I grew up in the absolute middle of nowhere. Dirt roads, fields of corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see. Hotter than hell during the summer and colder than shit during the winter months.

Let me dispel some myths about the country in America.

1. There is no patriarchy in the country

This one is a common meme in the media and liberals. Take note: fat, white women rule the country and the small towns. Men still usually make up the formal leadership in small towns and rural power structures, but women pull the strings of power.

I made the argument in a political science class about sex and politics that men have the authority (formal power) in the country, but women exert the power (they have the ability to influence the authority). This was back in my blue-pill days. It did not go over well. Like the frustrating arguments I had in Family Law about whether being the primary wage-earner gives you the power in a relationship, I could not have a true discussion about power and how it works – which led me to this corner of the web. I was supremely frustrated with people who refused to care about understanding the world around them.

The country and rural areas are ruled by obese Caucasian women. It doesn’t matter if she is Christian, secular or anything else. Women have the upper hand. Some of the most pussy-whipped motherfuckers I know are the most “conservative.” The women do their utmost to front their man as the head of the household,  to socially present him as the “man,” when she is actually in control.

I argued with a woman about a “controlling” husband who limited his wife’s autonomy. I pointed out that clearly the wife is in control and is manipulating your perception of the relationship because she needs you to see her in a certain way. The woman was completely offended by my assertion. I pushed further, asking her to really consider the husband – do you really think this man is a controlling asshole? She laid down her arms because the social script of the dominating male didn’t fit here because she knew the husband was a bitch.

2. Rural areas are not hotbeds for conservative Christians

While this stereotype may or may not apply to the South, it isn’t true in rural areas of the Midwest.

It is absolutely true that Christianity has a strong influence over society and politics in the country, but it isn’t as controlling as portrayed. Part of this conception stems from who is consuming, reading or viewing media coverage of rural areas – city folk. Part of the mis-characterization is narcissism – they need to feel superior to those ignorant Bible-thumpers. It’s also political – they need to feel that there is a strong backlash to liberal politics festering in the hotbeds of reactionary America.

There isn’t.

As usual, reality is more boring than fiction and that applies to rural areas and the country. Isolated areas attract a diversity of folk, many of whom are seeking to exist outside the mainstream. As such, you get many conservative Christians. You also get inordinate amounts of atheists, radical liberals, gay women (haven’t figured that one out), libertarians and all manner of folk who are not long for mainstream American society.

In many rural communities, the breakdown is as such: Christian conservatives, Big Union Democrats (Blue Dog Democrats) and libertarians. There are many, many conservative Christian conservatives in rural areas. The twist is that a good bit of them are Democrats – Democrats that abhor social liberalism but are strong fans of unionism and Keynesian economics (whether they know it or not). While they may be completely against gay marriage, abortion, feminism or whatever, their livelihood depends on their union membership and vote as such. These voters strongly preferred Hillary to Obama in 2008. Such voting was chalked up to racism, but that was very off-base. Hillary specifically targeted these sorts of voters with her strong pro-union credentials. Sometimes I wonder about the so-called “political” experts in the media.

Still, there are a good bit of strong liberals in rural communities. Sure, they rarely make up more than 25% of any local electorate, but they most assuredly exist. Political debates are far more robust in the country than urban areas – I have found big cities are thoroughly liberal. Voting patterns show this well, but my life has also reflect this. The most vigorous debates I had were often over hookah, weed and booze in a backyard of some farm house or living room of a rural apartment.

I think part of this is the fact the media presence is much more omnipresent in urban areas. It is tough to think for yourself when confronted with endless pleas to conform from the media. Only in the country can you sit back in your yard, enjoy the sky strewn with beautiful constellations of stars and just enjoy your beer. Alone. With just your thoughts.

Still, given the economic stress most rural communities experience, the debates often focus over approaches to economics. That is why both rural Republicans and Democrats spar primarily over economics. The sleight of hand the media engages in is that we are fighting over abortion or whatever. We aren’t. Conservative Christians sometimes use social issues as ways to politically organize, but the most passionate debates are over economic issues. Leave it to Starbucks liberals to bitch about gender roles. There are no debates about what sex does such and such when you have a hog farm to police, fields to walk and siding to mend on your house. The privileged get to bitch and moan about whether buying the groceries is gendered.

3. The country is not violent.

A common trope in mainstream media is that the country is highly violent, especially towards women.

It isn’t true.

My hometown hasn’t had a murder since Lyndon Johnson was President. Batteries and assaults have almost exclusively happened at the local bars, between high schools kids and young, adult males. Domestic violence isn’t as much as a concern in the country precisely because you can’t just exist in rural areas, everybody is obvious.

The idea that domestic violence is openly tolerated in society is blown wide open by rural America. I would surmise that urban areas are more susceptible to domestic violence just because it is easier to slip away into a crowd, but in the country it’s impossible.

City folk regard rural folk with such suspicion because the country deals with violence differently. Urban folk are far, far more likely to take a pure authoritarian approach and leave it to the police and the courts to deal with violence. In rural areas, where people actually know each other, there exist real human ways to deal with others.

I have known local cops to take a perp to his local pastor, where the pastor admonished the man for his violence at the local bar. I have know a guy who was known for beating women to be taken to his grandmother’s house over jail, where he got a verbal licking so bad it became a local legend. Is it more effective than police intervention? Maybe not, but considering the failure of rehabilitating offenders in our criminal injustice system, maybe it is a good approach. Reinforcing family or social ties in order to engender better behavior out of somebody is probably more effective then some random judge telling you need to get your shit together.

For the record, suicide is a huge issue in rural areas. There are suicides every year in a sizable community. Murders, rapes, serious batteries and the like are rare. Yet, taking your life is common.

4. Growing up country can be a great life experience

Growing up in the middle of nowhere is a truly unique life experience. When all you know, as a child, is a home surrounded by corn fields and dense woods it truly is a different experience. Biking hours in the punishing July sun just to see a friend and, for when you get there, they don’t have AC so you bake in the 104 degree steam playing PS1 is just strange to most people.

I have seen and done it all – driving around remote roads slinging back Bud Light as foolish youths, watching some depressed and poor farmer torch his barn and lighting off highly illegal fireworks with absolutely no worry about police action. In the country, a man can truly exist as he wishes. Sure, it isn’t pure independence from society and its ridiculous expectations, but the leash is so much longer.

The great amenities, culture and lifestyle urban areas afford are counter-balanced by the looming presence of government and the lack of anonymity. In the country, you can truly live life as you see fit. Policing is very light, prying eyes are far fewer and the social expectations are far different. The appearance of rural areas being hyper-conservative is off-base, as the country is more libertarian than anything else.

Still, the social ties you do have are deeper and more meaningful. The collective sense of community is so much greater because the isolation and lack of available governmental services. People learn to take care of one another, instead of letting disinterested government bureaucrats tend to the needs of their neighbors. You may hate the people around you, but you will always matter. It is a cardinal sin to not care about your neighbor in the country.

You may point out that this means that people’s autonomy is limited in the country and you would be right in a sense, but the biggest weirdos I have met were all country. Deviance is more tolerated in rural areas. Don’t listen to the propaganda in the media about  rural intolerance. People come to and stay in the country because of the freedom of thought and action afforded by the geographical isolation.

With all that said, I hope you come away from this piece with a greater understanding of the flyover areas of America. They aren’t even close to being the bigoted, gun-toting rednecks media liberals desperately want them to be. They are hard-working citizens who provide great value to society at the expense of enjoying the pleasures a city affords.

Read More: Why The Past Is Best Left In The Past

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"Agency" is a word Mr. Aurini taught me (among many others).  It not only refers to an organization you might work for, but also means purpose or usefulness.  It also happens to be a mandatory requirement for all men to attain happiness.

If a man doesn't have agency or purpose in life, he becomes depressed and lethargic.  Sometimes even suicidal.  Just look at what happens to men after they retire from a successful career.  Many, at best, go through a funk.  Others get angry, irritated, depressed and don't know what to do with themselves.  But forget men who are lucky enough to have a "successful" career.  Consider young men today.

Most young men today have had the three main ways they can attain agency denied to them:

Career/provider
Husband
Father

And this was done largely at the hands of women (and lefty pansied men) who voted in government to supplant men in these roles.

The economy is shot and offers no employment opportunities (let alone something as idealistic as a "career") as it is no longer focused on the private sector and growth, but rather wealth redistribution and supporting out parasitic classes.

Becoming a husband is becoming impossible as feminism has turned the quality and caliber of women into this.

And without a wife, let alone a career, it's pretty hard to become a father.  Oh sure, men will inseminate women.  Sure, they'll breed.  But they won't raise a child or spend time bringing the child up.  Besides, that's now the job of state-run schools and divorce courts.

So there sits about 2 full generations of young men, full of capacity, full of potential, laying idle and twiddling their thumbs.  And just as government has supplanted their roles in society, these men have turned to video games, booze, drugs, porn, even crime to replace women's.

But drink all the booze you want and save the princess a million times, in the end your genetic hard-wiring will take over.  And no matter how much you fight it, you will get depressed you have no career, you have no family, and you have no future.  The environment is hostile to men's nature and it is an uphill battle to find agency and thus happiness.

But may I make a suggestion?  It doesn't solve the underlying problem, but does, in a sneaky way, provide men with a substitute for agency.

Start running.

Running is a way to trick your brain into thinking you have agency.  In the darkest days of my life I would get up and literally be incapacitated.  I could not move.  Not because of neural damaged, but every choice, every action I had available to me led nowhere.  So why choose any of them.  It had no purpose.  And so I laid there on the couch, getting up to get food or go to the bathroom occasionally.  My frontal lobes knew, however, this was not a viable long term plan.  I had to do something, but with no career, no desire to meet girls, and no (at that time) obvious entrepreneurial opportunities, I did the only thing I could do.

I ran.

Not that I hadn't ran before, I always knocked out 3 miles every other day to keep in shape.  But now I was running to kill time.  And so instead of my short 25 minute run around Lake of the Isles, I was running 10 miles, everyday.  I'd return home and for once I felt completely normal.  I wasn't sad, I may have even felt like going out that night to an old haunt.  But soon the endorphins wore off and I was back to incapacitation.

Time for weights.

Understand at this point in time I was so defeated I also wasn't eating much.  I had dropped from 150 pounds to 125.  But, add the running and weight lifting, I was ripped.  Not an ounce of fat on me.  I could bench press 180 pounds and knock out 150 push ups non-stop.  But I wasn't lifting weights to get ripped.  Matter of fact, I LOATHED lifting weights.  It was the "normal" feeling I wanted after.  I refused to do anti-depressants and so weights it was.

Sure enough, after an hour or two, I was feeling "normal" again.

Ideally this would last me into the night at which time I would pop two sleeping pills to knock me out to the real world.  And sure enough, my internal organs would not fail me, and I would wake up the next day to start the whole miserable process over again.

This lasted about a year, but inevitably things turned around.  When a recruiter called me I was drunk and went into a rage, tirading against the banking industry and how I wasn't baby sitting "dumb, mother fucking, middle aged bankers who can't do Excel."

I got the job.

I had self-taught myself salsa and ballroom dancing.

My dance class revenues tripled.

And though I hated every second of lifting weights,

girls were throwing themselves at me.

Then one day (ironically listening to this song of all things-have to get to the 55 second mark) I all of the sudden realized something - I was happy.  I had created my own agency despite society's best efforts to deny me any.  I was getting up to do things in life, not merely to run.

Since then, of course my running and weight lifting has tanked.  I only knock out 6 miles every other day.  I lift weights, but only do enough to keep in shape, and my girlfriend is an outstanding cook, nursing me back to 150 pounds.  But I will never forget the role running (and lifting) played in my overcoming that depression.  Not because it made me feel normal, but because it didn't make sense at the time why it did.  But in hindsight I now know why.

Running or any exercise directly stimulates the lizard part of your brain and tricks it into thinking you have a point or purpose in life.  When you are exercising your hindbrain is thinking, "We must be doing something productive. We must be hunting mammoth or toiling in the fields.  We are being productive.  We have agency." which then continues to have your various glands produce various hormones and chemicals that make you feel good.  Of course you don't have purpose.  YOu don't have agency.  And once you stop working out your frontal lobes that are acutely aware of this fact take over, sending you back to Cameron-ville (Ferris Bueller).  But for that hour of working out and the two hours after that your brain and body are given the much-needed "normal feeling" you need to get through the worst bouts of depression.

Now, is every Millennial male and young Gen X man in the throes of a crushing depression?

No, of course not.

But they are without agency or purpose, and they are in a hostile environment that will never provide them the opportunity to have those things.  This will at minimum put most young men in a funk and lessen their quality of life.  But this does not have to be the case.  All a young man has to do is start running (or working out).  This won't guarantee a job opens up.  This won't guarantee a career becomes a possibility.  And it certainly won't turn women today into the Sophia Lorens and June Cleavers we demand.  But it will, on a subconscious, cave-man level trick you into thinking otherwise and make it much easier to enjoy the decline.

[This post is for the women.  As always, commentary, correction, and other thoughts from the men will be gratefully accepted.]

How do we teach our children what we are learning here (and by here, I mean this collection of blogs encompassed by the mano-, ortho-, and reactionary-spheres)?

In our home, we have opted not to have television and to limit our children’s screen time.  We’ve also recently removed their i-POD Touches from them; they can now only use them between certain hours and they must stay in one of the common areas of our house to do so.  This means that our children are sometimes a bit sheltered, yet I want to make sure they are prepared to deal with the world as it really is, not as I wish it were.

The way that I have handled this is with story-telling.  We love telling stories in our house and often take turns making up tales for one another.  It’s highly enjoyable, but a wise parent can also use story-telling to be instructive without preaching.  I would like to describe a story I made up and told to my girls last year.

In the story, there were a group of sheep in a sheepfold in a barnyard.  They were owned by a farmer who was kind to them, who saw to their every need and many of their wants.  Their only job was to grow wool and produce lambs for the farmer, so they had a lot of free time to do as they pleased and were happy, contented little ewes.

One day,  a wolf sidled up to the sheep pen and started whispering to some of the sheep.  He told them their life looked dull.  He told them how much more fun it was outside the sheepfold.  He told them that he had a wonderful time being free and that it was such a shame that the poor ewes had to obey the farmer and grow wool for him.  How terribly unfair that he gets their wool for free!  The wolf said he would never make the sheep do anything like that for him if they were ever to come out and play with him.

The sheep were timid at first, but a few started to listen.  They looked at the wide world outside the pen, and it looked enticing – all that freedom!  And the sheep started to whisper about the farmer, that he was using them unfairly and not letting them have any fun.  They decided they would be much happier if they escaped from the farmer altogether and went to play with the wolf.

And then one day, the farmer didn’t latch the barnyard gate securely.  The wolf pointed that out to the sheep; he himself did not open the gate but only mentioned it slyly so as not to put the ewes on guard.  When the ewes saw that the gate was ajar, they shrank back a little at first.  But then one particularly brazen little sheep wiggled her fluffy self through it, and out into the wide world she went.  Once she had escaped, the others began to follow the naughty sheep out, a few at a time.

