Will the Real Elizabeth Edwards Please Shut Up?

Why John Edwards Is a Tool

The reason why John Edwards is a low-life has little to do with his affair. John is an ambulance chasing lawyer who made millions alleging that doctors delivering babies caused those children to be born with cerebral palsy, even though studies show this is not true.

It also takes a brazenness born of stupidity to stand in court in front of a jury, channeling the plaintive cries of an unborn child, when at the same time you are perfectly content with having that child hacked to pieces.

Johnny Boy, who is worth 29.5 million dollars, made as a central focus of his campaign “Two Americas,” pointing out how awful it was that some Americans were rich, while the rest of the country lives in squalor. Nobody is forcing Johnny to hoard all of his money and to get $400 haircuts. He could always try leading by example, say by getting a $50 haircut and donating the other $350 to charity.

The Way the World Works

Now Elizabeth Edwards is touring every media outlet in the country as part of her Wondrous Traveling Pity Party and Medicine Show, reenacting her humiliation at the hands of her husband, who had an affair. The whole ordeal was so traumatizing and humiliating that the only way she could cope was to write a book about it and go on a nationwide publicity tour.

Elizabeth, look in the mirror. In her wedding photo Elizabeth is attractive. To look at her now, let me just say that there has been a precipitous decline in her attractiveness. John Edwards found himself in the same predicament that every married man finds himself in, saddled with a wife that an observer would have a difficult time recognizing from her wedding picture. John Edwards looking at his wife is a sort of transgender picture of Dorian Gray –Johnny remains eternally young and handsome, while she turns into an old hag reflecting all of his moral decay.

Elizabeth's age and her cancer mean that she is less fertile at best, or infertile. It is natural for a man to be attracted to younger, more fertile women. This doesn't mean it's pretty. It would be reassuring to all of us if the crippled boy were just as likely to get the promqueen as the captain of the football team, but it's just not the way the world works.

If that sounds callous, there is another way for Elizabeth to play the hand she's been dealt. I know of one elderly guy who married a much younger Filipina. It reached a point where he was in poor health and couldn't get out of the house. At that point she was dating another, younger man. When the old man found out, (and he could see where things were going, since he was incapacitated and she was younger) he dealt with it graciously, saying that he seemed like a nice young man and that he's the type of son-in-law he'd like to have. The wife even brought her “friend” to the house. Rather than blow up and furiously rail against the inevitable, the old man had accepted it, and lived out the little time he had left in peace, without bitterness and recrimination.

Get a Job, Elizabeth

The women (and I use the term “women” loosely) on The View were very unsympathetic to Elizabeth. She must have known she was marrying a grasping ambulance chaser. And despite all of the pain she has endured, she is married to a multi-millionaire. If Johnny is such a cad, and marital life is so miserable, why doesn't she just walk, and take 14 million and change with her?

She is now facing the Hillary Dilemma. If she divorces her wandering husband now, what are the odds of her marrying another multi-millionaire? Sure, she could leave, but the ride on Johnny's Italian handmade coattails would come to an end. Elizabeth might have to live in that horrifying other America, where people drive their own cars, drink beer, do their own housework, and –gasp-- go to work.

Seduction Tip: Be Rough around the Edges

A new study shows that women prefer men with facial scars for short-term flings.

There is a theory in sleight of hand magic called the “too perfect theory.” The idea is that some tricks are “too perfect,” and either seem implausible or lead the spectator toward figuring out the secret. As an example, in the effect cigarette through coin, if a cigarette passes through a flat piece of metal, spectators’ thinking may lead them toward the secret. But suppose a small hole is drilled in the coin. Admittedly, a cigarette through a tiny hole isn’t as miraculous as a cigarette through a solid piece of metal, but the effect seems more likely.

Another example is a prediction effect. If a spectator is given a free choice of any word in a dictionary and chooses “consternation,” and my prediction is “consternation,” something seems fishy. The prediction is too exact. If on the other hand my prediction is “concentration,” or “constellation,” it seems believable.

The main idea of the too perfect theory is that things can be too neat and tidy for their own good –there is a certain appeal in roughness.

