Category: Uncategorized

Pretty Lady’s recommendations aren’t universally hailed:

Pretty Lady has been remiss, once again. Months ago, she picked up a free CD in a charming little French café on 5th avenue and 11th street. Months later, she remembered to play it. Months later still, she is reporting that Clare Burson’s music is quite lovely, well worth listening to, and not a bit like Tara’s, for those of you who are still feeling violated and betrayed by Pretty Lady’s rougher tastes.

Actually, I thought Tara’s two songs were rather nice myself, not completely unlike how Sara McGlock-Land (or however you spell it) might sound with a smoking habit. But with music, as with so many things, one’s mileage always varies.

The Lady’s post reminded me of an amusing episode a few weeks ago when Big Chilly and the White Buffalo insisted on my meeting them at a bar that I’d never hitherto frequented despite living nearly on top of it for four or five years. It was next to the Mermaid, and apparently the plan was to commit karaoke again on an unsuspecting public. I’m not a karaoke fan – I first encountered it in Japan and I’m still shocked that it not only made it over here, but became popular – but the boys are genuine karaoke fiends, being Confirmed Performers.

The bar seemed three-quarters empty, but this was a little misleading because it was so big that there were actually a fair number of people there. The women tended to favor vaguely country songs I had never heard before, while the men were mostly singing old songs by people with names like Dan Fogelberg, which I didn’t know except for one guy’s “Hotel California”. Still, one woman did do an unexpectedly credible version of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, while a random skinny guy did a great job at “So What’cha Want” by the Beastie Boys. Our fellow patrons seemed slightly taken aback when the three of us enthusiastically joined in the callbacks, but you can’t front on that and by the end of the song everyone had gotten into the spirit of things.

I can’t remember what songs the White Buffalo did, but he brought the house down as always on two out of three, while Big Chilly uncharacteristically butchered a Lenny Kravitz song. He did better on his other two, but it was still an off night for the big bass. After the WB provided a second Blue Hawaiian, I finally obliged them by first confusing the DJ by giving the name of Javert – “Jahvurt? Um… Javahrt” and then failing miserably at “Stars” from Les Miz.

But for the first and surely the last time, however, I managed to upstage the two of them at their favored game. Keep in mind, the musical theme for the evening was overwhelmingly soft and 70’s, so the DJ was visibly amused to put on “Down with the Sickness” for “Jahvert”. I’m not sure which was funnier, the look of total disbelief on the face of the Whitney girl followed by her collapse into helpless laughter during the matricidal rant, or that during the second verse, a rather intoxicated woman came up to the stage, sat down next to me and put her head on my shoulder for the rest of the song. Judging by the crowd’s initial reaction, they were as unfamiliar with Disturbed as I was with their Dan Fogelbert and so forth, but they came around and eventually seemed to appreciate this stretching of their musical boundaries.

Either way, it was the only time I’ve ever been enthusiastically applauded for a karaoke performance. Clearly, I’ve peaked and it’s time to end my career on its solitary high note.

Amynda appears to think that if she waves her hands fast enough, no one will actually read the words right in front of them:

Yes, Vox is trying to reassure himself that he’s seeing sorrow when he looks at the glee feminists are showing about Forbes running an article that bluntly argued that financially dependent women are easier to dominate and control, which has been our point all along…. So we’re all in perfect agreement—me, Steinem and [Vox]. Men who want to oppress women do so to compensate for personal weakness. So why all the fussing, Vox?

That’s a bizarre summation. I didn’t see any sorrow anywhere, but I sure noted an awful lot of anger being expressed by the career women who read Forbes in light of how many of them were reacting hysterically to Mr. Noer’s article and threatening to cancel their subscriptions. Forbes itself, in first taking down the article and then pairing it with what was apparently supposed to be a rebuttal, was responding to “a heated response from both outside and inside our building.” I even argued that it wouldn’t make sense for feminists to be angry about it, given their general hatred for marriage and happily married women alike.

Why any of this should upset feminists who believe that marriage is inherently oppressive remains a mystery….

While I agree that there is no reason for Amynda to be upset, the same is not true of most career women because Mr. Noer has forced them to look squarely at the reality that what they thought made them more desirable to men actually makes them less desirable. This is understandably distressing, particularly to women whose sexual value and childbearing capability, two factors of interest to most men inclined towards marriage, is on the decline.

I do find it amusing how Amynda serves as her own “strawfeminist” here, note how she explicitly equates men who want to marry women who will stay home, have children and manage the family household with “men who want to oppress women”. This is straight out of Friedan, it’s a hoary old argument so dated that most modern feminists would be ashamed to dig it up for display. No doubt she’ll be denying this in future posts….

