Tuesday, December 31, 2013

My Old, Blind, Deaf, Incontinent Pug

“Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.” - Schopenhauer

I have a 13-year-old rescue pug I got when he was seven. He had been abused and was psychotic. He bit me several times, hard enough to lay the skin open. It took me a year to turn him into a decent dog.

Now he's old and blind and deaf and incontinent. But I'll keep him until he dies.

Some people, when their dog gets like that, dump them at a shelter. Then pug rescues get them and make them comfortable until they die.

I don't understand people who dump their old dogs just because they're not happy healthy dogs anymore. If you don't want to deal with an old dog, then get a stuffed toy one.

Schopenhauer was right.

Monday, December 30, 2013

"...Wanting and Doing What is Best for the Other Person"

“Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.” ― George Eliot, Middlemarch


I have heard love defined as "wanting and doing what is best for the other person at all times." That's a pretty good definition.

I have been in love more than once. Three times, actually. What I felt, if I analyzed it, was an immense gratitude toward her. And I wanted the best for her, for her to be happy. And when I first felt it, I knew exactly what it was.

Yet I also thought, "This is amazing. It's so far above the normal world it's not even close."

It reminded me when I found out, many years ago, that eudaimonia means "well-being, human flourishing," the feeling of being alive, of having life more abundantly, being joyful. And that it was based on arete, excellence, liking and being good at what you do.

And what comes before arete? The Greeks decided it was Eros, which doesn't necessarily mean sex, or even love. It meant growth, the desire for union, the desire to create and discover, to invent.

It can take the form of love, or sex, or sex and love together. But it's about wanting the best for yourself, and in loving someone else, wanting the best for them. In other words, it's a relationship.

Before Eros was Chaos, or formlessness. Eros is what binds everything together. Without Eros everything falls back into Chaos.

Not surprisingly, the word "religion" means "to bind together."

In love you want to have union with the other person, connection, to be "joined together," as in the marriage vows, which also includes "love and cherish." (The word "cherish" comes from the root word, "dear," as in "dear to me."

To cherish, to have it be dear to you, to wish and do what is best for the other person, gratitude...that's a pretty good definition of love. Not just a feeling, but a doing, action.

Abraham Maslow, who came up with this:

...had some interesting thoughts about love.

He found there were two kinds of love "that correspond to a person’s orientation toward either 'deficit and repair' or 'growth and maturation.' 'Deficiency-love' is 'selfish love' or 'need-love,' whereas 'Being-love'—love for the 'being' of another person—is 'unneeding love' or 'unselfish love.' Being-love is not possessive and is admiring rather than needing; thus it is a richer, 'higher,' more valuable subjective experience than Deficiency-love. Deficiency-love can be gratified, whereas the concept of 'gratification' hardly applies at all to Being-love. Being-love has within it a minimum of fear. Being-lovers are more independent of each other, more autonomous, less jealous or threatened, less needful, more disinterested, but simultaneously more eager to help the other toward self-actualization and self-transcendence, more proud of the other’s triumphs, more altruistic, generous, and fostering. Being-love, in a profound sense, creates the partner, provides self-acceptance and a feeling of love worthiness, which enhances continual growth."

Again, it's what I have noticed: desiring the best for the other. And, again, Eros is about growth. The first kind of "love" is sometimes not even love: it's using the other person for sex, seeing them as a thing to satisfy base desires (the Greeks, among may others, noticed that those who devote their lives to physical pleasure become degraded).

I think it's pretty obvious that with the break-up of families, with single mothers, with vicious divorces...it's going to be the children who suffer the most. They'll grow up with little idea of what love is supposed to be. Oh, they'll know what sex is, of course, and try to fill their lives with it. But ultimately, they'll become degraded people - lost and lonely, looking for something they desperately want but cannot find...because they've never seen it.

Misunderstanding "The Dark Triad"

This article is from Inside the Criminal Brain and was written by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. This is the first part of a three-part series, which you can access by following the link.

Fallon has seven murders committed by those within his father’s family line, including the first case of matricide in the U.S. As shown in the article, Lizzy Borden was related to him.


"The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine.

"About four years ago, Fallon made a startling discovery. It happened during a conversation with his then 88-year-old mother, Jenny, at a family barbecue.

" 'I said, 'Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives?' Jenny Fallon recalls. 'I think there were some cuckoos back there.'

"Fallon investigated.

'There's a whole lineage of very violent people — killers,' he says.

"One of his direct great-grandfathers, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1667 for murdering his mother. That line of Cornells produced seven other alleged murderers, including Lizzy Borden. 'Cousin Lizzy,' as Fallon wryly calls her, was accused (and controversially acquitted) of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in Fall River, Mass., in 1882.

"A little spooked by his ancestry, Fallon set out to see whether anyone in his family possesses the brain of a serial killer. Because he has studied the brains of dozens of psychopaths, he knew precisely what to look for. To demonstrate, he opened his laptop and called up an image of a brain on his computer screen.

"'Here is a brain that's not normal,' he says. There are patches of yellow and red. Then he points to another section of the brain, in the front part of the brain, just behind the eyes.

"'Look at that — there's almost nothing here,' Fallon says.

"This is the orbital cortex, the area that Fallon and other scientists believe is involved with ethical behavior, moral decision-making and impulse control.

"'People with low activity [in the orbital cortex] are either free-wheeling types or sociopaths,' he says.

"He's clearly oversimplifying, but Fallon says the orbital cortex puts a brake on another part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved with aggression and appetites. But in some people, there's an imbalance — the orbital cortex isn't doing its job — perhaps because the person had a brain injury or was born that way.

"'What's left? What takes over?' he asks. 'The area of the brain that drives your id-type behaviors, which is rage, violence, eating, sex, drinking.'

"Fallon's brain has dark patches in the orbital cortex, the area just behind the eyes. This is the area that Fallon and other scientists say is involved with ethical behavior, moral decision-making and impulse control. The normal scan on the left is his son's.

"Fallon says nobody in his family has real problems with those behaviors. But he wanted to be sure. Conveniently, he had everything he needed: Previously, he had persuaded 10 of his close relatives to submit to a PET brain scan and give a blood sample as part of a project to see whether his family had a risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

"After learning his violent family history, he examined the images and compared them with the brains of psychopaths. His wife's scan was normal. His mother: normal. His siblings: normal. His children: normal.

"'And I took a look at my own PET scan and saw something disturbing that I did not talk about,' he says.

"What he didn't want to reveal was that his orbital cortex looks inactive.

"'If you look at the PET scan, I look just like one of those killers.'

"Fallon cautions that this is a young field. Scientists are just beginning to study this area of the brain — much less the brains of criminals. Still, he says the evidence is accumulating that some people's brains predispose them toward violence and that psychopathic tendencies may be passed down from one generation to another.

The Three Ingredients

"And that brings us to the next part of Jim Fallon's family experiment. Along with brain scans, Fallon also tested each family member's DNA for genes that are associated with violence. He looked at 12 genes related to aggression and violence and zeroed in on the MAO-A gene (monoamine oxidase A). This gene, which has been the target of considerable research, is also known as the 'warrior gene' because it regulates serotonin in the brain. Serotonin affects your mood — think Prozac — and many scientists believe that if you have a certain version of the warrior gene, your brain won't respond to the calming effects of serotonin.

"Fallon calls up another slide on his computer. It has a list of family members' names, and next to them, the results of the genotyping. Everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person.

"'You see that? I'm 100 percent. I have the pattern, the risky pattern,' he says, then pauses. "In a sense, I'm a born killer."

"Fallon was prompted to study his brain after his mother, Jenny, told him his ancestry was full of alleged murderers.

"Fallon's being tongue-in-cheek — sort of. He doesn't believe his fate or anyone else's is entirely determined by genes. They merely tip you in one direction or another.

"And yet: 'When I put the two together, it was frankly a little disturbing,' Fallon says with a laugh. 'You start to look at yourself and you say, 'I may be a sociopath.' I don't think I am, but this looks exactly like [the brains of] the psychopaths, the sociopaths, that I've seen before.'

