Bulletproof Pimp

The Secrets Buried in Marriages

2010-10-17T08:39:00.000-07:00

Greg Gutfield has a great take on marriage, secrets, and honesty here:

THURSDAY'S GREGALOGUE: THE HONESTY OF DAVID ARQUETTE

"So, while the world fixated on "important" matters like trapped miners and political debates, a more monumental event took place: David Arquette and the chick from Friends separated.

Yep. This news sent shock waves through my soul, as I could only wonder if a drill bit existed that could extricate Mr. Arquette from the deep, deep hole his mouth dragged him into.

I speak of his interview with Howard Stern a few days ago. In it, Arquette spilled the beans on his marital troubles. He told the world that his wife initiated the separation, quoting her telling him, "I don't want to be your mother anymore." He then confessed they didn't have sex for five months and that after they split up -he had casual sex with "the girl in the paper." He differentiated sex with her and sex with his wife, in a manner that did him no favors.

You can find what he said, here.

http://www.tmz.com/2010/10/12/david-arquette-courteney-cox-separation-howard-stern-interview/

And so the disarming, goofy actor made the biggest mistake a married man could ever make: he was honest.

You see, people, there all sorts of secret societies: the freemasons, the Hibernians, the illuminati, the modern Woodman of America, and of course, the Order of the Fist - which I belonged to until an accident led to a very awkward afternoon in the ER.

But the most secretive group I know are married people, and even if you tried, you could not find a single book or pamphlet which reveals what married life is like for those involved. Instead, we see the courtship, the giant wedding album, the romantic bliss of a honeymoon – and then we wave bye-bye to the couple forever, leaving them on that mysterious island of matrimony.

But for a brief, idiotic moment, Arquette performed a selfless service, and pulled back the curtain of couplehood for everyone to see –– and by doing so, might have doomed his own marriage.

This pretty much makes up for Scream 2 and Scream 3.

And if you disagree with me, you're a racist, homophobic, malaxophobe."

Sexual Violence and Sexual Poverty

2009-09-16T18:39:00.000-07:00

The recent murder of Anne Le is tragic beyond belief, especially in view of her beauty, intelligence, youth, and charm. In every picture of her I've seen, she looks absolutely gorgeous. Whoever killed her deserves to die.

Forgive me if this is the wrong time to raise the issue, but the question must be asked –To what extent is violence, particularly sexual violence, due to sexual poverty?

Despite its economic wealth, America is sexually poor. And despite the constant saturation of the media with sex, sex, sex, creating the impression that living in the US is one big non-stop orgy, America is the sexual equivalent of Calcutta.

Sexual poverty leads to violence. If a man steals food, it's reasonable to conclude that he's hungry. If a man steals drugs, he may very well be trying to feed an addiction. And if a man rapes a woman, it is probably due to a lack of sex (i.e., sexual poverty).

Feminists have been very successful in propagating the myth that rape is not a sexual crime. I have had college professors repeat this nonsense to me. Yet there are studies that show this isn't the case (1). For instance, it must be asked, if rape is not intended to satisfy sexual urges, then why are the vast majority of victims sexually attractive?

It stands to reason that some men who are sexually frustrated will resort to rape. Even if we concede that power and control are the principal motivators of sexual crimes, what man feels more powerless than the man who can't get a date, and is constantly rejected by women?

In the Philippines I heard a heart-breaking case of several pedicab drivers who kidnapped, raped and murdered a young girl. These sorts of stories are depressingly all too common. A pedicab driver is one of the poorest of men in an already very poor country. His chances of having a fulfilling sex life are almost nil. Although sexual violence is never justified, it should not shock us when it occurs in conditions of sexual poverty.

Marriage creates sexual poverty. If a woman marries and becomes the exclusive partner of one man, then other men lose. If Donald Trump marries her and has her exclusively during her most fertile and attractive years, and then dumps her once she is past her prime and marries another woman, thus denying other men sexual access, then Donald makes the situation even worse. Multiply this by all of the wealthy men who marry multiple women in succession, and it exacerbates the problem of sexual poverty.

Like the time I saw a very attractive soccer mom at the pizza parlor. She was attractive to me, but she was the exclusive partner of another man. Perhaps this man might have found my wife attractive, but she was off the market. We were both sexually bored with our wives (who probably felt the same way), yet we were all trapped in a stalemate, an exclusive, yet unfulfilling relationship. I would have been excited beyond belief to have slept with that guy's wife, but we were all stuck in the same dead status quo. And the status quo is sexual anorexia.

Marriage not only creates sexual poverty, but violence as well. There was speculation by a TV commentator that the murder of Anne Le occurred so close to her marriage because her killer knew that he would lose any chance of having her once she got married. Perhaps the thinking was, “If I can't have her, no one can.”

Think about it: If you find your girlfriend in bed with another man, you leave. If you find your wife in bed with another man, you kill him, and possibly her, too.

Human beings once lived in paradise (2). Paradise was not Adam and Eve in the garden, but humans in a cave, in which everyone mated freely. Why does a man produce millions of sperm, when only a few are necessary for conception? If you sleep with Eve, and then I sleep with Eve, whichever one of us has the largest number of sperm wins in the struggle to procreate. Sperm competition, in which penis size, ejaculate volume, and numbers of sperm increase, soon follows.

Every night in the cave is an orgy. Children are raised by the tribe, and resources are shared.

At some point an evil idea occurs to someone. “I can have a woman all to myself.” It is about this same time that humans transition from being gatherers and diggers into being hunters –and killers. The Bible allegory of Cain and Abel is a profound insight into human nature –we are fratricidal killers descended from a man who killed his brother. Only it is more likely that one brother murdered the other not over religious practices, but over exclusive sexual access to a woman.

We must recognize that no matter how sexually wealthy any society is, there will always be evil in the form of murder and sexual violence, but we must not kid ourselves and pretend that sexual poverty does not lead to desperate --and violent--attempts to gain sexual satisfaction and a feeling of power.

Thornhill, R. & Palmer, C. T. (2000). Why men rape. Sciences, 40(1), 30-36.
The early human paradise/orgy scenario is from the writings of Desmond Morris.

Beauty Rears Its Ugly Head

2009-09-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Can you find the attractive woman in the pictures above?

Feminists have long been pushing the idea that beauty is subjective (i.e., "in the eye of the beholder"), when research shows it is not the case (1). An example of this fallacy is "The Beauty Myth," by Naomi Wolf, which contends that women are judged by arbitrary standards of beauty.

I believe that many liberals would be aghast to find out just how much they have in common with evangelical Christians, and vice versa. When I was a serial church attender in my youth I was told the women in Playboy magazine were “artificial,” and were not really attractive. Naomi Wolf would agree. However, if you think Lisa Bonet isn't really attractive, get yourself to an optometrist, and please don't drive yourself there.

If you as a man are attracted to women in the media, it's not accidental, and it's not artificially created. Every man since Adam who ever trod the planet would find these women (e.g. Halle Berry, Salma Hayek, Heidi Klum) gorgeous.

What is artificial and contrived is a feminist attempt, aided and abetted by political correctness, to make certain women look beautiful. If beauty is arbitrary, and if women in Playboy are beautiful only because they're airbrushed, then it stands to reason that any, and I mean ANY, woman can be made attractive with enough effort. And in the case of Caster Semenya, the South African runner with the most Freudian name since Oral Roberts, we're not even talking about a woman.

You see, some people were upset that IAFF wanted to have Caster undergo genetic testing to see if she was actually a woman. Even a three year old watching the freakish athlete would jump up and shout like Austin Powers, “That's a man, baby!”

In the politically correct world, it looked as if uptight white judges subscribing to arbitrary and shallow standards of beauty were oppressing both a woman and a “person of color” (like I don't have any color?). So “You” magazine featured Caster on its cover and on four pages inside with a “sexy” photoshoot.

The only problem is that Caster is a hermaphrodite. This very “sexy woman” has no womb , but does have internal testes. So whose standard of beauty is artificial?

1. Langlois, Kalakanis, and Rubebnstein, 2000. Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytical and theoretical view. Psychological Bulletin, 126 (3)

Cleaned Out

2009-09-06T18:11:00.000-07:00

I shared some Zacapa rum with a friend last night, and we talked about work and retirement. (By the way, Zacapa is the world's best rum. It is dark, flavorful, and exceptionally smooth.)

I told my friend I plan on retiring in the Philippines, and he has similar plans. But the catch is that he's married to a Filipina. I warned him that anything he buys in the Philippines (and you can't really buy land, just lease it) can get taken from you. I've seen it happen time after time, and have heard the terrifying stories of guys who have lost houses, land, businesses, life savings, and sometimes, their lives.

Just this summer I heard of assets being frozen in Filipino banks. And the guy who is trapped in the Philippines. He owes his wife a million pesos (about $20,000 US), and can't leave until he comes up with the money. He can't come up with the money, so he can't leave the Philippines.

Well, my friend agreed. He realizes that in his late 50's he doesn't have the chance to get back on his feet financially if he gets divorced a third time. Yes, you read that right, a third time.

My friend got cleaned out in his first two marriages. I collect these stories because they are so common, yet totally unknown to men.

“You should have seen the shop I had,” he told me. “It was so clean you could eat in it. If I still had it we'd be in there right now. I lost it.”

“Excuse me if I'm prying, but how much did you lose in your last divorce, say a ballpark figure?”

“I declared bankruptcy.”

How many men are aware of how common these stories are? Yet I continually read how marriage is the surest route to wealth, how marriage boosts your assets, how getting married is a surefire financial strategy. But time after time I meet guys who have lost everything in the aftermath of a divorce, and are financially devastated.

Look, if getting married makes a guy wealthy, then marrying two women should make him twice as wealthy.

Of course, if you studied men with multiple wives, you would find that the men with the greatest number of wives are the wealthiest. (Keep in mind that this is in societies where women cannot divorce men and take half their property as well as making additional claims on men's income.) But are these men wealthy because they had multiple wives, or do they have multiple wives because they can afford them? I think we understand that any man of ordinary income with two wives would soon be broke. Whether you're married to both at once, or marry and divorce them sequentially, the bottom line is that you are stripped of any accumulated wealth.