The truth is that any feminist glee with regards to the increasing undesirability of career women is likely to be shortlived. Feminism’s remaining popularity among women rests on the deceit that equality is both possible and desirable, when that deceit is punctured, most women turn away from feminism in disgust. The only place all men are equal is the grave, which is why the adherents of equality have sent so many victims there since the days its bloody banner was first raised.

Who needs Western Culture anyway when you’ve got your own sophisticated pre-Western traditions:

Skeletons found at an unearthed site in Mexico show Aztecs captured, ritually sacrificed and partially ate several hundred people travelling with invading Spanish forces in 1520. Skulls and bones from the Tecuaque archaeological site near Mexico City show about 550 victims had their hearts ripped out by Aztec priests in ritual offerings, and were dismembered or had their bones boiled or scraped clean, experts say….

On hearing of the massacre, Cortes renamed the town Tecuaque – meaning “where people were eaten” in the indigenous Nahuatl language – and sent an army to wipe out its people. When they heard the Spanish were coming, the Zultepec Aztecs threw their victims’ possessions down wells, unwittingly preserving buttons and jewellery for the archaeologists.

If you’ve ever bothered to actually read any history, you’d know that one reason, (besides the primary one of happening to be in the way), that colonial-era Europeans had so little regard for the noble indigenous cultures they so blithely wiped out was because more than a few of them were cannibalistic and quite reasonably considered disgusting and subhuman. If you consider how Americans from feminists to Christian conservatives already view Iran today, just imagine the reaction if President Ahmadinejad began regularly eating people on live television.

I don’t know how serious La Raza is about its trappings of Aztec revival, but here’s hoping they stick with Catholicism’s metaphorical cannibalism and burritos.

The Original Cyberpunk defines heroism:

Heroes do not live to crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women. Any group of thugs can do that. Nazis and Klansmen do that.

I disagree twice over with the OC here. First, I see “heroic” as being more akin to “superhuman” than “self-sacrificing”. Any definition that would require stripping heroic status from Conan of Cimmeria, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hercules necessarily renders itself dubious in my eyes. Who is the greater hero, the man who leaps in front of a speeding train to push a woman out of its way and is then run over, or the man who leaps in front of that same train and stops it in its tracks? The sacrifice of the first example is obviously much greater, but the latter example exhibits the greater hero.

And while it is customary to regard the Nazis and Klansmen as thugs and strutting bullies, this isn’t a particularly accurate picture. The Klan was never in a position of power, not even during its brief heyday in its second 1920s incarnation, and in its initial form it was primarily a violent resistance to a victorious occupying force. Thus, it was reasonably regarded as heroic by occupied Southerners in much the same way that Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization are considered to be heroes in most of the Arab world.

Ironically, the Nazis fit the OC’s definition of heroes disturbingly well. They were outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded on every side by powerful enemies and through the combination of national desperation and the force of one man’s will, managed to overthrow a weak and corrupt government and wrest the strangling hands of the vengeful Western Powers from Germany’s throat. Indeed, it was primarily their heroic qualities that caused Winston Churchill to recognize early the danger they would pose to a far more powerful France and England.

The OC writes: “The essential quality of heroism, I think, is that of being worried, concerned, even brown-shorts scared, but still being willing to put your life on the line and do something that desperately needs to be done….”

In “The Last Lion”, William Manchester’s biography of Churchill, the author quotes several Nazi generals as well as Adolf Hitler on the occasions of the rearming of the Rhine Valley, the Austrian Anschluss and the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland. What is intriguing is the naked fear he reveals on the part of the Germans, who knew very well that they had no ability to resist any military reaction on the part of the Western Powers and yet risked it all anyhow on behalf of their New Order.

On October 14, 1933, without warning, he [Hitler] made three announcemnts. The important one was that Germany was withdrawing from both the disarmament conference and the League of Nations…. Hitler added that if the league attempted to impose sanctions [which in German implies armed invasion] his new minister of defense, General Werner von Blomberg, would order German troops to fight. Blomberg did in fact instruct his soldiers to man the Reich’s frontiers and “hold out as long as possible.” However, as he and his fellow officers were well aware, that wouldn’t be long. Serious German resistance was impossible, and they were horrified. – p. 120

One need not harbor any liking for the mad National Socialist vision of pagan Teutonic revival and European rule, (and despite what the Gay Mustachio insists, I don’t, I actively despise even the pale imitation of the Third Reich known as the European Union), to recognize that there was a reason for their massive popularity both inside and outside Germany during their rise. Indeed, to deny their heroic aspects and dismiss them as mere thugs would not only be to miss the point of their historical appeal, but to deny the heroism of those who defeated them as well.