"I asked his wife, Diane, what she thought of the result.

"'I wasn't too concerned," she says, laughing. 'I mean, I've known him since I was 12.'

"Diane probably does not need to worry, according to scientists who study this area. They believe that brain patterns and genetic makeup are not enough to make anyone a psychopath. You need a third ingredient: abuse or violence in one's childhood.

"'And fortunately, he wasn't abused as a young person,' Diane says, 'so I've lived to be a ripe old age so far.'

"Jim Fallon says he had a terrific childhood; he was doted on by his parents and had loving relationships with his brothers and sisters and entire extended family. Significantly, he says this journey through his brain has changed the way he thinks about nature and nurture. He once believed that genes and brain function could determine everything about us. But now he thinks his childhood may have made all the difference.

"'We'll never know, but the way these patterns are looking in general population, had I been abused, we might not be sitting here today,' he says.

"As for the psychopaths he studies, Fallon feels some compassion for these people who, he says, got 'a bad roll of the dice.'

"'It's an unlucky day when all of these three things come together in a bad way, and I think one has to empathize with what happened to them,' he says.

"But what about people who rape and murder — should we feel empathy for them? Should they be allowed to argue in court that their brains made them do it? Enter the new world of 'neurolaw' — in which neuroscience is used as evidence in the courtroom."


Fallon has come to believe that, in addition to particular brain and genetic patterns, there is a third ingredient involved in the development of a violent psychopath. The environment, he explains, can help determine whether violence-related genes and certain brain processes, such as those involving mirror neurons, are triggered towards aggression. Specifically, he believes that abuse – especially severe early childhood sexual, physical or emotional abuse – is instrumental in this process. And he also believes that the precise timing of when various factors come into play is critically important in determining whether one becomes a psychopath and, if so, exactly what type of psychopathological behavior is exhibited.

As for why he himself is not a violent man, Dr. Fallon credits his upbringing in a highly nurturing environment, in which he was not only not abused, but was showered with wonderfully loving family support.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

"Sissies Shall Not Inherit the Kingdom of Heaven"

" . . . Be not deceived: neither whoremongers [pornoi], nor idolaters [eidOlolatrai], nor adulterers [moikhoi], nor sissies [malakoi], nor male-bedders [arsenokoitai], nor thieves [kleptai], nor the covetous [pleonektai], nor drunkards, nor revilers [loidoroi], nor extortioners [harpeges], shall inherit the kingdom of God." [1Co 6:9-10]

"Knowing this, that the law is not made for the righteous man but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners: for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and for murderers of mothers, for manslayers, for whoremongers [pornois], for male-bedders [arsenokoitais], for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine."


There is an old saying, and it's a true one: "All translators are liars."

That's includes the Bible.

There is a rather interesting quote from Paul about "effeminates" (malakoi oute arsenokoitai), not inheriting the Kingdom of Heaven. The words used are rather difficult to translate, but they pretty much mean "soft men." They can mean "morally weak," or someone who uses "uses power to obtain sex." They can mean, depending on the context, laziness, degeneracy, decadence, or lack of courage. They can mean pedophilia. They can mean prostitution, "either relating to the paid-for-pleasure of others, or self-gain through the cultivation of someone wealthy – and often elderly - in order to inherit their estates." Or children kidnapped and used for sexual exploitation. It can even mean "sissy."

It depends, again, on the context, and also what it meant in those days. Example: "Repent from your sins" more correctly translates as "You have missed the mark so you must change your hearts and minds." And "soul" sometimes translates as "true self."

If I want to understand something written in the past, I look around today to understand it. Human nature doesn't change.

What do I see? Every act that can described by the meanings listed above. Those who exploit children sexually (who often tend to be homosexual), and are now trying to make it legal.

That, to me, is the big problem with homosexuality - they tend to go after children (pedophiles) or teen-age boys (pederasts). If not, why do they want to be in the Boy Scouts and the military?

I see those who kidnap women and children and sell them into sexual slavery. (I think of the movie, Taken.)

I see weak, effeminate manginas who support women over men, I see men who lie to women to have sex with them (some of them pretend to be feminists, like the demented Hugo Schwyzer) and some of them pretend to be mentors and models for younger men - which they are not (like promoting those monstrous "Dark Triad" traits without knowing what they are in reality as opposed to their foolish theories). I've seen men devote their lives to seducing women, and every one I ever met was a weakling, a liar, a coward, and a manipulator.

I've never seen a happy child-molester. They end up in prison, where they are at the bottom (cop shooters/killers are at the top of the hierarchy) and other prisoners will torment child-molesters to suicide or kill them if they can. Then of course there is the effect on the children.

I used to own a taxi and got to know several hookers. Believe me, they don't have hearts of gold. They're immature self-centered whackjobs who are only interested in money, which flows like water through their fingers. I knew some who were heroin addicts.

I'm not even sure what "Kingdom of Heaven" means. Being happy in the here and now? We should be, as much as possible. ("The thief comes not but to steal and to kill and to destroy. I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.")

Bizarrely, these days, every "sin" (which really translates as "missing the mark") is now being encouraged to the point some people are trying to make them legal. First we had abortion, and now there is talk about euthanizing imperfect babies, and old people. It's a slippery slope.

I consider the Bible to be good practical wisdom about how awful human nature can be. I don't think it would have survived all these years unless there was a lot of truth in it.


"What!? Do you not understand that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be fooled! The promiscuous, the idolaters, the adulterers, the perverts, the homosexuals, the thieves, the greedy, the drunkards, the trash talkers, the extortioners — these will not inherit the kingdom of God."

In Thrall to a Seductive Woman

Even as a child I used to wonder why witches (or as I now prefer to call them, sorceresses) were often portrayed as beautiful, seductive women instead of the wizened old crones of popular imagination. It took some decades of experience, and much thought, but years ago I finally figured out why.

These stories of men being in thrall to beautiful seductive sorceresses would not have existed for several hundred years – if not several thousand – unless there was a lot of truth to them. If you want to see a movie that’s close to a perfect portrayal of this, then watch Body Heat, in which Ned Racine (William Hurt) is ensorcelled by the siren/femme fatale Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). He is, of course, and here’s the rub, a willing dupe, as all these men are to this kind of woman.

This willing-dupe-to-be-conned-by-a-beautiful-seductive-sorceress has happened to me twice, many years ago. One thing I can say is “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Since those two times, I immediately see through them.

In both cases they came across as smart, funny, knowledgeable women, easy to talk to. They were also -- – and this should be immediate red flag for all men – instantly seductive and intimate, although it can be subtle. They could make a man feel special, looked up to, admired. They say they’re looking for a relationship and you fit the bill. I realize now they were trying to seduce me into giving them attention – and that was about all they wanted. More than anything else, I was a thing to them, one to be manipulated.

It took me a while to realize they did this all men they found attractive. For all that outside charm, inside they were self-absorbed, self-centered and emotionally shallow. The first was a narcissist; the second showed many signs of Histrionic Personality Disorder (and “histrionic” actually means “actor”).

In modern terms, not only should the narcissists and histrionics be avoided, but also the borderlines, definitely the anti-socials/psychopaths, and the bipolars (even if treated) should give you definite pause, although I am very sympathetic to the last if none of the first.

Why did I fall for these women? I was instantly attracted to them because of the immediate charm, intimacy, intelligence, wit and seductiveness. There was that superficial word, “chemistry.” Could it be considered a flaw in me at that time? Sure. Everyone has holes in them that need to be filled. That’s what relationships are about: you fulfill me, I fulfill you. Sometimes, though, they’re not good holes that need to be filled.

Many men fall for this combination, and have since men and women have been around, otherwise the stories of sirens and femme fatales would not exist. Or stories of men who want to be Price Charming and instead of finding Sleeping Beauty get sidetracked into falling for a trickster and a sorceress.

