I Learned How to Live from Dogs

"The dog is the god of frolic" - Henry Ward Beecher

I had dogs growing up. So did my friends. I played with all of them, except the mean ones (that includes dogs and kids). I found there is a symbiotic relationship between people and dogs. They learn from us, and we learn from them.

The graphic and video above illustrates this. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The Power of the Dog

Rudyard Kipling

There is sorrow enough in the natural way

From men and women to fill our day;

But when we are certain of sorrow in store,

Why do we always arrange for more?

Brothers and sisters I bid you beware

Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy

Love unflinching that cannot lie--

Perfect passion and worship fed

By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.

Nevertheless it is hardly fair

To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years that nature permits

Are closing in asthma or tumors or fits

And the vet's unspoken prescription runs

To lethal chambers, or loaded guns.

Then you will find--its your own affair

But--you've given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will

When the whimper of welcome is stilled (how still!)

When the spirit that answered your every mood

Is gone--wherever it goes--for good,

You still discover how much you care

And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We've sorrow enough in the natural way

When it comes to burying Christian clay.

Our loves are not given, but only lent,

At compound interest of cent per cent.

Though it is not always the case, I believe,

That the longer we've kept 'em the more do we grieve;

For when debts are payable, right or wrong,

A short time loan is as bad as a long--

So why in Heaven (before we are there)

Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

The Real Problem with Drugs

The real problem with drugs is not Mexicans supplying drugs, no matter how vicious and murderous the drug cartels are. When there is a demand, there is always going to be a supply. It's an economic law, and no one can stop it.

Neither is the problem the demand for drugs by Americans, no matter how many of them are the kinds of people who want to do nothing but take drugs. As a wise man once said two thousand years ago, the poor are always with us. Not financially poor, but poor in spirit and character.

The problem is that which gets in between the supply and demand: the State. Specifically, grossly overpaid, underworked, not-very-bright, self-deluded bureaucrats who think the force and fraud of the State can stop both the supply and the demand, though killing and prison.

Let's do a thought experiment and imagine all the Drug Warrior bureaucrats are shipped off to Hell, which is where all of them are going away, and quite deservedly so. Then let's make drugs legal.

What would happen?

Within one day the drug cartels would collapse, since their billions of dollars of profit would immediately disappear — poof, just like that. All the violent crime, including murder, associated with illegal drugs would evaporate on the spot.

The demand for drugs would still be there, but the crime associated with getting the money to pay for the drugs would disappear. Our prison population would cease exploding, since many of those incarcerated are there for drug offenses.

Would people stop using drugs? No. But the problems associated with getting the drugs would disappear. Would real crimes disappear? No. But crimes created by State interference would.

What has to be discovered is how many real crimes would remain when the "crimes" created by State interference cease to exist. Thought experiments can only go so far with that.

As Thomas Sowell and many others have noticed, there are very few solutions in life, only trade-offs. The problem with the lackeys who work for the State is that they think there are solutions, always involving laws, guns and prisons.

If drugs were legal, there might be an increase in drug use. No one knows. If there is an increase, that is the trade-off of making drugs legal. But at the same time, all of the horrendous problems caused by drugs being illegal would disappear.

There is one big problem that would be solved with making drugs legal: no more Drug Warrior bureaucrats. It's not even a trade off. It's one of the few cases in life where there is a solution with nothing bad created someplace else.

That is a solution I think everyone can live with. Except, of course, for the bureaucrats who would be off of the taxpayer dime and have to get real jobs. That is, if any of them are qualified for anything in the private sector, and I really doubt that.

Belonging to an Alien Species

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." - Thoreau

Ever since I was 12 years old I have felt like I belonged to a different species. I've always felt human... well, mostly...but with maybe, oh, I don't know -- some sort of unusual DNA, perhaps like in The Island of Dr. Moreau. That would explain things.

I probably felt this way when little, not that I really remember, what with every day in school being exactly the same, but my report cards (which I have saved) often had comments on them about how I was daydreaming, not paying attention, and not turning in my homework. School bored me. I wasn't "a good fit." Round pegs in square holes never are, even if you pound them real good.

Although the diagnosis did not exist during that time (just yelling), I would have been determined to have Attention Deficit Disorder without hyperactivity (why is there no Excruciatingly Boring School Disorder?). These days, that means Ritalin, a drug related to cocaine. And in the past the diagnosis was often, "Minimal Brain Dysfunction," even though researchers couldn't open your brain and look in there. One of my college girlfriends got that one, and oddly (I'm being ironic), she home-schooled her children.

Ritalin! Drugs for a normal condition! Or else, hey, let's try "brain damage"! Who woulda thunk it?

By the time I was 12 my IQ was 126, which is in the 95th percentile. Later, when I took the Myers-Briggs (MBTI), and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, I found I was an INTJ: Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging. That's about one percent of the population.

The INTJ is often called the "Rational Mastermind," which to me sounds like one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Barsoom" novels. It's also known as the "System Builder." In my case, both are true, and my strongest traits are imagination, followed by reason. I can put both together if I concentrate long enough, and I don't even need drugs. That leads to creativity, or if strong enough, genius, which I've read defined as "a zigzag lightning in the brain that others have not." You think and imagine long enough, concentrate long enough, and boom! -- fireball. Little, big, and everything in-between.

As a kid I was imaginative, and somewhat creative and artistic and weird, although never to myself, just the Muggles. I found that my imagination, logical and rational, allowed me to start with a premise and try different paths to see where they lead. Sometimes I would get so absorbed in thought my imaginary world would be more real than the "real" world -- and I put quotes to highlight the fact that imagination is a real world.

How did I end up like this?

By the way, those of you who think they are "different" or "unusual," which many people say to claim they are "special" or even better than others, generally don't know what you are talking about. To be different is not what you think it is. It has its benefits, but it is also a burden. William Blake, the artist and poet, once wrote about being born "with a different face." I know what he means.

Most kids with "ADD" are boys with blond hair and blue eyes. Such things as autism and Asperger's are concentrated among the red-haired, especially males.

This is strange, isn't it? There is a theory which explains this; whether it is true or not, I don't know.

Some think that red and blond hair -- and there are there blonds and redheads in my family, including me -- originated with the Neanderthals. In short, I have Alley Oop genes.

Supposedly this accounts in large part for the way I am. Or as Thom Hartmann put it, people like me are Hunters in a Farmer's World.

Even if these theories are not completely true (and I think there is much truth in all of them), I still find it instructive to the extent to which misfits will go to understand why they are misfits. I guarantee you the guy who wrote the article about Neanderthals is a misfit, and very much so.

Unfortunately, the public schools are not set up for misfits. They're set up, if anything, to produce a standardized product, like Lego blocks, or zombies, or curdled milk.

If you don't fit in, school will try to hammer you on the top of your head so you do fit. Some people don't hammer so well. I was one of them. I always felt like they were calling down the Firestorm of Conformity on me, followed by being run over by Garbage Truck of Boredom, which then backed up and ran me over again.

One of those who also didn't hammer so well was Robert Frost, the poet, who was dropped from school for daydreaming. What was he doing? Composing poems? If so, he turned out to be pretty good at it.

Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, would get so lost in thought his uncle had to yell at him to get him back. Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and author of The Wealth of Nations, would go for walks at night and get so absorbed in thinking he once fell into a ditch. I've come close to that myself.

Nikola Tesla had such a strong imagination he could design a machine in his head and run it there to see if it worked or not. He didn't find it necessary to build it out there, in "reality."

In his autobiography My Inventions, he wrote, “Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start out on my journeys -- see new places, cities and countries -- live there, meet people and make friendships and acquaintances and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.

"This I did constantly until I was about seventeen when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind.”

One of Thomas Edison's teachers told people he was "addled" and it wouldn't be worthwhile to keep him in school. Whenever I think of this great inventor I am reminded of a comment by David Yarian: "Imagination generates hope -- or more exactly, unleashes creative powers to transform reality into something beyond that which is currently visible."

Albert Einstein noted, totally correctly, "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." This is a guy who rode a light beam, in his mind, to see what happened. How many people can do that?

Some have claimed that Einstein (and Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Newton) had Asperger's). Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that gifted children manifest symptoms of Asperger's, although there are some substantial differences that make the first "gifted" and the second "disordered." Myself, I consider "not gifted" and "disordered" to be the same thing.

In school, imaginative kids are accused -- and I repeat, "accused," as if they're guilty of something, and not even with a trial -- of daydreaming and not paying attention. That is exactly right. They're off building worlds in their heads. Pretty nifty ones, too, I can tell you.

Our schools are very good at identifying certain talented students, although they are not talents I'm interested in. Athletes especially, for one. Ambitious (but unimaginative, and excruciatingly boring) students who make good grades, for another. But kids who are imaginative? There is no place for them, except maybe in the hall or the principal's office, never mind the fact it's the imaginative ones who create, discover and invent. In fact, the first is a prerequisite for the last three. As for athletes and students who make good grades because they are good at rote memorization...like I said, I personally have no use for either of them, so go away, you bore me.

Why this animus against imagination? I've never understood it. It's not like they ever did anything to teachers except ignore them! But it exists. I suspect those who rebuke the imaginative feel they may not be able to function in the "real" world, or that being imaginative is unhealthy, that it will produce more Marquis de Sades or more serial killers or people who can't work in Dilbertized cubicles.

