She sounds lovely!

Roissy posted this, complete with some excellent commentary, and as the guy who sent it to him suggested, it really merits going viral. It should be subtitled “I’m throwing in the towel“.

So this is it–I’m not looking, I honestly don’t care if I meet anyone on here anymore–and this is what I’ve learned about the men that I have had interactions on here with a little parting advice.

If you are over 40 and you do not take care of yourself, unless you truly don’t care that a woman is dating you for your money, then maybe a better site for you is sugarbaby.com

Those of us that are of a certain age and reasonably successful on here are on here, want to meet someone reasonable–intelligent, successful, happy, that we’re attracted to physically and emotionally, not because we’re desperate, but usually because we’re too busy to date, or we do not wish to date through our work. We have businesses to run, we travel frequently, or we be on here because our friends and family are bugging us about being single and this is way to get them off our backs. What that means is–
1. We are not desperate–we do not need you to have a fulfilling life.
2. We are busy people–just like you–and we mean what we say, and say what we mean because we don’t have time to play silly word games or have drama like 20 somethings.
3. The silly little texting games are the fastest way to blow it. If we give you permission to call–then call–don’t text to see if its ok to call–we have a life–random texts from people we don’t know don’t cut it if we haven’t met you.
4. If we ask you not to contact us further–then don’t–unless you want to appear as a crazy person.
5. If we call you on the above..we’re not crazy, or scary..we just don’t have time to waste on people who don’t get it. We deal enough with that in our work.
6. Life gets shorter for us every day–we have no time or desire for drama, games or people who do not have their act together.
7. If we reject you after you have done any of the above, put your big boy pants on and move on.
8. We are not angry–we know what we want–we know what we’re willing to put up with. With age, the list of what we want gets a little longer, while the list of what we’re willing to put up with gets infinitely smaller because we have learned from our youth.

I don’t think this woman understands that any man with half a brain not only prefers younger, hotter women to the likes of her, but she is such a nasty piece of work, rotting from the inside out from all of her bitterness and barren professional ambition, that only the most masochistic of gamma males would ever want anything to do with her.

Some women are astonished by the fact that I repeatedly assert that men actively dislike intelligent, successful, educated women. What, I ask them, sounds even REMOTELY attractive about this woman and her poisonous attitude. I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with her, let alone an entire evening.

And here is a little nota bene for women. “Busy” doesn’t impress men. I don’t quite understand what women think they’re conveying by resorting to the term as they do – I suspect it’s supposed to be a display of high value – but when a woman says “busy”, men hear “bitch”.

I know! (raises hand)

Victor Davis Hanson asks a multiple-choice question concerning American strategy in Afghanistan:

Somehow the U.S. finds itself in a position of having to apologize for the inadvertent burning of terrorist-desecrated Korans; of not expecting an apology from Karzai (a recipient of the 2004 Liberty Medal) for the murdering of U.S. troops by their supposedly friendly Afghan counterparts; and of again having to apologize for a horrific mass murdering spree by a lone, rogue gunman, who, nonetheless, off-the-record, is said to be emblematic of the frustration of U.S. troops. Our troops are largely forgotten by the administration and the public, cannot trust fully those on behalf of whom they are risking their lives, and are not sure what the U.S. mission has become. When an invading and occupying force apologizes so repeatedly to the resident population, it is a sign that locals have lost any fear of its unpredictability and lethality, or respect for its proven record of reconstruction and humanity, or for its own sense of self-confidence in its mission.

So what now?

a) To escalate is politically impossible and strategically nonsensical.

b) To leave abruptly is to admit defeat and cede complete control of the country de facto to the Taliban, and to confess that the previous human and material cost was wasted, while relegating millions of pro-Western-reform Afghans in the major cities to Taliban reprisals or refugee status. (I assume that at this point the Afghan Security Forces would not fight on, or at least not fight very well, alone against the insurgents.)

c) To continue with the present policy of announced withdrawal dates, and a final departure in two years, punctuated by periodic apologies to the Afghans when their customs are abridged, or civilians killed, in the hope that the Karzai government and its successor by 2014 will come to a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban, one that will not nullify all the gains achieved in the last decade — a dubious proposition at best.

The answer is (b), VDH. The answer is (b). No one is fooled when the defeated occupation force “refuses to admit defeat”. All that refusal does is square the stupidity. Not only was all of “the previous human and material cost” wasted, people like me have been telling people like you that for years!

And as for the “pro-Western-reform Afghans”, screw them. Don’t even think about bringing them over here, or you’ll soon discover that they’re a hell of a lot closer to the Taliban than they are to the West.

In which we are amused

I don’t know which is more amusing to me, the fact that some of you are actually lamenting the demise of CoComment or the idea that the world has suffered any loss from the disappearance of the comments into the great digital void. The comments are a daily conversation, and like most conversations, exist only in the moment. When they did produce one of those rare moments of enlightenment, I usually turned them into posts anyhow.

