"The Sexual Revolution and Children: How the Left Took Things Too Far"

"The Left is about fucking children and making it cool." - former '60s hippie

I have never been a leftist. I was vaguely liberal as a teen, but I got over that by 21. I consider leftism a mental and moral sickness and about as close to pure evil as exists.

"Gay" marriage is a con, since homosexuality is ultimately about having sex with children.

This article is from Spiegel Online International, and was written by Jan Fleischhauer and Wiebke Hollersen.

Germany's left has its own tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children. For some, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was considered progressive.

In the spring of 1970, Ursula Besser found an unfamiliar briefcase in front of her apartment door. It wasn't that unusual, in those days, for people to leave things at her door or drop smaller items into her letter slot. She was, after all, a member of the Berlin state parliament for the conservative Christian Democrats. Sometimes Besser called the police to examine a suspicious package; she was careful to always apologize to the neighbors for the commotion.

The students had proclaimed a revolution, and Besser, the widow of an officer, belonged to those forces in the city that were sharply opposed to the radical changes of the day. Three years earlier, when she was a newly elected member of the Berlin state parliament, the CDU had appointed Besser, a Ph.D. in philology, to the education committee. She quickly acquired a reputation for being both direct and combative.

The briefcase contained a stack of paper -- the typewritten daily reports on educational work at an after-school center in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, where up to 15 children aged 8 to 14 were taken care of during the afternoon. The first report was dated Aug. 13, 1969, and the last one was written on Jan. 14, 1970.

Even a cursory review of the material revealed that the educational work at the Rote Freiheit ("Red Freedom") after-school center was unorthodox. The goal of the center was to shape the students into "socialist personalities," and its educational mission went well beyond supervised play. The center's agenda included "agitprop" on the situation in Vietnam and "street fighting," in which the children were divided into "students" and "cops."

Pantomiming Intercourse

The educators' notes indicate that they placed a very strong emphasis on sex education. Almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.

According to the records, a "sex exercise" was conducted on Dec. 11 and a "fucking hour" on Jan. 14. An entry made on Nov. 26 reads: "In general, by lying there we repeatedly provoked, openly or in a hidden way, sexual innuendos, which were then expressed in pantomimes, which Kurt and Rita performed together on the low table (as a stage) in front of us."

The material introduced the broader public to a byproduct of the student movement for the first time: the sexual liberation of children. Besser passed on the reports to an editor at the West Berlin newspaper Der Abend, who published excerpts of the material. On April 7, 1970, the Berlin state parliament discussed the Rote Freiheit after-school center. As it turned out, the Psychology Institute at the Free University of Berlin was behind the center. In fact, the institute had established the facility and provided the educators who worked there. Besser now believes that it was a concerned employee who dropped off the reports at her door.

A few days later, Besser paid a visit to the Psychology Institute in Berlin's Dahlem neighborhood, "to take a look at the place," as she says. In the basement, Besser found two rooms that were separated by a large, one-way mirror. There was a mattress in one of the rooms, as well as a sink on the wall and a row of colorful washcloths hanging next to it. When asked, an institute employee told Besser that the basement was used as an "observation station" to study sexual behavior in children.

It has since faded into obscurity, but the members of the 1968 movement and their successors were caught up in a strange obsession about childhood sexuality. It is a chapter of the movement's history which is never mentioned in the more glowing accounts of the era. On this issue, the veterans of the late '60s student movement seem to have succumbed to acute amnesia; an analysis of this aspect of the student revolution would certainly be worthwhile.

The Possibility of Sex with Children

In the debate on sexual abuse, one of the elements is confusion as to where the line should be drawn in interactions with children. It is a confusion not limited to the Catholic Church. Indeed, it was precisely in so-called progressive circles that an eroticization of childhood and a gradual lowering of taboos began. It was a shift that even allowed for the possibility of sex with children.

The incidents at the Odenwald School in the western state of Hesse -- a boarding school with no religious affiliation -- showed that there was a connection between calls for reform and the removal of inhibition. The case of Klaus Rainer Röhl, the former publisher of the leftist magazine Konkret, also makes little sense without its historical context. The articles in Konkret that openly advocated sex with minors are at least as disturbing as the accusations of Röhl's daughters Anja and Bettina that he molested them, which Röhl denies.

The left has its own history of abuse, and it is more complicated than it would seem at first glance. When leaders of the student movement of the late 1960s are asked about it, they offer hesitant or evasive answers. "At the core of the movement of 1968, there was in fact a lack of respect for the necessary boundaries between children and adults. The extent to which this endangerment led to abuse cases is unclear," Wolfgang Kraushaar, a political scientist and chronicler of the movement, writes in retrospect.

A lack of respect for boundaries is putting it mildly. One could also say that the boundaries were violently torn open.

Sexual liberation was at the top of the agenda of the young revolutionaries who, in 1967, began turning society upside down. The control of sexual desire was seen as an instrument of domination, which bourgeois society used to uphold its power. Everything that the innovators perceived as wrong and harmful has its origins in this concept: man's aggression, greed and desire to own things, as well as his willingness to submit to authority. The student radicals believed that only those who liberated themselves from sexual repression could be truly free.

'Hostile Treatment of Sexual Pleasure'

To them, it seemed obvious that liberation should begin at an early age. Once sexual inhibitions had taken root, they reasoned, everything that followed was merely the treatment of symptoms. They were convinced that it was much better to prevent those inhibitions from developing in the first place. Hardly any leftist texts of the day did not address the subject of sexuality.

For instance, "Revolution der Erziehung" ("The Revolution in Education"), a work published by Rowohlt in 1971, which quickly became a bestseller, addresses sexuality as follows: "The de-eroticization of family life, from the prohibition of sexual activity among children to the taboo of incest, serves as preparation for total assimilation -- as preparation for the hostile treatment of sexual pleasure in school and voluntary subjugation to a dehumanizing labor system."

Issue 17 of the cultural magazine Kursbuch, published in June 1969, described the revolutionaries' position in practical terms. Published by German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the issue contained a report by the members of Commune 2 in Berlin, titled "Educating Children in the Commune." In the summer of 1967, three women and four men moved into an apartment in an old building on Giesebrechtstrasse, together with two small children, a three-year-old girl, Grischa, and a four-year-old boy, Nessim. For the residents, the cohabitation experiment was an attempt to overcome all bourgeois constraints, which included everything from separate bank accounts and closed bathroom doors to fidelity within couples and the development of feelings of shame. The two children were raised by the group, which often meant that no one paid much attention to them. Because the adults had made it their goal to not just "tolerate but in fact affirm child sexuality," they were not satisfied to simply act as passive observers.

The members of this commune also felt compelled to write down their experiences, which explains why some of the incidents that occurred were reliably documented. On April 4, 1968, Eberhard Schultz describes how he is lying in bed with little Grischa, and how she begins to stroke him, first in the face, then on the stomach and buttocks, and finally on his penis, until he becomes "very excited" and his "cock gets hard." The little girl pulls down her tights and asks Schultz to "stick it in," to which he responds that his penis is "probably too big." Then he strokes the girl's vagina.

Kursbuch 17 contained a series of poster-sized photos. Under the headline "Love Play in the Children's Room," it depicted Nessim and Grischa, both naked. The oversized images are of the sort that one would expect to see in a magazine for pedophiles today -- certainly not in an influential publication of the leftist intelligentsia. The caption reads: "Grischa walks over to the mirror, looks at her body, bends forward several times, encircling her buttocks with her hands, and says: 'Look, my vagina.'"

Ulrich Enzensberger, a former member of the commune, later said that Nessim, at any rate, looked back "in horror" at his commune days. Nessim is now a political scientist in Bremen, while Grischa lives in Berlin and works for a publishing company. Nessim and Grischa have lived very private lives ever since they were able to make their own decisions. When asked, Nessim says politely that he only discusses his childhood "and, therefore, intimate subjects, with trusted individuals." Grischa, now 46, is similarly private about her past.

It is tempting to dismiss the "love play" in the commune as an exception, as a radical excess of a revolutionary project, if so many leftist parents hadn't modeled their own lives on the educational experiments on Giesebrechtstrasse. For these contemporaries, Commune 2 was a pilot project in anti-authoritarian education that was quickly followed by private kindergartens in which parents applied the new ideas to raising their children, first in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg and Stuttgart, and eventually in smaller cities like Giessen and Nuremberg.

Initially, the parents addressed practical issues, such as whether to take their children with them to protest marches. But the agenda eventually turned to sex education. In these anti-authoritarian kindergartens and daycare centers, known as Kinderladen, no other subject was discussed at such length as sex, says Alexander Schuller, one of the pioneers of the movement.

Divided Over the Issue

In 1969 Schuller, a sociologist, was one of the founders of a Kinderladen in Berlin's Wilmersdorf neighborhood. Like Schuller, the other parents were academics, journalists or university employees -- a decidedly upper middle-class lot. Schuller's two sons, four and five years old at the time, grew up without the customary rules and punishments of a government-run daycare facility.