As long as what is imagined is positive and healthy, I guarantee them, they are wrong. And how can anyone use their imagination positively and healthily in a class full of kids, sitting in rows in desks?

The combination of reason, or thought, and imagination is what has created just about everything there is. As Francisco Goya put it, "Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."

Education is supposed to be about identifying a student's strengths and talents and developing them. It's not about pouring knowledge into some tabula rasa empty bucket, but lighting a fire in the brain. The march/sit/march of school is not conducive to lighting any kind of fire -- especially not that zigzag lightning kind of fire.

Or, as William Marts put it, "A tremendous amount of good has manifested into this world from the positive imaginations we have that may start early in our youth."

I often wonder how many people have been lost because of the school system? Not everyone is so strong, or such a genius, that they can overcome the Harrison Bergeron handicaps placed on them at an early age.

People should go to school with their own kind, like fish with fish and fowl with fowl. You don't find fish up in the air with birds (not in this world), and you shouldn't find smart imaginative kids with dumb literal-minded ones. In real life, people associate with those they have common interests with. Forcing together kids who do not wish to be together isn't "socialization," it isn't "education": if anything, it's just plain old trauma.

If imaginative kids were encouraged to follow their interests, I believe we would have more polymaths, more inventions, more discoveries. Imagination strengthens your creative abilities. It is a great power that can change your life, and the world. This would not only benefit such people, but also society.

After all, imagination is the only known thing that travels faster than the speed of light -- it can zip through space and time in a flash. Let's see any valedictorian do that!

“Deviation is necessary for progress to happen.”

Make-up Applied With a Paint-Roller

Some years ago, for one day, I met a woman who I estimated was about 58. She was way overdressed and had on way too much make-up. Her own mother told me she was "high maintenance." (I didn't even ask about this woman, who was far too old for me, but the mother just volunteered it for some unknown reason. Sometimes I think people look at my goofy face and figure they can pour their hearts out to me.)

This woman was fairly good-looking for her age, but she turned out to be a secretary who spent a lot of her money on her clothes and make-up to disguise the fact she had passed her prime about 35 years before. She was divorced and lived alone in an apartment. Her mother also told me she often slept in her old room at her parent's house and sometimes cried out in her sleep.

She was a hostile spinster, the kind who hated a lot of men because they didn't meet her "standards," which of course were bullshit.

I've seen this kind of woman before, and I'm seeing more of them every day.

These days whenever I see a woman overdressed with too much make-up I look at her ring finger. Almost always there is not a ring on it, and if there is I assume it'll come off some day.

You can judge a book by its cover. Just imagine an obese woman at Wal-Mart (I know it hurts but you can do it), wearing lime-green stretch-pants. Do you really think her IQ is above 100?

Years ago I was standing outside the garage at a friend's business, when I looked across the street and saw who appeared to be a woman in her 70s....wearing a miniskirt. At least that what I think I saw.

Later I asked some friends who worked there if what I saw what I thought I saw. Yep, the told me, it was a woman in her 70s. She owned the house she was outside of. They also told me she had stabbed her multimillionaire husband to death, put a tiny cut on her arm, and hide in the closet. She claimed an intruder did it.

Oddly enough, she got away with it. I don't know how she did it. But I knew just by looking at her that there had to be something very wrong with her.

I have found that when a woman is overdressed with too much make-up they are always angry at men. Why? I have found they always expect to find a good-looking, materially successful man...and there aren't that many anymore. And when they get too old, they aren't being asked out anymore, which drives them crazy if they were good-looking and popular when younger.

So of course the men are "shallow" and "immature" because they ignore hostile spinsters and sometimes go after younger women...or foreign women.

In a way I consider it just desserts for these women. What goes around comes around. These are the kind who ignored a lot of men when they were younger, ostracizing them because they considered them not good enough for them. Now the tables are turned, and men are ignoring them.

And you know what? I don't feel sorry for them. Not at all.

You Get Knocked Down, You Get Back Up Again

It was assumed I would go to college, and I did. Yet I wondered about all the male relatives in my quite large extended family. Some graduated from high school and some didn't. None went to college.

Every one of them worked for himself. I wondered about that. Obviously they couldn't work for anyone else. And this working for himself included my father.

After I got out of college I used my degree for three years, then said the hell with it. I was essentially working for idiots, and that included MBAs from Harvard and Yale. They didn't have much of a clue.

Now here's a little digression. The owners of "In and Out" burger once hired a MBA to advise them on how to improve their business. He told them pay the workers less. The owners threw him out and sneered at him as "a suit," i.e., an empty suit with an empty head.

So I became an independent contractor and had a blast. Then I decided to open up my own business, and I realized something about myself I didn't know: I didn't mind at times working about 70 hours a week. I was my own boss.

I had freedom, I answered to no one but myself, and so had control.

Unfortunately the business went under. But it didn't matter. I learned from my mistakes, and a few months later opened up another. This one succeeded and I made a fair amount of money. And again I had freedom and control.

Just like all my male relatives. Sometimes I think this independence is genetic.

It doesn't matter if you lose. Get back up and try again. If you get knocked down, get back up. And if you get knocked down, get up again.

You need confidence and discipline, and those are qualities you should have anyway. This put it this way: two of the Four Cardinal Virtues are Self-Control and Courage. Interesting, hmm?

The other two are Prudence ("able to judge between actions with regard to appropriate actions at a given time") and Justice ("the perpetual and constant will of rendering to each one his right").

The Four Cardinal Virtues are essential to starting and running your own business. If you get knocked down, it takes courage and discipline to get back up and try again. And if you keep trying the same thing over and over and failing, then you lack prudence ("Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" - Rita Mae Brown). Go at the problem from a different angle - which is what I did when I opened the second time. It was basically the same field, but not completely. It was easier and I made more money.

It takes justice to give customers what they want. You don't give them what they don't want and expect to be paid.

People have the wrong idea about the Four Cardinal Virtues. They not religion. They're good practical business sense. They're good sense in general, for your self-respect and the respect of others.

Why Public School is Bad for Introverts

I am an introvert. That means I recharge my batteries my being alone. Crowds exhaust me and make me irritable (more than once I have told women I'm with in shopping malls, "We have to leave right now"), and it means I am imaginative (a "daydreamer").

And when I say right now I mean right now. I am overwhelmed by the lights and noise and motion of the people. It is physically painful for me.

So you can imagine how good of a fit I was in public school. The same bad fit applies to all introverts in public school.

I consider public schools to be a weird combination of minimum-security prison and daycare center. It's also about as close to the military as you will find outside the military. The march/sit/march structure bored me to the point I did little but daydream and do the minimum amount of homework.

I had a lot more fun, and learned a lot more, by wandering around alone on weekends and looking at tadpoles and then checking out books on frogs at the library. I remember what I learned on my own vividly but about the only thing I remember from public schools is learning readin', writin' and arithmetic. I could have dropped out in fourth grade for all the good school did me after that.

Being an introvert doesn't mean I'm unsociable or don't have friends or don't like to go out. I could have been a stand-up comedian or magician. But I have to be alone to charge my batteries. Extroverts gain energy from other people, which is why I refer to the dumb ones (which is most of them) as the Herd/Ants/Sheeple/Borg.

Introverts validate from within; extroverts from without. That's why introverts are the ones who came up with the words "freedom" and "liberty" and why so many extroverts don't really know what they mean and believe the government is Mommy and Daddy and is supposed to take care of their dumbass immature selves.

As weird as it sounds, I felt lonely and cut off in public schools. Now on the weekends and after school I didn't. So for those who say public schools are for "socialization," then why did it not work on me? Why does it not work on any introvert?

It's because we're not allowed to be what we are. School is ideally supposed to identify your talents and develop them. It doesn't do that bad of a job for low-IQ extroverts, i.e. athletes (because extroverts make up 80% of the population), but it does a horrible job on introverts.

To be happy you have to have meaning and community. To me school didn't have any meaning at all. It was without purpose to me. And the community was the ones I created with my friends. The fake community of "school spirit" didn't do anything for me, or my friends, for that matter.

For me school was close to solitary confinement. And that is why is some ways I acted out. In middle school, for example, I was a class clown. It alleviated the boredom and meaningless, as did the daydreaming. The partying and drugs and booze on the weekends was great help, too.

Were I in high school today I know exactly what I would be - a computer-programming, game-playing, pot-smoking, science-fiction-reading weekend-partying hippie-nerd. One with a streak of humor sometimes vicious and sometimes punny. In other words, the kind that created the computer revolution.

Extroverts do not understand introverts because of their low-to-moderate IQs and their lack of imagination (which means they lack empathy, i.e., the ability to put themselves in someone else's place). Introverts understand extroverts because they are smarter and more imaginative. I use a saying of a friend of mine: the smarter understand the stupid a lot more than the stupid understand the smart. Or: introverts understand extroverts a lot better than extroverts understand introverts.

What's probably the most dangerous thing of all is that extroverts, being 80% of the population and lacking smarts and empathy, unwittingly try to destroy introverts under the guise of "helping them."

Clearly, introverts and extroverts speak different languages. Sometimes I think they're almost different species.