This applies to seduction in that men can be too clean, too nice, too polite. This is easy to do in a culture in which men are raised to repress their natures. Think how often we are told that “violence solves nothing,” and how easily flirting, telling a joke, or saying the wrong word can result in charges of harassment and insensitivity.

Men are also raised to be the fall guy, the upright citizen, the hard-working, self-effacing nice guy who will put in long hours and ask little in return. When a woman has her fling and ends up pregnant, or suddenly realizes she is not as attractive as she used to be and now needs to settle down, she turns to the fall guy, who will raise another man’s child as his own and spend his whole life supporting a woman and her children (which may or may not be his).

Seduction guru Paul Janka observes that he does better with women when he doesn’t shave. A couple of days’ growth of beard is ideal. We know that women who are ovulating prefer men with darker faces, which may explain the greater success of the “scruffy” look.

For years I suffered from being too neat, wearing ties when going out, or a suit and tie. Of course I was excessively polite and sensitive.

When I was a school teacher in Fresno the lady who taught next door to me was a very attractive woman. I was stunned to learned that she had screwed the Larry the janitor, who was loud, rude, vulgar, unshaven, and a smoker. The affair mystified me. Given my understanding of women and my philosophy at the time, it made absolutely no sense.

Only now does it make sense to me. Larry was rough around the edges, reveled in it, and was sexually aggressive. And it paid off.

The Go-To Guy and Beta Male Slavery

The following is a post from Perry Marshall. It outlines how the Bet Male schmuck is the world's ass, bearing the load and doing everyone's work.

The Go-To Guy Gets Educated:

How Business Really Works on Planet Earth

Start with about 300 million people in the United States . Consider that half of ‘em are retired or in school or on welfare, a fourth of ‘em are taking care of the retired ones and the ones in school, you've got 75 million left. But 29 million work for the Federal Government which means there's only 46 million left to bring home the bacon.

Ah, but then there's the 15 million who work for the local government, so they're only marginally more worthwhile than the feds. We're down to 31 million now. 80% of the 31 million are either lazy, apathetic and mostly unproductive, or they're busy undoing the damage done by the dufuses every day. So in fact there's only six million people doing real, actual, productive, innovative hard work.

Those 6 million people are not only feeding 300 million, but providing them with warm homes in the winter and quality television programming. The comfort food and Seinfeld reruns keep the unproductive, roiling masses from rioting.

(Karl Marx was wrong: Religion is not the opiate of the people, television is.)

That explains why you feel like, in any room full of 20 people, you're the only one getting anything done. It's because you ARE the only one getting anything done. The rest are mostly dead weight, playing a zero sum game.

That's a fact. Get used to it. Always been that way, always will be that way. What matters is that you understand this is your role as an actually productive person in the world.

But there's still another part of this that most people don't perceive.

Of the six million people who do the actual work, one million are company presidents and big-time managers. The other 5 million are the Worker Bees.

Most company presidents and big-time managers, truth be told, are pretty productive people. They are worker-bees too. But the biggest part of their job is to keep the other worker-bees with heads down, working. Nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground. (Uncomfortable position, that.) The stability of the modern world rests on the loyalty and commitment of those 5 million worker-bees. They need to not look up.

I'm wicked serious. You take a company like General Motors, with hundreds of thousands of employees, all that company's real productivity and competitive edge rests on the shoulders of about 5% of them, people who take complete ownership of their jobs. They come early, stay late, skip lunch when necessary (about half the time). They know the answers to important questions. They know how things work.

They know the password to the server. They happen to have a backup copy when the hard drive crashes – yes, it's three weeks old and unfortunately not all the data is recovered. But they happened to make a backup one day… well, just in case, and… because they want to make sure the machine stays running. They were too smart to count on the IT guy. Sometimes they spend their own money and/or take personal vacation days to go get edumacated about something.

They know how many hubcaps were made on the last shift. They know Karen at the chrome supplier who can occasionally work a miracle if FEDEX loses a shipment.

They take everything about their jobs they very, very personally. Very seriously.

Everybody else is interchangeable. But not them. If all those people suddenly left, GM would be in big, big trouble. The whole company would tank and the stock market and the prognosticators wouldn't have the slightest clue why.

