of drone strikes and SEAL missions never publicized, which the public would like to ignore.

Ultimately this is not sustainable, and the lone hero model while very dramatic has its own limitations, as actual policy. Which Hollywood's creative types understand because no one makes a movie by themselves. Indeed the series raises all sorts of questions. Are we willing to tolerate thousands of murders, each year, because we don't want to have intrusive, software-spying? If a couple of guys using the software can save that many, why not the police using it at will?

Naturally, this only around the edges. There is the PC heroic Black female cop. The usual "corrupt White cop ring" though the hot young female prosecutor is corrupt, the schlumpy divorced White guy is the intended victim not the killer. PC still reigns supreme in some areas. No one is asserting a broad-based challenge yet.

But … the whole point of the show is that the good guys use the ever-present surveillance technology (the hero Reese snoops a lot on targets electronically) to stop crimes from happening. In the pilot, they save three lives. They stop murders by not just breaking but obliterating every law, rule, and criminal procedure on the books. They step in because the government will not. The heroic Black female cop is shown as always three steps behind, not knowing who she is pursuing, or even why the hero acts as he does.

Let us put it this way. Not even JJ Abrams believes in Hope and Change and the West Wing anymore. Instead it’s a couple of vigilantes stepping in where the FBI or NYPD will not.

Pinker's Violence Fantasy: the Truth About War and Violence in the Post Cold War Age

2011-09-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

The WSJ's article by Steven Pinker Why Violence is Vanishing illustrates the desperate nature of Liberals and the Modern Western Society (which is profoundly Liberal in the modern, PC sense). Wanting desperately to believe that there is no more reason to fight, sacrifice, and empower nasty and dangerous men to protect us, and build nasty and dangerous weapons, the hope is that by clapping real hard for fairies, ala Peter Pan, we can believe and make it so.

Pinker notes, accurately enough, that the growth of agricultural states and enforcement technology (swords, spears, arrows, etc.) allowed centralizing monarchs to cut down hunter-gatherer personal violence which was horrendous and daily. Enlightenment Monarchs in Europe further cut down violence that was constant and grinding by eradicating banditry, enforcing laws, and promoting safety. This is why native European martial arts and weaponry, including staff fighting, knife fighting, bludgeon fighting, and unarmed combat disappeared save Savate in Marseilles, an ultra-violent port that kept that art alive until the Twentieth Century turned it into a sport. All of this is true.

But what Pinker does not contemplate, is how violence particularly in Europe and China was compressed. True Renaissance peoples did not slaughter each other personally as Dark Ages people did, let along hunter gatherers … most of the time. But a third of German speakers were killed in the Thirty Years War 1618-1648 and the terms Magdeburg Quarter entered the terminology of Europe. In China, the Taiping Rebellion wiped out 20 million people between 1850 and 1864.

Technology and new social orders tended to suppress day to day violence. Neighbor did not stick a spear into neighbor, because he had run off with a daughter or wife. Disputes were adjudicated by the state, even in Aztec Mexico. Bernal Diaz Del Castillo in his "Conquest of Mexico" first-hand account notes how Montezuma spent hours every day listening to people who came before him to judge disputes, this from a people who practiced ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism (as did, notes Diaz del Castillo, all their neighbors and the allies of the Spanish).

BUT … when the state loses control, or warfare becomes "total" with new weaponry that makes old orders obsolete, as in the 1600's, or again in the 1940's, horror emerges. Ordinary Japanese men, often under strict orders from high commanders NOT to engage in rape, pillage and murder, and facing an advancing enemy, spent all their time doing so. The destruction of Manila as American forces advanced in contravention of the commanding officer's orders is one example. Done by men who would not have dreamed of ever doing that in Japan. The violence exacerbated by a civilian population accustomed to obeying orders and unable to offer any real resistance anyway.

Violence, by being so rare, becomes almost viral when it does break out, infecting people with horrific results. There is a scene in the otherwise tedious and boring movie "the Debt," where the villainous Nazi doctor says he knew they would succeed when Jews handed over their children. Von Wallenstein and Tilly were hardly nice men. But they would have found it inconceivable to boast of such a thing, because for them, violence was a path to glory. The idea, of killing children as a means to become a famous and accomplished man would have seemed like … madness. One only became famous by fighting a powerful foe that could certainly destroy you. There was nothing to be found of glory in killing children, old men, women, and defenseless men. Though certainly they did that, on attacks on towns, their views of violence was that their glory came in open battle against a foe well able to defeat them.

Now we come to the heart of Pinker's argument. Like the "War Nerd" Gary Brecher, Pinker believes that somehow humans have stopped becoming violent, and that war will no longer break out because, well dammit human nature changed. He hand-waves the wars and civil wars that have broken out since the end of the Cold War and nuclear duopoly, including the Iran-Iraq War in the twilight of the Cold War, the Central African Wars of 1998-Present (about ten million dead or so), the Sri Lankan Civil War, the constant wars in Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Afghan War, 9/11 and the prospect for non-state violence not seen since the Treaty of Westphalia (growth of non-state militias). Pinker points to globalization and trade, ignoring that some societies are permanent losers in that unless they …

USE WAR TO CONQUER OTHER PEOPLES.

Look at Egypt. It cannot as Spengler/David P. Goldman notes, feed its people, manufacture anything worth buying, or produce literate people let alone engineers and other college graduates who are employable. All it has is War. The hope of conquering Israel, taking the Mediterranean gas fields, and then going on to conquer perhaps weak Italy, rich in resources, slaves, food, land, and without any meaningful defenses or even the will to defend itself.

Egypt, in order to survive without war, would have to deep six all of Islam, spend its time studying math and science not heaving their butts into the air five times a day, use the scientific method not something written in the Koran to figure out the world, teach their women to read and write, outlaw polygamy, give women equal rights, allow religious freedom and intellectual freedom, and promote a national concept of hard work and studying. Egypt would have to copy … China. And they cannot even be China, much less South Korea, Japan, or Finland. All that would destroy nearly everything that makes Egyptian society. The same goes for nearly all of the Muslim world, which would have to cease being Muslim if it is to eat, unless it makes war.

What Pinker does not realize, is that the AK-47, easy GPS, nuclear weapons from Pakistan, Iran, China, and so on, allow a vast equalization. Pakistan can cow the US, attacking our embassy in Kabul according to Admiral Mike Mullen in sworn Congressional Testimony, because they have nukes and we are afraid of them. The same is true for all those North African regimes. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya cannot feed their people. But they can cross the Med in boats, come ashore in Italy, France, and Spain, and simply take over. Killing any who object. That's violence, and violent enslavement. Which awaits Europeans who have a toy/pretend military and no will to use even that.

An example of Pinker's blinkered, utopian views are below:

Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.
For example, though the relationship today between America and China is far from warm, we are unlikely to declare war on them or vice versa. Morality aside, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money.
A third peacemaker has been cosmopolitanism—the expansion of people's parochial little worlds through literacy, mobility, education, science, history, journalism and mass media. These forms of virtual reality can prompt people to take the perspective of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.

The War Nerd has said the same thing, and much the same was said in … 1913. Britain and Germany simply traded too much with each other to go to War. This was also said in 1938, and of the US and Japan in 1940, which had considerable trade.

What neither the War Nerd nor Pinker really understand is how much of a loser globalization makes a lot of societies and people. Now Egypt, as Spengler notes, has to compete with China for food. As does, note, the US. The US can compete, because it is a richer society. Egypt cannot. So it is starve or war. Egypt will choose … war. Because the cost of War has gone down.

Most "loser societies" do not believe that they will pay any real price for War, and discount their enemies ability to match their "fighting spirit" and willingness to win. Advantages in jet planes or nukes are discounted, and perhaps not too unrealistically. Israel in 1973 had nukes, and Egypt still attacked it. Israel at one point faced annihilation by Egypt, and did not face nukes. If Israel did not use them, in its then greatest hour of need, would it ever? [Likely, not.]

Western societies are often, for the most part, unable to offer violence in any meaningful way. Save fantasy violence in movies, and the idea expressed in recent TV shows and movies that the public wants violence done on its behalf to be safe, no more 9/11's, but does not want to know how it was done or who did it. The violence is kept secret. No bodies in Afghanistan show, nor in Iraq now, though there are plenty. Still even less coverage of people killed by drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, tribal Pakistan, and rumored, Kenya, Tanzania, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.

Meanwhile "loser societies" remain immersed in violence. Violence in unimaginable and unreported ways permeate every inch of daily life, particularly in Muslim society and Latin American society. Santa Muerte or a thinly Catholicized Aztec Death-God, demanding human sacrifice, is rising, with people being tortured and killed over Twitter comments. Often the mass violence has no purpose save the satiating of the killers desires for murder and death. Given the widespread prevalence of human sacrifice and cannibalism that the Conquistadors found in Mexico (not just the Aztecs, EVERY TRIBE DID IT), you might argue that Mexico is reverting to pre-Columbian violent type.

Muslims have daily violence in their society on a deeply personal level, widespread, as well. Women are genitally mutilated, often honor killed, rape is done by judicial punishment, hanging and stoning to death for adultery is on the rise, child brides are increasing, and so is violence between Shia and Sunni, and against all non-Muslims unlucky enough to live in lands filled with Muslims in any number. This is the advantage, so Muslim thinkers and Mexican Drug cartel members alike, view versus the weak and soft West which is unable and unwilling to deal out violence except when it can massively pretend it is not.

Pinker and Brecher alike share in my view, a fundamental flaw by accepting the past as an absolute prediction of the future. They overestimate trade and cosmopolitanization. As Mark Steyn notes, the arrow of civilization does not go one way, women in Cairo in the graduating class of the University looked modern in 1959, and still fairly modern in dress in 1979. Today they are muffled in Burquas. Kabul in the 1950's had women in modern dress in record shops.