The Lack of Imagination and Empathy Among Extroverts

I have found that contrary to the myth, introverts are far more empathic than extroverts. And since women in general are more extroverted than men, this means many women aren't all that empathic. Again, that is contrary to the myth than women are more empathic than men. This is why I've run across several articles on the internet that claims many women aren't empathic.

Introverts are more empathic than extroverts because they are more imaginative than extroverts.

There are people who have little imagination and are completely literal-minded. All of them have problems relating to other people, because it requires imagination to put yourself into somebody else's place.

Imagination allows you to empathize with other people. That’s one of its functions. By imaginatively identifying with them, you in a sense bring them into you, making them part of you. As the philosopher Josiah Royce wrote, right before the 20th century, “Who can realize a given aim save by repeating it in himself?”

Another philosopher, Robert Bass, said the above account is similar to the Stoic concept of oikeiosis, a “process in which we gradually expand our self-concept and recognize larger and larger parts of the whole as ‘ours,’” writes Scott Ryan.

Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, said that empathy (which in his day was called sympathy) was wholly dependent on imagination. If this is true, and I believe it is, then imagination is what creates benevolence in people, since they become empathic through the use of their imaginations. This leads to some truly interesting concepts.

For one: a writer creates a novel, I read it, empathize with the characters through my imagination, and so understand what the author is trying to say. Looked at from a certain angle, it’s mind-reading – and “feeling-reading,” too. As Spinoza wrote: “From the fact we imagine a thing like ourselves…to be affected by an emotion, we are thereby affected by a similar emotion.”

The same thing can happen with music. You hear a song and listen to the lyrics, and you understand what feelings and thoughts the writer is trying to get across. As James Engell wrote in The Creative Imagination, “…sympathy also becomes that special power of the imagination which permits the self to escape its confines, to identify with other people, to perceive things in a new way, and to develop an aesthetic appreciation of the world that coalesces both the subjective self and the objective other.”

“To mean things in a new way” means creativity. Without imagination, there can be no creativity. As Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” He didn’t say knowledge wasn’t important (indeed it’s indispensable), but that imagination is more important. And this is from a man who imagined what it would be like to ride on a light beam. (Of course, Einstein was an introvert.)

Two: I wouldn’t be able to understand what the author was trying to say unless the concepts weren’t already within me. I’d have to be born with them, which means none of us are blank slates, tabula rasas. This means, in a way, we wouldn’t understand the answer to anything unless the answer was already in us.

Three: the “self” does not stand alone, unconnected to anything. If anything, it’s created in relationship with others, even if those others are imaginary fictional characters. “I” don’t exist, apparently at all, or else in a minimal way, unless it’s in a relationship with something or somebody.

Four: if we fully understood someone else – fully, completely understood them – then it seems we’d be that person, or else very close to it. This is similar to a comment by the philosopher Brand Blandshard that to know an object fully we’d literally have to have it within our consciousness.

Even more interesting, if we could incorporate everything into us, we’d be God. We cannot do this, but the fact we can enlarge our selves adding more and more to us through our imagination, is a kind of love.

And if someone can do the same to us, then they, in varying degrees, love us. Or, as Shakespeare wrote, love is the true meeting of minds. What this means is that love cannot exist without imagination. Or, if there are truly literal-minded people in the world, they cannot love.

The word “benevolence” comes partly from the words “wish” and “will.” We direct our will, our attention, on someone, and wish them benevolence. We can’t actually wish it on them, but we can wish it on them in our imagination and feelings, and that is the first step.

This empathy and imagination, and the benevolence arising from them, and the fact our “selves” are created only in relationships, means none of us can exist without some extremely large measure of cooperation. This puts the kibosh on any kind of extreme selfishness as a successful way of life.

Harry Wolfson, a commentator on Spinoza, wrote, “In order to understand another we must completely identify ourselves with that other, living through imaginatively his experience and thinking through rationally his thoughts. There must be a union of minds…”

Spinoza of course was an introvert.

All of this raises some disturbing questions about the introversion, extroversion, men, women, and the relationships between them.

Extroverts make up about 80% of the population and introverts about 20%. Introverts are generally far more intelligent than extroverts and are capable of more concentration and thus more creativity. A world without introverts would be a world with few scientists, musicians, artists, poets, filmmakers, doctors, mathematicians, writers, and philosophers. They are also overwhelmingly men.

A world without male introverts (whom quite a few extroverted women seem to hate, and I know well about this), i.e. a world based on the whims of extroverted, less intelligent women - say feminist women - would be a world with less empathy, less discoveries and creation, less advancement of society...any of this sound familiar? Sure it does.

A good example of this is the Adria Richards (what a dog) kerfluffle, in which an unimaginative, extroverted, not-very-bright feminist got a man fired because she says he was making mild sexual jokes behind her - although she has given conflicting accounts of what they said. She was listening in on a private conversation that was none of her business. Fortunately she got fired, which I guarantee you she does not understand because of her lack of empathy and imagination.

Since Pareto's 80/20 Law explains the oversupply of retarded extroverts compared to smarter introverts, this means only 20% of men and women advance society. Both these men and women tend to be conservative/libertarian. They aren't liberals, and if there are any, I've never encountered them.

Obviously a feminist-centered world wouldn't be a better world. It'd be a worse world, which we are now seeing.

Smart Introvert Men Fleeing From Stupid Extrovert Women

There are two mating strategies. One is low-to-moderate IQ, promiscuous, impulsive, "liberal," extroverted, narcissistic (self-centered), not altruistic, lots of kids, doesn't take very good care of them. This is generally called "r." The second is called "K" and it is high IQ, monogamous, not impulsive, "conservative," introverted, fewer kids, takes good care of them.

It isn't that one person (or group) is all either "r" or all "K". A person or group can show traits of both, but almost always they tilt far to one or the other.

I am an introvert. On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) I am listed as an INTJ, which means Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging. It's not as if I'm all introverted: I almost always score 60% introverted, 40% extroverted. But I understand what I am quite well.

I am high-IQ, ultimately monogamous, self-controlled (not impulsive except in certain circumstances), "conservative," imaginative, focused, altruistic, and both rational and intuitive.

I (and other introverts) are very sympathetic towards the Four Cardinal virtues: Prudence (able to judge between actions with regard to appropriate actions at a given time), Justice (the perpetual and constant will of rendering to each one his right), Temperance or Restraint (practicing self-control, abstention, and moderation; tempering the appetite), Fortitude or Courage.

For all practical purposes, the Four Cardinal Virtues are introvert virtues. This means the Seven Deadly Sins (wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony) are extrovert flaws.

Introvert values are also about excellence in life, what the Greeks called arete. That excellence is how introverts achieve well-being/flourishing, or eudamonia. Extroverts can achieve this, but only by following the values discovered by introverts.

Two examples of famous introverts are Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith, both of whom in many ways founded America. Smith used to go for long walks at night so he could think things through, and once got so absorbed in thought he fell into a ditch. Jefferson was the the same way, although he took long horse rides in the countryside. This is so they could think and imagine while alone, since introverts are recharged by solitude, while extroverts can't stand it because they can't bear to be alone, which essentially means they can't tolerate themselves...which is why they are the Herd/Sheep/Borg.

Examples of infamous extroverts were Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and both Bushes....moderate-IQ politicians and utter destroyers. Introverts saw straight through those extrovert destroyers (as they see through all of them) but low-IQ extroverts make excuses for their behavior and worship them as saviors, even though they were everything but.

Low-IQ extroverts are the types who end up in prison, because they are stupid, impulsive and narcissistic. They constitute the most murder-loving of soldiers. This is because they don't think, in addition to lacking empathy. As Frederick the Great said, "If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks."

Myself, I believe there is far more wrong with extroverts than introverts. This, from a review of The Introvert Advantage: "If the science behind the book is correct, it turns out that Introverts are people who are over-sensitive to Dopamine, so too much external stimulation overdoses and exhausts them. Conversely, Extroverts can’t get enough Dopamine, and they require Adrenaline for their brains to create it. Extroverts also have a shorter pathway and less blood-flow to the brain. The messages of an Extrovert’s nervous system mostly bypass the Broca’s area in the frontal lobe, which is where a large portion of contemplation takes place."

And this, too:

"A world without Introverts would be a world with few scientists, musicians, artists, poets, filmmakers, doctors, mathematicians, writers, and philosophers." It's not totally incorrect to say introverts are the producers and extroverts are the parasites.

Since Pareto's 80/20 Law holds here, with 80% of the world being extrovert and 20% introvert, this means democracy will not work and is inherently self-destructive. It also means anarcho-capitalism won't work, either, because the 80% of the population that is extroverts will in varying degrees cast off introvert virtues and ruin their lives. It's a lot easier to sink than fly, and when extroverts sink they try to take introverts with them.

I'll give two examples of extroverts I know. One, a man, is moderate-high IQ. He became a podiatrist, so he did have some discipline. He has no children because of birth control, and is extroverted, impulsive and promiscuous, with a count of about 100 women, which he achieved through lies and manipulation. He became a drug addict. He shows gluttony and lack of self-control. He's also a coward.

He told me he ruined his life and if he had to do it over again, he'd be a high-school coach.

To the more deluded in the Manosphere, this loser is an "Alpha." In reality the older description is more accurate: he's a cad.