That story of Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty (who is a Damsel in Distress) is another old, powerful story about the relationships between men and women. When some men hear from an attractive, smart, funny, seductive woman, “I’m looking for a relationship,” that Prince Charming/hero part of him gets activated, because what’s he’s hearing is, “Damsel in Distress” (the first words of Luke to Princess Leia: “I’m Luke Skywalker and I’m here to save you”). What happens, though, is that sometimes that Damsel in Distress is not a traditional Sleeping Beauty, but a sorceress/trickster/siren (although, actually, that sorceress/trickster/siren really is Sleeping Beauty, but how does one wake her up from a slumber than she does not know she is even in?).

For an example, a man I know met a Damsel in Distress and bought her condo from her for $150,000 cash (he did get a hell of a bargain and still lives there). For his trouble he discovered an ungrateful, self-centered woman who showed every sign of being a borderline, once he got past the intelligence, wit and ease of conversation with her.

The easiest con for these female grifters is a kind, compassionate man who is willing to go out of his way to help her and compromise in a relationship – and compromise is something which has to be done in any relationship.

To recap, never fall for a woman who is instantly intimate and seductive with you, and can instantly make you feel special. They’re in it for themselves, not for you. They’re femme fatales, attractive and seductive sorceresses.

Even though it’s obvious these kinds of women existed in the past, why are there so many today? The media and culture in general – and government policies toward men and women -- feeding right into our inborn narcissism and increasing it? Can a skewed society actually increase the number of character disorders – the psychopaths, the narcissists, the borderlines, the histrionics? It’s the only explanation that makes any sense to me.

The media and much of academia disparage men as the cause of most of the problems in the world (the infamous “dead white males” attacked by the mentally stillborn) and elevate intelligent and educated women to the extent they think they are entitled to ‘having it all” – an impossibility.

I recently read an article that pointed out if men find a woman with 80% of what they like, they think they’ve got “a catch.” Many women, if they find 80% of what they want in a man, think they’re lowering their standards and settling for what they don’t want. This is healthy? It’s as narcissistic as hell – Me! Me! Me!

All those stories of sirens and femme fatales are meaningless unless someone explains them to you when you’re younger. A story is about showing people knowledge about life, but it still has to be explained. One of the purposes of being older is to explain life to the younger. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of that anymore. While younger women are told the bad things about men (and a lot of them aren’t even true) younger men are never told what negatives there are in women.

Not once in my life, when I was a teenager, did any man tell me, “Never fall for a woman who is instantly seductive and intimate with you, and has a talent for making you immediately special. They’ve got something wrong with them, they’re shallow, they’re in it for themselves, and you’re just a puppet for them to manipulate. And they can never really apologize for what they’ve done, If you meet these women, don’t be a willing dupe and get ensorcelled, which is a flaw many men have when it comes to these women.”

Unless, of course, you want to spend the rest of your life falling for, as H. Rider Haggard put it, She-Who-Must-be-Obeyed. Ned Racine knew all about that.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Mastery Trumps Money

The phrase, "the pursuit of happiness" is a mistranslation of the Greek "eudaimonia," which means "human flourishing." You get it through "arete," or excellence. And what is excellence? Mastery. Autonomy. Meaning. Purpose. Community.

But it's not money. After a certain point, money doesn't motivate at all.

I had a girlfriend who worked for the federal government and made $120,000 a year. She had her own office. She hated it, lasted three years, went to work for herself making half the money, but is four times as happy.

Worshiping the False

There are a lot of definitions of idolatry, but I think all of them can be distilled into this one: worshiping the Created instead of the Creator; to see a partial aspect of reality as the whole of it; and to see the false as true. All three are related. The Created is a partial aspect of the whole, and because it is not "ultimately" true it is in a sense "false." (By the way, the word "whole" comes from the same root word as "holy" and "healthy.")

The Greeks has a similar concept with the "daimonic" (which was perverted into English as "demonic") which was when a part of you took over all of you. Take drug addiction, for an example.

The Commandment dealing with idolatry reads: "You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments."

Pretty baroque language, in a King James kind of way, even to the point of extreme severity. But then, it is several thousand years old. If you look at it as good practical advice instead of "religion," it makes a great deal of sense.

You don't even have to use the word "God." You can do like philosophers do and use "the Absolute." Use "Ultimate Truth," or "Natural Law" or, like C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, "the Tao."

Read the Commandment as "Lead your life in accordance with Truth, or bad things will happen." Sorta like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and expecting to float to ground.

If you want to update it a little bit, and make it a more philosophical, you can read "You shall have no other gods before me" as "You shall believe in nothing but the truth." (The whole truth. Because if people don't, unholy - unhealthy - things usually happen. And we have about four thousand years of recorded history as to what the Truth is.)

Some current modern "other gods" - idols - have been such things as the State, country, the flag, Communism, science, the Earth, animals, the free market, Nature, and Man. All of them are the Created instead of the Creator, partial aspects of the whole, and in that sense are "false." And when people believe in them ("worship" them) bad things automatically happen ("visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me...")

Visiting iniquity upon the children" surely sounds like a comment that when people do bad things it reverberates throughout the generations. Which, of course, it does. We're still paying for World War I.

I think it's pretty obvious that the worship of that false idol known as the State has, in the 20th Century, had some very bad effects. The historians I'm familiar with have settled on the number of dead as 177 million, although I've seen estimates of up to 200 million. That's "the iniquity visited upon the children" when people worship the False instead of the True. The Devil instead of God, if you want.

Communism, Nazism and fascism all were about the worship of the State. And all came out of Europe, too (Ray Bradbury has written, "If it comes out of Europe, it's probably wrong."). Currently, many European countries still worship the State (after two world wars, why haven't they earned their lesson?). And someday, fairly soon, bad things will happen to them for letting Muslims into their countries. I hope we don't save their keesters this time ("Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." What saying covers the third time?)

All three of those idolatrous philosophies were about the worship of Man. Communism, especially. If you'll read some early Communist writers you'll find they actually thought Man could become God on Earth. Of course, Communism is officially materialistic and atheistic - and now it's pretty much became the State religion of the United States. Liberalism, you know.

And since the U.S.is starting to believe more and more in the State and the Good Things it supposedly can do, what we will get is Bad Things will happen to us (we have the whole of history before us. Why haven't we learned its lessons?).

Then we have the saying everyone knows: "God and Country." Well, I dunno. Nearly all countries claim God smiles upon them and frowns upon their enemies (I've always found it amusing when athletes, on TV, thank God or Jesus for their team's win. Someday I expect one guy on the losing team to burst into tears and say, "It's true! God hates us! Jesus hates me! He deflected my pass!")

The Commandment, "Do not use God's name is vain" doesn't have anything to do with saying naughty words. The correct translation is "Do not carry God's name in vain causes." Like "God and Country." When soldiers marched off to war by the hundreds of thousands, to foreign countries that weren't a threat to us, to die for "God and Country," that is a vain cause indeed.) Then of course they make the "ultimate sacrifice"...to enrich Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations - more idols.

I consider myself a patriot, but I don't see how "pledging allegiance" to a flag (and isn't that a "graven image"?) has anything to do with patriotism.

The Nature-as-God environmental movement, with its worship of Nature, the Earth and animals (and humans as a cancer), is worshiping idols. Bad things will come from it. The philodoxer Pete Singer, the nutcase founder of the modern animal-rights movement, believes in infanticide, euthanasia and bestiality (specifically, sex with the higher primates. Someday, I'm going to write a satirical article about him and call it, "Your Monkey Wife, But Not Mine.")

If you want to describe the extreme environmental movement in one sentence, it's the worship of "anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

Even science can be an idol. I used to watch the late Carl Sagan on TV looking up at "anything that is in heaven above" with a breathless, almost religious look on his face. He was, not surprisingly, an atheist and a socialist. Science was his religion. He never realized (and would never believe it) that he was worshiping an idol.