These people are the Go-To guys (and gals). The real ones.

Company presidents and shareholders, consciously or unconsciously, must keep the Go-To guys from ever discovering their own value, their importance, their true levels of talent. The Go-To guys must stay muzzled. Because losing a Go-To guy is very, very costly. Genuine Go-To guys are exceedingly difficult to replace.

Corporate America 's formula for getting and keeping Go-To guys:

• It's almost impossible to identify them before you hire them, and HR departments usually screen them out. It takes a Go-To guy to know a Go-To guy, and Go-To guys rarely work in HR departments.

• You find them by accident, and when you discover them, you give them more and more work to do, supplemented with dainty morsels of guilt. Every time something is amiss, like sales are a bit off this month or the excel spreadsheet forecast was done sloppily on Friday, you call him at home on Sunday afternoon and express to him how concerned you are about his performance lately. You explain that you're afraid he's not keeping the eye on the ball and you don't want this to ever happen again.

• It's vitally important that your Go-To guy have between $25,000 and $65,000 of student loans. It also helps if he has two car payments and a balloon mortgage on his house that's really a bit rich for his income. That way he's freakin' terrified of missing even one paycheck. He knows that a layoff or firing would bring certain financial doom. That fear never vacates the back of his worried mind.

• His compensation for the 55 hour work weeks, the unceasing stress, the lack of appreciation, the complete absence of opportunities to influence really important strategic decisions, the vacations interrupted by cell phone calls and impromptu meetings, is those two cars and the house that's a bit rich for his income. During your fireside chats, you counsel him that he deserves these things because he works so hard, and maybe he should even treat himself to a boat. Aunt Visa and Uncle Mastercard and Madison Avenue do their part to reinforce this, ensuring that he never has enough money to take any business risks, ever.

• Stroke his ego with things that cost the company very little. Plastic plants, corner offices, fancy titles (“Vice President of Manufacturing Technology” is a good one), and when you're together at client meetings, whisper to the client, just loud enough for Go-To guy to overhear, that Go-To Guy graduated from MIT with a 3.6 GPA. Maintain a big long list of things Go-To guy can't take to the bank, but which still make him feel proud of his accomplishments.

• You pilfer money from his 401K program and limit it to extraordinarily conservative investments (while talking about the 401K program in such delightful, embellished terms that he never visits a financial planner and considers saving up his own nest egg) so your Go-To guy will actually never have enough money to retire. He'll still be your Go-To guy when he's 83 and has a colostomy bag strapped to his leg.

• If you don't want to keep him until 83, fire him four months before his 20 year company anniversary, just before his pension vests. Oh yeah, and if you really want to stick the knife in deep, fire him on his wedding anniversary. Send him home to his sweetheart in tears and shame. It'll sweeten their weekend, the one with the steak dinner and red roses at the Radisson. Oh, and whenever you bump into him around town, tell him to be sure and tell her ‘hi' for you.

• Tell the Board Of Directors meeting that the company lost the 3½ million dollar account with Starbucks because of Go-To guy's inattention to detail and lack of maturity. Tell them you'd already been concerned about his performance for quite some time, and you solemnly accept a share of the blame for not dismissing him as soon as you saw the warning signs. This will ensure that they never suspect it was actually your fault – you hacked off their purchasing manager for trying to cut your own distributor's throat to keep some more margin. He knew right then you were a blood sucker and he nixed the deal.

Now you know why you always hated corporate politics, eh?

A key element here that goes unmentioned is that the enslaved go-to guy is married. Between marriage and debt, he must constantly work his ass off in order to stay afloat.

I should also add that these dynamics at the workplace occur at the church, too. Most people are casual attenders. Those at the top, the Rick Warrens and his associate pastors, get the money and the prestige. The church depends on the go-to guys, the "5% Chumps," who are constantly to the heavy lifting while receiving very little in return. They are constantly manipulated by guilt and a sense of duty.

Pastor Rick Warren, Phenomenal Mediocrity

“The Porpoise Driven Life” is my satirical take on Rick Warren's book, “The Purpose Driven Life.”

