Month: February 2010

NPA Delivers Devastating Blow to the Philippines Military

The NPA has seen some huge successes in recent days. In Northern Luzon, the 5th ID of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) suffered some of their biggest losses in a long time when they waged a major offensive against the NPA in the Cordillera Region. The Cordillera is characterized by a high mountain range called the Cordillera Central. The region is about 110-200 miles north of Manila. I didn’t know that the NPA were so huge there, but apparently they are. People called Igorots live in this area.

The 5th ID offensive was directed at the Agustin Begnalen Command of the NPA, which is active in the area. Between January 27 to February 4, the 5th ID suffered 29 soldiers killed and 35 more wounded by the NPA. Those are some pretty devastating figures.

Apparently the NPA has now figured out how to use IED’s, possibly via the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Chechens in Chechnya or the Iraqi insurgents in Iraq. This technology has been perfected lately, especially by the Iraqis, which then moved to Chechnya and especially Afghanistan lately. It stands to reason that the same technological progress has now been perfected by NPA, as most to nearly all of the casualties were due to IED’s.

The AFP responded by accusing the NPA of using “landmines,” but they don’t use landmines. The NPA issued a press release stating that fact.

They also issued a press release, copied below, in which they actually mourned the dead and wounded enemy troops, who, said that NPA are just mostly poor peasants and urban poor just like the ranks of the NPA. That’s a pretty magnanimous act for an insurgent army, and I don’t think any Muslim insurgency would ever say such a thing.

Furthermore, it’s great PR as the insurgents really take the high road when they mourn the loss of cannon fodder of the state. In the same press release, they called on the troops of the 5thID to abandon their positions, seek out the nearest NPA unit and surrender to them, and the NPA would help to lead them out of the area. Excellent tactics.

Those of you on this site who oppose the NPA are asked what should be done in the catastrophe called the Philippines instead.

AFP Junior Officers and Rank and Files soldiers, defy your fake Commander-In- Chief

Simon “Ka Filiw” Naogsan, Spokesperson

February 6, 2010

We condole with the families of the 29 soldiers slain and 35 wounded in six clashes with the New People’s Army from January 27 to February 4, just as we would mourn had any of our Red fighters fallen. There will be more casualties if the ongoing massive military operations will not end. Ordinary soldiers are thrust into doomed operations while their generals are enriching themselves thru corruption and as protectors of the illegal drug trade.

Most, if not all, of the AFP casualties probably came from poor peasant and working class families just like the NPA fighters. The main difference is that the rank and file troops unleashed by the 5th ID serve the exploiting classes of big landlords, corrupt bureaucrats and their imperialist masters, while the NPA fights for the emancipation of the poor from the shackles of poverty, oppression and exploitation, and for the defense of land, life, livelihood and resources.

The Cordillera People’s Democratic Front thus calls on the rank and file soldiers as well as junior officers of the 5th ID to defy the orders of their superiors in this doomed military operation. The current military maneuvers have no purpose other than to prepare the region for the arrival of the US troops for the Balikatan joint exercise starting this month and provide security for the subsequent entry of large mining companies.

In particular, we call on the rank and file soldiers to defy orders from their immediate superiors who command them to conduct military operations against the NPA. They can file their leave of absence based on any alibi just so as not to participate in the operation.

They must not proceed to their target area but instead stay in safer grounds until the operation is terminated. They can pass vital information to or inform any unit of the NPA of their plans so that the Red fighters can advice them where to pass safely. We advise junior officers not to lead their men in areas where they will surely be ambushed.

We encourage them to join the underground Lt. Crispin Tagamolila Movement or resign and find better and more honorable jobs if they are not ready yet to join the revolutionary movement so that together we hasten the overthrow of this corrupt, anti-people and despicable reactionary regime and build a better tomorrow.

Finally, we call on Igorot military officers not to allow themselves to be used against the interest of their fellow national minorities. The transformation of the military as an “investment defense force” of large-scale mining companies that have appropriated 2/3 of the land area of the Cordillera is deplorable.

Equally detestable is the appropriation by soldiers of the 503rd Bde of a monthly tax of one sack of ore from every small scale mining tunnel in Lacub and Baay-Licuan, Abra. As sons of the mountains, we must all uphold the good aspects of indigenous tribal ways, and the sacredness of life and nature’s resources.

When the imperialist pillage of the Cordillera and the entire nation ends, then shall we enjoy the fruits of the mountains, forests, rivers and plains of this country. We will end our mourning and come out of our dap-ays to join in the feast of national liberation.

Land of the Blond, Home of the Blue

Here we have two maps, one for what I am going to call blond hair, though they are calling it light hair here. The other is for what I call blue eyes, but they are calling them light eyes here.

These are of course the Aryan Prize Jewels. What is funny is that the centers of Blondness and Blueness seem to be in some cases outside of the Land of Odin and Thor.

Blondism, with an epicenter around central Scandinavia.

For instance, the lower half of Finland, plus central Sweden and Norway, are Ground Zero for blonds. You can hardly spit in any direction around there without hitting a wolverine, a caribou, or some blond and blue hottie. If it wasn’t too cold to fuck, the place would be a sexual paradise!

What is interesting about this is that the your true Nazis always held that the Finns are “Asiatics,” and therefore not really White. What’s wrong with almond eyes and submissive, slender women, I’ll never know, but the Mighty Whiteys think this Chinky stuff is no good. Better a strong German woman who looks like she could shot put you across the room I guess. Sometimes Nazis are hard to figure.

Anyway, we see that Russia, in particular far northwestern Russia, is also a Hot Zone for major breakouts of blond and blue, especially for the blue eyes.

The epicenter for blue eyes seems to be a bit east of the blond breakout, around Estonia or just to the east in Russia.

In fact, the center for azure isises seems to be around Estonia or a bit east of there in the Ingrian region, a bit south and further east than the Almogordo of the blonds, noted above as central Scandinavia. Once again, the Nazi types insist that these centers of Aryanism are fatally contaminated with them dirty Asiatic genes.

I would say that these are markers of mutations. One, for blond hair, in central Scandinavia, around 9,000 years ago, and the other, for blue eyes, in Estonia around the same time.

Why they persisted is a mystery, as they add little Darwinian fitness. I assume that the blond and blue chicks were in hot demand by the fur-draped fellows up there. They all jumped on the blond and blue chicks, and the early Neolithic Marilyn Monroe types pumped out lots of babies. What’s surprising is that these evil bitches stealing all the good men were not all killed by their proto-Viking sisters.

Anyway, since gentlemen prefer blonds, the mutation spread, and nowadays we even have blond and blue Jews, though most of those come from bottles and contact lenses.

The maps are interesting. The general Scandinavian – Baltic region seems to be an epicenter, with the Finnic region predominating. Taking the median of the blond epicenter in central Sweden with the blue eyed epicenter around Novgorod in Russia just east of Estonia (Ingria), we get a blond-blue epicenter around Tampere, Finland in southern Finland about 150 miles north of Helsinki. Northwestern Russia has a lot of Finnic and general Scandinavian genes. After all, the St. Petersburg region and environs was ruled by Swedes for centuries.

We have a strange strip of blond along the forbidding Pomeranian coast of Poland, near the V-2 rocket test site. The outbreak of blonds in the Galicia region of Spain is interesting. These folks say they are Celts, and perhaps they are. Moving to France, we see another outbreak in Brittany, once again attributable to Celtic Bretons. In the UK, blondism trends to the East, but this was where the Danish influence and the Danelaw was greatest.

Heading down to Italy, we see that the Venetian speaking region in far northeast Italy is a blond outlier, not the general “Padania” of the northern separatists. Since this region was long under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, perhaps the answer can be found there. There is another blond outlier on the heel of the Italian boot in the Puglia-Salento region that is also unexplained. There are a lot of Greek and Albanian genes in this region, but how do we get blondism from that?

The blue eyed map also shows some interesting things. In Spain, there is an area of very dark eyes, but it is a little to the east of the Moorish area. There is an area of somewhat lighter eyes in North Africa on the border of Algeria and Morocco that is unexplained. A commenter says it was from Vandals. That region is in the area of the Middle Atlas Mountains and much of the Rif Range. There are a lot of the more pure Berbers in area – Riffians in the Rif and Chleuh in the Middle Atlas.

The Riffians in particular are very light – 36.8% of them have blond hair and blue or green eyes, higher than the % of light hair among Spaniards and Italians. Riffians have a moderate amount of Alpine and Nordic features for a Mediterranean race. Considering that Riffians are lighter than Spaniards or Italians, it seems insane that White Nationalists say that they are “non-Whites.” The Chleuh are also quite light, see pics.

Czechs have lighter eyes than Slovaks, and Turks have lighter eyes than most Italians, perhaps due to heavy Slav influence. The far south of Switzerland has darker eyes and hair than the Swiss to the north of them. This is the Italian, Lombard and Romansch speaking region of Switzerland.

My Latest Cholesterol Reading = 156

Well, I must say, it’s never been that low in my life!

At one time it was over 200, and I was put on cholesterol-lowering medication called Zocor. I’ve had a great experience with this drug. My last reading was around 190 or so, but the 156 number just blew me away. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m cooking for myself all the time, I rarely eat out, don’t eat any fast food, eat little if any junk food or sweets and in general I eat only one meal a day (dinner).

People who know me well keep insisting that I’m going to die since “I don’t eat,” but that’s more observational than factual. Anyway, the thinnest lab rats live the longest and caloric restriction of lab rats doubled life expectancy. Sort of the like the revenge of the Skinny Beach Guy in the Charles Atlas ads (bit of time-worn Americana here for you extra-North Americans).

My caloric intake is somewhere around 1,700 calories a day, or possibly a bit more or less. Consider that your average American consumes an incredible 3,800 calories a day.

I don’t exercize that much, but I rode 35 minutes on my exercize bike last night.

My diet is excellent. I’ve nearly cut out dairy. For my cereal, I use soy milk. I eat lots and lots of fiber, because I have diverticulosis, but fiber may lower cholesterol too. And when I’m doing great, I go on long fasts where I more or less consume nothing but fruit juice, vegetable juice, coffee and wine (the last two being necessary for life). People say I look 5-10 years younger than I am.

I doing all of this mostly for a shitty reason: I’m somewhat narcissistic, and like all narcissists, aging is tough. As the Buddhists say, when you bet on the body, you bet on a losing horse. All of us narcissist types are doubling down on that loser mare. She’s nobody’s pick, and all the tip sheets say avoid, but we keep plunking it all down anyway, results be damned. We know it’s nuts but we can’t help ourselves. In our heart of hearts, we’re all 22 years old for the rest of our lives.

The even more shitty reason I do this is so I can get young chicks! LOL, I know, quit laughing. At my age, with each passing year, the young women look at you less and less. For us narcissists, this is quite a blow, especially those of us who won Player of the Year a few years straight when we were young.

Anyway, narcissistic delusions, to the extent that they foster health, are a good thing. There are people my age who look terrible and are near death. I know people my age who are falling, breaking bones, in wheelchairs or on canes, unable to work or do much of anything. Some are on oxygen tanks. About nine years ago, friends my age started dying. Some were really overweight, most were heavy drinkers or dopers, some were both, and a few lived well and crapped out at the Dice Table of Life.

I’m 52, and 20% of men my age are already impotent (A 50 year old former girlfriend of mine told me it was 100%, but she wasn’t including me). Sure, there’s Viagra, but last I checked it was $10/pill.

With each new year, droop dick disease strikes more and more of my brothers. The best way to keep a stiff upper dick is a good diet, good weight, blood pressure and cholesterol control and even exercise. Overweight, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, inactivity are bad for your arteries, and your dick’s all about the arteries and the blood flow. Traffic jams or roadblocks on Dick Highway turn the essence of all of your manhood – the one root power – into a cartoon dog. Your hard drive fails, and the floppy drive takes over.

If there was ever a reason for guys to take up health in middle age, this is yet. Do it for your dick, guys!

The anti-cholesterol folks point out that 35% of all heart attacks occur in those with cholesterol of 150-199. Sure, but 65% occur in those with cholesterol above 200. You’re a betting man; which horse you want to bet on? An even more fascinating anecdote is here: No one with cholesterol under 150 has ever suffered a fatal heart attack. Assuming it is true, is that not an amazing statistic?

If you get below 140, and Pritikin suggests you actually start regressing the cholesterol in your arteries. Getting down lower than that, things get touchier.

Low cholesterol is associated with violence, depression, and suicide. An elevated death rate was due to the fact that many were getting into fatal fights in bars! Cholesterol coats the arteries, including those of your brain, and so provides an insulation layer. Low insulation in the arterial paths of your brain implies increased mental instability, possibly due to mood swings and depression. Presumably the more insulated passages are more protective of brain chemical stability, but I don’t know how.

The “Communism Ruins the Economy” Lie

It’s unfortunate that we even have to spend so much time refuting these lies, but as I’ve noted previously, under US capitalism, we essentially live in as propagandistic a state as the USSR. Sure, there’s stuff that violates the Elite – Ruling Class line, but you really have to dig around to get it, as you will never hear or see it in any large newspaper or major newsmagazine. You will also not hear it on 99% of the radio frequency. And you won’t hear it all on TV. Never! Not even one time.

So the capitalist Elite – Ruling Class has the propaganda thing pretty well locked down. They’ve got all of the large papers and newsmagazines, 99% of the radio dial and 100% of the TV channels. Even with cable and 600 channels, I still think they would have 100% of the frequency.

Sure, there are other places to find this stuff, but it’s outside the MSM, so it’s very hard to find. There are small magazines that are anti-US Ruling Class, but they have small circulations, are hard to find, and you often need to pay for a subscription, which hardly anyone will do. There is public radio, pretty progressive around here, but it’s only one station on the dial. There are no alternatives for TV and a daily newspaper.

The rare and hard to find anti-Ruling Class voices are similar to the underground press in the USSR. Back then, keep in mind that there were samizdat presses all through the East Bloc, but like a copy of The Nation, they were hard to come across most people hardly ever read one.

One of the lies that almost all of us, believe, including yours truly, a Leftist, is that Communism was an economic disaster. After all, why has the whole world abandoned it in favor of capitalism?

Like so many things that everyone believes to be true, this statement is, in a general way, false. Via Entitled To An Opinion, a link to the Less Wrong blog (great title by the way) which proves that actually, Communism was not an economic disaster at all. Nor was it a miracle. On the contrary, economic growth in the Communist Bloc during the period covered by the surveys was right around the global average, nothing special, nothing too bad. Just typical.

The problem with Eastern Europe was that they were comparing themselves to Western Europe. From 1945-1990, Western Europe grew at a rate faster than the global average, while Eastern Europe grew at the global average. It become apparent that Western Europe was beating the Communists, but only because the Communists could not excel in the same way that the West did. When one excels and another is average, the one who excels wins. But in no way can the East Bloc be said to an economic failure.

Looking specifically at West Germany and East Germany, it is hard to make the case that West Germany had a better economy. They started out better, and at the end, they were still better, but it was all due to boost at the starting line.

In 1950 West Germany to East Germany GDP per capita ratio was 2.04:1.00. In 1989 it was almost identical – 2.14:1.00. So 40 years of capitalism hardly widened the gap. It did widen it a tiny bit – by 10% over 40 years, but that’s not much to crow about.

The capitalists like to throw in North Korea, but North Korea appears to be an outlier even among Communist countries. Up until 1980, they had a bigger economy than South Korea. Then South Korea started beating them. After 1990, the price of oil went up 10X overnight. Imagine if that happened here in the US. Gas would go from $2.90/gallon to $29/gallon overnight. How would the US economy handle that? How would you handle that? Would you still be able to drive your car?

Anyway, that price shock was unaffordable, and North Korea just ran out of oil. Oil was needed to run the factories and the heavily mechanized agricultural economy, so the whole thing collapsed. Not only that, but the entire capitalist world would not lift one finger to help them, as the West has been embargoing North Korea from Day One.

In addition to Western Europe, East Asia was the big winner. They grew even faster than Western Europe. So the two prizes of the capitalist system, East Asia and Western Europe, have actually been performing abnormally well for decades now. Holding these champs up as representing world capitalism in praxis is most dishonest.

The big losers in economic growth over the period were all capitalist countries – India, Indonesia, Peru and most of Latin America, Argentina, Chile, the UK and New Zealand – going from poorest to richest. It’s interesting that we never think of these economies as being economic failures, but they have been.

One can argue that Communism failed not in terms of economic growth per se, which was quite average, but in terms of supplying good products for its citizens. Surely one should not have to wait in line 5 years to buy a refrigerator or 10 years to buy a car in an economy with decent economic growth. There were also long-term problems with housing – most Communist housing was small and cramped, and there were chronic housing shortages. There were also chronic shortages of many to most of the items one buys in a store, even foodstuffs, though in general folks had plenty to eat.

There Were No Beginnings, There Will Be No Endings

“Science has found that nothing can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation…” Werner Von Braun (Nichols 1962).

“This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts.” Giordano Bruno.

“It never starts it never stops it just goes it never zeroes.”  Robert Lindsay, 1979, from an unpublished work of fiction.

As you can see, the notion of beginnings and endings, of births and deaths, is illusory. As something may not come out of nothing (story of my life), yet something may not turn into nothing either. Nothingness may not birth any something, and something may not turn into nothing. It seems that this is occurring all the time, but this is mere illusion.

Instead births or beginnings are simply one form of energy and matter transforming into other, usually more salient one. Endings, deaths, dissolutions, are nothing of the sort. Something has merely transformed into something else, as we saw with beginnings.

Bruno, burned at the stake for heresy by the Inquisition in 1600 as a martyr to science, in part for upholding Copernican astronomy, was ahead of his time. The universe was infinite, as he put it, “many worlds.” All matter was made of atoms. Our world was not the center of the universe or of anything but that it only seems that way.

No position, not up or down or this way or that, is set, as all is relative to the positions of other entities. Life was probably not unique here, and had probably sprung up in many other places in the universe. Comets were the remains of stars, not messages from the Gods. In a sense, everything is connected to everything, prefiguring particle physics. Space was infinite (Bruno is almost the father of infinity) and if Space was infinite, than so must be Time.

And logically, if all of this is true, then Christianity is “wholly false.”

Although he did believe in God, it was a diminished God. This from a Dominican friar who spent most of his time in monasteries!

For the logical cul de sac in italics above, he burned with fire. 13 years later, Galileo barely saved his own skin from similar holy heat.

If space is infinite, then so must be time.

Here we look to the early Jewish Kabbalists, studying in the 1300s-1400s. After centuries of study, they determined that God was “endless bright White Light, extending as far as one can see in every direction.” Or infinitival White Light. Furthermore, God is “that which cannot be known.” Going beyond that, God was “that thought of which man may not even properly entertain.” In other words, God is beyond our mental grasp. He is the Inconceivable.

It is now the hour for a brief discussion about Time. I haven’t read Kant yet, and maybe I can’t, but we will dabble anyway.

First of all, the future simply does not exist. You are all aware of this, right? Quit shaking your heads. The. Future. Does. Not. Exist. Say it until you are blue in the face. What is fascinating about the future is that we all know it doesn’t exist, yet we spend all of our lives pretending that it does exist.