Those who say that marriage makes men wealthy have cause and effect reversed. Marriage doesn't turn poor men into millionaires –it's that women marry money. It's like saying that best way for a woman to become young, thin, and good looking is to marry a Hollywood director. It's obvious that marrying a director doesn't improve a woman's looks, the association between directors and hot women is because powerful directors choose to marry beautiful women.

A man becoming wealthy by getting married is about as likely as an old crone becoming a beautiful starlet by marrying a director.

Purpose and Foreigner Alcoholic Syndrome

2009-09-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the Philippines, and it had to be one of my best trips. I was with a girl I met via the Internet, in her early 20's and slim. We went out to Malapascua Island, with the most beautiful white sand beaches. We spent most of our nights having sex.

(By the way, a tip I picked up from a mentor of mine is to have sex without orgasming. If you orgasm, you get tired, and pretty soon you can't perform. On the other hand, if you don't orgasm, you can go all night. Rather than become more tired, you become more energized, and your sex drive grows even stronger.

It may seem like not orgasming is a let down, but if you stop before orgasm, you will have the same sort of feelings as if you orgasmed –elevated heartbeat, flushing of the skin, a feeling of relaxation, etc. Only you won't be totally exhausted. And you still have orgasms, only once a day, or every other day.)

We rented a boat for the day to Carnassa Island, which is an hour north of Malapascua. The island is remote, sparsely populated, with white sand beaches and clear, sapphire water. I learned to snorkel, and was amazed to see the colorful little fish and to hear the crackling of anchovies in the water. We explored a cave that was said to be a secret meeting place of very powerful Filipinos. I drank cold beer as we ate barbecue on the beach.

As we came back, we passed through the village that is the main population center of the island. Our guide steered us away from one small house that had some sort of commotion going on, with an assortment of gawkers loitering at the gate.

He explained that the guy who lived there was a foreigner who had just finished drinking himself to death that afternoon.

As I thought about it, I couldn't believe the insanity of the world. I had just had one of the best days of my life, and I would kill to live on Malapascua like that guy, but he couldn't find anything worth living for.

When I first saw the syndrome I was incredulous. You have guys living in the Philippines, sleeping with beautiful women, and yet they are full blown alcoholics.

Last summer I met an American guy who is an out-of-control alcoholic. This year he was even worse. He would be at the bar at nine o'clock in the morning drinking his first beer. (In fact, he had switched from beer to malt liquor because beer wasn't strong enough.) At eight o'clock in the evening he would still be there, having drunk all day. He might drift off to sleep for an hour or two, then resume drinking throughout most of the night. He might get two or three hours of sleep a night.

The raging alcoholic foreigner syndrome didn't seem possible. You had guys who didn't have to work, who had plenty of leisure, who were freed from the slavery of marriage, who were sexually wealthy, and yet had nothing better to do than get bombed.

And so I stumbled on the missing element in their lives –purpose. There has to be something that animates you, that gives you a reason to get up in the morning. I believe that as a man that reason needs to be larger than earning a living or raising a family. What is your life's purpose?

Rick Warren in The Purpose-Filled Life stumbles onto a great truth, that you need a purpose in life. But then he cops out. What is your purpose? To give your life to God, who has a purpose for you.

Well, like Rick, I can't tell you what your purpose is, but I do know that your purpose is unique to you. It is about you and your life. God doesn't need your purpose, and he doesn't want your life. You have to think about what makes you happy, about those things that drive you, even when money isn't involved. If there is something you'd like to have written on your tombstone, that thing that you would like to be remembered for may be your purpose.

As I've thought about it, I know that one of my missions in life is to empower men.

Will the Real Elizabeth Edwards Please Shut Up?

2009-05-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-01-12T04:47:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-28T11:05:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-25T12:08:00.001-08:00

“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

2008-12-22T09:52:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-12-21T08:33:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-01T19:16:00.000-08:00

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.

A Ticking Time Bomb

2008-11-29T17:26:00.000-08:00

40 year old Hugh Jackman was just named the “sexiest man alive” by People magazine.

What are the odds that a 40 year old will be named the sexiest woman alive? (Yes, 42 year old Halle Berry was named sexiest woman by Esquire magazine, but who really doubts that she was more attractive at 22?) Scarlett Johansen, at 23, is a much better pick.

This illustrates a simple concept: It is women, not men, who have a biological clock that is ticking like a time bomb. Women are fertile for a shorter period of their lives than men are.

According to nature, it is better for women to look screamingly hot (admittedly not a scientific term) for a short period of time, than to look good for a long period of time.

This leads me to the ripoff that is marriage. Men marry for sex with a young, beautiful woman, while women marry for access to a man's resources. In the typical marriage-to-the-death scenario, the man loses out.

A 22 year old woman I know is engaged. She is very sexy, in large part just due to her age. At 22, her estrogen levels are at their peak, and estrogen is responsible for a great deal of feminine beauty, such as skin tone and hourglass shape. (For instance, menopausal women have lower levels of estrogen, and rapidly put on weight.)

As attractive as she is now, she is at her physical peak. She has a large curvy butt, which drives men (like me) crazy, but how sexy will she be at 40, when she's put on weight on her butt and hips, and her skin is not so smooth or taut? She is on the downhill slope.

Her husband on the other hand, does not have such a short window of attractiveness. Furthermore, each year that works, his status and economic power increase.

So the man marries a woman who becomes less desirable each year, while a woman marries a man who becomes sexually more appealing as well as wealthier. Eventually a man reaches a point where he is fertile, but his wife is not. At a point in his life when he is capable of starting a new family, he is stuck in a marriage with an aging hag.

No one ever really thinks of it, but I have seen dumpy women with short hair that only accentuates their fatness and age. You would not screw one of these women at gunpoint, yet they are wearing expensive clothing and drive late model SUV's. Now what sane guy would be these crones anything? These worn drabs are still cashing in on the fact that they were attractive, perhaps only marginally so, 20 nor 30 years ago, and some dumbass is still paying for it.

Fool's Gold and the Pyramid

2008-11-18T18:46:00.000-08:00

When you read all of the get-rich-quick books, all of the wealth books, all of the guys in tuxedos leaning on a Porsche selling “Make Money Like I Did” programs, they are all based on a single premise: The answer in your life comes from moving to the top of the pyramid.

The median American income in 2007 was $48,000. If you earn $48,000 dollars, half of Americans make less than you do, and the other half makes more. Only 19% of American households earn $100,000 or more.

Statistically, the odds are against you. Keep in mind, that if you're moving up, and trying to move up, so is everyone else.

In the California Gold Rush, the real money wasn't made by prospectors, but by those supplied prospectors. Levi Strauss, Girardelli chocolates, and Wells Fargo, are examples of companies that struck gold not by getting dirty, but by supplying those who were. The real money is in feeding gold fever, wherein a hardworking drudge will do anything to crawl his way up from the bottom of the pyramid.

And then as now, prostitutes (both sexual and moral whores) made a killing.

This is the appeal of Amway and multi-level marketing, as well Mammoth Widgets, Inc. --peons will work much harder when “the dream” is dangled in front of them, much harder than they will work for simple wages. It's the concept of work as a 40 hour a week lottery ticket that just might pay off some day in untold riches.

Here's an idea: What if the answer is NOT in moving to the top of the pyramid? What if you could earn a median income, but live like you're filthy rich? For $48,000 a year, you could live like a king in the Philippines. You'd have a live-in maid and so many young women that you'd have to pop Viagra like Skittles just to keep up.

In fact, you could still live very well for $24,000 a year in the Philippines.

This idea of leveraging your earning power by automating your income and going overseas is the principal theme of The Four Hour Workweek.

On the face of it, it seems like a much more realistic approach to real wealth and happiness than trying to claw your way to the top of the pyramid.

Viagra --New Wonder Drug?

2008-11-15T08:37:00.000-08:00

Mexico City is going to start giving away free Viagra to elderly men. Are they on to something?

I have been reading “The Hardness Factor,” by Dr. Steven Lamm, in which he makes the case that the quality of a man's erections (which we might refer to as “sexual health”) are directly related to a man's overall physical health. Since an erection is a product of a man's circulatory and nervous system, poor cardiovascular health and nerve damage that cause poor erections or an inability to get an erection are signs not of isolated sexual problems, but of much larger health problems.

According to a Canadian study, 90% of men with heart problems and erectile dysfunction experienced erection difficulties 3 years before they hard any symptoms of coronary disease. This is the main idea of The Hardness Factor –erection difficulties are signs of much larger health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease.

There is also the study that men with more frequent ejaculations are less likely to get prostate cancer.

It has become clear to me now that Christian way of thinking, in which sex is relegated to a separate world of sin and shame, is wrong. Christianity has the idea that you can be a normal, healthy person, with your sexuality in the permanent “off” mode.

When I was a teenage fundamentalist Christian, it was taught that smoking, drugs, and drinking alcohol were sinful because they harmed your body. But there were plenty of fat people in church, and a couple who were morbidly obese, but that was just fine. No problem here!

I work with a Christian man who—despite the fact that he's a great guy-- is obese and has diabetes, a condition that Lamm calls “diabesity.” Being diabetic and grossly overweight makes one a walking metabolic train wreck, and you're waltzing with the Grim Reaper unawares. If you're going to have to be buried in an oversized coffin, you're likely to need that coffin sooner than later. Christianity is just fine with an obese, sloppy man, with diabetes, high blood pressure, and who couldn't have sex if his life depended on it, which it does, in fact.

Viagra; Super Drug?

Rather than rush out and treat erectile difficulties with Viagra or other drugs, Dr. Lamm rightly points out that a guy should treat the underlying problem of increased weight, poor cardiovascular health, high LDL cholesterol levels, and a life on the couch, up to your elbows in a super size bag of Cheetos.

There is gathering evidence that Viagra and other sexual performance drugs may be life savers. Keep in mind that Viagra was developed as a heart medication, and its sexual effects were only accidentally discovered. Viagra is used to treat pregnant women with high blood pressure and to ward off jet lag. In one study, cyclists taking Viagra improved their performance by 40%!

For men with erectile dysfunction, one study showed that Viagra reduced the risk of heart attack by one third. Lamm says that evidence is beginning to show that sexual performance drugs have heart and circulatory benefits, and “will commonly be used in the near future as heart medicines.”