But the adults were soon divided over the issue of sex. Some were determined to encourage their children to show and touch their genitalia, while the others were horrified by the idea.

"It was never addressed quite that directly, but it was clear that in the end, sex with the two female teachers was considered," says Schuller. "I found it incredibly difficult to take a stance. I felt that what we were trying to do was fundamentally correct, but when it came to this issue, I thought: This is crazy, it just isn't right. But then I felt ashamed of thinking that way. I think many were in the same position."

After a year of grueling discussion, the more prudish group prevailed, and the parents decided that there would be no sex in the Kinderladen.

Nowadays, the stimulation of a child's sex organs by an adult is clearly seen as criminal sexual assault. But for the revolutionaries of 1968, it was an educational tool that helped "create a new person," according to the "Handbook of Positive Child Indoctrination," published in 1971. "Children can learn to appreciate eroticism and sexual intercourse long before they are capable of understanding how a child is conceived. It is valuable for children to cuddle with adults. It is no less valuable for sexual intercourse to occur during cuddling."

Constant Enlightenment

The self-deception of these supposedly enlightened parents began when they tried to force an uninhibited relationship with sex on the children. In theory, their goal was to enable the children to act on their sexual needs. But because children are not spontaneously inclined to become sexually active in front of adults, they had to be stimulated to do so. The parents were constantly telling sex jokes and using words like "cock," "butt" and "vagina." "Actually, my sons really liked going to the Kinderladen," says Schuller, "but they thought the constant chatter about sex was horrible."

In her novel "Das bleiche Herz der Revolution" ("The Pale Heart of the Revolution"), Sophie Dannenberg strikingly described how agonizing it can be for children when their boundaries of privacy are violated. Dannenberg, whose parents, motivated by their affiliation with the German Communist Party, sent her to a Kinderladen in the western city of Giessen in the 1970s, used the stories told by her mother and other contemporary witnesses to write her account of an atmosphere of constant enlightenment.

The material she used includes an account of a parents' evening where one of the mothers said that she stripped naked in front of her son so that he could "inspect" her. In the process, the woman spread her legs to expose her private parts for his inspection. The game ended when the boy stuck a pencil into his mother's vagina. The parents also spent a long time discussing whether it was a good idea to have sex with their own children, so as to demonstrate the "naturalness" of sexual intercourse.

Although the people Dannenberg interviewed did not recall any instances of physical advances, they did describe "softer forms of sexual assault," such as pushy demands on children to show their naked bodies. In the novel, which is based on Dannenberg's research, the eight-year-old character Simone is told to strip in front of several adults and other children. "Why do you want to hide yourself," the mother says, to the amusement of the people standing around, when the child instinctively holds a pillow in front of her genitalia. "It's a beautiful thing you have there! Show it to us!"

Escapades

No other scene in the book has provoked such angry reactions as this one. Dannenberg reports that she was literally shouted down during events to discuss the book whenever the scene was mentioned. "Lies, lies," audience members shouted once when she was in a panel discussion with Ulrich Enzensberger and reminded him of the sexual escapades of the day.

It probably wasn't always easy for the adults, either, to be so free. Not everyone knew what to do when the children went from playing with themselves to fondling the adults.

In his 1975 autobiographical book "Der grosse Basar" ("The Great Bazaar"), Green Party politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit describes his experiences as a teacher in a Frankfurt Kinderladen. When the children entrusted to his care opened his fly and began stroking his penis, he writes, "I was usually quite taken aback. My reactions varied, depending on the circumstances."

Others found it noticeably more difficult to deal with the situation. The records of a Stuttgart Kinderladen from December 1969 include an account by a mother who suddenly found several children reaching under her skirt. When one of the boys began pulling her pubic hair, the woman wasn't sure how to react. On the one hand, she didn't want to seem inhibited, but on the other hand, the situation was unpleasant for her. "That hurts," she finally said, "I don't like that."

An account by the sociologist Monika Seifert, who described her experiences in the "Parents' Collective of the Frankfurt Children's School" in the magazine Vorgänge (excerpts of which later appeared in SPIEGEL in the fall of 1970), reveals how difficult it was for the Kinderladen parents to eventually decide between their own ideological expectations and their sense of right and wrong. In the account, Seifert critically asks herself why, in her project, "no cases of attempted, direct, purposeful sexual activity between a child and an adult were observed." It should be noted that she sees this as a shortcoming, not a success. As a mother, Seifert concludes that the "inhibitions and insecurities of the adults" were probably to blame for their passivity, and that the children were likely "suppressing their sexual curiosity in this regard because of the subconscious reactions of the adults."

'An Incredibly Erotic Game'

Does what happened in a number of the Kinderladen qualify as abuse? According to the criteria to which Catholic priests have been subjected, it clearly does, says Alexander Schuller, the sociologist. "Objectively speaking, it was abuse, but subjectively it wasn't," says author Dannenberg. As outlandish as it seems in retrospect, the parents apparently had the welfare of the children in mind, not their own. For the adherents to the new movement, the child did not serve as a sex object to provide the adults with a means of satisfying their sexual urges. This differentiates politically motivated abuse from pedophilia.

Here, too, the distinctions become blurred. How should we react when Cohn-Bendit writes, in his memoirs, about "little, five-year-old girls who had already learned to proposition me?" It wasn't the only time the Green politician raved about his experiences with children. In a largely unnoticed appearance on French television on April 23, 1982, Cohn-Bendit, a member of the European Parliament today, said the following:

"At nine in the morning, I join my eight little toddlers between the ages of 16 months and 2 years. I wash their butts, I tickle them, they tickle me and we cuddle. … You know, a child's sexuality is a fantastic thing. You have to be honest and sincere. With the very young kids, it isn't the same as it is with the four-to-six-year-olds. When a little, five-year-old girl starts undressing, it's great, because it's a game. It's an incredibly erotic game."

Cohn-Bendit later claimed that his portrayals in the book were meant as a provocation. Whether or not one believes his assertions, the development of the Greens in the 1980s shows that their nonchalant talk about sex with young children eventually attracted real pedophiles.

No Age Restrictions

In the wake of the emerging gay movement, so-called Pedo groups soon appeared. Taking their cue from homosexuals, they also claimed that, as a minority, they were entitled to certain rights. The best known of these groups was the "Indian Commune" in Nuremberg, an "alternative living project" of adults of children. The "Indians," brightly painted and vocal, appeared at the first Green Party convention, in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe in 1980, to drum up support for their cause, which they called "free sex for children and adults."

The Greens were not long immune to the argument that the government should not limit the sexuality of children. At its convention in Lüdenscheid in 1985, the Greens' state organization in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia argued that "nonviolent sexuality" between children and adults should generally be allowed, without any age restrictions. "Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalized," the "Children and Youth" task force of the Green Party in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg wrote in a position paper at about the same time. Public protests forced the party to remove the statement from the document.

During this time, no other newspaper offered pedophiles quite as much a forum as the alternative, left-leaning Tageszeitung, which shows how socially acceptable this violation of taboos had become in the leftist community. In several series, including one titled "I Love Boys," and in lengthy interviews, men were given the opportunity to describe how beautiful and liberating sex with preadolescent boys supposedly was. "There was a great deal of uncertainty as to how far people could go," says Gitti Hentschel, the co-founder and, from 1979 to 1985, editor of Tageszeitung. Those who, like Hentschel, were openly opposed to promoting pedophilia were described as "prudish" -- as opposed to freedom of expression. "There is no such thing as censorship in the Tageszeitung," was the response.

Carte Blanche

One of the few leaders of the left who staunchly opposed the pedophile movement early on was social scientist Günter Amendt. "There is no equitable sexuality between children and adults," Amendt said, expressing his outrage over the movement. Alice Schwarzer, the founder of the political women's magazine Emma, also spoke out against the downplaying of sex with children and defined it as what it really was: outright abuse.

Amendt recalls how he was disparaged as a reactionary in flyers and articles. "There was an outright campaign against Alice and me at the time," he says. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that this horrific episode came to an end. In 1994, the Pedos appeared in Tageszeitung for the last time, and even that publication recognized that intercourse with little boys was no different than with little girls, who, thanks to the women's movement, have long been deemed worthy of protection.

The revolutionaries of the late 1960s are still a long way from confronting this part of their history. When questions about the activities of members of the movement of 1968 were raised in connection with the abuse cases at the Odenwald School, the apologists for the movement were quick to give themselves a carte blanche.

"Such accusations are also part of an attempt to denounce social progress," sexologist and 1968 veteran Gunter Schmidt wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau. "On the whole, the social changes that are associated with the number 1968 were more likely to have led to the prevention of abuse."

This is a very mild way of recalling the past. It is certainly not shared by everyone who was part of the leftist educational experiments of the day.