Tomorrow I will…In the future I will…Pretty soon I’m going to…I have an appointment on the…I will be graduating on the…I’ll meet you at the restaurant at two…I’m looking forward to the future.

For something that doesn’t exist, we sure spend a lot of time thinking and talking about it! Worst of all, we prepare for it!

Now we have hopefully established the nonexistence of the future. At some point, sure, the future will exist. For instance, it will probably be 11 PM here in 31 minutes, assuming the world does not blow up. But at exactly that moment 31 minutes from now that the future supposedly exists, it won’t even be the future anymore! It will be another present moment. Follow? Of course you do.

What follows after the end of the last paragraph is that the present does indeed exist. You’d be hard to find a philosopher to disagree with that statement. A poststructuralist might, but they disagree with everything. Ah, so the present exists! But the future does not? Surely not. So we are left with only half of time. Every present moment, plus all of the past.

The next thing we need to ask is if the past exists. This is a very important question. I always figured it did, but a friend told me recently that the past does not exist. It used to exist, but it doesn’t anymore! But of course. He must be correct, no? At one time the past existed, but now it no longer does. How does it exist?

In memories, movies, books, etc. Which are merely objects in the present that made recordings of the past when the past was happening. Now we have eliminated the other half of time, and all we have left are second hands slamming on the clock, beginning and ending so quickly, nearly simultaneously, that we can scarcely put our finger on any moment and call it NOW.

Which now brings us to a rather carpe diem moment, eh? To live logically, we should all act like 80 IQ ghetto types, living for each second and nothing before or after existing. Thank God we don’t all think like philosophers.

There is another view, which is also very present-centric. This one holds once again that the present moment is salient, but that the past and future both exist, but they only exist as part of the present and of each other.

In other words, what has brought us to this present moment? Think about it. The entirety of the weight of the past, tumbling onto our hour like a rock slide, has brought us here, to this most auspicious of bright moments. The past made the present, so it is here with us as the vehicle that brought us here and also as the sculptor which made the present moment what it is.

As the future will in part be determined by the present, and hence also the past, the future also exists in the present, as a potentiality. The past also exists in the future, as the past and present vehicles drive towards the future and create it. Whether or not the present or future exist in the past is more problematic, but perhaps they do, as the earlier seeds that grew the trees of today and tomorrow.

One notion, popularized by Time Theorist Guy Murchie, is that all of the past that has already happened and all of the future that will occur, is, at this moment, all simultaneously present in this, our present moment. The Eternal Now. That’s a bit hard to swallow, but I like the mouth feel.

And that will be it for now, as we are out of Time.

References

Bruno, Giordano. 1584. On Cause, Principle, and Unity (De la causa, principio, et Uno).

Murchie, Guy. 1961. Music of the Spheres: The Material Universe from Atom to Quasar, Simply Explained. Cambridge: Riverside Press.

Nichols, William, ed. 1962. The Third Book of Words to Live By (pp.119-120). New York: Simon and Schuster.

"Postcards From Dream Land," by Alpha Unit

In I’m So Sick and Tired of This Shit, Robert talks about the infantilization of women – something radical feminists have brought about, either wittingly or otherwise. Street harassment of women has been one focus of this move to give women some kind of permanent protected status.
Like almost every other woman, I’ve been subjected to harassment by males in public places. It has been mainly verbal – no one’s ever put his hands on me. I can tell when someone is being friendly and “complimenting” me and when someone is really aggressively interfering with me. And the latter pisses me off.
It’s not so much that I’ve felt afraid in these situations (although I have a time or two); I’ve mainly been annoyed. And what made me angry was the sense that I had to placate this individual somehow to get past him and be on about my business. How you react to this harassment can make a difference in how swiftly you can get away from it.
In other words, if you say something like “Go to hell” or “Leave me alone,” you have committed the sin of deflating this male’s ego. Retaliation is sure to follow.
All of a sudden your great beauty and desirableness, those things that supposedly got his attention in the first place, fall away and you become the ugliest, most loathsome bitch that ever crossed his path.
I understand the impulse in some activists to do something about this. And in litigious America I can even see why some women have the idea of outlawing street harassment. There’s nothing new about the idea.
Ages ago, in 1993, law professor Cynthia Grant Bowman wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review called “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women.” According to Professor Bowman:

Typically, unacquainted persons passing on a public street, particularly in large cities, do not address one another, but instead perform an avoidance ritual…Staring at a stranger is a well-established cultural taboo.

She goes on to say that breaches of this “civil inattention” are reserved for people who are really unusual, those who are unusually similar to you in some way, or those who are in what she calls an “open” category – dogs and children, for example. Men seem to put women in this “open” category.

Unlike men, women passing through public areas are subject to “markers of passage” that imply either that women are acting out of role simply by their presence in public or that part of their role is in fact to be open to the public. These “markers” emphasize that women, unlike men, belong in the private sphere, the sphere of domestic rather than public responsibility. Ironically, men convey this message by intruding upon a woman’s privacy as she enters the public sphere.

Professor Bowman says that some women react with fear to street harassment because they don’t know if the stranger will turn out to be a rapist. She then asserts that women have good reason to see street harassment as a precursor to rape.

Furthermore, rapists often harass women on the street and violate their personal space in order to determine which women are likely to easy targets – a practice called “rape-testing.” Because potential rapists frequently select their victims by looking for women who appear vulnerable to assault, they may approach a potential victim and “test” her by a variety of means, including making lewd or insinuating remarks, to see if she can be intimidated.

Much of what immediately follows is an explanation of how uncomfortable and distressed women feel when they are subjected to this harassment.
Don’t women have recourse under current civil law? That is, can’t she sue for assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress, or invasion of privacy? Each of these options is inadequate, due to issues of intent, First Amendment protections, and the idea that a “reasonable” person (or, “man,” actually) wouldn’t see the conduct as offensive enough to warrant the intrusion of the law.
Professor Bowman is optimistic, however.

Women have made substantial gains in the last few decades in the field of workplace harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence; similar pressure may create remedies for street harassment…it would be necessary to overturn longstanding statutory and case law to hold that the intent of the harasser is irrelevant to criminal assault.

Finally, we get to what I see as the centerpiece of this article – a proposed statute or ordinance to be enacted:

Street harassment. It shall be a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of $250, to engage in street harassment. Street harassment occurs when one or more unfamiliar men accost one or more women in a public place, on one or more occasions, and intrude or attempt to intrude upon the woman’s attention in a manner that is unwelcome to the woman, with language or action that is explicitly or implicitly sexual.
Such language includes, but is not limited to, references to male or female genitalia or to female body parts or to sexual activities, solicitation of sex, or reference by word or action to the target of the harassment as the object of sexual desire, or similar words that by their very utterance inflict injury or naturally tend to provoke violent resentment, even if the woman did not herself react with violence [emphasis mine].
The harasser’s intent, except his intent to say the words or engage in the conduct, is not an element of this offense.

With all due to respect to Professor Bowman and to all of the women who continue to endorse such a proposal, this is Dream Land.
Set aside for a moment the idea of legally prohibiting men from publicly expressing their lust for attractive women on the street. Such an ordinance wouldn’t even require that the targeted woman be offended by this behavior. That one sentence in this proposed law reveals the real intent of this proposal: to put a muzzle on men.
This is a truncheon to bring men into line and force them to behave civilly toward women. These women want to enjoy the benefits of moving about in public but they don’t want to deal with the reality of actually being in public, a reality which includes the probability of receiving unwanted attention or being subjected to unwanted speech.
As I’ve said, I don’t appreciate being harassed in public any more than other women do. But here’s what I think: men really only respect and fear other men. I’ve said this before, and I’m convinced of it. A woman often gets respect only insofar as men understand that she is under the protection of some man or group of men. In other words, they have to know that to mess with that woman is to mess with some man – a man they don’t want to cross.
This is ultimately the only real deterrent to this type of behavior – male protection. Women who assert their right to be out and about without male protection now circle back and demand male protection!
And yes, the demand for men to be civil and restrained toward women in public is a demand for their protection. It’s a demand for them to set aside their own instincts and even freedoms for the benefit and comfort of women. More importantly, it’s a recognition that it’s men who actually wield power in the public sphere.
Is everybody listening? It’s men who actually wield power in the public sphere. Don’t get mad at me about it. It’s the way the world has always been. Feminists know it, too.
And to all of you men who want to go on and on about how men have been “emasculated” and made subject to women’s demands, you need to ask yourselves: Who relinquished so much of their power and allowed themselves to be gelded?

References

Bowman, Cynthia Grant. 1993. Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law Review Association.

“Postcards From Dream Land,” by Alpha Unit

In I’m So Sick and Tired of This Shit, Robert talks about the infantilization of women – something radical feminists have brought about, either wittingly or otherwise. Street harassment of women has been one focus of this move to give women some kind of permanent protected status.

Like almost every other woman, I’ve been subjected to harassment by males in public places. It has been mainly verbal – no one’s ever put his hands on me. I can tell when someone is being friendly and “complimenting” me and when someone is really aggressively interfering with me. And the latter pisses me off.

It’s not so much that I’ve felt afraid in these situations (although I have a time or two); I’ve mainly been annoyed. And what made me angry was the sense that I had to placate this individual somehow to get past him and be on about my business. How you react to this harassment can make a difference in how swiftly you can get away from it.

In other words, if you say something like “Go to hell” or “Leave me alone,” you have committed the sin of deflating this male’s ego. Retaliation is sure to follow.

All of a sudden your great beauty and desirableness, those things that supposedly got his attention in the first place, fall away and you become the ugliest, most loathsome bitch that ever crossed his path.

I understand the impulse in some activists to do something about this. And in litigious America I can even see why some women have the idea of outlawing street harassment. There’s nothing new about the idea.

Ages ago, in 1993, law professor Cynthia Grant Bowman wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review called “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women.” According to Professor Bowman:

Typically, unacquainted persons passing on a public street, particularly in large cities, do not address one another, but instead perform an avoidance ritual…Staring at a stranger is a well-established cultural taboo.

She goes on to say that breaches of this “civil inattention” are reserved for people who are really unusual, those who are unusually similar to you in some way, or those who are in what she calls an “open” category – dogs and children, for example. Men seem to put women in this “open” category.

Unlike men, women passing through public areas are subject to “markers of passage” that imply either that women are acting out of role simply by their presence in public or that part of their role is in fact to be open to the public. These “markers” emphasize that women, unlike men, belong in the private sphere, the sphere of domestic rather than public responsibility. Ironically, men convey this message by intruding upon a woman’s privacy as she enters the public sphere.

Professor Bowman says that some women react with fear to street harassment because they don’t know if the stranger will turn out to be a rapist. She then asserts that women have good reason to see street harassment as a precursor to rape.

Furthermore, rapists often harass women on the street and violate their personal space in order to determine which women are likely to easy targets – a practice called “rape-testing.” Because potential rapists frequently select their victims by looking for women who appear vulnerable to assault, they may approach a potential victim and “test” her by a variety of means, including making lewd or insinuating remarks, to see if she can be intimidated.

Much of what immediately follows is an explanation of how uncomfortable and distressed women feel when they are subjected to this harassment.

Don’t women have recourse under current civil law? That is, can’t she sue for assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress, or invasion of privacy? Each of these options is inadequate, due to issues of intent, First Amendment protections, and the idea that a “reasonable” person (or, “man,” actually) wouldn’t see the conduct as offensive enough to warrant the intrusion of the law.

Professor Bowman is optimistic, however.

Women have made substantial gains in the last few decades in the field of workplace harassment, sexual assault, and domestic violence; similar pressure may create remedies for street harassment…it would be necessary to overturn longstanding statutory and case law to hold that the intent of the harasser is irrelevant to criminal assault.

Finally, we get to what I see as the centerpiece of this article – a proposed statute or ordinance to be enacted:

Street harassment. It shall be a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of $250, to engage in street harassment. Street harassment occurs when one or more unfamiliar men accost one or more women in a public place, on one or more occasions, and intrude or attempt to intrude upon the woman’s attention in a manner that is unwelcome to the woman, with language or action that is explicitly or implicitly sexual.

Such language includes, but is not limited to, references to male or female genitalia or to female body parts or to sexual activities, solicitation of sex, or reference by word or action to the target of the harassment as the object of sexual desire, or similar words that by their very utterance inflict injury or naturally tend to provoke violent resentment, even if the woman did not herself react with violence [emphasis mine].

The harasser’s intent, except his intent to say the words or engage in the conduct, is not an element of this offense.

With all due to respect to Professor Bowman and to all of the women who continue to endorse such a proposal, this is Dream Land.

Set aside for a moment the idea of legally prohibiting men from publicly expressing their lust for attractive women on the street. Such an ordinance wouldn’t even require that the targeted woman be offended by this behavior. That one sentence in this proposed law reveals the real intent of this proposal: to put a muzzle on men.

This is a truncheon to bring men into line and force them to behave civilly toward women. These women want to enjoy the benefits of moving about in public but they don’t want to deal with the reality of actually being in public, a reality which includes the probability of receiving unwanted attention or being subjected to unwanted speech.

As I’ve said, I don’t appreciate being harassed in public any more than other women do. But here’s what I think: men really only respect and fear other men. I’ve said this before, and I’m convinced of it. A woman often gets respect only insofar as men understand that she is under the protection of some man or group of men. In other words, they have to know that to mess with that woman is to mess with some man – a man they don’t want to cross.

This is ultimately the only real deterrent to this type of behavior – male protection. Women who assert their right to be out and about without male protection now circle back and demand male protection!

And yes, the demand for men to be civil and restrained toward women in public is a demand for their protection. It’s a demand for them to set aside their own instincts and even freedoms for the benefit and comfort of women. More importantly, it’s a recognition that it’s men who actually wield power in the public sphere.

Is everybody listening? It’s men who actually wield power in the public sphere. Don’t get mad at me about it. It’s the way the world has always been. Feminists know it, too.

And to all of you men who want to go on and on about how men have been “emasculated” and made subject to women’s demands, you need to ask yourselves: Who relinquished so much of their power and allowed themselves to be gelded?

References

Bowman, Cynthia Grant. 1993. Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law Review Association.

Americans = Idiots

I’ve done a few posts here on how we are a brainwashed nation. I really believe that we are about as brainwashed as your average North Korean. Maybe not as frightened, but probably about as brainwashed.

You really don’t need a totalitarian state to brainwash a populace.

Following Gramsci, all you need is Ruling Class control over the media. Check, done, long ago. Actually it has gotten much worse in the last 60 years. After WW 2, we had a large labor press in the US. It’s been decimated and for all intents and purposes no longer exists.

Next you need Ruling Class control over the political parties. Check, done that, especially since 1980 or so.

Combine the political system with the media and you end up with something called “culture,” once again following Gramsci. The Ruling Class, using its political-media monopoly, then takes over the culture. “Popular culture” the lived world of you and me, then in essence becomes Ruling Class Culture. Even the poor and the workers talk like millionaire oligarchs. If a computer’s a dumb as a rock and it only knows what it’s been taught, then so’s a human. We only know what we’ve been taught.

Exhibit A for how exquisitely this system works in praxis:

From a Gallup poll asking an admittedly loaded question, but nevertheless:

“Is Iran a critical threat to U.S. vital interests?” 61% yes

“Is Iran an important threat to U.S. vital interests?” 29% yes

I certainly hope there were more choices than that!

In other words, 90% of the US population are officially complete and utter dumbfucks.

Unless they’ve figured out that “US vital interests” means “US imperialism,” in which case, I would have answered yes myself.

What do these poor deluded fools think? Do they actually believe that Iran is going to lob a nuke at us and commit national suicide? They don’t even have a nuke, and they won’t sacrifice millions of Iranian lives even if they get one.

Why Franco Was As Big A Killer A Stalin

Here in the US, one never hears the end of the “Stalin the murderer” line. Stalin is simply equated with genocide. The more intrepid on the Far Right even say that Stalin killed more than Hitler, in doing so betraying exactly where their sympathies have lain along (with the Hitlerists).

What does one think when one thinks of Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain. Nothing much. Sure, he was a dictator, but he was a good guy. Anyway, the economy boomed under him. Sure, he was Hitler’s best buddy, but let’s not talk about that. Did he kill anyone? Who knows? Maybe a few?

We know or do not know these things here in the West because the Ruling Class political parties have embedded these memes into our brain. Stalin? Greatest Murderer of All Time. Franco? Huh? I don’t know what to think. Not too bad, maybe?

We will do the math below, but first of all, some background. Why was and is Franco the pal of the US media and political elite. Because he was one of them.

And how did he get started? From 1936-1939, there was a popular regime in power in Spain. They won a democratic election. As we mentioned in the previous post, the Ruling Class never tolerates this, and in this case, they started a war against the state. The state had almost no arms (1 gun for every three men) and Franco’s best friends Hitler and Mussolini rushed in to help him out.

Other than brave volunteers who flooded in from around the globe to help the beleaguered state, not one state in the “liberal to conservative” West would lift one finger to help the Republicans. As Churchill (hero of the West, as I was taught here in the US) a far rightwing British elitist, pointed out, there was fear in the “liberal to conservative” West that aims of the Spanish Republican state would “infect” the masses of the West. And what might be the symptoms of this infection, that is, what did the Republicans want?

1. They put in a land reform which was opposed by big landowners. In the 1930’s, land reform was apparently anathema in the “liberal to conservative” West.

2. They massively expanded public education, antagonizing the Catholic Church which controlled education. In the 1930’s, apparently a massive expansion of public education was regarded with terror in the “progressive West.”

3. They put in a public pension reform, antagonizing the bankers. In the 1930’s, the idea that people should be financially secure and able to survive in their retirement was opposed by the “civilized West,” even apparently Roosevelt, who just put in a Social Security program.

4. They removed many of the top military officers in the reactionary army. This reactionary army had been used the elite to consolidate Ruling Class rule in Spain. Reform of the Armed Forces, that is, making them democratic and not controlled by the Ruling Classes to use to repress the people or fight imperialist war on behalf of Capital, was regarded with terror in the “democratic West.”

5. They encouraged workers to join unions, antagonizing the employers. In the 1930’s, in the “democratic West,” the idea that workers should have democratic rights and equal bargaining power with the bosses in the workplace was clearly to be opposed.

Hitler and Mussolini, along with the Ruling Classes of the “democratic West,” opposed all of these popular measures, giving the lie to the notion that somehow Hitlerism or Mussolinism were “socialist” projects, as the Right is now trying to rewrite them. It also shows that the “democratic states” of the West were completely supportive of the aims of the German and Italian fascists, at least as far as Spain, and probably beyond.

Indeed, a few years hence, the West would turn against their erstwhile fascist allies in a war. But the fact that they were strong allies only a few years prior shows that the differences between the West and the fascists were not over Elite or Ruling Class rule in society. Both the “democratic West” and the fascist dictatorships believed in Elite or Ruling Class rule in society, and both were essentially controlled by conservatives to reactionaries.