As the story continued, I described how the ewes had fun at first frolicking with the wolf, but then when it was dinner time, there was nothing to eat because they had always relied on the farmer for this, and the wolf suddenly was nowhere to be found. And then it grew dark and they were afraid and had no barn for shelter.  And then finally, the wolf returned, only this time he brought more wolves with him…

After awhile, a few of the surviving sheep in my story stumbled back to the barnyard only to find that the farmer has closed and locked the gate to keep the few sheep who had remained in the barnyard safe.  They could no longer get back in and they were sorry they had ever listened to that deceiving wolf and left the peaceful safety of the fold and the farmer’s protection.

Now, to adults, the story may sound simplistic, but my girls were fascinated by it.  They made up all kinds of different endings for the story, trying to figure out a way for the sheep to get back into the pen.  Could they jump the fence?  Could they hang around looking fluffy and cute to see if the farmer would notice them?  Could they bleat and cry until help came?  And I told the girls, “The other sheep should not have followed the naughty, brazen one.  They should have stayed in the pen.  The moral of the story is don’t follow stupid sheep into destruction.”

I never thought of telling that story here until yesterday, when Cail Corishev made this comment:

For women trying to teach other women, it’s important to remember the herd instinct. I think many people who aren’t experienced with herd animals misunderstand what that means and think it means that women always follow the herd — always go with the majority. But that’s not quite right. The thing about a herd is that the entire herd will follow one animal who is willing to take the lead. If you’re trying to get a herd of sheep to go through a gate they’ve never entered before, sometimes they’ll just mill around in circles, acting as if they can’t even see the gate, until you’re exhausted from chasing them. But as soon as you can get one ewe to break off from the group and go through, the rest will charge after her at top speed.

I’ve seen similar behavior among women. If all the women in a group are doing the same thing, it’s very hard to get any one woman to go against them. But if just one woman will go her own direction — and look confident and happy and attractive to men while doing it — others will soon be drawn to imitate her, even though they’re still in the minority. I don’t think women realize they have this kind of individual power, because the fear of being that first one to break away is so strong; but one woman setting the right example can have a major influence on an entire group in a way that doesn’t really work between men.

I was floored by the fact that Cail had used the exact same imagery that I had used in the little fairy tale I had made up for my daughters, only in his story the sheep who has broken out from the herd by following the shepherd’s instructions is leading the other ewes back to safety rather than leading them into sin.  I was so struck by what he was saying because it exactly describes what a number of us ladies have been trying to do with our blogs.

We are trying to listen to our shepherds – and many of us are ultimately trying to listen to the Shepherd – so that we can find our way through the narrow gate.  And as we listen and stumble toward that gate, we are trying to lead the rest of the herd that’s milling about and not listening for the shepherd’s voice at all back to the safety of the sheep fold in the barnyard.

To be sure, we do it imperfectly.  We get lost in the weeds, we draw wrong conclusions, we might not always choose our words carefully.  Sometimes we get lost in talking about the ideal rather than the real, and sometimes we focus rather heavily on all the things we love and are grateful for about our husbands, but as Velvet put it (as only she can) in her outstanding post Every House I Can See From Here Is Glass:

I do not consider my family a personal accomplishment, but I do consider their accomplishments and goodness as individuals a source of righteous pride.  I like my life, adore my husband, enjoy a good bikini wax, and can cook like few women can.  I can balance the checkbook, hire a contractor, plan a party, dig a garden while giving my husband great head and pray the rosary all at the same time  - if that’s what my husband required … I’d do it, with pleasure, and I’d be good at it.  That’s not bragging, it’s simply true.

A nasty little feminist sheep led the flock out of the barnyard a long time ago.  Ladies, though we will be criticized and attacked for it, let us resolve to continue to listen to the shepherd and be the sheep that obeys, who dares to come out from the group and follow the shepherd through the gate so that the rest of the lost sheep who aren’t listening can see a way to get home, too.

More instructive story-telling can be found here:

Dalrock:

• The Widow’s Two Daughters.
• The crumbs on the table
• Brothers Grimm Marry Him

Edited to add: I am using the word sheep here allegorically not in the sense of The Sheeple (mindless, unquestioning followers of government propaganda) but rather in this sense:

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:6)

Not too long ago I started a Google search for Panzer tanks of World War 2. After an hour I had completely forgotten why I was looking up sexy tanks of the Wehrmacht because I had inadvertently wound up on the incredibly unsexy site I Hate Men. Initially-due to its ugly look and clumsy design-I thought the site was just another abandonware blog. Yet it still seems to be functioning with a small but active user base.

The banner head proudly declares that I Hate Men is the ‘World’s Largest Women Driven Social Media Website’. I think Pinterest, Facebook and practically every other social media website in existence might have a legitimate argument against that claim but if there’s one thing I Hate Men dot org has in abundance it is overestimation of self worth and lack of rational thought. Remind you of any particular group?

“Not worshipping me is pARt of pAAAtriARchy”

The quality of the site is low. The majority of the ‘articles’ are mostly rambling one to four paragraph walls of text rife with improper punctuation and misspelled words submitted by ranting women frustrated with men. The majority of their accusations and hatred have little basis in the real world and it was readily apparent after only ten minutes of reading that the women on the site consist of spoiled, angry and aging sluts. However, the direct access into the minds of sluts is absolutely fascinating and also very informative, especially for those of you who plan on or just beginning to game said sluts. Although a lot of the site can be painful to your sanity, I recommend any budding playah to read through some ‘articles’ and study the inner workings of the mind of your promiscuous counterparts.

I would like to avoid giving the site the traffic since it’ll undoubtedly boost the ego of the creator but there are too many lols to be had and too much practical wisdom to be gleaned from examining the unadulterated thought processes of cheap women. In the end it is impossible to resist sharing when you have crap thoughtful, heartfelt confessions like this:

Why I hate men: by Tanya

“I hate men because they’re shallow. They’ll always turn to stare at a beautiful woman, even when you’re right there beside them looking your best. Do men think we should just sit there and endure it with a smile plastered on our face? Women don’t carry on like that. You don’t see us craning our necks to gawk at a hot guy right infront of our boyfriend.”

Billy’s Slut Translator: The alpha I’m banging is taking me out for some post “yay you let me finish on your face” pancakes. Having cheaply given my poosy up for him because he’s super cute, Mr. Alpha is now scoping out his next lay instead of staring directly at me the whole time – oh hey look at that guy’s cute butt.

“Anyway… I guess I’m feeling a little frustrated right now.”

Billy’s Slut Translator: After the pancakes Mr. Alpha had me drop him off and he’s not replying to my texts.

She has so many serious problems

“I am not the type of girl who will go out and sleep with any random guy. To be honest I’m sexually frustrated but I can’t seem to find a guy I like enough to become intimate with. I’ve tried internet dating websites.. It’s like the guys in my town are all taken, gay or just plain creepy.”

Billy’s Slut Translator: Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’m totally not a whore. I’ve never, ever, have sex with a guy within five minutes of meeting him. I always make sure I know their names first. For some reason they never want to wife me up afterwards and now I have to search for dick my prince on an international level with the internet. Every guy I find attractive enough to date doesn’t wanna date me; they’re probably intimidated. I mean, there’s tons of single guys available but they’re nowhere near as cute as the guys I deserve. Or they’re already out dating those real sluts. Gawd.

“I just want to find my kind of guy, I want to have fun and open up to him have that feeling you only have when you’re with your favourite person in the world.”

Billy’s Slut Translator: I want to find a guy who’s super hot and will bend over backward to worship me. A guy who doesn’t care that yeah, most of the time it really is all about me. I mean, if I’m happy then he’ll totally be happy just being in my awesome presence. Then I can tell him every single inane thought and opinion I have and he’ll totally be my favourite person in the world.

I want to say that Tanya’s little rant is more sad then funny, that it’s a tragic Banshee’s wail from a woman who is on the cusp of realizing her selfishness has a price and that the bills are starting to come in but the lack of self awareness and near clichéd level of narcissistic slut speak and rationalization really does blow away any sense of pity for her. Many of today’s women are genuinely out of touch with the world beyond themselves. They are simply incapable of seeing their inherent faults or of stepping out from behind their own conceit. Here are some more examples to show the bizarre thought processes behind the minds of today’s sluts:

(Except) I hate men!: by Separated4Ever111

“3. I hate men b/c they are physically stronger than us. F**k**g bullsh*t! So, this last one is really just an annoyance that I have since I hate men and I don’t want to have to need their help when I’m not strong enough to do something. Urrgh!”

The number one obstacle to women’s independence apparently

Sepafor (a heroic single mother) deeply desires to be independent, but all those 20kg Olympic bars lying around her house are really putting a strain on her feminism. Never mind everything else wrong in today’s war of the sexes; Sepafor hits the nail on the head – men being physically stronger then women is totally unfair and unarguably the number one issue we as a society must figure out ASAP.

I HATE ALL MEN!! THEY ALL SUCK BALLS, LITERALLY:  by manhater26

“Ok first off, I’m only 19 years old and I already hate men. They’re SUCH fucked up creatures. I’m glad I realized this early on in life because I’ll be saving myself a great deal of suffering in the future. The freedom that comes with not caring what men think about you is unspeakable. I used to try hard to look good for men; well, not anymore. FUCK IT. Older men are the WORST, they like to manipulate young girls such as myself because they know we’re naive/don’t know much about life. But hey, you live and you learn and I’ve definitely learned my lesson. I’m doneski. I don’t want to get married and I don’t want to have kids. I’m SOOOOO done.”

Here manhater26 (who claims to be only 19, manhater19 was taken apparently) declares how she’s NOOOOOW going to ACT how the millions of other sluts infecting/living western society already DO. I truly hope she ENJOYS her freedom but I have a sneaking suspicion that I Hate Men hasn’t seen the last of herski.

Pictured: the new and improved manhater26

I don’t just want to criticize though. I realize that Return Of Kings has a few silent hoebags reading it and their feelings probably just got hurt. We don’t want to become a hate site ourselves now. So hold off on rushing to comments section to deride me ladies. I don’t want to leave a sour taste in your mouths amongst the thick gooey saltiness that is already encrusted in there, so I’m going to pull out my inner Dr. Phil and guide you chicks out there through a final article where I offer some sage wisdom on how not to be the stupid sluts you probably are. You’re welcome.

hate: by monykah

“I hate men. I hate the games that have to be played with them.I hate the fact that they want women so bad sexually, if you have sex with them too quickly, they leave. It hurts so bad. I hate to think of how many men I have had sex with (only because I desire intimacy/closeness) and KNOW that I meant nothing to them (and vice versa). I’ve only had 2 real boyfriends, but several partners.”

Monica – sorry, monykah – and all you other women like her, here’s a little PROTIP on love; seeking intimacy/closeness with ‘partners’ (guys you screw without dating) via sex is retarded. Stop being retarded and stop having random sex if you want love. Sex does not lead to intimacy if you’re not committed to the person. If you’re looking for love, sex should be the culmination of a relationship, not something that happens after six Smirnoff mixers and three Jello shots. If a man is pressuring you for quick sex he’s undoubtedly looking for a pump and dump. If you give it up, it is no one’s fault but your own.

“I hate the way men try to give you the bare minimum, but will take everything if you allow them to. The other day I was texting with a guy that likes me and I told him that I had gotten laid off of my job. He then says, “oh, you’re at home?” After I tell him yes, he proceeds to ask me if he can come over and watch tv with me. Call me crazy, but that made me so so angry! He has never ever invited me out to dinner, lunch, a movie, bowling, or any other type of date, but he wants to come over my house, kick off his shoes, watch my cable on my tv, sitting on my couch, in my house, where I don’t even know how I’m going to pay rent at this month. If there is one thing I know about men (especially those that will invite themselves over to your place of residence, or you to theirs) they want to try to establish some false sense of intimacy with you, put their arm around you, touch your leg, try to kiss you, eventually hoping it will lead to sex. All without them ever having to spend a dime on a damn date.”

You Moneykuh’s out there, welcome to equality. Men don’t have to spend a dime on you just because you don’t have a job. If you want men to spend money on you, you have to be a woman worthy of spending it on. A lot of men work hard jobs and they have to earn their cash. If you want to date stop giving your body up for next to nothing. If you want a man to spend money on you then give him a reason to. You are only worth what you are worth. Men don’t owe you anything even if you’ve banged them; if you want cash for sex, become a prostitute.

If you only want sex and money you may as well hook – I still would if I could find a kind pimp

Brief aside: I can’t wait until someone makes an article saying that Return Of Kings tells women to become prostitutes and quotes only the last half of that sentence.

“I hate men who approach me who are way out of their league. And I get so frustrated with myself for being so damn polite to them, and not wanting to hurt their feelings. I hate how I have to pretend not to like the guys that I’m really interested in, knowing that if I pretend that I couldn’t care less about them, they will chase me to the ends of the earth. But if I am genuine and authentic, and show that I like them, they really aren’t interested. It’s the most unnatural thing in the world to pretend as if you don’t like someone when you actually do.”

Munnekaa’s, here’s a crazy crazy thought – bear with me – but if you’re not employed, if you’re deceptive and you’ve slept around with a lot of guys, there are very few men who are legitimately below your league. You are not good girlfriend material for most men out there and you certainly aren’t worthy of being a wife to any good man. An investment in you in either forms of love or finances is a terrible prospect for men. You’re a loser and the first step to fixing that is to admit you are the problem, not the men you thoughtlessly bang.

All your problems stem from your selfishness and sense of entitlement. Lose these and try to salvage the remains of your life, the one you alone are screwing up. And don’t be surprised when you play hard to get and nobody gets you. Most people have better things to do then to chase someone around who shows no sign of interest. Women of the west, find some middle ground between immediately giving your herpes to a guy you just met and completely ignoring him like he’s an unworthy smudge of crap on your heel. Stop being so extreme and if you genuinely like a guy let him know. There are only three possible outcomes to doing so;

1) He’ll want sex immediately, meaning he’s going to pump and dump you – proceed knowing that he won’t date you.

2) He’ll beta it up and he’ll ask you out on a date. If you accept that the date is not your inherent right, you’ll treat him with the same respect and dignity you demand for yourself. Respect it when a man spends time and money on you without pushing immediately for sex.

3) He’s not interested and will tell you so or simply just ignore you. You may be tempted to bribe him with sex, and he might take you up on that offer, but he’s not going to date you afterward so just forget about it and move the frig on.

“For every man that I have ever had sex with, I hate you. I hate you for making me feel worthless in your eyes, when I was simply trying to share a part of myself with you. I hate you for making me doubt myself. I hate you for making me have such a negative outlook on men. I hate you for making me cry. I hate you for not even making the sex worth my time.”

Moonicuz’s of the world, it is you and you alone making terrible choices in regards to men. You all are not some tragic heroine, spurred and used by the cruel vagaries of men. If you act like a cheap worthless slut, then that is exactly how men are going to treat you. All those tears you cry over us, all those angry feelings, they are not our fault – they are yours. Sex does not magically equal intimacy if there was nothing there beforehand. If all you want is sex sex sex then how are you surprised when that’s all you get? Stop trying to make other people feel guilty for you. You’re playing a game of Sexual Chicken with men and in Sexual Chicken the man always wins, especially if you don’t swerve your poon outta the way (of his penis). For women the only way to win the game is not to play it.