Without "Men," Women Go Insane

"Feminism is about empowering mentally ill teenage Marxist lesbians with facial piercings, who feel an urge to tell sane, normal adults that we are the problem, and that they are the solution." - the Other McCain

The reason I put quotemarks around "men" is that I mean "patriarchy."

I know more than one woman who is "bipolar" and on medication. All of them are unstable. When they became involved in a stable relationship with a man, they suddenly became much more stable.

I know a woman who is schizophrenic. When she's around me, suddenly she's much more stable.

I also know a woman who was living with a man (generally not a good idea, and certainly not in her case) who had a child by him (very bad idea to have children and not be married). She was living with the father in a house and they had a boy.

She once told me, "I like my nice boring life."

The relationship with him did not work out...and she just collapsed. She now lives with her mother, only has the boy about one weekend a month, lies in bed all day, and can barely hold a part-time job. She's been diagnosed as being on the verge of being "bipolar" and is on medication.

Those are individual cases, but when you generalize from them, it means modern women are essentially nuts.

Why? Because "patriarchy" is gone.

I use a very simple definition of leftism (and feminism is leftist): it's about the "murder of the Father," as Erick von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was perceptively wrote.

It's the belief women are "oppressed by men," which isn't true, and especially untrue since men invented everything good in the world (I consider leftism and feminism to be the creations of advanced technological society, which was created by men).

Just look at what leftism and feminism have mutated into. They're insane.

And since we have taken care of so many of our problems (like starving to death and dropping dead of disease left and right) the only things left are non-problems like "microaggressions," "rape culture," and other hallucinations.

I consider women's default nature to be socialist/fascist. When society is "patriarchal" that's kept under control. When patriarchy starts to disappear, women's nature pops back up. It might take two or three generations, but pop up it does.

This means the more women get involved in, the worse that thing gets. And since so many believe in a strong, centralized government, they're catastrophes when allowed to vote.

Many societies in the past have tried to ignore the differences between men and women and make them "equal." They've all collapsed and I know of at least 80 societies this has happened to.

Men, too, go insane without women, but in a different way. Just look around. They make enough money to just support themselves, with no surplus to support a family or advance society. Some go MGTOW and it's a damn shame that concept even exists.

"The murder of the Father" means the murder of the nuclear family, which has been one of the main goals of leftism since it's been around. They think without the "oppressive" family we'll be more free. The truth is the exact opposite.

Leftists, all of whom are deluded and don't live in the real world, just ignore these things, thinking that doubling-down on their beliefs is the cure to everything. If it doesn't work, let's make things worse!

There are prescriptions to cure our problems. The problem with the cure, as always, is to put it into effect.

I have a rough idea of what the future is going to bring. We're stomping on the brake and accelerator at the same time. Science and technology is accelerating by leaps and bounds while at the same time we're stomping on the brake when it comes to society.

Women were not especially crazy when I was in middle school and high school. My first semester in college I started to notice something was wrong with some of them, and when I gradated in 1983 it was very obvious there was something wrong with a lot of them. That was only a 15 year time period between middle school and college graduation. The difference was astonishing. Fifteen years!

Women are notorious about trying to blame their problems on men (that's one of the main characteristics of leftism - to blame your problems on someone else).

I guess we're going to have to lose another generation before there is any significant change.

“The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.” - Milton Friedman

I Don't Listen to Doom-and-Gloomers Because They're False Prophets

These doom-and-gloomers - false prophets - are always wrong.

A woman once left a book of prophecies in my house. Every prediction in them - and they ran back before the birth of Jesus - was wrong.

There is something in people that always believes catastrophe is around the corner. Why, I don't know, but it's why newspapers have so much bad news. Good news doesn't sell.

There is a saying among the media: "If it bleeds it leads." It's why we've got movies such as Terminator and Alien and why authors such as Stephen King are so popular.

And who has not heard of the Book of Revelation and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

There is a man named Paul Erlich, who back in the '70 said, "The battle is feed humanity is over!" He predicted hundreds of millions starving to death.

He was wrong. He was and is a false prophet. He's never been right. Not once. He's still famous. Still some tell me, "You just wait!" (the way people tell me,"You just wait for the Rapture!). I'm not losing any sleep over it.

Carl Sagan, another fraud (and a pothead), once "mathematically" figured the results of "nuclear winter." Wrong again. He was so bad at what he did he was denied tenure at Princeton. Yet everyone knows who he was.

I consistently get people telling me, "We can't do this because of this." But they're always wrong.

There is no such thing as an "expert" (reminds me of a joke I heard years ago: "ex" means "has-been" and "spurt"means "drip under pressure. So an "expert" is a "has-been drip under pressure").

Recently there has been hysteria about "global warming." Twenty years ago it was "global cooling," and if you look at headlines starting from the early 1900s, every 20 years it was cooling, warming, cooling. And some people always fall for it.

People aren't that rational, and the masses of people, never. Our perception goes through the emotional brain first. That's how propaganda works. Convince people they're rational when you're targeting the emotional brain, and people will fall for it every time.

We have problems, yes. We always have and always will. But we're not looking at a Mad Max scenario where society collapses. A slow government collapse, yes, but every government in history has collapsed (that is an accurate prophecy, based on thousands of years of history).

If people believed the nay-sayers, we'd never advance at all, in any way.

"It's Not Your Imagination, Single Women: There Literally Aren't Enough Men Out There"

One thing I noticed in college is not-very-smart, not-all-that-attractive women who put a remarkably high value on themselves. "How in the world do they expect to get married and have kids," I thought, "When they think the men here aren't good enough for them?" These women might have considered themselves "amazing" but in reality they were anything but.

This was in 1983, and now the the problem is worse.

By the way. Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1953's Childhood's End, made the observation that effective birth control would be a world-changer.

As for women maturing faster, hundreds of years ago Hegel noticed that when women hit 18 that's as mature as they will ever be, but men, since they mature later, go much farther than women.

Personally I've never noticed girls maturing faster than boys...except at 11 many of them were taller than the boys.

This is from the site Black Lips.

There really aren't enough men.

We all have that friend: the beautiful, intelligent, driven woman who—like Katherine Heigl in every rom-com—can't find a decent date. Every guy she goes out with is an asshole; she consistently dates "below" her league, and she's on the verge of giving up on a committed relationship altogether.

Not long after he turned 30, the writer Jon Birger realized he and his wife knew a lot of women like that. The couple didn't have a lot of single male friends left, but the many single women they knew all seemed to be buyers stuck in a seller's market. One of those friends, Birger told me, "had been dating a guy for a couple years. It certainly seemed like they were well on their way to getting married. She was in her late 30s, he was in his mid 40s. She really wants to have kids, get married, the whole [thing]. And she's amazing in every way."

One day at lunch, Birger casually asked her about her boyfriend. "Her whole expression changed," Birger recalled. They had just broken up. "They'd been dating for over two years and he said he 'just wasn't ready to settle down.'"

This got Birger, a former economics writer for "Fortune" and "Money," thinking: How could a man of that age be so cavalier about casting aside such an amazing woman? And why do we all have similar stories of incredible female friends trapped for years in dating hell? Why are there so many great single women? Where are all the great single men?

Using his background in economics and statistics, Birger sought out an answer. The result is his new book, Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game, a clever read with a sobering conclusion: There simply aren't enough college-educated men to go around. For every four college-educated women in my generation, there are three college-educated men. The result? What Birger calls a "musical chairs" of the heart: As the men pair off with partners, unpartnered straight women are left with fewer and fewer options—and millions of them are eventually left with no options at all.

I sat down for a long talk with Birger and found out why boys aren't graduating from college, why your best friend is single, and why more women should consider moving to Silicon Valley.

VICE: How did you determine that there was this nation-wide "man deficit" among the college-educated?

Jon Birger: I think when I began the research, I actually thought the conclusion was a little different. I assumed this was a New York problem or a big city thing. Like in New York, I [thought] it had something to do with the labor market here; fashion and PR and media attract a lot of women and Wall Street isn't nearly the all-male bash that it used to be, so I figured there would be all those shifts in the labor market—[I thought] maybe there was something unique about LA and Washington and New York that make them particularly bad for women. It turns out I was wrong. In fact, what I call the "college man deficit" is worse in rural states like Montana and West Virginia and Mississippi than it is in California and New York. It's a nationwide phenomenon.

So, where are all the men?

I mean they exist, they're just not going to college. This isn't China or India where they have a man-made gender imbalance because of all sorts of horrendous things. [Men are] out there, they're just not going to college. Last year about 35 percent more women than men graduated from college.

That's huge!

The Department of Education projects that by the class of 2023, there will be 47 percent more women than men [graduating from college]. That's three women for every two men, essentially. Obviously, none of this would matter if we were all a little more open-minded about who we are willing to date and marry. But there have been multiple studies on this and it turns out Americans have become less likely, over the past 50 years, to marry and date across educational lines. So educational intermarriage—I don't know if that's a real term, maybe I just made it up—is at its lowest rate in 50 years.