Second, the woman. She got an M.S., so she has some intelligence and discipline. She never married and has no children. She's impulsive, promiscuous, liberal and narcissistic, with a count of probably 30 men. She blames all her problems on men and is envious and gluttonous. She is also a coward.

Now we come to feminism. Feminism is "r": promiscuous, impulsive, moderate IQ, "liberal," envious, gluttonous, greedy, hostile. Feminists (and liberals in general) show far more of the Seven Deadly Sins than the Four Cardinal Virtues. Feminism considers children low investment, e.g. abortion, birth-control, giving them to poorly-paid workers or child-care centers. It is inherently self-destructive.

There is a certain kind of introvert man who is fleeing these snarky butthurt feminists who blame all their problems on men. I've seen many of these men. They are introverted, high IQ, disciplined, with many intellectual interests. They are independent.

These men, through the years, have found women are no longer worth the trouble for long-term relationships, because many of them are extroverted, narcissistic, impulsive, promiscuous, "liberal" feminists who blame all their problems on men, and are hostile. They have nothing to offer a man, even though they don't know it, and wouldn't believe it if told it. After all, it's men with the problem, right?

These are the women who wonder where all the "good" men are, which only shows they can't tell a good one even if he's standing next to her. These women usually describe themselves as "successful, gorgeous, amazing, wonderful" without understanding no man believes a woman says about herself or her friends.

Does any of this sound familiar?

In other words, the introverted men who advance society through invention and discovery are barely marrying and reproducing (as far as I'm concerned, extroverts do little if nothing because they are destroyers incapable of thought or imagination). Many of these introverted men are no longer valued and receive little appreciation and gratitude from modern women. So why should these men get married and have children, when the minuses far outweigh the benefits?

These intelligent, monogamous, self-controlled ,conservative/libertarian, imaginative, focused, altruistic, rational, intuitive men have almost nothing in common with moderate IQ, promiscuous, impulsive, "liberal," extroverted, narcissistic (self-centered), non-altruistic women. In a sentence, women severely damaged by feminism.

I've pointed out both feminism and democracy are inherently self-destructive. This is because the are both "feminine." Socialism, a more extreme version of democracy, is strictly "female." It's based on the female belief we should all be forced to share (which works until we run out of other people's money, which has happened already).

Society is in the process of collapsing because it has enshrined "feminine" virtues, i.e. an "r" reproductive strategy. Once it collapses, the introverts and their values will take over again, unless we want another Dark Ages.

Unfortunately women in general are less intelligent than men (there are twice as many men with IQs above 120 than women). Women are also more relationship-oriented and more extroverted. This means they will be influenced more than men by the dominant ideology. That is, feminism. Which will destroy their lives, and they will wonder why.

So what will they do? Blame their problems on men. Jung made the comment that women's greatest flaw was thinking she was always right. The other side of that coin is blaming your problems on other people. In this case, men, because if you think you are always, then the other person must be always wrong, so logically, they are the cause of your problems. Ergo, to women, men are always the cause of their problems.

Let's put it this way: without introvert leadership, discoveries and inventions, extroverts are damned.

"Negging"? What the Hell is That?

Here's how I would have handled the scene in the video:

Her: (reaches for my ice cream). Give me some.

Me: You can't have any. Girls have cooties.

Her: (laughing) Give me some!

Me: Say pretty please with sugar on top. With whipped cream and a strawberry.

Her: Pretty please with sugar on top with whipped cream and a strawberry.

Me: You may have one bite.

Now here's what the Lost Boys of the Manosphere think happened: Golly gee whillikers! This guy's an Alpha demonstrating he's a high-status male not taking an attractive woman seriously ("negging"), thereby showing he's not a Beta, so she'll be involuntarily attracted to him!

Me: Laughter.

Here's what is really going to happen in that video: sooner or later they will break up. He's actually showing contempt for her, and contempt is the biggest predictor of divorce or a relationship breaking up. Sometime in the future she will throw this in his face.

Neither looks that smart. What am I to think of a man who thinks he looks good with a beard and no mustache? Or a woman who thinks it's 1974 and parts her hair in the middle?

I've got this strange intuitive ability to see patterns. Then reason allows me to analyze what my intuition tells me. That's why I'm seeing a pattern in that video, and why I know their relationship will fail. The Lost Boys of the Manosphere can't see that. That's one of the reasons why they're Lost.

These delusions are what the Clueless-Betas-Who-Want-to-be-Alphas think attracts women. They picked these lunacies up from the worst parts of the Manosphere. They're based on Evolutionary Psychology, which makes me laugh.

Some fields of Psychology are a science (barely) and Evolutionary Theory isn't a science at all. I can come up with evolutionary explanations by the dozens: straight teeth show genetic fitness to reproduce by showing ability to chew food efficiently and thereby extracting all nutrients. Five toes on each foot shows genetic fitness to reproduce by giving balance necessary to run away successfully from predators. The Bushes, although of low intelligence and showing inbreeding because of narrow heads and squinty, beady little lop-sided eyes set too close together, show genetic fitness to reproduce by successfully gaining control of the government and murdering sexual competitors on the other side of the world, including children, babies, post-menopausal women, impotent old men, and pregnant teenage girls.

How about this one: "celebrities" of the Manosphere show genetic fitness to reproduce by giving bad reproductive advice to deluded and naive young men so women will laugh at them and avoid them, thereby preventing them from reproducing.

I've been reading the Manosphere for about a year. I am mystified at some of the things I read. It's almost as if some of these guys are completely at a loss and are looking for guidance. Did they not learn anything from the older mentors? Didn't they have any? Are schools and parents and churches that bad?

Let's take negging, for example. It's supposed to be a "low-grade insults meant to undermine the self-confidence of a woman so she might be more vulnerable to your advances."

That is not what it is. It's about finding out if a woman has a sense of humor.

All humor, excepts puns, is based on hostility - there are always winners and losers. When you do it to undermine someone to make them vulnerable - humiliate them - that's true hostility. When you're doing it to amuse them (and yourself), the hostility is irrelevant. That hostility, however, is something you should always keep in mind.

Also keep in mind humor can be a good way to get rid of your hostility...which is why underneath that humor, many humorists are pretty darn serious people.

What counts as "Game" and negging in the Manosphere is predation based on hostility. Belittling someone and thinking they are going to be attracted to you...what a bunch of 'tards. It's the exact opposite of a humorous, occasional light teasing, which is more play than anything else. And as Dr. Stuart Brown has pointed out, play is essential. That means negging should be fun...not hostile and humiliating.

I am nearly an expert at negging. I've been doing it since I was 12, and it's just part of my character. I even do it to my male friends. I did it to my relatives, also starting at 12, and they thought I was the funniest thing they had ever seen.

Example: I bought a brownie for a woman and me.

Me: You want part of this?

Her: Sure.

Me: Here (gives her a piece the size of a BB).

Her (laughing): You're funny.

Another time:

Woman: Babble babble babble.

Me (pinches her lips shut with my forefingers and thumbs): Hush up.

Her (bursts into laughter): You're funny!

What I've found is that some women hate me. Why? Because they have no sense of humor. And if she has no sense of humor, then why would anyone want to get involved with her?

I've also found that these women who hate me not only don't have a sense of humor, they're also not very smart.

Negging is actually a filtering device to get rid of unworthy women - those with no sense of humor and little brains. Those who think it's some sort of Magic Evo-Psych Voodoo to signal you're high-status to beautiful women...try it and watch what happens. Most women aren't that dumb, and those who are, aren't worth your time. And if you're not a mindless robot spouting the worst nonsense of the Manosphere, you'll find they're not worth your time, either.

Humor is about misdirection (so is magic). Logically, then, humor is magic! They think you are going to do one thing and you do another. One thing, though: it does require some confidence in yourself.

I could have been a stand-up comedian or a magician...except they're too much work. And I'm basically lazy. Smart and funny...but lazy. And I'll say this: if you don't have natural talent, then you really don't have much of a chance. You'll just make a fool of yourself.

If you really think you can get away with nonsense like this: "Okay, I gotta control the frame here, keep cool, gotta neg her, gotta make her think I'm a Alpha who doesn't care what she thinks.." you just might met a woman who sees through you, and responds "Oh, one of those Manosphere guys, huh? Think you're an Alpha boy? Think I'm going to be attracted to you cuz you're trying to neg me? Think again, little boy." (Just remember this saying I got from the Koanic Soul website: "Whom the gods mock, they first castrate.")

What are you going to do then? I'll tell you what you'll do. Collapse. If you don't have any talent at it, and aren't fast of wit, stay out of it. As I said, there are women who hate me because of what I am. It doesn't bother me. Ask yourself if it will bother you.

By the way, if you make a woman laugh...you're in. That bit of advice is a lot more important than all that Alpha/Sigma/Dark Triad bullshit put together.

(Oh, by the way, if a woman smokes and you can make her laugh...first night.)

