Monday, January 16, 2012

Martin Luther King: The Return of Otto von Bismarck


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


All quotes found here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King notably said:

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


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



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

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

Sunday, January 15, 2012

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, January 12, 2012

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Slate did not much like it either:

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


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

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

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

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."







...Read more

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

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.
...Read more

Monday, January 9, 2012

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.
...Read more

Sunday, January 8, 2012

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.
...Read more