Hey, I’m not the one saying it; a woman is

In a better world the butt-hurt sluts on I Hate Men would represent just a sub-sect of the Western woman; that they were nothing more then a small, pathetic repository of greedy hoebags who lack an ounce of logic or empathy. I wish we men didn’t encounter women like this every day, all day, in our jobs or on the street, while out shopping or at the gym. Yet we do. The rants expressed on I Hate Men are the zeitgeist of today’s Western female. They are everywhere, it’s like we live in a world of slutty Bodysnatchers. Hopefully this little bit of insight into the female mind helps improves your lives men; or at the very least helps lead to an extra notch or two in some roundabout way.

And to all the women reading this, do you want to be a decent human being? The method is simple; do not act or even think like any of the chicks on I Hate Men. If you already do change your ways quick before you wind up getting slammed by us alpha jerks next weekend and then fill the internet up with more jaded crap about how men are evil monsters. We don’t have to save you from yourselves. The majority of men are not assholes; they’re simply treating you how you deserve to be treated. Give yourselves a reason not to hate men because you alone are the only one with the power to find it.

Or, like always, just ignore my good advice and keep on skankin’ it up. It’s not my heartache.

Read More: Why Americans Hate The Oldest Profession

Do you want to learn how to make girls chase you? Visit or November sponsor, Girls Chase.

15 down, 35 to go.

HONOLULU (Reuters) - Hawaii's governor signed into law on Wednesday a bill extending marriage rights to same-sex couples, capping 20 years of legal and political rancor in a state regarded as a pioneer in advancing the cause of gay matrimony.

The new law, which takes effect on December 2, makes Hawaii the 15th U.S. state to legalize nuptials for gay and lesbian couples, rolling back a 1994 statute defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Marriage Equality will soon be law in all 50 States...you can bet the house on that.

I know a lot of people here who are upset about this state of affairs. Many of the folks opposed to today's legislative milestone were opposing it under the banner of DEFENDING MARRIAGE.

Others are exultant and exuberant. They feel like they were a part of a movement as momentous and historical as the civil rights movement for teh Blacks in the 60's. WE SHALL OVERCOME!!!!!!!

This new law signifies two things: its just another milestone for the gradual, incremental progress for the social engineering of our society towards the Brave New World Order, and oh yeah...the Family Law Industrial Complex in Hawaii has just acquired a whole new niche market for developing future revenue streams.

You see, prior to the passage of Marriage Equality in 15 States here in USA Inc., the State had a hard time finding profits in the dissolution of gay relationships, unlike the lucrative harvest the Family Court Industrial Complex has enjoyed in deconstructing heterosexual relationships since the advent of No-Fault Divorce for cis-Gendered marriages.

These sorts of injustices have gone on long enough!

Take the case of one gay man in Pennsylvania, who was denied the benefits of Marriage Equality, as recounted by a Divorce attorney:

The related, and far more common, would-be client is the unmarried gay person whose long-term, marriage-like relationship ends. Can he avail himself of the remedies available to married people under our divorce laws? Is she entitled to any assets or support from her ex?

That’s the question I was asked by Eddie, who’d been in a relationship for twenty-two years when his partner dumped him for another man. Older, educated, and successful, Marco, the ex, owned a house, investments, and a pension. Eddie had none of those. He was a high school graduate who essentially hadn’t worked since he moved in with Marco at the age of twenty-one. He dabbled in various artistic pursuits, none of them profitable. But that was okay, because Marco supported him and, according to Eddie, specifically, explicitly, told him that he always would. So Eddie enjoyed their comfortable, middle-class life together, and never took any measures to ensure his own financial security. When Marco ended the relationship, Eddie was faced with the hard reality that here he was, forty-three years old, with no money in the bank and no ability to earn much more than minimum wage. He came to me to find out if the promises Marco made could be enforced.

Since Marriage Equality has not been legalized in Pennsylvania, Eddie was unsuccessful in his bid to enforce Marco to pay him alimony to maintain the lifestyle he had become accustomed to.

I made our pitch during closing arguments, asking her to award Eddie $300,000, which was the amount Marco received from the sale of the house where he and Eddie had lived for twenty-two years and Eddie had come to think of as his own. We argued that this was a reasonable amount to fulfill the promise of lifetime support, as it would enable Eddie to buy his own house. The judge nodded as she listened. My associate and I packed up our files and went back to the office, chewed our nails, and waited for her decision.It came two weeks later. We lost. We never got out of the starting gate. The judge ruled that she could not find there was a contract.

We as a society cannot abide such glaring examples of gross injustice and oppression!

Now that Marriage Equality is spreading to all 50 States in USA Inc., these sorts of problems will no longer trouble our formerly oppressed, second-class citizenry. They too will soon enjoy the benefits of court ordered indentured servitude to upkeep an ex-domestic partner in the lifestyle they had become accustomed to.

We should all consider ourselves blessed to be living witnesses to such an era of Progressive  advancement.

Free at last, free at last.... oh Glee!

Jane Lynch has proclaimed that her divorce from estranged wife Lara Embry is "not dramatic," and we're hoping it stays that way after the "Glee" star gets wind of her ex's recent request.

According to legal documents obtained by TMZ, Embry is asking Lynch to pay her $93,809 a month in spousal support.

Embry stated that Lynch's "income, investments and assets increased dramatically with her newfound acting success," and TMZ reports that Embry wants to be able to sustain the lifestyle she was used to during the couple's three-year marriage.

This is the perfect example of Marriage Equality all those backwards, intolerant and bigoted Christian fundamentalist homophobes have been denying our second-class gay citizenry for too long!

This is more evidence that it is absolutely necessary to strictly police your organizations for hostile ideologies. It's very hard for normal people to comprehend this, but leftist parasites will readily devote years, even decades, to quietly worming their way in before showing their true colors.

The editor of Guns & Ammo magazine apologized to readers and resigned shortly after the writer of a column advocating gun control was fired this week.

Dick Metcalf, a well-known television host and gun writer, was canned after penning a column in favour of gun control in the magazine’s December issue. The outrage then prompted editor Jim Bequette to issue an apology and resign.

In the apology, Mr Bequette said he hoped the column ‘would generate a healthy exchange of ideas on gun rights,’ but then said he was wrong and asked for forgiveness.

Mr Metcalfe, widely visible in the gun community, has written about guns and hosted gun-oriented television shows for decades, but that did not save him from reader backlash.

Whether it is a smug-faced atheist schoolboy infiltrating a nominally Christian school or a gun-grabber seeking to become the voice of the gun media, the techniques and the tactics are always the same. And they are active in your church, in your synagogue, in your school, and in your place of work.

If you don't actively look for them and root them out, sooner or later, they will take over. Always pay particular attention to those who are unusually eager to help and happy to lend a hand. Being driven by ideology, they often have the motivation to take on all the dirty little jobs that no one else wants to do and secure their positions by making themselves indispensable. They usually present as being non-ideological, but put some pressure on to determine their real views and they'll usually reveal themselves.

Notice how Bequette tries to present a non-ideological justification: a healthy exchange of ideas. They always hide behind a facade of being reasonable.

you’ve seen her before. early to mid 40′s, loud, brash, VERY entitled and “independent”. you usually roll your eyes when you hear her launching into a feminist diatribe. i saw this the other night. matter of fact, i couldn’t HELP but witness it. she was so fucking loud that tuning her out wasn’t even an option. she knew the bartender, the manager, a few of the staff (i don’t know ANYONE on the waitstaff anymore….all new guys), and she had a BO belly up to her shortly after she made her presence known.

i was sitting 3-4 seats down from her, GOD do i wish there were more room between us. but she was there, soaking up the attention being poured upon her, talking loudly, not a HINT of femininity in her. she had the “mom cut”, her hair was just below her ears and looked….well, dingy. but it was late, maybe she had been working: see, i’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

but every time she spoke it was like nails on a chalkboard. i winced. i WISHED i could ignore her. eventually, her BO had gone away. the staff were busy, and there i was, watching me team whip the cow-gurls (YISH!!!), and i clapped and pounded the bar when Colston made a completion. then i heard it-

“you from louisiana?”

it was her. the mid 40′s she-male ball buster anti feminine modern woman. i looked at her, nodded and said, “yes ma’am.” what followed was so perfect and poetic that it made me glow with happiness. she winced and said-

“don’t call me ma’am, makes me feel old.”

THIS. this.right.here.

i realized i had found the best offense against these older “independent, modern, empowered women”.

don’t just ingore them, remind them that you don’t see them as a sexual creature. they’re just an older women, who you are simply being polite to. you see, she expects that, but she doesn’t WANT that. she WANTS to have a younger guy view her as sexy, not as a “mom-type”.

so gentleman, i propose a new battle-paln. no more nuking the older ladies. no more being a dick. NO….be polite. treat her like an asexual senior citizen. you will have robbed her of all her vitriol with ZERO risk on your part. seriously, who’s going to join her side if she gets pissed for you being polite, genuine and referring to her as “ma’am”?

granted, this will be APPRECIATED by red-pill women, but ardent feminists will despise it. if you spoke to my mother as i recommended, she be appreciative. but the woman at the bar, her reaction was telling. i’d like my readers to try this out and tell me what you see. i’m on a mission now when i run into a ball-busting feminist-nazi hole.

stay up.

Deti, from a recent Just Four Guys comment thread:

Women cannot bear to see a Man experiencing negative emotions such as extreme anger, rage, fear, despair, despondency or depression for extended periods of time. You say you want to “be there” for your Man; but you cannot do it. If it goes on long enough, it kills the attraction; it sets off your hypergamy alarms; and subconsciously causes you to start hunting for a replacement Man.

A woman seeing a Male go through the above will seek to replace that Male immediately.

Women cannot listen to Men talking about or working out their dating/mating/relationship issues or problems. Women reflexively view a Man discussing such issues as “whining” or “complaining” or “bitterness” or “sour grapes” or “well, you just chose poorly, so sucks to be you” or “suck it up, no one wants to hear you bitching about it”.

As to both of the above principles; when a Male is involved, ratchet up by a factor of 5 the disdain and repulsion a woman experiences when seeing a Male do or experience the above.

Around the first week of August this year I suffered what’s commonly known as a ‘dancer’s fracture‘. For all of the risk taking activities I’ve engaged in over my life, I’d never had more than a hairline fracture on any bone in my body before this. This fucking hurt. Like edge of the bed, don’t turn the wrong way or you’re in agony kind of hurt. Forget about putting weight on it for 4-6 weeks, “holy shit I have a 2 story home” and my bed’s upstairs kind of hurt. The Doc explained that there’s really no way to set a dancer’s break so I’d just have to “tough it out” and take it easy. I refuse to take any kind of narcotic painkiller (Vicodin, etc) so it was ibuprofen and Tylenol for the better part of the first month.

After the first week, the pain went from “holy shit” to “ok, ow, ah fuck, yeah I can do this if I grit my teeth.” If a wild animal wanted to eat me, there’d have been no way for me to avoid it; I was literally hobbled for the first time in my life.

Sack up ya big pansy!

Now, do I sound like a big pansy to you? In my time I’ve squatted well over 400 lbs. I have benched 305 lbs. I’ve leg pressed the weight of small cars in my younger days. Most of the guys I know who’d broken a bone, or torn a bicep, or slipped a disc knew, and could empathize with, exactly what I was describing to them in great detail. However, my loving wife of 17 years and my fifteen year old daughter’s first reaction to my pain was “Oh, men are such babies! They all make such a big noise about how much it hurts. You think that’s hurt? That’s not hurt.” It was as if by their dismissing my injury I would get up and say “yeah, ok it’s really not so bad” and go back to mowing the lawn or something.

This has been a pretty consistent theme for Mrs. Tomassi – and every single woman I’d been involved with before her – women don’t want to accept that their Man could ever be incapacitated. Before I was Game-aware, I took this with a grain of salt. My wife has been a medical professional since she was in her early 20′s and she’s seen some pretty gnarly shit in various trauma centers so I had to take that into consideration. There’s a certain disconnect from human suffering in that line of work that has to be made or you lose it – I get that – but that still didn’t account for the default indifference to pain most every other female I know, including my own daughter and mother had ever had with regards to a man in legitimate physical pain.

The Mother-Nurturer Myth

One of the classic perceptions women, and even well-meaning men, perpetuate is the idea that women are the nurturers of humanity. They take care of the children, home and hearth. Theirs is the realm of the private and men’s that of the public – in fact this was one impression that early feminism took as its primary target, they wanted it all, private and public. Despite the statistics about abortion, despite the realities of Hypergamy and the War Brides dynamic, the classic characterization of woman as mother, nurturer, nurse and caregiver have endured, even as a complement to the Strong Independent® characterization feminism would reimagine for women.

Perhaps it’s due to a deeply enrgamatic hard-wiring of the importance of  hypergamy into the feminine’s psychological firmware, but women cannot accept that any man, and in particular a Man worth considering as a suitable hypergamic pairing, might ever be incapacitated. The feminine subconscious refuses to acknowledge even the possibility of this. Perpetuating the species and ensuring the nurturing her offspring maybe part of her pysche’s hard-code, but ensuring the survival and provisioning of her mate is not. This isn’t to say that women can’t learn (by necessity) to assist in her mate’s wellbeing, it’s just not what evolution has programmed her for – it requires effort on her part.

I propose this because women’s solipsistic nature (predicated on hypergamy) necessarily excludes them from empathizing with the male experience – and this extends to men’s legitimate pain. The idea that a man, the man her hypergamy betted its genetic inheritance on for protection and provisioning, could be so incapacitated that she would have to provide him with protection and provisioning is so counter-valent to the feminine imperative that the feminine psyche evolved psychological defenses (“men are just big babies when it comes to pain”) against even considering the possibility of it. Thus, due to species-beneficial hypergamy, women fundamentally lack the capacity to empathize with the male experience, and male pain.

Empathy vs. Sympathy

Now, before I’m deluged with offended women’s binary responses to the contrary, I very specifically used the term empathize rather than sympathize in my evaluation of women’s psychological coping dynamics here. There is a universal and comparative difference between sympathy and empathy:

Empathy is the ability to mutually experience the thoughts, emotions, and direct experience of others. It goes beyond sympathy, which is a feeling of care and understanding for the suffering of others. Both words have similar usage but differ in their emotional meaning.

	Empathy	Sympathy
Definition:	Understanding what others are feeling because you have experienced it yourself or can put yourself in their shoes.	Acknowledging another person’s emotional hardships and providing comfort and assurance.
Example:	I know it’s not easy to lose weight because I have faced the same problems myself.	When people try to make changes like this (e.g. lose some weight) at first it seems difficult.
Relationship:	Personal	Friends, family and community ( the experience of others) .
Nursing context:	Relating with your patient because you have been in a similar situation or experience	Comforting your patient or their family
Scope:	Personal, It can be one to many in some circumstances	From either one to another person or one to many (or one to a group).

Sympathy essentially implies a feeling of recognition of another’s suffering while empathy is actually sharing another’s suffering, if only briefly. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to “put oneself into another’ shoes”. So empathy is a deeper emotional experience.

Empathy develops into an unspoken understanding and mutual decision making that is unquestioned, and forms the basis of tribal community. Sympathy may be positive or negative, in the sense that it attracts a perceived quality to a perceived self identity, or it gives love and assistance to the unfortunate and needy.