Most of the world's population lives in a place where people worship Santa Muerte, or the governments urge them to please on no account kill and eat Pygmies or Albinos for magic powers, or where women are honor killed because they talked to the wrong boy. These are places where commerce means only poverty, because now they must pay more for food and everything else, and they have nothing to sell. These are places where violence is a way of life, constant and casual, and where it is viewed as the best way to get ahead in life.

Globalization has hotwired these places right into Western civilization, and they are not being removed any time soon. Violence, and disturbing violence, are only going to increase. Why? Because the State is a joke, unable to stop violence any more (quick how many Flash Mobs have been crushed) and only able to send middle class people to jail for improperly filling their recycle trash bins. While all the while lacking any external measures to deal with violence except things done in secret and willingly ignored.

Pinker, and Brecher, are state of the art circa say, 1975. Today, they don't grasp that failing states all over the globe (particularly in the West where violence to suppress greater violence is not allowed against non-Whites, see the London riots) running hand in hand with moral pretensions, are easy pickings for failed societies that live in violence. For now, the great majority of Santa Muerte's violence stays South of the Border. That is unlikely to remain so, any more than Muslim violence will remain mostly outside of the West either.

Mr. EBT and the Death of the Welfare State

2011-09-19T17:57:00.000-07:00

One of the most fascinating things about the internet is how it collapses different cultures, events, and people into an "endless now" entirely outside the mainstream media's attempt to edit and control the news that people receive. The video on Youtube linked by Drudge today ("My EBT" by "Mr. EBT") promises an incendiary repudiation of not just Obama, but every Democratic policy since LBJ.

Clive Crook at the Financial Times believes only a "move to the middle" can save Obama's Presidency, but Obama encapsulates much of what the Democratic Party has become: the Anti-White Guy/anti-White Middle Class party.

Democrats rely on gerrymandered districts, with Black and Hispanic voters, and state and nationwide, on Black votes around 95%+, and Hispanic votes around 65-70%+, to win. With a about 30% of the White vote, this is often enough. And the coalition of the anti-White votes and the White elite (Steve Sailer's "hi-lo" team-up) is based on transferring money from middle class voters to Black/Hispanic patronage politicians, and folks like Mr. EBT.

At a time when unemployment is at record highs, families are stressed by ever rising food and energy and clothing costs, Clive Crook does not get it, nor do most of the establishment. Voters among the White middle and working class have rejected the Welfare State because the Welfare State does not exist for them. The Welfare State exists for Mr. EBT. A man incapable of earning a living or doing much of anything, other than "keeping it real, dog." The Bismarckian Welfare State, giving ordinary workers a direct stake in the State, by getting various checks and benefits, regularly, is gone. Taken up by race-based Welfare and a permanent Jihad against the White working and middle class.

It is Mr. EBT on the lower end, making life miserable for pretty much everyone, and various enthusiasms of the White Elite Upper Classes, such as "green" lunacy, hideously expensive electricity rates, banning private autos (but not limousines), flights for the average person (but not private jets) and the like.

There is no more money to be gotten out of the White middle and working class, without a French Revolution style fight over taxation. There is no legitimacy or trust or desire to fund a Welfare State oriented around Mr. EBT. This video, a trivial affair, may yet be the opening start of the widespread repudiation of the Welfare State. Drudge has linked to it from the top of his page. The NYT obviously does not want anyone to see it, nor does the rest of the media. But the very act of the Drudge Report alone (which dwarfs the page views of say, the NYT or CNN) linking it and millions of voters and taxpayers seeing it, is revolutionary.

There is no going back to the Welfare State. The Tea Party exists because ordinary White working people, of some money or struggling means, just don't believe the government exists for any other purpose other than to take money from them and give it to Mr. EBT. Barack Obama and his policies just to borrow a Marxist phrase, sharpen the contradictions and class warfare (with overt racial underpinnings) between the hi-lo team up and the White majority. White guilt and shame are poor foundations for that sort of coalition, and the "swipe, swipe" of Mr. EBT may just start the beginning of the end of the Welfare State. You cannot ask the majority of the nation to make themselves patsies forever.

Nintendo's Best Bet: Kid Friendly E-Readers

2011-09-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

Nintendo's DS with 3-D is a failure. Fears by parents (who buy the things, after all) over seizures and the like limited its sales. Another round of price cuts from $249 to $169, have failed to boost sales. Nintendo has always been the cheaper, affordable, and kid-friendly (no violent stuff for parents who buy the systems anyway) gaming system. That strategy, along with intensive in-house development and integration, has allowed Nintendo to survive when other systems dropped out, were absorbed, or destroyed by larger competitors (mostly Sony and Microsoft). Now of course cheap games on Iphones are really hurting both the Wii and 3DS. But Nintendo has a secret weapon, if only it unleashes it. Books!

E-books are becoming the dominant way in which Americans buy books. Its convenient, fast, and much, much cheaper. With library lending already here for e-pub (Nook and the like) and coming for the Kindle (mobi format), you don't even have to go to your Library. Just download the book from your computer. E-books are cheap, with many free versions of the classics, and other low-cost options of back catalog books. Nintendo has seriously missed an opportunity.

Currently Amazon is the dominant e-reader, but it has an appeal mostly to older, and female consumers. No surprise there, Women account for 80% of the fiction market. Look at the Kindle Ads on TV. They all feature (hot young) women. A kids oriented reader, cheap and good enough, would do well. Particularly if it played kid-friendly, non-violent games (parents are not too keen on shoot-em-up, beat the prostitute to death, games like Grand Theft Auto) and was ... cheap.

Right now, the Kindle with Special Offers is at $114. Of course it needs a cover, and a light for night-reading. But that's cheap. Nintendo could offer a DS, without 3-D (who cares, really) for around $120 with a larger screen, in color, aimed at combining kids reading with educational games. Chess, backgammon, Go, Chinese Checkers, Scrabble, and the like. Currently people are laboriously hacking "homebrew" solutions to read books on their Nintendo DS systems. That's ridiculous. Nintendo ought to offer a cartridge for them, sold off their own website and through retailers, to read e-books. While using their own advantage (in-house engineering staff) to combine cheap/easy gaming and e-books. Bonus if the system reads both e-pub and Kindle mobi format.

E-readers are all targeted at adult women, and that leaves boys and young girls out in the cold. There is a market gap, in which Nintendo can challenge the Ipad and Iphone. No one wants to read a novel on their phone, or much less have their kid reading Treasure Island on it while they need to make a call. A price point of say, $120 that includes games no parent could object to ("Chess makes your kids smarter") and a way of transferring e-books already purchased onto the system, is a no brainer. [Likely a usb-adapter to connect a cartridge to a computer, in a simple file transfer system.] Meanwhile take money put on the table by current Nintendo DS users who would go to the trouble of doing a "homebrew" system. Allow the current DS systems to become e-readers officially, with a Nintendo sanctioned and supported cartridge.

The 3-D bet has obviously failed. Time for Nintendo to do something else. Someone will make a kid-oriented E-reader. It might as well be them.

Anna Faris and What's Your Number: Redefining Female Sexuality

2011-09-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal recently did a story on Anna Faris and her new movie "What's Your Number?"

Produced by New Regency for $25 million and distributed by 20th Century Fox, the movie centers on the sexual exploits of Ally Darling (Ms. Faris), a hard-partying young woman who resolves to track down all of her exes—with the help of a hunky amateur sleuth, played by Mr. Evans—in an attempt to avoid sleeping with more than 20 men in her lifetime.
...
Still, the idea of such a promiscuous lead character was enough to give some studio executives pause. "We had conversations like, 'Is 19 better than 20?' " says Ms. Smith. Ms. Faris wanted to go in the other direction, suggesting to screenwriters Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden that the number of past sexual partners be raised to 50. "They were like, 'No, 20's fine,'" she says.

A slew of new movies centering on women behaving badly have been released or are in the works. Hollywood is aiming them straight at female audiences, and they reflect a redefinition of female sexuality.

Some of these movies have been failures. Crazy, Stupid Love has made only $78 million domestically, as of this writing, and only $21 million in foreign revenues, according to Box Office Mojo. The movie cost $50 million to make and another $30 million or so to market, so the movie is likely a net loss, but not one that is a terrible drag (studios always get considerably less than gross revenues, taking around 75% of the first week end revenue and around 50% of the revenue thereafter domestically, and often selling foreign rights at a fixed fee in concert/bundling with other films). The movies are cheap to make, and Hollywood facing huge drops in DVD revenue, no rescue in 3-D, and no great rescues in streaming, is looking to cut costs and find a formula for making cheap movies they can sell and make profits on, even with reduced margins.

In addition, many studio execs are now courting female audiences, an easy transition from the female orientation of TV, from which many mid-level execs have made their transition. While Network heads and production studio heads in TV remain mostly male, the execs under them are often women, which makes sense given that most people watching television are in fact, women. Male-oriented films are a risk. They can hit big, like the Batman films under Christopher Nolan, 300, Taken, the Transformer movies, and some of the Marvel films. Or they can fail spectacularly, like Green Lantern, or Green Hornet, or Cowboys and Aliens. When the movies fail, they do so at a great cost -- the movies require expensive action sequences, often pricey CGI, and represent considerable downside risk. Since most execs don't share in the upside, they tend to want to hedge their downside. This as much as anything accounts for the desire to make a lot more chick-flicks, just raunchy ones.