Since none of the external comment systems are either very good or play well with the old Blogger template, I’ve simply gone with the existing Blogger comments since they’ve worked fine on Alpha Game. Unfortunately, there is no quote button, so I would encourage everyone to adopt the practice of italicizing text that one is quoting in order to distinguish it from one’s own comments. I would also encourage everyone who wants to provide links to learn how hotlink a URL; it’s not difficult and it will significantly increase the chances that someone will visit the link you are recommending.

Seriously, at this point, you look downright retarded when you copy an entire URL into a comment rather than hotlinking it. If you don’t care enough to hotlink the URL, then obviously it’s not important enough to bother pasting it in there in the first place.

While I’ll permit anonymous commenting for the time being, mostly because the alternative is requiring Open ID registrations, I would prefer everyone commenting to at least enter a name using the Name/URL box. It’s even easier to Remove Content than it was with CoComment – one fell click instead of the previous 7-step process – so don’t operate under the mistaken assumption that it’s going to be any harder for me to keep the usual suspects from getting out of hand than it was before.

Anyhow, it’s a sub-optimal solution, but a functional one, and should allow the daily conversations to continue to flow freely. A few notes:

1. If you don’t want a pop-up, but prefer to see all the posts embedded below the post, click on the hotlink on the bottom of the post in the white box. On this post, it looks like this: “3/15/2012 11:24:00 AM”.

2. The blogger pop-up window is not only limited to 200 comments, but won’t give you access to comments 201 or higher. To see them, you need to make use of the method described above in point (1), then click on either Newer or Newest depending on whether there are 401+ comments or not.

3. If any HTML-head knows how to adjust the template to allow the functionality described in (1) to be utilized using the post title in addition to the time, please let me know. It works like that at Alpha Game and I think it’s more intuitive.

It’s fascinating to see how much humans hate change. The traffic here dropped 600 visits from the lowest it has been in more than thirty days on a weekday, including holidays, simply due to the change from CoComment. Who would have thought the old commenting system would have so many fans? Somewhere, on an island not so very far away, Blackblade is wiping away a single tear….

UPDATE – All right, just pick a name, any name. It’s too much trouble trying to keep track of multiple Anonymouses, so I’ll just delete comments without names. It’s a pity Blogger won’t permit Name/URL without permitting Anonymous.

An ominous sign

It’s readily apparent that the women calling for a sex strike haven’t actually thought through the implications of their modern-day Lysistrata:

A group that supports health care coverage of contraception is calling for women to withhold sex from their partners between April 28 and May 5.

“This will help people understand that contraception is for women and men, because men enjoy the benefit of women making their own choices about when and if they want to get pregnant,” Liberal Ladies who Lunch says on its website. “Once congress and insurance agencies agree to cover contraception, we will then resume having sex. Until then men will have to be content with their left hand.”

On its Facebook page, the group charts a brief history of similar “strikes,” starting with Aristophanes’ ancient Greek play “Lysistrata,” where women refuse to have sex until the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Settling aside this ridiculous and totally obnoxious attempt to exert political control over men – and I recommend that any man immediately rid himself of a woman who would ever attempt to run this sort of power move on him – the basic concept of a sex strike is palpably stupid.

Six years after Aristophanes produced Lysistrata, which of course was written as a comedy, the Athenian fleet was destroyed by the Spartan admiral, Lysander. A year later, a starving and besieged Athens surrendered and lost its walls, its fleet, and its empire. And were it not for the unexpected mercy of the Spartans, granted in gratitude for the Athenian resistance of the Persian invasions, the Athenian women would have been enslaved by the men of Corinth and Thebes.

The lesson is that the society whose women attempt to use the crudest form of what John Adams once describes as “the tyranny of the petticoat” is a society that is unlikely to survive for long.

To Hell with secular society

I no longer have any use for it. None whatsoever. I was raised and indoctrinated in the ideal of the “separation of church and state” and genuinely believed that it was best if religion was not permitted to dictate societal rules or even unduly influence society. But this has finally convinced me that the Muslims have the right idea and secularism merits nothing more than being stamped out, ruthlessly and without remorse:

It is a world-renowned work of literature and one of the foundation stones of the Italian language, but Dante’s Divine Comedy has been condemned as racist, homophobic, anti-Islamist and anti-Semitic. The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination.

Dante’s epic is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group’s president….

Schoolchildren and university students who studied the work lacked “the filters” to appreciate its historical context and were being fed a poisonous diet of anti-Semitism and racism, the group said. It called for the Divine Comedy to be removed from schools and universities or at least have its more offensive sections fully explained.