Out of Egypt

2008-11-09T09:37:00.000-08:00

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The problem with being at the bottom of the pyramid is that the lives of men at the top (the Alpha Males) is so drastically different from those at the bottom (the Beta Males.)

Let us consider a DUI arrest for both an Alpha and Beta Male.

The guy at the top of the pyramid has a lawyer who has evidence thrown out. The Alpha CEO knows an Alpha lawyer, who in turn knows the Alpha judge. In fact they've probably all met on the golf course. The CEO gets a fine, which he can pay easily, and performs “community service.”

If this sounds far fetched, my father was a California Highway Patrolman who investigated a case of a drunk driving fatality. A young man was driving drunk and wrecked his car, killing the passenger in the front passenger seat. It seems like an open and shut case, right? The driver is looking at prison for vehicular manslaughter.

Well the drunk driver is the son of wealthy parents, who hire a professor to testify in court. (Keep in mind that lawyer's fees are so high that few people can afford to go to trial.) The professor argues that the wealthy survivor of the crash was not in fact the driver, but the passenger. He further contends that the impact of the collision caused the two bodies to be thrown around and to switch places!

The end result is that the wealthy young guy gets off scott free, when in similar circumstances you or I would have been in prison for years.

The differences between Alpha and Beta male are huge. Alpha males not only get preferential treatment, but all the “justice” money can buy, more money, better benefits, and all of the women worth having.

The irony is that all of the Beta Male's efforts to improve his situation, whether working longer hours, putting in more time, becoming more of a “team player,” etc., merely solidify the Alpha Male status of those at the top.

The solution is: you must see the pyramid for what it is. Whether the pyramid is the corporation you work for, the church you belong to, the club or organization you belong to (e.g. Elks, Rotary, Habitat for Humanity, etc.), your efforts to work your way up to the top will not only never get you there, but they merely enrich those at the top.

Knowing this, if you are in a pyramid, keep your investment to a minimum. While you go through the motions of being the ideal employee, you are not kidding yourself about reality. You are not volunteering for anything, unless it will benefit you at some point in the future. You are not going to run furiously on the treadmill because now they are dangling two peanuts instead of just one. You are not sucked in by the hype, the promise of future riches.

Start your own business and work part time on it. Moonlight doing something in your area of expertise. Start your own pyramid. Found your own church.

Suppose you are out on a date. Your expertise is web page design. At some point in the date you will inevitably, invariably, immutably get the Ambition Test if she is interested in you.

“So, Bob, where do you see yourself 5 years from now?” “Where are you at in your career?” “What are your goals?” “Where do you work?” This is a mine field, and for years I blew this, because like a dumbass I didn't even realize I was being tested.

You can answer, “I'm a low-level schmuck at Big Biz Inc.”

Or you can answer, “I've started my own webpage design business, and someday I'll be bigger than Big Biz Inc.”

Which answer is more likely to get you laid?

Breaking free of the pyramid means your freedom, the ability to set your own hours, to set your own rules, to get women, and to become rich. Even if you never become a megastar, at least your efforts will not be stripped from you to enrich someone else. You will be spared the agony of developing a crush on your young, hot coworker, deluding yourself into thinking she likes you, only to discover that she is screwing the boss even though he's already married and is a callous, hard-charging bastard.

Pyramid Schemes, continued

2008-11-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

Are you a part of a pyramid scheme? Don't be too sure you're not.

One defense that multi-level marketers (e.g. the Amway zombies, etc.) will make is that “all corporations are pyramids.” This means there is a leader or leaders at the top, then a few more senior executives with less power at lower salaries, and underneath them are middle management, and so on, with the largest number of the lowest paid, most disempowered employees at the bottom.

This is true. Most corporations are pyramids, as are many churches. Think of it, there's a pastor at the top, then an associate pastor or two, followed by elders, then deacons, and so on. At the very bottom of the pyramid is the single largest group, the chump churchgoer. If that sounds harsh, I've been the chump churchgoer, doing menial chores in the shadow of a celebrity pastor who was making more than twice my salary, tax free.

As I see it, these are the characteristics of the pyramid:

A single or handful of leaders are at the top of the organization.

A mass of followers and members are at the bottom of the organization.

There is a disparity in income, power, and status between top and bottom.

The efforts of those at the bottom benefit those at the top.

A person's chances of moving from the bottom to the top are illusory. (The game is rigged.)

People work harder than they otherwise would (put in extra hours, volunteer work, pay for things out of their own pockets, give up weekends, take dangerous work,etc.) because they overestimate their ability to move upwards.

For a woman, being part of the pyramid is no problem. She can sleep or marry her way to the top (which is the same thing). Supported by a boyfriend, husband, or similar rube, she can work part-time, turn down the promotion or transfer, or use her sex appeal to have men do her work for her. She can marry and drop out of the pyramid, then re-enter as she sees fit.

For a man, to be a part of the pyramid is to volunteer for a lifetime of slavery, with no hope of Moses killing your Egyptian slave master. Remember the woman who coasts through her tenure at the pyramid? Coming and going as she pleases, taking assignments that suit her, dropping out and in, all the while benefiting because of her “minority” status? Some dumbass in the pyramid is going to pick up her tab, and return home from a hellish day hauling several ton blocks of stone up the pyramid, to find himself waving a palm frond to cool some spoiled would-be Cleopatra reclining on a couch and popping grapes into her mouth.

Our pyramid slave will spend his entire life working to build a tribute to another man, constructing a monument to cast a slavedriver and exploiter of the first order as a god. The pyramid slave will feel scars from the whip spread across his back, like vines on a crumbling rock. But he'll go back, day after day, because someday he'll sit in the shade and drink from the gold cup. In the end he has his tongue cut out and he's buried alive with the pharaoh.

Oops. I spent my whole life on an illusion.

Next: The Way Out

It Pays to Be Rich

2008-10-29T17:32:00.000-07:00

The rich have gotten a bad rap.

For instance, the rich are less likely to be obese and/or addicted. Stanton Peele in The Truth About Addiction and Recovery says, “We can actually predict the likelihood of people's becoming addicted far more reliably from their nationality and social class...than their biological makeup.” Relatively few of the upper class are obese. In fact lower class women were six times more likely than upper class women to be obese.

A survey of the extremely wealthy found that they had better sex lives. 75% of the men said their sex lives were better because they had sex more often, and with a greater variety of partners. Remember, in the Philippines, you are filthy stinking rich (if you know how to play your cards). This summer I met a guy in the Philippines who had 4 women in bed at once! I heard of a guy there who lives with two women.

In the Philippines guys who know the ropes live life like a sexual buffet.

I've come to the conclusion that sexual wealth and financial wealth are related (positively correlated), as well as sexual poverty and financial poverty.

Yet being rich is supposedly bad. The latest attack on wealth comes from Barack Obama, who is betting that you hate rich people so much, that you're okay with someone taking their money –by force, if necessary. Why don't a bunch of us struggling middle class guys just roll some rich guy for his watch and his wallet. He doesn't need them, right?

The church has declared war on the rich. “Money is the root of all evil,” “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and the story of the rich man who wanted to follow Jesus, but changed his mind when Jesus told him to sell everything.

In church, being poor was “spiritual,” while being rich was like spitting in the face of God. Oh, yeah, there was nothing wrong with being rich, per se, but a rich person was always suspected of being outside the faith, sort of like a Muslim pig farmer.

Jesus is depicted as a homeless bum, complete with bare feet and a beard, but without the malt liquor. Jesus was poor, you know, just sleeping in the fields and picking fruit out of orchards for meals. And if the Lord didn't have deodorant, then who are you to want fancy-shmancy Old Spice and a leather chair?

The Cliff Notes Sunday school shorthand version of Christianity always held that it is downright scary to get wealthy, because that means you're a heartbeat away from turning your back on God. The best thing that God can do for you in that situation, in his infinite mercy and compassion, would be to have a B-52 on a training mission fall out of the sky in a wheeling fireball, completely obliterating your factory, wiping you out financially, and leaving you with third degree burns over 90% of your body.

Whew! That was close! Thank you, Jesus! I was all into myself, earning money and living my life. Now that I'm being fed intravenously, drinking Budweiser is out of the question. No more fornicating. As long as I'm in intensive care, I won't be hitting any strip clubs or R movies.

Okay, so the 200 employees making good wages and benefits at my recently obliterated factory are now unemployed, but hey, that's also helping to bring them closer to the Lord. And as for the grieving family of the vaporized eight man crew of the B-52, it's helping to bring them closer to the Lord, too. (Some of whom, it should be mentioned in passing, were starting to get a little too uppity and self-sufficient.) Nothing like another Hindenburg disaster to bring people into the fold.

Now, I realize that just talking like I am now, and speaking openly in favor of wealth, some are going to assume I'm talking about running over grandma if necessary, and earning enough to go on a huge shopping spree. Or that I'm going to urge you to work harder on the treadmill to push yourself into the top 5% of income, or die trying. Well, no.

I think that ultimately life is about wealth. Sexual wealth. Wealth in friendships and family relationships. Wealth in owning things of lasting beauty and value. Wealth in the form of managing your resources so that you get the greatest joy possible from your income.

Pyramid Schemes and Slaves

2008-10-28T19:20:00.001-07:00

I was ripped off by a pyramid scheme.

If anyone asks you to join any kind of multi-level marketing organization (MLM), don't walk, run the hell out. Often a friend will ask you to join, and the best way to save your friendship is to say “no.”

I revisited my MLM experience after reading Perry Marshall, a Google adwords expert, talk about his painful experience in, and eventual liberation from, MLM giant Amway.

It started with my friend Dennis asking me to join his MLM. It was a tremendous opportunity to sell a discount medical care program. Dennis knew guys who were making huge money, and the organization was just staring to take off in the area.

First of all, I had to enroll in the program. The cheapest option was something like $60 a month. Since I already had health insurance, my monthly enrollment was just so I could sell the program. There was also a starter kit, which cost nearly $300.

Warning Sign #1

How much does it cost you to sell something?

Do you have to pay to become a newspaper boy? No. You sell newspapers, and the local paper gets a share of the profits while increasing circulation. There are no sign up fees, no starter kits, no monthly dues.

Imagine you are selling a book you've written. Why would you charge me a sign up fee, monthly membership, starter kit, training tapes, etc.? The more I sell, the more money you'll make, and we'd share the profits.

