Thursday, September 24, 2009

Michael Ledeen on Obama: Likes Tyrants, Dislikes America

Michael Ledeen at National Review Online notes that Obama follows a pattern of elites. Who dislike freedom for the masses, and worship foreign tyrants.

I think that he rather likes tyrants and dislikes America. I think he'd like to be more powerful, I think he is trying to get control over as much of our lives as he can, so that he can put an end to the annoying tumult of our public life. As when he said (about health care) to the Congress, "Okay, you've talked enough, now it's time to do the right thing (my thing)." And he's trying to end American power in the outside world. He's saying "I'm going to stop us, before we kill again."


This is not surprising. The American Thinker has a post noting that celebrity journalist/author Christopher Anderson, in his book "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," confirms that Bill Ayers essentially wrote "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." Due largely, as an anonymous reader e-mailed me, to Obama's laziness and procrastination (the deadline was looming).

Obama indeed loves Tyrants, as his speech to the UN apologizing for the Nation he leads, even existing, makes clear. He also wants to be one of the tyrants himself. His protege, ousted would-be Honduran dictator Manuel Zelaya is claiming that "Israelis" are torturing him with mind-control rays and toxic gases. This is the man that Obama (and his fellow Democrats) are pressing to be restored as proto-Dictator in Honduras.

Even a hard-left traditional Communist, if suddenly vaulted to the Presidency, would pursue a military build up. Neither Stalin, nor Mao, nor the Kims, Jong-Il and Il-Sung, were known for their pacifism and disarmament. Obama fears the American people, particularly the White Majority population whom he instinctively hates and loathes (made clear in both his books where he writes about his innate dislike of most Whites). Obama notes (in the highly liberal and leftist academic settings that was Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard) in "Dreams From My Father" that if he "made no sudden moves White people would not be alarmed." He writes of being interviewed by a fat, middle aged White guy for a position and his internal loathing of the man which he admits was based entirely on his race. Or rather, Ayers wrote those passages for him, and Obama did not object. Ayers wrote, and Obama accepted, the passage where he dumps a White girl he is in love with because he did not want "any more White blood in his family." All passages in a book he released under his own name, he can hardly claim he was misquoted.

Even more intriguing, Obama notes with approval his father's desire for radical wealth redistribution, particularly from Indian entrepreneurs in East Africa who ran restaurants and so on in Nairobi. He reacts with rage when eating at one of them with a half sister, noting the absences of native Kenyans of African descent, and mostly White tourists and Indian-extraction businessmen. His solution which he mentions during this passage was permanent wealth transfer to make Black Kenyans the permanent "aristocracy." That this could only be done with all levers of power in society belonging to a benevolent dictator. This, then is the debased "Volk Marxism" of Obama, aiming not at a classic Communist Dictatorship but rather one of race and ethnicity similar to the Assad dictatorship in Syria, based on the Alawite clans.

This has profound implications for America. The Alawis were never more than 20% of the Syrian population, and are widely believed by Sunnis (and some Shia) to be heretics or non-Muslims. The Assad regime rules by military power, and nothing else. The Alwawis being very well represented in the military. Obama's power centers are in the Black Community (about 12.5-12.8% of the population), the SWPL subgroup, wealthy elites, Hispanics, and Single Women (who voted for Obama 70-29).

Obama clearly would like to be America's Vizier, ruling as a tyrant over the messy American people who prefer their freedom, the majority of whom he actively hates based on their race, but he faces two key obstacles.

The first, as the American Thinker post notes (and as an exceptionally astute reader e-mailed me last night), is that Obama is lazy. Obama's laziness has led him to outsource most everything in the White House. Health Care, economic, "Green" policy, and more are being led by Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, who have different objectives than Obama, and don't care about his popularity as much as they do feathering their own nests in corrupt bargains with insider power-brokers. This laziness extends to Obama's failure to check the credentials of lunatics like Van Jones, a 9/11 Truther who believes "White People cause pollution" and avowed Communist, or Cass Sunstein, Obama's Regulatory Czar who wants to turn Americans into Vegans and allow rats to sue homeowners to prevent them from trapping them in their houses. Sunstein even believes cows, horses, and pigs have more legal rights than human babies and toddlers.

Obama, through laziness, has failed to produce results favorable to the vast middle class of America, almost all of it White. He was elected in part in reaction to the economic melt-down and the inability of the Bush Administration or McCain to promise anything that even seemed like it would work. Obama asked for and got a huge stimulus bill that only propped up State and local government employment, temporarily, and a slight increase in federal employment. Meanwhile mass layoffs have increased 25% from July alone and unemployment still increasing, Obama's laziness has had a price. He's not only failed to deliver anything to the Middle Class, he's been seen as both lazy and arrogant in focusing on things Americans view as low-priority: healthcare, and "Green" Cap and Trade. Allowing the National Organization of Women and other groups to refashion the stimulus bill to simply prop up female employment in health care, welfare, education, and the like did him no favors. Obama, and Obama alone, single-handedly, has created a backlash consisting of outraged Middle Class White Americans, who represent about 70% or so of the country, enraged by his policies. Which they view, quite accurately, as a means of permanent wealth transfer to connected elites and non-White groups. Wealth transfers of course, that promise to make them poor. Machiavelli advised in the Prince to kill enemies rather than make them poor, and that a man would forgive the murder of his father sooner than the theft of his wealth.

Obama's laziness, in failing to produce anything of value to the White Middle Class, and threatening to make them considerably poorer, has produced permanent enemies. Meanwhile, Obama repeats the things he enjoys, giving campaign speeches full of hot air and empty promises, and "being important" in various meetings with various leaders.

Obama's other weakness is the core of his support. While the combined total of Blacks, Hispanics, SWPL, elites, and Single Women (plus a considerable amount of married women, who voted 50-47 for Obama) means Obama is unlikely to poll below 40%, no matter how bad he performs as President, this is a group by and large that lacks the ability to create a military dictatorship like the Alawite Sect in Syria. America is a very large country, both physically and population-wise. Single women, SWPL folks out of LATFH.com, and even paramilitary groups such as the New Black Panther Party or Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam (Farrakhan is a Chicago neighbor of Obama) are unlikely to create a military junta using mass-force to kill or imprison lots of Americans to make Obama a tyrant. Clearly, Obama wishes to become a tyrant, one ruling America on behalf of its enemies. But America is not Syria, nor Argentina, nor Spain, nor Italy, nor Germany (Obama's models of "ideal societies" particularly Iran, Syria and Italy under Mussolini). [Note his chin always juts out like Il Duce's, and the stylization of his posters echoes Mussolinis in eerie similarity.] Obama lacks the number of men under arms willing to kill fellow Americans to make him dicatator, in sufficient numbers in a vast, sprawling nation, to be effective.

The US military generally loathes Obama, though they will obey all lawful orders from the Commander in Chief, even those they despise. Obama, giving a lawful order to surrender or retreat in Afghanistan, will be obeyed. Though bitterly. Obama, giving a lawful order to destroy all nuclear weapons or follow policies that render them useless in the case of an attack, will be obeyed. Though many officers will resign and Obama will face a huge political firestorm, with a middle class fearing that they are being set up for attack. Much of the White middle class does not reside in major cities like New York City but does work there during the day. The much derided by hipsters "bridge and tunnel crowd" who made up most of the victims in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Obama CAN get all lawful, legitimate orders obeyed.

However, his obvious desire to "never let a crisis go to waste" and create himself as America's Vizier in the aftermath of a nuclear attack by non-state actors on America (or even perhaps an attack by Iran or Pakistan or North Korea) has a serious problem. The US military will NOT obey unlawful, unconstitutional orders. Such as making "insulting Islam illegal," or outlawing Christian and Jewish worship, or making Islam the official state religion, or any number of things Obama would propose as America's Vizier in time of crisis, as opposed to retaliating for a nuclear attack. With an enraged US military, highly regarded by most Americans as the only institution that is effective and relatively uncorrupt, it is likely that Obama, given clear unconstitutional orders (such as interment of White middle class people in Concentration Camps per Bill Ayers, his ghostwriter and close friend), would be removed. To acclaim from the White Middle Class, much of the non-Washington political class, small businesses, and others not aligned with Obama's power base. This was the problem for Obama's protege Manuel Zelaya, who proposed to make Honduras a Venezuelan satellite and thus alienated even his own party, and got himself removed from office for clearly unconstitutional orders.

Obama, not being American (culturally), raised outside the US during his character forming years, knowing only wealthy White radicals as non-Black associates, has no idea of the depth and breadth of his support. While Blacks, Hispanics, SWPL folks, and Single Women have passionate support for him, his opponents have evenly matched passionate opposition to him (largely self-created by his economic proposals). Obama does have the ability to make much of White America significantly poorer, and uncertain about their incomes. He has the ability to disarm the US, with lawful orders under the Constitution, though it will create an even bigger fight. Already, Petraeus has reacted to Obama's dithering on Afghanistan (in advance of a surrender/retreat there) by demanding more troops, backing McChrystal's demand for a surge in Afghanistan. Despite Obama's orders to keep quiet about troop requests.

Obama, because of a fawning media that does not report bad news (and is largely ignored by most Americans because of the failure to report actual news), a circle that has nothing but contempt for the White Middle Class majority (one Obama himself shares), and a profound overestimation of his political and military strength, is on a collision course. His reflexive desire to back America's enemies and punish its friends, and weaken America's defenses and military can get millions of Americans killed. Indeed, Obama not being stupid, hopes generally for that to happen, though he has no specific plan in mind just the general hope that inevitably, it will materialize. Thus providing him the "crisis" he wants to fundamentally reshape America into a variation of his father's dreams for Kenya.

However that "crisis" will not be enough for Obama to get his way. America is too divided, his forces not strong enough, and the anger of the populace against the elites growing not subsiding. America's "tyranny of distance" will hurt Obama in the way that the vast space of Russia neutralized the Wehrmacht's superiority in tanks, artillery, men, and airplanes.


As Ledeen notes, this is not merely Obama's failing. This is the failing of the entire elite, frustrated that their enormous amounts of money and fame don't translate into total control over every aspect of people's lives. Hotair reports that environmentalists (and the Washington Post) are on a campaign to force toilet paper manufacturers to use only recycled paper, which has the general consistency of sandpaper. This is the attribute of a degraded, debased, and debauched elite which wishes to reduce the people to the position of serfdom. After all, many of these elites are "famous." Laurie David, ex-wife of Seinfeld and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" creator/producer/star Larry David, tours the nation with Sheryl Crow lecturing college students on environmentalism. Jetting from city to city, when not living in one of her two mansions. [She was recently fined for Wetlands violations in construction in her Martha's Vineyard mansion.] Why shouldn't they control every aspect of ordinary people's lives? They're famous! Which means they are providence's elect, since only worthless people lack fame and fortune.