Does that mean in the working-class dating market there are a lot of single men? What implications does that have?

Among non-college-educated singles ages 22 to 29, there are 9.4 million men and 7.1 million women. And if you look at the women in that age group who are non-college-educated, something like 30 percent of the women are married but only 22 percent of the men are married.

"Being unwilling to consider working-class guys affects women in ways that it doesn't affect men. It's totally unfair, and I get that."

The other interesting thing—and you see this in China too—if you look at census data on fully-employed, non-college-educated men age 25 to 30, the ones who are married earn 20 percent more than the ones who are not married. Which tells me that in order to get married and attract a wife, you have to earn more and be more entrepreneurial and work harder.

Is there also an issue for American women where the more educated you are, the smaller your dating pool becomes? It feels that the smarter you are as a woman, the smaller your dating pool is, because women seem less likely to date men less intelligent than themselves.

It's not just women, both men and women are unlikely to date and marry across those lines. It just doesn't matter for the men because the pool of educated women is so vast that their own classism doesn't really punish them. But being unwilling to consider working-class guys affects women in ways that it doesn't affect men. It's totally unfair, and I get that, but it's not like only the women are choosy and the men are all open-minded.

Fair enough. What are some of the things women can do to increase their likelihood of finding a partner, other than considering working-class guys? I mean, are there "women deserts" they can go to? How old are you?

I'm 23.

So what I'm about to say is easier advice for somebody who's 23 or 22. What I'm about to tell you is probably not workable for a 45-year-old with a whole life here in New York, a family, a career: It's not an absolute, but as you go from the East coast to the West Coast, the ratios among college grads get a little better.

Really?

There are certain pockets. Far and away, the best dating market in the country for women is Silicon Valley, San Jose, San Francisco. Even with the gay population, San Francisco is still far better. So if you're just starting out—I'm not saying you're going to base your whole life around...

Finding a man, yeah.

But if you're really marriage-oriented and this is a high priority for you and you have geographical flexibility, you just might want to put this on your list, you know. San Jose, Denver, Seattle—those are going to be better dating markets for women than Miami or Fort Lauderdale or New York.

That's really interesting because it also speaks to tech's problem as a very, very male-dominated industry... Right. Back East, the city with the best gender ratio is probably Columbus, Ohio, which has a real burgeoning tech community there.

I'm making a quantitative argument not a qualitative argument. I don't know if these [tech] guys are good guys or whether—I don't know if they can carry on a conversation or not.

They can't.

I'm just telling you by the numbers I think they're less likely to act like dickheads because they don't have the same kind of leverage.

Why are more women graduating from college than men?

Obviously, if we'd had this conversation 40 years ago, this conversation would have looked different. There would have been a lot more [college-educated] men than women. Once upon a time, colleges were discriminating blatantly against female applicants, thinking they only went to college to get their Mrs. degrees. High schools did a particularly wretched job when it came to teaching girls in math and sciences. So there are a whole host of reasons why girls underperformed in high school and were discriminated against when it came to college applications, but Title IX leveled the playing field.

But I'm reluctant to entirely credit Title IX because women started attending college in other countries, where there was no Title IX, and the gains remained around the same time. So the question is, if it's not Title IX what is it?

Claudia Golden, who is an economist at Harvard, her conclusion is that it's the [birth-control] pill. Her argument is that the big driver of gains in female college enrollment is the expectation of workforce participation. If you're getting married at 21 or 22 and having kids soon thereafter, the payoff of going to college is very small. If you can plan your life with greater certainty and delay marriage and childbirth, the investment value of college goes up. So she credits the pill.

That kind of explains how we got to 50/50 enrollment; it doesn't explain how we got to 58/42. And my argument is that the old discrimination [against women] obscured a fundamental biological truth: Girls' brains mature at a faster rate than boys' brains, girls mature [faster] socially and intellectually. They're about a year ahead of boys. When it comes to actual schoolwork, girls do their homework better, girls are more organized, they're less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, they don't get put in jail [at the same rates]. So I think girls have a developmental advantage when it comes to college preparation.

So at the rates we're going, is there going to have to be affirmative action for boys, to keep things even? A lot of elite private colleges are already engaging in quiet, de-facto, under-the-table affirmative action for boys. I went to Brown. The acceptance rate for boys is 11 percent; for girls it's 7 percent. The worst example is Vassar. Their acceptance rate for boys is 34 percent and for girls it's 18 or 19 percent.

What's interesting is that if you look at the top public universities that are bound by Title IX [when it comes to admissions], they all accept girls at a higher rate than boys.

Right, because—

Girls are better applicants.

"It's a chicken-and-egg thing. If marriage is harder to come by, do you seek it less?"

Do you think that the attitude of men in their 30s and 40s who don't feel the need to settle down can be chalked up purely to the way the deck is stacked in their favor?

The one thing I never totally decided on was how much of this is conscious versus subconscious. So when a young woman or a young man gets to a school [where there are a lot] more women than men, and there's this highly intense hook-up culture, is it, "Well, there are three of us for every two of them, I'm going to change my behavior as a result," or is it a "when in Rome" kind of thing?

Or is it that attitudes towards marriage are changing? Do you think that my generation just places less of a value on long-term romantic commitment?

Well, it's a chicken-and-egg thing. If marriage is harder to come by, do you seek it less? I mean, the marriage rate for women in Silicon Valley is much higher than New York's. And the divorce rate's lower too.

What else did you find out about divorce?

It seems obvious that if women are in short supply then you're going to try harder to hold on to [your wife]. There's actually a lot of social science [research] on sex ratios that grows out of animal behavior and zoology. There's a study in the book I reference—what researchers will do is look at nominally monogamous species. They'll [mess] around with the sex ratios in a control population and take the ratio from 5:5 to six males for every four females to start. What they found is that the male desertion rate, once they made the population overly male, declined from 22 percent to 11 percent.

Because they don't have any other options.

But wait for this. When they took it the other way and made it six females for every four males, the male desertion rate went from 22 percent to 52 percent. So the prevailing mating culture went from monogamy to polygamy, just by changing the prevailing sex ratio.

The argument is that it's actually an evolutionary adaptation, because in an environment in which females are scarce and you want to pass along your genes to the next generation, making big investments in parenting efforts make a lot of sense. But when females are plentiful, the best mating strategy emphasizes mating effort over parenting effort.

Is there any silver lining to this for women?

There has been some reaction from women who found [the book] life-affirming, because they realize it's not them. They had been blaming themselves for their lack of success [in the dating world], and this was kind of assuring in some way.

It's hugely reassuring, I think.

But there are others who find it massively depressing.

How do you comfort your single friends—"Oh, you'll find someone"—when statistically, many of them won't unless they lower their standards?

See, I hate the "lower your standards thing," because I'm always thinking about my friend [who married a janitor] and I don't view [their marriage] as "lowering your standards." I view this as making a different kind of choice.

And as an older married guy, I also have something else to add: All marriage involves compromise. You'll learn this. Sometimes the fun part of marriage is working through the compromise and figuring out your comfort zones. So the "lowering your standards" thing ekes me a little bit—if lowering your standards means marrying an asshole, I'm with you. But if it means [marrying someone who] makes $60,000 instead of $600,000 I'm resisting that.

"My belief, my hope, is that once you shine a light on this stuff the behavior will change."

More and more women are deciding to live independent lives and not get married; could that trend actually be the result of there just not being enough men?

It's very important to understand that I am not endorsing marriage. I am not endorsing monogamy. I think people can lead fulfilled lives without getting married.

You can also ask the same question about hookup culture. I'm not the morality police, but at the same time I kind of wonder if men and women—women in particular—would be less enthused about hookup culture if traditional relationships were more available. I don't know the answer to that, but I wonder.

So is my generation headed for an absolute trainwreck of divorce and loneliness? It sounds like a perfect storm.

It does sound like a perfect storm. However, we are not voles or fish, we have a moral compass that animals do not. So my belief, my hope, is that once you shine a light on this stuff the behavior will change. I kind of believe that once everybody knows that guys are acting like pigs or that women are better off expanding their dating pool, the behavior will change.

I also think that [people will start] dating across educational lines. I think it's inevitable, given the way the numbers are, and actually if you look at the African-American community where there's almost twice as many women graduating from college as men, these [cross-educational] pairings are far more common. There's some Pew research data showing that African-American women are more likely to marry men [who are less educated than them.]

Are there any societies where men outnumber women, or where women have the power that men have in America?

China. There was a semi-recent story in Bloomberg, and it quoted a young couple who were about to start having a family. The dad said, "Oh, I hope I have a girl, having a boy is just too expensive." Because in the middle-upper class in China, it's now accepted that in order to be marriageable a young man has to own his own apartment. In Shanghai, that could be $300,000 to $400,000, and he has to own a car, too. This creates pressure not only on the young man but on the family, to be able to afford to help him. It's a reverse dowry, essentially.