While I have have fun ridiculing the book, I am not saying that Rick is a scammer, a hatemonger, narrow minded, and so on. Homosexuals and liberals may want to paint Rick as an extremist, a whacko on the the fringes of society, but the reality is that Rick is relentlessly mainstream.

Warren is the embodiment of mainstream, middle class Christianity, which explains why he has thousands of members in his church (22,000, to be exact!) and has appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Regardless of Warren's flaws or limitations, he must be given credit for his masterful handling of the presidential candidates' forum he hosted. In that forum he showed that he is intelligent, articulate, and hardly some Bible thumping, mouth breathing hick pastor. The Purpose Driven life has sold more than 25 million copies, and according to his website, “is the best-selling hardback book in American history, according to Publisher’s Weekly.”

But I have to wonder why the book sold at all, let alone became such a mammoth blockbuster. Here are my objections to the book, and I've included a link where you can download the first seven chapters to read it yourself.

1) According to Rick, your purpose is to give your life to God. Let us say this is true. What is next? This still doesn't answer the question of what to do with your life. What career should you choose? Whom should you marry? How do you find happiness?

Note how this leaves Rick unaccountable. He isn't claiming to produce any tangible result in the reader's life. By giving up your life, you're giving up any right to concrete results. If you've surrendered your life to God then you shouldn't be concerned with wealth, sex, entertainment, status, physical appearance and strength, etc.

Think about it: if you buy “Make Money in Real Estate,” you can judge the merits of the book according to whether or not you make money dealing in real estate. If you buy “The South Beach Diet,” you judge the book by whether or not you lose weight. But if you buy a book that tells you to give up any self-direction and the desire to get anything out of life, then how do you judge the book's effectiveness?

If you say, “I tried Rick's way, but I'm not happy,” the Christian response is, “Your life is not about your happiness. Don't you see how selfish and self-centered you are, always thinking about your happiness?”

2) Why does God give you a life, but not want you to live it? God does not need you. As a human, I need worship in one form or another because I have doubts about myself. When someone praises me, it helps to assuage my insecurities. God, on the other hand, has no self-doubt and neither needs nor desires anyone to worship him.

It seems to me that the point in creating humans with minds and free will is to allow them to create and to choose.

3) The book is poorly written. Rick talks about “spiritual green cards.” This is where an editor should step in and say, “Hey, Rick, that's a clunky metaphor. Drop it, okay?”

Rick repeatedly cites scripture, assuming that the reader accepts it as authoritative. This is like Christians who prove the Bible is true by quoting the Bible saying it's true.

4) Rick stresses the unimportance of this life, which is nothing, compared to the next life, which is everything. Ultimately, this is a nihilistic view. If my desires are inconsequential (if not evil), and my life on this earth is inconsequential, then why does this life –and whether I live or die-- matter? I know the response will be that the afterlife is what matters, but doesn't that make this life meaningless? If the afterlife is what matters, why not just start with the afterlife?

Suppose you come to my house and I serve appetizers. You say, “Ugh, this tastes like cardboard.”

I say, “It is cardboard. It's not real food.”

Then why in the hell did I serve it? If the main course is all that matters, why mess around?

Does there have to be a life on earth in order to determine who winds up in the afterlife? What is the point in a trial (i.e. being tested on earth) if God knows the outcome? Doesn't it say in the Bible somewhere, “The Lord doth not dick around?”

Rick Warren's Gay Problem

There has recently been a flap over president-elect Obama inviting minister Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration.

In a recent interview, Ann Curry snarled at Rick, hurling the accusation of “homophobe.”

From the video:

ANN CURRY: Your position [on gay marriage] has raised the spectre that you are homophobic.

(Warren responds with a hearty laugh.)

CURRY: You laugh, but that is why gay people are angry.

RICK WARREN: Well, I could give you a hundred --

CURRY: Are you homophobic?

WARREN: I don't know any church in America that's done more to help the gay community, particularly with AIDS, than Saddleback. But the hate speech against me is incendiary.

CURRY: If science finds that this is biological, that people are born gay, would you change your position?