If Obama wants to be America's Vizier, the Sheryl Crows and Laurie Davids are right behind him in the pursuit of that goal. Tragically, all he will do is get a lot of Americans killed, for his own vanity and hatred. And that of his backers. All for nothing.
...Read more

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Can Disney Grow With Boys and Men?


With the Mancession in full swing it would appear odd that Disney, along with Time-Warner, is busy restructuring itself to appeal more to men, and boys, but nevertheless, Disney is busy doing just that. Disney recently fired Disney Studios CEO Dick Cook, shortly after making an offer to purchase Marvel Entertainment. Reportedly, Disney CEO Bob Iger is considering Disney Channels Worldwide President Rich Ross as a successor, according to Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. Nikki's batting average on Hollywood rumors is the best among the Hollywood reporters, frequently scooping both Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, so the rumor is likely to have substance to it. But what the move shows, if true, is how thin the executive ranks in Hollywood are when it comes to proven ability to attract boys and men to either movies or (especially) television. The latter being a female and gay ghetto. [Disney's ABC is especially bad in this regard.]

Disney, Time-Warner, and other media conglomerates would prefer not to make the effort. They lack the ability, mostly, to shepherd complex, boy and man-appealing entertainment into success. Most of their outlets appeal to the "New Girl Order." But a terrible advertising climate, a crisis in DVD sales, and the threats of piracy, the internet, and simply watching existing DVDs has led Hollywood's media conglomerates to one conclusion. Women and girls are not enough.

Not enough to provide real growth in revenue, particularly if Larry Summers is correct and the current recession, with permanent job losses and structural unemployment at the 10-15% range over ten years or more, curtails the "New Girl Order." Even with men making up most of the unemployed, single mothers face economic pressure as well, if nothing else from declining real wages as tax increases and inflation mounts, along with job uncertainty. This promises to end the easy money of selling $100 "Hannah Montana" tickets to the parents of tween girls.

Hollywood focused on the female and tween girl audience because it was easy. Disney particularly was able to develop a strong stable of tween girl appealing stars, from Hillary Duff ("Lizzie McGuire") to Miley Cyrus. Disney's bets on Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez have not fully paid off, however, as the predicted influx of Hispanic/Latino girls flocking to those stars never materialized. Unsurprisingly to anyone but Disney execs drinking the Multicultural Kool-Aide, Latino/Hispanic (read, overwhelmingly Mexican) tween girls prefer real, authentic, Spanish-speaking idols from Mexico, available in Spanish-language television, magazines, and movies.

From the Wall Street Journal article:

Like other studios, Disney also has to combat the decline in DVD sales. Hollywood still makes the bulk of its profits from home-video sales. But that market, which grew more than 15% a year between 2000 and 2004, has begun to wilt. According to Adams Media Research, consumer spending on home video fell 9% last year. It projects home-video sales will fall between 8% and 10% for 2009.Mr. Iger has said DVD sales are in an irreversible decline, but he said Marvel's strong brand profile should offer a measure of protection. "They are not immune from the changes that we're seeing," Mr. Iger said, referring to Marvel, during a conference call with analysts Monday morning. "But they have established a footing that we think is more solid than what you typically see in the nonbranded, noncharacter driven movie."


As Charles M. Blow of the New York Times has written, the speed of the collapse of the Music Industry is amazing, cut in half from its peak in 1999, in ten years. First piracy, and then music streaming over the internet, free and legal, have severely cut industry revenues. Clearly, Hollywood can see the same problems facing themselves. Already Hulu.com, ironically created by NBC Universal (GE), Fox Entertainment Group, and ABC (Disney), has taught consumers to access streaming movies, television shows,and clips instead of buying DVDs. The success of South Park Studios where every South Park episode can be watched, for free, online, shows that creative people can build their own portals very quickly and capture consumer interest (and advertising revenue) without much cost. The success of "District 9" in providing a unique, and expensive look with a production budget of $30 million means that the studios, with high costs and overhead, face real challenges from productions in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and potentially many other nations with low production costs and favorable tax treatment.

Hollywood clearly must have a male audience, both boys and men, to provide revenue stability, let alone growth, if the pressures of piracy, online competition, and simply re-cycling existing DVDs (and video games) continues. Tween girls and women are not enough. From Box Office Mojo and the Wall Street Journal I have compiled the list of Female Skewing movies and Marvel Superhero movies:
























































































Female Skewing MovieWorld-Wide Gross
Sex and the City$415,252,786
27 Dresses$160,259,319
Devil Wears Prada$326,551,094
Jane Austen Book Club$7,163,566
The Proposal$272,060,335
He's Just Not That Into You$172,011,653
Marvel MoviesWorld-Wide Gross
Blade$131,183,530
X-Men$296,339,527
Spider-Man$821,708,551
X2: X-Men United$407,711,549
Spider-Man 2$783,766,341
Fantastic Four$330,579,719
X-Men: The Last Stand$459,359,555
Ghost Rider$228,738,393
Spider-Man 3$890,871,626
Iron Man$585,133,287
Wolverine$363,362,640
Punisher War Zone$10,089,373
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer$289,047,763



Most of the Marvel Movies outperform the Female skewing movie average (which was $225 million). Only 2 out of the 13 Marvel movies listed did less than the Female-skewing movies, and that is including the "Hard R" rated Punisher War Zone movie and 1998's "Blade" made over 11 years ago and featuring a very minor Marvel character. Even a not very well made movie like the second Fantastic Four movie brings in nearly $290 million. Obviously, the usual caveats apply. This applies to world-wide box office, including foreign box office grosses, and generally the studios receive significantly less than the gross for both foreign and domestic exhibitors. Often, foreign receipts are less percentage-wise to the gross than domestic receipts. Moreover, foreign receipts are more vulnerable to pressures of piracy. As MTV reported, the movie "American Gangster" was available in major US cities on bootleg DVDs (of high quality, too) before its release. Eli Roth reported that "Hostel II" was on sale in Mexico City for the equivalent of a quarter.

However , the average of the Marvel movies is $430 million world-wide. That is serious money no matter that the net for the studios is likely to be less.

Which makes Disney's move puzzling.

Disney has access to Marvel's characters, assuming they settle with Jack Kirby's estate over the rights to characters he created including Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, and the Avengers. These characters, are proven money-makers in extracting cash from the wallets of men and boys (who are the audience who sees the movies, and buys the DVDs). Disney also has family-film studio Pixar, with hit after hit, and a deal with Dreamworks for adult fare (likely to produce prestige but little cash). The role of the successor to Dick Cook as head of Disney Studios is to push products from the Marvel character library (and undo existing exclusive deals with Sony, and other studios such as Columbia, for characters like Spider-Man and Ghost Rider respectively) to grab more of the dollars "lying on the table" that belong to men and boys. Because clearly more "chick flics" and tween-girl pop princess fantasies face limited growth potential amidst DVD piracy and audience erosion from streaming online video.

According to Nikki Finke (who has an excellent track record), Disney is considering Rich Ross. Ross is listed in After Elton as one of the most powerful openly gay men in Hollywood. As noted in the NY Times article about how Disney used "Kid Whisperer" Kelly Pena to find out what boys liked, Ross was quoted thusly:

While Disney XD is aimed at boys and their fathers, it is also intended to include girls. “The days of the Honeycomb Hideout, where girls can’t come in, have long passed,” said Rich Ross, president of Disney Channels Worldwide.

Disney XD, which took over the struggling Toon Disney channel, has improved its predecessor’s prime-time audience by 27 percent among children 6 to 14, according to Nielsen Media Research. But the bulk of this increase has come from girls. Viewership among boys 6 to 14 is up about 10 percent.


Ross's track record is one of failure to increase boys watching Disney XD. As a Gay Man, he's incapable of understanding what boys and men like in entertainment. Ross could read market research report after report, and never understand why certain content succeeds and others fail. Including girls will automatically exclude boys, by making the content "girl-friendly" and therefore actively repellent to boys and men.

The extraordinary durability of Marvel Comics characters created from 1941 through the 1970's stems from the creators themselves. Often nerdy, shy, young men who did not find enormous success with the ladies, the creators (often deeply patriotic and assimilated Jews) created power-fantasies whereby "ordinary" young men with good character were transformed into weird and powerful heroes. Some were more upbeat, others more angst-ridden, but all were "fun" in the way that only a truly masculine identity could embrace: Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan's skyline and mouthing off to adversaries the way he could not in his ordinary life, Daredevil vigorously maintaining the line between hero and villain in a struggle to save his neighborhood, the Hulk's embodiment of a child's anger and innocence, or Captain America's exuberant love for his country and smashing his nation's enemies.

Making these characters "girl-friendly" requires mutilating them out of any appeal to young men and boys. Creating female characters who "tame them" and far too much competition over the female characters. The whole point of a character like Daredevil is that while his outward self may be handicapped, the inner person and hero is a ladies man, irresistible to a host of female characters: Elektra, Black Widow, and so on.

Because the executive talent pool for Disney and Time Warner is such a female and gay ghetto, reflecting much of its product, it is not surprising that Time-Warner appointed a female marketing executive whose prior experience was Harry Potter promotions as head of DC Comics. Nor is it surprising that Disney is considering an openly Gay executive, who notably failed in attracting boys to the male-oriented channel, as head of Disney Studios. Old habits die hard, and the Hollywood studios have pursued a gay/female ghetto strategy for so long that even when recognizing that growth, or more likely simply reducing the revenue erosion, depends on attracting boys and men, all the choices on hand to run the whole thing are women and Gays.

Thus, I expect Marvel Comics to get a lot "gayer" and existing projects such as the Iron Man 2 movie, the Thor movie, the Avengers movie, and so on to become a lot "gayer" and more "girl-friendly." Read: a flop like "Jane Austen Book Club" only costing a lot more. Hollywood simply does not know how to appeal to men.





...Read more

Elitist, Left Wing, and a Little Bit Gay: Our Feminized Cultural and Political Elite

The NEA is in the news, with at least 6 federal laws and regulations violated by a conference call with artists, a PR agency, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve, designed to use the NEA to (illegally) lobby for ObamaCare. Both Big Hollywood and Big Government have all the coverage on the people and the issues you could ask for. What the mainstream media refuses, actively, to cover.

But just as interesting is the nature of the people involved. As Charles Winecoff in Big Hollywood notes:


Last month, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman said that, in American politics, ”the arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.”