As Perry Marshall points out, the real money in Amway is not product sales to the public, but in the fees incurred by members looking to get rich, fees for tapes, seminars, training, etc.

In the healthcare MLM we had meetings at hotels, and I was a speaker. I'm good at public speaking. I made up brochures and business cards. One time Dennis and I went out in the snow in nearly blizzard conditions to post and hand out flyers. Nothing came of it. I asked Dennis to show me how to sell the program, but he never did. I never saw him make a sale.

I had a couple of presentations to a few prospects, but never closed the deal.

In my year or so in MLM, I never sold a product, nor did I ever see anyone in the organization sell the product.

Warning Sign #2

Are you selling a real product or a pipe dream?

Eventually I realized what was being sold was not the product, but the dream, or the “opportunity” as it was called.

Imagine I'm selling Freedom Paste, a regular sized tube of toothpaste for 7 bucks. You pay a one-time sign up fee of 297.99, plus a monthly enrollment fee of 48.99. You buy Freedom Paste from your upline for $6 a tube, plus shipping and handling.

Why would anyone buy Freedom Paste from you, when they can buy toothpaste at Wal-mart for less than two bucks? How much Freedom Paste do you have to sell before you break even?

Suppose you have no marketing skills or experience, no sales skills or experience, and no special product knowledge. It is not realistic to expect to be idly wealthy. It is more realistic to go to MacDonald's and get to work. In fact, given the choice between MLM and MacDonald's, fast food is the better choice, hands down. At least MacDonald's pays minimum wage. There's no sign-up fee or monthly dues you pay to work at MacDonald's –amazingly, they pay you. You can fry burgers at Mickey D's without exploiting your friends and family. It's honest work.

It turns out that the Egyptian pyramids weren't built by slaves, but by paid laborers, who received beer as part of their wages. If I had got a beer out of my MLM experience, that would be a vast improvement. The real slaves are toiling in pyramid schemes, dreaming of making it big.

And almost everybody in an MLM loses money. That's right. I lost money. But I consider myself lucky, because many people lose thousands –and tens of thousands-- of dollars.

It Gets Deeper

Some bigshots came in from corporate headquarters. I won $500 for a powerpoint presentation contest. (I split the money with Dennis, since the presentation was largely his ideas.) After the higher ups left, Dennis asked me what I thought of them. I responded that they seemed knowledgeable and helpful.

“Oh really?” Dennis replied. “That's not how they came across to me.”

Now Dennis revealed that something was fishy in the organization. He'd known of this for weeks, but said nothing to me. Some people who were supposed to get checks (Like him, for instance. I never got a check other than for the contest) were having trouble getting their money.

Dennis was abandoning the current MLM, and going with a new one, the New Improved MLM. It was a similar healthcare plan, only the minimum monthly fee for this one was $99. I never joined, and I soon quit.

I called and canceled, yet the next month the organization still took money out of my account! I eventually got it straightened out, and was done.

Soon Denis had gone to a third organization, because there was something fishy going on with the New Improved MLM.

Now Dennis was with the Latest New Improved MLM. He was appointed to be a regional manager. The founder of the Latest New Improved MLM was a guy who had made huge money on MLM one.

Before long Dennis and his wife found out that they were going to be millionaires. They were about to go from renting a modest apartment to living in a multiple bedroom mansion. They no longer had any kids living at home, but that was beside the point. Dennis and his most productive salesman went out shopping for homes, and had pictures of palatial estates they had visited with real estate agents. They were test driving Mercedes Benz cars.

An e-mail went out. “NOW is the time to get in on this opportunity! There is a HUGE income potential!”

And I had to ask myself, “What if this thing pays off huge, and I miss out?” There seemed to be strong evidence that Dennis was going to be rich.

Well, I reasoned it out.

I never sold anything before. What made me think I could sell anything in the future? I had to take an honest look at my skills and strengths. I am good at writing and public speaking. In fact, I excel at it, which is why I won the contest. If it sounds like I'm bragging, I also suck at sales.
I never made any money before. What reason was there to believe that I could make money now?
I am not a healthcare expert. It is not my area of interest. It is not what I want to do. It is not aligned with my strengths.

I had to resign myself to the fact that even if Dennis made millions, there was no reason to think that I could make a single penny in his Latest New Improved MLM.

Surprise, surprise. The whole thing fell through. I know of at least one woman who invested $2,000 and lost it all. Her phone calls to Dennis were not returned. The customer service number at Latest New Improved MLM was disconnected. Talk of the luxury mansion was quietly dropped.

What bothers me the most is the lack of accountability. I never made money, but Dennis made money off me, and other friends he talked into signing up. The honest thing to do would be to 'fess up, to say, “Hey, sorry I steered you guys wrong.”

Of course, there was greed on my part, too. And it's sad how a pipe dream of getting rich enables people to exploit their friends and blowup friendships in the process.

Your Legacy, Starting Now

2008-10-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

"A tiger dies and leaves his pelt,
a man leaves only his name."
Japanese proverb

My grandfather died a year or so ago, and my mother gave me some of his things. They were just cheap jewelry, bolo ties with horses on them. I'm not complaining, but it illustrated to me how we actually own so little of value.

My dad is undergoing chemotherapy right now. He has an incurable, although slow-progressing form of cancer. I was at my parents' house watching a football game when my mother brought up the subject of their will and inheritance. My dad is in his 70's, and my mom just hit retirement age.

My mom said they would rather square everything up now, rather than have a situation after their death when there's bickering and people squabbling over things. I told my parents I don't need anything. I'm not going to fight over who gets what of their belongings.

My mom said she thought the furnishings and appliances in their house should go to my sister. I agreed.

"What is there of ours that you would like to have?"

I was tearing up. I didn't like even thinking about it. Though we've all known for years that my dad has this cancer, I've mentally kept it at arm's length.

"The picture of dad in his police uniform. And his guns."

My mom said, "we may as well give it to you now." She went into the back and brought back my dad's Luger. He got the Luger when he was chasing a car. The guys in the car disassembled the gun and threw it out the window piece by piece. My dad went back later and recovered all of the pieces, except for the trigger spring.

But it's a question, "What do I own of real value?" "If I were to die, what would be passed on?"

I'm not talking about monetary value. The point is that we surround ourselves with junk. We own mass produced, disposable items. Even the very expensive things we own, like large TV's, have little resale value, and say nothing about us as persons.

One thing I have of value is a sterling silver razor handle that's engraved. I shave with it every day. Yes, I know it's not going into the Getty Museum anytime soon, and no one is going to sell it and have a night out on the town. But the typical alternative is the cheap, disposable Bic shavers. Even the higher priced electric shavers have no real value. They aren't in any sense unique.

What do you own that's unique? Have you created something, like a song, a book, or a carving that will last and be treasured after you die?

Because the question is really not about your death, but about the quality of your life right now.

U-Haul Can Go to Hell

2008-10-15T16:40:00.000-07:00

I'm finished helping my friends move. I've taken a blood oath I'm through.

It's not that I don't want to work, even though a couple of years back I nearly broke my ankle. I was the one walking backward down the steps with a dining room table, when my foot hit the corner of the sidewalk, with no grass or soil around it, but a deep depression. My foot pivoted and I heard a sickening "crack." That was the end of my moving. For the next couple of days I crawled around the house, and limped for months.

No, I'm tired of moving people's useless crap. (And "crap" is a polite term.) The latest was a woman who was moving because her husband was an abusive loser. We spent all day moving more useless junk, from a drawer full of MacDonald's, Burger King, and cereal box trinkets, to the particle board furniture which really should have been in a fireplace somewhere, to the countless boxes of knicknacks and white elephant gifts.

It's appalling how much flotsam and jetsam accumulates in a person's closets, drawers, and garage. We are like neurotic rats constantly packing in more. We're Imelda Marcos with 3,000 pairs of shoes in a walk-in closet, headed out the door because shoes are on sale at Macy's. We're diabetics wedged into a corner by mounds of hoarded candy that we can't eat.

Eventually I got pissed off. I spent all day sweating, busting my butt, moving stuff that she should have burned, sold, given away, or abandoned as a playground for cockroaches in the wake of a nuclear holocaust.

But no, she can't let it go. She's got to cling to her shoebox full of bottle caps, the rubber band collection, the Ronco In-the-Egg Scrambler. The garage was once the Land of Misfit Gifts, brimming with odd, useless "gifts" that are foisted on others by givers with little imagination or effort, and junk that only a marketing genius who had sold his soul to the Devil could ever have got anyone to buy.

Of everything I moved into a huge van, where was anything of value? Years of working, buying, and exchanging gifts amounted to nothing more than an avalanche of disposable gargbage. It was as though she had spent years of her life doing nothing more than constructing a landfill.

Then comes the thought: Am I doing any better?

Bowling for Dollars (and Chicks)

2008-10-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

I was in the Philippines this summer, and right now I'm back and finishing up my master's degree. (Yes, at last.)

I studied the Filipino martial arts with a grandmaster of a close fighting style, and I met an incredible girl. I met her via Date in Asia.com. She was young with a great set of breasts (even though I'm much more interested in spiritual beauty, ha ha).

Date in Asia is a free dating site. Before going I lined up a bunch of women, maybe 10 or so, and got phone numbers. I think this is key number one, to line up a bunch of women. Earlier I wrote about an acquaintance of mine (and I could choke him for not consulting me) whose single biggest mistake was focusing everything on a single woman. I arrived in the Philippines with several prospects.

Plan A is not enough. Have plans B-Z.

As soon as I arrived I had an Australian friend and his girlfriend who were looking to set me up with a single girl they knew. A Filipino gentleman approached me and offered to set me up with a girl he knew. A girl walked up to me in Ayala Mall and started flirting with me. Things didn't go very far when I told her I was there to meet my girlfriend. These opportunities fell into my lap, not because I'm a Brad Pitt look alike, but simply because I got on a plane, dressed reasonably well, and come across as a decent guy.

The Scammer, and a Date at the Bowling Alley

So as soon as I arrived I texted Anne and a couple of other girls to try to set up a date. I got a reply from an unknown number and set up a meet in SM Mall. I assumed the girl was Gladys from Cordova.

When we met at SM Mall, the girl was not the one in the picture. I started to get upset. I was close to chewing her out for being a scammer and using fake photos, and so on. But I thought, "Screw it. I'm on vacation and here to have fun."