WARREN: No, and the reason why is because we all have biological predispositions. I'm naturally inclined to have sex with every beautiful woman I see. But that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.


In defending himself, Rick resorts to typical Christian thought:

1)Humans are evil or sinful by nature

2)Humans have natural desires, whether a man desires to have sex with a beautiful woman or with another man

3)Since these desires are an expression of a sinful nature, they must be suppressed

The image created by Rick is of a man constantly at war with himself, following the seemingly arbitrary dictates of divine law. If you don't accept scripture, then Rick has run out of arguments. The rationale for fighting human nature evaporates if you don't accept the Bible as authoritative.

But there is another argument to be made, one that is supported by the Bible as well as reason. All living creatures have an incredible drive to reproduce. Animals such as salmon, preying mantises and black widow spiders will die to reproduce. According to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, if any aspect of human behavior is inherited, it is mating and sexual behavior.

Let me make a simple observation: Healthy orientations are those that lead to successful reproduction.

If a man is sexually attracted to plants, I can safely say that is not a normal or a healthy behavior. I don't have to quote the Bible to prove my point, either. Now you can try to paint me as a hate mongering “botanophobe,” but nature itself makes the judgment. A man with an attraction to plants will not have offspring, and so the gene that causes his attraction will die out.

Homosexuals get upset that homosexual marriage is compared to incest and pedophilia, but deal with it, losers. Like homosexuality, incestuous relationships have been universally banned throughout human history. Child brides are the exception as well (Mohammed had one, for instance), occurring either ceremonially or when there is a shortage of more suitable women.

Given the standard, “What is a reproductively healthy orientation?” we can say the following are not healthy behaviors:

pedophilia
homosexuality
incest
attraction to a post-menopausal woman
attraction to an obese woman
bestiality
fetishism
transexualism

Some of these behaviors are more emotionally loaded (e.g., “They oughta kill those sick bastards!”) than others. In some cultures some of these behaviors are punishable by death.

This is the idea of tolerance. We no longer arrest or execute people for being gay. Just don't ask me to pretend that you're normal.

The gay movement goes ape feces whenever someone who was formerly gay announces that he has changed his sexual orientation. Gays want to pretend these people don't exist, but they do. It makes sense that some sort of psychological disturbance causes a man to adopt behaviors that are counter-productive. Given the right support and the will to change, stronger, innate desires to reproduce will predominate.

But now we get to the other side of the equation: What is a healthy orientation? For men, a healthy sexual orientation means a desire to have sex with...

young women
curvaceous women
women who are not fat (i.e. do not have either a high BMI [body mass index] or a high hip-to-waist ratio)
women who are not too thin
multiple women, both one after another and at the same time (i.e., a threesome)
beautiful women

This is where Rick Warren is asleep at the wheel and headed off the cliff. Rick thinks that he's supposed to give up on sex with attractive women because of scriptural reasons. But in the Old Testament, a married man having sex with a single woman or a prostitute was not adultery. When I first learned this I almost fell out of my chair. For years in Sunday school I read the old stories in which men had multiple wives, and concubines, yet I was brainwashed into thinking that the Old Testament standard for adultery included a married man having sex with other women.

That a married man was free to have sex with other women was the standard for ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome. That such a standard is now seen as immoral shows how far America is from a “patriarchy.” When there really was a patriarchy, men had multiple wives, concubines, visited prostitutes at will and divorce was not an option –for women, that is.

The “ideal” of a man having sex with a single woman until the day he dies (and he may find himself wishing that day would come sooner rather than later) is not a sexually healthy behavior. Yes, being in a committed, long-term relationship with a fertile woman is a healthy behavior, but nature defines “long-term” as several years, not a lifetime. It also is self-defeating for a man to pass up sexual opportunities.

Rick Warren and other Christians want to relegate sex with busty women, with young women, with curvaceous women, with multiple women, to a realm of sin and shame. This makes no more sense than accepting homosexuality as a normal behavior.

Could You Eke Out a Living on $40,000 a Month?

Hulk Hogan's ex-wife is currently getting forty thousand dollars a month. And yet she claims to be broke!