Most modern science believes the material universe is all that there is. Life is just an epiphenomena. It's a dead universe, gigantic beyond human comprehension, with a few infinitesimal and maybe temporary sparks of life. The religious view (and the view of much Idealistic philosophy) is that the truth is the exact opposite. The material universe (the Created) is the infinitesimal part. It's just a teeny-tiny itty-bitty little part of the Creator, like the surface of an ocean.

When you have science based on philosophical materialism, it believes only that the Created exists, that the part is the whole. It believes in an idol. And bad things will come from this. That's why it never surprised me when I found out the Nazis were strongly influenced by evolutionary theory (and evolutionary theory is indeed just an infinitesimal and in many ways amusing explanation for a tiny part of that Whole).

When I see Muslims, Jews and Christians fighting over a sliver of land in the Middle East, I wonder, "Do they really think God lives in a piece of dirt?" Or in a house, like a church? Or in a piece of cloth, like the clothes someone wears? Or in a flag? (I learned a new word not that long ago: "revanche." It means "the policy of a state intent on regaining areas of its original territory that have been lost to other states." The root word is "revenge.")

The human race has a decided, and thoroughly unfortunate, tendency to ignore the lessons of the past - to see them as primitive superstitions. It's especially bad in the "elites," who often have no ears to hear, no eyes to see, ditches they rarely avoid, and hand-baskets-to-Hell they're always falling into. It is, to say the least, an unhealthy tendency. You can even all it unholy. It certainly leads to unpleasant things, even - or is it most especially? - for the innocent.

Friday, December 27, 2013

The Many Loves

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." - Lao Tzu


When I was a teenager I read something by Tolkien that has always stayed with me: that the heady romantic love people feel at first turns into a another kind of companionate, long-lasting love. That has been my experience, too.

The Greeks, who thought about everything, and were smarter than we are, noticed there at least four kinds of love: Agápe, Éros Philia and Storge.

I'll just quote from Wikipedia:

"Agápe means love in a 'spiritual' sense. In the term s'agapo (Σ'αγαπώ), which means "I love you" in Ancient Greek, it often refers to a general affection or deeper sense of 'true unconditional love' rather than the attraction suggested by 'eros.; This love is selfless; it gives and expects nothing in return. Agape is used in the biblical passage known as the 'love chapter,' 1 Corinthians 13, and is described there and throughout the New Testament as sacrificial and spiritual love. Whether the love given is returned or not, the person continues to love (even without any self-benefit). Agape is also used in ancient texts to denote feelings for one's children and the feelings for a spouse, and it was also used to refer to a love feast. It can also be described as the feeling of being content or holding one in high regard. Agape was used by Christians to express the unconditional love of God.

"Éros (ἔρως érōs is 'physical' passionate love, with sensual desire and longing. Romantic, pure emotion without the balance of logic. 'Love at first sight'. The Modern Greek word 'erotas' means 'intimate love;' however, eros does not have to be sexual in nature. Eros can be interpreted as a love for someone whom you love more than the philia, love of friendship. It can also apply to dating relationships as well as marriage. Plato refined his own definition: Although eros is initially felt for a person, with contemplation it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person, or even becomes appreciation of beauty itself. Plato does not talk of physical attraction as a necessary part of love, hence the use of the word platonic to mean, 'without physical attraction.' In the Symposium, the most famous ancient work on the subject, Plato has Socrates argue that eros helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty, and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth, the ideal 'Form' of youthful beauty that leads us humans to feel erotic desire – thus suggesting that even that sensually based love aspires to the non-corporeal, spiritual plane of existence; that is, finding its truth, just like finding any truth, leads to transcendence. Lovers and philosophers are all inspired to seek truth through the means of eros.

"Philia (φιλία philía) is 'mental' love. It means affectionate regard or friendship in both ancient and modern Greek. This type of love has give and take. It is a dispassionate virtuous love, a concept developed by Aristotle. It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity. In ancient texts, philos denoted a general type of love, used for love between family, between friends, a desire or enjoyment of an activity, as well as between lovers.

"Storge (στοργή storgē) means 'affection' in ancient and modern Greek. It is natural affection, like that felt by parents for offspring. Rarely used in ancient works, and then almost exclusively as a descriptor of relationships within the family. It is also known to express mere acceptance or putting up with situations, as in 'loving' the tyrant.

C.S. Lewis wrote a famous book called The Four Loves, in which he described the four loves this way:

Storge – affection

Philia – friendship

Eros – romance

Agape – unconditional love

Lewis also came to the conclusion there is element in love not much discussed today: Appreciative love. This is why I point out in true love there is always appreciation and gratitude.

Lewis had this to say about the perversion of Eros: "[he] warned against the modern tendency for Eros to become a god to people who fully submit themselves to it, a justification for selfishness, even a phallic religion."

Again I will quote Meister Eckhart: "If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough."

That's been my experience, too: in true love there is always appreciation and gratitude. If you can't feel that, then you are in a sorry way.

Not Having a Good Marriage to Imitate

The mother is the mirror - and watch what happens. It's a cybernetic feedback loop.

There are, as I have pointed out before, three concepts I keep in mind: model, mirror, mentor. The first ones are our parents.

Your parents - and most especially your mother - are your first mirrors. Those who study the development of babies right from the beginning babies pick up the emotional state of their mothers, and if something goes terribly wrong in the first few months if can affect the kid for the rest of its life.

The father, of course, is a mirror, too, and when the kid gets a little older, is more important then the mother.

I have for several years followed Object Relations Theory - "how experience affects unconscious predictions of others' social behaviors, with repeated experiences of the caretaking environment forming internalized images, which usually depict one's mother, father, or primary caregiver, and later experiences only somewhat reshaping these early images."

In simpler terms, we carry images (really more emotional than anything else) of our early "caretakers." They're inside us and very hard to change. Some people have to undergo years of therapy to make those "images" change.

Then we have models, i.e. that which we model ourselves after. We imitate them. Think...Miley Cyrus.

Then there are mentors, who are people who teach us things. They pass on their knowledge to the younger.

When the parents don't have a marriage worth imitating (actually emulating), how are kids going to earn what a good marriage is supposed to be? What if the parents aren't mentors? What if they aren't good models?

I once had a young man about 21 tell me, "How in the world am I supposed to know what a good marriage is like after being raised with my parents?"

I know a man whose memories of his parents are finding police cars in front of his house for domestic disputes, of pointing a rifle at his father...you get the picture. He used to pray for his parents to die because of the anxiety and tenseness he always suffered.

He once told me, "I wanted kids but I never wanted to get married." He has no idea of what a good marriage is supposed to be like.

He end up with a kid, now 21, who also has no idea of what a good relationship is supposed to be like. These problems travel from one generation to the next.

The idea of single mothers raising children by themselves is very disturbing. The evidence is overwhelming there is nothing good whatsoever about it.

The kid's first mirror is his mother - but then he ends up with no father as a mirror. Then there is no father as a model. And mentor? Forget it.

The boy ends up with no internal images of men - just women. And that causes what everyone calls, "issues."

Probably the first researcher to study attachment among babies is John Bowlby. It is, not surprisingly, called Attachment Theory. And what he found, several decades ago? "...an infant needs to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for social and emotional development to occur normally. Attachment theory explains how much the parents' relationship with the child influences development." He was the one who promoted the idea of a "secure base" for the child - the kids go exploring and then comes back to base.

So if a child doesn't have both parents it can't internalize both of them and therefore can't develop property. To me that just seems common sense.

In the past single mothers weren't allowed to keep their kids. There was a good reason why, even though people may not have been able to articulate them.

Considering the catastrophes single mothers are, I'm come to the conclusion they shouldn't be allowed to keep their children. They'd be better off being given to parents who want them, and if not that, bring back orphanages.

Because if we don't, we are going to end up with a bunch of screwed-up, clueless young men wandering around looking for the models, mentors and mirrors they never had when younger.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

When You Don't Get What You're Supposed to Get

I've been around long enough to see what happens when people don't get what they're supposed to get. These things have been noticed for thousands of years.