So the girl Gladys, her friend Marcela, and I agreed to go bowling. By the way, this is a great date idea in Cebu City. Neither of the girls had been bowling before, and anything new creates excitement. I paid about 300 pesos for an hour of unlimited bowling, and I had to buy the girls socks, for about forty pesos each. In all, I spent about 12-15 bucks.

I really didn't care at that point if the date led anywhere; I was just having fun. The girls' socks had American flags on them, so I told them they were "lucky American socks."

We bowled and the girls were horrible. I wasn't much better. Gradually Marcela went from getting gutter balls to scoring the occasional strike. And I started to notice Marcela. She was cute, with a fun-loving, easy going way about her.

But how could I make a move on Marcela without offending Gladys? Of course, in my mind Gladys was just a scammer and deserved whatever she got. But still, it wasn't in me to be rude to Gladys.

The date ended and we said good-bye. I chalked up Marcela as the one that got away. And I had fun. What the hell, I was on vacation, with no bills, no work, no hassles, in a tropical paradise packed to the rafters with beautiful women. Hey, life was great.

Plan B

So I got back on the phone and texted Anne again. "Let's meet," I suggested.

"We already met," she replied.

"What?" My mind was racing.

"I'm 'Marcela,'" she explained.

I was floored. I didn't recognize her from her picture online, but now I could see the resemblance. When I had texted her, Marcela (Anne is her middle name.) had used her friend Gladys as a screen. This way she could observe the guy she was interested in without the pressure of going out on a date. She could be the "fly on the wall" carefully observing if this guy was the type of guy she was looking for.

The desperate kind of guy who would settle for anybody would wind up with her friend Gladys. Which was good for Gladys and good for Anne, as it saved her from the desperate loser types out there.

The Importance of Plans B-Z

Anne was my girlfriend all this summer, and she still writes me. She was dynamite in bed, in addition to being the most easy-going, easy to like woman I've ever met.

Many times I've looked back and realized just how close I was to blowing it. If I had yelled at Gladys "the scammer" and stormed off, I would have missed the opportunity of a lifetime. But because I had multiple women lined up and confidence in my ability to find one (or several), I was able to play the hand I was dealt --which looked like an online scammer and her tag along friend out for a free lunch-- and win with it.

The importance of Plan B is not just to give you a back up option of Plan A fails, but to help you win with Plan A. Knowing you have Plan B, as well as Plans C, D, E, etc. means that you come across as relaxed. You are not trying to force the situation out of desperation.

The “Tragedy” of Hulk Hogan

2008-05-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

I just saw a couple of commentators on a celebrity news program bemoaning the sad fate of Hulk Hogan. His bloated nag of a wife with the three-dollar hooker eye shadow has divorced him. You might think of the former Mrs. Hogan as a fat Tammy Faye Baker, only not as good looking. This low-rent laundromat queen was little more than a gargantuan tapeworm feeding off of every penny that Hogan made.

Perhaps you remember this bit from a post of mine:

“I am reminded of the Hulk Hogan reality show, when he goes back into the ring. He's older now, and even if wrestling is fake, you still take punishment, like the knee that’s been killing him since his return to the ring. Hogan tells his wife he thought he'd be retired by now. God knows he's got money. The only catch is his wife's spending habits.

So Hulk Hogan stands in the living room, leaning to one side to favor a wrenched knee. He is in essence telling his wife, ‘I'm taking punishment and I'm in pain. I'm facing crippling injuries at an age when I should be resting and enjoying everything I worked so hard for, everything I sweated for. And all of this is to finance your out-of-control shopping trips.’

She sits there, like a sallow pumpkin draped in a corpse's pale skin, strategically highlighted with an over-application of makeup that is completely wasted on her. ‘I'm worth it. You need me.’ Her response resembles a taunting laugh.

No, he doesn't need you, you shallow, avaricious bitch. If Hogan hadn't made his deal with the devil, and signed over his soul, you'd be out on your ass. As you made your way to the Rescue Mission for a free bowl of soup and a bus a bus ticket out of town, Hogan would be laughing –not at you, but at himself, wondering how he got so drunk and desperate that he picked up the nastiest skank in the bar.”

That Hulk is divorcing his wife is not a tragedy, but a symbolic rebirth of hope on the scale of the liberation of France from the Nazis. Every man seeing this should feel like the Indian chief in the movie Little Big Man --“My heart soars like a hawk.” Not only is Hulk free, but his finances are free (or at least partially free), and if there is any justice in life the swill-guzzling hag will have to fill her own trough with her own money, earned at a bowling alley or a House of Large Sizes store.

Yet the commentators view this as a tragedy. I suppose they are upset when a man falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit is freed. They must be crestfallen when miners buried alive are rescued after several days in total darkness and stale air a mile beneath the earth. Anyone who cannot exult in the liberation of a hard-working man from the clutches of a painted lamprey must have a soul that is little more than a greasy black spot.

But “worse” news awaits the stunned viewer. The next shoe is about to drop, with an air of “OH MY GOD! HOW BAD CAN IT GET?” One can envision the few remaining Auschwitz survivors huddled around poor Hulk Hogan, murmuring, “I thought I had it bad; I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re going through.”

Poor Hulk is dating women as old as his daughter!

Believe it or not, this is portrayed as further evidence of the fall of Hulk Hogan, rather than the trajectory of an eagle soaring to the greatest heights. What other disasters might these two clueless dildoes tremulously announce to a shocked audience? “Hapless Bastard Finds Suitcase Full of Cash.” Or “Cursed Man Wins Powerball Lotto.” Or maybe “Pitiful Man without a Wife Tries to Wrest Some Joy out of Life by Earning Millions and Sleeping with Centerfolds.”

Would You Buy a Used Car from This Woman?

2008-04-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

Imagine an America in which white people got brand new cars for free. They drove around these cars without making payments, until they got tired of them, or the cars became too worn down, or they crashed them.

At that point black people could buy these cars. Blacks would make payments for years on cars, typically wrecked cars in horrible shape, often paying an entire lifetime for a single car. Even worse, sometimes these jalopies would be taken from their black owners, who would have to continue making payments for cars they no longer had.

Is there anyone who would argue that in this scenario, black are the “real winners”? Those poor honkies only know fleeting infatuation with a car, while those lucky black folk get to develop a deep, lasting emotional bond with a prized possession. And what’s a lifetime of payments for such a mature, adult experience?

No one would argue that, for the simple reason that it’s crazy talk.

In my analogy the cars are women. Alpha males make little or no investment in women, and as the women grow older or have kids, they’re passed down like an older brother’s purple knit tie and earth shoes.

Now the beta male starts making payments on an older woman with considerable more wear. The schmuck buys drinks, dinner, chocolates, gift cards, car repairs, Christmas and birthday gifts, theater tickets, etc., while the only thing the alpha male ever bought her was a pair of edible panties.

But the poor alpha male doesn’t get to have a family. Yet the “family’ the beta male is buying by staking half of everything he owns on a roulette spin with 50/50 odds can be raked off the table in a moment. The chump is acting like Loyd’s, insuring that his wife won’t leave him, and offering a huge payoff in the event that she does.

People who buy new cars usually fail to realize that for much of the time you own your car it is worth less than you owe, and for the man who’s stuck with an ageing, bloated wife who nags with a voice like a rasping hacksaw, the cost of leaving is (apparently) too great. And what little enjoyment he gets from the marriage pales in comparison to the terrible price he would pay if she leaves.

Bitter Is the Lash...

2008-04-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

...of a hard-driving, contemptuous bitch.

Here's one reason not to get married, if by "one" you mean a cornucopia full of misery-inducing hornets:

I admit that my husband helps out more than many men, but here’s another news flash: It isn’t because he’s such a fabulously enlightened being. Left to his own devices, he would doubtless park himself in front of the TV like some sitcom male-chauvinist couch potato while I did all the work. The reason Jeremy “helps” as much as he does (an offensive terminology that itself suggests who’s really being held responsible) is simple: He doesn’t have a choice.

…So how have I accomplished this? By holding my husband’s feet to the fire every single day of our lives, of course.

Yes, dear readers, it’s true: Maintaining some semblance of parity in your marriage requires you to deploy the same kinds of nasty tactics you swore you would never stoop to as a parent but nonetheless found yourself using the minute you actually had a kid. Bribery and punishment work; so do yelling and complaining. Threats are also effective, as long as everyone knows you mean business. With husbands, tender blandishments and nooky are particularly useful, as is the withholding of the aforementioned.

The fact that guys, when left to their own devices, rarely rush to offer more toilet-scrubbing and diaper-changing is not in itself surprising. As Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

So why aren't women demanding something closer to parity? While many are resigned to seething in silence, the stakes are far higher than they seem to realize. When wives permit their husbands to shirk a fair share of the homemaking and parenting, not only do they themselves suffer, but chances are good that they’re also sentencing their children to a similar fate. When you have kids, everything you do teaches them how to live their own lives when they grow up. Unfortunately, all too many women are still teaching their children that “woman is the nigger of the world,” as John Lennon and Yoko Ono put it so memorably in a song lyric years ago. And what too many fathers teach their sons and daughters is that men can get away with dumping the scut work on their wives, and that women will grit their teeth and put up with it.

When my husband has lingered too long over the sports section and I’m feeling overwhelmed by the number of errands that must be run, I hand him a list. “This is what I need you to do today,” I say in a tone of voice that brooks no equivocation. He may moan and groan, but the jobs get done. And while I still have to mastermind the operation — somehow he is never the one who remembers that our son needs new mosquito netting, baseball cleats, and basketball shoes for sleepaway camp…

…in my experience husbands are a lot like children. They will get away with whatever they can get away with. When you put your foot down and make it clear that you won’t take no for an answer, somehow the kids’ rooms get cleaned, the groceries bought, the laundry folded. It really does work, I promise.

The Man Shortage

2008-04-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article on why there appears to be a shortage of the most desirable men. The reason given is that the most attractive women tend to “hold out,” figuring that they can do better than an otherwise attractive man.

Suppose a man is a doctor who is athletic and loves globetrotting –but he’s 5’10”. The most attractive women will think, “I can do better,” or “I think I’m entitled to a man who’s at least six feet tall.”