What is interesting is that the films are redefining sexuality among women, particularly in acceptable behavior, but that there are still limits. Faris wanted the "number" to be 49 sexual partners, and the lead want to avoid sleeping with 50 not 20 men. The screen writers took a more conservative tack, wanting only 19 partners for the lead, not 49. But the limits are being pushed outward, not inward. This reflects in my view a fundamental unhappiness that modern Western women have with their men. Women in the West have moved to far greater heights, than compared to women in any other time and culture. But they remain unhappy, they want "more" from their men. If they live lives richer and more fulfilled in many ways than Cleopatra, they want Caesar or Marc Antony. Not boring old Beta Male Bill in the cubicle next door.

"Crazy, Stupid Love" falls into this category. The plotline concerns the lead character, played by Steve Carrell, who is having dinner with his wife, played by Julianne Moore. She tells him she's unhappy, is having an affair with a co-worker (played by Kevin Bacon), and wants a divorce. They had married as high-school sweethearts and Moore is the only woman Carrell's character had slept with. The rest of the movie concerns Carrell working with a younger, Pickup Artist mentor (Ryan Gosling), to become attractive to women, and gently rebuffing the 17 year old babysitter who has a crush on him to his 13 year old son's dismay. All so he can "win back" his ex-wife who Carrell's character admits to, "was responsible" for the break-up of their marriage by ... not being sexy enough and desired by other women.

The largely failed, because of course it wasn't attractive to men, and women don't want to go back to a guy who failed initially at being sexy. If a man fails in that regard, women want to trade up. This is the appeal of George Clooney, or Brad Pitt. They ARE already sexy, and therefore are the goal to which female protagonists largely aspire in their movies. Besides, most women would prefer Kevin Bacon to Steve Carrell, fantasy wise. But it is interesting in how Hollywood perceives women's interests, and so far as women are generally unhappy with the state of men today in the West (not sexy enough) that is relatively accurate.

TV is even getting into the act, with Are You There Vodka, It's Me, Chelsea based on the memoir by Chelsea Handler and starring Laura Prepon ("That 70's Show") as Chelsea. The lead character is wildly promiscuous, and often drunk. Set to debut mid-season on NBC, the show like Sex and the City is unapologetic about serial sexual behavior by the attractive female lead. Hollywood in both movies and TV is betting that women are comfortable with portraying lots of sexual partners for women as something not to be ashamed of, at least as long it is below a magic number. That's pretty revolutionary, in terms of what women themselves have defined in the West as acceptable sexuality.

Underlying the promiscuity, in both Sex and the City, and the Handler book and TV series (as well as the Faris movie) are the unhappiness the female leads encounter with the men in their lives. It was Tiger Woods who cheated on Swedish supermodel Elin Nordgren, not the other way around. It is George Clooney who dumps his girlfriends, not the other way around. It is Leonardo Di Caprio, who dumps his girlfriends, not the other way around. Women in the West are desperately searching for a dominant, Alpha A-hole they can keep, and since the price these men extract is casual sex, that is what drives an ever expanding sexual partner count for modern Western Women. As I noted back in 2010,, author Julie Klausner's "I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others" details her tawdry sexual encounters searching for that elusive, dominant Alpha A-hole male:

Like most of us, she spent her twenties ricocheting from douchebag to douchebag, and she reveals every crappy moment in her dating memoir I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others. As expected, there are tons of laugh-out-loud lines delivered from Klaunser's sharp-wit pen. More surprisingly is how cringeworthy tales of blow jobs with goths and bedbug-infested one-night stands are followed with sage observations. For instance, she points out the stark difference between guys and men. (As she writes, if Mad Men was called Mad Guys, it'd star Joe Pesci and not Jon Hamm.)
...
Historically, leading men, at least in comedy, have featured either the feckless or the boorish: the Fred Flintstones and Bullwinkles and then useless beta males. In my book, I say date guys like Rowlf and Fozzi and not Kermit. Let me think about it.
...
It's the teenage boys I'm worried about. They're not going to college in numbers. They're going to be angry -- depending on who's coming back from the war. There are charities for girls and I'm all for that, but ultimately, the real problem is the epidemic of inferior men - which is basically what my book is about.

Women have been trying to tell men in the West what is wrong. They just are not sexy enough, dammit! Useless, inferior, beta males. That's why they sleep with hipsters, trustafarians, indie rockers, and felons. Ricocheting as the reviewer (herself a young woman) from douchebag to douchebag. Hollywood is dialed into that complaint, itself being populated in middle and near upper level management, by women. Who share the same complaint. Its one thing if say, your husband is Robert Downey Jr. He's a big time movie star. He's Iron Man, or Sherlock Holmes! It is quite another if your husband or boyfriend is some corporate drone, who does not excite respect or more importantly, desire among your girlfriends. If your girlfriend does not want to sleep with him, he's a useless, inferior, beta male.

This is why Hollywood is worth examining. Hollywood tends to respond poorly, like GM before it, to demands by its customers, but it does respond. How it operates, and what it produces, tells you at least what elite women are thinking, and the men around them as well, in terms of how society functions and how they think it ought to function. So far at least, Hollywood (and publishing) recognize that the large amounts of sexual partners their attractive leading ladies (Klausner is not bad looking, Handler quite attractive in her twenties, Prepon a classic leading lady, Faris quite attractive, Moore still turns heads at age 52) end up with in films/stories is a result of there being too few Alpha A-hole men that are willing to commit. To be that reformed bad boy (like Downey Jr.) that has both domesticity, but not too much, an edge like a fighting dog that is well trained.

That this is not a realistic expectation, for the 99.99% of women who lack the supermodel beauty of say, Giselle Bundchen needed to attract a Tom Brady in the first place, has not yet penetrated. But clearly women are not happy with all these partners, preferring in the main to have one great, sexy, dominant, super-guy. And complaining when they don't get one.

The male part of the equation is of course ignored, but Hollywood being a gay-female ghetto that is to be expected.

Addendum to Whiskey's Law

2011-09-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

In Why The West Collapsed: Case Study Sweden, I proposed "Whiskey's Law" which states that the degree of Multiculturalism and PC in a society is directly related to the amount of equality between men and women, and particularly between men and women of the elites. That the greater the equality between the sexes, all other things being equal, the more loathing of the civilization, culture, heritage, race, religion, and so on will occur in the society. And the greater emphasis on Multiculturalism, PC, and in particular an attempt to import non-Western peoples. A society that has social superiority between (particularly younger) women and their male peers will therefore all other things being equal, will be plagued by PC and Multiculturalism. Naturally, as with all social science theories, this remains merely a theory, and subject to constant revision. In my view, however, any attempt to explain the collapse of the West into PC garbage, must fit the facts, and explain the variance, why some societies are more PC than others.

In the same way that Black society is worth studying, because Blacks collapsed much faster into illegitimacy than Hispanics, Whites, and Asians, so too are places like Sweden, or the United Kingdom. Any remedy that seeks to reverse say, illegitimacy will find far greater effectiveness if it can first understand why the Black nuclear family so rapidly ceased to exist, and why Asians have the lowest rate of illegitimacy among racial groups in the US. Whiskey's Law is only a theory, one I offer for testing and revision, to understand why PC and Multiculturalism is so strong in some places and not in others, and how to remedy the situation.

There are of course limits. Switzerland may have a greater social distance between men and women (women only got the vote over all Cantons in 1971), or it may be that direct democracy simply limits elites. It is however quite odd that elites in the West conspire in the "hi-lo" team-up as Steve Sailer noted, with the low part of the team-up being foreigners. A commenter from India noted that the elites in India have basically brushed off the middle class, noting they have hundreds of millions of votes from poor people, and thus don't have to listen to middle class concerns. But India did not see the need to import impoverished foreigners against their own people, nor has similar "hi-lo" team-ups in places like say, Thailand, or Portugal or Ireland or Hungary resulted in mass immigration, even when in some cases the amount of poor people is relatively low compared to the middle class. It seems odd that elites in the West would seek to import aliens in every way to their nations, given the overt threat to replacing them, which they themselves recognize. The famous quote in Sweden by a high ranking Socialist party member that when Muslims become the majority they will treat Swedes well. Who really believes that?

Other nations that have low amounts of PC and Multiculturalism may be reflecting direct democracy and limits on elites, rather than higher amounts of inequality socially between men and women. But it does seem quite odd that elites in places like Sweden loathe themselves and their nation, while in say, Japan the elites love Japan and all aspects of being Japanese. As do say, Italians and being Italian, even or especially among the elites. Italian elites as far as I know, don't go around disparaging Verdi or Da Vinci and saying they were nothing but trash for being "Dead White Men." Nevertheless the usefulness or not of "Whiskey's Law" remains in its power to describe and PREDICT what societies will be riven by self-hatred and thus PC and Multiculturalism, and which societies will be relatively free of it.

I must also point out that what (under Whiskey's Law) Western Women are seeking, and particularly Elite Western Women, is not a Hitlerian "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" society, (children, kitchen, church) but one in which men are sexier. If most men are equal, socially, they need to be sexier in other areas. When men do things women say they want, like share household chores, change diapers, cook dinners, do the dishes, etc. they must be far sexier. If today's women's grandmothers were satisfied with men who were faithful, loyal, loving and dependable, and their mothers with men who were faithful, loyal, loving, dependable, and charming and intelligent, today's women demand men who are faithful, loyal, loving, dependable, charming, intelligent, and most of all SEXY!. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Leonardo Di Caprio can afford to change diapers, or take care of kids, or be a "Kitchen Bitch" if they want to -- they're big time hot celebrity men who most of the female population wants to have sex with, they can afford it. Today's men, cannot, without an extra effort to become far sexier than they already are.

This accounts in my view, for the failure of the nuclear family in the West, seen first among Black people. Most men cannot be George Clooney, by definition. And being a sexy dominant A-hole who is also charming, in other words "Game" as defined by the various pickup artists, such as "Mystery," or Neil Strauss (aka "Style") or Roissy, is akin to becoming an accomplished martial artist. It takes massive dedication, constant practice, extended training, and astonishing amounts of discipline. Time that competes with all other demands.