It is interesting that “socialist” Roosevelt also lined up with his Hitlerist and Mussolinist buddies, but that’s the way it was back then. The fascists were good for business, and that’s all that mattered. And Roosevelt, while pursuing progressive initiatives at home, was utterly committed to a reactionary and imperialist foreign policy, as have all US “liberal” Presidents to one degree or another.

What’s little known is that after Franco won, he killed 514,266 people. I’ve lived in the West my whole life, and I just learned this today. And I’m a smart guy. Why did it take me 52 years to learn this? Because the US Political and Media Elite (the “free political system” and the “free press”) doesn’t want me to know that deadly little fact.

Indeed, Western support for the Francoists, even after the fact, is a dirty little secret, at least here in the US. There were 200,000 executions, 200,000 dead in prison camps, and 114,266 who simply disappeared. That’s over a 39 year period from 1939 to 1978. Franco died in 1975, but his regime continued for another three years until 1978.

From 1921-1953, under Lenin but mostly Stalin in the USSR, there were at least 2.5 million killed. There were 900,000 executions, 1.2 million died in prison camps, and 390,000 died in the population transfers out of the Ukraine during collectivization (the so-called Holodomor).

The figures do not include the natural famine that occurred in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR in the early 1930’s (the so-called Holodomor) because those were not deliberate killings, hence the Holodomor, or deliberate famine, never occurred. It also does not include deaths during population transfers during WW2 when Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars were transferred to Siberia for collaborating with the Nazi invaders, and possibly other deaths during the war, such at the massacre at Katyn Forest in Poland.

The sources are in the archives, and I don’t feel like digging them up, but they come from the unveiling of the secret KGB archives by Gorbachev in 1990. They made a note of everyone they killed, name, date, the whole works. Since then, there has been a huge argument about the archives in the history journals, with Robert Conquest, etc. taking the tens of millions killed side and J. Arch Getty, etc. taking the side of the archives. Sources should be online; one reference is below.

That’s 2.49 million dead over a 32 year period.

So we see that the length of rule was about the same for both leaders, 39 years in one and 32 years in another.

Stalin still killed more.

Demographics of Spain, 1900-2005.

But who killed a greater percentage of the population?

Look at the graphic above, the demographics of Spain. In 1936, the population of Spain was ~26 million. In 1978, the population was ~36 million. The average population during the period was 31 million.

Demographics of the USSR, 1900-1995.

Now look at this graphic, the demographics of the USSR. In 1921, the population was ~140 million. In 1953, the population was ~180 million. Average for the period was 160 million.

Let us now divide the number killed by the average population in each nation:

USSR: 2.5 million / 160 million = 1.56% of the population

Spain: 514, 266 / 31.75 million = 1.62% of the population

I suppose to be fair I should average out the final figure by numbers of years the regime was in power, but I don’t know how to do that. From the comments, James Schipper helpfully does the math:

In the case of Spain, 514,266/(1978 – 1936) = 12,244 per year.

In the case of the Soviet Union, we get 2,490,000/(1953 – 1921) = 77,812 per year.

Dividing the yearly figures by the average population, we get 12,244/31 = 395* for Spain, and 77,812/160 = 486* for the Soviet Union.

*I’m not even sure what that figure means. Let’s just call it a “genocide factor.” It’s the number of killed per year in the country divided by the average population in number of millions.

As we can see, Franco was nearly as big a killer as Stalin.

Think the “free press” in the US will ever tell you that?

Keep in mind that the whole time Franco was in power, he had no bigger ally than the USA. The US government supported him to the hilt during his entire reign, and afterward until 1978. Richard Nixon lauded him as a hero.

US liberals like my folks always said, “Well, that was because of the Cold War. We supported fascists in the Cold War.” Well, in 1989, the Cold War ended, and the US has continued to support fascists and murderous rightwing regimes just as strongly as we did during the Cold War. Was this really all about US-Soviet conflict, or was it about something else? Like US imperialism?

One argument is that many or possibly most of the executions occurred during the war years. True, but many executions, disappearances and sentences to labor camps occurred after 1939.

Many former supporters of the Republicans went into hiding and were still in hiding 30 years after the war. Even on his death bed, Franco was still signing death warrants. To this very day, over 30 years after the transition to democracy, fear still rules the country.

In Asturias, where many killings took place and mass graves litter the land, most people simply refuse to talk about the killings under the dictatorship. The terror is still there. The only possible reason that people are still frightened is that the former supporters and officials of the regime must still retain vast power in Spanish society. People are afraid of a recrudescence.

References

Getty, J. Arch, Rittersporn, Gabor T. and Zemskov, V. N. October 1993. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. American Historical Review. [Getty, J. Arch, Rittersporn, Gabor T. and Zemskov, V. N. Les victimes de la repression pénale dans l’URSS d’avant-guerre. Revue des Etudes Slaves, 65:1, 199.]

Starve The Beast Game Plan, 2010

So much of what you read, hear and see in the MSM Lie Machine really needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The debt/deficit hysteria – what’s it all about anyway. The bottom line in the “centrist media” is that we need to start making massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security right now or experience Financial Armageddon 10 years down the road. So Obama is setting up a sickening “Gut the Entitlements” commission which thankfully will get nothing done due to Republican intransigence. None of this really makes much sense.

What’s behind all of this? Turns out that Republican Game Plan since Reagan has been “starve the beast.” This was reiterated by Reagan, Bush, Allan Greenspan (the economic hero of both political parties) and Irving Kristol. Since spending cuts would not be popular, the Game Plan was to push through massive tax cuts, which would be.

Starving the beast means depriving the government of spending. Faced with drying revenue inflows, spending cuts would be sold as necessity. That, or the Republicans would just run up wild deficits and explode the public debt while they were in office, with the obvious though unstated agenda of causing state financial ruin at a later day.

The entire MSM, across the board, from “liberal” to “centrist” to right, would be utterly silent while this financial time bomb was being set off. The tax cuts of Reagan and Bush were greeted with glorious accolades, while the wild deficits were blown off with statements like, “Deficits don’t matter.” Huge armies of columnists and think tank whores were enlisted in this “deficits don’t matter” lie. Just about every Republican asshole you met in real life, if they had an opinion at all, repeated the same insanity.

When a Republican was in, it was all “deficits don’t matter,” but as soon as Bill Clinton came in, everything changed. Once again, the entire “democratic” and “diverse” US MSM was bombarded with a torrent of propaganda about how we needed to “balance the budget,” control the “deficit” and then hopefully start “paying down the federal debt.”

Your average Republican dipshit on the street, if they had an opinion, was repeating the same stuff like a Goddamned Myna Bird. I’d tell them how a few years back they were all, “deficits don’t matter” and they’d either get pissed or act like I was speaking Swahili.

Turns out Bill Clinton was the most fiscally responsible US President in decades, but he got no credit for it. Instead, bizarrely, he was tarred as a “tax and spend” profligate.

Turns out Clinton left office with the US government massively in the black. That was only 2000, ten years ago. The Republicans were freaked, and they were in office. Suddenly there was a “debate” about what to do with “extra money.” Like save it for a rainy day? Hell no.

There was no debate. Once again, the entire “left to right” spectrum of the US media decided that, “It’s your money, so you need it back.” The entire surplus was immediately blown on dumbfuck tax cuts and within a year, the state was badly in the red again. About this, once again, there was silence from the MSN and cheers from the Republican on the street.

Soon Bush beat all previous Presidents in financial irresponsiibility, but there was not a pipsqueak to be heard about that from the “democratic and diverse” MSM media in the US, nor from the Republican on the street. I’d bring it up, and all I got was, “deficits don’t matter” again.

Does any of that make sense? Of course not. Why should deficits be irrelevant and government act like a drunken gambler on a bender with a credit card and when Republicans are in office, but then as soon as a Democrat comes in, it’s all financial responsibility again.

Well, now we have a new Democratic President, and the shit’s started all over again. Remember: as soon as a Democrat comes in, the entire MSM and the Corporate Ruling Class turn into deficit hawks, quick as a chameleon. Your average dumbass on the street, including “liberal Democrats” my late father (and he was a good, solid liberal Democrat too), fall for the con one more time.

Since Obama came in, it’s all debt and deficits and spending freezes, all the time. Furthermore, now the big boys, the Big Three, are on the block: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They could never cut those before, because they are too popular. But the entire US media, from “left to right” has been itching to destroy these programs for over 30 years.

Paul Krugman makes sense of all of it here. It was all just a sinister plot from Day One. And now the Republicans are doubling down: They are deliberately trying to provoke a financial catastrophe so that “emergency measures” will be needed to deal with the Big Three and slash the state to bits once and for all.

A few things are clear. Just as Marx said, you never really have democracy in capitalism. You have in effect a class dictatorship of the ruling class. We know it is a dictatorship because they will steal elections if need to, kill, jail and harass opponents, and if there is ever a threat to their rule, the result is typically either a military coup or a Contra insurgency. A true democracy would allow the Ruling Class state to be replaced by a popular one. Since generally this is not possible, you typically never have democracy under capitalism.

Part of the way that Ruling Class Rule is enforced is by capturing the entirety of private sector media. The Ruling Class then sets up fake “left,” “center” and “right” factions of the Ruling Class media which more or less all say the same thing, with a few variations. Bottom line is they are all part of a project to perpetuate Ruling Class Rule. In fact, all of these outfits, from “left to right” are all run by Ruling Class members themselves, who use the outlets to aggressively propagandize for their class interests.

The Ruling Class then sets up or infiltrates various political parties, once again, “from left to right,” but once again, all of these parties are simply factions of the Ruling Class. Members of society then align with the media outlets and parties somewhere along this spectrum. Some become “liberals,” some “centrists,” some “conservatives.” Most of them don’t realize that these positions are almost meaningless and they are all, liberals to conservatives, simply supporting one faction or the other of the Ruling Class and its mouthpieces.

So you don’t really have much in the way of political freedom under capitalism since all or certainly most of electorate is under the sway of one faction of the Ruling Class or other. Sure, you can form some little popular party, but with no money, you will probably never get elected.

So you don’t have much in the way of freedom of the press under capitalism. Sure, you can say whatever you want, but unless you have a zillion bucks, no one can hear you. You have freedom of the press for those who own one, and everyone else is effectively silenced.

You don’t even have much freedom of thought under capitalism, because due to the fact that the entire media and all of the parties are typically just factionized elements of the Ruling Class, the overwhelming majority of society is effectively brainwashed into becoming a “supporter” of one faction of the other of the Ruling Class.

Through clever use of media and political ideological monopoly (washed together into what Gramsci called “culture”), you have a society that, at the end of the day, is nearly as brainwashed as Maoist China’s. Yeah, you have freedom of thought, but almost everyone is too brainwashed to exercise it. There’s no need for gulags or bullets in the head, as there are few dissenters and their political power is zilch anyway, so they can be ignored.

If through some miracle, a popular regime is ever somehow elected through the fog of Ruling Class Propaganda and Politics (“culture”) there are always contras, military coups, imperialist sanctions and death squads to reverse the progress.

Capitalist Society as Land of Gypsies

English has many synonyms.

For instance, look at these words:

Capitalist
Businessman
Corporation
Shyster
Liar
Organized criminal
Gangster
Gang member
Organized crime gang
Mafia
Mafioso
Fraudster
Thief
Ripoff Artist
Con Artist
Sociopath

The fist thing you will notice is that some nouns represent one person and some represent more than one person. Leaving aside the differences between singular and plural nouns, what exactly are the differences between the above words. At first glance, they all appear to mean the same thing, except some cannot be inverted. For instance, corporation and and criminal are obvious synonyms, but it doesn’t work the other way, since many criminals are not incorporated businesses with state charters.

One could argue that there are shades of differences between the above. I would agree with that.

We have many proponents of capitalism in the comments section. Yet capitalism, as practiced everywhere on Earth, automatically turns into an orgy of White-collar crime at best, street crime at worst. There doesn’t seem to be any way around it. Wherever you have capitalists, you have Roman legions of shady businessmen and professional liars and thieves, stretching as far as the eye can see. Capitalist apologists, even if they agree with this, say that that is why the state is needed, to enforce anti-fraud laws.

Yet Gramsci, Marx and anyone with their eyes open can see that under capitalism, the business class and oligarchic rich tend to capture the state. The ruling class and the state are synonymous. The ruling class parasitizes the state and fills the state with its agents, so essentially the state is simply another faction of the ruling class. And the agenda of the capitalist class and the rich, everywhere on Earth, is to get rid of state law enforcement into “business crime.”

Yep, businesses want the freedom to be fraudsters and thieves, even if they are honest themselves. Have you noticed that the US Chamber of Commerce typically throws a 2 year old temper tantrum whenever states start prosecuting more businessmen for fraud? Why? Because the C of C, here, and presumably everywhere, wants fraud to be legal. I guess they think you can settle with the guy in court or something. Especially when he’s offshored most of his operations. Yeah right.

Have you noticed that the overwhelming majorities of both parties decry “regulation of the Internet?” So the Internet is unregulated. Therefore, it’s a sewer with more shady characters and crooks than your average teeming ghetto corner at noon. The reason that 80% of both parties won’t “regulate the Internet” is apparently because they like the fact that it’s The Wild West where criminals outnumber humans 2-1. That or they’ve been brainwashed.

Let’s examine this more closely. Do both parties really prosecute fraud equally? Typically, when a state has a Republican attorney general, fraud and white collar crime rates go through the roof. Same thing when a Republican administration comes in. The Bush and Reagan Administrations were synonymous with corruption. Yet when you get a liberal Democrat in, like here in California, he typically vows to go after white collar crime and fraud. Why should this be only the job of liberals?

The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Republican Party thinks that fraud and White collar crime is a-ok. Apparently it’s all part of doing business. Which brings us back to the synonym test above.

Since fraud as thick as locust clouds seems to be automatically inherent in just about any possible capitalist society, what do you capitalist apologists in the comments section propose to be done about this? Are landslides of white collar crime that bury society the price one pays for living in a capitalist society? Inquiring minds want to know.

Exhibit A.

Sure, you argue that not all businesses are like this, but that’s a typical Internet business. “Internet business” and “scam” are more or less synonymous. And they are synonymous in large part because of the “don’t regulate the Internet” line pushed by both parties and the entire IT industry. So deregulation just means antelope herds of fraudsters galloping through your life. Can’t you guys see this? Capitalism and crime are in praxis one and the same.

Deficit/Debt Hysteria

It’s hard to check out the latest edition of the MSM shitrags (daily newspapers and newsmagazines) or lying megaphones (radio and TV) without seeing or hearing some screaming stuff about deficits and debts. The stuff is quite dire. In 10 years, debt payments will constitute 80% of the US budget, leaving only 20% for military and all other spending. The only possible conclusion is that this is catastrophic.

However, being fed a steady diet of MSM shit sandwiches my whole life before I finally figured out what the Hell I was eating anyway, I figured these capitalist corporate POS scumbags were lying to me once again.

If a capitalist’s mouth is open, he’s probably lying. And so all capitalist societies are fanciful places where all the world’s a lie, and all of us are liars. We lie to go along with the liars, because everyone else is lying, and because we’re too brainwashed or confused to figure out we are being lied to. Such is the Gramscian dynamic when the capitalists obtain cultural hegemony, as they nearly always do under capitalism.

It is curious that defenders of capitalism, including regular commenters on this blog, never face this World O’ Lies head-on. So is it ok or what?  I mean that living in a capitalist society is about as fanciful an experience as living in a state controlled by Communist propaganda. Capitalist versions of Pravda are replicated every minute across countless TV and radio stations and every corporate shitrag (daily paper and newsweekly) in the land. To say that they were “brainwashed” while we are free is the grossest of delusions, but it is essential to all capitalist societies.

Getting back to the deficit/debt hysteria, I had to search around to find some sane capitalists on the question. One of the evil things about capitalism is that under capitalism, the honest capitalists are rara avis. You really have to look around, as the capitalists try to lock out all the sane and decent voices. You know, just like those evil Commies do? So we spelunked the samizdats of Internet’s honeycombed caverns and came up with a couple of sane capitalists on the debt/deficit question.

Exhibit A: Paul Krugman.

Exhibit B: Martin Wolf.

Yeah, they’re both Jews. Liberal, capitalist Jews at that (No, wait! They must be Bolsheviks in disguise!).

Chew on that bone a bit, anti-Semites.

The depressing thing was that both of the sane people had dire messages. Those evil entitlement thingies, you know, like health care for the old and the poor and pensions for the retired, are gonna have to be slashed to the bone, their recipients cast to the desert winds so the vultures of capitalist society may pick clean their bones.

When even the sane people are channeling Edgar Allen Poe, you know that the horrorshow is the world outside your window, and the droogies are your fellow men.

So much for the end of history.

Some Thoughts on Anger and Aggression

In this post we will touch on anger, aggression and bullying, in particular with regard to people who are angry or aggressive towards others (many angry people are simply “charged up” at the world in general and can be pleasant interpersonally). This post will not exhaust the subject, but will just dance around the surface a bit.

The angry person in general directs all aggression outwards. There is little to no internally directed anger; it’s all outer directed. The problem, such that there is one, is all other people.

This is of course a defense. This defense is two-fold. First of all, there is denial of any wrongdoing on the part of the aggressive person. Then there is outward projection of blame and one’s own internal problems and failings onto others.

Classic projection is nasty business – it’s an immature defense. Say I’m a mean person and you’re a nice person. You eventually get tired of my shit and call me on it. Using denial-projection, I first deny that I am aggressive, then you will accuse me of being the aggressor! I’m the nice one and you’re the mean one! What the Hell? But if you’ve been around aggressive people, you will notice that this is very common.

Aggressive people characteristically enjoy their own anger and even get angry at you for pointing it out.

This is an interesting phenomenon. Such an angry person is typically enjoying their anger, as much as they insist that they are miserable. Why is anger pleasant? Anger is very empowering. An angry person is an empowered person, a strong person, someone who is 10, 100 or 1,000 feet tall. People enjoy feeling strong and dislike feeling weak.

Since it feels so good and makes the person feel so strong, why do the angry typically deny and project away their anger? I am not sure. Perhaps by calling attention to the anger, you are delegitimizing it, and you are asking the person to stop being angry. Since the anger feels so good and is empowering, that’s like asking a kid to give up his candy.

A more fascinating explanation is available: that in many cases, anger is simply a defense.

Keep in mind that we all use defenses every minute of every day. I’m using defenses right now as I write this.

However, we can never discuss or even write about defenses. Try to bring up defenses, and you get shot down pretty quickly.

I remember once I was in therapy with some female therapist (My new rule is no female therapists). She was being hostile for most of our one and only session. Why, I have no idea, but I think it’s because I’m a man and she’s a woman.

Anyway, we got halfway through and I think I finally called her fucking ass on it. You’re my therapist, and you’re sitting there being hostile. What gives? I forget what else ensued, but she said something. I almost popped out of my chair. “That’s a defense!” I pointed out. She freaked. “I don’t need you to tell me that! I’ve got my own therapist!” That was pretty damn funny.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that people don’t like to have their defenses pointed out. They can’t stand to discuss the whole subject, because it threatens to make them think of their own defenses.