America 4.0

Some months ago I ran across the concept of "America 3.0," but didn't comment on it until recently. It was about the next version of America once this one is gone.

I'd say, though, that we are looking instead at America 4.0.

It was the political scientist Kevin Phillips (among others) who observed that countries go through three phases: agricultural, industrial, then financial (and empire) then the government collapses.

We're in the last phase, which is why it is America 3.0.

First the United States was an agricultural nation, followed by industrial, then right around WWII we entered the financial/empire phase - which is now in collapse.

Each phase overlapped the other. Right now we are in America 3.0 - the financial/empire phase - but what are we overlapping in the coming America 4.0?

It looks to be three things: computers and software, nanotechnology and designer drugs. As America 3.0 collapses, America 4.0, like a phoenix, rises from the ashes.

Of course there is going to be a lot of dislocation during this transition. But then, there is always a lot of dislocation during major transitions.

You can what the problems are by people's complaints. During the industrial phase many farmers were wiped out - and there were many complaints. Now, in the financial/empire/collapse phase, our industrial base is not wiped out, but close to it.

So what's next? That, as always, is the problem. If you could tell what's coming, many of the problems could be avoided. You can't trust the government's predictions, of course.

When I was 12 or 13 years old, I read a story by the late Philip Jose' Farmer called "Riders of the Purple Wage." Farmer wrote that the story was based on the Triple Revolution Document (which is now online). In those days there was no internet, so I wrote a letter and ordered a copy (which disappeared decades ago).

The TRD was an attempt to predict what was coming. And this was in 1964.

What is discussed, more than anything else, was what is termed "the cybernation revolution. In other words, computers and software. "The committee claimed that machines would continue to reduce the number of manual laborers needed, while increasing the skill needed to work, thereby producing greater unemployment," says Wikipedia.

That was not a bad prediction at all, although their prescriptions - pure liberalism - were ridiculous and didn't work.

Yes, computers, software and robots have wiped out a lot of jobs. My last car, I got 488,000 miles out of it before it expired. I expect to get a least 500,000 out of my current one. Both of the were designed on computers and built in large part by robotics. Good for the public, not so good for all the auto workers who lost their jobs.

The only thing I can say is that we are looking at more advances in computers, software, robotics, designer drugs and nanotechnology. I suspect 3-D printing, which advances every day, will return power to the people and decentralize things.

Now we move to the basis of any society - the family.

The family in America 3.0 is in trouble - divorce, fatherless children, single mothers. This won't stand.

So, we're going to have to "evolve" a different family in 4.0 - which means going back to the original family - the nuclear family.

The authors of America 3.0 understand this. “The continuous core of our distinct American culture is the American nuclear family," they write. Because if you don't have a stable family, then everything is in trouble.

There have been a lot of changes in the relationships between men and women, all of which, in my opinion, have been driven by technology. Write the authors: “The liberation of women from backbreaking domestic work...the move of many women out of the house and into the cash economy, the dissolution of traditional family life, the legality and widespread use of abortion, the sweeping impact of no-fault divorce, the effect of fragmented families on several generations of American children, the social acceptance of single motherhood, the appearance of a political and cultural movement demanding civil rights and marriage for gay people, and the rise of ubiquitous pornography on the Internet.”

And don't forget effective birth control.

As far as I'm concerned, America's impressive accomplishments have been based on the fact we have stable nuclear families. But not so much anymore. But the more destruction of the nuclear families, the more destruction to society (which is why I consider leftists insane - they want to destroy the nuclear family). What we get instead are murderous "tribes" combating each other.

The Manosphere understands there are big problems between men and women, although some of the prescriptions (such as those of "Roissy" and "Roosh") will only exacerbate the problems.

Too bad I cannot specifically predict the future. It would save a lot of problems for everyone.

I will say our government is its own Doomsday Machine.

"Anyone who regularly navigates between the private marketplace and the world of government and politics is bound to notice the flexibility, choice, and efficiency offered by the first and the corruption, stagnation, and inefficiency on display in the second." - James Piereson

"John Hornick on 3D Printing, and some related comments about America 3.0"

I've mentioned about Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" books (and some have snickered, even though they are the history of our country. especially back when people where self-supporting and the government was a fraction of its current size) and it's obvious our current version of technological society hasn't been around very long and doesn't look like it's going to be around much longer. For one thing, our government is in slow collapse, and because of what it's become that's fine with me.

We need to decentralize, to return power to the people.

This article is from Chicago Boyz and was written by Lexington Green.

[Note: I am not personally or professionally acquainted with Mr. Hornick. He is in no way associated with any opinions I may have, or proposals I have made. He is not affiliated in any way with the America 3.0 Institute.]

We wrote "America 3.0" in 2012, mostly, and it was published in 2013. In the book we present a picture of America in 2040. We predict the demise of the industrial-era political and economic order, which is visibly failing today, and the rise of a new set of institutional arrangements for the country. A big part of this change is the development of several important new technologies which will undermine the existing order, and democratize the economy in radical ways.

We focused on 3D printing, driverless cars, cheap desalination and personalized health care and medication. We were not trying to write a comprehensive book about future technology. Rather, our goal was to indicate the scale of the changes in technology which were coming, and the disruptive impact they would have. If we were to write it now, we would have said more about robotics, drones, and blockchains, for example. Nonetheless, the general trend of things is as we predicted. And as we suspected, things are moving much faster, and the world will be even more different by 2040 than we rather conservatively predicted.

I recently ran across some outstanding videos by John Hornick, an intellectual property attorney at the Finnegan firm in DC. Mr. Hornick is an expert on the law and the technology of 3D printing. I have spent a few hours immersed in his videos.

Mr. Hornick has a video, entitled “3D Printing State of the Art: Industrial” from May of 2015 which gets into detail about the current state of the art in 3D printing. It is a good primer if you are interested in the field. His deep knowledge as well as his enthusiasm make for a compelling presentation of a highly technical subject.

Without any hype, and based on the actual practices in the industry as it is today, he is predicting massive changes in the economy to result from the development and dissemination of 3D printing technology. He mentions that there are various terms being used, including “additive manufacturing” but that he prefers the term “3d Printing” because it is the most appealing way to describe it, which grabs the imagination. I agree with him on that.

Incidentally, in our book we speculated that jet engine turbine blades would not be manufactured by 3D printing, because the processing history of the product as well as the shape and material were critical, and printing would not be able to provide the needed characteristics. We were very wrong about that! In fact, at about 57:00 he mentions that the first fully 3D printed jet engine has been made, presumably including turbine fan blades.

Mr. Hornick discusses the disruptive effect on the economy of 3D printing technology, which is only beginning to happen. He mentions as an example a company that was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on turbine blades, which started using a 3D printing to repair and replace turbine blades.

This is great for the company that needs the blades, terrible for the company that sells the blades. You can see how disruptive this technology can be, totally changing the way products are made, sold, distributed and used. And also totally changing who’s a manufacturer and who’s a customer. The customer becomes a manufacturer.

Established relationships are going to dissolve, and even established categories of business are going to dissolve.

Mr. Hornick says he views “the state of 3D printing today as where the steam engine was in 1765.” We agree that this technology is going to be, as the economists call it, a general purpose technology, meaning it will become pervasive in society, even down to the consumer and household level, it will improve in quality and fall in price over time, and it will spawn innovation. In other words, it will be a technology on the scale of the steam engine, electrical power, or computing. It will fundamentally transform society.

One thing that comes through clearly in this video is that there is a large number of firms, and they are currently using a variety of different methodologies. It reminds me of the early era of any new technology, where there are many firms and many techniques. For example there were dozens of automobile companies in the first two decades of the 20th Century. As the technology matures, there will be consolidation into fewer firms, and many approaches will be abandoned until a small set of standards are established. This typically follows a Hype Cycle, where there is excitement about the new technology, no one knows yet which firms will become leaders, there is overhype and over-investment, then there is a mass extinction phase that leaves a few market leaders standing, then a leveling off into being a mature industry.

But 3D printing is still in the “Wild West” stage, with lots of firms taking lots of different approaches. Mr. Hornick mentions the Hewlett Packard Multi Jet Fusion technology (FAQs here), which might be a “game changer.” Perhaps this machine, or a machine like it, will be the Model T of this technology.

At about 1:00:00 he talks about the legal ramification of this field. This technology, he says, cuts across all types of law and regulation. “Every industry, every type of law, every technology, they are all involved.” This is similar to the point I make in my talks about America 3.0 and the Future of the Legal Profession. The transition from America 1.0, the world of muscle power and small scale enterprises, to America 2.0, the world of machine power and large organizations, included a transformation of the legal profession. Old fields died out, or were changed in basic ways. New areas of practice arose which were never heard of before. There is nothing more basic than tort law, to the contemporary legal mind. It is one of a handful of basic features of our system. Yet it arose in its current form as a result of the steam engine. The first treatise on torts appeared in 1857, because before that time, before the existence of power machinery, the number and severity of accidents and injuries was immeasurably smaller. Similarly, the legal profession was essential to bringing the new world into being. All aspects of corporate law, litigation and transactional, had to be invented from scratch, for example. The lawyers and firms that were early and successful movers built empires, some of which endure to this day. Similar opportunities, and threats, are coming along faster than most people in the legal profession imagine.