This assessment can be extended to the cultural elite, and an increasing number of younger men in the political elite. Mostly due to an influx of younger women in cultural and political leadership, younger men in these institutions (culture and politics) are elitist, left-wing, and fairly feminized.




Witness the NEA's Yosi Sergant, Director of Communications. Neither picture of Sergant depicts a man who is exactly masculine. Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, a former Obama Campaign organizer and political organizer would not inspire confidence as a non-elitist, non-left wing presence either.



No word on which artists created the art work below, but it would tend to re-inforce the "little bit gay" part to which Landesman refers:





Perhaps they were the work of someone like this man:



In a workplace with mostly women, a traditional masculine presence is not very welcome. While women certainly like the Alpha Male, most men are not in fact, Alpha, and the sort of mocking, good-natured teasing found in male-dominated workplaces is not very compatible with, particularly, younger women. Who prefer women to be "strong" by men being, well fairly effeminate. This has the side benefit of preventing Beta Males from expressing (unwanted) romantic interest in their female co-workers.

Younger women also like Gays. Heather Havrilesky, Salon's Television critic, has a post on how much she loves gays.


Gay people are just like straight people, only they're smarter and funnier and more interesting.

Also, they smell better. They've read more books, sure. And they have more friends -- that part isn't surprising. Because they're better educated, generally speaking, and also a little wiser. Like blondes, they have more fun.

When people talk about homos taking over the planet, my heart races a little faster. A planet ruled by gays! Imagine how good the scones will be!

Plus, there'll be prettier yards, less crime, more funding for the arts but less bad poetry, fewer rude, disheveled dogs roaming loose on the streets, and less weak coffee. I'm guessing there aren't many gay Hummer owners. McMansions would surely fall out of fashion, along with miniblinds, vinyl siding and Applebee's.
...
I've been idealizing gay people ever since I moved to the Castro, in San Francisco, at the tender age of 25, where I was surrounded every day by beautiful, fit, talkative men. Suddenly I knew how Captain Kirk felt when he was beamed down onto a planet of gorgeous lady aliens who were nonetheless impatient with his dull earthling ways. Sure, I've been urged over and over again not to assume that all gay and lesbian peoples of the globe are wickedly witty and charming and fun-loving and smart, but each new gay person I meet only further clouds my vision with his/her general-purpose excellence and flair.


Younger women in professional settings do tend to idealize gays, and prefer gays to the vast majority of men (who are basically, Beta Males). Gays have fashion sense (or so goes the stereotype), most of the famous fashion designers are gay men, and gay men are assumed to be like Beta males, except far more politically correct, and without all the parts of masculinity women don't like in Beta Males. Most younger, professional women, if they could push a magic button and make most ordinary, Beta Men gay, would break their fingers pushing it, over and over again.

The horrors that is Look at This Hipster become understandable when certain workplaces are dominated by women such as Heather Hravelisky or Buffy Wicks. Even men not inclined to effeminancy will adopt the clothing and mannerisms, to blend in and not arouse the ire of a mostly female staff. Public Relations, Marketing, Human Resources, Education, Health Care, and Government are mostly female. USA Today reports that women are now on the cusp of being the majority of the workforce, with men losing 74% of the 6.4 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007. Local governments have cut 86,000 men from the payrolls while adding 167,000 women since the Recession began.

As the Weekly Standard noted, women's groups including the National Organization for Women persuaded Obama to change the Stimulus Bill, nearly $800 billion, so that the bulk of the spending went to increase or retain employment for nurses, teachers, social workers, and librarians. All fields dominated by women. This was possible (despite the obvious fall-out in that the nation did not go back to work, merely female employment was maintained or increased) because as the article in the Weekly Standard notes, feminists like Eleanor Smeal, Feminist Majority President, Nancy Pelosi, the National Organization of Women, the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and the National Women's Law Center, had extensive political connections to the Obama Administration. Which was itself filled with many women, nearly all of whom were deeply sympathetic to the idea that the majority of stimulus funds should be spent on women, to permanently transform the American workplace into one dominated by women.

Our elites, cultural and political, will look ever more like Buffy Wicks and Yosi Sergant, as the workforce is dominated by the fields of social work, education, health care, government, marketing, human resources, public relations, and little else. Already the Democratic Political elite at the lower levels, where most of the grunt work of organizing is done, tends to be made up of women like Wicks. Who have no idea how to relate to men who don't look like Yosi Sergant, and have even less idea of the actual makeup of the American workforce and population.

Lawrence Summers, the President's Economic Advisor believes that the US will face a permanent unemployment rate of between 10-15% for the next ten years, and perhaps forever, most of the unemployed being men. That further, the jobs lost in manufacturing, transportation, energy extraction, and so on will never come back. In the meantime, the jobs that DO exist are in areas where staff are elitist, leftist, and a little bit gay.

Which sets up a large power struggle. As younger women move into the workplace, they want a nation of nurses, teachers, baristas, marketers, human resources people, and public relations people. Cool jobs for hip people. For the elites, this sounds like a good idea. What to do with say, former Chrysler Managers cleaning toilets at 49 is irrelevant. Older straight White Men are of little concern to the Buffy Wicks and the Yosi Sergants. As I noted in my very first post Can Barack Obama Win With the Youth Vote the bulk of the population is comprised of people in their late twenties to mid fifties. The prime working age.


[Click Image to Enlarge]

A pre-revolutionary condition is where rising expectations, in income and personal wealth, are suddenly dashed for most people, who can now look forward to only increasingly diminished hard times. This was the case in France of 1789, when after a sustained increase in wealth and income in rural France, successive bad harvests, increased taxes (to pay for assistance to the Americans in the Revolutionary War), and collapse of local industry due to foreign competition, led inexorably to the storming of the Bastille by peasants who expected more.

More than anything, the damning self-indictment by Rocco Landesman that the arts (and by extension the artists themselves, as well as our elites cultural and political) are elitist, left-wing, and a little bit gay are accurate. The effeminate buffoons of the hipster class, such as Sergant, and the women who insist on them, such as Buffy Wicks, have no answer for the Dave Duncansons, taking jobs cleaning toilets to put some money, any money, in the family budget. "Let them become gay baristas" is not an answer.

Just as the increasingly female-dominated workplaces of health, education, welfare, hospitality, and marketing, public relations, and human resources are vastly disconnected from the men who used to make up the nations spot-welders, machinists, factory workers, plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, engineers, and project managers, the feminized, "sort of gay" elites have no connection to the vast "uncool" populace who demand economic growth. Not permanent unemployment (mostly male) in the 10-15% range, and higher unofficially.

Certainly most Americans would regard a Yosi Sergant or a Buffy Wicks as creatures from another world, even stranger (and less well regarded) as the courtiers of Louis XVI. While Aristocracies, beloved of women, often feature those with left wing views, who are elitists, and of effeminate manners, even they must deliver for the people or be swept aside. All the tragically hip, ultra ironic, clothes, and fawning, deferential manner to more powerful men won't change this fact. Something even Marie Antoinette, who famously had a marble floored stable to play milkmaid, found out.
...Read more

Monday, September 21, 2009

Barack Obama: America's Vizier

Barack Obama does not want to be America's President. Oh, he enjoys the pomp and ceremony of the office, the prestige of being President, the power and the money the office brings. But unlike all other Presidents in America's history, Obama fundamentally does not want to be President. Obama's support for a State-Run Press, unilateral nuclear disarmament, surrender in Afghanistan, and war against the CIA make it clear. He would rather be America's first, only, and eternal Vizier.


Obama is of course, not an American. Obama does not like America, has no respect for its traditions or values, does not like the American Flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem, or much else about America. Obama's two books, particularly his last, "the Audacity of Hope" (title taken from a sermon by his pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright) show that he believes the "original sin" was the creation of America, "White Privilege" and that in his words (again taken from a Rev. Wright sermon) "White Man's greed created a world in need." The audio book recitation of this by Obama himself being a favorite on talk radio. Obama, like many Blacks, particularly those in the South Side of Chicago who made his neighbor, Louis Farrakhan, a multi-millionaire, and his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a multi-millionaire (with an exclusive multi-million dollar mansion in an exclusive all-White gated community fronting a golf course), believes that Whites and America are both irredeemably evil, need to be punished, and only by doing so and "redistributing the wealth" can social justice and peace on Earth be achieved.


Michelle Malkin has pictures and a video tour of Wright's four car garage mansion. Obama in 2007 noted he would no longer wear the American Flag lapel pin, because it was a substitute for "true patriotism" after 9/11. Obama famously while running for President refused to put his hand over his heart during the National Anthem.

This is not surprising, it would be shocking if Obama had any regard for America, its majority population, or its traditions. Obama was born, likely in Hawaii, and raised the first 9 years of his life in Indonesia, shortly after the coup that removed Sukarno and installed dictator Sukarno. During this time, political repression was high in Indonesia, the only political expressions allowed, Muslim, and Obama was in a hot-house of debased, "Folk Marxism," Islamism, anti-American Third World ideologies, undergoing Muslim instruction along with other Muslim boys in a Catholic school. Obama in his autobiography "Dreams From My Father, a Story of RACE and Inheritance" (nothing is as important to Obama as race) recounts that the older Indonesian boys frequently threw him in canals, and called him various racist names on account of his mixed-race background. It seems that to avoid bullying, Obama became more anti-America than his tormentors, embracing at that time toxic brew of Islamism, debased Marxism, and Third World narcissism along with Big Man worship.

[Regarding Obama's birth certificate, only redacted information has been released by the Hawaii Secretary of State certifying Obama's status as a natural born US citizen. The full certificate, unlike all other candidates for President and Presidents has never been released, due to the President's legal actions. While it is possible that Obama was not born in Hawaii, but rather Kenya, or was claimed by his mother to be a Kenyan citizen, the most likely explanation is that his mother and grandmother, on one side, and his father on the other, were engaged in a bitter custody battle, and no father was listed on the birth certificate. Embarrassing to say the least for a man who has based his whole identity on being his father's son, a failed Kenyan Big Man. Obama Sr. having died from complications suffered from multiple drunk driving accidents. However with a man this secretive, who unlike every other President has massive amounts of his background unaccounted for and uncovered by the media, one never knows. Certainly something is embarrassing, otherwise the entire Birth Certificate would have been released, and there remains a possibility that Obama was in fact not born in Hawaii or was claimed by his Mother not to be a US citizen.]

Obama recounted to Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times in 2007 how:

He spent four years as a child in Indonesia and attended schools in the Indonesian language, which he still speaks.

“I was a little Jakarta street kid,” he said in a wide-ranging interview in his office (excerpts are on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground). He once got in trouble for making faces during Koran study classes in his elementary school, but a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics — and more likely to be aware of their nationalism — if he once studied the Koran with them.