The question really comes down to this: can a hero be evil? I say yes, whereas the OC’s definition would appear to preclude that.

I think my favorite response to the now-notorious Forbes article has to be the following one. Apparently the writer doesn’t realize the irony of how she is making a stronger case against men marrying ANY woman, than Mr. Noer was against career women.

No more sex for Noer. I wish there was a website where you could warn other women to keep away from men like Michael Noer. If this article gets around he may never have sex again, which would be for the best because he strikes me as someone who doesn’t really value women.

Now, while I have been accused of hating women, I have never been accused of not valuing them. And in fact, as an economics major, I daresay I can do it rather more precisely than most. Given the amount of financial information related to the subject available on the Internet, the valuation is pretty straightforward.

The price of a woman’s sexual favors ranges from approximately $3.75/hour at the very low end to an average of $1,500/hour at the extreme high end. I’d estimate that the average female value works out to around $50 per hour for all ages, sizes and levels of attractiveness, enthusiasm and skill, so given that the average sexual encounter lasts 28 minutes and taking into account that Americans average 58 such encounters per year, the sexual worth of average American woman is $1,353.33 per annum.

Not a lot of money, is it. That’s why using sex as a weapon is such a prodigiously stupid idea, as sex is simply not a very powerful weapon for the average woman. It does work for some fortunate women of high sexual value, of course; one can work out the specific sexual value of any individual woman according to the following formula:

P = price per hour. Ranges from $3.75 (emaciated crack whore) to $1,500 (Marissa Miller in a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders outfit tuned up with Dom and a candlelight dinner overlooking the Arno).
E = length of average encounter in minutes
N = number of monthly encounters

Therefore, SVW = (P*(E/60)*(N*12). Anything over $10,000/year is quite good, only the financial elite, the egregiously handsome or the famous and powerful can expect to regularly obtain the favors of women in the $50,000+ category.

From the Forbes comments:

A man wrote:
“With one exception, men can accomplish anything that we think is important all by ourselves. Explore, build empires, create new industries, invent, discover, make money–all these things come naturally to us. We don’t need your help. But the one thing we can’t do by ourselves, and it’s the thing most men want more than anything else, is to have a family and play a prominent role in raising our children.

A feminist responds:
This is true. And we women have caught on to you: note the plummeting birth rates everywhere where women have reproductive choice and access to education. Mail order brides and third world recruiting notwithstanding, ultimately it’s going to catch up to you, because the fact is we shouldn’t have to choose between bread and water, so ultimately we don’t. When the birth rate plummets and population growth turns negative, all of a sudden the powers that be start talking about family friendly policies and flex time.

To sum up: I’m voting with my uterus, and so (apparently) are quite a few of my sisters. Good job, men: your refusal to broke real compromise and share has had spectacular results in the form of no babies for you! My suggestion is that you suck it up and start making equal contribution by sacrificing career advancement and glory to the rearing of your ever-so-precious children.

Now, if one looks at the grand scope of human history, which is more likely. That the elite, (or more likely, some forward-thinking charismatic individual capable of seducing the elite), will consider the dying society situation posited by the feminist and:

a) attempt to convince women to again resume their child-bearing responsibilities through forcing men to somehow make it easier for women to have both the metaphorical bread and water.

b) strip women of the so-called “rights” they have only ever held in Western society, and which have been revealed to be of completely disastrous effect in less than fifty years.

The answer, of course, is (b). Moreover, the true alternative is not (a), the success of which is wildly unlikely, but (c), societal collapse before an energetic and more propagation-friendly culture. The jury is still out as to whether (a) or (c) will win out, in either case, feminism spells not only its own death, but also the death of Western-style liberal quasi-democracy.

See Turkey, Algeria and Russia for details….

The Fraters Libertas refer to something that somehow appears to have vanished:

Don’t marry a career-oriented dame. Sounds like good advice to me. Who wants to put up with all the aggravation, self-centeredness, pantsuits, powerpoint presentations and general added marital stress? But who is giving such sage advice to non-married men? Vox Day? Some loudmouth conservative like ol’ JB? Nope, Forbes magazine:

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage.

Shocking. Good thing we have these social scientists doing these important studies. Otherwise how would we know such common sense things like don’t marry a career gal?

While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women–even those with a “feminist” outlook–are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

JB adds:

Don’t miss hitting the comments section. I haven’t laughed this much in ages!