On the other hand, a less attractive, and less arrogant woman, will whole-heartedly pursue the “flawed” world-traveling doctor. So while ordinary looking girl-next-door types are relentlessly chasing down the most desirable men to get them to commit, the models and wannabe models are holding out for someone better. The end result is a group of bitter women wondering why “there are no good men left.”

How does this apply to you as a man? The typical guy senses that marriage is not in his best interest, but can’t quite articulate why. Joe Six Pack, or the college version, Jordan Beer Bong, has formulated an oh-so-clever strategy –he will “play the field” first and then he will “settle down.” This is like a strategy of looking around a lot before blinding yourself, or going to whorehouse before volunteering for castration.

What is going to happen to the guy whose strategy is “stall, then get married” meets a woman whose strategy is “marry or die”?

Another interesting lesson to take away from all this is that the more attractive the woman you are dating, and particularly a woman who is “out of your league,” the less likely she is to insist on marriage.

The Lost Boys

2008-04-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

In the recent uproar over the women and children taken from the fundamentalist Mormon church in Texas, it has come to light that the men of the church have a strategy to get multiple wives.

You see, if one man has multiple wives, then several other men must do without. How does a community solve this problem? In the days of Odysseus, a band of warriors set out in a boat, hit the shore and sacked the nearest village. They killed the men, raped the women, and took captives as slaves and wives. But in a closed community like the fundamentalist Mormon church, getting women from outside the community is not a possibility.

So the leaders of the church kick out the young men, often by manufacturing petty offenses. These young men are chief competitors for young women, so they have to get removed from the picture. These young men are simply kicked out onto the street.

You should be aware that this is essentially the same strategy of the Mormon church. Why are young men sent out on a mission lasting a year or more, paid for with their own money, right at a time when they might think of marrying? The clear purpose, dating back to when the chief fraud Joseph Smith was around, was to eliminate competition in the form of young men.

Don’t laugh. I don’t care what church you go to, they don’t want you to get laid, either. Marriage is essentially a non-sex plan. Married sex is like the two week “All You Can Eat, Nothing But Watermelon Diet”; It doesn’t take too long to get sick of watermelon, especially when it’s gained 25 pounds of cellulite, wrinkles, and stretch marks.

The No Asshole Rule

2008-04-11T20:10:00.001-07:00

I just read Robert Sutton’s “The No Asshole Rule,” which is a thought-provoking book even if the title is a little brusque.

Sutton’s main contention is that even though we may politely label them as “bullies” or “jerks,” the bottom line (pardon the pun) is that the term “asshole” strikes us all as true emotionally, whether it’s politically correct or not. In the workplace assholes have very real consequences, causing a loss in productivity, an increase in absenteeism and employee theft, and causing an emotional impact that is five times stronger than a positive interaction with a normal, well-adjusted co-worker.

The book raises the question, “Why put up with assholes?” The answer is that we shouldn’t. If we think about it, the worst part of any job, and the most stressful, is dealing with assholes.

I worked at Pioneer Chicken years ago, and loved it. I wore yellow and brown polyester as part of the uniform and got paid about minimum wage to fry chicken over oil heated to 335 degrees. I came home from work covered in grease and flour but I loved the job. Why? Because the bosses treated me and all of the employees very well. On the other hand we had people come to Pioneer Chicken from the local MacDonald’s franchise, and they felt like Kunta Kinta leaving Mississippi. The difference was that assholes ran MacDonald’s.

The worst part of being a teacher is the students who are assholes. These are typically just a handful, but this slim fraction of malignant semi-human growth make life miserable. And I’m certain the same is true for any job.

It’s somehow assumed that dealing with assholes is just a part of life. “The customer is always right” is a retarded idea that should be scrapped.

I say, “The customer is always right, unless he’s an asshole, at which point he can $#@! himself.”

But the pencil pushers and three martini lunch swillers in management are removed from dealing with assholes, except for the occasional admiring glance at themselves in the mirror. They wouldn’t be able to feel your pain even if they weren’t sloshed at noon. They don’t have to deal with the abusive, belligerent, nasty customer grinding you beneath his heel, so it’s easy to calculate the profit made by you enduring the most putrid and abrasive assholes. So you’re enduring the equivalent of a sadistic Viet Cong dentist while he’s in the office practicing his putting. The secretary would rather service him at his desk than deal with the Neanderthal offal stalking the reception area. Hey, management and “leadership” is tough work.

How much stress could you be free of if you practiced the “No Asshole” rule? For a moment consider the implications of a life without assholes, in your personal and your professional lives. Rampant assholes are not a given in life; it’s that we accept them as a given. Resolve to free yourself.

3 Foot Tall Crippled Ladies Man?

2008-04-08T17:56:00.000-07:00

I just got an e-mail from Grant Adams at net2bed.com. It's a great message with two key ideas.

How do you think a woman views you upon first meeting you?

She's got two instant filters.

The first is "Is he good looking?"

Now, most of us don't have the chiseled features, rock hard
abs,and the 6'2" stature of an Abercrombie and Fitch pretty
boy...

So, does that mean that all of us "normal" guys are out of
luck? Nope. And pay attention to what I'm saying here...

Because the second, more important filter that a woman
processes you through is, "Is he ATTRACTIVE?"

And being attractive trumps being good looking every single
time.

So what does it mean to be attractive?

Being attractive means how confident you are, your
linguistic capability, your body language, your ease,
how you talk about yourself, how well you interact with
others, how comfortable you are in your skin, and if
your humor comes from a place of security.

Women pick up on all of this on an intuitive level, and
measure a man by THESE standards far more deeply than by
his physical appearance alone.

The question is, how do you nail down these traits QUICKLY
and PERMANENTLY??

In this month's Complete Attractor we will show you how
to reach DEEP attraction, and to jettison excuses once and
forever.

Because we talk to the extraordinary Sean Stephenson.

If you don't know Sean, here's what's slightly interesting
about him --

He's won the respect of teachers like Zan Perrion, David
DeAngelo, David Wygant, Lance Mason, and yours truly for
his unique contributions to strategies of Inner Game.

He practices what he preaches and is constantly surrounded
by gorgeous, intelligent women who love him for his confidence,
wit,and humor.

Outside the Community, he's shared the speaking platform with
figures such as Mark Victor Hanson, Henry Winkler, and Tony
Robbins.

That's all well and good, but here's what's REALLY interesting
about him...

Sean was supposed to DIE at birth.

He suffered more than 200 bone fractures by the age of 18, he
is about 3 feet tall, can't walk, and is permanently confined
to a wheelchair.

You read that right.

So how the f**k is YOUR day going?

Despite these challenges that would have buried an ordinary man,
Sean has overcome them, thrived, and become an extraordinary
teacher and an irresistible womanizer.

Yes, an IRRISISTIBLE WOMANIZER.

I was with him last night at a local restaurant and he was
hitting on the 18 year old hostess. And he was GOOD!

Ladies LOVE Sean (I can personally attest to this) and he is
always involved in positive, intimate relationships with gorgeous,
enlightened women.

The cool thing is that he can show you how to get there too,
and help you cut through every negative belief or limiting
notion you may have about yourself.

You can never retreat into excuses again.

Sean is the only one I know who got Tony Robbins to write
the intro to his forthcoming book. Tony NEVER does this for
anyone. But Sean is different. Sean is POWER.

And here he shares that power with you.

Have a brief listen to this clip as Sean explains the
difference between being good looking and being attractive.
And how you can be attractive no matter WHAT you believe is
holding you back.

Click here to listen to Sean.

As crazy as the idea may seem, how you perceive yourself and interact
with the world is far more important than any "facts," many of which
are nothing other than your fears and insecurities masquerading as the "truth."

Talk With a Clueless Trainer, Part II

2008-04-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

I told the trainer I was on a low carbohydrate diet, and every time I used the word "diet" he couldn’t grasp the definition of the word “diet” to mean not just a fad, like the “Miracle Rapid Weight Loss Hollywood Cabbage Diet,” but diet to mean the foods that a person eats on a regular basis. If I say the Japanese diet has lots of rice and fish, that doesn’t mean the entire nation of Japan has gone on a 2 week crash diet of rice and fish –it means that rice and fish are what the typical Japanese person eats throughout his life.

“You need your carbs.”

Bull$#@!

I have already documented how the Eskimos lived on a diet of no carbs, and they were in perfect health. Look, carbs are just a fancy word for sugar. We are all aware (or should be) how fattening sugar is and how it can lead to diabetes. Fewer people realize how sugar can lead to high blood pressure, stroke, and heart disease.

But it’s not just sugar that’s the enemy. Say a person doesn’t want to drink a Pepsi, because he knows it’s loaded with sugar, so he’ll have orange juice instead. The problem is that orange juice is loaded with carbs, as is pizza, and a potato, or a bagel, and all of these foods are readily converted to sugar by the body.

Everything with sugar or carbohydrates (which are rapidly converted to sugar) results in a spike in blood sugar levels. This causes the body to secrete insulin. Insulin flips a switch that causes the body to store fat.

Fat in your food does not make you overweight –it’s the insulin switch, triggered by carbohydrates, that causes your body to store fat.

Get rid of the carbs! Eliminate:

Potatoes

Sugar

Bread

Flour

Corn

Rice

Vegetable oils

Instead, eat fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, nuts, seeds, dairy products, etc. Use butter, olive oil, and coconut oil.

P.S. And no, I am not kidding about coconut oil. More to follow.

A Talk with a Clueless Trainer

2008-04-05T02:54:00.000-07:00

I just signed up with a new gym and got a free one hour session with a trainer. Although he certainly had some useful information, in some areas he was just flat out wrong.

Building Muscle

His program was some convoluted plan involving separate muscles on separate days of the week, then changing up every other week --at least as far as I could understand it without a schematic in front of me. He was also recommending doing three sets of 15 repetitions.

The key to building muscle is simple. The muscle must be worked to its maximum, or to failure, and then allowed time to recover. Use the heaviest weight you can lift, and lift it until you can’t lift it any more. One idea is to lift the weight until you can’t move it any more, then drop down a couple of pounds, and repeat.

“Your body learns your workout” or “Your muscles learn.” Bullcrap. Muscles are dumb. The problem with plateauing is that you’re lifting the same weight when you should be increasing it with each workout. You’re doing three sets of 15 reps when you should be doing one set of one rep at a weight that makes your muscles scream. See the “Max Contraction” books.