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s own grandfather in Kenya was a Muslim. Mr. Obama never met his grandfather and says he isn’t sure if his grandfather’s two wives were simultaneous or consecutive, or even if he was Sunni or Shiite. (O.K., maybe Mr. Obama should just give up on Alabama.)


Census.gov estimates that there are 307 million people in America. Estimates here estimate 2.8 million Muslims in America, and America.gov estimates between 2 and 7 million Muslims in America. This translates into 0.6% to 2% of Americans being Muslims. Barack Hussein Obama, is very unlike the vast majority of Americans, who do not speak Indonesian, and were not raised Muslim, and have negative views of Islam and Muslims.

Obama then spent his adolescence in Hawaii, home of Kill Haole Day, separate from the May 1 Beat Up a White Kid Day. The state of Hawaii has unusual demographics, for the time in which Obama grew up, even more unusual. Whites were then as they are now, a minority. Casual marijuana use, and also cocaine, to which Obama admitted in his autobiography, was widespread in the islands at the time, in contrast to the mainland. Obama's regular drug use, particularly of cocaine puts him at odds with most Americans, if one assumes the 7.2% of 12th graders who have tried cocaine in their lifetimes is roughly representative of all Americans. Given that 92.8% of the High Schoolers surveyed had not tried cocaine.

Obama then spent his early manhood at first Occidental College, where he hung out by his own admission with radical marxists, radical feminists, queer liberationists, militant Black Nationalists, and Muslims. As I posted in October 2008, in Barack Obama's Hidden Columbia Years, it is likely that the reason Obama is so little remembered by his classmates at Columbia, in marked contrast to Occidental and Harvard, is that he was at a Mosque attended by his Pakistani Muslim room-mate most of the time he was not on-campus. As I note in the post, this would certainly explain his strange trip in the Summer of 1981 as noted in the NY Times to Pakistan, where he spent three weeks there. During which time, Osama bin Laden and other Jihadi groups were running active terrorist activities against the Soviets, and offering "tours" to wealthy or connected Muslims interested in observing the front or otherwise engaging in Jihad type activities.

So much about Obama is hidden that it is unknown just exactly how he connected to the room-mate in Columbia (a man he did not know, and to whom he had no personal connections, and who appears in his autobiography only briefly). It is not known just what Obama did while in Pakistan, certainly it is unusual for a College student interested in girls and fun to visit Jihad central (instead of nearby Bali, as he visited his mother and half-sister in Indonesia during the trip). It makes Obama very, very different from most Americans, who would not find Summer in Pakistan an appealing prospect in the best of times.

After his graduation from College, and his law school years, Obama moved to South Side Chicago where his role as an ACORN agitator (he worked for them and later hired them to work on his campaign), "community organizer," Farrakhan neighbor, member of Trinity United Church, and extremist views (he wrote two weeks after 9/11 an editorial basically laying out Rev. Wright's views that America "deserved" 9/11 in more polite terms) characterize him as not American. Certainly not culturally American.

This should shock no one. Obama had been raised outside America, in the critical first few years of his life. The Jesuits famously claimed "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man." Obama was given over to Suharto's Indonesia, until he was nine, and reflects the deep anti-Americanism, confirmed over and over by his life's choices and voluntary associations in the course of his adult life.

Which is why Obama does not want to be President. He wants to be America's first and only, and eternal, Vizier. Obama sees his role as fatally weakening America, so its enemies can attack. Allowing him to rule as Big Man, in the style his beloved father advocated. Not as a dictator fighting a ruthless war of national survival, but rather as a Vizier ruling on behalf of the Third World to punish America (for it's original sin of existing, especially America's White Majority).

Not content with the fawning coverage of the Press and Media, Obama wants a bailout bill for media to create a State Run Pravda-style Media. The press fawningly covers Obama as a Living God, can you imagine how worse it will get when all Media is owned by the Government and run by Obama:

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.


Obama clearly wants to create a "Dear Leader" type of North Korean media (where it is a capital offense to sit on a newspaper containing a picture of the Jongs, Kim Jong-Il or Kim Il-Sung). He wishes to have non-stop Cult of Personality worship, the way African Big Men also have it, in the state-run press. Notice also, Obama wants to "regulate" blogs and control the internet. So that only "the proper people" can tell the populace what to do: worship Obama as a god. Not even the worst AMERICAN Presidents ever went this far. Obama is not an American.

Obama's decision to continue the jihad against the CIA against the advice of SEVEN CIA Chiefs, among whom three served under Clinton (Tenet also served under GWB).

Allowing future investigations and prosecutions “will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country,” the seven men write. “In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us.”

Moreover, they argue, “public disclosure about past intelligence operations can only help Al Qaeda elude US intelligence and plan future operations. Disclosures about CIA collection operations have and will continue to make it harder for intelligence officers to maintain the momentum of operations that have saved lives and helped protect America from further attacks.”

The seven former directors are Michael Hayden and Porter Goss, who served under President George W. Bush; George Tenet, who served under Bush and President Bill Clinton; John Deutch and R. James Woolsey, who served under Clinton; William Webster, who served under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan; and James R. Schlesinger, who served under President Richard Nixon…

The former directors who wrote the letter also argue that a “certain result of these reopened investigations is the serious damage done to our intelligence community’s ability to obtain the cooperation of foreign intelligence agencies,” which are “already greatly concerned about the United States’ inability to maintain any secrets.”


Obama is not stupid. He knows very well that allowing Holder to pursue the Jihad against the CIA will make all CIA agents, for at least fifty years down the line, unwilling to do anything that could be construed as mis-treatment. Making the CIA into essentially, a blog and newspaper clipping analysis agency with no ability to detect and stop terrorist threats against the US. Which in turn makes another terror plot, even bigger than 9/11, a dead-certainty.

Indeed, this Obama's desire. He WANTS America to be attacked, with potentially millions dead. So he might rule as an emergency dictator. Not, to fight back with absolute powers, but to use absolute powers (including a State Run Media) to force a surrender. To whatever terms America's enemies, from bin Laden to Iran to Pakistan to Russia to China to any other group, might want to dictate. With himself as Vizier of America.

This explains Obama's otherwise inexplicable desire for nuclear disarmanent and his belief that:

The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: "Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president's weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role."


Obama believes America's nukes "belong" to him personally. This again is the attitude not of an American, but an Indonesian filled with debased Marxism, racialism, and Islamism.

Obama is not stupid. He knows well (having visited there as a youth) that Pakistan will never give up their nukes, and is indeed arming themselves with more, as is India, China, and quite likely, Russia. Israel (having been abandoned by American security guarantees by Obama, and only 4% of Israelis thinking Obama is pro-Israel) will never give up its nukes. Iran will never give up its nuke program either, and likely already has a few nukes at hand. Obama instead wants to make it "safe" for Pakistan or Iran to nuke America. Hence the focus on eliminating as many nukes as possible, creating a policy of American retaliation for only massive nuclear attack by a clearly identified party (his "narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons" demand) and removing testing of any nuclear weapons (which makes American nukes unreliable). This comes after eliminating the airborne laser missile defense in April 2009, 24 hours after North Korea fired an ICBM at Hawaii, along with the Multiple Kill Vehicle, and additional ground radar stations and missiles in Alaska to defend against North Korean missiles aimed at Hawaii or the US Mainland. The cancellation of the missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic on September 18, 2009 (the anniversary of Stalin's invasion of Poland in WWII) is also part of the plan to make America unable to respond to missiles from enemies. The proposed shield would not only have protected Europe from Iran's missiles, but the US East Coast.

Obama wants an America with few working nukes (and none at all would be even better). Disarmed to make America with few options, and if nukes still exist in America's arsenal, he wants retaliation for the loss of American cities something strictly forbidden by formal and public US policy. Famously, in the debates among the Democratic candidates he said he would not retaliate if America was nuked, but rather hug the first responders. Even Hillary Clinton managed to say she would retaliate. This is why Obama has met Venezuela's Hugo Chavez promises of Iranian nuclear missiles in that nation with shrugs (in contrast to JFK's response to Soviet missiles in Cuba). Or has reacted with approval of Venezuela's open alliance with Iran, supplying Venezuelan gasoline (in violation of US led sanctions against Iran over their nuclear program) in exchange for arms and Iranian missiles.

All that is left is making sure the US is defeated in Afghanistan. By denying McChrystal's demand for more troops. Obama campaigned on winning the war in Afghanistan, but it was all a lie. A man brought up in Indonesia, who associated with Marxists, radical feminists, queer theorists, angry Black Nationalists, and Muslims in College, and Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn in adulthood (they launched his political career in their living room) does not want America to win any war. Certainly not the struggle which is against the interests of his Islamists hosts in Pakistan in the Summer of 1981. Obama is eager to abandon Afghanistan, so that bin Laden can take control of that nation again, and with a great victory and safe haven, launch more terrorist attacks.

Which will be Obama's great dream. His whole life, he has dreamt, not of leading a United America, but of punishing America, and its White majority, for sins in the past, imagined and real, and those in the present, imagined and real.

Obama, in raw terms, is doing everything he can to create his own Reichstag Fire, to create a dicatorship so that he can be America's first and eternal Vizier. It is why he is deliberately weakening America's defenses, cutting both nukes and missile defense at the same time. Pushing for unilateral American disarmament so that the US can have no response to the nuking of several cities, other than complete surrender.

Obama's plan is this: eliminate America's nukes, and missile defense. If the US still retains some nukes, create a formal policy whereby they are never to be used except in retaliation for a mass attack by Russia or China. Ensure the nukes are so aged and unreliable they cannot be used anyway. Create a state-run Media that embraces a cult of personality worship in the African Big Man and North Korean style. This goes hand in hand with his desire to create his own private, Big Man style Army:

We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded


Obama's close friend, collaborator in the Annenberg Challenge (who steered millions Obama's way in grants to his program), wanted concentration camps for those who did not embrace communism:

asked, “Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.

And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.

And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.”

Twenty-five million people.

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.

And they were dead serious.


With a massive defeat of the US by bin Laden, in Afghanistan, Obama will be able to finally have that which he most desires: the nuking of New York City, around 3 to 6 million American dead, and perhaps another city nuked with even more dead. Maybe even 10 million dead. More hideously burned. So Obama can rule by emergency decree, rule out any retaliation (which will in any even be forbidden by policy and perhaps by nukes that don't work), and surrender. Surrender and humble America, they way he has wanted to since he was a boy, drinking in anti-Americanism and hatred of Whites since he was a boy.