Women do not lack a capacity to sympathize with male hardship or pain, but they categorically lack a capacity to empathize with uniquely male experiences.

This needs to be made clear to both sexes. While I have no doubt that many a woman may have experienced the pain of a dancer’s fracture they’ve never experienced that pain as a man, and therefore cannot empathize with that experience. Now, extrapolate this pain to other aspects of a man’s life, or his idealizations about how he would want a woman to love him.

I constantly see the term empathy supplant the term sympathy when used by women; as if their feminine character uniquely transcends merely sorrow or compassion for someone in pain, but becomes somehow magically equitable with feeling that person’s pain. As an insulation against the cruel realities that their own hypergamy demands and exacts on men, women convince themselves that their sympathy is really empathy, and their innate solipsism only serves to further insulate them from even having the curiosity to attempt real empathy towards men.

It’s the Just Get It dynamic on a more subliminal level; if a woman has to put forth the effort to truly attempt to empathize with a man, he just doesn’t get it, she marginalizes his experience and continues her hypergamous search for the Alpha who doesn’t force her to real empathy.

This fantasy of feminine-specific empathy can be traced back to the Mother-Nurturer myth attributed to the feminine as well as the mysticism of the Feminine Mystique. If women are the unquestionably unknowable forces of nature that the Mystique constantly batters into popular consciousness, it’s not too far a stretch to accept that the mythical feminine intuition might also stretch to their literally experiencing the pain of others in an almost psychic fashion. If women are the “life-givers” (mother-godesses?) how could they not have some quasi-psychic connection to that which they’ve birthed?

That all makes for good fiction, but it hardly squares against the “oh, men are such big babies when it comes to pain” trope, or does it? If women are granted the authority to define what really hurts and what doesn’t for men – due to a socially presumed ownership of empathy – then this puts them into a better control of which men can best qualify for feminine hypergamy. In other words, women own the selective-breeding game if they can convince men that they know, by literal experience, what really hurts a man and what doesn’t, or what shouldn’t.

 

Filed under: Biomechanics, Hypergamy, Psychology

LudVanB objects to the idea that atheists should be expelled from Christian organizations:

"Not all Christians are required to be dicks, Vox"

To which Myrddin responded:

Actually, if we behave the way Christ and his apostles behaved:

1. To honest seekers: Be gentle.
2. To scoffers in private: Avoid them.
3. To scoffers in public: Humiliate them.
4. To people who claim to be part of the church, but are willfully and proudly disobeying: Kick them out.
5. To false teachers: Silence them and/or kick them out.
6. To those who repent: Welcome them back.

Notice under churchian definitions, in four of those six situations, Christians are required to be dicks.

Let's see if we can  find Scriptural justification for Myrddin's claims. I'll start with the two that are relevant to yesterday's discussion, numbers (4) and (5).

(4) 2 Thessalonians 3:6: "In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers and sisters, to keep away from every believer who is idle and disruptive and does not live according to the teaching you received from us."

1 Corinthians 5: 11-13 "I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”"
 
(5) James 3:1: "Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly."

2 Peter 2:1: "But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves."

The lesson, as always, is this: never listen to an atheist attempting to lecture you on theological matters. They literally do not know what they are talking about.

A mea culpa from the manager of the Federal Reserve's mortgage-backed security purchase program:

Confessions of a Quantitative Easer

We went on a bond-buying spree that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, it was a feast for Wall Street.

I can only say: I'm sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.

Five years ago this month, on Black Friday, the Fed launched an unprecedented shopping spree. By that point in the financial crisis, Congress had already passed legislation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to halt the U.S. banking system's free fall. Beyond Wall Street, though, the economic pain was still soaring. In the last three months of 2008 alone, almost two million Americans would lose their jobs.

The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed's central motivation was to "affect credit conditions for households and businesses": to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this reason, he originally called the initiative "credit easing."

My part of the story began a few months later. Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed's trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE's bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history.

This was a dream job, but I hesitated. And it wasn't just nervousness about taking on such responsibility. I had left the Fed out of frustration, having witnessed the institution deferring more and more to Wall Street. Independence is at the heart of any central bank's credibility, and I had come to believe that the Fed's independence was eroding. Senior Fed officials, though, were publicly acknowledging mistakes and several of those officials emphasized to me how committed they were to a major Wall Street revamp. I could also see that they desperately needed reinforcements. I took a leap of faith.

In its almost 100-year history, the Fed had never bought one mortgage bond. Now my program was buying so many each day through active, unscripted trading that we constantly risked driving bond prices too high and crashing global confidence in key financial markets. We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.

It wasn't long before my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the Fed's rhetoric, my program wasn't helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn't getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.

If you've read RGD, (published in 2009), then you are aware that even at the time it was obvious that the neither the Fed nor the White House was trying to help home buyers. They could have simply written off the debts owed by mortgage holders, but instead, they funneled trillions to Wall Street.

This proves, once more, that the Federal Reserve has zero interest in fixing, saving, or otherwise improving the US economy. It has other objectives, other goals, and it is a category error to even discuss the Fed's future actions in terms of whether they will be good for the economy or not.

To do so is like discussing whether the future run/pass ratio of the New England Patriots will be good for the New York Yankees. It's not even relevant to the discussion except perhaps as an unintended consequence.  And notice that they changed the name from credit easing to quantitative easing just to make the concept harder to grasp for the average American. Simple, but effective, because MPAI.

I just found out that Miss Venezuela won Miss Universe 2013. I can’t say I’m a fan of her tranny face…

In fact, I think there are 13 other girls who are more beautiful than her. Here are my selections:

13. Korea

Thick hair and dynamite hip-to-waist ratio.

12. Slovenia

Her eyes are spaced too far apart, but otherwise she’s very nice.

11. Costa Rica

Jaw can be less prominent.

10. Dominican Republic

I don’t have sex with black women often, but if I do, this is what I want.

9. Thailand

Cute and petite, though the ass looks like a pancake.

8. Spain

Classic Latin look, strong child-bearing hips.

7. Lithuania

Forehead is a bit large, but I like her look.

6. Australia

Very pretty, though shoulders are too husky for my taste.

5. Paraguay

Doll face, tiny body, gigantic ass. I would love to demolish her.

4. USA

If the average American girl look liked this, I would have never left the country. Beautiful.

3. Colombia

Stiff body language, but super gorgeous.

2. Hungary

This right here is why I live in Eastern Europe.

1. Finland

I don’t even prefer blondes, but this is as close to genetic perfection as you’ll get.

You can see all the contestants here.

Read Next: Top 9 Ugliest Feminists

Do you want to learn how to make girls chase you? Visit or November sponsor, Girls Chase.

It's always interesting to read David Berlinski's acerbic comments, since his secularist criticism of scientists and professional atheists not only parallels my own, but tends to confound those who believe all secularists should shut up, stop thinking, and obediently follow the instructions of their self-appointed superiors. This interview is amusingly unprofessional, as the interviewer seems to think that he is debating Berlinski rather than interviewing him, but as you can see, the more fool he:

Why do you think the debate about Darwin’s theory of evolution has taken on such a nasty turn? 

Nasty, eh? If so, the nastiness is not entirely ecumenical. As far as I can tell, only one side is now occupying the gutter, even though the gutter is, as gutters generally are, more than spacious enough for two. But you raise a good question. Why are Darwinian biologists so outraged? Like the San Andreas fault, the indignation conspicuous at blogs such as The Panda’s Thumb or Talk Reason is now visible from outer space.

There is a lot at stake, obviously. Money, prestige, power, influence – they all play a role. Darwinism is an ideological system and when such systems come under threat, their supporters react in predictable ways. Freedom of thought very often appears as an inconvenience to those with a position to protect. Look at the attempts made to humiliate Rick Sternberg at the Smithsonian Institute, or the campaign now underway to do the same thing to Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State. There is nothing surprising in all this. I myself believe that the world would be suitably improved if those with whom I disagreed were simply to shut up. What is curious is how quickly the Darwinian establishment has begun to appear vulnerable ….   

Not to scientists …

No, perhaps not. But to everyone else. Consider the latest Pew poll. “Two-thirds of Americans,” the New York Times reported, “say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools.” But even among those quite persuaded of Darwin’s theory, “18 percent said that evolution was ‘guided by a supreme being.’” Now these are astonishing figures. They represent an authentic popular revolt against elite thought. I cannot remember anything like it. The fact that so many Darwinian biologists are utterly tone-deaf when it comes to debate has hardly helped their case. It is no small thing to have appeared before the American public in a way that suggests both illimitable arrogance and scientific insecurity.

How would you react to the argument that Dawkins has made that any form of religion that goes beyond the scientific facts about the universe really represents a form of brainwashing …

He’s probably right. Most education is a form of brainwashing – so much better in French, by the way, lavage de cerveau. Give a child to the Jesuits, they say, and ten years later the man will cringe when he spots the Cross. But look, ten years or so spent studying physics is a pretty effective form of brainwashing as well. You emerge into the daylight blinking weakly and talking about an endless number of universes stacked on top of one another like an old-fashioned Maine pancake breakfast. Or you start babbling inanely about how meaningless the universe is. But if you ask me just who is the more credulous, the more suggestible, the dopier, the more perfectly prepared to convey absurdity to an almost inconceivable pitch of personal enthusiasm – a well-trained Jesuit or a Ph.D. in quantum physics, I’ll go with the physicist every time. There is nothing these people won’t believe. No wonder used-car salesmen love them. Biologists are, of course, worse. Tell them that in the future Richard Dawkins is going to conduct a personal invasion of Hell in order to roust the creationists, and The Panda’s Thumb will at once start vibrating with ticket sales.

Perhaps this isn’t the most productive of topics to pursue …

Well, no, it's not productive if you're trying to convince everyone that biologists can be relied upon because physicists have very accurate models, anyhow. This post brought to you on the basis of John C. Wright's recommendation.

A couple of observations. First, neither the woman nor the man knew how to box. Second, the woman was considerably tougher than I expected; she didn't fold or go down after taking the first, second, or third shot. Third, this underlines what I've said about women being slow as molasses; not only can't she touch an inexperienced guy, she can't even block or evade his initial jabs! Fourth, people tend to forget that F=MA. Her punches don't make contact because she is so slow, but even if they did, they wouldn't do any damage.

Fifth and most importantly, notice the female mindset in action and how bizarre it looks from the male perspective. She knows nothing and learns nothing. She wildly overrates her own ability; an even moderately trained fighter would likely have knocked her out in the first exchange. She stubbornly continues after it is abundantly clear that she is in well over her head and the referee is manufacturing excuses for her to stop. Then, after being utterly humiliated, she doesn't have the good grace to acknowledge the victor her superior.

This is exactly the mindset one sees from the Left in intellectual discourse here and elsewhere. They know nothing and learn nothing. They wildly overrate their own ability, don't understand they are losing while in the very process of doing so, and then refuse to acknowledge they have been beaten despite thousands of people witnessing their defeat.

I have little doubt that tomorrow, the woman will be right back to bragging again about how she can beat any Marine on the base. That's why you shouldn't bother to reason with these people or attempt to convince them of anything. Just wait until the bell rings, then hit them in the face until you knock them out. Repeat as needed.

So let this be a warning to the usual suspects. No one has any interest in your performance art or whatever it is you think you are doing. If you are a troll or an anklebiter, any assertion you make will either be accompanied by your evidence supporting that assertion or it will be spammed. It doesn't matter how many names you attempt to hide under, because if you do not present an actual argument in your comment every single time you attempt to criticize any post or anyone's comment, your comments will end up in the spam filter.

No one has to agree with me. I welcome substantive criticism. I appreciate rational dissent. I enjoy genuine debate. Everyone is entirely free to have their own opinion, to express it, and to defend it. But there will be no more empty posturing, no more meaningless affectations of superiority, and no more insubstantial critiques that stand on nothing but hot air.

The constant ad hominem attempts to ritually cast me out are redundant. I am not part of your group, I never was, and I have nothing but pure contempt for your pathetic warrens. If you are working out the fear and rejection issues that stem from your shrunken amygdala, that's understandable, but you'll have to do it someplace else. This is not your in-group. You do not belong here, and you are not welcome here, because you have repeatedly demonstrated that you bring nothing of substance to the discourse.

This isn't an echo chamber, but it also isn't group therapy for leftists unsettled by reality.

The public persecution of Orson Scott Card is an indicator that it is time for the Right to, in Instapundit's words, start punching back twice as hard.

A friend posted on Facebook about his interest in the new Ender’s Game film based on the classic novel by Orson Scott Card.  Another person chimed in with joy over a news story that Card would not profit personally based on the performance of the film.  Why would such a thing be an occasion for joy?  The answer is that Card (a Mormon) is a known opponent of same-sex marriage.

Card’s career of late has been affected by his view of marriage.  He lost prospective work writing for a Superman project when voices piped up in opposition to him.  Was it because of his poor writing?  No.  It was because of his politics.  These same people who villify Card and hope to destroy his career are surely the same persons who curse the “Red Scare” and “McCarthyism.”  What is the phenomenon in either case?  It is the attempt to prevent a person with a particular worldview from getting work or to prevent others from associating with that person.

The Right has long sabotaged itself through its pride in playing fair and refusing to bar leftists from employment on the basis of their ideological allegiances. Where did that get them? Barred from the mainstream media and the universities. What did that accomplish? Nothing more than the complete loss of the intellectual high ground.

Now that it is in the ascendant in the decision-making positions at the publishers and the large technology companies, we are seeing the same process at work. The leftists at Tor Books aren't dumb enough to drop Card while he's still their best-selling author, but they are going to prevent the next Card from publishing there. In fact, they have done so for years, if not decades.

It is no use for the Right to primly disapprove and declare "that's not sporting, old chap". When one side clings to the Marquess of Queensbury rules while the other is making use of the full range of MMA options, the outcome is certain. The Left is increasingly confident, in part because its numbers have been swollen through immigration and forty years of public school indoctrination, in part because, rather like Hitler, they simply don't believe the other side has the backbone to stand its ground.

But the Right still has the bigger numbers. Despite the Left's loathing of him, it is Card who is Tor's best-selling novelist, not their left-wing poster girl. Despite the fact that I am not published by any major publisher, I have the most-trafficked blog of any SF/F writer. By every objective measure, the Right remains more culturally powerful than the destructive parasites of the Left. But it is an impotent, mostely unused power.

So, it is time to use it. It is time for the sleeping dog to wake up and bite back. It is time to treat them the way they have been treating us for decades. Don't hire them. Don't publish them. Don't support them. Express social disapproval of them. If you suspect them of left-wing sympathies, if you suspect them of equalitarianism and feminism and other intellectual diseases, inquire further and then drive them into social quarantine. Force them to rely upon their own kind rather than subsisting like vampires upon the human cattle they despise.

Don't whine about how they won't let you into the clubs and companies they invaded and occupied and made their own, create new ones, make them bigger and better, and then, (and this is the crucial part), DO NOT LET THEM IN. To "foxnews" should be a verb in every right-winger's vocabulary; Fox News is the model that shows how easily the Right can dominate and destroy the Left on the Left's own turf so long as the Right stops trying to appease and accommodate the Left.

Punching back is punching back twice as hard, because the Right has more muscle.