Do a whole body workout and then rest a couple of days. At first, when you start out and are lifting light weights, you can work out every other day. But the more muscular you get, the more you lift, and the more time your body needs to recover. A critical idea to keep in mind is that you don’t build muscle when you lift; you build muscle during the recovery phase.

As an example, one trainer in Florida used to advertise that he could add a ½ inch to major muscle groups in a week, guaranteed. Now to professional bodybuilders who have hit a plateau, gains like this are huge. These guys are often doing two workouts a day, of several hours each, and are totally maxed out in muscle gain. When a body builder arrived at the trainer’s gym in Florida, he would measure them and then tell them to take several days off. He told them just to lie out on a beach. For these guys, that was incredibly difficult, but when they returned to the gym in several days, he measured them, and they’d made gains! What was the secret? Simple –they’d overtrained and hadn’t allowed time for their muscles to recover and rebuild. Those three or four days off gave them the time they needed to build muscle mass.

Seduction Tip: Hot and Cold

2008-03-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

In my recent reading I came across an interesting tip. In the initial stages of a conversation, you disagree with her. This creates tension and conflict. Remember, women love drama, otherwise you could score consistently just by saying, "I'm a man, you're a woman, we both like sex, so let's #@%." By disagreeing with her, you also show that you're not some mealy mouth butt kisser agreeing with everything she says because you're desperate for her approval.

Later in the conversation begin to agree with her. The impression you want to create is that she is "winning you over." This helps to relieve tension, and it also flatters her, in that it shows her persuasiveness and the influence she has on people.

I have seen other master pickup artists refer to this as "push/pull." The man's mind is utilitarian, focused on logic. Male thoughts move in a direct line from point A to pint B. The woman's mind is based on emotion, interaction, and I'm tempted to add, crazy-ass circles. Rather than being consistently and doggedly nice, open, interested, and so on, charging along in a straight line, the ability to run hot and cold, to push and pull, running from challenging, to indifferent, to teasing, to affectionate creates the emotional high that women crave and would more easily get if they just cut the crap and did heroin.

Christianity’s Dumbass Critics

2008-03-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

I can’t write the previous post without adding this one. It was really tough for me when one day I had to ask myself the question, “Am I a Christian?” When I realized the answer was no, it scared me. I grew up as a child steeped in church doctrine, and the self-confession I had just made was the sort of thing that sent a person screaming to hell.

I’ve been left on my own, wondering “What’s next?” I feel that there is a criticism of Christianity to be made, but I don’t want to join the list of bitter, empty critics who are simply piling on.

Here is a list of criticisms to Christianity that miss the mark.

1. Atheists. It should be obvious that the incredible complexity we see is not the result of random processes. If the world’s greatest scientists cannot assemble a single living cell even with the most advanced technology, how in the hell does a living cell assemble itself from inorganic material (i.e. dirt and water)? Furthermore, how does this newly generated cell replicate itself?

Most atheists don’t really live as if they believe themselves, like the atheist co-worker who was convinced that she would die and be forever extinct like a cat. If that were true, you wouldn’t be a school teacher in Fresno California. If Howard Stern really believed there were no afterlife, he wouldn’t have been rejecting hot chicks and playmates to stay with his wife.

An agnostic is just the theological equivalent of an “independent,” a person without the guts to own up to his convictions.

2. Christian Haters. If the Anti-Christ arrives, he’s going to have to work awfully hard to outdo Dawkins and a whole horde of Christian-hating nihilists. (I can imagine an anti-Christian zealot saying, “Excuse me, Mr. Anti-Christ, take a number and get in line; I’m still dancing on Jerry Falwell’s grave.”)

The attempt to portray Christians as fascists, book burners, and clinic bombers just isn’t going to fly. Okay, so you don’t think drinking, dancing, or flare pants, are sins, don’t try to scare the kids with images of Krystalnacht. The beauty of Christians is that you can flip them off and they’ll still risk their lives trying to pull your ass out of a burning building. Try that with the Carl Sagan crowd.

3. The Clueless. These people are so hip and fancy themselves as total free agents, only they wind up at exactly the same spot as Christians. They scoff at the Christian prudes who don’t like porn –the clueless don’t like porn because it degrades women. They scoff at Christian notions of chastity –the clueless sleep around and then get married just like every other Christian. The clueless are snickering at “dumb” Christians, and yet they buy into every single assumption a middle class Christian makes, so aside from a tattoo and the occasional joint, they are both working 9-5, saving for retirement, getting into debt, marrying and getting divorced.

The sad truth is that once you strip away the theology and the Biblical trivia games, Christians lead the same middle class lives, with all the attached dead-end assumptions as anyone else, including the atheists, the namby-pamby agnostics, and the too-hip-for-the-room clueless.

It’s Easter –So What?

2008-03-25T20:02:00.000-07:00

I went with my parents to church this Sunday. I know how important it is to them, so I go, plus it gives me the chance to spend some time with them. The church was definitely upper middle class, packed with yuppie types. It had the slickest multimedia I’ve ever seen in a church, with three large screens overhead, spotlights, a stack of TV monitors displaying graphics and professionally produced videos, and state-of-the art speakers interspersed with spotlights on overhead tracks. A full band packed with talented musicians played while the lyrics appeared on the giant screens. All of this was being filmed by multiple broadcast-quality cameras, overseen from a mixing board at the back. This church was ready for prime time.

The sermon was written in advance and printed out on sheets that the minster read as he sat at a chair. The message had four key ideas taken from John 3:16. There was no shouting or T. D. Jakes pimp suits. The minister was well-dressed, articulate, and personable. And I’m guessing, but he’s probably richer than Croesus.

I had the overwhelming feeling that the service was entirely irrelevant. I quit going to church years ago when I finally decided I had better things to do with my time. I realized that if I wanted help succeeding with women, succeeding in my career, or achieving anything other than mediocrity, I was going to have to find it on my own.

The church is brimming with answers on all sorts of biblical trivia, like who the Galatians were, prophecies in Ezekiel, foot washing rituals, and my favorite –pointless Greek definitions, such as “The Greek word for ‘chair,’ ‘εβηθένξμ,’ means ‘something that is sat upon.’” True to form, the minister Sunday couldn’t help but resort to the old Greek definition filler. Please wake me when you get to the part about making money or getting laid.

The Non-White Diet

2008-03-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

No, it's not a racial joke, but a simple diet idea --avoid white foods. If you eliminate sugar, flour, bread, potatoes, white rice, and white bread, you'll do fine. (See Tim Ferriss here.)

Reducing the amount of carbohydrates you eat (and everything white above is carbohydrates) will help you lose weight while lowering your trigylceride levels --which is a good thing, since they can cause heart disease.

A low carbohydrate diet can also reduce inflammation, which can in turn reduce your odds of getting cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

(Both of these tidbits are from the April 2008 issue of Men's Health magazine, pages 46 and 50.)

If you're ever in the Philippines, a key to maintaining your weight is do not eat the rice. Filipinos eat white rice, and huge amounts of it, with every meal. I've seen them pile plates with mounds of rice, and the average meal is just that mound of rice and a topping, like dried fish (buwad) or vegetables. White rice is pure carbohydrate, and enough to to send a diabetic plunging like a Japanese zero into the waves. If you're not a diabetic yet, you will be.

And white rice is a nutritional vaccuum.

In Cebu, a local variety of rice is called "puso," in which rice is steamed in woven leaf packages. I've ordered one or two of the small bundles with barbecue and had Filipinos give me that quizzical "Are you kidding?" look. I guess you're supposed to order them in gargantuan quantities like every other pot-bellied Filipino.

Another option is "red rice," which is unpolished rice that has a reddish tinge to it. It's far better on diabetics and diabetics-in-training because the fiber in it slows down the glucose blood sugar spike that immediately follows eating white rice. Red rice also has some nutritional value.

Why Do Men “Go It Alone”?

2008-03-18T17:47:00.000-07:00

Here some poor desperate chump died a hideous death when the woman he was writing to hired a hitman, who strangled him with wire and burned his body.

Listen to Your Friends, Buddy

You trust them enough to be your friends, but don’t trust them enough when they tell you the woman you're with is a scammer or an unfaithful whore?

Raymond’s friend warned him, but dumbass Ray didn’t listen. “With age doesn't necessarily come wisdom,” Ray’s friend ruefully observed. If you won’t listen to your friends, and won’t seek any help, you’ll be as goddamn ignorant at 90 as you were at 13.

Get Help, For Cryin’ Out Loud

Ray went to Brazil: Who did he ask for help? Did he get any advice about the possible dangers in Brazil?

I’m not a Brazil expert, but I know that there are huge slums in Brazil the size of large US cities. These slums are breeding grounds for some very ruthless individuals, the type of animals who make a ghetto crip look like Richard Simmons.

Why didn’t Ray take a friend? Who was he in contact when he was there? By the time anyone figured out something was wrong, Ray’s smoldering corpse would have fit neatly into an ashtray.

Stop Trying to Buy Women!

We find out that Ray “was lonely and depressed, having been dumped by a Las Vegas woman for whom he had bought expensive gifts.” Ray got dumped because of the gifts, not in spite of them. When you buy, buy, buy for women you send the unmistakable message that all you have to offer is money.

You also send the unmistakable message that you are a chump who can be played for money. Ray sent the murderous bitch in Brazil $10,000 for a skin care clinic. Then he bought her a $20,000 SUV, and she had the audacity to complain that it wasn’t fancy enough! There are galaxies smaller than the size of that red flag.

Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but by his actions Ray was saying, “Kill me, please.” His lack of self-respect and self-assertion were so pathetic, but he couldn’t see it. Now that you’re a charcoal briquette cooking a rat on the barbecue grill of some bastard kid in the favela, are you listening now, Ray?

This kind of #$@! pisses me off. Guys continually go it alone, and pay the consequences. I’ve done very well for myself in the Philippines, and it’s not because I’m a genius. By myself I was just as clueless as Ray and might have ended up as some sort of Auschwitz souvenir myself, except I listened to guys who knew the ropes. Every time I go to the Philippines, I listen to the guys who live there and get their advice.

The new site is up at Tropicalseduction.com. Check it out. Feel free to post a question in a comment or via bulletproofpimp@gmail.com.