When women don't get husband, home and children their apparently instinctive desire to blame their problems on men is intensified and sometimes goes berserk. Then they turn into overweight spinsters on psychiatric drugs, or skinny spinsters on psychiatric drugs. They collect cats or big dogs to protect from their fantasies of rapists lurking everywhere. The hostility just radiates from them. It's almost as if they think men are doing these things to them on purpose.

Even into their 50s some of them are whining, "Where are all the good men?"

Men are a different story. When they're not allowed to have decent, high-paying jobs, and to be protector/providers, they become drug-using bums, live off of women and become players, or just withdraw from everything except their hobbies.

These things were predicted several decades ago by those who looked at black families and said, "This is what is going to happen to white families next!"

One of them was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in 1965 issued a report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."

Fifty years later there was "The Moynihan Report Revisited":

"The statistics that so alarmed Moynihan have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well. Today, the share of white children born outside marriage is about the same as the share was for black children in Moynihan’s day. Meanwhile, the percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers has tripled, remaining far higher than the percentage of white children born to unmarried mothers."

"In 1960, 20 percent of black children lived with their mothers but not their fathers; by 2010, 53 percent of all black children lived in such families. The share of white children living with their mothers but not their fathers climbed to 20 percent in 2010, up from 6 percent in 1960.

"There has been a marked retreat from marriage. In 1960, just over one-half of all black women were married and living with their husbands, compared with over two-thirds of white and Hispanic women. By 2010, only one-quarter of black women, two-fifths of Hispanic women, and one-half of white women lived with their spouses.

"That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children."

Few listened then and few are listening now.

Nothing exists independently. Whatever way women act, men will react to it and their behavior will change. Whatever way men act, women will react to it and their behavior will change. The characters of both will change, too.

I consider it a cybernetic system - a feedback loop.

These problems have become world-wide. In Japan there was what are known as Herbivore Men.

From Wikipedia:

"Herbivore men is a social phenomenon in Japan of men who shun marriage or gaining a girlfriend. They are characteristically described as frugal, and interested in personal grooming. Under this categorization scheme, men and women are either herbivore type or carnivore type. As of September 2010, 36% of Japanese men between the ages of 16 and 19 perceived themselves in this way. Additionally, two surveys of single men in their 20s and 30s found that 61% and 70%, respectively, considered themselves grass-eating men. This phenomenon is viewed by the Japanese government as a leading cause in the nation's declining birth rate, prompting the government to provide incentives for couples that have children, including payouts and free health care."

"'[Grass eaters] are not without romantic relationships, but [have] a non-assertive, indifferent attitude towards desire of flesh'. Later, philosopher Masahiro Morioka redefined [grass-eaters] as men who are 'the nice guys of a new generation who do not aggressively seek meat, but instead prefer to eat grass side by side with the opposite gender.' [Grass-eaters] are often given as the primary cause of single women's woes....the decline of the Japanese economy is often cited as a root cause as disillusionment in the economy has also caused Japanese men to turn their backs on typical 'masculine' and corporate roles."

Good luck with that free health and payouts, government of Japan.

I used to live in Albuquerque and got to see what the government had done to Indians, under the guise of helping them. It's not pretty.

It's always the same thing, over and over. The government screws up the relationships between men and women, then tries to fix it and makes it worse. Maybe sometime it might occur to them the way to fix the problem is to withdraw and leave people alone.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Below Average IQs and Below Average Jobs

"Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad." - Dostoevsky



The average IQ in the United States is 100. It doesn’t particularly matter if you’re talking about mean or median average; either way, it means one-half of the people in the U.S. have IQs below 100, and the other half have IQs above 100.

About five percent of all people in the U.S. have IQs of 125 and above. Less than ten percent have IQs above 120, which is the cut-off point for “very bright.” Before the days of Political Correctness, those with IQs 85 and below were called "morons" (Muhammed Ali scored 78 on a military IQ test - and even his best friends claimed he was a moron).

What does all of this mean? Nothing good for the vast majority of people, which means nothing good for the United States.

As the political scientist Kevin Phillips has pointed out in several of his books, empires (and the U.S. is an empire) go though three phases: agricultural, industrial, then in decline they develop financial industries. Actually, countries are already in decline when they enter that last phase.

Phillips used the now-gone empires of Spain, Holland and England as examples. All went though all three phases, then collapsed. These days, he writes about the United States – which mired deep in its financial bog is in decline.

If this decline isn’t bad enough, it’s made worse by the exporting of our highly-paid industrial jobs, which the feds encourage because they delude themselves they’ll be replaced by better financial or service (“Do you want fries with that?”) jobs. Which they’re not, and won’t be.

Many of these now-gone jobs didn’t require high IQs to do them. You don’t have to have an IQ of 120 to work in a steel mill or on an auto-assembly line. In fact such an IQ would be a detriment in such jobs due to boredom.

Those high-paying jobs requiring average IQs are now gone. What’s left for these people? Jobs paying minimum-wage or slightly above. Either that, or welfare. Or crime (the average IQ of those in prison is 93).

The United States is stratifying itself by IQ. We’re going to end up without much of a blue-collar middle-class since their jobs are being outsourced. We’re going to end up with a poorly-paid lower-class partly supported by marginal welfare payments and a highly-paid upper class with higher IQs, who are partly supporting the lower classes through transfer payments. While they hide in their gated, armed communities.

I’ll give one example of what happens when the middle-class collapses: in Germany the Nazis were bought to power by the economically-ravaged middle class. You can fill in the blanks about our future (it won’t involve Nazis, contrary to the hallucinations of leftists, who don't know the Nazis were leftists).

Liberals, who delude themselves human nature is completely plastic and therefore don't understand it at all, claim IQ can be raised substantially. How they think someone with an IQ of 85 can raise it to 125 is beyond me, but then, I’m not a leftist, all of whom are about four years old emotionally.

Your IQ is pretty much set by the time you are 12 years old. It can go up and down a little bit but it’s not going to go up and down by 20 points. There is no way to make it go up 20 points, and barring some major neurological insult, it can't drop 20 points, either.

Education does help in developing what IQ a person has, but the public schools haven’t done that for a long time, not with a 50% drop-out rate. It’s got to the point where if you have a lot of money you can get a fairly decent education but if you don’t have money these days you can’t even go to college unless you go into debt $30,000 – and sometimes a lot more. The smarter people are home-schooling their kids.

Personally, I'd live in a rural hobbit-hole and home-school my kids before sending them to many of the public (read fascist/socialist) schools.

One of the things that the financial “elites” do is what to flood the country with low-IQ illegal immigrants. Why? To drive down wages, which means more money for the elites. The fact that many “libertarians” are too blind and ignorant to realize that by supporting open borders they are cutting their own throats – and that of the nation – would be amusing if it wasn’t so tragic.

This stratification into socio-economic classes won’t last, since the financial phase never lasts. If whatever administration that is in power had any sense, it would set up laws to reindustrialize the U.S. It wouldn’t be that hard.

Only making things produces wealth. Shuffling “money” around is not wealth; for that matter, money is not wealth. Gold and silver are not wealth; they're money. Agriculture is wealth; manufacturing is wealth; a financial economy is an economy on its way down and out.

The Constitution not only demands that only gold and silver be money, it also forbids "Bill of Credit," i.e. paper money. Any economist who does not understand this is not an economist.

To use Thom Hartmann’s phase, we need to reboot the country. That rebooting would in many ways take us back to the past, to ideas that worked for decades. The ideas of today are not working; they are destructive.

The financial “elites,” for all their vaunted high IQs (which doesn’t have much of anything to do with wisdom or even common sense) are extraordinarily short-sighted. They won’t change their policies until there is revolt.

Which, of course, sooner or later, there will be.

Myself, I give the U.S. until about 2030. Then, kablooie.

Some Quotes from Dostoevsky

"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man."

"Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded."

"The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness."

"Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad."

"One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man."

"The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month."

"We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken."

"Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid."

"The soul is healed by being with children."

"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!" "It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half."

"To love someone means to see him as God intended him."

"To live without Hope is to Cease to live."

"There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."

"Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it."

"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."

"It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?"

"Realists do not fear the results of their study."

"The formula 'Two and two make five' is not without its attractions."

"Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death."

"Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship."

"Blood and power intoxicate; coarseness and depravity are developed; the mind and the heart are tolerant of the most abnormal things, till at last they come to relish them. The man and the citizen is lost for ever in the tyrant, and the return to human dignity, to repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

"Do As I Say and Not As I Do"

"For surely thou art plagued on account of friends…"

“Feminists of the Sixties and Seventies,” wrote Nicci Gerrard in The Guardian, “have had to pay a terrible price for their dedication – most of them are forgotten, reviled, poor, and alone.” To that I’ll add there are even some from the Eighties and Nineties who are in the same condition.

How did they end up like this? Didn’t the late Betty Friedan and the still-alive-and-babbling Gloria Steinem promise them otherwise? Paradise on Earth? Of course, there is often a difference between what one promises and what one does in one’s personal life – that is the definition of hypocrisy. And what Friedan and Steinem promised to others, and what they did in their personal lives, made them the most deplorable of hypocrites.

Both of these women insisted women follow their teachings, when they, in their personal lives, didn’t follow them at all. In reality, they lived their lives in exact opposition to what they told women to do. They expected other women to make the sacrifices, but never them.

Friedan’s most famous book is The Feminine Mystique. A Marxist tract written by a life-long Stalinist, it was about “patriarchy” and “capitalism” and “female oppression.” A best-seller and a very influential book, it was, in many ways, the start of Sixties feminism.

Yet, when Friedan wrote it, she was married to a very wealthy man and living in a mansion on the Hudson River in New York. She was not employed, and in fact only one job in her life (a journalist when young). She spent the rest of her life instructing others how to live theirs. The housework in the mansion – I’m shocked! Shocked! -- was done by a maid.

All of this is of course rank hypocrisy. A woman writing leftist fantasies about downtrodden and oppressed women while living a life of luxury so opulent that the housework was something done by domestic servants? How could she possibly know anything about any woman’s life other than her own?

I’ve tried to imaginatively place myself in Friedan’s place to understand her puzzling behavior. She was an unattractive woman. Was she hurt by being ostracized in high school, not invited to parties or on dates, and envious of better-looking women? Like many envious people, did she cover it up with a spurious desire for “social justice,” which is no more than a desire for revenge?

She apparently wanted revenge on men – to drag them down because of what they did to her when she was younger. But why did she not attempt to drag women down too? Perhaps it was because the Zeitgeist allowed fame and fortune by attacking men but not women?

Gloria Steinem, in her own way, was worse than Friedan: a former Playboy Bunny, she was very attractive, oftentimes appearing in boots and mini-skirts, but she misused her appeal. She was the glamorous poster-girl of feminism, making it seem a wonderfully easy and sexy thing to do.

In her books, her articles and her many well-paid public appearances, she insisted that marriage and romance were a trap and a delusion for women, and that they could never fulfill themselves unless they learned to be emotionally and financially self-sufficient.

So how did Steinem lead her life?

Starting in college, she saw the same wealthy man -- television writer, producer and musician Blair Chotzinoff -- for close to 30 years. They were going to get married, but she called it off in college. Still, she saw him for three decades.

She called her relationship with him “a long-term romance.” People told of seeing both of them walking arm and arm in the park, and dining and drinking wine in cozy restaurants. She said this romance was about “passion and curiosity.”

For three years she was involved with Mort Zuckerman, a wealthy faux-conservative who bought her expensive presents. Now why would a flaming liberal feminist be involved with a “capitalist” and a “conservative”? Does love and money trump ideology? It does appear so in Steinem’s case.

Her friends remember her visiting fertility clinics in order to determine if she could have children with Zuckerman. (By the way, the most well-known liberals don’t raise their kids permissively – Hilary Clinton, for example, refused to let her 11-year-old daughter get her ears pierced).

Steinem never said a good thing about marriage in her life -- until she one day suddenly did a complete flip-flop. For decades she called marriage “an ownership contract” and that married women were “part-time prostitutes.” She also said repeatedly she would never get married because it would vacuum the brains out of her head, and that women needed men, to use a cliché that is thank God long out of style, the way “a fish needs a bicycle.”

Then one day she met a wealthy South African, David Bale. Her fuzzy liberal brain did a complete somersault on her life-long opposition to marriage, and not long after she dressed in white, he held her hand, and they got married in a park. She claimed things had changed and marriage was now acceptable. She never explained how things had changed so rapidly, when in fact she had still viciously attacked marriage less than two years before she tied the knot.

Peter Schweizer in his eye-opening book, Do As I Say (Not As I Do) referred to Steinem as a “hopeless romantic, dependent female [and] serial monogamist.” In her mind these things were good for her but bad for other women – if they acted like her they were traitors to Steinem’s leftist cause. Again, rank hypocrisy on her part.

Other feminists have shown the same hypocrisy. Susan Brownmiller wrote a famous book, Against our Will, in which she claimed men were rapists who historically used rape to dominate women. Yet she admitted she always wanted men and marriage and romance -- she just wouldn’t lower her standards. Which ones? Finding some spaghetti-spined liberal male to eagerly agree with her assessment that all men were rapists? Like Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch), another lost leftist-feminist soul, Brownmiller never got what she so badly wanted.

People, unfortunately, are flawed creatures, and can be exceptionally deluded.
While Friedan and Steinem were cavorting in the limelight and living lives of ease and privilege with very wealthy men, many of the women who believed their falsehoods ended up as Nicci Gerrard described them.

Friedan and Steinem got what all of us want – importance and meaning and community in their lives. Yet they were engaging in one of the worst things people can do – they were lying to themselves. And before you can lie to others (even if you don’t know you are lying to them) you first have to lie to yourself…even if you don’t know you’re lying to yourself.

I understand in some ways the blindness, unwitting cruelty, and cupidity of people like Friedan and Steinem, except to blame it on their self-deception (which also leads to them rationalizing their behavior, no matter how outrageous). This self-deception appears to a mental illness, a cognitive dissonance that allowed them to do one thing and say the exact opposite with no sense of anything being wrong. To use an old saying, the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing.

How could Friedan attack men and capitalism when it was men and capitalism that gave her nearly everything good she got out of life? How could she not see the glaring contradictions of how she led her life and how she told other women to lead theirs?

How could Steinem so brutally and uncompromisingly denigrate men and romance and marriage for other women when they were what she wanted more than anything else – and got? Did it ever occur to her that some women would idealize her and her beliefs, and years later find that by following Steinem’s pronouncements their lives had become self-defeating, self-destructive and unworkable?

Yet I’m sure in her mind, with her self-deception and rationalization, there is no guilt and no responsibility for what she did to her loyal followers. Even today, she sails on, never looking back.

Perhaps Friedan did not, and Steinem does not, want women to succeed to the extent they did. Perhaps they idealize their own sex as a defense against their envy of other women – and in envy you always want to drag others down. Friedan’s envy I understand. Steinem’s I do not, but one thing is clear about her – she has no personal relationships with the average women, except to instruct her how to live. She clearly has no respect for them, although she deludes herself she does.

There is no such thing as “independence.” It doesn’t exist. All of us are involved in an immense web of dependencies, and need others to survive, starting not only when we’re born, but before we’re born. Everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, and nothing exists solely on its own.

So when Friedan and Steinem lectured about “independence” and “autonomy” as being desirable feminist goals, they were speaking of things that don’t exist.

Leftists wish to destroy the existing order and replace it with laws enforcing their opinions, which they consider not opinions but facts. Yet the existing order gave Friedan and Steinem fame, fortune, men, and romance. Did it ever occur to them that if it had been replaced when they were young, neither of them would have had what they got? Of course not.