"The Nail That Sticks Up Is Pounded Down"

That's an old saying about Japan, and it's not supposed to apply to the U.S., but it does. Here I will quote the late Gore Vidal at length:

"One understands of course why the role of the individual in history is instinctively played down by a would-be egalitarian society. We are, quite naturally, afraid of being victimized by reckless adventurers. To avoid this we have created the myth of the ineluctable mass ('other-directedness') which governs all. Science, we are told, is not a matter of individual inquiry but of collective effort. Even the surface storminess of our elections disguises a fundamental indifference to human personality: if not this man, then that one; it's all the same, life will go on. Up to a point there is some virtue in this; and though none can deny that there is a prevailing grayness in our placid land, it is certainly better to be non-ruled by mediocrities than enslaved by Caesars. But to deny the dark nature of human personality in not only fatuous but dangerous. For in our insistence on the surrender of private will ('inner-directedness') to a conception of the human race as some teeming bacteria in the stream of time, unaffected by individual deeds, we have made vulnerable not only the boredom, to that sense of meaninglessness which more than anything else is characteristic of our age, but vulnerable to the first messiah who offers the young and bored some splendid prospect, some Caesarian certainty."

I'll say that according to Pareto's 80/20 Law, 80% of the people in this country are sheep. The other 20% are individuals. More than generally speaking, those 80% sheep are extroverts and the 20% are introverts.

It's even worse than that.

It's men, overwhelmingly, who are the reckless adventurers, be it physically or intellectually. The physical I'm not concerned about here, only the intellectual. And what I and many others have noticed about intellectuals (real ones, not the leftist frauds Thomas Sowell mocked as "the Anointed") is that they tend to be eccentric - at least to the masses.

They also tend to be introverts, the kind who have that hyperfocus that allows them to engage in the concentration necessary to discover/create/invent. Because they are so eccentric and unusual, they tend to be ostracized. Although America is supposed to be an individualistic society (it was far more in the past than today), it's becoming more and more group-oriented (aka fascist). So it's becoming more and more "the nail that sticks up is pounded down."

One of the problems is that about 80% of people are extroverts, i.e., other-directed. They tend to be the destroyers. Politicians, for example (can you think of any politician who isn't an extrovert?). Extroverts gain energy by being around people. As such they are enormously influenced by them.

Introverts, on the other hand, gain energy from being by themselves, and since they aren't particularly dependent on other people, they are far more independent than the group-oriented extroverts. That's why so many introverts are libertarians and extroverts are, well, whatever.

Since introverts have that hyperfocus, along with the independence (and imagination), they tend to be far more creative than extroverts. (As far as I'm concerned, extroverts are incapable of actually thinking - their thoughts are too fuzzy, they can't concentrate and they bounce from subject to subject.) This is why introverts tend to be creators, as compared to the destroying extroverts.

We can use Thomas Jefferson as an example of an introvert, and who was one of Vidal's individuals who had a huge influence on America. Since he was a true individual, it's why the leftists who believe in the Hive or the Borg (which is all of them) hate him and are always trying to destroy his reputation.

The more intellectual and creative of introverts remind me of Aldous Huxley's comment that an intellectual "is someone who has found one thing more interesting than sex."

One thing I've noticed recently about the more intelligent and creative of male introverts is that they are not getting married and having children anymore. Modern women for the most part tend to find them too eccentric, too much of outliers, and to not appreciate or even understand who they are and what they can do. In other words, they are the nail that sticks up and so is pounded down through insults and ostracizing.

I've read some people today who go so far as to claim that introverts (specifically the INTJ) have a lot of Neanderthal ancestry, and extroverts are Cro-Magnon. These people are essentially claiming these two groups are almost different species, and that Neanderthals are the forerunners of today's introverts.

What I find interesting about that assertion is that, if true, modern Cro-Magnons are in the process of destroying themselves. And if species go extinct, good riddance, as long as they are replaced by someone better.

Whatever the reason behind the difference between introverts and extroverts, I do know 80% of extroverts are unwittingly trying to kill off the 20% of introverts. It's the Borg trying to murder or absorb the individualistic introverts.

I don't believe in democracy. Eighty percent Idiots ruling the 20% Smart? Give me a break. It should be the other way around - the introverts ruling the retarded extroverts. Until that happens, the world will be perpetually in a mess.

Love as Appreciation and Gratitude

A woman I know told me she spent a year (if I remember correctly) telling herself to look for the best in every man she met, and found that many of them became more attractive (as an aside, but not much of one, I've read several times women rate 80% of men as below-average in looks).

What this women proved to herself (and indeed to anyone who pays any attention) is that attraction in some measures voluntarily. I couldn't quite figure out, though, why looking for the best in people makes them more attractive.

Then I realized it had to do with appreciation and gratitude. I have memorized this relevant quote from Meister Eckhart: "If the only prayer you said was 'thank you,' that would be enough."

I think many people these days aren't quite sure what Eckhart's quote means. But if you can real true appreciation and gratitude, it is an amazing thing, and you can't be happy unless you have it. That's why I realized my woman friend was telling herself, "Find something to appreciate in these men." And they suddenly became more attractive, not because they were any different, but because she was different.

In fact, in love there is always appreciation and gratitude. This has been confirmed by researchers. I read an article once that said to maintain a relationship you must: 1) feel gratitude 2) show thanks 3) look for appreciation.

There are some differences between those three things. You can to consciously look for things to appreciate, which is what the woman I know did. Then you have to feel the gratitude. Then you have to show the thanks.

The one thing that is absolutely inimical to to gratitude is envy. It's such as old observation there are Aesop's Fables about it, such as "The Fox and the Grapes," "The Ass and the Charger," and one with the obvious name of "Avaricious and Envious."

The last one I will quote in full because it's such an interesting thought experiment: "Two neighbors came before Jupiter and prayed him to grant their hearts' desire. Now the one was full of avarice, and the other eaten up with envy. So to punish them both, Jupiter granted that each might have whatever he wished for himself, but only on condition that his neighbor had twice as much. The avaricious man prayed to have a room full of gold. No sooner said than done; but all his joy was turned to grief when he found that his neighbor had two rooms full of the precious metal. Then came the turn of the envious man, who could not bear to think that his neighbor had any joy at all. So he prayed that he might have one of his own eyes put out, by which means his companion would become totally blind. "Moral: Vices are their own punishment." In a sentence, envy is so agonizing it is it's own punishment.

Let's put it this way: you can't feel envy and gratitude at the same thing. This is such an important thing researchers have put a lot of effort into studying it. Melanie Klein wrote an important book about it, called, not surprisingly, Envy and Gratitude.

Klein found, and many researchers after her, that babies go through three phases: envy, guilt, reparations, gratitude. I have seen this sequence in novels and movies, such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and the Robert DeNiro movie, The Mission.

Think about it this way; until those who envy feel guilty about it, and make reparations, they will never feel gratitude, will never know well-being, will never flourish and never know love and satisfying life.

And the first thing, I'd say, is to look for things to appreciate.

Why the Word "Groovy" and Others Like It Should Come Back

In my hometown the police one night pulled up an elderly lady's okra plants, believing they were marijuana. The woman was like 115 and called the police and told them, "Some young hooligans were up to their shenanigans and absconded with my okra plants." That made me laugh. She was using words almost never used anymore.

What she said reminded me of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (the real one with Michael Rennie, not the fake one with Keanu Reeves). There is a goofy little boy in it, who wears his baseball hat askew (this is in the 1950's), and he's always saying stuff like, "Golly gee willikers, Mr. Klautu, your buddy there Gort sure is nifty." I sometimes do that imitation for friends, which puts them on the floor.

Another word I use is "groovy." When I was about 12 years old a new station popped up on UHF (please don't ask me to explain the difference between VHF and UHF, because with cable everywhere these days no one know what they are anymore). This station on Saturday at noon ran all of Elvis Presley's movie, the ones with names like "Clambake" and "Viva Las Vegas" and they always involved him singing and driving nifty sports cars and getting all the girls.

This funfest was called "The Groovy Movie."

The station also ran all those early '60's Beach Party movies with Frankie and Annette and Bonehead, in which all of them were getting into mischief when they weren't singing and dancing on the beach, or else trying to fend off Erik von Zipper and his motorcycle gang.

Now after all that, I want to say I wish the word "groovy" would come back. Today I still use the word, ironically, usually to describe the deluded fantasies of liberals, all of whom are about four years old emotionally, and whose minds are so fuzzy I can't figure out how the come to any conclusion at all.

I usually describe their delusions as "their groovy little fantasy world." As I said, I use it ironically, because liberals always want to create Utopia but always end up creating a Hell, which they never understood.

The word "groovy" originally meant "in the groove," and it's what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi meant when he wrote about "Flow," i.e. being totally absorbed in something and feeling well-being.

Wikipedia puts it this way: "Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does."

In other words, when everything is groovy you are in the Flow. So calling those Saturday movies "The Groovy Movie" was correct, since when I watched them I was in Csíkszentmihályi's Flow.

In fact, you want a society that maximizes well-being and Flow. You sure aren't going to get it from fascism and Communism and liberalism and socialism, all of which involves the State crushing people through trying to impose Thoughtcrime and Doublespeak on everyone.

You can only get that Flow and well-being and flourishing through political and economic liberty. This is why the Founder's wrote about the "pursuit of happiness," which is a mistranslation of the Greek word eudaimonia, which means well-being/flourishing, and is achieved by arete, or excellence, which can only be achieved by autonomy, mastery and meaning/importance. In a word, it all has to be groovy.

It's all summed up by that one word. And that's why I wish it would come back.