Perhaps the surrender will be the form of "reparations" and formal "submission to Islam" or perhaps merely outlawing "insulting Islam" and legalizing polygamy, restricting Christian and Jewish worship. Perhaps the remaining bits of America's military will be ordered to attack Israel in order to wipe it out, to protect the remainder of America's cities. Perhaps concentration camps will be prepared for "Tea Baggers" and "Townhall protestors" and "racists" who don't like Obama. Bill Cosby, after all, believes it's racist to criticize Obama.

Obama is President, and is accorded enormous power. He has an absolute Democratic Majority, and if nothing else can ram his policies through, foreign and domestic, national security and otherwise, through Congress. By the reconciliation process if nothing else, where he needs only 50 votes (that he is sure to get). Many other policies he can take unilaterally as Commander-in-Chief. The media already worships him, and is openly counting the bailout they will soon get. The Media wishes to be formally, Pravda. Obama can do everything up to getting millions of Americans killed, the taboo of nukes broken, and major US cities containing priceless people, works of art, architecture, and history destroyed forever. Obama can do all this (and clearly, wants to).

But, not being an American, having no friends who are American (they are all Rev. Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers, or Van Jones), he does not understand that his moment of control passes as soon as America gets nuked. Obama, will soon face after his fondest dream, America punished for its sins by being nuked, his worst nightmare. An angry, frightened, fearful America, casting his leadership off, by impeachment and conviction, or military coup (the US Military is the only institution that is still trusted by Americans as it is the only one that actually does its job) if Congress is vaporized in Washington. Indeed, Obama himself might be vaporized by the very Jihadis he seeks to encourage. They owe him nothing and have nothing but contempt for him, witness bin Laden's message to Obama that he cannot stop war.

Americans won't stand for a forced surrender to Jihad by a foreign President. One whose nature, being of Jakarta not America, does not allow him any real understanding of Americans. Obama dreams of inflicting a massive defeat and nuclear humiliation on America. Instead, most Americans, once they have thrown off Obama, are likely to conclude that the only way to be safe and secure is to kill most Muslims on the planet. And set about doing, just that. As the response to Pearl Harbor was a bloody series of naval battles, island campaigns, the firebombing of Japan, followed by nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

People often wonder about the difference between 9/11 and WWII. In WWII, people were afraid and quite reasonably afraid that the US could lose and face foreign occupation. On 9/11, no matter how hard the terrorists hit us, we were not afraid of a foreign occupation and defeat. Now, Obama intends to inflict defeat on America. On a scale that dwarfs 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Reminiscent of the leveling of Rotterdam and Coventry. All so that Obama can rule as the foreign tribune over an America he (and his wife) hate.

Obama does not wish to be President. Only Vizier. Thus his bowing to the Saudi King:



No other US President has EVER bowed to a foreign leader. No American ever would. Instinctively, Obama does not even think himself a President, rather a Vizier in Waiting.

He is likely, for all his trouble, to be removed from office. While his friends such as Ayers and Dohrn and Soros are rich, money is not everything. Most Americans are not the sons of Commonwealth Edison CEOs and Chairman such as Bill Ayers, revolutionary born to wealth. America is still at least 74% to 80% White and only 12-12.8% Black. Fewer still are the born to the manor revolutionaries, political hacks, corrupt bagmen, and radical grifters (Van Jones) who make up Obama's retinue of advisors, friends, and associates. All likely sense Obama's desire to be Vizier, and agree with the fundamental outlines. But none really understand the vastness, both physical and population-wise, of America.

Yes, Obama can get millions of Americans killed, its premier Eastern cities in radioactive rubble, a humiliating inability to strike back immediately. But all he will do is provoke a final, and very dangerous struggle between the elites and those who back him as a "Light Worker" and the people, who are beginning to actively hate and despise not just him but all around him, including the failed media (who did not report at all on ACORN even after Big Government reported for days with shocking media on the ACORN prostitution sting.

With millions of Americans dead, cities in ruin, Obama's ability to give a big speech to adoring people, who want a Big Man leader, after having failed spectacularly in protecting America, is limited. His core followers will be with him, but that is all, and would amount to no more than 20% of the population. The rest will want him gone and will work with whatever remaining forces are left to accomplish that, whether it be people in the military, or surviving Congressmen and Senators, or even Governors. Obama himself might be dead in any attack on Washington. But even if he survives few will be willing to sign up for even more defeat, humiliation, and foreign rule in one way or another.

America's elite (and that of the entire West, but that is another post) is hopelessly corrupt and decadent, removed from the people, without any understanding of them and given to open fear and contempt for the people. Obama, and his desire to be Vizier not President, merely exemplifies this desire of the elite to surrender to any, any enemy, so long as they may rule over their people without restraint or consideration for them. Too much wealth, control of culture, and lack of challenge to their near-hereditary positions has corrupted their minds to the point where they believe themselves the natural born aristocracy fated to rule over a people they believe, also, inherently "evil" and worthy of punishment.

However, while lacking in the enormous amounts of wealth that the elite have, the people have wealth of their own, to the point where obesity is a serious health issue in the West. Cars, computers, and other pointers of wealth abound. The White middle and working classes in America are still the largest groups. Obama hopes to destroy both at a stroke and set himself up as Vizier, offering more defeat to America. In this quest for defeat and becoming America's First Vizier, Obama may have more in common with Al Qaeda than he thinks: a fantasy ideology, one not based on any actual knowledge of real, ordinary Americans.

But then, Obama was never American.
...Read more

Friday, September 18, 2009

Can Brett Favre Save the NFL?


The Wall Street Journal disclosed that Brett Favre's Jersey is the best seller in 19 states, Favre being one of just eight players whose jersey is a top seller in more than one state, far out ranking that of the other seven players. This is a problem for the NFL, because their business is in a potential crisis: they don't have (many) popular players, and many of their best known players are thugs who alienate the mostly White, middle aged fans. This is particularly dicey for the NFL given that it's four largest TV deals expire in 2014 and TV networks are under huge earnings pressure. The NFL is caught between a mostly Black, thuggish player corps threatening to alienate the mostly White and Middle class fans, and the demands of PC and Multiculturalism. Perhaps only Brett Favre can "save them" by buying space and time while the NFL figures out what to do and develops more popular players.


The NFL will have its deals with NBC (after a deal in August to extend "Sunday Night Football in America" to two more years, through the 2013 season), CBS, FOX, and ESPN expire at the same time. The league nets about $3.1 billion per year from those deals, and about $1 billion a year from the DirectTV Sunday Ticket deal, which expires year later, at the conclusion of the 2014 season. The NFL Network deal is about $400 million a year for the league, although that is mere book-keeping given that the NFL owns NFL Network. Altogether the NFL nets somewhere north of $4.1 billion a year from TV revenue, given that it likely makes a small profit on the NFL Network via advertising and cable/satellite fees in addition to the main TV deals. This is serious money, that is shared relatively equally among the league, forming the core revenue of many smaller teams (Buffalo, Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Seattle come to mind). The the failure to develop new appealing stars, and a serious problem with thuggery by a significant number of its players, threatens this extraordinary revenue stream, the best in professional sports.

Michael Vick is the best example of polarizing figures, and an ominous one for the NFL. A recent poll noted the huge racial disparity — Blacks support Vick returning to the NFL by 82%, while Whites oppose it by 46%. Meanwhile a survey of NFL fans finds that53% don't want Vick on their team. Vick, it must be noted, engaged in a long-term gambling ring (dog-fighting), threw family pets into dogfights to be torn apart (and laughed at it), and personally hung, electrocuted, beat to death, and drowned dogs that would not fight or failed to fight well. According to sworn testimony, he found killing the dogs "funny" and amusing. Indicating a strong streak of sadism that characterizes the progression of serial killers. All this while Vick had a multi-year deal worth $130 million.

According to Alan Barra at the Wall Street Journal, 67% of the 1,696 players on the NFL's per-team 53 man active player roster are Black. About 31% are White, with a small sampling of other ethnicities. Using the US Census Factfinder this compares to a population that is 74% White and 12% Black (based on the 2005-2007) survey. With the 2008 estimated data, the Census Bureau reports 80% White to 13% Black. Even by the most conservative estimates, America remains a very White nation, and with the Black Middle class being only 40% of Blacks, or about 5% of the total population. The most "Black" of the sports leagues, the NBA, is believed to be getting $930 million a year from all its broadcasting partners. Estimates vary for the percentage of White players in the NBA, from 9% to 20%, complicated by a good percentage of White players being foreign born (example: LA Lakers player Pau Gasol, is from Spain).

Clearly, while the mostly White sports fans can and will readily accept a large percentage of teams comprised of Black players, television revenues decline as team rosters become uniformly Black, and particularly when few "stars" who are both amiable sports figures and achievers in the game, are White. No one can force the mostly White, middle class, and middle aged sports fans to watch games, either on TV or in person. Sports fans not watching, means lucrative Television deals are renewed at far lower rates. League licensed apparel sits in warehouses or must be sold at discount rates. Corporate sponsorships are dropped or are renewed at far lower rates. This is not surprising. People like to watch people who resemble (idealized) versions of themselves.

Cleveland Wide Receiver Donte Stallworth, convicted of a DUI manslaughter, remains under house arrest but is on the Cleveland Browns roster, though currently suspended by the NFL. The murder charge against Raven's Linebacker Ray Lewis, the Las Vegas shooting that paralyzed a security guard in a strip club by the entourage of Pac Man Jones, Jones later fighting with the Dallas Cowboys bodyguard-minder, involvement in gambling, the murder conviction of Carolina Panthers Wide Receiver Rae Carruth, are all problematic for the NFL. Michael Vick's actions did not bolt out of the blue, rather he was merely the latest in a long trend that dates back to the 1990's.

It is perhaps inevitable in that with 1,696 active players, many of them raised by single mothers in Black ghettos, finally getting enormous amounts of money, fame, praise, and attention, and being able to slide by most of society's rules by athletic achievement since early adolescence, that year in and year out, there will be shocking, and often vile behavior by a few of them. In 1963, both "Golden Boy" Green Bay Quarterback Paul Hornung and Detroit Lions All-Pro Defensive Tackle Alex Karras were suspended for one year for gambling. Showing that even White, middle class players are susceptible to bad behavior.

John Madden has noted that the overwhelming majority of NFL players are good people, who anonymously work for numerous charities, giving of their time and money (from players whose average career lasts only 5 years). Warrick Dunn, for example, was the Walter Payton Man of the Year in 2005, and has established a charity to purchase homes for single parents in memory of his mother, who was murdered working a shift as a security guard. Dunn is hardly alone, NFL players like the Manning brothers, Peyton and Eli, chartered trucks with food and water to Katrina victims in New Orleans, in the aftermath of that hurricane.