One of the main platforms of Marxism (and Friedan was, and Steinem still is, a Marxist) is to destroy the family, and have children raised in common (in reality this means by poorly-paid strangers) while mothers are forced into the workplace whether they want to or not. The fact the many women want marriage and home and a family – these are right-wing delusions, a Frankfurt School “false consciousness.” For them, that is, but not for leftist-feminist leaders.

This hypocrisy is, in fact, the essence of leftism – its tenets apply to you, not me. One need look no farther than Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Al Gore, the Clintons, Cornel West, Norman Lear, Barbra Streisand, Nancy Pelosi, the Kennedys, the Obamas…all of whom are multimillionaires leading lives of luxury while calling for the under-people public to make crushing sacrifices.

When leftists don’t follow their own teachings, their lives get better. Why? Because leftism doesn’t work. That’s why leftists don’t follow their own beliefs in private. They just make a lot of money with their public faces.

Unfortunately, as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote in Leftism Revisited, the Children of Darkness are cleverer than the Children of Light. Cleverer in the sense the average person falls for their promises of an almost god-like freedom and happiness – promises that can never materialize through the politics the left so fervently worships.

Instead, people are herd animals, social, imitative and hierarchical, and they seek a confident leader to give them guidance. That can be used against them by the cynical…or the hopelessly deluded and idealistic. Whether cynical or idealistic, I consider both kinds to be wolves in sheep’s clothing.

The Greeks, thousands of years ago, understood what was wrong with these people. Hubris, which they considered a kind of insanity (the Old Testament calls it Pride). Thinking that you're mentally and morally superior to "common people," that only you know the truth, that they should be forced to listen to you.

Thomas Sowell called these people "the Anointed," the ones who congratulated them on how their ideas made them feel, no matter what carnage they wreaked in real life. Their philosophies not of adults but children. As Thomas Hobbes wrote, "The evil man is the child grown strong."

In the long run, none of this damaging leftist feminism will last, because it goes against human nature — and human nature, contrary to left-wing delusions, is neither a blank slate nor infinitely malleable.

There will, unfortunately, be a lot of heartbreak and wrecked lives until better days arrive. And those better days, I dread to say, are going to be a long time coming.

Monday, December 23, 2013

The State Degenerates Our Humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The State, in its attempt to “help” families and the economy, has instead damaged them, sometimes severely. The economy is badly damaged, pace court intellectuals, and has been for 40 years. This damage was, and is being done, by government interference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, we have a massive and ever-growing federal government, appalling deficits, unending wars with the attendant lies and propaganda, inflated money that has made the dollar worth a penny compared to its value a little over 100 years ago, an unemployment rate of over 10% if not more, and the hemorrhage of tens of millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our wealth to our enemies in the Middle East and Asia.

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

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

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

Experience Trumps Theory Every Time

I had been taught in college that women were monogamous and men were polygamous. I had some doubts about that when I remembered high school; I had seen more than once one girl do six guys. I repeat: more than once.

It was just as bad in college, but in a different way. It was then I saw some girls have sex with 20 guys. So I starting to come to the opinion that when let loose, some girls became very promiscuous. Not all, of course, but a noticeable number.

I was confirmed in my opinion when I started seeing divorces - most of which were initiated by the women, sometimes to "find themselves." Whatever that means. You call that naturally monogamous? (By the way, the costs of divorce and single mothers are now overwhelming.)

Later I find these "findings" were called "Evo-Psych," and even today I think it's overwhelmingly a joke.

I was also taught that women were more "biologically valuable" than men because they could only have several children during their lives while men were mostly irrelevant because one man could impregnate several thousand women.

Really? A woman is only biologically valuable for maybe 15 years. After that, "biologically," she's worthless, because she can no longer have children anymore. A man, for the other hand, can have kids from the time of puberty until perhaps in his 80s.

The late comedian Tony Randall had a child in his early 80s, then keeled over soon after, which makes me wonder what his son is going to tell people.

So you can make the argument, based on reality, that women past their age of fertility are completely worthless.

Society solved this problem in the past by having mothers and grandmothers become depositories of wisdom, which they passed on to younger women. I don't see that too much anymore. But at least they were valuable - very valuable.

These days, perhaps we can take post-menopausal women and use them as cannon fodder. I'm sure they'd love that, if equality means men and women having equal responsibilities.

Or perhaps we can just warehouse them in huge cinderblock apartments and feed them potatoes and oatmeal. We'd save swimming pools of money. Or perhaps, after the age of 35, if they're not married and have children, they can just be euthanized as parasites on society.

After all, what wisdom can a woman pass on without a husband, home and children? Would you actually believe anything said by a spinster with multiple cats, who blames her life on men? Perhaps she can wax eloquent about the wonderful career she thinks she had.

I've mentioned these measures to some women and most have been outraged. They seem to think they're valuable when they're far beyond child-bearing age. As for that wisdom...they'd better start developing some.

For that matter, why should any man be chivalrous to some "biologically worthless" women?

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Some Advice to Avoid Being a Cougar and a MILF

I knew a girl in college who told a friend and me she was going to marry a rich man who would support her in her music career. I pointed out to her some women saw men as Success Objects and some men saw women as Beauty Objects (there is nothing new in the Manosphere, contrary to those who think there is), so if she was going to judge a man on his money, why should he not dump her when she lost her (merely okay) looks and find a younger woman? She gave me some excuses and rationalizations about "he should love me, etc." Then I asked her if she would stay with him if he lost all his money and of course she said, "Yes." Then I asked her if she could love him if he didn't have much money, or if a man should love her if she didn't have much looks, and you just hear the sound of her brain popping. These were things she had never considered, and didn't want to consider, because it was interfering with her Groovy Little Fantasy World.

I told her "that quite soon you will lose what looks you have, so if you don't find him really soon you are going to be up shit creek. For that matter, his money might go up but your looks will certainly go down, so it might get to the point you're too unattractive to use, so he'll trade you in for a newer model. You know, like a car."

She looked at me with pure hate, as if she wanted to kill you. I expected that.

She did get married but he wasn't anywhere near rich. Just a regular guy making a decent salary. I have no idea if she's still married, but if she's not she may have taken the route of blaming all her problems on men - and I've seen a lot of that.

Speaking of cougars, the worst I ever saw was a 75-year-old woman in hots pants and go-go boots - she apparently thought it was still 1966. She had, by the way, murdered her rich husband for his money - and somehow got away with it.

I also knew a very unpleasant middle-aged women who was such a horror to her well-to-do husband that he was seeing another woman and initiating divorce proceedings against his wife. She ran him over with her car and told the police: "He made me do it!" In her case, she went to prison.

I ran across the article below several years ago and recently ran across it again.


"A WOMAN WRITES:

"What am I doing wrong?

"Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy.

"I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

"Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 – 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won't get me to Central Park West. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

"Here are my questions specifically:

"Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars, restaurants, gyms.

"What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won't hurt my feelings.

"Is there an age range I should be targeting (I'm 25)?

"Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the Upper East Side so plain? I've seen really 'Plain Jane' boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I've seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What's the story there?

"Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows – lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

"How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY Please hold your insults – I'm putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I'm being up front about it. I wouldn't be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn't able to match them – in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth."


"THE ANSWER:

"I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament.

"Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it.

"Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won't be getting any more beautiful!

"So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you're 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold - hence the rub - marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to buy you. (which is what you're asking) so I’d rather lease. In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It's as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as 'articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful' as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way. Classic 'pump and dump.'

I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know."


Society pretty much got around this problem in the past. One: when you got married it was very difficult to get unmarried. If a man got divorced, his career was shot to hell.

There was another, and better way: Love Goggles. Often, if a man and woman married young enough, no matter how old his wife got he still saw her as young.

There is a woman I know from 30 years ago in college. As bizarre as it sounds, she looks the same to me, even now.

No, No, No, You Don't Use Your Fist

When you get a guy down like this, you use the bottom of your elbow.