We find out that $40,000 a month isn't all Hulk Hogan is paying his ex, there are other expenses on top of that.

“Back in August, Hogan -- in addition to the monthly alimony payments -- agreed to pay some monthly costs, including repair and maintenance to their home. Bollea's legal team claims that Hogan refuses to pay for cable, pest control, window washing and their security system.”

You'd think that with forty grand a month the corpulent skank could pay for her own damn cable. I manage to pay my cable bill, and I make considerably less than forty thousand a month.

If she can't afford the window cleaning service, maybe she could wash the windows herself. Since she has no job, and never has, she's got plenty of idle time. Besides, the exercise will help tone up her flabby arms.

But think for a moment -What could you do with $40,000 a month?

Do you think you'd have any trouble finding female companionship if $40,000 a month were just part of your earnings?

Even if you got desperate and had to buy chicks, how much could you buy with forty grand a month?

(And before anyone gets all huffy about a man stooping to buying hookers, do you really doubt that Hogan's ex is anything other than an outrageously expensive, less attractive whore? When Hulk was in pain, she was more preoccupied with her next shopping trip in a vain attempt to validate her empty life. She looks like a prune rolled in makeup foundation, and has the moral sensibilities to make a crack whore look like Florence Nightingale.)

So at what point did marriage ever make sense? What was the rationale? How many opportunities for love and sex did Hulk Hogan forgo because he was shackled to the Creature from the Black Lagoon and paying off her platinum card?

Big Fat Lies

I just finished reading “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” by Gary Taubes, and it's a mindblower.

The basic premise of the book is that many or most of the diseases that we experience today are due to a single cause –a diet high in refined carbohydrates (e.g., potatoes, beer, and sugar). This premise sounds implausible, especially since we've been lead to believe that high fat and artificial ingredients are responsible for heart attacks and cancer.

Every disease that we consider as an inevitable part of growing old, such as cancer, diabetes, coronary disease, were unknown in hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherers were slim, had good teeth, and rarely suffered from ailments like appendicitis and constipation. In case after case, Europeans in primitive societies observed that the natives weren't fat, diabetic, and experienced little or no heart disease or cancer. When Albert Schweitzer first went to Africa, he treated Africans daily for thirty years and saw nothing in the way of cancer.

If the “fat is deadly” dogma were true, then many primitive cultures would have died out long ago. The Masai cattlemen lived on a diet that was very high in fat, living on meat, blood, and milk. (The Masai also had very low blood-cholesterol levels, despite a diet of 3,000 calories a day consisting mostly of saturated fat.)

The Eskimo lived exclusively on fish. Harvard anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote of living for years on nothing but fish. (Remember how we were told to avoid fatty fish like salmon, which was like a dietary Grim Reaper dressed in pale pink? Until it was discovered that fatty fish is heart-healthy.) When Stefansson was challenged , he underwent scientific test in which he was confined to a hospital and fed a diet consisting entirely of meat. He thrived.

The Tokelau Islanders lived on a diet consisting primarily of coconut. 50% of their calories were from fat, and 90% of those fat calories were from saturated fat! According to today's anti-fat, high carb consensus, Tokelau Atoll should have resembled The Island of Doctor Moreau. Yet the Tokelau islanders were in excellent health.

It was not until Tokelau residents went to New Zealand and began eating a Western diet that they began to gain weight, get diabetes, and have high blood pressure. Yet the islanders in New Zealand ate less fat ans smoked fewer cigarettes, than those who had stayed behind on Tokelau.



The real culprit is the recently documented metabolic syndrome, which is also discussed in the South Beach Diet books. A high carbohydrate diet, especially one with refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour, leads to high insulin levels. Insulin signals the body to store fat. Increased insulin levels lead to diabetes and heart disease. While we tend to think of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes as three separate diseases, they are really Siamese triplets born of the same underlying cause.

The most eye-opening revelation of the book is the link between high blood sugar and cancer. The link between the Western diet and cancer has always been assumed to be additives or impurities in food, like FDA Yellow #5 or MSG. The real problem is high blood insulin levels. Insulin feeds tumors.

You can read Taubes' New York Times article here.