But the overall decent nature of NFL players is not enough. The NFL has a star problem. Few of their stars are White, and even fewer of them are the sort of "funny" and self-deprecating characters that generate ratings, ticket sales, and fanatical fans generating over $4 billion a year in Television revenues.

The League tried to "sell" variously Tom Brady, Ladainian Tomlinson, Donovan McNabb, Phillip Rivers, and Brady Quinn, among others, and found few takers. Despite being featured in DirectTV "Sunday Ticket" commercials, and a few others, Rivers and Tomlinson lacked the sort of charisma needed to connect with fans. Brady and McNabb, meanwhile, came off as arrogant, with a side order of whining (about how hard it was to be a Black Quarterback) from McNabb. This in the year that Eli Manning and Rex Grossman were roasted on sports talk radio. Brady Quinn, while personable, has yet to accomplish anything interesting on the field.

Meanwhile the NFL's most popular star remains: Brett Favre. It's no secret, Favre has charisma, the older White male NFL fans identify with the man who will be 40 in October. This is why his jersey sold so much, setting the single day record for the NFL's online shops when he signed with the Vikings this Summer. After Favre, the 33 year old Peyton Manning, the 38 year old Arizona Cardinals QB Kurt Warner, the 27 year old Ben Roethlisberger, and the 30 year old Drew Brees are popular, amiable, and visible Quarterbacks (the marquee position of the game). The 29 year old Dallas Cowboys QB Tony Romo has yet to accomplish anything in the post-season, limiting his popularity.

NFL fans like particularly QBs who have won in the post-season, particularly Superbowl champs, and who are amiable with a sense of humor about themselves. Arrogance finds few admirers, while humor finds many. Tom Brady has played in four Superbowls, winning three of them, and being the MVP of two. Yet he remains, unpopular, compared to Peyton Manning or Brett Favre, who have won only one Superbowl a piece. Clearly, persona counts, and Brady, despite his accomplishments on the field, has been unable to connect to fans. Clearly humor (both Favre and Manning are funnier than Brady) counts for a lot. Above all, the games are entertainment.

The problem for the NFL is that Favre and Warner have only a few more years left, if that. Peyton Manning is 33, Eli Manning is 28, and Drew Brees is 30. These are players who are all getting older, and of them, only Peyton has connected with the public in a wide fashion. Roethlisberger is an up and coming player, with two Superbowl victories, a general amiable on-screen presence, but despite his size has a history of injuries, a potential scandal (a rape charge that appears a bogus extortion attempt, but still exists) and a team that does not feature much passing by the QB. Roethlisberger, however, is the one potential younger star in the NFL that could possibly replace Brett Favre.

It is true that players, particularly quarterbacks who maintain rigorous off-season conditioning programs and do not run much, can play much longer than in previous years. But even so, the current crop of NFL QBs beyond the ones listed above have yet to connect with the wider NFL audience and fan base. Brett Favre, assuming he can play a full season, and take the Vikings into the post-season, might just buy the NFL another year to help develop Roethlisberger, Brees, and perhaps Brady Quinn into more appealing stars that generate interest in the mostly White fan-base.

So far, the ESPN Monday Night Football double header did very well. The come from behind victory by the Patriots over the (hapless) Buffalo Bills averaged 14 million viewers, beating the number for the most viewers by cable set last Summer by TLC's "John and Kate Plus 8" (10.6 million viewers). The week before Christmas in 2008, the CBS NFL game pulled in 20 million viewers. This compares with the 16.9 million season average for the CBS new show (that season) "the Mentalist." With, it must be noted, hard to attract male viewers making up most of the 20 million viewers, compared to a likely female-majority audience for "the Mentalist."

Clearly, the NFL is popular. Football is an amazing game, like chess where the pieces collide into each other at high speed and with great force. At its best, the game can be complex, fast paced, exciting, and with huge momentum changes from play to play. Featuring grace and power together, along with team-work and huge amounts of cooperation under a paternal, older male authority figure. But the game itself, though a large part of the NFL's appeal, is not enough to sustain the more than $4 billion a year revenue from television contracts, particularly with all deals expiring in four years.

The college game offers the same thrills, and it is no accident that ESPN promotes both clean-cut (and White) QBs such as Colt McCoy and Tim Tebow, as well as "conference buster" teams such as Boise State, BYU, and Utah, that offer a larger proportion of White players, and a more accessible image.Football fans who find mostly unattractive "stars" such as Donovan McNabb, or Michael Vick, or Tom Brady, can simply substitute the College games. It is as easy as flipping the channel.

What Bret Favre allows the NFL is time. Time to promote more clean-cut, amiable stars. The happy focus on a feel-good story of an aging QB trying to help a team loaded with talent get into the playoffs, instead of a nascent serial killer as the NFL's most-publicized QB. Favre, at least while he plays, can starve the Michael Vick story of oxygen. Which clearly the NFL needs.

It was rumored that Jessie Jackson (with the help of former Colts head coach Tony Dungy) threatened a public protest if Vick was not re-instated by the NFL, and predictably, the NFL caved. That caving however, has a huge risk. Fans could simply turn away in enough numbers that the NFL resembles the NBA in fan base (and revenues) instead of what it is now. If Michael Vick is the face of the NFL, with the current Black player roster percentage (67%), those astonishing viewer levels for games will likely be cut in half.

Perhaps the man who ultimately replaced Michael Vick in Atlanta, Matt Ryan, can become a fan favorite nationwide, or hapless Detroit Lions QB Matthew Stafford revive the moribund franchise the way Peyton Manning did the Colts. The NFL had better use the extra year Favre gave them to find something. Fans have to want to see players win, if not, significant numbers of them will simply not watch.
...Read more

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Ashley Madison: Marriage Redefined

In National Review Online's "the Corner" Kathryn Jean Lopez was scandalized for ads running on Television for "AshleyMadison.com" a dating site for married people. Or, in other words, a site for cheaters on their spouses. On Hotair.com, Ed Morrissey was similarly outraged. One of the ads is below:



But both social conservatives are raging against the tide. We live in a science fiction world, not the least of which is the impact of technology and technology empowered elites to redefine bedrock cultural institutions. Such as marriage. What is not remarkable is the existence of Ashley Madison. There will always be cheap and sleazy uses for technology. What is remarkable is that the ads run, essentially without comment, on television and Youtube.com. Social attitudes have changed, perhaps irrevocably, and what remains is figuring out how the impact of these social attitudes will ripple across American society.


In my post Prop 8 Hate: Our Glorious Multicultural Future, I noted how NRO's Stanley Kurz had predicted, accurately, that cultural elites (many of them gay) would redefine the institution of marriage along gay norms (i.e.) open cheating, seen here at NRO and here at the Weekly Standard. As Kurz notes, there are movements in Sweden from the radical feminists to abolish marriage and legalized polyamory. Polyamory is legal in the Netherlands. Canada and Britain give welfare benefits to polygamists. As Kurz notes in the NRO article:

It isn't just Big Love's co-creators who think of it as something that will influence our cultural, legal, and political battles. Big Love's actors seem to feel the same way. Ginnifer Goodwin, who plays one of the wives of Big Love, says that for many women, polygamy "is the answer to their problems, not a problem in and of itself." Big Love lead, Bill Paxton, says: "This show talks about the freedom in this country. Are we free to choose who with want to live with? Well, yes, but we can't have legal rights together." Paxton seems to be pretty clearly arguing for decriminalization of polygamy, and probably for direct legal recognition as well.
...
We are dealing, not with an election campaign, but with the possible collapse of a social taboo — something television is ideally suited to achieve. Social taboos may erode gradually over the very long haul, but up close, and especially toward the beginning, you get little collapses — the quick and unexpected falling away of opposition. What used to be hidden emerges with startling rapidity, because much of it was there all along. Polygamy, and especially polyamory, are already widespread on the Internet. Both practices are pushing toward a major public taboo-collapsing moment. We can't know when "critical mass" might be reached, but Big Love has got to be getting us there a whole lot quicker than we were.
...
All indications are that Big Love is a product of this radical sensibility. The goal is not to adapt couples to an already existing institution but, in Scheffer's words, to "subversively" transform the institution of marriage from within. So by highlighting the analogy between gay marriage and polygamy, Big Love simultaneously builds support for same-sex marriage, while also deconstructing the very notion of monogamous marriage itself. It's a radical's dream come true.

This means the real challenge we face is not from a huge, nationally based movement of so-called "Mormon fundamentalists." (These renegade polygamists are emphatically not members of the mainstream, Mormon Church.) Instead, as in Canada, the challenge will come from a complex coalition: gay radicals who favor same-sex marriage but who also want to transform and transcend marriage itself, feminists (like Canada's Martha Bailey) who feel the same way, Hollywood liberals like Tom Hanks (an executive producer of Big Love) who want to use the media to transform the culture, civil-rights advocates like the ACLU and ex-Humphrey aide Ed Frimage, libertarian conservatives like John Tierney and an ever-larger number of young people, fundamentalist "Mormon" polygamists, and the ever-growing movement for polyamory (which features both heterosexuals and large numbers of bisexuals), and perhaps someday (as in Canada) Muslim and other non-Western immigrants.

This complex coalition ranging from old-fashioned Humphrey-style liberals to anti-marriage feminist radicals, to libertarian conservatives, is what will power future efforts to radically deconstruct marriage. And we're only at the very beginning of these efforts. For the most part, cultural radicals are holding back, knowing that anything they say may jeopardize the movement for same-sex marriage by validating slippery-slope fears. The remarkable thing is that, at this early stage, the radicals have forced themselves so openly into the cultural argument. That is a sure sign that if same-sex marriage were to be safely legalized nationally, the way would finally be open to a truly concerted campaign to transform marriage by opening it up to polygamy and polyamory, or by replacing it with an infinitely flexible partnership system. Whatever we're seeing now is only the barest hint of what will happen once the coast is clear.


In the Weekly Standard article, Kurz notes:

Yet the larger effects of such unions on the institution of marriage would be devastating. At a stroke, marriage would be severed not only from the complementarity of the sexes but also from its connection to romance and sexual exclusivity--and even from the hope of permanence. In Hawkins's words, the proliferation of such arrangements "would turn marriage into the moral equivalent of a Social Security benefit." The effect would be to further diminish the sense that a woman ought to be married to the father of her children. In the aggregate, what we now call out-of-wedlock births would increase. And the connection between marriage and sexual fidelity would be nonexistent.


The other Ashley Madison ad, below, suggests that this has already happened.