So stop priding yourself on your open mind and your tolerance. Stop thinking you are going to shame them, or inspire them, or convince them into following your lead. Their minds are closed and they see you as an evil enemy. Accept that and treat them accordingly. Support your own kind, give preference to your own kind, and stop paying tribute to the enemy.

As for their vilification, wear it with pride. Feed on it and grow strong. I would be embarrassed, I would be downright disgusted with myself, were the intellectual dwarfs of the Left to approve of me in any way, shape, or form. Persecution either breaks a faith or makes it stronger, and the more they try to increase the pressure, the stronger and harder and more confident they will make us.

Job security is dead. You are one earnings call, one technological innovation, and one denouncement away from losing your job. Hopefully you have a skill that allows you to be re-employed immediately, but most men are not immune to such a sudden lost. Let’s take a look at what happens when two men netting $5,000 a month lose their jobs at the same time.

The first man works for the government and lives alone in an expensive condo. He likes the finer things in life and is quick to pick up the tab when going out with friends. He spends $4,500 a month and saves $500. He’s read that saving 10% is better than the American average of 4%. In one year, he has $6,000 saved.

The second man works as a bartender at a popular club. He lives with four roommates. He wishes he could live alone, but the club industry isn’t stable and he doesn’t know how long his current gig will last. He makes it a point to network with other bartenders to get as many free drinks as he can when going out. He spends $2,500 a month and saves $2,500. In one year, he has $30,000.

Both lose their job at the same time. The first man enters a full-blown panic, because he only has one-and-a-half months of money to survive, which simply isn’t enough time to find a job in his bureaucratic field. The second man, while upset at the loss of his job, knows he can take a one year vacation without a single change to his lifestyle.

Which strategy is superior? The man who has no leeway but lives a high-profile lifestyle, or the man with a large savings but basic lifestyle? The answer you receive from them will likely depend on whether they are fully employed or not.

I live like the second man. I save about half of my income, preparing myself for possible irrelevancy if game gets outlawed or my books stop selling. I have created a fund where I can live for several years without income. I figure that that’s enough time to come up with a new way to provide for myself.

Do I wish I had a luxury condo, a BMW, and all the accouterments of rich living? I sure wouldn’t say no if you gave them to me, but I refuse to spend more than 50% of my income on living. It’s hard, because I know I can spend more, but I rather live simply with security than live lavishly with anxiety. I find it hard to imagine how people live paycheck to paycheck, knowing that their life will be in total turmoil if something bad happens. If I have a bad month—or even a bad year—you wouldn’t even notice a change in my output or demeanor.

Financial freedom is the most important type of freedom, because it lubricates all other forms of freedom. You have to be able to walk away from anyone who tries to limit you, whether your boss or your critics, and still live on your own terms. You can’t do that when your monthly expenses are so large that you spend most of your earnings. Unless you can go a year without any income, you are in a very fragile economic state. I lived like that before, but I won’t do it again.

Read Next: There Are No Rules

P.S. My newest book is called 30 Bangs. It's about 30 of my bangs. Click here to learn more about the book.

Why do women use sex to attempt to secure commitment from men?  Deti wondered about this on a recent thread at Haley’s Halo:

Women who give up quick and easy sex are not doing it because they want the guy to fall in love with her; they’re doing it because they want the sex. Why else would a woman repeatedly pursue a failed strategy? How many times does a woman have to see this fail before she figures out it’s not working? The fact that so many women pursue this failed template tells me something else is going on; something else is motivating her.

My critics say no; she really does believe that she can get a guy by sleeping with her. And I admit that sometimes, not often, but sometimes, it works.

But as I have pointed out before, this strategy does frequently appear to work..  Not only is it not rare for it to work, but in fact the vast majority of modern Western women who have been able to secure a commitment from a man, including the majority of Christian women, used sex to do so.  This is not to downplay all the other issues that go into deciding whom to marry, such as compatibility, shared life goals, and liking each other’s personalities, but the reality is that most couples, Christian or otherwise, are sleeping together before they say I do.  Women are successfully using sex to secure commitment from men.

Men may think this strategy doesn’t work at all because it does not work in every individual attempt; a woman may have to try it with several men to get it to work, but eventually she finds one man whom she likes and who likes having sex with her enough to put a ring on her finger in order to continue having sexual access to her.  This strategy doesn’t work in every individual attempt, but it does work for nearly every individual woman eventually.

At least, that is how it has been for the past thirty years or so.  But on a previous thread, I noted

By the way, I am not arguing in favor of fornication. I’m just trying to explain why women try to use fornication to get commitment. They are trying to do this because eventually it works. At least, it used to work. It seems like that might slowly be changing. It may be the case that men are losing interest in committing to women. It will be interesting to see, if that happens, whether that has any impact on women’s willingness to engage in fornication.

Reader imnobody00 then pointed me toward the “Battle of the Sexes” model by Richard Dawkins (1976), explained here as a Circular Matrix:

Dawkins (1976) considers the following imaginary game. Suppose that the successful raising of an offspring is worth +15 to each parent. The cost of raising an offspring is -20, which can be borne one parent only, or shared equally between two. The cost of a long courtship is -3 to both participants. Females can be ‘coy’ or ‘fast’; males can be ‘faithful’ or ‘philanderer’. Coy females insist on a long courtship, whereas fast females do not; all females care for offspring they produce. Faithful males are willing, if necessary, to engage in a long courtship, and also care for the offspring. Philanderers are not prepared to engage in a long courtship, and do not care for their offspring.

The characteristic feature of this matrix is its cyclical character. That is:

1. If females are coy, it pays males to be faithful.
2. If males are faithful, it pays females to be fast.
3. If females are fast, it pays males to philander.
4. If males philander, it pays females to be coy.

Although Dawkins’ model describes an imaginary game, I had been thinking something along the same lines for the modern Sexual Marketplace (SMP) and Marriage Marketplace (MMP).  Imnobody00 explained how it is similar:

We are in this phase:

If males are faithful, it pays females to be fast (most men are blue pill).

We are entering this phase:

If females are fast, it pays males to philander. (This explains the appearance of PUAs)

When most men are PUAs we will enter this phase:

If males philander, it pays females to be coy.

So yes, when most promiscuous women fail to get married, you will see women rediscovering chastity. Count on it.

Again, Dawkins’ model isn’t describing some law of human mating and to my knowledge, no modern civilization has done a complete cycle through this circular matrix and started it over.  However, it may be that this cycle has been played out in the ancient world; if any reader knows more about ancient history than I do, I would be interested in knowing if there was ever a time in recorded human history when this cycle has actually played out in its entirety.

To make more sense for our day and age, I would like to change the terminology in Dawkins’ model:

1. If women are chaste, it pays men to be committed.
2. If men are committed, it pays women to be slutty.
3. If women are slutty, it pays men to be cads.
4. If men are cads, it pays women to be chaste.

For men, the two choices are:

• committed = offering commitment in exchange for sexual access (monogamous)
• cad = able to gain sexual access while withholding commitment (promiscuous)

For women, the two choices are:

• slutty = offers sexual access without requiring commitment (promiscuous)
• chaste = requires commitment before offering sexual access (monogamous)

We could also put it like this:

1. If women are monogamous, it pays men to be monogamous.
2. If men are monogamous, it pays women to be promiscuous.
3. If women are promiscuous, it pays men to be promiscuous.
4. If men are promiscuous, it pays women to be monogamous.

So right now, what we are perhaps witnessing is dissonance in the market.  Women are still being fast but men are beginning to cease being faithful.  In other words, for the past thirty years, women have been able to be easy sluts and still find a man to marry, but as men are beginning to be less willing to be faithful and committed in exchange for sex, women are just beginning to find it more difficult to be easy sluts yet still find a man to marry.  Perhaps that is what a lot of drunken hook-ups that end in sexual assault allegations the next day are unconsciously really all about; the young woman is still trying to acquire an item (commitment) using a currency (sex) that is becoming less acceptable as payment.

And finally, what those of us who are parents want to know is whither the circular matrix?  Will we cycle all the way through and begin again?  Get stuck in one phase indefinitely?  Or could some variable interrupt the circle?  It is theoretically possible that the matrix could shift to look like this:

1. When women were chaste, it paid men to be committed.
2. When men were committed, it then paid women to be slutty.
3. Now that women have become slutty, it pays men to become cads.
4. When men are all cads, it will pay women to be chaste.
5. If women become chaste, men will lose interest and play video games and masturbate to internet porn instead of becoming committed. (This phase has already come to fruition in Japan).
6. If men are no longer committed, women will use other means (legal and legislative) to secure the resources from all men that used to be acquired through commitment from an individual man.

I think we already see shades of #5 and #6 in our modern day; what that portends for the future is anyone’s guess but undoubtedly it will look something like what Captain Capitalism describes in Enjoy the Decline.

Note: this essay has been written from a secular point of view and is only meant to describe.  It offers no commentary on what is morally right or what should be.  However, regular readers know that I am a Christian and espouse biblical sexual morality, in which women are chaste and men are committed, as the only moral option for human mating.  Hard monogamy is both moral and best for society.

A Georgia girl named Maya Van Wagenen, who at the age of 13 found herself socially anxious at a new school, picked up Betty Cornell’s Glamour Guide for Teens, an etiquette book published in 1951, and used it as her blueprint for popularity. It worked, and she documented the process with a diary, which she recently sold to Penguin for $300,000. But it doesn’t end there. Dreamworks, always on the lookout for material that will have broad appeal, made a deal with her to make a film out of the book. At 15 years old, she is the youngest non-actor to make a feature film deal with Dreamworks.

I find this pretty amusing, because it proves that traditional femininity, all the rage in the 1950s due to the adoption of a conservative, Freudian philosophy as the guiding standard for family life at the time, gets a girl farther than adopting a defiant, hostile and unattractive feminist stance.

The 1950s were far from perfect. There were clearly a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out, such as the problem of economically unproductive housewives, and Freud’s ideas were based in large part on faulty assumptions, but it was closer to the ideal than the contemporary setup.

Media outlets are gushing over Ms. Van Wagenen, but the material in the etiquette book would give feminists fits. For example, girls are urged to wear a girdle and white gloves and learn to do tricks with strands of pearls (I have no idea what that means, but I assume it’s innocent). There must be a little more to it than fashion (maybe not much), as the book also recommends being “open, honest and kind.”

I looked the book up on Amazon, and found a couple reviews. According to one hefty feminist, it is “fascinatingly awful.” Another writes “If you are a teenage girl, this book tells you that you better be skinny with perfect hair and make-up.”

Then, I found a review on a website called “Embarrassing Treasures” that includes a few more quotes and some background on author Betty Cornell. It turns out that Cornell had been a big girl when young, and her advice revolves in large part around keeping a trim figure. To do that, she advocates what loks like a low-carb diet:

Sample Menus for Weight Control

Breakfast: Half a grapefruit, 1 poached egg on rye or whole wheat toast with small amount of butter, 1 glass of milk.

Lunch: Small container of cottage cheese, fresh fruit, any kind of lean meat sandwich, consommé, milk

Dinner: 1 glass of tomato juice, generous serving of broiled calf’s liver, serving of cooked carrots, tomato and lettuce salad with lemon juice, fruit Jello, milk.

Cornell on identifying fattening foods:

If you don’t know what foods are fattening, ask your chubby friends, because they will know.

Here’s why she recommends a girdle:

Even a teen with a trim figure needs to coax her curves a bit when it comes to wearing slim skirts and slacks. To me there is nothing more repellent than a protruding fanny or a bulging tummy marring the outline of a narrow silhouette.

So much for the “changing beauty standards” fantasy feminists go on about.

Although it’s tempting for me to write this stuff off as trivial, I can’t think of anything that so clearly demonstrates the utter failure of feminism better than the enormous success and accolades that have fallen into young Maya Van Wagenen’s lap.

Eat your heart out, feminists.

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First, I must admit that I’m a fan of Neil Postman, the late American cultural thinker. I recommend his book Amusing Ourselves To Death if you want to understand the effects that technology has on humanity (for a shorter synopsis of that book, check out his speech here). Similar ideas can also be found in the great documentary Connections by James Burke.

What I wanted to know is how to solve the problems that we face from blindly adopting technology. Postman suggests that we should borrow the 18th Century way of thinking from the Enlightenment in order to navigate our modern times (the century of Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin). He briefly goes over their philosophies and how we can adopt their way of thinking.

One of the most important points Postman makes is that modern man has lost a purposeful narrative of religion. The narrative that has replaced it is using technology and being satisfied with one’s consumer products.

…when people do not have a satisfactory narrative to generate a sense of purpose and continuity, a kind of psychic disorientation takes hold, followed by a frantic search for something to believe in or, probably worse, a resigned conclusion that there is nothing to find.

[...]

I write for those who are still searching for a way to confront the future, a way that faces reality as it is, that is connected to a humane tradition, that provides sane authority and meaningful purpose.

But attempts at constructing a narrative won’t work, because…

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it always has been, and it is a delusion to believe that the future will render irrelevant what we know and have long known about ourselves but find it convenient to forget.

The 18th Century marked the beginning of the modern world, not unlike how the Ancient Greeks marked the beginning of the Western world. In fact, the Englightenment was partially due to a re-discovering of the Ancient Greek writing. All the founding fathers of America studied them, and used those ideas to birth America. But how many American men study the Ancient Greeks today?

Today’s society has been taken over by a zombie march of progress instead of the accumulation of wisdom. This idea of progress is relatively new. In the past, science was a pursuit of truth, without any immediate applications, but now everything must be done to make humans happy or improve their standard of living (i.e., bombard their senses with cheap and accessible entertainment and feed them with subsidized corn and sugar).

The eighteenth century invented [the idea of progress], elaborated it, and promoted it, and in so doing generated vast resources of vitality, confidence, and hope. But the eighteenth century also criticized and doubted it, initiating powerful arguments about its limitations and pitfalls.

These limitations and pitfalls are rarely discussed today. 3D movies are progress. Internet is progress. Porn-on-demand is progress. Google Glass is progress. And so on. A cultural obsession with progress results in spiritual emptiness and a confused people. Progress has replaced god.

We can get a clear idea of the seriousness and skepticism with which European intellectuals regarded technological progress by reading a letter Lord Byron sent prior to a speech he gave to the House of Lords early in the nineteenth century. The letter summarizes his speech. He spoke against a proposed law which would apply the death penalty to anyone deliberately breaking a machine, as those people called “Luddites” were in the habit of doing. Byron tried to show how the rise of factories made workers useless and desperate, and how their way of life was being destroyed. Byron was not a Luddite himself, and, in fact, understood the advantages of mechanized progress. But he saw in such progress a tainted bargain—economic growth on one hand, the loss of self-respect and community vitality on the other. (The law was passed, with only three votes against it.)

Postman gives us the intellectual tools to question today’s technology:

The most obvious question to be asked about any new technology—for example, interactive television, virtual reality, the Internet, or, for that matter, doorknobs and toasters that “understand” human speech—is, What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?

[...]

What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem? The automobile solved some very important problems for most people, but in doing so, poisoned our air, choked our cities with traffic, and contributed toward the destruction of some of the beauty of our natural landscape. Antibiotics certainly solved some significant problems for almost all people, but in doing so, resulted in the weakening of what we call our immune systems. Television solved several important problems, but in solving them changed the nature of political discourse, led to a serious decline in literacy, and quite possibly made the traditional process of socializing children impossible.