My poor late father was hit by a bus that ran a red light when he was 17. He was in a coma for a month and had metal plates all over him. His left arm was useless, and he never got more than 5'6", yet I saw him put guys on the floor by kicking them in the shins.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Killer Ants From Space


The Greeks had a myth about what the State considered the perfect soldier - an ant. These ant soldiers were called Myrmidons. They didn't question orders, they didn't think, they just fought and died.

Every portrayal of soldiers I have read in all those dystopian science-fiction novels I read all the time are just updated versions of that old myth. Portrayals of the military didn't used to be this way.

We can use as an example Robert Heinlein's novel, Starship Troopers, which was made into a movie that, although it has the same name, has little in common with the novel. In fact, it is a degenerated version of the book.

The late Heinlein was strongly libertarian in his writings, although his support of the military has caused some to label him fascist. They're wrong. Heinlein was far from a pure libertarian, but he was in no way a fascist.

In his novel he supported a purely voluntary military, easy to get out of, but very hard to stay in. Why? He only wanted the most motivated soldiers. The book supports the old military virtues of honor, pride, loyalty and patriotism.

In some ways it is a silly book, with depictions of terribly wounded soldiers who aren't supposed to make a sound, but overall, Heinlein's world is one in which I could live.

Then there's the movie. It shows the difference between Heinlein's 1950's jdealized view of the military, and Paul Verhoeven's mocking, satirical 1990's one. The society in the movie is what I call "soft" fascist – the world is starting to become politicized and militarized. As a result, the military has started to degenerate.

The more politicized and militarized a society, the more fascistic it becomes, and the more its military will degenerate,because of the loss of the true military virtues, and the installation of sadistic, power-mad ones. Heinlein's strongly libertarian novel was some 40 years later turned into a fascistic movie. Such is the change in the view of artists toward the military, in a short time.

Most artists are, in a way, prophets. They have a sensitivity, and an imagination, that oftentimes allows them to predict the future, not specifically, but in a general way. Science fiction is specifically about the future. In its history it's done a pretty good job. It's usually 30 to 50 years ahead of society.

I think another reason is that most writers, and especially the good science-fiction writers, are somewhat anarchistic. The imagination, the sensitivity, and the anarchism together gives them a leg up on everyone else, because they have a pretty clear view of the State and the damage it causes to whatever it gets its tentacles into.

Currently, science fiction's depiction of the military is very disturbing. There are three trends in modern science fiction that all should pay attention to: nanotechnology, designer drugs, and genetic engineering. Especially when the military-industrial complex gets its claws on them, because it will try to use them to produce Myrmidon super-soldiers – killer ants from space.

The first example that comes to my mind is the movie Blade Runner, which is about artificial, genetically engineered humans called replicants. The movie, which is very subtle in many ways, suggests the replicants have animal DNA inserted into them. One is part turtle, one raccoon, one wolf, one snake, and one fish, probably shark.

Could such DNA insertions be done? You just wait. I do know that unholy mutant that is the marriage of Big Business and the State will try, in order to create super-soldiers. You can take that one to the bank.

What comes after Verhoeven's view? The Borg, a futuristic group of Myrmidons that use genetic engineering, nanotechnology and probably designer drugs. I consider them to be the scariest soldiers ever.

The Borg comprises humans (and aliens) who are kidnapped and, though nanotechnology and genetic engineering (and I suspect drugs), turned into Borg soldiers. The soldiers are true Myrmidons – they are without fear of anything (including death), without anxiety, without mercy or conscience, indeed without self-consciousness. They follow orders without questions and die without hesitation. They have no honor, no pride, no dignity. They don't even have loyalty or patriotism, because they have no choice in the matter, no more than an ant does.

Any degenerated military in the world would love them. They'll all trying to create them. And the essence of a degenerated military culture is to treat soldiers as expendable things – although the upper echelons are always taken care of.

As a personal example, my last year in college a smirking Army officer tried to get us to join, telling the class we would be made officers and "taken care of." The enlisted men, on the hand other, he said, "We don't care what they want." I didn't join.

I also received offers through the mail from every branch. All of them, except the Marines, were interested in certain degrees such as computer science or engineering. Every other degree was listed as "other," except for the Marines, which only wanted to know if I had a degree. And from what I've been able to gather, it is only the Marines that still have some understanding of a true military culture. The other branches, obviously, are starting to degenerate.

The Borg also show something rare in fiction, but which always exists in the real world – the welfare/warfare state. Writers in general are very good at portraying warfare. Few understand the other side of that coin is welfare. One never exists, in the long run, without the other.

The Borg are on perfect welfare. They're literally babies in their flying cube. Every need is taken care of. Unfortunately, to protect that welfare, they are always at war with whatever comes their way. Welfare at home, warfare abroad. It's a law of bad human nature.

The Borg are also always trying to absorb whatever race they encounter. Obviously, they consider themselves so superior to all other races they believe it gives them the right to "civilize" them by force. They certainly do sound familiar.

Good fiction is always a cautionary tale, usually jammed right up reader's nose. It says, "This is what can happen unless you stop it." Currently it's saying, "A fascist society can be recognized by the attempts of its degenerated military, along with State-supported degenerated Big Corporations, to use science and technology to create expendable Myrmidon super-soldiers, even if it costs them their humanity."

Dumb People With No Lives

One of my friends mentioned he had watched a comedian talk about older retired people, who had no lives, so they spend their times peeking through their drapes: "What's that cat doing on the sidewalk in front of our house? He doesn't live on this street! He's up to no good. He's going to steal our silverware! He's going to rape us! Mabel!!! Call the swat team! WE HAVE A RAPIST CAT OUT HERE!!!"

I've encountered these loons more than once. Some years ago I lived in an apartment complex, and the building on my left side had four retired people who had nothing better to do than look through their drapes. One was a spinster and three were retired military, the dumb kind who couldn't make it in the real world, so they spent 25 years in the service, but were so stupid they couldn't make Master Sergent. One failed the test three times. (After meeting guys like this, I understand why they're used as cannon fodder: "Good ones in back, the sorry ones in front.")

All four of them came out of their apartments and harassed me me about my dog peeing on bushes. They thought these bushes and trees 30 feet from their front door belonged to them. One told me dog pee would kill a tree and another said it would make the area stink. How did they know these things? They made them up.

I came to blows with one after he came out of his apartment and confronted me about my tiny dog peeing on a bush (they harassed everyone about their dogs, not just me). He really thought the bush belonged to him. Even security told him he was wrong, which didn't penetrate. When he came over to my apartment to see why I was talking to security, I actually to shoo him away by showing him the top of my palms, with my fingers down, and going, "Shoo, shoo, go back home." I also told him, "You enjoy this, don't you? You're one of those people with no life so this drama is the only excitement you have."

Stupid people, retired or not, when they have no lives, fill it with drama, because it's the only excitement they get in their empty lives. Just as bad, something has gone wrong in their brains so they become self-righteous, which means they are consistently violating people's boundaries, and don't even know it.

I mean, come on, what sort of a lunatic starts a fight over a dog peeing on a tree? And what are the chances of four of them living next door to each other? What did I do, offend Cthulhu so he sent four demons to live next door to each other and gleefully harass humans?

I know a man who lives in a condo, surrounded by retired whackos, and he tells me he regrets buying the place and wishes he had bought a house instead. Not only does he have to deal with those sticking their noses in everyone's business, he said some of the retired guys have so lost their minds they wear Bermuda shorts with blacks socks up to the knees, and sandals. I've seen that, too.

I sometimes have this fantasy these people should be Soylent Greened. At least they'd make themselves useful.

Or maybe they should be put on an island, with hidden cameras (like in the movie, The Truman Show) and it should be broadcast to the world. It'd be hysterical, watching two 80-year-olds brawl over a chihuahua peeing on the beach, while their wives beat them over the heads with their umbrellas.

If I lose my mind and get like this, please God, just kill me. I don't want to wear shorts with black socks and sandals while chasing people around with my cane and screaming about their poodle violating my rights.