Defenses work better when they are somewhat unconscious, and they tend not to work quite as well when we are aware of them, so that’s why people freak when you bring up the subject. You’re throwing off the tarp in the deep hidden woods and showing them their armament collection. A very curious weapons stockpile, one that works better when you don’t even know what the weapons are, how they work, who you are using them against, or even where the damned armory is at!

So the aggressor denies his aggression. And he resents you, you bastard, for pointing it out. The aggressive person will typically deny that they angry and then insist that you, the nice person, is the angry one! This is essential to know. In the world of the aggressive person, Poland is always attacking Germany.

Sometimes they will admit to being angry, but they will say, “I’m only angry because you’re pissing me off!” This really isn’t true. You’re simply being targeted because you’re an acceptable target. In this case, the innocent person, really the victim of the aggressor’s anger, is blamed for the aggression itself! So really here the bully is blaming the victim for the bully’s anger and bullying and is accusing the victim of causing his own victimization. “I’d be nice if only for you!”

Who is an acceptable target? Aggressive people are not idiots. They pick their targets very carefully. Many of them are quite nice and friendly towards many people, but then quite cold and cruel to others. We have all had the Terror Boss who ferociously dominated the underlings and then meekly sucked up to everyone over them. Most aggressive people do something similar. The targets they pick out are usually the people closest to them, who hold no sway or power over them. Their own friends, lovers or family.

Why not strangers? Strangers can retaliate. Why not employers? Same reason. The angry person is quite careful to not aggress against those who can retaliate and cause them harm. The people they aggress against are trapped. The aggressive person feels that these victims can’t leave. Family is a typical target. Is your family going to abandon you because you’re an asshole or a bitch? Never. So fire away! What about your friends? They’re often by your side too, but not so much as family.

Another target is spouses and lovers. The worst of all are spouses and lovers who live with the bully. Once again, we see that the angry person cleverly targets those who are trapped and cannot leave them. Your spouse is married to you; they are not going anywhere. Neither is your boyfriend or girlfriend, especially if they reside with you.

The more trapped they are with the angry person, the more the aggressive person feels that they can fire away with no consequences. This is where you have the phenomenon of the underling who meekly submits to crap all day at work, then comes home and kicks the dog, yells at the kids to pick up their stuff, and screams at the wife over dinner. That’s another defense by the way – displacement. The anger towards the co-workers or superiors which may not be expressed is instead displaced onto the trapped and easy targets at home.

We see that angry people typically pick on trapped people, people who can’t fight back, and people with whom there are little or no consequences to their anger. They avoid anger towards those who can fight back and cause them problems. Therefore we see that many angry and aggressive people are simply flat-out bullies. Only a bully, after all, only picks on people who can’t fight back and avoids fights with those who can fuck them over.

It’s a sad statement, but the world is full of bullies. Many people who seem like the nicest people around are bullying, angry people a good part of the time. They typically pick people who seem meek, mild or wimpy for their attacks.

If you’re on the receiving end of bullying, nothing much is going to work. Smiling and humoring the bully is one way. The victim in this case is thinking, “They’re probably mad because of me. If I just try harder to be nicer to them or to quit screwing up so bad, they will stop the aggression and start being nice.” This is typically pointless.

They’re spoiling for a fight, fighting is fun, and they probably regard this behavior as submissiveness. After all, someone who reacts to aggression with niceness is probably seen as submissive by the angry person. Displays of submissiveness towards angry people just perpetuate the anger. It’s nothing but green light.

There are other things you can do. You can be silent to try to punish the bully. This won’t work either. The bully is in a mean mood, and they will just enjoy the silence. Angry people like their quiet anger. Besides, they are making the victim suffer due to silence. The victim wants to engage, but intead is forced into silence by the angry person. The angry person has basically muzzled the victim, knows that the victim doesn’t like being silent, and is enjoying the torture.

Another approach is to fire back at the angry person. Everyone tells you to fight back against aggressors, but in life, I’ve basically found that it’s worthless. Most angry people are just bullies, and when you fight back, they typically just go insane and ramp up the anger to high levels. The angry person has a game going: “I get to attack you all I want to, and you never get to fight back, not even once.”

It’s similar to a master-slave dynamic. It works better when the slave is more or less trapped, because then they really can’t fight back. If the victim depends on the bully for support, a job, friendship, anything really, the tiniest little pipsqueak out of the victim prompts the bully to towering rage and threats. Threats to cut off support, fire you, divorce you, end the friendship or relationship, etc.

Often the bully will appeal to others, telling them to “stop the attacks.” To stop the counterattacks of the victim that is! The bully has the victim between a rock and a hard place, and they know it. Unfortunately, bullies usually have lots of friends and allies who assist them in their bullying.

These co-conspirators then go to the victim and tell the victim to “stop their aggression” against the angry person. There are often threats involved. The bully will refuse to meet with you, talk to you, be friends with you, eat with you, etc., if the victim doesn’t stop fighting back.

The wild reaction of bullies to the slightest retaliation by victims is peculiar. The explanation is that the bully is typically in a master-slave dynamic. The whole game is that the bully gets to pound away night and day, and the victim never gets to fight back. When the victim stands up for themselves, this threatens to upset the whole pleasurable sadistic dynamic of the bully, and this slave rebellion must be halted by any means necessary.

You might be surprised that some of the nicest people you know are some of the biggest bullies to their chosen victims, but that’s one of the oddities of human nature, and it shows why personality assessments are often faulty. The personality must be seen in its whole, not in its parts.

The nicest guy in the whole world at work who is a tyrant to his wife, kids and pets in the hidden world of his castle is not actually such a nice guy after all. People who only see Mr. Congeniality at work are dumbfounded that he turns into Ivan the Terrible when he opens the front door to his home. Typically, they will deny that it is possible, insist that he really still is the nicest guy in the whole world, and often blame the victims for “provoking” Mr. Rogers on his home turf.

They blame the victim, but that’s another charming human tendency.

Why Zionism is Uniquely Dangerous

A new commenter, a Zionist of uncertain heritage, has appeared on this anti-Zionist blog. I will first unveil his comments below, then I will explain how they encapsulate the unique menace of Zionist thinking.

Hi there.

Interesting set of comments; some intelligent, others less so.
I’m particularly interested in land claim rights, myself. The whole debate over “Ashkenazim Jews are fakes… they’re really Khazars” rests on it.

As you point out – and others have since – Ashkenazim Jews are most genetically identical with Palestinian Arabs and Kurds… and no-one is suggesting for one second that Arabs are Khazars!

But the Jewish claim that they have a right to return to Israel because of genetic descent is refuted because…well…because it’s been too long since they’ve been away.

Alright. What makes a fair and acceptable right to return to, control or own any bit of real estate on this ball of dirt?
Q: By what right did the Muslims conquer and thereafter rule Palestine in 638 AD? I mean, back then it was part of the Christendom empire of Byzantium (having previously been part of the Pagan empire of Rome… previously ruled by the Jewish Hasmoneans…)

A: Oh, that was ages ago! Why bring that up!? Palestine is Arab land, Palestine is Arab land, Palestine is Arab land… ‘cos, like, it was Arab before it was Jewish and I don’t like it being Jewish. So f*** off!

Hmmm…

Okay. There are 300 million citizens of the USA. About 500,000 of them descend from First Nations.

Q: By what right did the Europeans effect a conquest upon the Americas and wipe out 95% of the indigenous population?
A: Oh come on! That was over 500 years ago! Why bring that up? This is totally irrelevant! Who cares what the Europeans did!? We’re criticising the Jews here ‘cos that way we don’t have to look at the sh** in our own history.

Let’s try one more time…?

Q: By what right do the Chinese invade and conquer Tibet – kick out its sacred ruler, the Dalai Lama, slaughter the people, destroy their culture…

A: The Chinese had always laid claim to Tibet, and were merely regaining a rebel province. They’d never rescinded that claim even though Tibet was partially or totally autonomous since 1350AD…like, over 600 years of “disputed territory” If China’s got it back, that’s okay. ‘Cos, like, there’s 1.3 billion Chinese and there’s only 13 million Jews…so it’s easier to shove Jews around…and, besides, China’s got a seat on the UN Security Council and Israel doesn’t.

All this is important because it sets a precedent for The United Nations to determine a new set of ‘rights’ – Rights of Land ownership, Rights of Possession, Rights of Return…that sort of thing.

To suggest that a two thousand year old Land Claim is somehow not valid because…because it’s, like really old…is logically indefensible and hypocritical in the extreme.

The Zionist claims are as honest or as fraudulent or as questionable as those of any other people.

In the Jewish case, it works like this:

1. Every other country we’ve ever lived in has hated us, persecuted us, been jealous of us and then kicked us out. They don’t want us to live anywhere. Frankly, they’d rather see us all just die out as a people to make a convenient solution to their Judenfrag. That ain’t gonna happen.

2. Israel is our ancient Land – we never gave it up. We’ve come back. Anyone wanting to stay has two choices – share or move out. You Arabs don’t seem to understand the meaning of the word “share”. (Remember 638AD… you know.. .that conquest thing…? “Once Islam, is always Islam”…? Yeah, right!)
2. You tried to wipe us out in 1948. You lost.
3. You tried to wipe us out in 1967. You lost.
4. You tried to wipe us out in 1973. You lost.
5. Anyone see a pattern here….?

This is a new commenter here. I haven’t the faintest idea if he’s Jewish or not. The arguments and the furious passion behind them are typical of Jewish Zionists, but Gentile Zionists often use these arguments too, and there are hundreds of millions of very dangerous Gentile Zionists on this planet too.

These ideas are so toxic that they demand to be confronted head-on and full-force every time they lift their heads out of the swamps where they reside.

This is typical Zionist crap, but it’s an exceptionally poisonous worldview.

The world has moved beyond the principle of conquering, annexing, ethnically cleansing and settling foreign lands via warfare, especially since the Geneva Conventions of 1947 and the establishment of the United Nations.

The fact that the Geneva Conventions and the UN threaten to end once and for all the principle of conquest, annexation, cleansing and settling of foreign lands via war is one reason that Zionists have singled out the UN and the Geneva Conventions for particular contempt. The Conventions and the UN stand in the way of their whole barbarian project.

The Zionist game says that this is the way it’s always been for humans (true) so this is the way it’s going to be. Further, as this fellow suggests, any and all aggrieved parties the world over now have a right to fight irredentist and revanchist wars to reclaim ancestral land that was stolen. Can you imagine the chaos?

Conquering and stealing land is the way that every nation on this Earth got formed. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the indigenous have renounced their rights to their land and agreed to share it with the invaders. The Arabs have not done this.

American Indians. Zionists always bring up the Indians. Americans acted like shits, so hey, Jews can be shits too. Anyone else can be shits to boot, forever and ever I guess.

Yes, in a less enlightened age, we conquered the Indians, they surrendered, and now we share the land with them. This is not a mirror of Israel – a State For the Non-Indians of the World. This is a state for all of us. The Indians can go anywhere in US, buy up any land, Hell, they can buy the whole place back if they want to. Indians are not second class citizens. In fact, they are super citizens. They have rights well above those of the rest of us. The comparison between Indians and Arabs is invalid.

As the boundaries of most nations are just lines drawn by invasion and ethnic cleansing, we have say that there is a time frame to get your land back, and once you renounce it, it is gone forever.

Otherwise, the Jews’ example means that everyone gets to go fight revanchist and irredentist wars all over the globe to reclaim all of their ancestral lands. No, the Jews do not get to go back to Palestine 2000 years after the fact and reconquer the land. Why? Because Arabs conquered it in 636? So? They didn’t even conquer it from Jews. Jews were long gone. They conquered it from Christians. Are Jews Christians? Didn’t think so.

Granted, the Jews are not the only such scumbags in the world today, but they are some of the worst.

That’s why there are so many UN resolutions against Israel. If you look at those UN resolutions, you will see that similar international outlaws as the Jews have also been slammed over and over by the UN on similar grounds.

The scofflaws: Indonesia over East Timor and West Papua. India over Kashmir. Turkey over Cyprus. Iraq over Kuwait. China over Tibet. Morocco over Spanish Sahara.

And Israel.

Notice anything about these outlaw countries? They all conquered other nations’ land in wars, annexed the territory to their state, and then conducted massacres and ethnic cleansing of the conquered peoples.

They are international outlaws, the state equivalent of the criminals you see on Wanted posters in the post office.

The Indians, the Indonesians, the Moroccans, the Jews, the Turks, the Chinese. All nationalist barbarians, every single nation. Twisted menace molded into state form.

China and Tibet? Most of us anti-Zionists also oppose China’s bullshit in Tibet too.

Anti-Semitism is a tragic thing, and it’s the cause of this whole mess. The anti-Semites created Israel. It’s their baby, they made it. The more anti-Semitism, the more the Jews cling to Israel and the last refuge in a murderous world. Obviously, more anti-Semitism is not the solution the mess in the Holy Land! The anti-Semites are as guilty in this outrage as the Jews. The Jews didn’t try to wipe themselves off the face of the Earth. The anti-Semites did.

The pogrom and persecution line of Jewish history is not very accurate. For one thing, Jews here in the West and the Anglosphere live extremely comfortable lives. There are some problems in France, but that’s all due to the Zionist Problem. There are problems in Russia, but Russians and Jews have never gotten along.

This group is .3% of the world’s population and they how much of the world’s wealth again? They control how much of the world’s media again? They even have the most powerful nation on Earth, with the biggest military, the US, utterly by the balls and totally controlled, no?

Oh, those poor, pitiful helpless Jews! Shivering in their hovels in the muddy streets of the Pale, waiting in terror for the Czar’s next pogrom! Please. Playing the pogrom and persecution “poor Jews” game with this elite of all elites ethnic group in 2010 is like sick comedy. Spare us.

Portraying this outrageously powerful group, which is now a major faction of the Oligarchy of the World, as latter day residents of the Warsaw Ghetto is ludicrous. Much worse: it’s a horrible insult to the starving, doomed Hebraic fighters in 1944 Poland.

One reason that the Jews are particularly dangerous with regard to Zionism, as opposed to the other barbarians who have been pursuing similar projects, namely Iraqis, Indonesians, Indians, Turks, Moroccans et al, is that those other primitives have no power in the world to speak of. They have little wealth, military power or media power. They’re flies in the Earth’s horse barn. They’re nothing.

So it is the power of the Jews combined with the menace of their barbaric conquest and annex project that makes them so uniquely dangerous.

Jewish minds sit in the world’s top think tanks, swarm the world’s weightiest corporations, fill the halls of law schools, crowd judges’ chambers and flood the Bar. They reign supreme in the most powerful government on Earth. They and their Gentile Zionist allies hold stupefying media power worldwide. None of that is necessarily a bad thing, except that they use this otherworldly power to push their Zionist project with Mach force.

And it’s not so much the project itself – a tussle of a tiny sliver of land – that is so nasty. It’s no worse than Morocco and Spanish Sahara. It’s more that the power of the Jews means that they have the potential to shred world governance and norms and the other scofflaws don’t. Further, if Zionism is ratified, as the poster above notes, logically, we have to open up the entire planet to a hornet’s nest of irredentism and revanchism based on claims going back at least 2000 years. How the Earth will be torn asunder!

But this is how it works. Jewish legal minds, the best on the Earth, pen brilliant defenses of the principles of conquest, annexation, ethnic cleansing and settlement of foreign lands via conquest and publish them in the world’s premiere legal journals.

Via their weighty think tanks, confetti of position papers and endless legal argumentation, they attack the UN and the principles of International Law like termites on speed. They’ve long ago set their scopes on the UN, the Geneva Conventions, the World Court, the whole thing. With their brains, power and money, they can blast holes in the Legal Fabric of the planet like no other group.

"Liberation," by Alpha Unit

Henry Miller wrote a novel over seventy years ago in which the narrator spoke fondly and admiringly of prostitutes – and low-rent prostitutes at that. One of them was quite exuberant in her whoredom – “a whore all the way through,” the narrator says proudly, because she acted the part “with feeling,” even though it was a part she acted for anybody.
The novel was Tropic of Cancer. The narrator is an expatriate American writer, committed due to circumstance to live in the present, with a focus on the satisfaction of bodily needs, sort of the way animals live (at one point, he declares himself, happily, to be “inhuman”). The descriptions he gives of how these needs were satisfied – especially those satisfied by prostitutes – shocked and mortified several states and the U.S. Post Office, leading to an obscenity trial that eventually produced a ruling in the publisher’s favor in 1964.
I’ve read the opinion that this ruling ushered in what some call the Sexual Revolution – a distinction it shares with some other cultural shifts in post-World War II America. At the very least, it was part of a trend toward more and more openness in the discussion of sex in the United States.
Those who came along in the generations after Tropic of Cancer was published sometimes applauded it as an example of a modernistic, stream-of-consciousness style of literature that broke through convention in the same way some earlier novels had.
But a lot of people were impressed with it in a different way – they were appalled by the graphic descriptions of sex acts, in the context of sordid encounters, and by the way Henry Miller wrote about women. Women were “cunts.” If they weren’t “cunts” they were “sluts” or “bitches.” But they were mainly “cunts,” whether they were whores or respectable.
Feminists have long had a problem with Henry Miller, n’est-ce pas?
Seen as some kind of maven of sexual liberation (and perhaps excess), Miller was interviewed during the 1960s by Esquire magazine and others. Naturally, he was asked for his assessment of the “new” sexual climate in America.
The interviewer David Dury asked Miller if he was bored with sex – referring to the openness with which Americans could speak of it and partake of it. Miller responded:

One can’t get bored with sex. But one is bored with making such a tremendous issue of it. This constant harping on sex all the time is so immature, not just sexually, but socially and politically. It’s as though we’re a race of adolescents.

Dury tells Miller, that it is he, Miller, who harps on it in his books, but Miller’s not having it.

I harped on trying to get at the whole truth of one man: myself. Sex was a big part of that, but no matter how you add it up, in pages or print or words or volumes, it was only a part. It just happened that this was the part that had shock value.

Miller agrees with Dury that all the talk about sex is better than the old ignorance and secrecy that once prevailed. He adds:

But because in the past we have been so Goddamned backward about sex, this revolution is causing sex to become a preoccupation. This I find sad, and even deplorable in many ways.

According to Miller, sex is now a commodity, but what’s worse is that women were becoming commodities. There is a lot of promiscuity, but no passion or vitality.
Miller lets Dury in on what things used to be like in the “bad” old days:

During my time, the girls were so shut in, and you were always watched. Now everybody’s free about sex, but they’re shut in in other ways. In the old days the great difference was that when we were committing these – What are they calling them? Adulteries? Fornications? Illicit sex? Ridiculous words!
When we did it, we did it! We didn’t sit around and talk about it first, intellectualize it. There was always pleasure involved. I mean, great fun! For everybody! Joy, do you see? That’s the big difference, that element of joy! Joy in sex! You’d have to be a blind man not to see it.
In my time, either they weren’t having any sex because of too much guilt, or they were having wonderfully joyous sex. Now everyone’s having sex, the guilty ones probably more than anyone – but it’s so joyless, so much of it.