Consider this. The Papal States produced La Commedia Divina, Catholic Italy produced Vivaldi, Anglican England produced Shakespeare, Christian Austria produced Mozart and Haydn. What have two generations of modern secularism produced despite its lofty claims concerning the female liberation and the unchaining of the human spirit? Avatar, Twilight, and The Vagina Monologues.

Camille Paglia was right. “Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.”

Secular progressives are totalitarians and book-burners every bit as fanatical as religious extremists they decry. They always have been, they just build their cultural walls one stealthy and dishonest brick at a time.

Now this is sad

I am a huge proponent of ebooks. They’re fantastic and I now prefer reading on my Android phone to an actual book. But that doesn’t one doesn’t feel a genuine sense of loss at this news of the classic encyclopedia series ceasing traditional publication:

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

If it weren’t for the pervasive political correctness that has infested encyclopedias for the last 20+ years, I would pick up a set. As it happens, I might consider picking up an older one, ideally the legendary 1911 edition.

Liberal atheists are cowards

It’s hard to illustrate their cowardice more precisely than the NYT’s rejection of an anti-Islamic ad copied directly from an anti-Catholic ad previously run in the newspaper:

Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in “a few months.”

So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?”

Mr. Christie said, “I’m not here to discuss the anti-Catholic ad.”

I said, “But I am, it’s the exact same ad.”

He said, “No, it’s not.”

I said, “I can’t believe you’re bowing to this Islamic barbarity and thuggery. I can’t believe this is the narrative. You’re not accepting my ad. You’re rejecting my ad. You can’t even say it.”

We used the same language as the anti-Catholic ad. The only difference is, ours was true and what we describe is true. The anti-Catholic ad was written by fallacious feminazis.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Christians should do every single time anti-Christian propaganda is put forth through the mainstream media and every time anti-Christian views are displayed by irreligious individuals. Force them to publicly expose their hypocrisy. Force them to admit that they are actively taking sides in the cultural war. Force them to finally recognize that they are not secular and neutral as they feign to be, but are actively working against the survival of Western civilization.

The hurricane of fraud

Matt Taibbi on Bank of America:

There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it’s corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors, and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it’s a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

But Bank of America hasn’t gone out of business, for the simple reason that our government has decided to make it the poster child for the “Too Big To Fail” concept. Because it is considered a “systemically important institution” whose collapse would have a major, Lehman-Brothers-style impact on the economy, two consecutive presidential administrations have taken extraordinary measures to keep Bank of America in business, despite a staggering recent legacy of corruption schemes, many of which were simply overlooked by regulators.

The frightening thing is that this isn’t rhetorical exaggeration. The real case is almost surely much worse than Taibbi paints it. And he asks a very pertinent question of so-called conservatives.

“When did we make it the job of the taxpayer to buy failed companies, and rescue companies from their own bad decisions? How is that conservative?”

Furthermore, you smell bad

Mark Kruse of Grantland addresses bracketologists, for varying degrees of “address” that includes “pushing you down and kicking you in the ribs”:

The NCAA tournament is properly rated. Many think it’s one of the best sporting events of the year. That’s what it is. But the whole fill-out-the-brackets thing? TOTALLY OVERRATED. I don’t do it. I won’t do it. Because I want to be able to watch Montana beat Wisconsin or Harvard beat Vanderbilt or South Dakota State beat Baylor, and enjoy that unabashedly, without worrying about whether I “picked” them or not. You “had” Montana? You “had” South Dakota State? No. You didn’t HAVE anything. You don’t deserve to claim even the most peripheral form of ownership. Because it matters to the kids on those teams and their coaches in a way that it doesn’t and shouldn’t and could never matter to you. And because they don’t deserve to be depersonalized into pieces to be so cavalierly “picked” or not “picked” in some annual national gambling exercise. And because they also don’t deserve to be called “bracket busters” if they win. It’s insulting and selfish. The point isn’t that they’ve ruined your chances to win some dumb pool. The point is that they’ve done something unexpected, exhilarating, and empowering, for themselves and the people who know them, love them, and have invested in them. Your “pick” does not count as an investment. You say this gives you a reason to watch and to care? “Picks” make you care about the thing you’ve set up to give you a reason to care about the thing … NOT the thing itself. The thing is the thing. Your brackets are not. At stake in games over the next three weeks: goals, dreams, jobs, futures. That’s not enough for you? An interest based on brackets is an inauthentic interest.

I’m kind of with him on this one. I don’t bother with brackets, I just want to see upsets and Cinderellas and 15 seeds beating 2 seeds.

Fidelity survey

In light of the interesting information provided by the previous questionnaire, I’ve posted another set of questions related to one’s historical fidelity or lack thereof. It’s entirely anonymous, so you want to add to the data available for crunching, please visit Alpha Game and answer the seven questions there.