Groovy, man.

The State Degenerates Our Health and Humanity

I am not one to believe our physical, emotional and intellectual development is either all genetic or else all environmental. I’m not even one to say we’re half and half. Nor will I say we’re 60/40, as in “We’re 60% genetic and 40% environmental.”

Believing our development is strictly based on genes is a belief in a determinism so complete it can lead to horrors such as Nazism, with its insistence that some people are born so inferior they have to be eradicated. Claiming our development is completely due to the environment can lead to other horrors such as Communism, because of its belief all of us are infinitely plastic and can be molded into gods – once you get rid of the people who cannot be molded.

This nature/nurture controversy has led to many furious debates not only in the past, but today. These arguments will exist in the future. There is a third alternative, one that I believe is much more fruitful than the simplistic view of “We’re mostly one or the other.”

The third one is known as fetal programming, which I heard about it several years ago, but hadn’t given much thought until I recently met a woman who has a Masters degree. Okay, lots of women have Masters degrees. But one brother also has one, in Mathematics. Another brother is a TV, stage and film actor. Then there is the sister who designs jewelry and sells it. I told her, “You do know of course the existence of your family is nearly impossible.”

She told me she came from a big happy family, and that got me to thinking about fetal programming. In short, and oversimplified, fetal programming is the theory that hormones released by the mother during pregnancy have a very powerful effect on the fetus.

My view, long before I had heard of fetal programming, is that a happy pregnant mother will release “good” hormones which wash the developing fetus, and an unhappy mother will release “bad” hormones. Her happiness in turn is dependent on her husband’s happiness, which of course will affect her. His happiness will be strongly influenced by a job he likes, and making a good living from it.

In other words, a happy family will create babies that from conception are the best they can be in body and brain, because of the optimum influence of hormones.

Here is a quote I ran across about fetal programming, and darn if I can remember where I got it: “A comprehensive number of epidemiological and animal studies suggests that prenatal and early life events are important determinants for disorders later in life. Among them, prenatal stress (i.e. stress experienced by the pregnant mother with impact on the fetal ontogeny) has programming effects on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis, brain neurotransmitter systems and cognitive abilities of the offspring.”

In a nutshell, if you want happy, smart, healthy, talented kids, make sure the parents are happy. There are other very important determinants, such as nutrition and the environment after the children are born. Conversely, it’s not hard to create unhappy, not-so-bright kids prone to various sicknesses.

What I find disturbing is the destructive influence of the government on fetal development. I don’t find it such a bad thing if the government would confine itself to telling mothers to watch what they eat when pregnant, and to not smoke or drink, but apparently government officials don’t have the slightest clue about how destructive the government can be to families and children when it goes far beyond those simple commonsense things.

Here’s what I mean: wages in the United States stopped going up in 1973 and have been flat since. In many cases, they have been declining. As hard as it is to believe today, at one time a high-school graduate of a husband, on 40 hours a week and on his salary alone, could provide a nice house, a car, and raise several children with his wife. Those days have been gone so long most people don’t even know they ever existed.

Here’s an example of those days long gone: I know a retired man who bought his middle-class house in 1969 for $14,000. He was a high school drop-out and worked all his life as a carpenter. In 1969 he was making $14,000 a year, which meant his house cost one year’s salary. His mortgage payment was $141 a month, for 30 years. Try to find something similar today.

These days, both husband and wife have to work to maintain a middle-class existence – and they’d better have graduate degrees. When a baby is born it is, as soon as possible, given to a day-care center so the mother can go back to work. Then it’s sent to public school, unless the parents decide to homeschool. That means the wife has to quit work, which means they’d better go live in a cabin in a rural area and grow a garden…which is not such a bad idea.

The ogre Karl Marx and his demented modern-day followers (say, the buffoon Van Jones) consider destroying families and babies being raised by strangers to be commendable, but one thing they failed to predict is that in less than ten years we have had over 80 public-school shootings.

These shootings now have a shorthand label, and everyone knows what it means: “going postal.” It not only happens in schools, but workplaces, and even in public.

One of the reasons why these shootings happen? In two words, unending stress. People end up with adrenal glands the size of golf balls.

Then we have the high school dropout rate. What is it in some places? Forty percent? Yet I’ve read of high school principals in such districts making $100,000 a year. You might as well burn the money. It’s just tax money, anyway.

The State, in its attempt to “help” families and the economy, has instead damaged them, sometimes severely. The economy is badly damaged, pace court intellectuals, and has been for over 35 years. This damage was, and is being done, by government interference.

In attempting to help families, the State has damaged them. Just as it has damaged, and sometimes destroyed, neighborhoods, towns, and cultures. Grotesquely, the people who promote these policies can never see the bad effects, and instead convince themselves there are only good ones.

Is it not possible the unending stress that affects people also affects the fetus, right from the moment of conception? That it affects body, brain and character, throughout its entire life?

I have wondered for a long time what happened to the polymaths we had in the past. In our time, the only one I can think of offhand is Freeman Dyson. Where are our Thomas Jeffersons, our Ben Franklins, our Adam Smiths, our Isaac Newtons, our Bernhard Eulers? Is the loss of these people because of environmental causes, or genetic causes? Or is there a third, better, explanation for it?

Back in the 1930s the dentist Weston Price travelled the world studying “primitive” cultures. He found some very disturbing things. When people ate “modern” processed food the children ended up with bad eyesight, crooked teeth and other life-long ailments. When they did not eat processed food their children had none of these problems.

Price called his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Now, it looks as if this one should be written: “Stress and Character and Intellectual Degeneration: What the Government Does to Us and our Children.” What exactly are we dealing with now? PTSD right from the moment of conception?

Some fetuses are of course constitutionally stronger than others. But what about those who are not?

Utopia is not an option. But a better world is, and a better country. If the U.S. had not strayed from its original path, we’d have a small government, stable money, a growing economy, and many high-paying jobs. And stronger families.

Instead, we have a massive and ever-growing federal government, appalling deficits, unending wars with the attendant lies and propaganda, inflated money that has made the dollar worth a penny compared to its value a little over 100 years ago, an unemployment rate of over 10%, and the hemorrhage of tens of millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our wealth to our enemies in the Middle East and China.

None of us are islands. We’re all connected to something. We are part of families, nuclear and extended; neighborhoods, and the other things I listed -- towns, cultures, countries, economies. These things should exist to support the most important thing, the family. For the most part, they do not, contrary to Hillary Clinton and her imaginary village.

Conservatives and libertarians are right in their beliefs that things should be bottom up, from what Burke called our “little platoons.” Those who believe things should be top-down, from the government down to you, have it exactly backwards. They are the ones trying to degenerate and destroy everything, including children. And, as far as I’m concerned, fetuses.

The Bible (which I see as excellent practical wisdom even more than religion) tells us the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. If only it was not so.

The Trolls of the Manosphere

I've been reading the Manosphere for about a year. I find some disturbing things in it. For one, I believe a fair number of posters who pretend to support the Manosphere really want to destroy it and destroy men. They're trolls.

The Manosphere is in response to feminism, which has severely damaged women and men. So, there is a lot of good in the Manosphere. Yet I also see a lot of bad in it.

I keep seeing the same comments over and over, always by "Anonymous" or someone with a fake name. The comments are always the same: all women are hypergamous, all women want "alphas" and hate "betas," women are incapable of love or loyalty, they're "sluts" who ride the "cock carousel," who look for "alpha fux and beta bux," who love guys who exhibit "Dark Triad" traits.

It's almost as if several dozen people are reading from the same script. And that is a definition of a troll if there ever was one.

Why would trolls do this? There are people out there - leftists - who want to destroy Western culture. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them were employed by the government/corporations/the wealthy elite (all the same thing).

One of the best ways to do destroy society is to destroy the basis of all societies - the family.

Feminism has done a fine job of destroying men, women, their relationships, the family, and children. (By the way, a lot of feminism was funded by the government.) The trolls of the Manosphere look to be finishing the job - and why should they not be funded by the government? They're trying to inculcate the hatred of and contempt for women among men, just as feminism inculcated the hatred of men among women.

I've seen the results of feminism - hostile middle-aged spinsters with no husband, children and home, living alone in an apartment with a cat, stuffed to the gills with psychiatric meds, hating men and blaming all their problems on them.

I've also seen the results of 40 years of feminism among younger men: playing exhilarating video games and avoiding women. For an example I recently had a father tell me his 20-year-old son was sent to a seminar with several of his friends. His friends didn't want to go out and explore a new town: they wanted to stay in their hotel room and play video games. These are the young adults who only want to make enough to get by because it is no longer worthwhile to work hard, because they get almost nothing in return.

But what is the Manosphere telling these kids today, who never learned what it is to be a man? When it comes to women, pump 'em and dump 'em. Be a PUA. Be an "Alpha." Show "Dark Triad" traits (which is, "Act like a psychopath"). Women only want money and status. All of them have "rationalization hamsters." They're whores and sluts. Don't marry them. Don't have kids. The women will dump you to "trade up."

All of it is dangerous,deluded nonsense, and those who are espousing it because they really believe in it are fools. All women, including innocent women, are being degraded, dehumanized and demonized.

Men who fall for this will end up hating women. This is exactly what the trolls want. Then we will get less marriage, less children (and more screwed-up children), less of everything good. Society and culture - which men created - will go backward.