[...]

What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change? This question needs to be asked because significant technological change always results in a realignment of power.

[...]

…I find it useful to ask of any technology that is marketed as indispensable, What problem does it solve for me? Will its advantages outweigh its disadvantages? Will it alter my habits and language, and if so, for better or for worse

[...]

I will use technology when I judge it to be in my favor to do so.

We’ve reached a point where the newest technology hype coming out of Silicon Valley offers only marginal benefits to our lives. Having an app that reserves a restaurant in 10 seconds is handy, but calling to make a reservation isn’t particularly burdensome. Everyone is quick to look at the benefits that such technologies give, but what do we lose from them? Do we lose the basic ability to communicate with other people? Of having empathy and patience for our fellow man?

Postman also understands information is not knowledge, and that it’s possible to have tons of information but stupid citizens who don’t understand the political process that dominates them.

…the concept of “information” was different from what it is today. Information was not thought of as a commodity to be bought and sold. It had no separate existence, as it does in our age; specifically, it was not thought to be worthwhile unless it was embedded in a context, unless it gave shape, texture, or authority to a political, social, or scientific concept, which itself was required to fit into some world-view. No one was ridiculed more in the eighteenth century, especially by Jonathan Swift, than the pedant, the person who collected information without purpose, without connection to social life…

[...]

The problem addressed in the nineteenth century was how to get more information to more people, faster, and in more diverse forms. For 150 years, humanity has worked with stunning ingenuity to solve this problem. The good news is that we have. The bad news is that, in solving it, we have created another problem, never before experienced: information glut, information as garbage, information divorced from purpose and even meaning.

There is no problem caused in today’s society by a lack of information. Bad education is not caused by lack of information. Neither is crime, world hunger, or wars. Information without context is useless; it’s mere trivia.

It is also assumed that, as we proceed into a postmodern world, we are bereft of a narrative that can provide courage and optimism; that we are facing what Vaçlav Havel and others have called “a crisis in narrative.” Old gods have fallen, either wounded or dead. New ones have been aborted. “We are looking,” he said, “for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions.” In other words, we seek new narratives to provide us with “an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archtypical wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and faith.”8 No one must underestimate the difficulties in this.

And so what narrative have guys like me sought out? Tradition, masculinity, strength, conquest, hard-work. Technology doesn’t fill a man’s spirit, and neither does information. Like Postman, I have looked to the past for answers that can give me meaning today, because I know that consumer messages or new technology don’t have the answer.

There is very little the culture wants to do for children except to make them into consumers. A child is someone who has money to buy things. An adult is someone who has more money to buy things.

[...]

The whole idea of schooling, now, is to prepare the young for competent entry into the economic life of a community so that they will continue to be devoted consumers.

[...]

The average American graduate student cannot tell you, given a thousand-year margin of error, when the alphabet was invented, or, given a two-hundred-year margin of error, when the printing press with movable type was invented, let alone say anything intelligible about the psychological or social implications of those inventions. To think that these are the people to whom we will entrust the uses of the information superhighway would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.

[...]

…the structure and authority of the family have been severely weakened as parents have lost control over the information environment of the young.

In the end, Postman argues that education has failed to teach reason and skepticism, two prime qualities of the Enlightenment. At the same time, having educated minds is a nation’s best resource, creating citizens who can doubt authority and identify propaganda that hurts the nation. But we no longer aim to create this type of society in America. Instead, we give a tiny elite a proper education while the rest are reduced to the learning of facts and obedience. Let them have iPhones!

This book brought up a lot of good points, but it did meander at times. It’d be best if you read Amusing Ourselves To Death first. Unless you love that volume, you may not get too much value from this Postman offering.

Read More: “Building A Bridge To The 18th Century” on Amazon

Do you want to learn how to make girls chase you? Visit or November sponsor, Girls Chase.

Matt Walsh points out the historical reality to anti-homeschoolers:

I’d like to treat you to a look at a few snippets of some emails I received yesterday, after a certain “controversial” segment on my show:

“I never realized you were so anti-education…”

“It figures that a teabagger would hate education so much…”

“….so it seems you would rather have a nation full of illiterates…”

“….I get tired of your anarchist propaganda…”

“I’m sure Hitler would be very proud of you…”

That last one — the obligatory “you’re as bad as Hitler!” charge — is especially ironic, considering the subject that prompted these responses: public education. Specifically, my belief that government education is an unmitigated disaster, and can only be remedied by more and more families deciding to remove government from the equation and educate their children themselves. That last emailer is, predictably, a proud product of public school. But you already knew that, in light of his hilarious historical ignorance.

Contrary to his claims, Hitler would not have been very “proud” of my pro-home school rhetoric. In fact, he would have been quite displeased. In fact, he probably would have expressed that displeasure in a manner which would have left no room for interpretation. That’s because Hitler actually outlawed home schooling (a law that’s still enforced in Germany today, and passionately endorsed by our own Justice Department). The Fuehrer was a huge proponent of public schooling — and that’s not an attempt to compare modern public school proponents to Nazis.

But, you know, if anyone comes close to mirroring the National Socialist Party on this particular subject, it obviously isn’t the home schooling folks…

The whole article is pretty good, as Matt goes on to explain how the public school system is working precisely as designed. The fact is that if you believe in public education, you are every bit as much a Nazi as someone who believes Jews should be oven-baked and every bit as much a Communist as someone who believes in the abolition of private property. Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx were both absolutely avid advocates of public education, in fact, "Free education for all children in government schools" is the tenth plank of the Communist Manifesto.

Public school is systematic child abuse. It is that simple. Don't ever be defensive about home schooling. When someone asks you why you homeschool, just tell them "public school is child abuse" and give them the opportunity to explain how and why that statement is incorrect. They will not be able to do so.

Game continues to break into the mainstream, as evidenced by this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled Why women lose the dating game. It even features citations from Dalrock as well as Susan Walsh:

He barely had a date through much of his 20s and gave up on women. But then he spent time overseas, gained more confidence, learnt how to dress well and hit his early 30s. ''I suddenly started to get asked out by women, aged 19 through to 40. The floodgates burst open for me. I actually dated five women at once, amazing my flatmates by often bedding three to four of my casual dates each week. It is a great time as a male in your 30s, when you start getting more female attention and sex than you could ever have dreamt of in your 20s.''

That's when some men start behaving very badly - as the manosphere clearly shows. These internet sites are not for the faint-hearted. The voices are often crude and misogynist. But they tell it as they see it. There is Greenlander, an apparently successful engineer in his late 30s. In his early adult life, he was unable to ''get the time of day from women''. Now he's interested only in women under 27.

''The women I know in their early 30s are just delusional,'' he says. ''I sometimes seduce them and sleep with them just because I know how to play them so well. It's just too easy. They're tired of the cock carousel and they see a guy like me as the perfect beta to settle down with before their eggs dry out … when I get tired of them I just delete their numbers from my cell phone and stop taking their calls … It doesn't really hurt them that much: at this point they're used to pump & dump!''

It's easy to dismiss such bile but Greenlander's analysis is echoed by many Australian singles, both male and female.

''It's wall-to-wall arseholes out there,'' reports Penny, a 31-year-old lawyer. She is stunned by how hard it is to meet suitable men willing to commit. ''I'm horrified by the number of gorgeous, independent and successful women my age who can't meet a decent man.''

Penny acknowledges part of the problem is her own expectations - that her generation of women was brought up wanting too much. ''We were told we were special, we could do anything and the world was our oyster.'' And having spent her 20s dating alpha males, she expected them to be still around when she finally decided to get serious.

But these men go fast, many fishing outside their pond. The most attractive, successful men can take their pick from women their own age or from the Naomis, the younger women who are happy to settle early. Almost one in three degree-educated 35-year-old men marries or lives with women aged 30 or under, according to income, housing and marriage surveys by the Bureau of Statistics.

''I can't believe how many men my age are only interested in younger women,'' wails Gail, a 34-year-old advertising executive as she describes her first search through men's profiles on the RSVP internet dating site. She is shocked to find many mid-30s men have set up their profiles to refuse mail from women their own age.

Talking to many women like her, it's intriguing how many look back on past relationships where they let good men get away because they weren't ready. American journalist Kate Bolick wrote recently in The Atlantic about breaking off her three-year relationship with a man she described as ''intelligent, good-looking, loyal and kind''. She acknowledged ''there was no good reason to end things'', yet, at the time, she was convinced something was missing in the relationship. That was 11 years ago. She's is now 39 and facing grim choices.

''We arrived at the top of the staircase,'' Bolick wrote, ''finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up - and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don't want to go out with.''

So, many women are missing out on their fairytale ending - their assumption that when the time was right the dream man would be waiting. The 30s are worrying years for high-achieving women who long for marriage and children - of course, not all do - as they face their rapidly closing reproductive window surrounded by men who see no rush to settle down.

One thing that tends to confuse those looking superficially at the matter is that most women, even in their late 30s, are able to find partners. But what tends to escape the attention of those superficial observers is that the men for whom the women are settling in their 30s and 40s tend to be of distinctly lower quality than the men that were pursuing them in their middle and late 20s. If you see a high caliber married man in his 40s or 50s who is married to a woman within a few years of his age, in most cases you will learn that they married when he was in his 20s. One seldom sees a high caliber married man that age who is engaged to a woman who is within five years of his age, as the statistics increasingly demonstrate.

This is why divorced men tend to do well among women approaching the Beauty Wall. Since divorce downgrades their MMV, they still have many of the SMV characteristics that women find attractive, but they possess lower marital value due to the greater baggage and higher relationship risk they represent. So, the older women retain access to the men their age the younger women find less interesting from the relationship perspective.

I have always enjoyed home-making, even when I worked full-time before we had children.  I don’t mind cleaning, and I love cooking, baking, gardening, canning, and decorating.  After we had children and I went down to working very part-time, one of the things I most enjoyed was having more time to devote to home-making activities.  Now that all the children are in school and no one is currently being home-schooled, I asked my husband if he would like me to go back to work full-time, but he was quite opposed to it.  He appreciates the work I do at home for our family and prefers for me to continue in that role.  He got no argument from me.

So, it was with interest that I read a series of posts from other lady bloggers recently explaining what a day in the life of an average housewife is like.  You can find their posts here:

Stingray: A Day in the Life

Margery: Day in the Life

Lady Sigyn: A Day in King’s Haven

Their days look a lot like mine except that I work part-time, and I’m not home-schooling this year.  For those of you who work full-time but are interested in housewifery, you may enjoy reading Mary Ellen’s blog:

The Working Home Keeper: Celebrating the Domestic Side of Working Motherhood

We lady bloggers use our down time to work on our blogs but for much of the day we are busy with mothering and home-keeping.  There is, however, another kind of housewife that doesn’t often get talked about: the lazy housewife.

I was thinking about the lazy housewife recently when I was reading a sad story about a man who had gone through a divorce after supporting his home-maker wife for many years.  He described what a terrible housewife she had been; the children and home were not cared for at all, but he couldn’t force her to work.  His story reminded me of a girl named Beth whom I met in graduate school when I was working on my Master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology.

Beth told me that she was trying to use the speech therapy techniques we were learning with her two young nieces, both of whom were very language delayed.  She told me that her brother’s wife, who was a stay-at-home mother, did basically nothing to care for the children.  From the time they were babies, she would drop them in their playpen with a bottle or an open package of crackers and leave them there all day, every day.  The house was a mess, she didn’t cook, she didn’t exercise, and the children were unkempt and under-stimulated. Beth said that the youngest one was about to start school and that her sister-in-law was panicking because Beth’s brother wanted her to get a job; she began pressuring him to get her pregnant again, even though she didn’t really want any more children, just so that she would have an excuse to continue to sit on her lazy bum at home all day.

I thought about that sad story a few years later when I had an acquaintance whom we’ll call Sue who was a housewife but confided in me that she hated housework and was bad at it.  She was very obese but always looked clean enough, and her two school-aged children appeared to be cared for.  Sue and her husband were going through a nasty divorce, and she told me that one of his reasons for leaving was because she wouldn’t take care of herself or the house but also refused to go back to work.  She had a lot of excuses as to why she couldn’t keep her home or have a job, none of them particularly valid.

One day she called me and another friend and asked us for help.  Her husband had filed a petition to be granted sole physical custody of the children and the court had ordered some kind of home-check, which would happen the next day.  She asked if we could come over and help her clean up the house, and we agreed to do so.  I had never been to her home before, and when she let us in the front door, this is similar to what we saw (this is not her actual home):

I did not want to be rude to Sue, but I just looked at her and wondered, “What do you do all day?  You don’t cook, you don’t clean, you don’t exercise, your children are in school, and you don’t have a job!”

What is to be done about lazy housewives?  They give all of us a bad name, and they do their families no favors.  If a lazy and rebellious woman is refusing to keep her home, ought she not to get a job and use the money to pay someone to keep the home for her?

 The problem is that in both of my anecdotes above, the husbands did get tired of their wives refusing to keep the home and tried to get them to return to the paid workforce, but the women refused.  What can a man in this situation do?  When we lived in a time when men were not hogtied by our legal system and could actually enforce some consequences to maintain an orderly household, a husband could send such a wife back to her father or even threaten to turn her out.  But now?  He’s stuck with her.  If he divorces her, she is going to collect child-support, which was the motivation Sue had to get her house cleaned up; she simply couldn’t lose custody of those kids because otherwise she’d lose out on child support and have to get a job.

Once a man is in this situation, he’s basically stuck.  Therefore, one of the things men should vet for ahead of time in a potential wife is home-keeping skills.  He ought to view her apartment, including stopping by unannounced.  If she lives with her parents, he ought to expect to see her room.  If it’s messy, that is a bad sign; if she can’t keep a room or apartment clean when it’s just her, how will she manage when she has an entire family and a larger home to manage?  No matter how pretty a girl is, she’s just not wife material if she can’t keep a tidy, organized home.

Because it is Friday, let us end on a pleasant note by encouraging one another to be useful keepers of the home, whether we work or not.  Is there an area of mothering or home-keeping that you aren’t doing well at?  Share it in the comment thread and let us exhort one another to improve.  Also, if you have a favorite home-keeping skill or tip or a favorite recipe, share it in the comment thread.  Even the men can participate if they’d like. One final thing I would ask the men to comment on is what kinds of things men appreciate having their wives do so that the rest of us can check ourselves and make sure we’re taking care of business properly.

And now, here is a perfect recipe for this time of year, when cold viruses are making the rounds and a nice, hot homemade soup is just what is needed:

Sweet Garlic Soup from Meals that Heal by Eileen Behan

Ingredients:

• 10 large garlic cloves, peeled, sliced thin (about 1/2 cup)
• 1 small onion, peeled and sliced into thin rings
• 2 T butter
• 6 cups chicken stock
• 1 T. fresh lemon juice

In a heavy soup pot, saute the garlic and onions for two minutes until soft, but do not let them brown.  Add the chicken stock and simmer on low heat for 30 minutes.  Puree in a food processor or blender; return to heat.  Stir in the lemon juice, cover, and simmer for another 60 minutes.  Serve warm with a few croutons or fresh herbs on top if desired.