Women when made equal to most men, don't want a return to social inequality at lower, previous levels. They do not want a return to being "barefoot and pregnant" in the kitchen. Indeed if you look at the movie "Bridesmaids" which plays on female fears of status and romance, the lead character is insecure because she's unemployed, suddenly, loses her boyfriend, and looks like nothing compared to a successful friend. Women want to keep their careers which mark them successful, competent, and important, outside romantic relationships. Women know, that they will not always be pretty (the error many women consistently make is overestimating their time that they will be pretty). They do not want, despite the popularity of Mad Men, and other projects mining that territory (correction, "Pan Am" is being shown on ABC, not NBC, "Playboy Club" is on NBC), to return to the days of female social inequality. Women in the West merely want sexier men. Sexy being defined as dominant, cocky, arrogant, amusing, always having the right words to say, and being desired by all other women around them.

The ability of men in the West to become what women want, that level of sexiness, is probably quite limited. A few pick up artists and their followers, if they practice diligently, can become that kind of man. Which women find quite satisfying. Probably more common will be the "Situation" type approach, the muscle-guido combination which is found in the site Hot Chicks With Douchebags. It probably does not matter which approach is taken, the recovery of the West hinges on women finding Western men sexy and therefore worthy of defense and admiration. If most men become like the Situation, well it does not matter in the short term, because then PC and Multiculturalism would die down. Most Western Women finding their men quite sexy, because now even if they were roughly equal in pay, status in the company, and so on, working alongside them in a cubicle next door, many women would want them. Therefore, they are by definition desirable. And thus, worthy of defense.

PC and Multiculturalism, therefore, as defined as part of "Whiskey's Law" is merely the overt disgust of most Western women particularly those in the elites with the non-sexy nature of the men who are mostly equal to them. If not outright inferior in social stature, a dweeby guy being inferior to a hot chick, even if the dweeby guy is a relatively high earning accountant and the hot chick works at a Starbucks. The way then to kill PC and Multiculturalism, if "Whiskey's Law" is at all an accurate model for explaining those phenomena, is to make most men far sexier. Thus erasing the reason for PC/Multiculturalism among (particularly) elite women.

Can the West be saved? I think yes, but it will not be saved by acts of bravery, it is sad that no one remembers or cares about 9/11 and the heroic sacrifices of the firemen and police that day, or the passengers who fought back on Flight 93. Women particularly in the elite do not lust after them. Instead of Special Ops fighters, firemen, cops, and ordinary men thrust into heroism, women lusted after sparkly gay vampires (Twilight) or more brutal kinds (Tru Blood). Justin Bieber and Robert Pattinson are objects of lust. Not firemen and cops.

Rather, the West will be saved by men like the Situation, or Roissy, or those who follow either path. To become sexy. Like it or not, the fundamentals of human nature still apply. Women will defend men they find desirable and sexy, no matter what they do. Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, all behaved criminally or poorly, but women defend them because they are the big-shot big man dominant A-hole that most crave. [Not all women crave the A-hole, but enough do to make that behavior the dominant preference in women in the West.] No amount in justifiable pride in the considerable achievements of the West, which in total add up to far higher than any other civilization, will save the West. Women don't care about that any more than they find the ability of male nerds to create amazing technology sexy. Rather it is the social dominance by being attractive to the broadest range of women that has the only possibility of saving the West. One Pickup Artist or Douchebag at a time.

Steroids Are Bad For You

2011-09-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

Submitted without comment:

Why The West Collapsed: Case Study Sweden

2011-09-10T15:39:00.000-07:00

The case study method has much to recommend it. There are many theories as to why the West has collapsed, into Multicultural, PC-driven weakness. But no Western nation has collapsed as quickly, and as completely, as Sweden. As the above video notes, the constitution no longer requires citizenship to hold high or sensitive office, and the constitution now requires multiculturalism. As the speaker notes, Swedes are now (or their elites are) ashamed of being ... Swedish. And are attempting to replace Sweden and the Swedish Identity with something else, as rapidly as possible. Sweden as the "rape capital of Europe?" Swedish (and other) feminists don't mind. They certainly do not blame the perpetrators: Muslims in Sweden. Deportation of Iraqi Christians but not Muslims? Lying about who perpetrates rapes in Sweden. Hmm. Where have I seen something like that before?

The Case Study Method is not without its flaws, but has quite a number of benefits:

When the Harvard Business School was started, the faculty quickly realized that there were no textbooks suitable to a graduate program in business. Their first solution to this problem was to interview leading practitioners of business and to write detailed accounts of what these managers were doing. Cases are generally written by business school faculty with particular learning objectives in mind and are refined in the classroom before publication. Additional relevant documentation (such as financial statements, time-lines, and short biographies, often referred to in the case as "exhibits"), multimedia supplements (such as video-recordings of interviews with the case protagonist), and a carefully crafted teaching note often accompany cases.

In my view, doing a "mini-case study" on Sweden is beneficial to understanding WHY the West has collapsed, and what can be done about it.

There are several main theories floating around on the various parts of the "Right" or one should say, non-Left. The first blames PC and Multiculturalism on The Frankfurt School, of committed and hyper-competent Cultural Marxists who globally changed the culture to one of PC and Multiculturalism, and led people like Swedes to loathe themselves and worship ... Muslims. The second is that old-time favorite, "It's the Jews you idiot! What was the question." Here the Jews ... used mind-control rays to control a global population in the West, including places historically Jew-Friendly like Germany and France, to ... loathe themselves and import lots of Muslims. Who are notably Jew-friendly. Those "devious Jews!" What will they think of next? [That's sarcasm for those not getting it.] Variations of these two theories blame politicians in search of votes, who import immigrants, or feminism, or the like. Elitism, and a disconnect are blamed. While some of these elements contain partial explanations, in my view they are merely attributes of a much broader, wider element.

Which is massive social change driven by new technology, which in turn drives new economic winners and losers, power-grab opportunities, and a fundamental restructuring of the social order in the West. This has happened before.

The Protestant Reformation, with Martin Luther's 95 Thesis nailed to the Cathedral door in 1517, or Henry VIII in 1529, happened against a backdrop of increasing Catholic Church corruption (Pope Alexander had numerous mistresses and illegitimate children) and insatiable demands for more money (to build massive Cathedrals in Rome and hire massive amounts of mercenaries to build the Papal States). But whereas Jan Hus was burned at the stake, and John Wycliffe was declared a heretic after his death, the Protestants mostly made their break with Rome stick. Scandinavia, Switzerland, much of Germany (the Northern Parts), and the United Provinces which rebelled against Catholic Spain from 1568-1609, all broke successfully from Rome. Northern France was partly Protestant, but did not remain so for long.

Whereas Cathars and other break-away groups such as the Waldensians largely failed, the Protestants in Northern Europe mostly succeeded. Why?

The success was driven by a number of factors, crucially including technology, and involving ... money. The Printing Press allowed, the upper classes, the most critical being the new Merchant Houses, to read the Bible for themselves. Not needing a Priest to explain for them what Christianity was about. A pre-literate Church, the Catholic Church, could not long compete with great Merchant Houses that had their own Bibles and wished to direct their own priests with their own money in their own way (hint: the most Godly were not the Popes and Priests of Rome, but the ... Merchant Houses. Did not God favor them with commercial success?) But just as important as the printing press were gunpowder and Atlantic sailing vessels.

Already by the 1200's, places like Bruge, or the Hanseatic League, had grown very, very rich. Off the wool trade from England, and the fur, timber, and iron trade from Scandinavia, respectively. Letters of credit from these great Merchant Houses were good, as good as gold from the Kings of Europe, and perhaps better, since the former were prone to debasing their currency with too much lead in their coins. The great late Medieval churches in places like Bruge attest to the power and influence the region in the Belgian and Dutch lowlands possessed. As do surviving churches and houses in Northern Germany built around the same time. These places were already rich. And they got richer, particularly in the Netherlands, when trade with the East via great galleons and Atlantic going cargo ships commenced, and with the West with the appearance of sugar. Sugar was particularly important, a century later William Blake did the portrait of a West Indies Sugar Baron having his morning rum poured by a West Indian Slave girl, note how Blake has made the Baron look like a Turkish potentate (the parallel is not meant to be flattering). Sugar was immensely valuable, being rare and unable to be grown in quantities outside the tropics. The Netherlands prospered under what were for the times, enormous riches. Northern Germany meanwhile remained a center of trade with Scandinavia, offering furs, amber, iron, and above all timber (for ships of all types) as well as firearms, clocks, wrought iron, and porcelain. The amount of money was just staggering.

In military developments, gunpowder had changed the way in which Europeans fought. Medieval Kings did not have heavy monetary requirements. Feudal arrangements pushed most of the need to support fighting men onto barons and other great lords, who maintained the mounted knights, and other fighting men, through massive landed estates. In an era where coins were scarce to non-existent, and armies were small, consisting of a core of highly trained (often for decades) and heavily armored mounted fighting men, backed by a fairly disciplined and skilled set of archers, pikeman, and men at arms, power lay with the great lords, mostly, not the Kings. As one English King named John found to his sorrow at Runnymeade. Kings had neither the means (cash on hand) nor the ability to train and retain fighting men year-round, on their own. Thus feudal states were relatively weak, relatively decentralized, and also fairly land-based. Charlemagne, for all his power, was never able to crush Viking incursions, much less meet them on the open sea, in battle. The great King and Emperor mostly just paid the Northmen off.