It's a given. Just wait and see.

The Liars of the Manosphere

"...if one cannot make sense of morality within some sort of satisfying, natural context, then one is likely to end up with no morality, which is less than societally reassuring, or is likely to end up with a competitive plethora of moralities in which ninety-nine percent of the world's population is convinced that the other ninety-nine percent is unclean, stupid, uninformed, vicious, depraved, in need of coercive correction, and such. That too, seems less than reassuring." ~John Norman (aka John Lange)

It started in high school. There would be an occasional guy who would brag all the time about "this chick I fucked." In every case, he was lying. He was bragging, and in his case, there was nothing to back it up. What they said reminded me of what Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) told the Wilmer the gunsel in The Maltese Falcon: "The gaudier the punk the cheaper the patter."

I see the same thing in the Manosphere. These PUAs who have entire sites about "this chick I banged" and "that chick I banged" and "my first Japanese chick I banged" and "my first Brazilian chick I banged" are lying. They are the equivalent of those high school boys I knew. Braggarts, blowhards and liars, who tried to raise their self-respect - and gain the respect of others - through lies instead of actually doing something.

In high school when I or someone else called these guys on their lies they got defensive. If we mocked them and ridiculed them they stopped with the lies, since they were no longer trying to validate their self-respect with us. It's not like they had much self-respect in the first place.

Because these guys are liars and have little self-esteem, they will sell out in an instant.

I became fairly popular in college (I did okay in high school). I was popular enough that I was the object of a lot of vicious envy from guys and girls. I never bragged about the girls I got. In fact, somebody who is good at something never brags about it. He doesn't have to. Everyone else can see what he is.

I will say one thing, and I am reluctant to say it: my count with women is quite high. And out of all of them, only three meant anything to me. The rest meant nothing to me emotionally. That is why those who devote their lives to physical pleasure become degraded. I have seen this with "professional' PUAs once than once - and they never bragged either, and in fact ultimately became regretful about their ruined lives.

Everyone seeks self-respect. That's how you gain well-being, how you flourish. You can gain it by actually doing something useful, or you can just lie.

After all, remember that old saying: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

And what are the liars of the Manosphere trying to do? Teach, of course.

No One Believes in Equality

No one believes in equality, no matter how much they claim they do. To be totally equal, people would have to be totally identical, the way two quarters or two nickels are identical. And being identical, they’d be interchangeable.

The closest to total equality and total identicalness in nature are bees, termites and ants, but even they are not identical and still have a division of labor, so they’re not interchangeable. If we go to a level even more primitive than insects, we can go to amoebae, which reproduce by fission, so each offspring is identical to the parent. This concept, for people, sounds like something out of a bad science-fiction movie.

On TV and in the movies, the closest are the Borg from Star Trek, but they’re still not equal and identical. They’re close, though, for humans.

Incidentally, I was always amused by the Borg Queen’s puzzled question, “Why do you resist us? We only wish to improve the quality of your lives.” As both Jesus and Aesop noticed, all dictators call themselves benefactors. Both referred to tyrants as wolves and foxes, definitions Vilfredo Pareto used – he wrote the first used force; the latter, fraud.

Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine if people were totally equal and therefore identical and interchangeable. We’d be clones, meaning we’d have to take over our evolution, an idea which has made science-fiction writers salivate for a few centuries, long before H.G. Wells and his The Island of Dr. Moreau. We’d either be hermaphrodites or else sexless clones, with babies grown in artificial wombs (the artificial wombs were a staple of the TV series, Space: Above and Beyond).

Loveless, sexless clones, since love and lust are too upsetting to our well-ordered Myrmidon society. Aldous Huxley came close to visualizing such a society in Brave New World, but he didn’t go all the way. Kurt Vonnegut also came close, with his famous satirical short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” in which an attempt at love and inequality were ended with some shotgun blasts.

All of us would look exactly alike to avoid envy, unless we can rid ourselves of it. The British writer L. P. Hartley wrote a novel, Facial Justice, in which women got plastic surgery so no one would be any prettier than another.

We’d have to edit our genes and change our brains and get rid of not only sex and love, but families and religion and other “primitive” things we wouldn’t need anymore.

We’d have to think exactly alike. Isn’t that the goal of Political Correctness/Cultural Marxism, anyway? The only way that could happen is if we were a hive mind (bees, again), such as the one Orson Scott Card wrote about in Ender’s Game. We’d have no individuality whatsoever.

Since we’d be clones with a hive mind, the individual would mean nothing. The death of an individual would mean no more than clipping a fingernail. The white-suited Stormtrooper clones in Star Wars are a well-known example of those fingernails. So are the Borg, for that matter.

What an awful world! It wouldn’t be a Heaven on Earth; it’d be a Hell. Why would anyone want it? Don’t the supporters of “equality” ever think it though to its logical end? If they did, they’d be horrified.

I suppose a few lunatics, probably some man-hating atheistic nihilistic socialist/radical feminist anti-Western New York lesbians, fantasize about such a world, but the mentally-ill hallucinations of one out of every 50 million people don’t exactly count.

We don’t believe in equality in sports. You’ll never see Affirmative Action there. Yet we do believe in it economically, even though it’s a brake on wages and the creation of jobs.

Michelle Obama had a job at a Chicago hospital making some $300,000 a year. When she left the administration eliminated her job. It was a make-work job because she was (is) an incompetent Affirmative Action baby.

We don’t believe in Affirmative Action for romantic relationships. I’ve pointed out to people they should imagine if there were laws enforcing such equality, and to think about the trouble it would cause.

Imagine if women were required by law to ask out a certain number of men a week, keep track of it, and report every week to the Federal Affirmative Action Bureau of Dating and Romance. Then bureaucrats would call the men to make sure the women weren’t lying. If they were caught lying, there would be stiff fines, of course.

There would have to be re-education classes to forcibly remake the hearts/minds of resentful, recalcitrant women, the way men at corporations are required to attend “sensitivity” classes about workplace sexual harassment, etc.

Nonsense? Of course it is. But it’s not much more nonsensical than businesses having to file reams of paperwork to the federal government to make sure they hire they right number of women, blacks, Hispanics or whoever else is the “minority” du jour.

Since equality cannot exist, then what do words such as “sexism,” “racism,” etc. mean? They mean nothing, which means they can mean anything. They mean whatever those who have captured the culture want them to mean. No one talks about “white maleism,” even though Affirmative Action means, “white males need not apply, since you won’t be hired, even if you’re the best-qualified, and if you do get hired, you’ll be carrying the unqualified we have to hire by law.”

If “equality” is not about equality, what is it about? Ultimately it’s about special rights. It always is. It’s about money/political power, one of the worst banes of human existence.

Since we are not going to have equality, being that it is impossible, what we will end up with is what we always end up with until revolts overturn it: a vanishingly small minority of extremely wealthy and politically powerful people, who crush everyone else with the power of the State and try to force equality and poverty on them.

It’s why we end up with loons like the multimillionaire Al Gore (whose father made the family fortune through political connections), who insists everyone else make crushing sacrifices while he lives in a mansion that uses the energy of ten houses. Or how one percent of the population has used the government to appropriate 40% of the national wealth.

“Equality” itself is a fraud, one that many people believe in unwittingly. It doesn’t lead to equality at all, just wealth and power for a handful and poverty for nearly everyone else. The German psychotherapist Hans Prinzhorn called it “the tyranny of a clique in the name of the equality of all.”

The writer Richard K. Morgan (author of the amusingly preposterous satire, Market Forces, a leftist stab at what I call Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations, the kind that finance both sides in a war) made this comment about such a tyranny: "Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses."

About the time Morgan was born, back in the middle Sixties, Norman Spinrad wrote a bloody, gruesome and sometimes repulsive novel illustrating Morgan’s comment – The Men in the Jungle, a book that is an example of Dostoevsky’s observation in The House of the Dead that "Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost for ever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."

It’s not that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. There are people who haven’t been corrupted by power. It’s far more accurate to say: blood and power intoxicate, and immunity corrupts. If one sentence defines the abuse of government, that’s it.

There are people who believe they are intellectually and morally superior to everyone else, and who are convinced they can “rationally” plan society and move people around like chess pieces (Michael Oakeshott called these people “rationalists” and Thomas Sowell sneered at them as “the Anointed”). I don’t really understand the mentality, being that it is so alien to me, but it certainly exists.

It’s a tribute to the empathic power of the human imagination that I can comprehend at all the mentality of such people. Still, I find it nearly impossible to understand their blindness and hypocrisy.

Their names are legion – Ralph Nader, Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Kennedys, Nancy Pelosi, Cornel West, John Hagee, Jesse Jackson, George Soros – and all of them believe they are better than the dim-witted unwashed masses and should rule ever them. As long, of course, as they are extremely wealthy and politically powerful -- and their subjects are not.

In other words, everyone but them is supposed to be an identical, expendable worker-ant. Does anyone really believe that universal health-care and the rationing and lack of quality it will create will apply to our rulers? Of course not. It’s only for the anonymous, expendable masses, not the politically powerful.