If there was any doubt, this promotional video for NBC's "Mercy" ought to seal the notion that marriage has been re-defined:



Note the definition of marriage — boring "companionship" where attractive women have what Sandra Tsing Loh in her Atlantic article termed "kitchen bitches," i.e. someone "boring" takes care of the domestic partnership and domestic chores, while women pursue what feminist author termed "passionate and chaotic" relationships. The very idea of fidelity is not something that enters the cultural conversation, and the lead character's workplace friends find nothing wrong with a married woman having an affair with the handsome, powerful doctor (or lusting after a hunky bartender).

Taken together, the NBC "Mercy" series, the Ashley Madison ads actually running on CNN, with the tagline "Life is Short, Have an Affair" and Youtube commenters finding the commercials well, thrilling, all point to a cultural inflection point from which there is no escape. Marriage is redefined. Towards a "French" model of infidelity based on the relative attractiveness of the partners (note the Ashley Madison ads have partners more attractive than their spouses cheating).

The only problem for America is that Americans are not French. Specifically, the "French" model only works when marriage is assumed to be a partnership for conservation of resources that are passed on, fairly bloodlessly, to children. With all the passion and love of a corporate merger. For most Americans, that is simply not the case. The Eliot Spitzers, the John Edwards (both of whom are said to be contemplating a revived political career), are able to conduct "French" style marriages. So too, those with considerable but not massive resources, around the $10-20 million range, where divorce means real economic losses, are probably able to tolerate mutual discreet affairs. "The Nanny Diaries" film and book cover this dynamic. Wives are reluctant to divorce cheating husbands because it means loss of beach houses in the Hamptons. The ultra rich like say, Paul McCartney or Maddona, of course, can afford divorce.

For example, in my post How Many White Men Are Getting Married I noted that there is evidence that a good many more White Men ages 35-40 are never married, as opposed to the past:


[Click Image to Enlarge]

In my post Beyond Gay Marriage I noted the trend below (data from US Census Bureau, check my post for links and data):


[Click Image to Enlarge]

The graph below is my crude attempt to measure women who were ever married, from those cohabitating (again from the US Census Bureau data in the post):


[Click Image to Enlarge]

Clearly, the status in American society as a whole of marriage is colored by the large amounts of older women who certainly won't be patronizing Ashley Madison. But ... the ability or willingness of older women to criticize those who do, and protest Ashley Madison ads, running on CNN, or rebuke NBC for "Mercy" is questionable at best. Older women are not going to redefine their understanding of the institution of marriage, but they don't, in our extreme culture of individualism, consumerism, and "non-judgmentalism" exert cultural pressure to maintain the norms of marriage they themselves hold.

The changes to marriage, by those just entering into it (roughly people in their mid-twenties to mid thirties) are striking, both with the rapidity of which it changed, and how widely it will ripple out to society. As Charles Murray, author of "the Bell Curve," notes, the rates of illegitimacy for WHITES are vastly different from the longitudinal study done of women born from 1957 to 1964. The women of childbearing years now:

Today, the illegitimacy ratio for non-Latino whites is 28 percent. How do the classes break down now? As it happens, I’ve spent the last few weeks exploring that question. I’m not done, and want to save that discussion for a formal presentation in any case, but here are some tentative estimates: The illegitimacy ratio for the white underclass is probably now in the region of 70 percent. I think that the proportion for the white working class may be above 40 percent. The white middle class is approaching 20 percent—a scarily high figure when you think about all the ways that the middle class has been the spine of the nation.

The white overclass? They’re still living in the 1950s—their ratio is probably about 4 or 5 percent tops.


Murray defines the overclass as women who have at least one year post-baccalaureate College, and family incomes of more than $100,000 the year before the birth of the first child (2006 dollars). This is about 10% of the population. Middle Class women (40% of the population) are defined as College graduates, family income $60,000 but not over $100,000. Working Class women (40% of the population) are defined as Women with family incomes less than $60,000 but more than $20,000. Underclass (10% of the population) is defined as no more than High School education and family incomes of less than $20,000.

Marriage and child-rearing are removed and disconnected from each other just like marriage and fidelity are now removed from each other. As Murray notes, the White Overclass, the elites, are still living in the 1950's. With two parent families, perhaps living lives of discreet infidelity, but remaining intact as married partners.

Working class women are moving beyond marriage and "quaint" notions of fidelity and family, to chaotic, short-lived "passionate" romances like that depicted in "Mercy" which certainly allow women (and a few lucky men) the ability to feed a passion for novelty and excitement. Increasingly, middle class (White) women are doing the same. The underclass is functionally the same as Urban Core Blacks, who have illegitimacy rates of 90%. The only reason this collapse excites no commentary is that the White underclass is so small (10%) and "invisible" to media and elites who comprise the media, that their plight excites no comment.

Certainly, part of this redefinition of marriage is due to cultural elites (often gays and feminists as Kurz details) using entertainment to push the redefinition of marriage and family. However, you cannot sell sandboxes to desert nomads, or refrigerators to Eskimos. Modern life in the West offers absolute freedom, unfettered by nearly any constraint, and men and women alike desire this freedom greatly. Family law radicals, feminists, gays, and others seeking to redefine marriage found willing buyers among women and men who wanted no more limits on sexual conduct. Women more than men, since only a few men are attractive (having power, status, physique, and personal dynamism), while most reasonably fit women are attractive.

As the various conservative commentors such as Kay Hymowitz Man Child in the Promised Land lament, young men are not getting married as they did in 1965. The data from the GSS shows a significant uptick of men never married between ages 35-40 over the years.

Unlike the hedonistic, gaming and player caricature that Hymowitz paints, however, most young White Men lack the ability to get married, and stay married, in today's cultural and economic environment. As Murray's data shows, Overclass men and women do not have much problem getting married. Income and status over $100,000 (and it is often well over $100,000) can account for many short-comings in excitement, social dominance, and physicality, as seen in the clip from "Mercy." Overclass men and women marry each other, it seems, and stay married, not having kids out of wedlock, certainly. This is at most 10% of the population, and even with marriage redefined as a boring domestic partnership, the most jaded husbands and wives can find "discreet" partners. Eliot Spitzer was an outlier — neither Gavin Newsome, nor LA Mayor Tony Villaraigosa, nor Mark Sanford, nor John Ensign, nor Bill Clinton, nor Gary Condit, nor John Edwards paid for sex. Their power and charisma made them irresistible, to the interns who worked for them, ambitious news women and reporters who covered them, videographers who documented their campaigns, family friends, and of course the wives of subordinates who found their husbands bosses irresistible. Most wives and husbands of this class will tolerate affairs under a redefined marriage as long as they are discreet and carried on covertly.

But for middle and working class men, marriage is not in the cards. When women select on "passion" (seen most clearly in the Mercy clip) then most men need not apply. Only the most charismatic, dynamic, attractive, and socially dominant men will attract romantic and sexual interest from women on this basis, and these men generally only settle down when they start to age out of attractiveness. Joe Average in his cubicle, so amply demonstrated in Mike Judge's "Office Space" is not going to attract much (if any) female attention, certainly not for a sustained period of time, making marriage moot.

If for middle and working class men (that's about 80% of the male population in Murray's definition) relationships with women are characterized as "hoping to be some girl's mistake" (as the protagonist in the Judd Apatow comedy "Superbad" exhorts), at best short term, and quickly terminated relationships with women are going to characterize this class of men. This just is not a basis for marriage. No wonder X-boxes and male bonding are attractive. In a society that has as it's prize the boob husband of a million ads or the cheated upon "nice guy pal" husband in "Mercy," where cheating is a click away on Ashley Madison's website, the brass ring of marriage and family looks increasingly illusory to these men. Who in any event have mostly fleeting engagements with women, lacking the ability to excite passion and desire by dominance and charisma.

For Underclass men, the answer has been clear. Chav Britain, or as I posted in Paging Dr Dalrymple, this guy:


[Click Image to enlarge]

"Chaving it up" or engaging in the boozy, fighting-dominated life of "Chav" Britain, is the quickest way for Underclass men to get women. They cannot compete on economic grounds. Women have their own earnings, various welfare schemes, and face no social pressure for pursuing passion (and the desire for bad, dangerous men) over sensible and more dependable, but "boring" companions and potential husbands. Only a few men possess, naturally, the charisma, social dominance, physique, early experience with women that builds natural confidence and assurance, and playful teasing mixed with an edge that characterizes the natural ladies man, or "Alpha male" that women of the Underclass (and appropriate to their socio-economic background, women of Working and Middle Class as well) desire and now, with total freedom, can pursue with no barriers. Only a very few men can simply naturally charm girls and women into sex, and perhaps long-term relationships (which now come after, not before, sex for the most part).

But nearly all men can fight. And fighting is an easy way, a short-cut, to social dominance. The most confident and self-assured ladies man will not look winning if given a beating by rivals. Thus the importance not just of fighting, but of fighting in groups, to assure domination over other men, in the very Darwinian competition for women, un-mediated by any social institution or controls. For Chav men who can fight, women are not a problem. Though here, too, marriage has collapsed. Black blogger "the Rawness" has written on the same subject in his post on the "Myth of the Alpha Ghetto Male" where the same dynamics for competition for women, and no mediation or moderation by older men, takes place. Read the whole thing:

So since they don’t have men to teach them how to be a man, this creates an insecurity in their male identity and causes them to create their own hyperexaggerated ideal of what a man should be. Supermacho, obnoxious, fearless to the point of knuckleheaded, overaggressive…basically the parody of manhood we see in gangster rap. It’s overcompensation to the worst degree.


Certainly both Chav Britain and the Black Ghetto have experienced, since 1955, a dramatic turn in violence, and hyper-violence, of drive by shootings, of knifings and killings, unheard of in times with far greater material want (Britain had rationing well into the 1950's) and overt discrimination (Segregation did not materially end until the late 1960's at least). The Black Ghetto family of 1950 had a fraction of the wealth and materials (computers, televisions, game systems, cheap food), yet experienced only a fraction of the violence and intimidation. Single motherhood dominated societies quickly devolved into violent matriarchies, with men competing for women based not on provider status but violent posturing. Seen in any Gangsta Rap video.

With the collapse of provider marriage (and just as critically, the demand for provider marriage among Underclass women), in the US, the UK, and Black Ghetto America, the "Chav route" has been the only proven way for most young men to achieve any sort of relationship with women. We can expect to see this continue as the economy continues to have few options for expansion, certainly not to the point where Underclass men could be credible providers (as opposed to welfare spending) anyway.