Gunpowder changed all that. Now, great Merchant Houses could and would fund Kings and Princes to their liking. With professional, year round armies made up not of hideously expensive mounted knights who required twenty years of training, but various middling class and peasants, trained by officers on a few simple tasks with a musket, made easier by ... the printing press which could print out training manuals from the finest military minds of Europe. Bombards and cannon meant high curtain walls and castles were no match for a King with a professional army at his back, and engineering (low, earthen walls to absorb cannon fire, and star forts providing cross-fire) supplanted feudal levies and knights. This meant power shifted to Kings, and those who aided Kings with money. The Merchant Princes, in other words.

The Catholic Church, with its fat system of monasteries and landed estates, were a tempting target not only to Henry VIII, but others who wished to sell all those lands, for quick and easy cash, and had willing buyers (Merchant Princes) with cash on hand. Buyers who moreover would now be bonded to the Ruler, because a Catholic return would lose the buyers their lands and perhaps their heads. Yes Henry had a need to get a quickie divorce or five, but there was all that money to be made. What would the Pope do, send an Army? Or Navy? Now Henry had a big navy, with big guns on board, staffed by professional sailors, who could use compasses to navigate (along with Astrolabes and star charts).

So, in places with Merchant Houses (who never ruled, but nevertheless provided critical financial support for Kings and Rulers they approved of in the North), lots of tempting Church lands, Kings wanting to challenge the Pope, and many able men willing to join in and fight, the Protestant Revolution worked out quite well. In places like Switzerland (ample for defense, and with few great landed estates and many merchant houses) even nearness to the Pope was no problem. While Spain, far from the Pope, had no merchant houses to speak of, no Kings with a cash problem solved only by selling off Church lands (in Spain there was no one able to buy them anyway), and so remained quite Catholic.

It was not JUST the printing press. It was gunpowder, and the Merchant Houses (providing cash to all those big armies with lots of peasants and middling class men with muskets instead of knights run by feudal levy), and big sailing ships carrying cargo (which made the Merchants even richer) that fueled and made certain the Protestant Revolution in those places. All together, had rapidly changed Catholic Europe (in 1492, Europe was completely and it would seem, irrevocably Catholic) into one that was either Protestant or Catholic, and divided among Protestants also.

How then, does Sweden of today, undergoing now a change as profound as that from Catholic Europe in the early 1500's, compare?

Sweden, has almost no Jews. Sweden has been hostile, in fact, to Jews throughout most of its Christian history (few Jews at all ventured into Viking Scandinavia). Though Sweden had few Jews in its history, it has been reliably anti-Israel, and anti-Jewish, since the founding of Israel in 1948. Casual anti-Semitism characterized 19th Century Sweden, and Sweden of course like Switzerland collaborated heavily with the Nazis to avoid invasion and occupation. Meanwhile, Italy with its overtly anti-Muslim Lega Nord, under Mussolini did the bare minimum to assist the Nazi's Final Solution. Primo Levi's mother and sister rode out the War in their Roman apartment. Their neighbors shopped for them. No Italian of course, would have ever trusted their government, Fascist, Communist, or anything else. Or wanted any contact whatsoever with the government, in any way. While Sweden has had up to recently, a fairly non-corrupt, fairly efficient, government. But Switzerland is made up of mostly German speakers, who collaborated with the Nazis, and has a government that is efficient and not very corrupt.

Switzerland of course has passed restrictions on Muslim immigration, and minaret building. While possessed of crazy impulses (lawyers for plants, mandatory sex lessons for kindergartners) like most of Europe, Switzerland has passed several anti-Muslim measures (to be fair it has more direct democracy bypassing elites than say, Sweden). But comparing Sweden, or Switzerland, or Itay, or Germany, one finds not much Jewish influence or presence, and relatively large doses of PC and Multiculturalism. If it was "the Jews you idiot, what was the question?" then one would expect that a lack of Jews in say ... Germany would make that nation, and also Sweden, and Switzerland, a paragon of anti-PC, anti-Multiculturalism. Yet Sweden and Germany are fairly PC and Multiculturalism driven, Sweden being by far the worst of any nation on Earth, and yet lacking totally in Jews. Germany, being notably not ... Jew friendly to put it mildly, is also PC and Multiculturalism-driven. Under a recession and fiscal hard times, not a single German politician has proposed "Let's kick out immigrants and spend the social welfare on ourselves!"

Nor does the explanation of Frankfurt School cultural Marxists hold water. Real, actual hard-core Marxists have a way of dealing with things. Shooting people. Stalin, Chavez, Castro, Guevara, the Kims, all deal with opposition by ... shooting people. Sometimes after torture. In East Germany they built a giant wall, a Secret Police goon squad, and kept prisons well stocked. Male-oriented tyrannies always do this. Violence is the stock in trade, and there are huge goon squads operating under brutal patronage rules to enforce compliance. Indeed, real Hollywood Marxists called before the HUAC hearings who refused to testify (but were card-carrying members of the Communist Party) never loathed being White or male. Or thought that America should disband itself into a Mestizo driven Mexico Norte. Tom Joad was not a "hillbilly zombie," but the moral conscience of America. Johnny may have got his gun, but Dalton Trumbo did not reject violence, just for capitalism's sake. The socialist paradise that Trumbo and Schulberg and the rest envisioned was mostly White, and mostly working-class. Just with them at the top, not Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner.

Besides which, how can you sell self-loathing to people who don't already hate themselves? How can most people be induced to hate themselves? Most people don't hate themselves, indeed they mostly love themselves. Often, far too much, where the mirror becomes their own God. If subliminal advertising and the like were all powerful, half the cars sold in America would still be GM-made. As they were in the early 1960's. Telling men and women of a country that their heritage, race, religion, history, culture, language, and everything else is worthless, and that obviously failed Third World cultures are superior, are a tough sell. Most people just have too high a regard for themselves. Imagine going to Boston, and telling people in Sports Bars that the Red Sox and Patriots are worthless and should be disbanded, that they should all become Yankees and Jets fans. How many patrons would actually say, "Gee, that's right. I HATE the Sox and Pats. Go Jets! Go Yanks!"

There is no magic button to mind-control masses of people. The more a group desperately asserts something to be true, creates memory holes, and the like the more resistance they create (not the least of which is that young, hungry and ruthless men of ambition are freed by an ever-changing past to seize power and create their own realities in which they are the heroes). Power runs from patronage, fear, control, tradition, and the interplay of these factors combined. Machiavelli had it more right than Orwell in writing the Prince. Neither Stalin nor the BBC could create a "New Man."

Rather, if you look at Sweden, one thing stands out. Like the Kingship of Henry VIII, or the splendid defense of the Mountains and pikeman in Switzerland, or the great wealth in the United Provinces. Women.

Or rather, the nearly full equality, and perhaps even minor social superiority, of Swedish women to Swedish men.

In no other place, are women as fully socially equal to men as in Sweden. Sweden was not always like this, mind, as anyone reading Ibsen (a Norwegian but Norwegian society was at the time akin to that of Sweden) could attest. But starting in the post-WWI era, in 1921, women gained unlimited suffrage (as in the American West, Swedish women had in certain places limited suffrage in the late 19th Century). Norway granted universal suffrage in 1913, Great Britain in 1928, the US in 1920, and in 1971 for Switzerland (all cantons, universally).

Naturally, suffrage alone does not mean equal or slightly superior moral status for women. Mexico has had equal suffrage since 1953, and no would would assert full social equality for women there. But Sweden has gone farther than most nations in making women socially equal, most of the time, to most men, most of the time, if not in fact socially superior. The Feminist Initiative proposed to ban marriage, and generated visits and donations from Jane Fonda, and a member of ABBA (Benny Andersson). Swedish Kindergartens make boys wear dresses:

Swedish journalist Kurt Lundgren had a noteworthy story on his blog this week. A friend told him about a magazine published by Lärarförbundet, the Swedish Teachers’ Union, the largest union for teachers and heads of schools in the country. The magazine, aimed at preschool teachers who take care of children between the ages of 0-6 years old, included recommendations to not only promote “gender equality” but also “sexual equality” at this tender age.
...
In a kindergarten in Stockholm, the parents were encouraged by the preschool teachers - apparently ideological pioneers - to equip their sons with dresses and female first names. There are now weeks in some places when boys HAVE TO wear a dress. Lundgren considers this sexual indoctrination as worse than the political: “The political nonsense is seeking to alter opinions - the sex freaks seek to alter the children’s personality, their mentality and their entire constitution.”
...
“When sexual equality was promulgated, and it was decided that a woman’s place was not at home but out at work, there was a rapid change in the language. The customary Swedish for housewife is husmor, which is honourable; it was replaced by the neologism hemmafru, literally ‘the-wife-who-stays-at-home’, which is derogatory. Within a few months, the mass media were able to kill the old and substitute the new term. By the end of 1969, it was almost impossible in everyday conversation to mention the state of housewife without appearing to condemn or to sneer. Swedish had been changed under the eyes and ears of the Swedes. Husmor had been discredited; the only way out was to use hemmafru ironically. Connected with this semantic shift, there was a change in feeling. Women who, a year or so before, had been satisfied, and possibly proud, to stay at home, began to feel the pressure to go out to work. The substitution of one word for the other had been accompanied by insistent propaganda in the mass media, so that it was as if a resolute conditioning campaign had been carried out. Very few were able to recognize the indoctrination in the linguistic manipulation; in the real sense of the word, the population had been brain-washed.”
...
In Sweden, it is thus unacceptable if girls are presented with pink ice-creams or Barbie dolls because this reinforces gender stereotypes, but the burka is just fine. Meanwhile, Sweden is in the midst of the most explosive rape wave in Scandinavian history, largely caused by immigration. While Swedish girls are called “whores” by Muslim immigrants, Swedish boys are told to wear a dress and study queer theory.

Sweden is supposedly the most “gender equal” country in the world. It’s also one of the nations most eagerly (at least officially, all other viewpoints are banned) embracing Multiculturalism. Promoting “sexual equality” alongside a rapidly growing Muslim minority is going to become an increasingly challenging balancing act.