I am amazed that so many people are hypnotized sheeple who never wake up until many of them have followed their leaders off a cliff. The blind leading the blind, right into a ditch. Many see the government as a never-empty breast from which all goodness flows – ignoring the fact that perhaps 200 million people lost their lives in the 20th Century to government-created wars. Only those who have been blinded by propaganda believe the State is their friend.

Maybe the Grand Inquisitor was right in The Brothers Karamazov when he said that people are desperate to give up their freedom to a leader who will take care of them. Apparently there are contradictory impulses in people: one for freedom and one for being taken care of, which, when it comes to the State, is another word for slavery.

I am quite sympathetic to libertarian anarchists who believe there should be no government at all, although they live in a fantasy world that will never exist. Americans at one time understood the government is not reason, it is force and fraud – as George Washington noticed, it is, like fire, a handy servant but a dangerous master.

Some writers have been so frustrated with the blindness and stupidity of people/herds they’ve written novels in which we’re ruled by benevolent robots. Harry Bates wrote a story – “Farewell to the Master” – which was filmed as The Day the Earth Stood Still and featured the famous robot, Gort.

Jack Williamson wrote The Humanoids, in which each person had a personal robot to watch over them and make sure they did no harm. These stories may sound silly, but I understand the sentiment -- left on their own, the narcissistic/psychopathic minority appropriates wealth and political, economic and often religious power and crushes the half-asleep sheeple.

One of my friends, who is over 80 years old and who was involved in politics his entire life, told me he’s met one honest politician in his career. The rest had sex, money, drug and alcohol problems. I think history confirms his observations. And it’s the public that pays the price for politicians’ flaws.

What to do? The public schools, from beginning to end, are hopeless about teaching children about the nature of the State and the tyranny of the few and the forced equality and poverty of the many. If I had my way, I’d close them down. These days, much of the time, they’re not educating children; they’re traumatizing them with leftist fantasies.

Churches have failed, too, being that so many are busy with their Tribulation/ Rapture fantasies about how Jesus is going to come back, kill two-thirds of the Jews in Israel, convert the rest to Christianity, then rule the world for a thousand years. If they’re not teaching these “Left Behind” hallucinations, they’re supporting open borders to increase their congregations.

So it’s up to people to educate themselves. Government should be the servant, not the master; the more local and smaller it is, the better and more efficient; politicians are always to be closely watched, never trusted and to understand they can be removed in a heartbeat. The federal government, which originally wasn’t to do much more than build some roads and run the Post Office, has now turned into an unmanageable, unsustainable, war-mongering, economy-and society-destroying behemoth, one that is the implacable enemy of the citizenry.

Since we’re always going to have government, I’d be satisfied if people stopped seeing it as an omnipotent benevolent parent and instead saw it as the eternal oppressor and murderer that it is.

The political scientist Kevin Phillips pointed out that countries go through three phases – agricultural, industrial, financial. In the past when they have become financial empires they have always collapsed. The United States has become a military/financial/corporate empire, with a concentration of financial and political power in a few hands and the enforcement of an impossible equality – but a most definitely possible poverty – on everyone else.

Being that such empires are houses built on sand, I see no way for the United States, in its current form, to be able to endure.

Invasion of the Contemptible Do-Gooder Bureaucrats

The Scene: a Restaurant and the Street Outside.

Grammy: I’ll have a cheeseburger, a piece of cheesecake and one of those drinks with the little umbrella in it.

Waiter (apologetically): Sorry, ma’am, but this morning the government has declared those foods harmful, so we can no longer serve them. They're illegal.

Grammy: The drink with the umbrella isn’t a food. Can I still have one?

Waiter: Nope.

Grammy: What do you have? (Looks at menu.) Raw carrots? Decaffeinated herbal tea? Zucchini? Are you trying to finish me off?

Waiter: The government is here to protect us, ma’am.

Grammy: It isn’t here to protect me or anyone else. It’s here to hurt all of us. (exits restaurant)

Bureaucrat (glaring at Grammy): Wait a minute! My Sooper-Dooper Advanced Nanny-State Snooper indicates you have tobacco on you!

Grammy: What?

Bureaucrat: In your purse you have a pack of unfiltered Camels! Hand them over!

Grammy: Who are you?

Bureaucrat: A government bureaucrat!

Grammy: Get lost.

Bureaucrat: Tobacco has been illegal since this morning! Now hand them over or I’ll shoot you!

Grammy: Okay. (opens her purse, takes out a Colt Python .357 Magnum and points it at the bureaucrat’s head) You were saying?

Bureaucrat: You can’t do that! I work for the federal government!

Grammy: You’re going to be a dead ex-bureaucrat in about two seconds if you don’t hand over your pistol. You’re a disgrace.

Bureaucrat: Okay! Sure! Whatever you want, ma’am!

Grammy: Look at you, crying like that cop in Thelma and Louise. And you’ve pissed your pants, too. You’re nothing but a bully hiding behind bad laws. If you’re a decent human being than I’m a banana. Now go away before I get really mad. Treat an old lady like that. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Bureaucrat: Oh, I am!

Grammy: No, you’re not. You’re a liar. Now go away and if I ever see you here again I’ll shoot your left nut off, then your right one. That is, if you have any, and I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't. Would you like to find out if you have any?

Bureaucrat: N - n - no!

Grammy: Git!

Bureacrat: I’m gone!

Grammy (lighting up a Camel): Buncha morons. And if people don’t do anything about it they’ll take over the world. But not if me and my pistol have any say about it. Yay for .357 Magnums making punks into polite people!

Waiter: Here’s your drink.

The Empire in Space

Popular culture should never be ignored or underrated. Shakespeare during his day was popular culture. Today, he's considered the greatest writer in the English language.

These days, the two biggest media for popular culture are TV and the movies. As all art does, they reflect life. Sometimes, they predict it.

One little-known and underrated movie that fits this pattern is Soldier, starring the also underrated Kurt Russell. What makes this movie, which appear to be little more than Grade B action/adventure in space, so special?

It's about Empire, and the soldiers it uses to advance itself. This time, it's not just on Earth, but in far space. Since we've always had empires on earth, will we have them in space? Perhaps? Certainly?

The movie, which is set in a not-very-far future, portrays Russell as Sergeant Todd, a genetically engineered, nearly mute soldier. He can talk, but has little to say. I doubt he says 20 words in the film, although his learning what feelings are, portrayed through his expressions and body language, is poignant. Once, sitting alone around a fire, tears come to his eyes, probably for the first time in his life. Another time, asked what it's like to be a soldier, he can barely answer, "Fear. . .discipline."

There is a scene early in the movie in which a list of battles are scrolling in the background. One reads, "Tannhauser's Gate." This is an allusion to the movie, Blade Runner, which is about artificially created humans known as replicants. The implication is that Soldier, set even farther in the future than Blade Runner, also breeds artificial humans as soldiers. Sergeant Todd is one of them. Ominously, he is part of the "Adam Project" – creating the new man, one brutal, violent, conscienceless - a killing machine who, early in the film, kills children.

Raised from a child to be a merciless murder-machine, Russell finds himself made obsolete when a new set of superior genetically-engineered soldiers shows up. After losing a battle to one of them, Caine (played by Jason Lee Scott), Todd is thought dead, and dumped with the garbage on a "waste disposal" planet.

There, he is found by a rag-tag group of marooned humans. At first accepted by them, Todd finds he has feelings buried in him he did not know were there. For the first time in his life, he has a family. The message is that a prerequisite for killing machines is to have no feelings or family.

As Todd heals, he starts to frighten everyone, and they ask him to leave. That is when he ends up around the fire with tears in his eyes. For the first time in his life, he has found a family and community, but terrifies them with his potential for violence. However, guilt forces the community to invite him back.

Meanwhile, the Empire is busy testing new weapons. Where does it decide to test them? On the waste disposal planet. The parallels to large powerful countries that attack smaller, weaker countries, and in doing so tests it new weapons, is clear.

This time, though, Todd has something worth fighting for.

This is not a perfect movie. Indeed, it's B-movie masquerading as an A one. The special effects are rather cheap; the battle tanks appear to be cars with hollow plywood shells. And without Russell, it wouldn't be worth seeing. But his journey from emotionless killer to a man who discovers family and community, is what makes the movie.

As mentioned, there are other messages hidden in this film. Empire always expands itself though the military; it will always attack the defenseless, trying out new weapons on them; and it wants its soldiers to be emotionless killing machines, without mercy or remorse. And if it can, it will use science to create them. And that is something to keep in mind – how far will the State go in altering humans to create what it wants in soldiers?

One major flaw in the movie's portrayal of Empire is it does not point out it almost always uses as a justification for its depredations the excuse that it is being a benefactor to those attacked.

The film is also about the lust for power, and how it degrades. The soldiers are not bad people; indeed in some ways they are admirable. Gary Busey, as a commander, especially illustrates this. He does care about his men. On the other hand, the political types are portrayed as utterly despicable, people only interested in power, unconcerned with whom they murder.

The movie, being essentially a high-class B-movie, is nothing new. It's derivative of Blade Runner, The Terminator, and First Blood, to mention three. But many of those who have seen it find it stays with them. It is not a great film, but it doesn't pretend to be. But for those who look, there are some very important messages here about the expansion of empire, and the eternal fight between Society and the State, and how the latter will always try to absorb, indeed destroy, the first.