An earlier video by Mr. Hornick from 2013, entitled “3D Printing and the Future (or Demise) of Intellectual Property” focuses more on the potential impact of 3D printing as a disruptive technology, and on the legal side of these developments.

Mr. Hornick (around 11:00) uses the helpful phrase “away from control” to describe what will happen when people can manufacture anything they want, with any functionality, at will, not subject to external supervision, and privately, with no one knowing the item was made. He predicts “a complete paradigm shift” where there is a “complete democratization of manufacturing.” The “lines will blur between manufacturers, retailers and users.”

He does not focus on this “democratization”, which is a key feature of the argument in America 3.0. We argue that the new technologies which are coming are anti-hierarchical, anti-centralizing, individually-empowering and work ideally in networks rather than boxed-in organizations. Another way to say it is that the limitations on knowledge and capabilities which Ronald Coase asserted as the rationale for the business firm are dissolving. The way I have described this is that, far from fading away, we are on the verge of a renaissance of American manufacturing, and the factory floor will be everywhere. Every single manufactured product can be and will be customized. Furthermore, 3D printing, and other technologies, will not only disrupt and transform the economy, they undermine the rationale for the modern state. Major technological changes inevitably have downstream political consequences. We can only speculate on this, but it is certainly coming. And it will take lawyers to navigate the period of disruption, and to enact the reforms needed to take advantage of these developments, so that they make our country more free and prosperous in the future.

Everyone Has a Philosophy of Life to Live By Whether They Know it or Not

“Life itself is but what you deem it.” - Marcus Aurelius

So it's best to be conscious of it, because otherwise it runs you instead of you running it and using it be your advantage. Call it making the unconscious conscious.

You can call it a model if you want. That's what Richard Maybury does, in his Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career & Financial Security, a 44-page pamphlet everyone should own. He uses it in all his books.

The thing to do is make your model conform as closely to reality as possible, because the closer to reality it is, the better your chances of success. If you think you can jump out of an airplane without a parachute and live, that is not a good model of reality.

I used to run across men who thought, "I can rip off people in drug deals and nothing will happen to me." All of them ended up murdered or in prison. Obviously, not a good model at all.

There are certain things I've learned about life.

1. If you fail, get up and keep going.

Failure is inherent in life and you cannot avoid it. Instead, use its lessons.

I've mentioned the "Little House on the Prairie" books. When she was a little girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder's father told her, "In every great loss there is a small gain."

What he said is true. If you fail at something, there is a lesson in it somewhere. Just make sure you find out what it is.

I've started businesses that failed. After they failed, I knew exactly why. I've started ones that succeeded - and I know exactly why they succeeded. But it was always after they failed or succeeded that I knew why.

2. The only thing that works is political and economic freedom.

I once ran across a man who sputtered, "I thought this was supposed to be free!" when he found he was supposed to pay $600 a month for government healthcare. I just shook my head. He was clueless.

His mind wasn't right. So, get your mind right. You can even say you can program your mind. Economic and political freedom, and learn from and work though failure.

The government is supposed to be your friend, but now is massively bloated to the point it cannot survive. These days, as Aesop wrote (along with a lot of other people), "The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny." Our political and economic freedom is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.

Once you understand exactly what the government is, and does, you can work your way around it and still be successful, still be happy.

3. Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity.

That's an old saying, and it's a true one, just as the old Boy Scout saying, "Be prepared" is true.

A lot of times your talents show up early.

"What's bred in the bone will come out in the flesh." More Aesop, and it's an observation thousands of years old.

I once had a girlfriend who told me when she was five she used to shinny up lightpoles and at the top wave to cars. She later became a fantastic athlete. That's not a coincidence, just the way it's not a coincidence I knew a boy who learned to play the guitar at five and later became a professional musician.

4. Learn some useful skills, no matter how minor they are.

This is related to "Be prepared."

I was once in the middle of nowhere - like a desert - with a friend when a tire went flat. I found a screw in the tread. I had a spare, but I told my friend, "Watch this." I pulled the tire off, pulled the screw, put a plug in the tire, pumped it back up, and continued on our way. Since he's known me for a long time, he never says, "That was lucky."

Yes, a minor skill, but it's come in handy more than once.

5. Cultivate gratitude.

Gratitude and envy are inversely related. You'll have a much happier life if you can feel gratitude and appreciation for all the gifts that are the result of the work of those who came before us.

6. "Be not afraid."

Have some confidence in yourself - a confidence that if you fail, you get up and try again. Bluster and a big mouth is not confidence - it's just a bunch of bluff covering up a bunch of anxiety and fear.

"Be not afraid" is right out of the New Testament, along with sayings about bad trees producing bad fruit and houses built on sand falling down when a storm came. If those sayings are about anything, it's about the models people keep in their head, the ones they run their lives by.

It's a good thing to memorize those short, pithy, true sayings and keep repeating them to yourself until they are second-nature. This is what I mean by "programming your mind."

All of these things have been covered thousands of years ago by the Four Cardinal Virtues - Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, Temperance.

Fortitude is a big one. It's not exactly confidence. More than anything else it's persistence (confidence is part of persistence), not giving up, getting up when you're knocked down.

Prudence is doing what you are good at and like, like my girlfriend shinnying up lightpoles at five. Trying to get a Ph.D. in Math or Physics when you have no talent is not prudent.

Justice is giving each his due. Someone who thinks other people should be forced by the government to pay for his healthcare is not just.

Temperance governs our appetite for pleasure. Just remember that pleasure is not well-being. Pleasure always goes up and down, but true well-being doesn't.

Governments are never prudent, just, and temperant. They certainly are persistent but almost always in a bad way.

Only people can demonstrate the Four Cardinal Virtues.

As for "programming your mind," that concept, too, is thousands of years old. Men such as the Buddha and Jesus have pointed out that you become what you think.

You can program it for good concepts, or bad ones. It's up to you.

“Our life is the creation of our mind.” - the Buddha

Farmer Boy

Many years ago I had a girlfriend who was a big fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her "Little House on the Prairie" books. I didn't know this until we were in the Missouri Ozarks and drove by a small town called Mansfield. A sign said it was the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family, so my girlfriend said, "Oh, let's stop! I have all her books!" So we did.

We visited their two-story house, which was built by Laura's husband Almanzo and neighbors (the Wilders were, by the way, the parents of the talented writer, Rose Wilder Lane, author of The Discovery of Freedom).

Later I read some of Laura's books. Four, actually. The first was Farmer Boy, which was the biography of her husband, Almanzo.

It was an impressive book. All of her books are impressive, and not exactly for children and women. Men can profit from them - I guarantee you that. All the books are both educating and entertaining.

Farmer Boy was about Almanzo growing up in the 1880s, and it was clearly a different world and a different country.

I've mentioned before the study of history is essential because if you don't understand history, then you're lost.

Farmer Boy is the history of a lost time.

Almanzo was instrumental in running the family farm, even as a small boy - and he loved it. He didn't mind getting up in the middle of the night to make sure the cows didn't freeze to death.

He also hated school and attended only a few months at the most, yet still grew up well-read and self-educated (when we visited their farmhouse there was a fairly large library in the living room).

Almanzo was raised with meaning, importance and community. These days children have little of that in their lives, and spend most of their time not learning anything in school, which they have to attend by law.

As for Laura, she was originally raised in Wisconsin, then when neighbors starting showing up Pa packed up the family and moved them farther west in a horse-drawn wagon to get away from everyone and to be free. He preferred the nearest neighbor to be about three miles away.

In some ways it was a much better world then. (By the way, Pa made everything - house, floor, chimney, furniture - mostly with an ax).

They had very few things that weren't handmade, and they appreciated and were grateful for everything they made. One Christmas Laura and her sister got a tin cup, a peppermint stick - and a penny. And they were grateful "with all their hearts."

I meet a lot of kids who suffer from "failure to launch." They have to spend their days in school from five to 17, can't find any decent jobs, and end up bored and suffering from ennui. None of that happened in Almanzo and Laura's time.

Their daughter, Rose, was essentially home-schooled, yet became one of the best-known and highest-paid woman writers of her time. Raised in a small town, with no Third Worlders, with self-sufficient parents, with a library at home....how often do you see this today?

I also encounter a lot of talking heads from the chattering classes, who babble their prescriptions for our present problems. They're always wrong, which is why I stopped watching them a long time ago.

If you want to find some answers, look to the past. For one thing, the government barely existed then. Nowadays, you can't escape its meddling.

In the past most people worked for themselves. In fact, Almanzo's father essentially told him that if you worked for someone else he owned you and you weren't free.