Dury asks Miller, “Do you consider sex without love to be harmful?” To which Miller replies:

There’s nothing wrong with sex without love. But much more is needed, because just to have a good sex fling isn’t enough, there has to be something more. A man has to fall in love. He has to want something more of the woman and see more in her than an object to be used.

Does this sound like any misogynist you know?
The next question is, “What exactly do you think men are missing in the way they relate to women sexually now?” I love Miller’s response, as most women probably would!

They’re missing a lot of things. For one, there’s no adoration for women! Now there’s another word I would like to emphasize – adoration! Where do we have any adoration today in our talk about women and sex? I believe in adoration, not only in relation to women, but in relation to men as well, where the man above you is someone you adore and admire and want to emulate, the adoration for a master.
This is completely lost in our society today. Instead of adoration for women, men seem to be just always on the chase.

This was all from a man who was seen as someone who despised women and saw sex as nothing but an outlet for a crude impulse – a conclusion people arrived at on the basis of a work of art.
Miller gave this interview back in 1966. I can only imagine what he would think of the way a lot of men see women today. The contempt with which some of these pickup artists speak of women would probably be gravely disturbing to him!
But, as always, the problem is not that simple. The feminism that opened so many doors for women and created so many opportunities for them – a development Miller looked upon favorably – has contributed enormously to the disgust so many men exhibit toward women. In another interview with Dury, Henry Miller expressed a fear that the sexual revolution was “masculinizing” women – something that would be to their detriment.
With foresight, he told his interviewer:

These aggressive females, particularly the American type, aren’t improving their situation vis-a-vis the male…I am sincerely convinced that a woman’s greatest reward comes from the role of – what shall we call it? – stimulator and comforter.
Now if she takes the greater independence and equality necessary for her own development, and becomes masculinized by it, then she is the tragic loser, as much or more than the man. She loses her powers as the seductress, when she becomes masculinized…She’s best when she’s that way. And it’s also best for the man. It brings out all that is masculine about him.

But Dury isn’t giving up entirely on the idea of female independence and equality. Couldn’t these make the woman a better seductress? Miller answers:

Yes, it really should. But if it makes her equally aggressive in the male sense, instead of truly seductive, then it will be like two machines coming together…put a coin in the slot and bang! bang! You see? The poetic prelude and the art of it all will be gone. Just get it over with, bim-bam! I still believe a man really wants to woo a woman. It gives him great satisfaction, don’t you think?

Henry Miller dismissed the idea that he had ever set out to be some kind of expert on sex or love. But for someone who for decades endured a reputation for being some kind of hypermasculine woman-hater, the truth about him is quite refreshing.
Could it be that lurking inside your average latter-day misogynist is a romantic who, sadly, has given up?

References

Miller, H., Kersnowski, F. & Hughes, A. 1994. Conversations with Henry Miller. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

“Liberation,” by Alpha Unit

Henry Miller wrote a novel over seventy years ago in which the narrator spoke fondly and admiringly of prostitutes – and low-rent prostitutes at that. One of them was quite exuberant in her whoredom – “a whore all the way through,” the narrator says proudly, because she acted the part “with feeling,” even though it was a part she acted for anybody.

The novel was Tropic of Cancer. The narrator is an expatriate American writer, committed due to circumstance to live in the present, with a focus on the satisfaction of bodily needs, sort of the way animals live (at one point, he declares himself, happily, to be “inhuman”). The descriptions he gives of how these needs were satisfied – especially those satisfied by prostitutes – shocked and mortified several states and the U.S. Post Office, leading to an obscenity trial that eventually produced a ruling in the publisher’s favor in 1964.

I’ve read the opinion that this ruling ushered in what some call the Sexual Revolution – a distinction it shares with some other cultural shifts in post-World War II America. At the very least, it was part of a trend toward more and more openness in the discussion of sex in the United States.

Those who came along in the generations after Tropic of Cancer was published sometimes applauded it as an example of a modernistic, stream-of-consciousness style of literature that broke through convention in the same way some earlier novels had.

But a lot of people were impressed with it in a different way – they were appalled by the graphic descriptions of sex acts, in the context of sordid encounters, and by the way Henry Miller wrote about women. Women were “cunts.” If they weren’t “cunts” they were “sluts” or “bitches.” But they were mainly “cunts,” whether they were whores or respectable.

Feminists have long had a problem with Henry Miller, n’est-ce pas?

Seen as some kind of maven of sexual liberation (and perhaps excess), Miller was interviewed during the 1960s by Esquire magazine and others. Naturally, he was asked for his assessment of the “new” sexual climate in America.

The interviewer David Dury asked Miller if he was bored with sex – referring to the openness with which Americans could speak of it and partake of it. Miller responded:

One can’t get bored with sex. But one is bored with making such a tremendous issue of it. This constant harping on sex all the time is so immature, not just sexually, but socially and politically. It’s as though we’re a race of adolescents.

Dury tells Miller, that it is he, Miller, who harps on it in his books, but Miller’s not having it.

I harped on trying to get at the whole truth of one man: myself. Sex was a big part of that, but no matter how you add it up, in pages or print or words or volumes, it was only a part. It just happened that this was the part that had shock value.

Miller agrees with Dury that all the talk about sex is better than the old ignorance and secrecy that once prevailed. He adds:

But because in the past we have been so Goddamned backward about sex, this revolution is causing sex to become a preoccupation. This I find sad, and even deplorable in many ways.

According to Miller, sex is now a commodity, but what’s worse is that women were becoming commodities. There is a lot of promiscuity, but no passion or vitality.

Miller lets Dury in on what things used to be like in the “bad” old days:

During my time, the girls were so shut in, and you were always watched. Now everybody’s free about sex, but they’re shut in in other ways. In the old days the great difference was that when we were committing these – What are they calling them? Adulteries? Fornications? Illicit sex? Ridiculous words!

When we did it, we did it! We didn’t sit around and talk about it first, intellectualize it. There was always pleasure involved. I mean, great fun! For everybody! Joy, do you see? That’s the big difference, that element of joy! Joy in sex! You’d have to be a blind man not to see it.

In my time, either they weren’t having any sex because of too much guilt, or they were having wonderfully joyous sex. Now everyone’s having sex, the guilty ones probably more than anyone – but it’s so joyless, so much of it.

Dury asks Miller, “Do you consider sex without love to be harmful?” To which Miller replies:

There’s nothing wrong with sex without love. But much more is needed, because just to have a good sex fling isn’t enough, there has to be something more. A man has to fall in love. He has to want something more of the woman and see more in her than an object to be used.

Does this sound like any misogynist you know?

The next question is, “What exactly do you think men are missing in the way they relate to women sexually now?” I love Miller’s response, as most women probably would!

They’re missing a lot of things. For one, there’s no adoration for women! Now there’s another word I would like to emphasize – adoration! Where do we have any adoration today in our talk about women and sex? I believe in adoration, not only in relation to women, but in relation to men as well, where the man above you is someone you adore and admire and want to emulate, the adoration for a master.

This is completely lost in our society today. Instead of adoration for women, men seem to be just always on the chase.

This was all from a man who was seen as someone who despised women and saw sex as nothing but an outlet for a crude impulse – a conclusion people arrived at on the basis of a work of art.

Miller gave this interview back in 1966. I can only imagine what he would think of the way a lot of men see women today. The contempt with which some of these pickup artists speak of women would probably be gravely disturbing to him!

But, as always, the problem is not that simple. The feminism that opened so many doors for women and created so many opportunities for them – a development Miller looked upon favorably – has contributed enormously to the disgust so many men exhibit toward women. In another interview with Dury, Henry Miller expressed a fear that the sexual revolution was “masculinizing” women – something that would be to their detriment.

With foresight, he told his interviewer:

These aggressive females, particularly the American type, aren’t improving their situation vis-a-vis the male…I am sincerely convinced that a woman’s greatest reward comes from the role of – what shall we call it? – stimulator and comforter.

Now if she takes the greater independence and equality necessary for her own development, and becomes masculinized by it, then she is the tragic loser, as much or more than the man. She loses her powers as the seductress, when she becomes masculinized…She’s best when she’s that way. And it’s also best for the man. It brings out all that is masculine about him.

But Dury isn’t giving up entirely on the idea of female independence and equality. Couldn’t these make the woman a better seductress? Miller answers:

Yes, it really should. But if it makes her equally aggressive in the male sense, instead of truly seductive, then it will be like two machines coming together…put a coin in the slot and bang! bang! You see? The poetic prelude and the art of it all will be gone. Just get it over with, bim-bam! I still believe a man really wants to woo a woman. It gives him great satisfaction, don’t you think?

Henry Miller dismissed the idea that he had ever set out to be some kind of expert on sex or love. But for someone who for decades endured a reputation for being some kind of hypermasculine woman-hater, the truth about him is quite refreshing.

Could it be that lurking inside your average latter-day misogynist is a romantic who, sadly, has given up?

References

Miller, H., Kersnowski, F. & Hughes, A. 1994. Conversations with Henry Miller. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Epic Beard Man is 62 Year Old Thomas Bruso

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF6W3206l70]

This video is going viral as Hell right now. It shows a drunken, belligerent younger Black man, possibly around 40, who gets into it with a 62 year old White man, Thomas Bruso, a former Marine and Vietnam vet, on a bus in the Bay Area in the West Oakland area.

The argument starts when Bruso thinks he heard the drunken Black guy asking if he can shine Bruso’s shoes. Bruso says sure, you want to shine my shoes, go ahead. Turns out that’s not what the Black guy said after all, and he gets mad, calls Bruso a racist and threatens to kick his ass. Bruso apologizes, tries to maneuver out of the situation and goes to the front of the bus to get away from things.

The Black man goes to the front of the bus and hits the White guy. Colonel Sanders, or Santa Claus, or whoever he is, jumps out of his heat and beats the Black guy bloody. He is wearing a blue t-shirt that says, “I am a motherfucker!” The shirt has now become famous.

Then he runs off the bus, but he leaves his bag on the bus. The woman filming it, Iyanna Washington, calls the White man “Pinky” during the fight, siding with the Black guy, yelling, “Whoop his White ass!” Later she steals the White man’s bag. The Black man is bleeding from his mouth, but he doesn’t seem to have lost any teeth. He keeps saying what appears to be, “Bring M and M’s.” But he is really saying, “Bring ambulance.” As the Black man is bleeding, the Blacks say they are going to press charges against the White man.

There is another video of the scene outside the bus after the fight. Bruso is very agitated, running around, yelling and screaming, “Motherfucker!” at the AC Transit Authorities. I thought he turned in an excellent performance in this second video and I hope he goes on to star in more roles.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5fnjFVPCek]

Apparently, Bruso is a pretty wild guy. He got tasered at an A’s game last year. Clips are on Youtube. He was sitting in someone else’s seat and drinking when he was ordered to move. He refused to move when the cops came and they cleared the area and tasered his ass something good. Reports say that he turned in an excellent performance at the A’s game. Supporting roles were played by the cops who tasered his out of control White honky ass.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXkwa9uFBss]

Bruso has been arrested and is now in custody on assault charges stemming from this incident. He is under psychiatric observation at the moment, which seems appropriate. The more I think about this case, the less clear-cut things get.

Bruso has created a new Internet meme called Epic Beard Man and the mumbling of the drunken Black guy for an ambulance created another meme called, “Amber lamps.” Epic Beard Man has a Facebook page that is filling up with fans by the minute. He now has over 3,000 fans.

The video is going nuts on Youtube. Almost all viewers, White and Black, think the video is funny, but the video has caused a strange outpouring of racist hatred against Blacks from the Whites on Youtube. Some are saying that the White man is, “The Rosa Parks of the Whites,” which is just idiotic and an insult to Rosa Parks’ great name.

It’s just a fight between a decent guy and a drunken asshole. These situations happen all the time in White World, and the drunken assholes often get pounded just like that, while everyone cheers. I don’t see what this video has to do with race, but many people are starting to score some racist points off of it.

Commenter tulio has some great comments about this video in another post. I will reprint them here:

There is a video that is going bonkers on Youtube right now about a crazy 67-year-old white vet on a bus that beats the shit out of a younger (but not young) Black dude. The Black dude is confrontational and hostile. This video is being posted and forwarded everywhere right now.

Now personally, I think the video is hilarious. The guy deserved to have his ass beat. I don’t know anyone, Black or White that doesn’t take the White guy’s side.

However, look down at the comments. This video has many duplicates on Youtube and they are all filled with the exact same racist comments. I’ve never seen one video on Youtube generate so much racist sentiment amongst Whites.

Not only in volume, but in the speed. A new comment is being posted almost every minute. While most Blacks view it and see a funny video about a shit-talker getting his just desserts and not really a thing about race per se, the comments from whites are jaw-dropping. Besides the obvious “N” bullets being sprayed like a machine gun, it’s almost like an orgasmic experience for the Whites viewing.

The comment that stuck out to me most is where the white guy is likened to being White America’s “Rosa Parks.” That one particularly stuck with me, because I think that’s how many whites view this, on some level.

One guy on another forum a visit said the fact that he was Black made the video more satisfying. I told him that I am Black, and if he thinks it’s cool to see him get beat because he’s Black, then that’s racist and “fuck you”. He responded by calling me a Nigger despite the fact that I and just about every other Black person takes the side of the White guy. Anyway, even the Whites that aren’t posting overtly racist comments seem to be going ape-shit over it.

I have no idea how much the Youtube audience represents the hidden thoughts median White America, when allowed to speak anonymously, that’s a wild card to me. I’m under no illusions that most Whites view Backs as equals, but the level of anger and resentment you see there is stunning. To the point that it makes me wonder how Obama even got elected.

So tying this all in with this ongoing issue with respect of Blacks. I agree with Black Thought in that Whites haven’t shown respect for non-Black minorities historically either. However the disrespect of Blacks goes far and beyond what exists for any other group. I see this when I view anonymous comments.

There’s an underlying deep resentment of blacks. A man on another forum says that he sees Blacks attacked routinely on Youtube by Latinos on Spanish language videos too. As well as Asian videos. While sociologists have traditionally divided the world by White vs. non-White, I’m starting to think it’s more like Black vs. non-Black. At least when viewing social attitudes.

What else could explain why a thematically similar video with a White aggressor received virtually no racist replies.

A white man physically harasses an Asian woman, and the Asian woman kicks his ass badly right there on camera. Now I think this one is even funnier than the bus video. Now one can only imagine the responses if a Black man went up to physically harass a white woman and the white woman beat the shit out of him on tape. It would have 5,000 N-word laced responses within the hour.

So in conclusion, Black Thought and Robert Lindsay are actually both right. After pondering the reactions of this video for a moment, I don’t think their two positions are mutually exclusive.

Some Observations on Felines and Canids

Repost from the old site.

I’ve been having some conversations lately with some of my smart friends about felines and canids, and here is some what we think we have worked out.

First of all, a cat is supposedly as smart as a 1½ year old human. As a human, albeit a human who is also a cat-lover, I find such a comparison insulting. I just spent some time with my 1½ year old niece. No way on Earth is my cat as stupid as that kid was.

I’m spending some time as a caretaker for my 86 year old father who lives 33 miles away. My folks have two cats and recently acquired another one. This one is a Siamese named Cleo. When I met this cat, very quickly, I thought it was one of the smartest cats I have ever known. I don’t know why, but someone said that Siamese are an intelligent breed.

The other night, one of other cats, Callie, got the night-crazies and took off running across the house for no reason. Cleo saw this and immediately chased her for equally no good reason. I immediately began to reassess my opinion of her as the smartest cat I’ve ever known. I asked around about this.

Turns out that in general, if a cat sees another cat take off running for any reason, the observer cat will often give chase. Why? Possibly instinct. They seem to be programmed to chase after any non-predatory moving object.

Many prey animals, like the rabbits who live around here, practice freezing as a form of predator avoidance. On the principle that predators generally hunt by following rapid movement rather than attacking stationary objects. The rabbits around here will freeze and let you walk right up next to them before they take off running.

There have been some mountain lion attacks here in the West recently. Attacks have, in general, been on little kids or on adults either jogging or riding bicycles.

Reason? A little kid is about the size of many of the mountain lions more slow-moving prey objects. An adult human really is not, except if it is running or riding a bicycle fast, in which case apparently it is about the size and speed of a deer, one of the lion’s favorite prey animals.

As long as you are strolling along in the woods, the cougar usually won’t bother you. But start jogging, and you turn into a human deer and you might just get nailed.

Observations of wild cats have shown that wild domestic cats make few sounds except when fighting or mating. Why do cats meow? Probably because we make sounds, and their meows are their way of trying to speak human language back at us.

Cats are generally solitary, and the cat adaptive style is to hide. If you notice, your cat at home likes to hide in really weird and hard to find places. Often a place where it can see out but you can’t see in. They will do this whether they are threatened by other cats or by dogs or not.

The reason cats hide? Probably instinct. The cat style is to hide and only come out at night. Wild felines such as bobcats and mountain lions hide much of the time and are mostly nocturnal.

This is also why cats bury their shit. They are probably not naturally fastidious, but instead, I suspect that they do this to cover up their trails from predators. This is also why they roll around in the dirt. They are covering themselves with dirt to hide their scent from predators.

On the other hand, the dog has a different adaptive style. Does a dog ever hide? What for? A dog is always walking around, right out in the open, afraid of nothing. With wild dogs it’s pretty similar. Coyotes and wolves are active all hours of the day and tend to roam around in plain sight. Foxes do hide, but they are pretty small, and they also spend time hunting in broad daylight (I’ve watched them).

Cats are generally solitary (although lions are an exception), and dogs are pack animals. Cats hide because they are solitary, and dogs walk around in plain sight because they are instinctively pack animals with little to hide. Wolves, jackals and hyenas travel in packs. If something wants to kill a hyena (and a lion might), it would have to deal with a whole pack of howling hyenas that would come to the defense of the hunted one.

Hunting in packs is also a strength. A pack of hyenas could possibly even kill a lion, and I suspect that they do sometimes.

Since dogs are pack animals and find strength in numbers, they don’t give a damn about burying their shit or rolling around in the dirt. There is no need to cover one’s tracks when one has strength in numbers.

One of my friends insisted that canids and felines are closely related, and that both go back to some ancestral canid-feline duoform. Raccoons and bears are related to dogs, but they supposedly split off from proto-dog after the split from proto-dogcat. I don’t know enough to comment on this, as I’ve never heard of dogs and cats going back to a feline-canid ancestor.

Dope Makes You Act Intoxicated

Repost from the old site.

Reduces your performance in every way, is incapable of enhancing performance, and other lies.

This is one of the biggest lies of all about dope, and it needs to be challenged head on.

Most, if not all, non-users believe that all drugs make the user obviously intoxicated and reduce performance in all areas. I’ve tried to explain to them that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine are stimulants, and hence don’t make you “fucked up.”

Instead, in the short term, they improve mental and physical performance. If you take a test on meth or coke, you will probably do better. The jury is still out on physical performance, but for at least some things, you will do better on coke or speed.

