Hollywood Bets It All on Stupid

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

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


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

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

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

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

Goldstein swallows whole the following fantasy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contrast that with the fatuous stupidity of Yglesias at Slate:

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

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

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







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TV's Bad Boys and Violence

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look for this sexy bad boy killer trend on TV and movies to go away. Soon.
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Why Women Are Not At The Top (of Politics, Business, and Culture)

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

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


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

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

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

As Business Week noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

How has marriage come to this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hipster rock climbing instead of marriage is all well and good, but a woman's "boyfriend" is not going to display the same sacrifice and courage in fighting off intruders as one's husband.
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Where the Jobs Aren't: the Growth of the Craigslist/Moonshine Economy

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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Incredibly Emo and Extremely Effeminate

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THAT would have been the movie made if Joe Average White Guy and his money dominated the movie industry. That this movie has no testosterone whatsoever is indicative how skewed towards the female audience Hollywood has become.
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Obama's Military Cuts: Stupid or Hate America?

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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