If he's not careful, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Scientists is going to round up James Delingpole for excess public brutality. His demolition of the BBC and its so-called science experts borders on pure sadism:

The Beeb constantly resorts to 'experts' whose arguments are bigoted, feeble, fatuous, fallacious and stupid

‘Well, you’re arguing facts against opinions. OK, I mean, the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has rocketed up since the Industrial Revolution, and continues to rocket up, is a fact. Now, it’s so much a fact that even the climate change deniers look away from it and don’t deny it.’
— Professor Steve Jones, Feedback, BBC Radio 4, 18 October

Have a look at that last sentence. It represents such a cherishably stupid, rude, fatuous, crabby, bigoted, ignorant, petulant, feeble, fallacious, dishonest and misleading argument that if it turned out the speaker in question was a professor of logic or philosophy you really might want to shoot yourself in despair.

Can you see what the problem is? Let me explain. This angry professor character wants us to believe that there are people called ‘climate change deniers’ who are so far outside the pale of reasonable discourse that even when they are right it’s another sign of just how wrong they are.

Atmospheric CO₂ has been rising since the Industrial Revolution, Jones is telling us, but those pesky deniers are so slippery that they refuse to deny this fact. If they did, presumably, it would make Jones’s job a lot easier because then he’d be able to provide a clear example of these wrong ‘opinions’ deniers supposedly hold. Apparently, though, Jones is unable to produce such a clear example. So instead he has to fabricate one and — in the very next breath — to discount it by conceding that actually this is a point on which ‘even’ the ‘deniers’ agree.

It's a bad sign for the state of science when the average anklebiting blog troll can produce arguments that are more coherent, credible, and convincing than the official mouthpieces of scientific consensus. But then, that's what happens when scientists show they are more dedicated to scientistry than scientody.

Appeal to authority are inherently problematic. But appealing to the climatological authority of a biologist whose specialty is snails? It requires years of J-school to produce that quixotic form of genius.

The Anti-Gnostic writes a very good post about Obamacare, and the unsustainable folly of the welfare state in general.

There are many layers of confusion [about the medical insurance business], so let’s take a look at some facts.

1) Most people lose money on insurance, because most of the time insurance doesn’t pay out more than it takes in.

2) Thus, a “good” policy is a catastrophic-coverage-only, high-deductible policy, where most payments are out of pocket. This is a policy that protects you against the downside risk, but where you lose a lot less on average.

3) This is because the purpose of insurance is to protect yourself from *catastrophe*, not to make routine purchases.

4) For example, if you went to Best Buy and whipped out your home insurance card to get a new flat screen TV, everyone would look at you as a crazy man. “Don’t you know that home insurance is only for fires and floods, and not for routine purchases?”

5) And so it should be with health insurance, because you’ll actually — *provably* — pay less with a high deductible plan for all but catastrophic conditions.

6) Indeed, the most innovative and technologically advanced areas of medicine are ambulatory areas in which people feel that markets are “ok”. These are paradoxically the most trivial areas: lasik, plastic surgery, dermatology, dentistry, even veterinary medicine.

7) Why are these areas so advanced? Because people pay cash money, because they choose based on quality, and because they are *able* to choose — i.e. they aren’t being wheeled up to the hospital in a gurney in a no choice scenario.

8) Moreover, with every technology ever, from cars to cell phones to air travel to computers, things that start out expensive become cheaper when enough people demand them. With medicine it seems to bite more that money means differences in care. But at the end of the day doctors, patients, nurses, drugs, ambulances…all that stuff means real resources, and a refusal to do explicit computations just results in massive waste as costs are shunted to a place where no one looks at them.

9) How insane is it, for example, that in this age of internet shopping that you can’t do comparison shopping on a hip replacement or a physical on the internet? It has to do with the irrationality that surrounds the concept of paying for the most valuable service of all: for someone saving your life.

10) Now let’s consider the elderly. The big problem here is that there IS going to be a catastrophe that hits them with probability 1. It’s called dying from being old.

11) If you know anything about medicine, you know that futile care is a ridiculous proportion of healthcare expenditure.

12) Now, in the abstract everyone is all about taking care of the elderly. Witness [another commenter's] bleeding heart:

“Were they to offer profitable policies to old people, the premiums would be unaffordable.”

The whole point is that *old people are going to die* with probability 1. So let’s take those evil capitalists out of the question, and assume for now that no innovative entrepreneur could figure out something win/win for his own grandpa. …
Now we are in the realm of social justice. Which sounds so nice in the comments section. Until [the commenter] answers the question: how much of his children’s money does he want to spend on futile care for 83 year old Emma in Ohio? For 74 year old Bill in Texas? For countless, endless, unnamed others?

Because you can spend ALL of your money on futile care. Literally every last penny.

So now he says, “well, of course there have to be limits”.

And here we come to the nub of the matter.

This is h-bd land. We are adults. We understand hard facts.

One of those hard facts is that until Aubrey de Grey really gets on the hop, people *are* going to die.

The question is whether they die when THEY and their family run out of money — localizing the catastrophe — or whether every single one of them is connected to a public purse that they can draw down without consequence.

Because draw it down they will.

You see, for most of us, if our own mother was on a deathbed, if we had the ability to tax and steal from Joe and John and James to keep her alive we wouldn’t think twice about it. Because even if it took a million dollars in stolen tax money a day to keep her alive, well, hell, then I guess they’ll just have to work harder.

The problem, of course, is when everyone thinks this way.

Because what quickly happens is that once you’ve given the government access to that giant pool of money, they make damned sure that no one ANYWHERE is spending that money other than them…and then too only for the express purpose of the vote-buying schemes that our esteemed host has bought hook, line, and sinker.

That money is not spent for saving any more mothers.

Not for actual care.

Not for innovative treatments.

Not for anything other than the necessary minimum to keep up the facade, to buy people’s votes.

But hell, what does it matter, right? At least now we’re all equal. Equally poor in health. We’ve defeated the Magic of the Market. We can now allocate scarce resources not through merit or money, but through queues and connections and politics.

Like this.

Biogen Idec is running an early-stage trial of the drug in multiple myeloma, but Baron doesn’t meet the criteria to participate.

Baron’s a prominent donor to the Democratic party, and many of his powerful friends, including Lance Armstrong and Bill Clinton, made appeals on his behalf. And the family agreed not to sue if anything goes wrong.

Ultimately, his doctors at the Mayo Clinic worked directly with the FDA to find a “legal basis” for giving Baron Tysabri. The deal was announced on Baron’s son’s blog late yesterday. The details remain unclear.

Fantastic work, all of you. We’ve now taken the profit out of health care. No more profit motive to encourage ambitious young geniuses to develop miracle drugs rather than program social networks.

Instead it’s just pure politics.

This is what we need to get back to: a basic understanding that health insurance is meant for catastrophes, not routine check-ups or money spigot end-of-life care on old people waiting for death’s imminent and unstoppable escort.

Harsh, but true.

And isn’t this just the problem with leftoids’ over-sensitivity to harm and fairness? It’s all egogasmic hurty alleviation… until the credit line that funds their moral posturing is maxed. And then it’s time to memetically move on to the next civilization and repeat the process of suicide by feels.

It is an awful dilemma. The State, having assured the taxpayers that their geriatric needs would be met, must now breach its covenant with its citizens. As several commenters noted, there is no way out.

… As a society we are suffering tremendously because we forgot that the best retirement program is to have 6 children and teach them how to be prosperous and then stay on the good side of at least a few of them.

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.

I have my own fantasy of a nice little country that extracts the minimum taxes necessary to fund its military and maintain the social safety net. I’m sure that has been the selling point trotted out by every welfare state politician since Bismarck. But inevitably it seems, net tax consumption increases, birth rates fall, the culture shifts to high time-preference, and the State inflates the currency and runs deficits–further distorting the productive economy–to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

GBFM lzollzollzol’ed.

Obamacare is a ruling class pet project. It’s labyrinthine opacity is a feature, not a bug, that enriches the corrupt managerialist Top and the blood-sucking parasitical Bottom at the expense of the beta niceguys in the Middle. This formula is bad enough in homogeneous societies, but in racially and ethnically diverse ones like America, where ability and temperament and charitable fellow-feeling are all unequally distributed at both the individual and population group levels, it’s a guaranteed failure.

Strip out the market-distorting and depraved actor-attracting opacity of medical insurance — this means ending employer provided coverage and nationalized healthcare — and return it to the economically and morally sustainable notion that insurance is supposed to protect one against devastating… and relatively rare… calamities.

If this is not possible, well… try separatism. It may be that a precondition of solvent and sustainable medical insurance programs is ethnic kinship.

Filed under: Culture, Current Events, Goodbye America, Self-aggrandizement, The Id Monster, Ugly Truths

Since the age of 18 I have managed, without female intervention or supervision, to

bathe regularly,
floss and brush my teeth,
prevent myself from starving,
clean my humble abode,
do laundry,
not starve

and a whole host of other things that have kept me alive and in reasonably good physical condition and health.

Enter the ladies.

Not one girl in the history of girls could just leave my place well enough alone.

No this must be cleaned.

No this must be put away.

No these clothes must be folded (which I know for a fact they don't because I haven't folded clothes since 1993 and the world has yet to spontaneously explode).

So permit me a new rule in the little lexicon of Cappy Cap;

"The most cleansed cleans."

You see, I clean to a standard that I find is necessary and eliminates biological messes and threats.  Ergo the toilet is normally cleaned as is the sink, but the papers on my desk are not.  The showed is scrubbed down with bleach when needed, but the clothes will remain in their respective "clean" and "dirty" piles until I do laundry.

Naturally this upsets those of the female persuasion.

"Why doesn't he KNOW that's NOT where the clothes go!!"

"Doesn't he KNOW that's NOT how papers should be stacked!!!?"

So the answer is simple - "If it's bothering you that much, then clean."

This rule solves that vast majority of domestic excuses between the men and the ladies.  If you don't like the standards of a certain aspect of the house, then by all means upgrade it to your satisfaction.  It's already up to mine, ergo, any further cleanliness is up to you.

But don't be so quick to think it is a cheap way for men to get out of cleaning.  Consider the maintenance of the house and other fixed assets.

If left to the devices of women oil would be changed once every 63,000 miles and air filters never.  The roof would be curled and warped as the shingles would be approaching 80 years old.  And siding would be falling off as the first brisk fall breeze would come through.  It is merely an issue of who has the lowest tolerance that determines who does what work.

Thus, instead of fighting and complaining, perhaps everybody should clean, maintain and do chores to their own personal level and not somehow view this as somebody too damn lazy to do it and thus "being their slave."

This has been a PSA from Cappy Cap.

"She kicked, scratched and slapped me regularly. As time passed, her physical violence escalated and became more frequent. The objects she threw at me became bigger, harder and heavier."

I couldn't help but think of Galatians 6:7 when I read about the tragic death of this father on his misguided trek in remembrance of his dead son.  "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

I can't link to the story, for some reason, but the headline is: Oregon Father’s Memorial Trek Across Country Ends in a Family’s Second Tragedy. So you can probably find it on Google or wherever.

The American elites have declared that there is nothing wrong with what God calls abomination. The usual suspects will insist, in defiance of both traditional morality and secular logic, that there is no such thing as objective universal morality while simultaneously insisting that homosexuality normal and it is wrong to say otherwise.

But at the end of the day, God's Game, God's Rules. Are they arbitrary? Perhaps. So is the intentional grounding rule. That doesn't make them nonexistent and it doesn't mean we can safely ignore them, given that we are warned about what the wages of sin are.

That being said, I very much doubt that the grieving father was struck down by God simply because he was on a personal crusade to popularize the acceptance of a particular form of sin; the ironic malice involved tends to strike me as the handiwork of a very different supernatural being.

This is something many Christians don't seem to understand. Evil revels in grief, pain, and suffering. Not good. And not God.

A minor debate has continued over the past week in a thread about wifely submission to a husband’s authority* and whether or not a wife should obey a husband who has commanded her to sin.  Several comments in particular interested me, including this one from Cail Corishev:

…what scriptural basis is there for a wife to refuse a sinful command (such as a threesome) from her husband? Scripture is very clear that she is to obey him in all things. So if you say that it also forbids fornication, thereby forbidding a threesome, at best you have a tie: she can obey the scriptural ban on fornication, or the scriptural command to obey her husband, but not both. How does she decide? How, in the process of her decision, does she make sure that her own desires — and her own sinful impulse to rule over her husband — don’t influence the decision?

When you add Peter 3:1-2, it becomes even tougher for the woman who says, “I’ll obey him as long as I don’t think any of his commands are sinful.” In the previous chapter (not that there were chapters when it was written), Peter was talking about how Jesus submitted to those who sinned by accusing and reviling him, so that we stray sheep could be converted. Then he says, “Likewise you wives, be submissive to your husbands, so that some, though they do not obey the word, may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives, when they see your reverent and chaste behavior.”

He’s drawing an analogy there between the way Jesus submitted himself to his torturers and the way a wife should submit herself to a husband who isn’t obeying the Word. And he says to do this “without a word,” which presumably means without complaining or arguing. Instead, she’s supposed to win him over with her “reverent and chaste behavior.” Putting that all together, it seems pretty clear to me that a woman being commanded to sin by her husband should take up the cross of doing so out of obedience, while being as reverent and chaste as possible at all times so as to win him away from such things.

That’s a hard word, and I don’t blame people for looking for wiggle-room. But most seem to come to a conclusion that sounds like, “That just can’t be what it means, because that’s scary and horrible, so it must mean this instead.” As a Catholic, we have a Magisterium that’s in charge of interpreting Scripture and telling us what it means, so if I told my (theoretical) wife to get ready for a threesome, she could go ask our priest for advice, and he’d probably call me in and read me the riot act. But if I decided to ignore him and proceed, knowing I was committing a list of mortal sins, it seems to me she would be obligated to obey.

The bottom line is that obedience isn’t only — or even primarily — for when you think the commands you’re being given are just.

and this one from Escoffier:

…Cail made the point that the command for wives to submit to their husbands does not admit of caveats. It does not say “submit to his virtuous or just commands” for instance. True enough.

But follow that logic. The Ten Commandments do not say “Thou shalt not—except if you are a married woman who is so commanded by her husband.” They don’t admit of caveats or exceptions either.

So, since neither admits of exceptions or caveats, why is the choice for submission to the husband rather than to God so obvious? Put in those terms, it would seem that the logical choice would be the reverse.

But now we are back to the same issue identified above. God cannot command X and Not-X at the same time. Or, He can, but He must know that man as man is not a being capable of understanding or fulfilling such commands. My read of the Bible, which is no doubt shallower than all of yours, does not find many (or any) instances of God posing such dilemmas to man. Rather, His commands are if not always straightforward, at least fulfillable, if not necessary intelligible. That is, the reasoning behind them may not be intelligible. The “what to do” must be. And, as it happens, is.

First, suffer me to tell a little story here that exemplifies my general feeling about the topic.  A little over a year ago, a few women and I were chatting about the topic of penis envy in a thread on my old blog.  One woman said she’d never want to have a penis, and I said that, while I’m very happy being a woman and have no desire to be a man, well…one is sort of curious as to what it’s like to be the opposite sex.  So, I said jokingly that if there were a Magic Penis Fairy who offered to give me a penis for 24 hours, sure I’d take it for a spin.