Strangely, the article which appears to have generated the predictable rush of hysterical career women demonstrating how reasonable and open-minded they are by shrieking for jihad against Forbes, has vanished from the Internet…. UPDATE: It is back up, but now paired with a hastily prepared “rebuttal” written by a woman whose conclusion is: “So guys, if you’re game for an exciting life, go ahead and marry a professional gal.” Of course, by “exciting life” she means “antagonistic, adultery- and divorce-filled life without children, at least children you can see more than one weekend a month”. And as we have all learned to expect of a female attempt at a rebuttal, she answers Noel’s general statistical points with personally anecdotal evidence. For the love of all that’s bone-dry and dull, someone needs to tell that brilliant career woman that when it comes to statistics and probabilities, the personal isn’t political, it is completely irrelevant!

UPDATE 2: Amynda points out that the slide show with accompanying text is still missing and helpfully posts it on Forbes behalf. Why any of this should upset feminists who believe that marriage is inherently oppressive remains a mystery….

In any event, Michael Noel’s conclusion is absolutely true, which is why it reduces the usual suspects to slavering madness. If you want a happy marriage, don’t even think about marrying a career woman. A woman who declares herself a career woman is openly declaring that her career is more important than any boyfriend, husband or children, so unless you intend to a) live off her, or, b) enjoy playing third fiddle to Powerpoint demonstrations, don’t even consider dating one. There are much better women out there.

The Original Cyberpunk ponders a literary point:

Perhaps pro-military was the wrong word. What I’m trying to understand is why heroic stories *only* seem to work as fantasy or history.

Well, I think Conan-style heroism might be a bit much in the romance genre. Mystery, too, would be problematic:

Watson: “I say, Holmes, who do you think beheaded and disembowled these poor men?”
Holmes: “Elementary, my dear Watson. Judging by the pattern of these bloody footprints, I’d say that the killer was a barbarian warrior armed with a scimitar. He is favoring his left side, most likely because he is carrying a naked woman with large breasts over that shoulder, and if you had noted those oddly discoloured droplets of blood there and there, you would have known that he has forgotten to clean his blade, which by my reckoning was forged in Outer Tungustia.
Watson: “Great Scott! How did you know his scimitar was smithed in Tungustia?”
Holmes: “Only iron ore from Tungustia reacts with blood in such a manner as to leave a tell-tale discoloration. If it had been greenish, then it would have been Inner Tungustia. But as you can see it is tinged yellow, ergo….”
Watson: “What a brain you have, Holmes! Still, if the dripping blood leads to the east, then why are we running due west?”
Holmes: “Watson, do I really have to do all the thinking around here?”
Watson: “No, wait, don’t tell me! Since the earth is spherical, you’re obviously planning to cut off his retreat by encircling the planet from the other way around! Brilliant!”
Holmes: “Quite to the contrary, dear Doctor. An important aspect of my philosophy of which you have hitherto remained ignorant centers on avoiding armed barbarians given to impromptu experiments in vivisection at all costs. And now that we’ve put three well-populated city blocks between us and our Outer Tungustian dissection enthusiast, shall we stop for a good English pick-me-up of cocaine and crumpets?”

As for heroic chick lit, that’s a basic contradiction in terms. Because men are bad and their bad, evil, selfish, behavior that reminds more highly evolved beings of pigs is the manure-enriched soil in which a strong, independent flower who doesn’t need men will blossom and be appreciated for her own inherent flowerness.

And here I thought that Western civilization frowned on honor killings:

A wife who axed to death her cheating husband after a decade of lies and deceit was freed by a judge yesterday. Wadanalegeder Chandrasekera suffered years of humiliation and isolation because of the activities of her philandering husband, who fathered a love child by her niece during a lengthy affair. She snapped and, in a blind fury, struck Sarath Chandrasekera, 57, with an axe 11 times on the back and head at the family home in Bearsted, Kent, last October.

The 59-year-old mother of two was initially charged with murder but a guilty plea to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility was accepted by the Crown after her mental condition was assessed. Sentencing her at Woolwich Crown Court yesterday, Mr Justice Fulford said jailing her would serve no purpose…. His wife began divorce proceedings in 2004 after more than a decade of his cheating. When he visited the family home one evening last year, she attacked him from behind as he walked towards the house.

The frightening thing about the devolution of the West is that as crazy as things are getting in the United States, they are arguably worse in England. No doubt Susan Smith will soon be medicated and released into the wild soon, after all, if a woman kills someone, it’s always the victim’s fault, whether that victim is an unborn child or an old man.

From the New York Times:

In the conversations observed by The Times, the pedophiles often discussed their personal lives…. The most frequent job mentioned, however, was schoolteacher. A number of self-described teachers shared detailed observations about children in their classes, including events they considered sexual, like a second-grade boy holding his crotch during class.

I’d bet that at least 30 percent of schoolteachers have serious psychological problems and that the majority of male schoolteachers have at least some psychosexual issues. I simply don’t trust any adult who regularly prefers the company of children to the company of adults.