What does Sweden itself say:

Sweden has one of the highest levels of gender equality in the world. This is based on the belief that a more just and democratic society results from women and men sharing power and influence equally. A well developed welfare system makes it easier for both sexes to balance their work and family life.

Gender equality is a cornerstone of Swedish society. It means that women and men have the same opportunities, rights and obligations in all areas of life. It implies that they can work and support themselves, combine work and care of their children on the same terms, and that neither sex in a relationship need worry about being subjected to abuse or violence.

In the Global Gender Gap Report 2008, Sweden was one of the world leaders in equality. The report, drawn up at the initiative of the World Economic Forum, measures equality in four areas: economics, politics, education and health. It can be read at www.weforum.org.

Or, as Sandra Tsing Loh wrote in the Atlantic:

Some of us stay married because … what else is there? A lonely apartment and a hot plate?

That said, it’s clear that females are dissatisfied—more and more, divorce seems to be initiated by women. If marriage is the Old World and what lies beyond is the New World, it’s the apparently stable men (comfortable alone in their postfeminist den with their Cook’s Illustrated and their porn) who are Old Worlders, and the Girls’ Night Out, questionnaire-completing women who are the questing New Worlders. They most embody what Tocqueville described as America’s “restless temper,” or l’inquiétude du caractère. (Interestingly, according to EnlightenNext magazine, some northern European women are reportedly eschewing their progressive northern European male counterparts and dating Muslims, who are more like “real men.”)

Double X (a feminist blog) echoed Tsing Loh's lament of the "Kitchen Bitch" in deriding men who are equal and do the laundry, housework, and cooking.

I propose "Whiskey's Law" in which the degree of a nation or society's embrace of Multiculturalism and PC is related directly to the amount of equality and even social superiority between women, on the one hand, and men on the other. That the more most women are equal or slightly superior to most men, the more the society will broadly embrace PC and Multiculturalism. And that further, the more the ELITES are equal among genders, or women elites are slightly superior to most (but not all) male elites, the more the elites will whole-heartedly embrace Multiculturalism and PC.

In my view Sweden, because of its simultaneous embrace of PC and Multiculturalism on the one hand, and female equality on the other hand, is the perfect case study.

Women have been telling men in the West for years, for decades really, what is wrong with the West. It just does not have enough sexy men. And sexy men do not mean metrosexuals. It does not mean guys with rock hard abs, the result of relentless diets and millions of crunches, and a semi-gay attitude (that's half of young male Hollywood). Sexiness is not related to being a blow-dried contestant on American Idol. It is about dominance. Women are hard-wired to crave dominance. Need it, want, do anything for it. Including import lots of dominant Muslim men, in the hope of transforming the nation into a place filled with dominant, sexy A-holes that women crave.

Filled with loathing for a nation, its culture, its society, its history? Heck that describes the average woman's view of the West on a Saturday night when she's pestered by Beta males at the bar and Alpha males ignore her. Women are ruthless in judging a society that does not produce sexy men, and offers nothing else but empty consumerism in its place. No, women did not always HATE HATE HATE Beta males. But largely, they do now. The plague of Multiculturalism, of PC, of the hatred of the West, is almost entirely that of Western women rejecting the "Kitchen Bitch," the man who is roughly equal to her (or even, slightly socially inferior since he must pursue and she must accept/reject).

Look at the ads below:

They worked because though women were broadly equal (and had the voting rights to prove it), even a housewife whose husband worked in a factory craved his approval -- he was her social superior. And thus sexy. Women had the slight inequality, socially, that made for a "sexy sweet spot." See the furor over Mad Men (women love it, with its sexy bad cad who is superior to all those secretaries) and NBC is attempting to clone it TWICE with a series about 1960's Pan Am Flight Attendants and a Playboy Club (with sexy bunnies hoping to score the sexy bad boy lead).

Steve Sailer noted wisely:

Returning to these complaints about disparate impact on women in the executive suites, let me point out that one mechanism that thins the ranks of women in the executive suites is that as young women climb the corporate ladder, they come into less and less contact with the dweebier guys down the ladder and more and more contact with the most powerful and ambitious men at the top. Women don't generally love working in the macho atmospheres found higher up, but a lot of them do fall in love with individual macho executives, whom they often marry. And then they tend to downsize their own careers (since their husbands make so much money) to concentrate on helicopter mothering their children.

I recall one young woman at my old company who was shooting up the corporate ladder until she became a direct report to the single most brilliant youngish executive. After awhile, he left his wife and kids to marry her, and then she started concentrating less on her own career and instead on the promoting the career of her very high income, very high potential new husband.

Women want and need sexiness in their men. Which means a dominant, Alpha A-hole. Few men in the West can fill that role, but there was enough social inequality that even Steve's described dweeby male counterparts (who are essential in producing and maintaining a modern, technology driven society) were sexy enough (to secretaries and lower-level status co-workers) that marriages were not the sole province of hot young women and the superstar young execs, but between near but not total equals.

That near but not total equality has been the "Secret Sauce" of the West's success. Preventing male in-fighting over women that retards Muslim polygamous societies, and weak polygamy found in West Africa that reduces male involvement in children to basically, none at all. With kids being left to sink or swim in an environment actively hostile to sustained, focused effort on anything abstract.

Sweden fell because women, pushing for full equality, got it. There is nothing men in the West like to do, for the most part, than please women. This is why the West produces so many "nice guys" that women find detestable.

"Nice guys" are required for technology to keep advancing. One of the factors limiting technological advance is that a man may find some limited financial or intellectual rewards being "a nice guy" into technology, or pour all his effort into being a sexy bad boy. Being a bad boy is work, it takes near total waking hour effort for most men to maintain that posture, since it is not natural and must be honed like a martial art.

Sweden got the equality that women craved, and also that the consumer products industry needs. Women make 85% of all consumer purchases we are told. The business empires of L'Oreal, of Benetton, of "Seven for All Mankind" and other luxury $500 jeans, all depend on an independent, late child-bearing woman who spends money on luxury items weekly instead of baby related stuff. Most women would prefer the baby, but only from a sexy guy. Most of the men in the West, prior to full social equality, were sexy enough to make Alpha pursuit a bone-head affair. Why spend all the time, like say, Monica Lewinsky, aimlessly pursuing an Alpha, when you can have a perfectly sexy guy at home? You might not get a chance at a Ferrari, but Ford Mustang is fun enough to drive, and you won't have to share it. Most men in the West were Ford Mustangs, due to the slight social inequality amidst the sexes.

Now, the Ford Mustangs have disappeared. So "five minutes of Alpha beats five years of Beta" as Roissy says, is a reasonable way of behaving to most women. Look at Lewinsky:

Monica, apparently, is desperately trying to live down her past.

The insider told the Enquirer: 'She's alone most of the time and is pretty much a social pariah.'

The source claims Monica has more or less given up on finding love.' Monica still feels like she's the punchline to a dirty joke,' the source said.' The publicity over her affair with Clinton ruined her chances of ever finding a decent guy.

In June she made a rare outing with a small dinner party at Lucy's El Adobe Cafe in Hollywood.

An eyewitness told the Enquirer that gawkers at other tables were making jokes at her expense, while she looked emotionless. 'She stared at her food throughout the dinner and uttered maybe three sentences, the eyewitness said. 'It was a very awkward, uncomfortable evening.'

In March, MailOnline.com told how Monica is reportedly still in love with him and 'always will be'.

‘Monica still hasn’t got over Bill and would take him back in a second,’ a friend told the Enquirer.

‘She told me: “There will never be another man in my life that could make me as happy as he did".

Well of course. And that is the reason for the collapse of the West in a nutshell. Sweden exemplifies it the most. Collapsing Christianity, allows near unlimited sexual freedom, as women abandon it in droves, and can trade casual sex with Alphas even when relatively fat. Meanwhile their male peers look like a bad bet, and increasingly find aging cougar types such as the Nice Guy hating woman in the video above, a poor bet compared to online porn found on the internet. Women in the West react in turn, by pushing for massive importation of "sexy dominant guys" who are "real men" and hope they can "have it all." A Western society run by what amounts to sexless drones at the bottom of the status heap (Joe Average White guy) doing the Dirty Jobs (as Mike Rowe found) or the technocracy stuff like maintaining power grids, sewer lines, and the like. While "noble lies" about mythical Black scientists prop up the desperate excuse making for the non-Western "Alpha Males."

Thought experiment. Pop in the various excuses Amy Winehouse made publicly, about ex-husband bad boy drug abuser Blake, into quotes in defense of Multiculturalism and PC by various leftists. What would be the effective difference? As Theodore Dalrymple noted (but lacked the courage to explain further), his young female patients, and his older female patients, and even his professional nurses, spurned nice guys with skilled trades (plumbers, carpenters) in favor of violent, abusive bad boys constantly. Until they reached menopause and the end of their sexual desire. If they ended a relationship with one, they found another just like him. Always with the same scars from fighting, tattoos proclaiming a love of violence, and aggressive dominant behavior. And the same excuses, time after time.

Sweden is importing basically, Muslim bad boys, making excuses for rapes and assaults, embracing PC, and loathing its history, culture, and values, because it is run in the main part to appeal to women (if not run by them directly) and there is nothing Women in the West HATE HATE HATE more than a Beta male. Or a Beta Male society. It wasn't always so, but it is today.

It is absolutely striking how female oriented this process is. Yes, there are no female Prime Ministers in Sweden (ever). No Merchant Prince ran England, or the United Provinces, either. Yet that did not negate the very real power of these Merchant Houses, who could raise lots of money for the King or Prince. Or not. Who always had to be carefully considered, because the King and the Prince did not rule absolutely. If women do not rule, and they do not, in the West, their power is among the first. It has to be considered. Their interests and reactions calculated.