In the Valley here, farm workers are using meth to help them do their jobs. They’re able to work harder, pick more crops faster and work longer before they get tired on meth.

I’ve never driven a car on meth, but I have driven a car on amphetamine tablets. Works great. You can drive just fine on cocaine too. I don’t see why it’s illegal to drive under the influence of these drugs. Might as well make it illegal to drive under the influence of coffee.

Non-users only experience with drugs is with alcohol. Alcohol makes you obviously intoxicated as a general rule. But the other drugs don’t necessarily. Non-users find this clear fact almost impossible to comprehend.

I decided to ask Doperman about this:

Hi Bob, Doperman here. Thanks for letting me post here. Every time I took psychedelics (LSD, LSA, psilocybin, peyote), I assure you I knew completely what was going on.

I even drove a car once for 15 hours on a nice straight highway on a head full of acid. Another time I drove to Mexico with my brother, went to Tecate, cruised around a bit, and went back to the US and stayed at Cuyamaca State Park.

On the 15-hour trip, I don’t think I was normal, because I drove by the Owens River, and there were all these guys fly-fishing there, and they all looked up at me driving by like “What the fuck is with you man???!!!”

I went into stores a few times and bought stuff, and at the end of the voyage, and stopped and got a motel room near the Nevada border at 1 AM. All flying on a head full of LSD.

I can act totally normal on any of those drugs.

Problem is you get these huge saucer eyeballs and it’s verging on a bust right there to be walking around in public. But people on acid don’t necessarily act all that different. You can’t even really tell that they’re on a drug if you see them. They’re not obviously intoxicated.

I once threw a party and at least 200 people showed up. At least among those who showed up at the beginning, a lot of them were on LSD. At the start, there was a house full of people high on acid. It wasn’t really obvious, and no one acted really weird or did anything crazy or stupid. Only a relative few LSD users act stupid or crazy or have to be hauled off by the cops. Most of them make it through the trip acting fairly normally.

Coke is the same way. The coke user is not obviously intoxicated either. You can’t even usually tell if someone is high on coke, because people don’t act all that much different when they are on it.

I don’t think people act all that different on speed either. I’ve seen a lot of people on that stuff and they typically don’t appear intoxicated.

It’s often the case that you cannot tell when someone is high on marijuana.

In my mid-20’s, I was living at home and getting my college degree. I was stoned out of my mind every night. I lived in the basement and had a separate entrance and a separate phone. My living at home included unwritten contracts stating that I could smoke pot and drink all I wanted to, and have visitors over until all hours of the night.

The folks were sleeping two floors up, so we had to turn down the music late at night. I didn’t have the right to fuck women at home, but I fought hard for that one. My Mom wouldn’t budge on that one. I used to violate it anyway. I had a separate entrance, and could sneak women in no problem.

My Mom even heard about the women I sneaked in and fucked, and if they were knock-dead gorgeous (some of them were) she was quite proud of her son in a perverse way. I’ll never be able to match Sexmaniacman (Who can?) but I did my best.

But my Mom could always tell when I was stoned, and she hated it. So if you’re around it a lot, maybe you can tell.

I’m an experienced pot smoker for 35 years off and on, and I typically don’t have the faintest idea if someone is stoned or not. How can you tell anyway?

Lies About the Drug Burnouts

Repost from the old site.

Dope fries your brain, and all ex-dopers are “permafried,” or damaged by drugs. This condition is both immediately obvious and permanent.

This is one of the staples of the anti-drug line, and it appears that the vast majority of Americans have bought into it, including most drug users and former users.

I think it’s utter nonsense, so I’m going to take it on head-on here in this post.

Simply put, I don’t really think that “drug burnouts” exist anymore than “alcohol burnouts” do. The notion comes from the idea that illegal drug use damages the brain. Hence, after years of use of this, that, or various substances, the brain is permanently damaged, and the person is odd, strange, weird, bizarre, permanently spacey, “permafried,” crazy, nuts or mentally ill in some way or another.

The theory is very appealing in that unfortunately, it is starting to look like most of these drugs, at least in heavy use, are capable of damaging the brain. The jury is still somewhat out on cannabis, but even that does not look really encouraging for heavy long-term users.

The theory is typically used to abuse users of hallucinogens and psychedelics, probably because these are the most feared drugs of them all. There is a serious problem with the “fried brains acidheads” line: the hallucinogens are one of the very few drugs that look pretty clean as far as brain damage goes.

When you come out and say that LSD does not cause general damage to the brain, as I am doing now, people tend to get really upset. After all, if anything damages your brain, it must be LSD! After all, if acid, the ultimate evil drug, doesn’t mess with your brain, then surely nothing does.

The truth is much more strange. It’s now clear that the most popular drugs of all, like cocaine and methamphetamine. can damage the brain, often pretty quickly.

Cocaine begins to cause demonstrable brain damage after as few as 12 uses (constriction of the arteries of the brain). After a few grams a month for a few years, clear brain damage shows up on the P300 test (a general slowing of the EEG). There is now evidence for serious changes in white and gray matter with heavy cocaine use.

Meth is much harder to pin down, but heavy current users often appear scattered and damaged. After 1.5 grams a week for 1-2 years, clear signs of damage start showing up. I believe that damage is also starting to show up on white and gray matter tests.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough what bad news these white and gray matter tests are – they indicate destruction of the neurons themselves and the connections between them.

The damage from meth seems to be to dopamine neurons and their connections and is observable with brain diagnostic imaging tools. Whether or not damage occurs at lower doses over shorter periods of time is not known, but meth is starting to look like nasty stuff for your brain.

I still say you can take meth at least a dozen times or so (and possibly much more!) without any permanent damage. At some point though, you are going to start damaging your brain, and we don’t really know what that point is. Want to try to find out when the damage begins? Don’t bother!

Ecstasy or MDMA, formerly up in the air as far as brain damage goes, is looking worse all the time. The best we can say now is that one dose probably does not cause damage. More than one dose almost surely does, and the damage is cumulative. The drug damages serotonin neurons in certain parts of the brain by killing the connections (axons) between the neurons. The neurons themselves are not killed.

It is a common falsehood about drug abuse and the brain that “drugs kill brain cells.” In truth, actual neuronal death is hard to pin down for a lot of these drugs. Instead of killing brain cells outright, drugs often just damage them so they don’t work quite so well. With MDMA, the serotonin axons grow back, but they do not grow back correctly.

I never did MDMA – it was after my time.

Even heavy cannabis use is looking suspect.

Drinking more than two drinks a day over a period of time causes shrinkage of the brain. The shrinkage increases as the drinks per day does up. Periodic heavy drinking depresses brain cells for up to two years, and chronic heavy drinking actually kills neurons.

Now on to the psychedelics. The hard facts are that we do not have good evidence that LSD, peyote, psilocybin and similar drugs damage the brain in any way that would that reduce your intellect, make you odd, strange, weird, bizarre or crazy, or effect your ability to think and feel rationally.

It is true that LSD, psilocybin and MDMA are capable of causing HPPD. That is hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. The result is visual aberrations persisting into the period when one is not using the drug. LSD seems to be the worst offender, but some cases are caused by psilocybin. Until a cure or prevention is found, HPPD is an excellent reason to avoid using psychedelics, LSD in particular.

There is a board on the Net for HPPD sufferers, and if you go there and tell them that you are still using acid, they are going to give you a piece of their mind. They aren’t anti-drug ignoramuses or holier than thou moralistic types. They’ve just been there and done that and don’t want to see you in the same boat as they are.

No one has any idea what is causing HPPD, but a Dr. Abraham in Massachusetts has the notion that it is related to damage to the visual system. All LSD users show damage to the visual system. It’s not apparent to most of them, but it shows up on tests. It has to do with how fast you can adjust to from a totally light environment to a totally dark environment. LSD users do poorly on that.

It’s interesting to note that although all of the tests for LSD and brain damage in animals were negative with the exception of very high doses that would be about the equivalent of 1,000 50 mcg. hits at once, LSD was shown to be hypotoxic to the optic nerve in the bird.

These negative findings for brain damage and LSD go back to the 1950’s. We now have over 50 years of negative tests for LSD and brain damage in animals as well as humans.

LSD does some pretty bizarre things to animals. If you give it to a cat and put the cat in an enclosed area with a rat, the cat will cower in terror of the rat, which it normally would try to kill. Strange.

All tests of intellectual function damage for LSD users have come up negative. Some suggested temporary damage on visual function tests (the Trail-Making B Test), but as the HPPD data above suggests, LSD may indeed damage the visual system. Even this finding cleared up one year post-drug

Damage to the visual system would logically cause HPPD. Would it make a person weird, strange, odd, bizarre, insane and stupid? Why would it? The visual system effects vision. It doesn’t effect psychological stability or the ability to think or feel in a normal way.

That said, there is anecdotal evidence that very heavy LSD is somehow bad for your brain. It seems to go away if you quit, but it’s there nevertheless. There are reports on the net of users who used LSD very heavily – several hits, several times a week, for a year or so. Afterward, they had symptoms of brain damage.

They could no longer do the intellectual work that they could formerly do, and they had a hard time reading. After a year or so off the drug, their intellect seemed to return. The users were not mentally ill at any time.

The notion of mental illness from the use of LSD is very controversial. It seems almost impossible to understand how a drug that has no permanent brain effects outside the visual system could make a person weird, strange, odd, bizarre, crazy, nuts, insane, or mentally disturbed in any way at all. Surely, if it did so, the etiology could not be from actual brain damage but must be in purely psychological terms: psychogenic.

Nevertheless, we continue to get reports of mental illness after LSD use.

The most frightening to me are reports of mental illness after very heavy use. We have reports of individuals who used LSD very heavily (several times a week at high dose) for a year or two. After that, they became mentally ill and had to be admitted to a hospital. They got better and were released and seemed OK on the outside. But then they got into heavy LSD use again and had to be readmitted.

There are other reports of folks in their 40’s and 50’s who used LSD maybe 2,000-3,000 times. They are reported to be mentally ill to some degree or another.

We don’t yet have any good theory to explain cognitive problems or mental illness in extremely heavy LSD users, but nevertheless, based on anecdotal evidence, one ought to avoid this sort of high-risk behavior.

Timothy Leary probably used LSD between 1,000-2,000 times. I have to admit he looked pretty fried the last few times I saw him on TV. He also used all sorts of other drugs.

As a good general rule though, I haven’t met one person yet who is “permafried” from any kind of drugs. My perception has been that if you quit using, after a while you become normal again. Most of the so-called permafried types are still using drugs heavily. It seems to me that no matter how damaged people seemed, if they quit and sobered up, they seemed to be quite OK once they were clean.

I’ve met some folks who seemed damaged from very heavy dope use, but in the one case I can think of, he wasn’t really strange or weird. He could be socially inappropriate, and his basic problem was he didn’t give a damn about anything. You will find this personality syndrome in a lot of very heavy users that otherwise function pretty well – they seem like they don’t care about much of anything.

He couldn’t hold down a job because he was so damaged that he couldn’t even make change. Yet I was at a party with him once and he picked up this gorgeous young blond ten years his junior and fucked her brains out that night. How nuts can you be if you can pull off something like that?

I met another fellow like that on the streets of San Francisco 15 years ago. Smart guy, Masters Degree from a good university, lived off a trust fund, traveled the world, partied his brains out, in his 40’s.

He had that “I don’t give a fuck” attitude, but I don’t consider that mental illness. Hell, I don’t consider most stuff mental illness! He wasn’t ready for corporate America, but he didn’t want to be either, and I didn’t consider him mentally ill in any way, shape or form.

But then I think the whole notion of “crazy” is horribly abused against people who aren’t even nuts at all.

I’ve known many individuals who used drugs heavily for years who are now more or less sober, although some continue to use cannabis. For the life of me, I can’t see how even one of them has been permanently damaged by their drug use. I haven’t met a permafried person yet, but I guess there’s always a first.

I keep meeting people who used cocaine very heavily for 5-10 years, or so heavily as to have to go into drug treatment, or took LSD up to 300 times or so, or have been smoking pot for 20-30 years and still are, now heavily, in their 40’s. For the life of me, I can’t see anything wrong with them now. Some of them have very good jobs and make $100,000/yr or so.

Despite a lot of theoretical support for the “permafried” notion (in that many of these drugs are now being found to actually damage your brain), I haven’t seen much of it in my life. If anyone knows any “permafried” individuals who are now clean and have been clean for a while, let me know in the comments.

Until then, I think the whole notion is ridiculous.

Dope Sucks

Repost from the old site.

At the time I was into getting high, roughly 1973-1988, there wasn’t a lot of good information that most of that stuff was bad for you, or certainly that it was bad for your brain. There was a lot of information that said that drugs could be used recreationally in moderation without problems. That was the spirit of the age. It’s dead and gone now, maybe forever.

I keep thinking that if I knew then what I know now, I would not have gotten into drugs as much as I did. The drugs all seem so much worse now because our information is greater. My use was really a product of an era as opposed to just some general degenerate tendency of mine.

Cocaine.

Towards the end of the period, cocaine had turned from the Yuppie Party Drug into the Evillest Drug of Them All. A lot of us were still using it, because we couldn’t seem to make sense of how this drug had gone from White Status Symbol to Black Slum Drug. I guess we just didn’t believe it. We still thought we could use the drug recreationally.

Over a 13 year period, I probably did about 16 grams of cocaine by myself. Most non-dopers are horrified when I tell them that; they assume that anyone who used for 13 years is automatically an “addict”. But if you know anything about coke, you know a little over a gram a year is nothing more than dabbling, and it’s not really serious cocaine use at all. Further, of course you can do coke for 13 years without getting addicted. I did so myself.

But just about everyone I knew who got into coke at least to the extent that I did turned into an addict. Sooner or later, sniffers move on to smoking or shooting, because it’s simply a more economical way to take the drug.

I’m convinced that cocaine is a great big drag. For instance, I’m such a dabbler that I would actually save up coke. I’d get some out for the evening, lay out of a few lines for everyone in attendance, then sit back and drink Heinekens with everyone else. Coke is such a stupid drug that you can’t just give people a little bit of it and then put it away. If you do, you’re risking a riot.

After an hour or two, they start bothering you for more. You tell them that you’re saving it for later. Now they start getting belligerent.

I’ve had people swear right to my face that they were going to come back when I wasn’t home and steal my coke. The very idea of “saving coke” from one night to the next was considered to be the ultimate in stupidity, and they were going to punish me for being a moron.

So, really, coke sucks. It’s no fun. Even if you can somehow stay a dabbler like me, everyone else turns into an addict, and when they do, they’re actually dangerous to be around.

The addict idiots would come over, excuse themselves to go to the bathroom, and then shoot up in there for the next thirty minutes. We’d be out in the room steaming away. When the guy came out, we’d confront him and tell him to quit shooting up in the damned bathroom, but they never would quit. Addicts don’t take no for an answer.

Other coke addicts stole from me, then had the nerve to blame it on the coke, then told me flat out the money was never coming back. No problem, as long as you stay the Hell away. But they wouldn’t. They rip you off, then they keep knocking on your door and coming around.

I kept banning the worst ones, but they would come back, like males who batter their wives, bearing gifts and apologies. Soon they were back into their abusive manipulative addict game again.

One of the reasons I moved to Central California was to get away from some of these morons. I’d banned them over and over, but they kept coming back. I’d known them for many years, and they were still friends with all of our friends. Sometimes to cut yourself off from these idiots, you might just have to pack up and move away from them.

The addict has a personality. The personality is that of a callous, manipulative prick. There are some decent or classy addicts out there, but those are mostly dealers who deal to afford the habit. If they’re not doing that, they’re hungry for cash and all sorts of other stuff all the time, and probably mooching off or using others. The addict is a user. He doesn’t care about you or anyone else. The only thing he cares about is dope.

Speed.

Speed has got to suck even worse than coke. I did meth around three times in my whole life. When I tell this to non-users, they get a snarl of contempt on their face. But I’m comfortable with it. Three times is basically nothing; it’s experimental use. Why should I feel guilty about it because some annoying Puritan shit wants me to be?

The reason I only took it three times is because that’s how long it took me to realize it’s one of the most awful drugs on Earth. The high is excellent. You’re smart, in control, sane, happy and confident. You feel warm and friendly and talk all night with your wonderful friends. You don’t act wild or crazy or insane or anything like that. Your mind is sharp as a pencil, and your emotions are controlled. It lasts a good 18 hours.

The next day you feel like you got hit by a freight train. First it feels like your IQ just dropped 10 points. The stupid feeling gradually goes away after about a week. Your body feels like a sack of bones. It feels like someone took a vacuum cleaner and sucked all the energy out of you. That lasts a few days too.

So 18 hours of high is followed by up to one week of crash. Who needs this?

PCP.

PCP is a really strange drug, and I took it about a dozen times, mostly unwittingly. When I tell that to non-users, they get this wild, horrified look in their eyes, but it’s no big deal. A dozen trips is experimental use, and I don’t regret a thing.

Back in the 70’s, scumbag PCP users were common. They were evangelizing, and the way they did it was to pass PCP joints around masquerading as pot joints and not tell you.

You could always figure it out real quick due to the bizarre minty metallic taste, but you were still mad at the dusters for being so dishonest. The first time was out of this world; the rest of the trips were unremarkable. I’ve certainly heard of people doing strange things on the drug, but I’ve never seen it much myself.

I remember once I was at a party in downtown Huntington Beach in 1976. There was a band playing, then people started passing joints. At some point, the dusters sneaked theirs in too. By the time I realized it, I was flying, so I just kept taking hits off the PCP jays.

This was a party of around 20-30 young folks, most around age 18, and everyone was high on PCP. Not one person was acting weird in the slightest. Non-users don’t get it. Even crazy drugs like PCP typically don’t make most folks act nuts.

LSD and psychedelics.

Acid and all the other psychedelics suck because just about everybody on Earth despises them and the people who take them. We were never in the stage of psychedelic acceptance when I was using them from 1974-1988, and I’m not sure if we ever will be.

Nothing strikes terror, rage and disgust into the heart of the non-user like the word LSD.

In truth, psychedelics are probably my favorite drugs of all. I took them about 40 times and never really had a bad trip.

Once on mushrooms on got on a bit of a bad trip – sort of an anxiety – awkwardness – nerd trip where I suddenly felt like the biggest geek on Earth. I was with a tripping partner and he wasn’t cool about me being transformed into Ultra Nerd.

So I turned the trip around. There were bad nerd vibes with strange deep blue colors and energy fields running through my body like waves of electricity. Those were the shitty nerd vibes. The rest of you might refer to them as an emotion. The fascinating thing about psychedelics is the way your feelings actually become extremely electric and even colorful. Joy has one color, sadness another, on and on.

Well, I decided I was going to turn this trip around. It took me about 45 minutes, but I was able to do it. I took the bad nerd electricity, changed it from blue to red and changed its direction. It was going from my skull down all through my body and out my feet in a big fat blue-purple electric drag feeling.