Let's see...small government and working for yourself....

The idea of working for someone else, with regular raises and being paid a good wage, didn't even last 100 years. It was gone by the year 2000, if not long before. In some small ways it does still exist but is a fraction of what it was at its peak.

Wages peaked, as I have mentioned a few times, in January, 1974. Since then they've been basically flat. The economy, on the other hand, has at least doubled since 1980.

You're on your own.

A few weeks ago I read an article about some petroleum engineering graduates who had their job offers (up to a $100,000 a year) withdrawn because of extreme volatility in the oil industry.

These days I cannot recommend college unless your degree is in extreme demand - and even then that demand might collapse. I'd get some sort of certification that might take three months.

The government is going to collapse sooner or later - and as far as I'm concerned, the sooner the better. It's become your enemy, not your friend.

In some ways we're going to head back to Almanzo's time - people as self-sufficient as possible, working for themselves, with a much smaller government, living in rural small towns, away from the Third World hellholes big cities are becoming.

And that's just fine with me.

Incidentally, across the state highway from Mansfield is a small winery, the Gloria Winery (Missouri, where I lived for years, has many wineries and caves).

The woman at the winery told us she and her husband moved there to reopen the winery, which her husband's family owned but had closed down for years.

They lived in a trailer and had perhaps an acre of vines. She told us, "We don't make much money but we're happy."

After all, enough is as good as a feast. Even if it's a tin cup, a peppermint stick and a penny.

The Vital Importance of Deducing from First Principles

"The only way to proceed through a complex situation is to start with the right first principle." ~ GK Chesterton.

When Karl Marx was writing his dangerous nonsense, he had critics, rarely known today, who wrote that his theories, if applied, would produce the worst tyrannies ever seen. And they were right.

How did they do this? Economics wasn't all that advanced then, but these men understood human nature. They deduced from correct first principles, and when you do that you can't go wrong.

The first one is that human nature is imperfect and cannot be fixed. The first even leftists will admit but not the second. They think with education and force people can be compelled to be perfect and happy. Utopia!

I'm written before the best way to understand the flaws in human nature is to memorize and understand the Seven Deadly Vices: Pride (grandiosity), envy, greed, wrath, etc.

When you start with those first principles, and add to them political power, then deduce from that what kind of society you would create. It's obvious it would be a Hell.

"By their fruits you will know them." "A house built on sand." Do those sound familiar? Ancient wisdom, easily understood.

The last article I posted pointed out the only way you can reproduce "social science" is through history. Unfortunately this can involve the death of millions (or hundreds of millions), as happened in the 20th Century, which was an attempt to overthrown ancient wisdom, based on millenia of history, and apply "new" principles.

This is why I am technically a "conservative," in the sense of "If it's not broke, don't fix it." This doesn't mean I don't believe in change, but there is a world of difference between advancements in cars and tinkering with societies.

Now apply this to the Manosphere. Its "first principles" are the beliefs in "alphas," "betas," "gammas," "omegas," "the Dark Triad," etc.

None of these concepts are based on hundreds if not thousands of years of history. Its principles are based on something completely new (at least in the fanatic's minds), which makes much of the Manosphere leftist. The first principles are unsound. A house built on sand.

It's an attempt to re-engineer human nature. It's not going to work, which is why the ideas of the Manosphere are going exactly nowhere. At least the bad ideas. There are some good ones, but they are based on old wisdom.

It's why in the long run frauds and and grifters such as "Roosh" and "Roissy" and "Vox Day" are going to fade away (notice how "Roosh" is trying to reinvent himself as some sort of Christian, and Vox Day as a science fiction writer. "Roissy" is just repeating his babble about "aphas" and sticking "shivs" into people.)

Ask yourself this: apply pride and envy and wrath and greed to the adolescent concepts of the Manosphere...and then ask yourself to where will these combinations will lead?

Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?

Clarice Starling: He kills women...

Hannibal Lecter: No. That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?

Clarice Starling: Anger, um, social acceptance, and, huh, sexual frustrations, sir...

Hannibal Lecter: No! He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now.

Clarice Starling: No. We just...

Hannibal Lecter: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?

"What’s To Be Done About The Reproducibility Crisis In The Social Sciences?"

I've pointed out before it takes a lot of evidence to convince me. I look to history, for one thing. It's why I dismiss most of the Manosphere as childish nonsense, don't accept "evo-psych" since it's not a science and certainly not reproducible, and consider leftism insanity.

Years ago the late James Hogan told me science automatically turns itself into technology. The same thing applies to "social science." It automatically turns itself into "technology," technology which sometimes kills people by the millions and destroys societies.

This was written by James "AntiDem" Rustler and is from the blog Social Matter.

There has of late been a lot of discussion about the future of social science and the direction that it should take if it is to remain relevant. This has been touched off by a “reproducibility crisis” in social science which has brought its system of validating results into serious question. Perhaps the most noteworthy headline generated by the matter involved an investigation, published in the journal Science, which found that over 60% of a selection of peer-reviewed research papers in psychology that had been published in prestigious journals in the field had claimed results that were not reproducible. Similar bad news emanates from other areas of the social sciences, throwing doubt on the reliability and usefulness of the entire field.

But all of this only confirms what traditionalists and reactionaries already knew: that a very large amount of the social science that has been produced over the past century – or even longer – is utter bunk. News of the reproducibility crisis provides some nice validation, but it is hardly a surprise to us that the social sciences are fundamentally broken. The question is what to do about it. In an article in the Drexel University-affiliated online magazine "The Smart Set," the economist Michael Lind recently proposed abolishing social science entirely*.

Lind’s complaints are reasonably valid: That social scientists have applied the mindset and methodology of physics in areas of study to which they are completely unsuited; that once social science became convinced that it was a “hard science” it became arrogant; that this has caused a disconnect from reality and a prioritization of abstract theory over practical results. Yet, abandoning social science altogether seems unwise. For one thing, good social science is needed in order to combat bad social science, which despite the reproducibility crisis retains tremendous influence. For another, with the power of faith and tradition broken or nearly so throughout the West, something is needed in order to guide us forward (even if its goal is to eventually lead us back to faith and tradition). Lastly, a full documenting of what went wrong with the West and how it happened is necessary so that we can (hopefully) avoid making quite exactly the same mistakes again in the future.

So no, I don’t propose a complete abandonment of the field of social science. What I do propose is a complete reorientation of it around a new model, or at very least (as we cannot control what leftists do), the adoption of a new model by social scientists of the right. In short, while the left’s social science takes physics as its model, the right’s social science should take engineering as its model.

One may be tempted to ask: What’s the difference? After all, engineering is no more than applied physics, isn’t it? Well, yes it is, but the qualifier “applied” makes all the difference in the world. It imbues engineering with an entirely different mindset–one far more suited to the task of building functioning things in the real world. While physics is theoretical, engineering is concrete. While physics explores what is possible, engineering explores what is practical. While physics asks: “Is it theoretically plausible that X could work under exactly perfect conditions?”; engineering asks: “Can we design X such that it will stand up to real-world conditions?”**. While physicists theorize, engineers test.

This should sound like a godsend to the men of the West, who have spent 250 years watching their civilization be slowly destroyed in the name of one or another fine-sounding theory – all of them untested, or unfalsifiable, or both – developed by men of impressive credentials.

The misconceptions of the “I Fucking Love Science” crowd aside, the truth is that engineers prefer the known to the unknown, the tested to the untested, the proven to the unproven. They understand that innovation for innovation’s sake is bad engineering. Earthy as it may be, the old saws “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “The perfect is the enemy of the good” both reflect sound principles of engineering. If an existing solution is working fine, a good engineer will see no reason to replace it. The fact that the concept behind a new solution sounds fantastic does not move the engineer, because he understands that any slick-talking snake-oil salesman can make big promises – what matters is not what someone can promise, but what they can actually deliver. Yes, sometimes a new design that may work better or that may do something that the old design couldn’t do at all comes along; but when it does, the engineer will insist that it be exhaustively tested before it is put into use.

I have seen this personally. In an earlier part of my life, I was tangentially involved with the testing regime that the FAA put GPS through before they allowed it to be used for instrument approaches in civilian aircraft. By that time, GPS was a well-developed technology that had been successfully used by the military for years. Despite this, the FAA insisted on doing years more worth of testing, which included thousands of hours of field testing in actual airplanes during flight. As far as they were concerned, nobody was going to end up flying a 747 full of vacationers into a mountainside because the FAA hadn’t tested this technology thoroughly enough. This is the engineering mindset at work.

That the left and the IFLS crowd (Or do I repeat myself?) seem not to understand this is a function of the fact that what little they know about engineering they take from the example of Silicon Valley. But the Valley is an exceptionally poor model of engineering-thinking. Silicon Valley ships undertested, half-broken products all the time, because it is in a business that is essentially low-stakes. If the latest release of iOS or Google Hangouts or the Facebook app is a buggy mess, nobody dies because of it. But this is not the case for other technologies. In short, the Valley is a consumer-focused and often ego-driven industry where flashy “innovation” is prioritized, safety concerns are minimal to nonexistent, and there are no stakes for failure other than a little pride and money. Thus, no matter how trendy and high-status it may currently be, it should not be taken as a model for what serious engineering looks like.