And it is striking how PC and Multiculturalism are enforced. No shootings, goon squads, torture, and the like as in male-run oligarchies and repressive regimes. Instead, ostracism, ridicule, civil sanctions, and the like. Stalin would not have bothered with any of that, he'd have simply shot 20 million people or so. Women do poorly with violence, try to avoid dealing it out personally (because they lack intimidation) and though they might love completely those who deal out the violence, even when it rebounds (as it often does) on them, they prefer not to be part of the sharp end. There are few women who want to be cops, fighter pilots, combat infantrymen, and the like. Women whatever their human faults, do not share the bloodlust and desire for killing that men mostly do. Nor indeed are they good at it, either.

So there it is. The Case Study of Sweden, as defined by its fundamental attributes: Gender Equality, and the resultant self-loathing. As Roissy pointed out,

Also from yesterday’s post, commenter Sebastian Flyte highlighted women’s natural inborn revulsion for beta males with the example of the fun bar game Marry Shag Kill:

Another aspect I’m increasingly seeing – WOMEN ARE PITILESS ABOUT BETAS.
Most gamers who run the routine “murder, marry, shag” quickly realise this. For those who don’t, you and the girl point at various people around the bar and state whether you would murder them, marry them, or shag them.

Sometimes I point at wallflowers and guys with no game. I normally just feel bad for them, there-but-for-the-grace-of-god and so forth, me a year ago, he just needs to learn… but women_are_brutal. Murder of course, but they embellish it further with unflattering observations on their penis size, acne, relationship history, masturbation habits… the vitriolic hate they have for these guys, it’s scary. If a couple of alphas walked in and started ripping on the betas, women would join in.

I have noticed the same thing with women when I play Marry Fuck Kill with them. After an initial hesitancy, they get comfortable playing and suddenly the claws and fangs are out, revealing in high definition surround-sound glory their barely submerged joyous hate for the hapless beta male.

The nicer ones might try to think of alternate ways to dispose of the losers.
“Uuumm… yeah I guess I would kill him [pointing at rumpled shirt herb]. Do I really have to kill him? Ew, yuck, could we just have him shot into space or something? Or moved to China?”

If the guy is really emanating the stench of loserness, her killing instinct sharpens:
“Yeah, kill him. Oh god, yes, just kill him.”

If you want to understand how the West was lost, any bar scene will enlighten you. Once, ordinary women were slightly below ordinary men. And craved their acceptance, even of their coffee. Now the men crave acceptance from THEM. And will not get it. There is nothing like the contempt by women for non-sexy men. Hence, a desire to import a whole lot of people, who are not Western, to play status moralizing games (the Help, other "Nice White Lady" moral uplift dramas) or provide "real men."

Gay Star Trek

2011-08-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

There are plans for a new Star Trek TV series. Among the tidbits, two gay leads. Is there a problem with this plan? Sure. As William Goldman noted, in Hollywood "nobody knows anything." But ... in Bar Rescue, a reality series on Spike-TV, bar consultant John Taffer knows quite a lot. With demographic profiles, surveys, even aerial photos of nearby bars and identification of what kind of establishments the competitors are. All that for a reality show. The great "Moneyball" revolution has begun, with ordinary bars, restaurants, and every other small business discovering that computers and simple stat programs (often just spreadsheets) can offer meaningful statistical analysis to make their business a success while others fail. How long can this sort of idiocy, ala "Gay Star Trek" go on?

Not long. Because sooner or later one Hollywood studio will gain dominance by adopting a Moneyball approach.

Goldman believed no one knew anything, and that moreover, no one could know anything. This belief pretty much approximates Baseball management before Bill James and the Moneyball revolution proved this wrong. Making "gut calls" on both players and moves (stealing bases, giving up outs to move a runner up into scoring position, going for "good body" guys who can't hit instead of "ugly" guys who can) is no longer supportable. The same way that trading by big firms has moved away from "gut calls" and instinct to program trading, computerized searches for micro-advantages in mis-pricing, so too has sports management. Besides baseball (the Red Sox, Yankees, Rangers, and other teams have adopted all or part of the Moneyball approach), the NFL (particularly the New England Patriots and New Orleans Saints), NHL, have adopted a method of statistical analysis to overturn long-held but erroneous assumptions about proper strategy and player selection.

Only Will Smith and his agent have really applied any rigor to figuring out what movies are successful, and which ones are not, and identifying common elements. Such as a Sci-Fi theme, action, comedy/humor, and so on. Early in his career, Smith and his agent sat down and did such an analysis, and came up with a set of criteria that he has mostly stuck to, in taking roles or declining them. Such a discipline has led Smith to become one of the all time box office champions, in terms of leading men. And it was not really that hard to figure out.

So too with TV. TV breaks down into female-oriented (which is most of it) and the few scripted shows that guys still watch. Star Trek, the original series, was famously just a Western set in space. Creator Gene Roddenberry pitched it as "Wagon Train to the Stars" and it even had regular Western character actors such as DeForrest Kelly as one of the leads. The original series garnered so-so ratings on NBC during its run, upon cancellation running for decades with great ratings. Various film revivals made lots of money, and series attempts even with living room sets (Star Trek Next Generation) or female captains (Voyager) or looming angry Black guy leads (Deep Space Nine) did acceptable ratings. The secret to the original series repeat success in syndication was being just a Western in space. That was it. The whole point. Nerdy White guys watched in droves, imagining they were Captain Kirk. A guy macho, but not too much, whom they could conceivably become. Those nerdy guys first started balking at imagining themselves the patriarch of some living room in space (Next Generation), then as some Looming Angry Black guy (lead Avery Brooks, a fine Shakespearean actor, for some reason played the character of Commander, later Captain Sisko like Othello). The last straws were Captains as inept female middle managers (Voyager) and milquetoast nebbishes (Enterprise). The final Star Trek TV series, Enterprise, was canceled in February 2005.

Who watches Star Trek? Gays? Nope, only 2-4% of the population is gay. What about the revival of BattleStar Galactica, which had prominent gay characters? That show was mostly watched by ... women. And it had fairly miserable ratings, as it went. Witness the swift cancellation of "Caprica" the follow-on show. Much of the TV business either is too stupid (always a possibility) to realize press and media coverage do not equal popularity (Gossip Girl dominates the media, yet barely ekes out a million in viewers). Or producers and such don't care, they won't share in financial success and just want to raise their profile in the industry for their next job.

Nevertheless, a professional management would have on hand:

1. What is the target audience, how much of them can we realistically expect to get, and how much will advertisers pay to be on our show?
2. How much will the show cost, and how expensive will it get over the years?
3. How long will the show realistically run?
4. How much can the studio sell other areas of revenue, DVDs, merchandising, etc.?

A professional management, would know much indeed. It would know the success rate for each type of show, and each type of audience intended. Women are not fond of action-mostly shows, and men don't watch night-time soaps. It would know how much money would be spent, and how much money would be expected in return.

Proposals such as a Gay Star Trek, would be laughed out of the office. Writers and producers would not even pitch them, for fear of looking stupid. This seems like a monumentally stupid idea, therefore it is almost a lock to go into production.

No one knows anything because they are less motivated than a bar consultant to find out about their business. Who their customers are, what they want, and how much money each type generates. It is astonishing that Warners/DC has not copied Marvel's formula for exploiting, what must be admitted is second-class super-heroes. With a rich pantheon of demi-gods and mythological heroes, DC is making ... Deadman the series, on CW. Along with a flop-tastic Green Lantern, and Jonah Hex. With all that money, why hasn't there been a plan to have Christian Bale's Batman, a Superman, a Captain Marvel, a Doctor Fate, a Hawkman, a Green Lantern, a Flash, a Green Arrow, a Wonder Woman, and a Martian Manhunter team-up in a Justice League Movie? Or two?

Why? Because Warners/DC are run by a bunch of idiots. Meanwhile, Disney has largely left Marvel alone, to make decent to good superhero movies. Thor, Captain America, and the second Hulk movie were all acceptable to good comic book movies. Captain America may be the best of its genre. Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury shows up in all of them, along with the Iron Man movies, and fans are excited. Marvel is not doing anything difficult, and the formula is pretty cut and dried. Stick to the comic book origin and basics of the character. Choose an actor over a physique, and strike a long-term deal. Use good actors in all the roles, don't skimp on support. Treat the script with respect, don't camp or joke it up. Deliver meat and potatoes and the fans will show up -- there is a reason these characters have lasted for in some cases more than half a century. Their creators knew what they were doing -- just don't screw it up.

Nope. Instead we'll get a Gay Star Trek. To match the Gay Christ Allegory of Superman Returns. It will fail, miserably. And execs will say, no one watches sci-fi on TV anymore. Let's do another soap opera.

What the Help Says About America and Obama

2011-08-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

The movie "the Help" has of this writing (Friday, Aug 26, 2011) made approximately $82 million at the box office, against a production budget of only $25 million and a publicity budget quite likely of $30 million. The movie is well on its way to being at least mildly profitable, though nothing like the big-budget winners of say, Iron Man and Iron Man 2 or the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. But still, the movie has been successful. It is worth noting the reasons why the movie (and before it New York Times best-selling novel) has succeeded in what the movie says about America ... and Obama's chances of being re-elected.

Of course, a good deal of the movie's success has to do with counter-programming. It is quite simply the only chick-flick available now. Women like to go to see movies too, and the idea of say, sitting through Cowboys and Aliens or some other action film doesn't appeal to them. In the same way that Jason Statham movies often take advantage of being the only action flick around, this movie benefits from savvy scheduling. The success of the novel, of course is reflective that the bulk of the book-buying public are women. No one would argue that Twilight is a work of great mastery, but women ate up that stuff like crazy. Romance novels from Barbara Cartland on have sold well, and if instead of Fabio on the cover there is the thrill of a hunky, glittery-gay vampire lurking inside the novel, well that's just the market working to serve a hungry readership and audience.