I changed it by reversing it. A new red electricity feeling would start at the toes and go up, fighting the perennial 18 year old vibe in a sort of battle of the feelings. It took me a good 45 minutes to get the good feelings going in an excellent flow that didn’t hang up on the bad stuff on the way up. Then the trip was turned around and a really crappy trip was turned into a fantastic trip.

You know that, you bad trippers? A lot of you can do that. You can change your trips, turn them around, make them go this way and that way. It’s just a drug. You’re still generally steering the ship you call your mind.

I often would buy a hit of LSD and just keep it in my drawer for months or even years until I felt that I was ready to take it. I would wait until a period in my life when I was feeling happier, more together and more mentally healthy and centered than I had in a while. Sometimes I might have to wait a while until I felt my head was ready for it.

That’s really the only way to take LSD. Never take it when you’re out of sorts in any way at all, in a bad mood, or in a bad, down or stressed out phase in your life. That’s how bad trips happen.

I haven’t taken a psychedelic in 20 years. I probably won’t take one ever again.

You really don’t get any credit for being a casual, recreational or responsible doper. It’s hard to do with most drugs anyway, but you can do it with pot and possibly psychedelics.

But you don’t get any credit. If you take a hit off a joint once a year, you’re the same as some guy slamming a gram of coke a day. The non-users hate all dope and all dopers, and that’s one of the sad rules of the game.

With booze, people are pretty sane. If you drink lightly, say no more than 1-2 drinks a day, most non-drinkers are sane enough to recognize that that’s not a problem.

Not so with dope. If you don’t use, you hate it, and you hate people who use it. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a non-user who was tolerant towards any kind of kind of drug use. Ex-users are pretty much the same way. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met an ex-user of even marijuana who was willing to tolerate it in anyone else. Once they put on that ex-doper crown, they get up on that high horse and never get off.

It’s for all of these reasons that I think dope sucks.

Drinking is fun in part because it’s socially acceptable. Things that aren’t socially acceptable are a drag. You’re always paranoid about who to reveal your drug use too, and you’re always running into morons who think that heroin and weed are one and the same.

Not because dope is bad for you or you’re evil or immoral if you use it, but more that the whole scene around it, and the ridiculous non-users, is a great big gigantic drag. If even pot ever gets to the point where non-users can accept it the way they accept social drinking, maybe it might get fun again.

Sexmaniacman On Borderline and Schizotypal PD

Repost from the old site.

A commenter notes:

Schizotypal was always the odd-man-out personality disorder — both literally and figuratively.

Sexmaniacman thinks he had a gf once who was both a Borderline and a Schizotypal:

Hi Bob, this chick was so nuts, man, oh man oh man. She had a dx of “Borderline Schizophrenia” and was a serious acidhead.

She proudly said, “I’ve always been crazy.” Her Mom was schizophrenic and had tried to stab her in the back and kill her when she was 4 years old. Her life was desolate, and she would move back and forth between all these different personalities that you could not keep track of.

She lived in Hollywood, was a fag hag and was always getting picked up by guys and abused. She let groups of guys gangbang her and all sorts of crazy shit. She was always telling stories about guys or groups of guys picking her up, tying her up, torturing her, having sex with her, and threatening to murder her.

The stories seemed almost too weird to be true, but she was an extreme submissive who obviously was giving off “hurt me” vibes that a lot of sicko dudes might have picked up on and acted on.

She was also a bit bi and had sex with women sometimes. But she liked young girls, like 14 years old! Whoa! She also liked young boys, like 13 years old, and she loved to entertain me with stories about breaking in 8th graders. She was an old pro at this. I thought it was just plain weird.

We were going to go a lesbian bar in Hollywood and try to pick up a girl to take home with us (that was real easy to do in LA, which is full of all kinds of gays, bis and swingers), but she was so weird, I figured we would never be able to pick up any decent women.

Her idea of a good time was going to a gay bar and hanging out there all nite. I said pass.

She literally ate acid by the handful, five or eight hits at a time.

I took her to a Cure concert and for some weird reason, all these Goth chicks were grabbing me and trying to molest me the whole time at the concert, even when I was with her. While we were walking around, while we were sitting at the concert, the women just wouldn’t leave me alone. The whole thing seems like a hallucination now. It was 1983. She was flying on a handful of acid.

I took her to see Pink Flamingos, we watched Divine eat dog shit off sidewalk, and she thought that was hilarious. We went to see The Story of O, which I thought was weird, but she insisted was the story of her life.

She kept wanting me to inflict pain on her in all these different ways (A LOT of women are into pain! Is that weird or what?) but I wasn’t really into being a sadist too much. I did inflict some pain on her, but I didn’t really enjoy it. She sure did! Damn right! But it was the weirdest joy, a joy in a bottomless sadness. I couldn’t relate.

We went at forever, and she was a real screamer. One night she turned me in the middle and said, “You know what, Sexman?”

“What?”

“You’re a good fuck.” She repeated that a few times.

I’d just been turned into a complete sex object by a woman, and I didn’t even care.

I’d leave her place at the end of the weekend. Her Hollywood apartment complex was full of all these Guatemalan and Mexican illegal aliens. It was 1984 and the invasion was well under way. I guess the guys had been listening to her sexual opera performance all weekend because as I walked out, the Hispanic guys would all stand up and start clapping for me and raising their beers.

Cheers to the Master Fucker! She would drink, take acid, smoke pot, do speed, and then grab a bottle of antidepressants and start taking pills and downing them with a glass of booze.

“Whoa!” I said. “What do you think you’re doing!”

“You don’t know the pain I’m in Sexguy,” she whimpered and started crying. “You have no idea what it’s like. I need this, Sexdude.”

I shrugged and hoped she didn’t die on my watch. Who wants to deal with a dead chick and cops?

She was schizotypal in that she used language in really weird ways, and even though she insisted she had all these friends, she seemed really isolated. Plus she was just flat-out fucking weird in a way that Borderlines simply are not. Like she was on another planet, an alien. Invariably, she accused me of being a fag too for some reason like all of her faggot friends, and that pissed me off.

I will say she had more insight into my personality at the time than most other women have ever had.

She used to regale me with stories about her gay friends. Her gay friends were all these seriously weird masochist dudes into the leather scene.

Her eyes got really wide.

“My friend Jim, he’s not satisfied until the welts are this big.”

That’s one of her sicko masochist gay friends. Every time she talked about them, I told her to shut up as she was grossing me out.

She stretched her fingers to make about a one inch measurement. In her eyes, she was trying to shock me and I know it turns her on. She wanted one-inch welts too. Obviously. Like Hell you’re getting ’em from me, you sick bitch, I thought.

She called me one time but I wasn’t home. A woman I knew was over at my place in my absence and answered the phone. “Tell Sexman it’s just me,” she sighed wearily into the phone. “It’s just me. Just V.” Her self-esteem was 80,000 leagues under the sea under an anchor. The woman hung up the phone.

Later the woman said: “That’s the woman you’re dating, Sexguy?”

“Yeah,” I sigh.

“Wow, she seems like she thinks she’s the biggest zero on the face of the Earth. How sad.” The woman shook her head, and an incredible sadness came over her face too, a hundred years’ worth.

“I know.”

I broke up with her.

“Can…you…at least…give me a reason, Sexcat?” V. whimpered into the phone.

“You’re just too nuts for me. I mean, I’m nuts, but I’m neurotic. You’re way more crazy than I am, and I just can’t deal with you. It’s like dealing with someone from another planet. I can’t handle you. Good luck in the rest of your life.”

She called me a few days later, crying.

“After you broke up with me, Sexbro, I put my fist through a wall, I was so mad. Now I have a hole in my wall.”

“Over me? You did this over me? Why? Don’t bother, V. Don’t smash walls over me. I’m not worth it. Smash walls over someone else…Look, I can’t handle this, this is way too nuts.”

I got a new girlfriend, K., pretty soon, and V. had given me VD like most sluts do, something called Trichomonas with no symptoms in the male. I immediately gave it to the new girl, and it causes four days of misery in the female. The new woman was pissed.

I said the only thing you can say when you give your girlfriend VD.

“Hey, don’t ever say I never gave you anything.”

I thought that was pretty funny.

She sure didn’t. Icy eyes shone at my across the room.

“That’s not funny, Sexman.”

“Yeah it is.”

“No it isn’t.”

I saw V. again two years later. She came down to visit me, an hour’s drive. I saw her on my porch like a lost poppy, the most forlorn thing you ever saw. We went inside and had some wild sex for a couple of hours. She got pissed at the way it ended and left in a huff.

I never saw her again.

I assume she’s dead, probably long ago. The way she was, she couldn’t have lasted long.

Sexmaniacman On Seduction

Repost from the old site.

Sexmaniacman just told me the following:

Hey Bob, a woman just told me that I have a take it or leave it attitude. I was interested, but obviously, I said, “Yeah, so what?” Then she said, “See? That was take it or leave it right there.” I said, “Sure, I know. So what.” Then she said that was what she loved about me (this take it or leave it attitude that she says she actually dislikes), and then mentioned how she wants to have sex with me.

For some reason, I thought, “Ho-hum, she wants to have sex with me, yawn.” And I like this woman. But this “I can take it or leave it” attitude towards sex feels really liberating. Make them work for it. I’m a privileged catch and you have to work to get me. I think women really despise guys who crawl all around trying to kiss up to them and accommodate them.

I never realized I had such a dicky attitude, but I think it’s the best. On the other hand, you should also try to be accommodating to others to some extent, and I do.

I’m reading this guy’s blog here, which is all about picking up chicks. It’s for young guys in their 20’s who are upper middle class yuppies. Everyone else needn’t bother to read.

I disagree with some of the stuff he says, but he does have some good points.

He says never complain about a lousy kiss from a woman. I disagree. You go to kiss a woman at the end of the date and she turns her cheek and lets you peck her cheek. Lean back and say, “Wow,” real sarcastically.

Most of the time, that will get her back up and she’ll start kissing you for real. If that doesn’t work, make fun of her. Say, “You call that a kiss? Where’d you learn how to kiss? You don’t even know how to kiss.” But say it humorously, not angrily.

Women actually like to be provoked. It works pretty good to suggest they can’t kiss worth a crap or they are probably frigid and lousy in bed. That’s a direct challenge, and a lot of the time, they will respond to it by showing you, “Damn right I know how to kiss/fuck, etc, baby!”

The mistakes he is talking about are guys who don’t know how to read women. You have to read women. You need to be an expert in verbal and nonverbal communication. I’m still learning this stuff every day, and I figure it’s a Lifetime Course. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough, because you really do need to learn this stuff in order to deal with women.

Here the guy asks his date to kiss him. I’ve always thought that’s the stupidest thing in the world to do. Never ask a new woman if she wants to have any kind of sex act. Don’t even ask your girlfriend if she wants to have sex. Let her ask you or take the initiative.

I’ve always just been a Rapist and an Attacker. I just grab at them or needle them with my feet or make rude sexual remarks. I always make a big joke out of it and I’m laughing and screwing around the whole time.

It’s hit or miss that way, but I’ve had sex with scores of women. The only new woman you should ask if she wants to have sex with you is a whore. Any other female is probably going to say no, and they don’t get better as they get older.

Generally, you have to wait until you get the proper signals that it’s ok to assault her. You might have to wait a while. The signals might never come, in which case you probably don’t assault her. Just figure she’s a lost cause and don’t date her anymore.

If you try to assault her and she pushes you away or threatens to call the cops (Yes, it’s happened to me) just shrug your shoulders, forget about her, and then act mildly put out the rest of the night. She’ll feel bad and try to make up for it. Act like, “Gimme one reason why I should date you again?” Not angry or anything, just “take it or leave it.”

Assault can be very soft, slow-motion and tender, like a movie that’s in slow motion, or you can just push her up against the wall and kiss her really hard. I’ve done both many, many times, and I do recommend this approach.

Bob, I remember one time I was out with this rock band. I was trying to screw the lead singer, whose name was Ann.

I won’t give you the name of the band because there were sort of big around LA for awhile (she’s still kind of famous and there are pics of her on the Net)and this might get back to me.

I just Googled her and it turns out that later she went solo and formed her own band and released some albums. She also played with some of the big LA punk bands. You can order her records on Amazon and some other places. She’s still performing up til 1989, then she’s gone.

There was another woman there, Linda, and I’d already had sex with her, but now we were sort of through. I think Linda and Ann were having sex at some point.

They were all a bunch of goth rockers and I was a punker with a leather jacket and an attitude. The goth guys were mostly fags or bi or might as well have been. If you were good looking, confident, cocky and didn’t act like a total queer, you could clean up with the goth chicks, who were mostly bi themselves, by the way.

You just had to play this role of arrogant, old-fashioned guy disgusted by all the rampant homo/bi-sexuality in the scene. The chicks all thought that mean and horrible and disgusting, but then they wanted to have sex with you too, because you know, you were really the only real man around.

I was in the back seat in a car full of this punk band’s members, and I kept reaching up in front and grabbing Ann. She was reaching back and we were playing games with fingers and grabbing or some shit.

Everyone else was talking and watching us like, “What are they doing, anyway?” I was partly doing this to piss off Linda, and she didn’t like it too much. But she wasn’t putting out anymore anyway, so I was a free man, and she needed to avert her eyes and shut up.

We were walking into this Denny’s at like 2 AM and I finally realized how pissed I was at Ann. She’d been teasing me like this for way too long. As we walked into the doorway, I suddenly grabbed her and shoved her up against the wall and kissed her real hard. Then, just as quickly, I let her go and smiled like nothing had happened.

The whole party (the band members) was like, “Whoa!”

Linda asked with a weird smile, like I was acting extremely weird, “Sexman, what do you think you are doing?”

Duh. What do you think I’m doing? Ann acted like she didn’t know what hit her, but she liked it of course. The guys in the band were like, “Whoa, this dude’s hardcore, man.”

We went to the table and everyone made sure Ann was out of reach of me because now I was a confirmed public assaulter-rapist, and they didn’t want any more scenes. But Ann was smiling and chatting me up the whole meal.

It’s good to give women orders too, Bob. Have you ever done that? Do. I picked up this woman in a bar once within like three minutes of walking into the joint. It was a place called the Anti-Club in Hollywood. It was 1985, the show was Christian Death, and it was too awesome.

Three minutes, I bought her a drink, had my arm around her and was feeling her up. We left the club for a while, drove around and sort of had sex in the car while driving around Hollyweird, then went back to the club.

At the end of the show, the date had gone sour, and she tried to ditch me.

I looked at her and said, “Hey, look, you don’t understand. You’re not going home with them. You’re going home with me.” Smiling the whole time.

That got her back up good. “Oh yeah? Who says?”

“Says me.” Still smiling.

“Wait a minute. Let me try something.” She tells me to stand up straight on the sidewalk and looks me up and down lasciviously for about a minute like it’s some kind of test.

“OK,” she said. So I drove her home from LA to Orange County and we managed to have sex in the car on the 5 Freeway in downtown LA going 55 miles an hour at 2 AM, which is always interesting.

She had the same name as my Mom. I told her that, and she acted disgusted, like, “Fuck your Mom, you wimp. Obviously you’re abnormally attached to her.”

Another time I had a new woman in my bedroom. I had her top off and was feeling her tits.

She whimpered, in this totally lame voice, “Please let me go home.”

Obviously she didn’t mean it.

I said, “No way, you’re staying right here.” Not real psycho-like, but firm nevertheless.

She was free to leave, as the cops say, and her car was in the driveway. At some point there was an argument.

I said, “Get over on that bed right now.” Same way, not real crazy, but firm nevertheless. She was free to say no.

Of course, she scurried over to the bed very obediently like a little puppy. Then, later, at some point, she didn’t want to have sex or something.

I just got out of bed, walked over to the couch and said, “Fine, if you don’t want to fuck, I’ll just sleep on the couch. You sleep on the bed. See you in the morning.”

And closed my eyes.

Not two minutes went by and I heard this little bird chirping, “Come on over to the bed.” You can guess what happens next.

So a proper mixture of assertiveness and indifference can sometimes work wonders.

I’m sitting here, Bob, thinking that I have to get rid of this take it or leave it attitude, but the major part of me says, “Who cares? This is the way I am, and I’m not out to kiss up to or accommodate everyone else. This is me and this is my style, like it or not, I’m not making any major changes to suit you or anyone else.”

This Roissy guy is going on and on about alpha males and beta males. I confess I don’t get it. What’s the difference? Do betas get lots of women, or is that impossible? I have a huge ego, I strut around like a rooster, I’m cocky and vain, and I think I’m Joe Hotshot With the Chicks and King of the World combined, even though it’s not true at all anymore. So is that alpha or what? I’m not sure I understand what he’s getting at.

Amerindians, Hypertension and Obesity

Repost from the old site.

I recall when I worked for an Indian tribe a decade or so ago. Some silly White liberal health workers came in one day and I went in to talk to them. What was I doing at the Indian tribal headquarters? Why, I was employed on a government grant as an anthropologist and linguist. Wow, how fascinating! And what did these silly PC health workers do? Why, they went around wherever doing health work with Indians.

Why did so many of these Indians have high blood pressure (HTN)? I was dying to know. First came denial. Whites have HTN too, you know. The angry, suspicious and uncomfortable looks were already starting. Ok, but Indians have more. Way more. What’s it all about? The entire conversation was soon veiled in hostility, suspicion and out and out bad vibes.

I finally got out of these liberal dipshits that the diabetes epidemic among these Indians was giving them HTN. Diabetes causes hypertension. How? It destroys your blood vessels by narrowing them. Narrow blood vessels gives you HTN. Why the diabetes? Abandoning the native diet and the taking up (with gusto) of absolutely the very worst (And I do mean the worst!) aspects of the White man’s diet.

I suggested that the high Indian rate of diabetes was due to genetics and an inability to adapt to a White diet they had not evolved to eat. By this time my conversation with the idiotic White health workers had deteriorated, and I kept trying to rescue it. Did you know that genetics and genes do not exist, or, if they do, that they are irrelevant in humans? That there is no such thing as race?

I had wandered into race-denier Hell and, as in a Sartre play, there was “No Exit.” Accusations of racism, veiled and otherwise, were hurled in my direction. I was an evil racist and I deserved to die.

Turns out Indians, like indigenous peoples all over, have adopted a thrifty metabolism due to surviving many famines. You have a horrible famine, and the only folks that survive are the ones who can eat hardly any food and somehow manage to not die. Their genes get passed on, and you end up with a race that doesn’t need much food to get by.

They live well on a native diet, but on a modern diet (which they invariably adopt the very worst aspects of) they become obese and develop epidemic diabetes and all of the resulting problems. This is also true among Oceanians, Aborigines and Hispanics, who have lots of Indian blood.

The Indians’ idiotic response to this was to blame Whitey for creating an evil diet and I guess force-feeding it to poor helpless Indians, probably by feeding tubes while they were strapped helplessly to their hospital beds. My response, muttered under my breath many times, was, “So quit eating it already!”