Yes, I know that conversation was rather lowbrow.  If you’re looking for highbrow, try The Orthosphere.  Here at Sunshine Mary, sometimes we talk about imaginary Penis Fairies.  Anyway, we all had a good laugh imagining what we would do if we had penises for 24 hours, which was fun until some wet blanket sourly inquired as to whom we would be able to legitimately use them on.

So let me premise this whole article by saying that when I imagine what I would do if my husband commanded me to sin, it is exactly the same as me imagining what I would do if the Penis Fairy granted me a 24-hour loaner.  I consider both of those situations to be about equally likely to happen.  In other words, neither of those things will ever happen, though if either of them should happen to happen, I promise to report back to the group forthwith.

Since it is unlikely that most of our husbands will ever command us to sin, why does this concern always pop up in every thread ever written anywhere about wifely submission?  At first I thought it was merely because women were looking for an out on having to obey their husbands; it’s quite clear that the problem with the modern marital hierarchy isn’t that husbands are en masse commanding their wives to rob banks and engage in threesomes but rather that women are rebellious and disobedient, judging their husbands’ performances in an attempt to find some reason why they need not submit.

But in considering Escoffier’s comments, I realized that there is some kind of foundational theological and philosophical concern here.  It’s almost more of a concern about what kind of God we serve rather than what kind of man we married.  My humble self will not be able to solve the deepest philosophical considerations about the limits of authority and obedience, but I do have several practical points to share with women that might make it easier to put this concern to rest.

Yesterday evening it occurred to me that I had never actually asked my husband what he thought about the whole submit in everything versus submit in everything except for things that are sinful debate.  So I asked him, and his answer surprised me a bit.  He said to imagine if I were in a room with both him and Jesus, and he told me to do something but Jesus countermanded him and said, “No, don’t do it.”  Whom would I obey?

Well, that’s easy, I said.  I’d obey God.  And then my husband said, now consider this:

Here is how my husband explained it to me: God is present with us, and He is always in authority over husbands.  There are some things that husbands may command wives to do that are not in accordance with God’s will but which are not revealed as sin in the Bible; those things wives are obligated to do and trust in God to make right.  There are other things that are clearly stated in the Bible that we are not to do; they are commands from God that we must not disobey (“Thou shalt not”).  Since these are explicit commands from God, and since God is present with us, therefore a wife must not obey her husband when it would mean disobeying a direct command from God in the Bible.

This does not mean that she gets to disobey her husband carte blanche if he himself is in sin.  We don’t get to judge our husbands just because they may be in rebellion to God; if they tell us to do something we think is a terrible idea but which doesn’t violate Scripture, we must do it.  We don’t get to judge our husbands but we must judge their commands if they violate any of God’s thou shalt nots.

Some women may disagree with my husband.  They may believe that they must obey their husbands in everything, even sinful things. Imagine if a husband commanded such a woman to have an abortion.  What should she do?  The Bible says she must obey in everything, which she takes to mean including sinful things, yet the Bible also says we must not murder.  First Corinthians 7:10-11 says:

10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife.

If she believes that she must obey her husband, then perhaps the better choice for her would be to tell him that she cannot obey him in murdering their child, therefore she does not feel that she ought to continue to live under his protection and provision.  If she cannot obey him, then she should not eat his bread.  Perhaps the better choice would be to separate from her husband while remembering that the Bible does not ever permit a woman to divorce her husband for any reason.  She can live apart from him and support herself.  If they are not living as husband and wife, if they are not engaging in sexual intimacy, if he is not protecting her and providing for her, then it does not seem that she would need to submit to him.  However, she should always have an eye toward reconciling with him.  The minute he redacts the sinful command, she should ask him to take her back, reconcile to him if he is willing, and live in submission to him.

So here is the conclusion, ladies:

1. Your husband is never going to command you to sin.  He may want you to sin, he may ask you to sin, he may try to persuade you to sin, but he is not going to command it.
2.  If he does command you to sin, remember that God is present and has already commanded you not to sin.
3. A possible solution to living in disobedience to your husband is to separate from him.  If you will not submit to him, you should not receive the benefits of being his wife.  Is that fair?  No.  But then again, it wasn’t particularly fair to Adam that Eve chose to listen to the snake.  Sometimes in this world we will have to suffer to do what is right; if you cannot submit to a command from your husband, perhaps you should not receive his provision and protection.

*Verses on wifely submission to husbands:

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. - Ephesians 5:22-24

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. - 1 Corinthians 11:3

Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct. Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious. For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, … - 1 Peter 3:1-6

To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” - Genesis 3:16

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.- Colossians 3:18

There are many obvious objections to traditionalism and monarchism — many of which have been taught in schools or homes since the French Revolution, and which are faithfully repeated to this day. Many date right back to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet, which John Adams rightfully called a “poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass”.

1) Things are so much better now technologically, of course Democracy is a good idea!

Comment: This one is the first objection that anyone with half a brain immediately comes up with. Addressed here, at Handle’s Haus. The full explanation for why democracy and technological progress are orthogonal is very, very long and hasn’t been written up yet. The full picture is something that took me several years of reading to reach. For now, just let me comment that the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution got going in countries that were monarchies, republics, and mixes of both such as Victorian England. It’s not like society was technologically primitive prior to the implementation of Democracy in Europe. In prior posts I’ve mentioned how the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire were industrial powerhouses during the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th and early 20th century.

2) There is less violence now.

Comment: It depends on which traditional era you’re comparing us to, but the short answer is that during the era of Enlightened monarchs, there was less violence than there is now, both in terms of warfare and on a day-to-day basis. See also Foseti’s review of Steven Pinker’s book.

3) It’s unjust not to let people have a say in the decisions that affect them. 

Comment: People do more harm to themselves when they have a say in government policy they know nothing about. If we thought people were better off voting for political decisions, there wouldn’t be a neoreaction. The reason why neoreaction exists is that it’s fairly clear to us that everyone is worse off from democracy, not better off. This is pretty fundamental. The long-form argument is Hans Herman-Hoppe’s Democracy: the God That Failed. A shorter and heavily libertarian-biased argument is in Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter. See also Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality.

4) Human rights are sacrosanct, and monarchical or hierarchical systems compromise human rights.

Comment: This is an important issue, but a complicated one from the Lockean 21st century frame of reference. (Though a peasant from the 18th century would understand it easily.) The simple answer is that the Lockean concept of “natural rights” is profoundly flawed, and actually restricts human freedoms rather than enabling them. Nothing could be more unnatural. Rather than true freedom, what we have is “many individual, domesticated, and mechanized freedoms, in a state of reciprocal limitation.” The Lockean concept of natural rights is thoroughly and simply deconstructed in chapter three of Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins.

5) Good kings are good, but bad kings are very bad.

Comment: Bad kings are not nearly as bad as Demotist/Communist dictators. Bad kings are in a different universe from bad Demotist leaders. There is not even a vague comparison. In the traditional system, kings rely on the aristocracy and clergy for support, and have trouble doing anything without them. For a Demotist leader, there tends to be far fewer checks and balances. They can cause a half million deaths in a place like Iraq with a snap of their fingers. Study up on the history of “death by government” to get a better perspective on what I mean. Kings and emperors very rarely, if ever, engage in mass murder against their own people.

6) What if the king is an idiot or psycho?

Comment: Then the prior king appoints a regent to take over the affairs of state on behalf of his successor. There is also a debate within the Reactionary community as to whether adoptive succession is preferable to hereditary succession, which avoids the issue of stupid or crazy children. Adoptive succession was used for the “Five Good Emperors” of the Roman Empire, until the disastrous sixth emperor, Commodus, who was the child of the fifth. After he threatened to kill them, the Roman senators ended up paying a gladiator to strangle him in the Colosseum’s equivalent of locker rooms. After his assassination, the senators declared Commodus damnatio memoriae and all his statues and inscriptions were destroyed. Such extreme scenarios rarely ever happened during the age of Renaissance European monarchs. One of the greatest statesmen of all time, Klemens von Metternich, strongly influenced the mentally deficient monarch Ferdinand I of Austria during his reign, sat on the regency council, and ran most important affairs, presiding over a hundred years of relative peace in Europe.

7) Traditional societies harm outsiders by being exclusionary and not letting them play too. 

Comment: Too bad. The point of a traditional society is to serve the people who are a part of it. If foreigners want to have a good society, they can make their own. It is not possible to make functional societies for everyone on Earth overnight. It’s better for 50 million people to live in a flourishing society and the rest of the planet to be stuck with democracy than it is for everyone to be stuck with it. If people had good societies themselves, they wouldn’t be so hung up on trying to raid the societies of others. The reason they complain about exclusion is because their societies are broken and they want to escape them. This is all the more reason to build the border walls taller and thicker.

8) I want the freedom to run amok, be totally hedonistic, defect in Prisoner’s Dilemma, etc. 

Comment: No. Following an extreme Pareto principle, probably 2% of people in society are doing 95% of the damage. These people enjoy modern democracies because they are allowed to run amok. (The plundering of Russia — in the name of “democracy” and the “free market” — during the collapse of Communism is one particularly egregious example.) A strong central leader puts an end to these shenanigans. In a healthy society led by a monarch, these defectors will receive a rude awakening. In democracies, they buy silence with campaign donations.

9) The idea of a monarch or an aristocracy is a bunch of bullshit.

Comment: Democracy is a bunch of bullshit. Imagine if every family or company were run by popular vote. It would be total chaos. Many of the fundamentals of the world are already reactionary and hierarchical, it’s only the government that has been temporarily been conquered by Demotist ideology. The reason why the Left keeps working day and night to deconstruct and “equalize” society is that it keeps naturally falling back into a reactionary order based on hierarchy and ability. Progressivism has to keep running just to stay in the same place. This Sisyphean cycle would be amusing if it hadn’t caused over a hundred million deaths in the 20th century alone.

10) Wealth is unequally distributed and it’s unfair.

Comment: It is unfair. The primary reason why it’s unfair is that the current rich are hoarding their wealth offshore rather than putting it to work for the populace, as they are traditionally supposed to. The role of a monarch is to use force and intimidation to ensure that the nobility does what it rightfully should — run projects that constructively generate wealth for the country and its inhabitants. The traditional wealth of the nobility is in land, not the accumulation of trinkets such as cars. Nobles that abdicate their responsibilities and focus only on themselves will be punished by the State. Over time, feelings of realistic mutual expectation will develop, and the nobility will understand what is expected of them. It’s quite simple, and worked perfectly well for many hundreds of years. The problem today is that the wealthy consider themselves atomized, cosmopolitan individuals with no allegiance to any state or the other classes. The solution is not to grab their capital and tear it apart into a million pieces so it can be handed to peasants who will squander it (how many times does this have to fail horribly until people get it?), but to cultivate a nobility that understands its responsibilities to the nation. Since the present-day rich are mostly conceited and selfish, they will have to be whipped into shape by a strong monarch. It’s only a matter of time until this happens, since the alternatives — state redistribution or lower class rebellion — don’t work in the long term and lead to economic collapse.

Peripatetic commenter PA writes,

With regards to ejaculations such as “stick to poon”, “I thought this is a Game blog,” “how does this race-post help me get laid?” that predictably pop up on ideological posts such as the previous one — here is why they happen:

Liberals have been coasting for decades on a deadly concession from righties that they (libs) are: 1) smarter; 2) better; 3) sexier.

And like every illusion, the one about liberal supremacy of mind, heart, and body is becoming a spent force. A brief explanation follows.

1. The lie that leftists are smarter: though this may not be apparent, liberals have abandoned their claim on intellectual superiority. Free inquiry and scrupulous reason is now the domain of the so-called “dark enlightment”. The leftists, feminists, anti-racists, statists, now resort to censorship, personal destruction, and faggoty snark. Leftist thought is, as Bryan Caplan arrogantly admitted, little more than marketing for the ruling classes.

2. The lie that leftists are better people: we all know the founding moment of leftist moral superiority, when Welch told Joseph McCarthy: “at long last Sir, have you no decency?” Please take the time to read THIS, up to and especially to the sweet payoff in the post’s final line.

3. The lie that leftists are sexier. Or more cool, more attractive, more hip. That is the one they still hold on to, willfully oblivious to the fact that they are fearful, tight-lipped prigs. But this is exactly why no-name commenters mews “stick with poon!” when slapped with a CH clear-talk evisceration of a feminist of an anti-racist shibboleth. They are disturbed, very deeply, by the fact that verve, coolness, sexiness, style, and Game are ours, not theirs.

The brains, the heart, and the body ascent toward excellence when congruous with themselves, each other, and with truth, beauty, and honor. And those things are what we seek, while they desperately try to bury.

While fatties, feminists and feckless freaks are fun manboob-sized targets upon which to practice one’s soul carving skills, the maestros of gleeful malevolence at CH really love to sharpen their shivs on the strip-mined ids of more evasive prey. Blasting double-barreled buckshot through a SWPL leftoid’s snark-and-Stewart-pumped ego is a thrill that no lumbering megafembot sporting an exposed id the width of a barn door can provide. And, as PA says, as long as your heart and your mind are true, so shall be your aim.

Not many have the stomach for the hunt. Fewer still have it for the ultimate hunt: to hunt the hunters. Stare with sharp eye, breathe with cool repose, hold with steady assurance and, at the precise moment of uncoiled contempt, relish the glory of dropping a paper titan, sniveling, to his knees. Where he knows deep in his heart he has always belonged.

***

Runner-up Comment of the Week winner is tspark156.

There is a simple truth that betas are unaware of or simply ignore. It is the misunderstanding and deliberate ignoring of this truth that is responsible for the state of western society today. Women hate men that give and love men that take.

Correct. But if you ask women, they’ll tell you the exact opposite. So don’t bother asking women what they want. They’ll only lead you down a dead end.

Filed under: Comment Winners

The republican party has a big problem: How to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The government has, without quite realizing it, accepted piecemeal funding of everything except Obamacare. There is no shutdown. There is just the government doing occasional bits of petty spitefulness and nastiness to express its hatred of its subjects.

Since no shutdown, no reason for the Republicans to pass a bill funding Obamacare. The “shutdown” can continue forever. How are they going to get themselves out of this problem?

If the Republicans retreat from victory, republican voters are going to become even more disgusted than they are already. If, on the other hand, they stand pat, and the government just goes right ahead with Obamacare, they will have failed in their task of making it look as if voters can influence the government.

Since the Republicans have won, the only way to maintain the illusion of democracy is to postpone Obamacare.

Those parts of the world where health care works have a system that is both more socialist than the US and more capitalist than the US, in particular, and especially, Singapore. Singapore has a fully capitalist health care system with actual prices. The American health care system does not have prices, therefore does not have markets, therefore is not capitalism. But, if someone is stony broke, the Singaporean doctors can kick him from the fully capitalist health care system, to the fully socialist system, where he is taken care of by a doctor on the government payroll, gets government medicines, has a government bed in a government owned building, for a low government set price, or for free if he cannot afford that price.

Somehow, almost everyone in Singapore prefers to go with the capitalist health care system.

Similarly, a major reason the Canadian health care system works is that nearly everyone lives a short distance from the US border.