And yes, the "help" even in say, early 1960's Jackson Mississippi was far more likely to be named Frigidaire, or Kitchenmaid, or Hoover, than anything else. Few American housewives had domestic servants of any kind, back then, and even fewer today. Those who do tend to be on the rich side of things. The reality is that Rich and Powerful Black Men employ domestic servants, and these servants tend to be illegal aliens from Mexico. Not downtrodden Black women in the 1960's caring for White babies. The real "help" was automation, and machines, that made domestic life entirely different, in rich countries first and then poor nations. Hans Rosling remembers how in Sweden, his grand-mother cried when she got her first Washing Machine:

Washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, garbage disposals, vacuum cleaners, all made domestic life far easier for the 1950's housewife. Allowing her to work outside the home in the 1960's and onward. The help was not oppressed maids in middle class houses. It was machines, that transformed the brutal work of women in the house to one of manageable chores. Meanwhile Desegregation happened not because of some noble crusade by White women and Black people, but because Whites had already left places like Jackson and New Orleans, for suburban places far from Blacks. The cheap automobile, provided by Ford, GM, and Chrysler, allowed people to move far away from the urban life, including far away from Black people, and live in air-conditioned isolation, away from the hustle and bustle.

This process had begun, first in places like New Orleans, when the St. Charles Streetcar started running in 1835. People moved out to the more genteel, and isolated places along St. Charles (originally where just a few Plantations and houses stood). The same was seen in London, where the commuting process along regional railways started around the same time. If you could avoid living in the city, it was better. Less polluted and stinking (before the advent of modern sewage systems, the city meant chamber pots emptied out onto the street, and of course horse manure everywhere), people moved out to the country the way only Kings and Emperors had before. Technology is wonderful, it allows ordinary people to get wealthier!

In the 1950's, people moved out of cities like New Orleans and Jackson, MS for the suburbs. In New Orleans, the White middle class moved to Jefferson Parish, or Metarie (home of Britney Spears), or even North Shore outposts like Slidell. Air conditioning and television replaced sitting on the front porch, desperately trying to catch any evening breeze, and gossiping with the neighbors. The great roaring White Middle Class withdrawal from public life dates to about that time.

So nope, the picture "the Help" paints of an oppressive domestic serfdom in the South in the Sixties was false. Whatever semi-serfdom operates today, is the province of celebrities and powerful people, any number of which are Black as well as White. Nearly all Americans cook their own food, wash their own cars, care for their own babies, and have no desire to change. Their only wish -- more powerful technology to make each task easier.

Rather, the key to understanding "the Help" is the basic plotline. A young White woman, Eugenia Phelan, nicknamed "Skeeter" returns from College to investigate where the maid who raised her has disappeared to, and discovering a systematic series of racial oppression ... writes a gossip book about the mal-treatment of the maids by her mother's friends, and their scandals and secrets to boot!

Yep, no standing up to violent abuse by police dogs and firehoses on national television. No investigation of secret killings and burials of civil rights workers by police, at the risk of her life. No non-violent resistance to segregation's uglier practices, with predictable violent consequences. Nope. The protagonist ... writes a gossip book. The protagonist avoids "getting married" (her mother's big dream for her) and instead succeeds in being an "important writer."

In the movie, things are even clearer. The heroine is played by the much younger and hotter Emma Stone, while the bad women are played by older actresses. If you wanted a clearer picture of what "Civil Rights" today meant, you could not find one. Civil Rights amounts to a constant status-struggle by hip young women to over-turn the older women's status and seize it for their own. This story is why the book sold so many copies, to female readers, and why the movie was successful, apart from chick-flick scheduling in the middle of "testosterone action Summer."

For a significant portion of the White, professional, and female demographic, it is always 1963. But that 1963 is not the real version, but rather a fantasy construction of place where they and their projections are the heroes, defeating the forces of evil by ... writing a gossip book.

That's pretty thin. True, Obama does well with White College-educated Women, and poorly with all other Whites:

College Educated White women: 56% approval.
College Educated White men: 38% approval.
Non-College White women: 34% approval (lowest).
Non-College White men: 35% approval.

But even White College Educated Women, prone to using Black people in internal dramas over status with other White women (there are few male characters in the movie and book "the Help") ... need to eat. Or buy gas. Or clothes. All of which have gone up in price under Obama while wages and earnings remain stagnant.

Obama benefited from a perfect storm in 2008. An economic collapse and a Republican opponent who wanted to lose to gain the respect of the NYT and his daughter, who HATES HATES HATES Sarah Palin (echo of "the Help" by the way, you can see its power). Now instead of running against the Man, he IS THE MAN. Americans want results, not a symbol. Largely, people have tuned him out. His speeches tend to be followed by yet another drop in popularity or approval. Obama lost White men voters, but gained in White women voters in 2008's Presidential election, to carry the day when adding all non-White votes on top of College Educated White women voters.

Yes, there are plenty of White College Educated women willing to play eternal status games, with "enemies" like Sarah Palin, or Michelle Bachman. But as long as say Republicans avoid nominating women who bear a resemblance to say, Sissy Spacek (one of the villains in "the Help") and focus on economics and Obama's responsibility for the same, status-games will not save Obama. No matter how much women like Meghan McCain want to gossip about Sarah Palin types. "Change begins with a Whisper" (the tagline of the movie "the Help") but Hope and Change have left folks without much change ... in their pockets.

Obama seems to be basing his entire re-election campaign on appealing to the inner "Skeeter" of his White College Educated Female supporters. While it is true that he allows them to play moral superior to those they have rivalries with (again see Meghan McCain and Sarah Palin) that's thin soup these days. "The Help" shows how the Civil Rights struggle ends. In farcical idiocy, akin to the severely retarded and deformed Hapsburg Emperor who cried "I am the Emperor, and I want noodles!" at a state banquet.

The Help won't help Obama.

Steve Jobs And The End of Apple

2011-08-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs announced his resignation from Apple Computer. Is this the beginning of the end for Apple? Previously , I wrote that Apple is "trapped" in China. Without Jobs, that trap is likely to be sprung, making Apple just another HP, or Dell Computer. A commodity company making a commodity product.

Jobs, besides his design vision (less than appreciated, witness his famous "you're holding it wrong" video about the Iphone antenna screwup) understood what made Apple different. Which was software and hardware integration. Far more than rival products, Apple products "just worked." So they could charge a premium over rivals for making a system that ordinary people could use, mostly, without lots of help and hand-holding. Oh yes, there was the yuppie, SWPL-snob appeal, the trendiness, the design mastery, and the hype. But simply making things work was the core of Apple's success. There were other MP3 music players, and other smartphones before Apple. But none that made using either device so easy.

The danger for Apple is of course, China. Chinese contract manufacturers make almost everything for Apple. With Steve Jobs in place, Apple could cajole, threaten, and flatter China's top political leaders, because Jobs was a crony of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama. Current or former Presidents and Vice Presidents and thus important. This is why Apple until recently was not the target of widespread gray-market manufacturing and selling. The clone-Apple Stores opening up by pirate retailers, with genuine Apple merchandise, was evidence of Steve Jobs being unable to fulfill this role.

Yes, successor Tim Cook is quite able in wringing inefficiencies and costs out of Apple's supply chain. But that was not the skill-set of Steve Jobs, and what made Apple great. What made Apple great was stuff that just "worked" ... and keeping a flood of copy-cat merchandise out of places like Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Cook lacks the connections and cronyism to top Democratic politicians needed to keep Chinese Contract Manufacturers, many of them connected to their own top political people, from simply running off lots of extra Iphones, Ipods, Mac laptops, and the like, and selling them for their own pure profit.

Really, what's Apple going to do? Sue the cousin of a top Politburo leader? When they flood not just China, but Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Europe, and the Americas with the exact same kind of Ipod and Iphone made from the exact same factory as those Apple takes delivery of?

All that money is just sitting there, on the table. Apple has margins of around 35%, astonishing for a computer company (the industry average is about 4-8% or so) and in part that depends on there being limited, and Apple-authorized supply of their electronic merchandise. No, Best Buy and Amazon will not sell gray-market merchandise. But Mom and Pop retailer and swap meet and flea market folks will, at far less prices. At least part of the untold story of the DVD collapse in terms of prices has been the easy availability of DVDs from Asia on the semi-black market. The same factories that churn out say, copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster on contract will inevitably run off millions more for their own sales. "Hostel" producer-director Eli Roth famously discovered copies of his movie on sale in Mexico city for what amounted to twenty-five US cents. They were pirated DVDs of course, but ran just the same. They were no doubt pressed from the very same factory that ran off officially authorized copies for sale in the US.

HP's discontinued tablet, selling at $99, was sold out in a matter of days. That's the price point for things like an Ipad. It is naive and unrealistic to expect Apple's manufacturers to not sell those things for about that price, one way or another. What the hell do they care about Apple's intellectual property? Contracts? Rule of Law? In China the rule is of crony, of power, of connections. And nothing else. The Red Emperors, Princes, and the like do as they please. Steve Jobs when he was healthy was able to delay this process, but even had he not been sick, these contract manufacturers would end up screwing Apple over. In order to make more bucks.

The "Chinese advantage" has always been a trap. Yes, manufacturing costs are far cheaper there, but producing things in China just makes it easier for the factory to run off millions more copies and sell them on their own. Apple post-Steve Jobs is going to be a wonderful example of just how much a trap the Chinese manufacturing cost-advantage really is, and how far a company can fall. When its previously expensive, hip, and trendy stuff gets sold like pirate DVDs.