In serious engineering, nothing is deployed until it has been tested and tested and tested again, under every possible condition that can be conceived of. Especially, every possible failure mode of a new technology will be explored in depth, both to determine its likelihood and to determine its possible severity. Here it is worth noting of the left that not only do they put forth untested and unfalsifiable theories, but so convinced are they that history is on their side, that their views are backed by Science!, and that their utopia is inevitable, that as a matter of principle they never consider the possibility of failure. This extends to all of their thinking.

One may recall that the reason why Chernobyl (the official name of which was the V. I. Lenin Atomic Energy Station) was such an awful disaster was that the Soviets didn’t believe in constructing containment buildings around their nuclear reactors, because (of course!) Marxist science was so perfect that no such measure would ever be needed. Why think of containing that which cannot fail? This is a perfect metaphor for Marxism itself: let us not forget that Marx claimed that what he had was not an economic theory or a philosophy: no, what he had was hard science – physics itself! – the triumph of which was absolutely inevitable. If modern leftism has budged one inch from this belief about its own theories, I have seen no evidence of it.

(An aside: For a time in the early 00s, I worked in the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts – one of the many old mill towns in the northeast that has fallen on hard times due to a combination of automation and foreign competition. In the early 90s, a team of divers exploring the Merrimack River where it runs through Lawrence discovered a set of water turbines that was built in the 1850s in order to power the mills that sat along the river. It was found that the turbines were still in fine shape, and would only need the mud dredged out of them in order to be put back into service. After that, all the city of Lawrence would need to do would be to buy some generators, put them in one of the long-abandoned mill buildings, hook the generators up to the water turbines, and they would have enough electricity to power the entire city with enough left over that they could sell it at a profit to the power grid. It would be free energy – both clean and renewable for as long as the Merrimack keeps flowing. It is a testament to the incompetence of the Lawrence City Council that nothing ever came of this, but the point stands – sometimes old technology really is better. Certainly, this would have been a better solution for generating electricity than Chernobyl proved to be.)

As with the V. I. Lenin Atomic Energy Station, so with V. I. Lenin’s own history – with both, we see an unproven technology (in one case a scientific technology, in the other a social technology) put into practice by people who insisted that their theoretical model was so perfect that failure was impossible, and thus that both a sufficient amount of testing and the consideration of possible failure modes were foolish and unnecessary. Among those who still defend Marxism (or who advocate the various attempts to rebadge it under another name) we continue to see (a misapplication of) physics thinking. In physics, it is valid to say that the failure of X under conditions Y is no proof whatsoever that it would fail under conditions Z. Every possible set of combinations must be tried until it can be categorically stated on a theoretical level that X does not ever work under any conditions. Engineering, on the other hand, learns from history; it can say: “X failed every time we tried it in the real world; let’s try something different instead”.

And this brings us to a key concept: history. The left, being utopian, theory-based, and incapable of conceiving of the possibility that its ideas might ever fail, is by its nature fundamentally incapable of learning from history. But to the right, history is the answer to the critical question: How is it possible to test social technology? History is the testing ground of social technologies, and tradition represents the lessons that have come of that testing. Over thousands of years, our ancestors – who the left regard as idiots because they did not have iPads, but who we know were generally wiser and more realistic when it comes to human nature than we are – developed, adjusted, and refined the social technologies that they passed down to us in the form of tradition.

Sometimes the lessons that they learned came in the form of the words of wise men; often they came in the form of iron, blood, and fire. But either way, they learned from their experiences, and we of the right learn from them as well, because we understand that while the left never tires of hectoring their adversaries by telling them that science is objectively true (or at least, it is when its results are actually reproducible), it isn’t the only thing that is objectively true – so is history. The left may try to tell us that history is irrelevant or meaningless, and that their untested, unfalsifiable theories*** are superior to our ancestors’ lived experiences and the traditions born of the lessons they learned from them, but we know better. We know that history actually happened, that our ancestors were wise, and that tradition represents tried, tested, proven social technology.

Does this mean that we will never deploy a new social technology, or adjust an existing one, when circumstances demand it? No. But we will not innovate for innovation’s sake; we will not change just to change. Where an existing solution has been shown to work, we will keep using it (or, if one has been abandoned in favor of something that doesn’t work, we will bring it back). Where an existing solution no longer works as well as it once did (and the claim that it doesn’t must be proven, not just asserted), we will adjust it as minimally as possible in order to meet the changed circumstances.

In no case will we throw out a tried, tested, proven social technology in favor of an untried, untested, unproven theory, no matter how good it looks on paper. We will not scrap what works, even if imperfectly so, in exchange for pie-in-the-sky promises of perpetual motion machines that will deliver a free lunch to everyone. We will say that if a theorist wants us to believe their claims of having designed a better system, then they must prove that it is so in the real world. And until they have proven their theories, we will say: do not bother us with them – untested theory is worthless to us****.

With engineering as our model, we will adopt no social technology until it is thoroughly tested, adjust no functioning social technology until it is absolutely necessary to do so, and go back to tried-and-true technologies when new ones fail. We will dredge out old water turbines instead of building new Chernobyls, and appeals to the fact that it is the current year and water turbines are horribly old-fashioned will be meaningless to us. We will go with what we know works, because that’s just good engineering.

(*It appears that universities in Japan are beginning to do just that.)

(**The Constitution is a good example of a document that follows the physics model. It is theoretically possible for the Constitution to govern a certain kind people well, and in fact it did, for a limited period of time. But it was only engineered to stand up to what is essentially a best-case scenario. As soon as those design limits were exceeded, which happened in less than a century, it failed.)

(***It is worth noting that very often the left’s theories have been tested and shown to be failures, but where this is true, they simply raise the standard of proof of failure until it is unreachable, making their theories effectively unfalsifiable. For this, see the claim that the failures of communism in the 20th century are meaningless because those weren’t “real communism”. Where this fails, they will simply lie outright, as in the claim that the atheist left never oppressed, tortured, or killed anybody because they were atheists. From the Catholics of the Vendée to the Falun Gong in China right this minute, the history of the atheist left doing precisely that is as well-documented as it is horrifying. But the left will either simply deny this, or make bizarre assertions along the lines that Stalin had centuries-old churches dynamited or Mao had Tibetan monks tortured to death in prisons for some other, unspecified reason completely unrelated to anyone’s religious beliefs.)

(****And remember, if they are your theories, then it is your job to prove them, not ours to disprove them. And no, we’re not going to offer up our nation, our society, or our children’s cultural inheritance as a testing range for your unproven theories. If you want to test them, then move all of the believers in your theory to an island somewhere, and call us in a couple of centuries when you have some results that we can skeptically analyze.)

Sexual Perverts

I suppose close to 20 years ago I was listening to G. Gordon Liddy's now-defunct radio program, in which he commented that while in prison he encountered a child molester, which attitude was that everyone would be a "child lover," but that they were too scared to act on their desires.

This molester's attitude didn't surprise me, because I've seen it more that once.

When I was a teenager, perhaps 15 and 16, I used to hitchhike a lot. Many of us did. I was warned by friends about a middle-aged homosexual who'd pick up hitch-hikers and proposition them. Fortunately, I never encountered him, but in-between 15 and 21 homosexuals did proposition me. Then it quit.

Even then, I knew why: I was young. Even then, I knew they liked young boys, which is why they want to join the Scouts and the military. Access to young boys and men - and don't think otherwise.

After 21, I was too old for them.

My experience with sexual degenerates is they just don't have sexual problems - their problems affect their whole character. I've lost track of the homosexuals who are now dead of HIV. They're self-destructive and extraordinarily promiscuous, and their culture, such as it is, is rife with drug abuse, suicide and murder (homosexuals have a major serial killer problem, ignored by the media).

And leftists try to convince us there is nothing wrong with these people? This is one of the reasons, among many others, why I consider leftism to be a mental disease.

There are several signs of cultural collapse, but I think the easiest one to recognize is when the media celebrates sexual perversion.

"Gay" marriage? What a joke. Every one of them will cheat. The honest ones admit it.

I've never met a homosexual who wasn't a leftist, the reason being is that all leftists don't believe in any fixed human nature, so they believe all children can be raised as homosexuals if caught early enough.

Exactly what kind of culture do leftists believe their beliefs will create? They believe it will be a better one than we have now, obviously, but do they ever think about the details? One is which all are "equal" and there is no discrimination? What exactly does that mean? Or are they so ruled by their infantile emotions they can't see more than two seconds into the future?

Sooner or later, leftists are going to celebrate child molesters and try and convince us to do so, too. Just wait and see.