Actually I said it out loud a few times. Yep, they admitted doggedly, we gotta quit eating this crappy White man’s food. Next time you see them at the supermarket, it’s a whole shopping basket loaded up with the very worst foods in the store, and the Indian pushing it can barely squeeze through the aisle.

Some people never learn.

Indians are addicted to the Blame Whitey Game. It’s their favorite pastime.

Yet More Romance Intelligibility Figures

From here.

I happen to agree with these figures. The figures involve the intelligibility of various Romance languages, spoken and written, for speakers of Spanish.

Intelligibility for Spanish speakers, oral: 77% of Galician, 55% of Catalan, 54% of Portuguese, 25% of Italian, 1-5% of French and many Italian dialects.

Written: 93% of Galician, 90% of Catalan, 85% of Portuguese, 50% of Italian, 16% of French.

As you can see, the figures are much higher for written than spoken language. This makes a lot of sense. With my fluent Spanish and some knowledge of Portuguese, French and Italian, I can pick up a fair amount of the written text of any Romance language.

Orally though, I’m typically pretty lost. The best ones are those that are closest to Spanish, such as Andalucian dialect, Aragonese, Asturian and Galician. Leonese is a lot different, heading towards Portuguese. You get to Catalan and Occitan and I start having lots of problems. Portuguese is way harder than you might think, even with my rudimentary Portuguese. Standard Italian as spoken slowly by say a documentary narrator is a bit better.  Street Italian is nearly useless to me, as is Spoken French, Romansch, Romanian, Italian dialects and hard Andalucian.

It’s very interesting that Spanish speakers can understand Galician better than they can Portuguese, but it makes sense. After all, Galicia split off from Portugal long ago and came under the influence of Castillian. I am not sure which Galician they are referring to here. There is a soft Galician that is used on Galician TV which has very heavy Castillian influence. Even I can pick it up pretty well. But there is a hard Galician of the street and the rural areas that is much harder to understand.

The figure for Catalan is much lower than for Galician because Catalan has so much French influence. Look at the dismal figure for spoken French and you can see why Spanish speakers have a hard time with it.

25% intelligibility of Italian sounds about right to me. Spanish speakers can understand Italian much worse than they can understand Portuguese. The figure for French is shockingly low, but it makes sense, as previous studies have shown that nobody can understand the French.

I would agree that Standard Italian, especially spoken slowly by a professional speaker, is much easier to understand than many Italian dialects, which are actually spoken languages. I’ve seen them on Youtube and I can’t make out a single word.

With my Spanish, my figures for written intelligibility of Romance are not as high as those above, but I’m not really fluent as far as reading Spanish goes. I’m a lot better at speaking it and hearing it. Others have given much lower figures than the one above for Spanish speakers reading Galician, but it probably improves very quickly in a short period of time.

The Pig Farm Murders

Warning: Adverse reactions – vomiting – have occurred from watching the video and even from reading this post. Please read or watch with caution.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnBU7FXUgSg]

I’m not sure I had ever heard of this case before, but it’s really bizarre! Robert Pickton and his equally bizarre brother owned a pig farm in British Colombia. They had a building built next to it for “charity events” hosted by the “Piggy Palace Good Times Society.” These events were actually wild booze-fueled bacchanals with up to 1,800 partiers and “entertainment” by plenty of prostitutes from Vancouver’s raunchy and drug-ridden Downtown Eastside district.

The Downtown Eastside has one of the West’s most concentrated populations of drug addicts, mostly using crack and heroin, but increasingly also meth. Most of the female addicts there support their habits by prostituting themselves. There are an estimated 5-10,000 drug addicts living there at any given time. Despite a vigorous needle exchange program that hands out 2-4 million of free needles a year, the population has one of the West’s highest HIV rates: 1/3 of the population and 80% of the prostitutes are HIV-positive.

Around 1983, three years before the Olympics, prostitutes started disappearing from the area. They continued to disappear until Pickton’s arrest in 2002. In 2007, Pickton was tried and convicted of six homicides, all Downtown Eastside prostitutes. He was charged with 21 more homicides of more Downtown Eastside prostitutes, but he may never be tried for those deaths.

He is also implicated in another five homicides of young British Colombian women. He claims 49 murders. He really wanted to hit 50, but he says he got careless and got caught. He really regrets not hitting the big 5-0.

Some of the testimony coming out of the case is outrageous:

The star witness in the trial of accused Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton testified on Monday that she walked into the barn at his suburban pig farm to find him covered in blood and a woman’s body hanging from a chain.

“There was blood everywhere,” Lynn Ellingsen told the court.

“He told me if I was to say anything, I would be right beside her.”

Good Lord! Ellingsen, a prostitute and crack addict, lived on Pickton’s property for a month. Earlier on the same night when she saw the horrible sight, she and Pickton had gone to Eastside Downtown to pick up crack and a prostitute. They went back to Pickton’s place and smoked crack.

Ellingsen had fallen asleep when she heard a noise. She went into the barn and saw Pickton, covered in blood, with a woman hanging from the same chains he used to hang up his pigs when he slaughtered them. The woman on the chain was the prostitute they had picked up earlier than night. Pickton was skinning the woman when she walked in.

The arrest was not his first brush with the law. Five years earlier, in 1997, a young woman had barely escaped with her life. A drug-addicted prostitute named Wendy Eistetter was handcuffed and stabbed by Pickton. In a wild melee, she somehow got out of her cuffs, disarmed him and stabbed him before escaping. A motorist found her by the side of the road at 1:30 AM, wearing only a coat, with multiple stab wounds and took her to the hospital. Charges were mysteriously dropped.

While the investigation into the charges was going on, an acquaintance came forward and fingered Pickton as a suspect. His description of Pickton was riveting. Pickton spent most of his time downtown picking up whores. His farm was a bizarre and creepy place, patrolled by vicious dogs who roamed the property with a 700 pound boar. The dogs and the boar would all attack you if you came onto the property. Good God. Then there was Pickton’s trailer. What were all those women’s pursues and ID cards doing in there anyway?

Pickton’s brother, David, was also a strange guy. In 1992, he was arrested on sexual assault charges. He had attacked a woman in his trailer at the pig farm, but she managed to escape. He was given a slap on the wrist. He looks menacing in his photo.

Police found all sorts of horrible things in their investigation. Women’s heads were found in the freezer, sawed in half vertically. Female hands and feet had been stuffed inside the severed heads. The body parts were sharing freezer space with unsold pork.

Female remains were found in a wood chipper. Women had apparently been chopped in the machine and the meat was fed to the pigs on the farm! In 2004, it was revealed that some of the women were ground up and their flesh was mixed with pig meat from the farm. Thankfully, it was not distributed commercially.

A .22 pistol with a dildo on the end was found, apparently a murder a weapon. The dildo was used as a makeshift silencer. Blood-stained clothing was found in the trailer where Pickton lived. A woman’s remains were found in a trash bag at the bottom of a trash can on the property. A woman’s jawbone and teeth were found near the slaughterhouse on the property, where more than pigs were slaughtered. Another jawbone was found in the mud of one of the pigpens.

Night-vision goggles, Spanish fly, fur gloves, .357 ammo, and a syringe with blue windshield wiper fluid inside were also found. Pickton had injected some of the women with windshield washer fluid to kill them. Pickton had told a friend that women were stripped, handcuffed, gagged and taken to a bed where he had sex with them doggy-style. Afterward, he strangled them on bed using a looped wire. Then they were bled and gutted with the main body parts being fed to the pigs and the rest mixed up with pork offal and taken to a rendering plant to be disposed of.

Prostitutes and other guests were invited to the farm. There Pickton cooked for his guests, offered them drugs and hosted wild, never-ending parties. It now appears that some of the food he was cooking for them involved pork mixed with ground up female victims.

He had taken the remains of some of the women, mixed them with pork offal, and taken them in barrels to a rendering plant, where the rendering machines like this one were used to grind up his victims’ remains.

After a huge investigation involving 54 anthropologists and huge earth-moving machines, the DNA of 30 different women (some say the figure is now up to 80), was found at the site. 27 were identified, all prostitutes.

It now appears that Pickton, aged 52 when arrested, had been killing women for at least 11 years before he was caught. His first known victim disappeared in 1991, when he was 41 years old. However, as early as 1988 and 1989, he was already regarded as dangerous to women. In 1988, women were warning other women to watch themselves around him. In 1989, people were warning women not to go home with him, admonishing them with terrifying tales.

He had apparently grown to hate prostitutes, whom he had been using for years, after as he put it, they infected him with Hepatitis C, attacked him with a knife, stole from him and used him. His rage at prostitutes did not develop until relatively late in life, which is why he did not start killing until age 41, which is quite late to begin a serial killer career.

There are other unconfirmed aspects of the case, with Ellingsen accusing Pickton of having sex with a dead woman’s corpse. Ellingsen and other drug addict-prostitute, Dinah Taylor, lived with Pickton for a while and helped him to pick up prostitutes and bring them to the farm. There is also a possibility that Taylor may have been involved in some of the killings, but she has never been charged. Pickton told his brother David that Taylor had killed some of the girls.

Good overview of the case here.

"Female Logic," by Alpha Unit

In case you wondering, this is satire. It’s Alpha trying to get into the head of the modern militant woman. She doesn’t feel this way herself.
Hi, guys. This is Modern Militant Woman.
Listen – there’s something you’ve got to stop doing. You’ve got to stop talking about how illogical I am all the time. Men have been saying this about women forever. And you guys love to entertain yourselves with little nasty comments about how “female logic is an oxymoron” and how men have to “abandon all logic” to talk to me.
For your information, I am every bit as logical as you are. It’s just that there are certain realizations that create a slight cognitive dissonance in me, and I’m still working that out. But Modern Militant Woman doesn’t back down. If I did, the Bad Old Days would come rushing back upon us, because you guys would just go back to your old woman-oppressing ways if someone didn’t make sure you treated me as an equal.
One of the things you’re gonna have to do to keep us equal is make sure I can go everywhere you can go and do everything you can do, pretty much. Look, I know guys take risks out in the world all the time, day and night, and have to go it alone in all kinds of situations where they have to be able to hold their own with other guys. Well, I want to be able to do all those things, too, if I ever feel like it. Except, I don’t really care for the “risk” part. Because that just wouldn’t be fair, since I’m a woman.
I can’t really hold my own with one of you guys; haven’t you heard about the significant physical differences between the sexes? They’re genetic, so it’s not my fault. So if you ever see me out there acting free and equal, and getting into some of those risky situations, just cut me some slack, okay? It’s not right to take advantage of people who are weaker than you are.
I mean, doesn’t that make perfect sense? The strong have an obligation to look out for the weak. And I’m the weak.
Hey, I’m not stupid. I know I’m the weak. After all this time, some things are still the same. I’m still in this female body that’s just no match for yours, if things ever got down to it. So it makes perfect sense for me to constantly keep you on the defensive. And that’s what I do.
You see, I have to protect myself every way that I can. And if keeping you on the defensive works to my advantage, I’m going for it. After all, a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do. You know. To stay safe.

“Female Logic,” by Alpha Unit

In case you wondering, this is satire. It’s Alpha trying to get into the head of the modern militant woman. She doesn’t feel this way herself.

Hi, guys. This is Modern Militant Woman.

Listen – there’s something you’ve got to stop doing. You’ve got to stop talking about how illogical I am all the time. Men have been saying this about women forever. And you guys love to entertain yourselves with little nasty comments about how “female logic is an oxymoron” and how men have to “abandon all logic” to talk to me.

For your information, I am every bit as logical as you are. It’s just that there are certain realizations that create a slight cognitive dissonance in me, and I’m still working that out. But Modern Militant Woman doesn’t back down. If I did, the Bad Old Days would come rushing back upon us, because you guys would just go back to your old woman-oppressing ways if someone didn’t make sure you treated me as an equal.

One of the things you’re gonna have to do to keep us equal is make sure I can go everywhere you can go and do everything you can do, pretty much. Look, I know guys take risks out in the world all the time, day and night, and have to go it alone in all kinds of situations where they have to be able to hold their own with other guys. Well, I want to be able to do all those things, too, if I ever feel like it. Except, I don’t really care for the “risk” part. Because that just wouldn’t be fair, since I’m a woman.

I can’t really hold my own with one of you guys; haven’t you heard about the significant physical differences between the sexes? They’re genetic, so it’s not my fault. So if you ever see me out there acting free and equal, and getting into some of those risky situations, just cut me some slack, okay? It’s not right to take advantage of people who are weaker than you are.

I mean, doesn’t that make perfect sense? The strong have an obligation to look out for the weak. And I’m the weak.

Hey, I’m not stupid. I know I’m the weak. After all this time, some things are still the same. I’m still in this female body that’s just no match for yours, if things ever got down to it. So it makes perfect sense for me to constantly keep you on the defensive. And that’s what I do.

You see, I have to protect myself every way that I can. And if keeping you on the defensive works to my advantage, I’m going for it. After all, a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do. You know. To stay safe.

“Road to Nowhere” Talking Heads

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYFFc5ZyRQA]

One of my all-time favorite bands.

Saw them at UCLA in February 1979 at the beginning of the punk explosion, when punk was truly cutting edge. The Talking Heads were the shit then. No one had heard of them, and anyone who had was hip.

They did “Psycho Killer” and it brought down the house, except it was outdoors.

There were UCLA students in the crowd. Some sat behind us. Guys who looked stoned and were already feminized and pacified, warm, floppy shells of men, though feminism was hardly even born yet, but they were students, and college will turn the best of men to school pusses.

The women were sort of masculine, as they must be when the males are feminized, otherwise you have a half-filled whole, and nature abhors a vacuum. To complete the circle, the female must become masculine to the very degree that the male has become feminine.

A guy named Lao Tzu figured this out 2000 years before, but even he was too late. It’s so obvious. It’s the way of the circle. A half is never whole. The male and the female are each halves, broken humans. Only through linkage can we fill in the colors and make the circle whole to set the wheel spinning so the cycle can go on. A male is empty without a female, and vice versa. Joined, each is made whole and the emptiness is filled in again.

Heard this in a coffee shop the other day, Starfucks. Well, at least they play good music.

The guys working there were feminized, as they always are in such places. The chicks dig the feminized guys, but the probably never fuck them, the danger necessary for sex that the female requires being lacking. Once again, an unfilled whole. Feminine plus feminine doesn’t fill in the circle with the Number 2 pencil. It just makes a half moon.

I was listening to the song. I was sure I’d heard it before. Some guy my age was in there bobbing his head, along with his daughter. She couldn’t have been much more than 13 or 14, but she was looking at me in that way, half hate, half stare can’t stop, so I knew she was a woman-in-girl, true girls having no sexual world. The guy was a square, but he was bobbing his head. I was moving to where the sound was coming from, where they lurked. We were all bobbing our heads to the music, but no one said a word.

I thought it was Talking Heads, but I wasn’t sure.

Googled it and there it was. 1985, a bad year, but there was lots of sex and tons of drugs, so really, no matter how fucked of a year it was, the palliatives always alchemize it somehow golden, which is all you can do to a shitty year. 1985, in three years David Byrne’s band would break up, true genius being a flash in the pan of youth, as Weininger notes.

The real geniuses are always young, and the greatest bands flash and burn Roman candle-like and smash to bits pretty quick, the Super Collider Reactor of multiple geniuses being too much for the temporal universe of flesh and blood, so they go out in fire not ice, but they are kind enough to leave us the greatness flashes, like those human images burned into walls after Hiroshima, daguerreotypes of genius before they go.

We’re on the road to nowhere, says the song. Well sure we are.

David Byrne says its meaningless and silly, the song.

Like Hell it is. Bout as vapid as the trails of life. Where do they lead? To the bones, or increasingly, the urn and if you’re lucky, a hole in a rock.

We’re on the road to nowhere.

Where are we headed? To nowhere, to death, to a personal Black Hole sucking away whole universes in a pinpoint, at Warp Speed, faster than light.

Well, of course.

Meaningless, my ass, David.

What’s left to do? All there is to do is dance. Get up and dance to the music, fools. For too soon we drop our last.

On Female Emotionality/Illogicality

Alpha Unit comments in the I’m So Sick and Tired of This Shit thread:

Men don’t really know women at all.

Instead of actual knowledge and understanding of women, what they have are assumptions and myths.

“Women have no souls.” “Women are illogical.” “Women see you as friends after you’ve unsuccessfully dated them.”

How did these soulless, illogical beings gain the upper hand over you men? You, with all the soul and all the logic?

Could someone answer that?

Answer: They don’t have the upper hand. We guys rule, even still, probably. It’s a Man’s World, even 2010 USA. As far as the rest of the world, sure, of course we’re in charge.

Look, sure women are more emotionally directed, and men less so. Everyone knows this.

You’re out hunting a bunch of woolly mammoths. You can’t be getting all emotional. It’s dangerous. You have to stay calm and quiet so you can kill the beast. One of you might die in the assault on the mammoth. Man World is an intensely violent place. If guys were as emotional as females, we’d be beating and murdering each other all over the place.

You’re a caveman. You see some guys from another tribe. A dispute occurs, a potentially fatal one. Instead of flipping out and turning to all out war like women do, and then regretting it the next day, you negotiate your way out of it. What if we went to all out war, some of our guys got killed, then we sat down and cried about it the next day and went back to say we’re sorry to the other guys. They’d probably kill even more of us!

We can’t afford to be emotional. It’s deadly. Women can afford to be emotional, hate each other’s guts, start fights and wars with each other all the time, because females are not dangerous. Female aggression is nothing. What happens when women are having a catfight? Nothing. Someone cries, and everyone gets their feelings hurt. Oh, boo hoo. If a men had the same type of catfights that females do on a regular basis, someone’s going to get killed.

Female emotionality is best because her emotions probably pick the best provider for her and tell her when to stay with him and when to leave him. They probably also help keep him around.

Also, female emotionality is great for raising kids and building bonds with other females. Women create the network of civilization around the village. They string it all together through their friendships. Men are also lousy at friendships, so we don’t sow a connecting network together to make the village thing work.

I think men suck at raising kids. Women’s emotionality helps to tune them in to the baby or kid’s emotions and attend to his needs. If it were up to guys, a lot of kids would just die because we don’t care.

The sexes are different. Female emotionality can be hard to deal with at times, even for other women, but it was obviously evolutionarily necessary and probably still is. I don’t feel that either sex is maladaptive. Both sexes are for the most part probably very adaptive in most ways.

The sexes complement each other, yin and yang, and make a whole. Alone, each is incomplete. Together, the circle is complete.

Sure, men complain about women. Hell, women complain about women. But they can’t help it, and neither can we.

And female emotionality is easier to take and less destructive than male violence. Women are nutty and hard to take sometimes, but there’s always another one across the way to trade her in for, and anyway, males have tried to kill me. Not once, but repeatedly. I’m lucky I survived. No female has ever tried to kill me. Compared to male dangerousness, the breezy emotions of the female are a walk in the park.

Getting down to brass tacks, do you really want a world where the women all act like men? Forget it. It’s bad enough that 50% of the population are asshole males, can you imagine if the whole world was like that? Thank God that only half the world is male. Thank God females act like females and not males.

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