What about the Working and Middle Class men, what are their options? Increasingly, contrary to Hymowitz (who makes the usual social conservative error of ignoring female preferences), men are substituting a bad diet of porn, video games, male bonding, and intermittent and generally infrequent sexual encounters for marriage and family formation. Contrary to Hymowitz, their female peers don't want them as monogamous life partners, but rather at best, cheated upon "kitchen bitches" who take care of the household while they pursue "passionate affairs of the heart." [It might just as well be that the young men don't want monogamous relationships either, but most if honest would admit their relative attractiveness puts that option for them out of the question — monogamy is their best deal and they know it.] This is at best, and mostly among Middle Class women, who though are increasingly turning towards the single-mother model of childbearing. At worst, their female peers would rather these young men of Hymowitz's "Child Man" article be fabulously gay co-workers, and thus not express any romantic/sexual interest in them at all, or at-sea clueless idiots upbraided by them in private (see again, the "Mercy" clip).

Working class women have turned even more to the single motherhood model, and for working class men, the only route they have is a modified "Chav" route of casual intimidation and fighting unlikely to lead to lengthy imprisonment, when it comes to winning sexual favors. As the economy continues to roil, and shed blue-collar, working class jobs, creating permanent unemployment among men of this class, the full Chav route looks even more attractive. Given that this class of men is about 40% of the population (according to Murray's definition), this is not an insignificant development.

So for Working class men, the slide towards the Chav route and Underclass status is likely to be rapid. For Middle Class men, perhaps best idealized by the "Michael Bolton" character in "Office Space" the frustration will grow as the ability to substitute a relationship with a woman fails, particularly given a downwardly spiraling economy, job uncertainty, and social isolation creates massive frustration with mundane issues:





This is particularly true for the effects of the recession: women are poised to become the majority of the workforce. Men accounted for through June, 74% of the 6.4 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007. Three million jobs in construction and manufacturing alone were lost, nearly all of those by men.

The gender transformation is especially remarkable in local government's 14.6 million-person workforce. Cities, schools, water authorities and other local jurisdictions have cut 86,000 men from payrolls during the recession — while adding 167,000 women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.


All of this, the redefinition of marriage, by cultural elites (and willing buyers among the people), and large economic changes, threatens to redefine fundamentally how men and women relate to one another.

For the elites, the Overclass, life continues as it did in the 1950's. With the exception that women now comprise significant portions of the workforce and have many more career and leadership opportunities. For lower class men and women, life will be dominated ever more by the Chav model, and chaotic, transient relationships among men and women, often marked by violence. This is increasingly the model for working class women as well. Note Dalrymple's nurses, educated and professional, did not have affairs with glamorous, upper class doctors. They instead chose, time and again, violent and abusive men who abused them (humiliatingly) even in their own workplace, and still went back to them. Abjuring "boring" men who were "decent" and tradesmen, with good earnings but lack of danger and excitement.

For those in the middle, life is a powderkeg. In my post Paging Dr Dalrymple note the competition among attractive women for the few, dominant, charismatic, high status men does not often go well (even for those pretty and advertising the same):


[Click Image to Enlarge]


[Click Image to Enlarge]


[Click Image to Enlarge]




[Click Image to Enlarge]


[Click Image to Enlarge]


[Click Image to Enlarge]

There are, after all, only a few socially dominant, desirable men, and any night out, these men will go home with only a fraction of the women available. Even pretty young things end up on the side of the road, consoled by their friends, as a night out ended in failure. No matter how alluring the state of dress, youth, and availability (to the "correct" sort of man) might be for an attractive woman, there is always an even more beautiful woman around.

With downward pressure on earnings, among the "Michael Bolton" types shown in "Office Space" the selection of only the most dominant, "Alpha" type men makes sense for women in the Middle class. The provider types don't have even providing to offer, certainly not a stable income, with outsourcing and H1-B visas providing job insecurity, and economic growth certain to be stagnant for years to come. Meanwhile, the Alpha types offer excitement and thrills, and if a woman is unsuccessful one night, she might well be successful the next. Certainly a better outcome than moving downwards to the Michael Bolton types. At any rate, even the Michael Boltons seem uninterested in being the "kitchen bitches" cheated on by a click on Ashley Madison.

The catch for women in the Middle Class, and there is indeed a catch, is that only the most beautiful will end up with the Alpha Male, and then only when he's on an age-inspired urge to settle down. Call it the Michael Douglas syndrome. The former ladies man settles down with a significantly younger partner, based on his status and charisma. Only a few will become Catherine Zeta-Jones. It's entirely likely that as many as three nights at the club out of four will end like the sad pictures of women distraught, as above, texting, or holding their friends, or sitting alone on the side of the curb. Possibly fewer than that will hit the "jackpot" of marriage to the Alpha Male, and even fewer one who does not stray, even when older.

For Middle Class women, this catch will be considerable. The source, too, of much understandable anger.

But for the "Michael Bolton" types, who toil in the cubicle, awaiting the next round of layoffs, fighting with printers flashing "PC LOAD LETTER" the urge to do something, anything, will prove irresistible. Along with a huge dose of anger and frustration, higher even than their female Middle Class counterparts, who at least periodically "win" far more than the "Bolton" types.

Culturally, we should see a huge amount of nostalgia among the Middle Class cubicle dwellers, for more gender-role settled times, when men could and did form Middle Class families, from the 1940's to the 1950's. While the current crop of creative people, forming a disconnected Overclass that has no clue about the social life of others, is likely to prove incapable of producing that entertainment, the miracle of technology means that 1950's movies and television shows are only a click away on Amazon.com. Or Hulu.

Substitution of real relationships with women by male bonding, X-boxes, and porn was never going to be a realistic outcome for the Middle Class man for long. Now that the recession has serious impacted that ability to spend into oblivion for men, along with great uncertainty, a huge mass of White middle class men is now invested in something, anything, that will both restore their economic security, and allow them to attract and keep women, away from the threat of one bad night of Ashley Madison-enabled cheating.

It is unlikely that female hypergamy (women wanting men of significantly higher status, power, social dominance, etc) will be repealed any time soon. Even more unlikely that restrictions on social and sexual behavior, to the point where a site like Ashley Madison would no more be able to advertise on CNN than an explicit porn site, will happen. Which means that marriage will be redefined for the foreseable future as the union of two people for domestic chores, profit-sharing, and nothing more. Certainly not fidelity or child-raising for most people. Only the latter will apply, to the thin (10%) Overclass of society.

Instead, Americans will co-habitate, in chaotic and short-lived relationships. Sexual freedom will be maximized, with a few winners (Alpha men, Middle Class women optimizing sex with Alpha men) though not without cost. For Alpha men, that cost can be deadly, as the late Steve McNair discovered. For Middle Class women, the cost is spending most of their lives (35-80's) alone and invisible.

Underclass Men already Chav-it-up, and will continue to do so in greater numbers. Increasingly, the "New Girl Order" of Hymowitz, with terribly fashionable young women doing corporate marketing, human resources, and government health, education, and welfare work as it displaces Blue collar Working class men in the economy, will result in the same for Working Class men. Who having little to lose will rapidly embrace the Chav life.

But for the great losers in the sexual reordering, in the "Ashley Madison World," the "Michael Boltons" who struggle with PC LOAD LETTER on their corporate printers, their desires running flat into the demands of the "New Girl Order" promise to shape culture and politics for decades to come, the way the Civil Rights movement or Depression did in decades past.

On the one hand, an ever-declining productive Middle Class workforce, hunkering down to avoid layoffs, angry and resentful, mostly male, and on the other, an "empowered" group of young and youngish women in the bloom of sexual power and attractiveness, wanting not a single check on sexual freedoms and messy romantic compromises, and certainly not on economic measures designed to invest the "Boltons" in the success of their companies or society at large. A pent-up, mostly chaotic, and unformed force of Middle Class men, up against the immovable object of women understandably unwilling to surrender either economic or sexual freedom.

With no compromises possible, because for one to win, the other must lose, and lose terribly.

Ultimately, this will play out on an ever declining quality, productivity, and ability of the American workforce. "Boltons" do not go the extra mile for a system that produces frustration and rage. The ability to extract tax resources from this Middle class will collapse as its productivity and earnings collapse. The "New Girl Order" is not economically sustainable, and a lost decade, characterized by continual economic decline and political infighting over Male and Female Middle Class objectives, either removing or protecting the world of "Ashley Madison" the rule of the day. Women can of course block any move to fix restrictions on the "Ashley Madison" world, either culturally or politically or both. But Middle Class women cannot force the "Boltons" to work extra hard. Casual theft, shirking, slacking, a desire even at the extremes to loot or burn down the company as seen in "Office Space" is far more likely. Men without any reason to provide, generally do the minimum possible. The hidden cost of the "Ashley Madison" world is a slide to say, Romanian work ethic and workforce skill levels.

This will make American society far more fragile than that say, of December 7, 1941. On that day, there was little question that the US would mobilize in massive fashion to defeat the Japanese. The full industrial might (and 500,000 US casualties) would see victory for an enraged and united populace. A similar calamity now, promises different results. At least a good chunk of the populace endorsing surrender or negotiated settlement, as the nuclear family and thus widespread investment in society has collapsed. The flip side of a society that effectively endorses "Life is Short. Have an Affair" is that no one is willing to die for it, and few willing to spend tax money for it either.

It is likely that at this moment, when power swings to those who fire rifles, and those who design and man UAV firing platforms, that the unformed but real anger of the Boltons are likely to show. After disastrous French offensives, the French army largely mutinied and mass arrests and executions were not enough, Petain had to agree to an end to offensives and more frequent, and longer leaves. America, at an inevitable time of great crisis (there is always a crisis in one form or another, human nature being what it is), will not be able to call upon the Boltons unless their demands are met. A man cannot be forced to work harder, and the imposition of the draft is politically unthinkable, even with widespread Middle class female support (itself unlikely), men will be able to veto it.

Men with families are always ready to fight to defend them, and men with a reasonable chance at forming them willing to fight for that privilege. Men with no hope of family, must be paid. Considerably. The need to re-allocate resources away from the New Girl Order and into defense and the military, are likely to be the great political struggle, dominated by the considerable political strength of women (understandably reluctant to cede spending and disconnected from most men), on the one hand, and absolute military and political need on the other.

One thing is for certain: we live in a science-fiction world unimaginable fifty years ago. Dominated by technology, to the point where advanced computer networks available to anyone can enable cheating spouses to help redefine marriage to norms advocated by elites. This in turn has accelerated the collapse of traditional marriage and family even among Whites, towards a new uncertainty characterized by vicious internal gender-political struggles, overlaid by elite disconnection, and providing provocative weakness inviting outside attackers. Whose attacks in turn promise to shape the deadlocked gender wars in unpredictable ways.
...Read more