Even if it’s not from me, get help from somebody.

Learn from a Pickup Disaster in the Philippines

2008-03-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

I just spoke with a guy we’ll call Joe this weekend, who recently returned from a trip to the Philippines.

“How was the trip?” I asked.

It took him a while to get around to letting me know, without ever saying as I am telling you now, that it was disastrous.

A Filipina here in the US had set Joseph up with her niece. So he went to Manila with the intent of contacting this girl and marrying her.

Joseph’s first complaint was that she “wouldn’t commit.” What should practically scream at you like a flaming banshee is that this sounds like a woman talking.

“I spent a lot of time waiting in the hotel for Ellie to show. Plus she had a gay brother who was escorting me and keeping me company. Once she got off work, we usually had hardly any time to see each other.”

Ellie was unaffectionate, but had asked for a cellphone.

“The maid there was very friendly, but I didn’t want to disrespect Ellie.”

This reads like a textbook example of what not to do. I am just amazed that a person could create such a monumental flop without resorting to fictional devices. This is like another single friend of mine who was writing to just one girl in the Philippines and blew it every way possible. If you’ve never been to the Philippines, why don’t you ask for help?

1. Don’t Count on One Woman

This follows my saying, “Look for one woman and you’ll get nothing; look for 2 women and you’ll get 10.” You just don’t know whether or not any one woman is going to work. I told Joseph the story of my first trip to the Philippines and how it was a total fiasco because I was going to see just one woman. If Joseph had asked me ahead of time I could have spared him.

That woman could be looking to scam you, she might be older, fatter, or uglier than in her picture, or Lord have mercy, all three. I’ve had it happen. She might look good, but not be in to you.

I’ve seen gorgeous women who look plain on the photo id’s they’re wearing! So some plain looking women online may turn out better than what you expected.

Don’t Advertise You Want to Get Married

First of all, you shouldn’t want to get married. I don’t care if getting married is one of the conditions of your parole –you’re just exchanging one prison for the other. When you push about getting married, it’s a turn off. Women want to marry men who don’t want to get married. If you want to get married it must mean you’re desperate. Think about it, if you were rich, young, handsome, single, and dating centerfolds, would you be in a rush to get married?

It’s smarter to hint that you want to get married, but you must be careful to find the right woman. At least act reluctant.

Don’t Wait for Anybody

Sitting in a hotel room is just not attractive. I don’t care if you’re an underwear model or the incarnation of Apollo, sitting on your ass in a hotel room watching “Wow Wow Wee” (It’s a huge hit show in the Philippines.) does not make you seem bold, adventurous, or motivated. I haven’t been to Manila in years, but off the top of my head I was able to rattle a half dozen places he could have gone, from beaches to museums, to zoos, to famous restaurants, parks, volcanoes, and pine covered mountains 20 degrees cooler than Manila. But because he didn’t ask, he just sat there.

Have Plan B (and C, D, E...)

You have to be ready and willing to let a woman go if it’s not working. Clearly this wasn’t working, but he held onto her like a starving mouse on a glue trap. Ironically, his only chance of winning her was to show independence and a confident willingness to walk.

5. Go With What’s Working

The maid may not have been the ideal woman, but that was a start. Ask her out and walk along ocean front Roxas Boulevard at night. Now you’re proactive and building your confidence. Get on the Internet and find other women. If it doesn’t work out with the maid, ask if she has female friends or relatives who would be interested in you.

If you’re just sitting there, you’ll go nowhere, but once you start to build momentum, you can break out of your rut and be successful with women in the Philippines.

Why not ask for help? E-mail me your questions at bulletproofpimp@gmail.com, and check out the site Tropicalseduction.com

The Tipping Scam and the Beauty Industry

2008-03-12T20:34:00.000-07:00

David Lee Roth was recently slammed for being a “fecalesque” tipper after he left a $20 bill for a $200 tab. I thought 10% was customary. Okay, let’s say it’s 15% --how much would you be willing to bet that the waitress would still bitch if she got $30?

I say, “Right on, Dave.” And “Rock on, Patriarchy.”

If payment is mandatory, then it’s not a tip. When people expect 15%, demand it, and then slime anyone who fails to cough up, then a tip is no longer a gratuity, a gesture of kindness by the customer, but a shakedown enforced by the threat of social blackmail.

I see this all the time, dating and pickup women books giving the following advice on dating a waitress: “Go to her restaurant, order a meal, and tip generously.” You think she isn’t avalanched by a pile of loose bills every time she opens the closet at home because a million other desperate chumps had the same idea, that if they threw enough money at her that she was going to recognize their existence, let alone sleep with them? This single stupid idea is enough to create a multi-million dollar industry, and a monument to desperation made by legions of slaves building a pyramid out of a mile-high pile of sweaty bills.

The waitress business is a beauty industry, and men are so amped up at the sight of a hot waitress that they will fork over big money for nothing. It’s like the Tubes song, where “you can talk to a pretty girl” ... “but it will cost you a dollar first.” As insane as it sounds, I’ve heard of women putting themselves through law school just based on tips.

I knew a waitress who was on the downhill slide, but she was still good looking. She told me that she used to work as a bartender, when she was younger and slimmer. She had huge breasts and wore low cut blouses intentionally, not by accident. Do you think that this was related to how much money she made in tips? So a blatant sex sell was going on, but you’re a Cheap Charlie if you don’t shovel money onto the table for the privilege of being in the presence of a woman who through a genetic accident happens to be good looking. As I talked with this waitress her guard would come down occasionally, and I got a glimpse of a drab who held men in contempt, viewing them as dopes who were always suckers to provide innumerable tips, free drinks, and free meals.

If you think this is misogynistic, what about the fat girl with acne? Is she going to get hired as a waitress, or is she going to be in the humid kitchen with grease in her clothes and freckles on her skin where she’s been singed by splattered oil from the deep fryer? The busboy doesn’t get a tip –he’s making minimum wage. The same thing happens with men, where the young stud works as a waiter and the gangly guy with the bad complexion is the fry cook, sort of a non-animated Sponge Bob. And I’ve seen what happens when a waitress gets old and wrinkled, and isn’t quite so hot any more.

Oh, I’m waiting for the big retort. Remember, men have to be browbeaten in order to toe the line. I’m “cheap,” I’m “scum,” I don’t appreciate the hard work waitresses do, etc. Just this weekend I was talking with a short order cook working at a truck stop who was vainly trying to get any woman to take an interest in him. Why doesn’t he get tips? One reason is that he doesn’t wear a ‘D’ cup.

Stop tipping, dumbass. But even better, don’t patronize restaurants. Drive by Applebee’s and flip off the waitresses as you zoom by. Then take all of the money you saved on tips and throw a kick ass barbecue party at home. Invite beautiful women. Any woman who expects to be paid for the privilege of letting you talk to her can be told to get the $#@! back to TGIF, Chili’s, Fudrucker's, or some other clip joint trying to pass as a restaurant. If you want to tip somebody, tip your garbage man, who’s far more likely to get injured on the job than a waitress.

Eat Like a Caveman

2008-03-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

One of the most important ideas to me lately has been the concept of human design. I believed in intelligent design for some time, but ignored an obvious implication: If God created humans, then their design must be good. This is in direct conflict with the Christian notion that humans are screwed up, and while everything from a Madagascar hissing cockroach to an eagle is a marvel of creation and a testament to an awesome God, the human body is a hell-bent, self-destructive piece of crap.

One astute reader “Ψ” (I hope I got the symbol right.) mentioned the Christian notion of “the fall.” The basic idea is that humans were created perfect, but since Adam sinned we’re all jacked up. There is no natural explanation for the fall. If I am an extremely evil person (and any feminist reading this blog would agree to that) that doesn’t make my children genetically evil. If Adam’s sin somehow screwed up man’s genetic nature miraculously, then we’re right back to the notion of God intentionally creating humans who are less like Halle Berry or Steve Reeves, and more like the Hunchback of Notre Dame or John Merrick the Elephant Man.

What if design applies to diet? I’ve recently become interested in a low-carbohydrate diet, which is a diet low in carbohydrates like wheat, rice, potatoes, and corn, and high in proteins and fats. This was popularized as the Atkins diet, and although Atkins was scorned as a bloodletting quack with a bag full of leeches, scientific evidence has continued to amass in his favor.

If we look back far enough, man’s first diet was primarily meat and animal fat, supplemented by nuts, berries, and greens. This is called the "Paleolithic Diet," and represents the diet that many believe humans are intended to eat. If you look at diets of people like the Eskimo who at times lived on diets composed entirely of meat and fat, they should be dead, or at least resemble post-holocaust mutant zombies. They don’t. One explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, lived among the Eskimo for five years and ate nothing but meat. He later subjected himself to an experiment that proved it was possible not only for a man to survive on a meat diet, but to thrive. The Masai offer similar evidence, as do scientific studies of early man’s diet, including the study of coprolites, or fossilized crap. Now you have a new word you can use, like “Barak Obama’s program for change is pure coprolite!” Or for my Christian readers, "The human body is a coprolite waiting to happen."

In research of the Egyptians, it was found that despite their “ideal” diet consisting of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and little meat, they were obese and prone to heart disease (See “Protein Power,” by Michael Eades.). In fact, the easy way to tell whether human remains are hunter-gathers, who were primarily meat eaters, is by looking at their skeletons, which are healthier than those of people who subsisted primarily on wheat, potatoes, and corn.

If we look at the Biblical account in Genesis, God accepts the meat offerings of Abel, but rejects the grain offerings of Cain. Is this evidence that humans are intended for a diet that primarily consists of meat?

First, Kill All the Lawyers Financial Advisors

2008-03-07T17:08:00.000-08:00

Note our client above: In just 47 years he was able to save enough to purchase the fine genuine cashmere sweater you see in the photo. Those glasses have real tortoise shell frames, and the wood used in his hovel is rare imported cedar.

Why waste time enjoying life today, when you could be living a life of luxury in less than a half century!

Is there anything more useless than a financial adviser? Besides a castrato stud service, that is.

The so-called financial adviser is going to sell you his products, and all of them involve being rich (supposedly) when you retire. Of course that is decades away. Tons of get rich books are filled with the same lame advice –save money until you retire. You just left the world of work where you’re supposed to slave and kiss ass and dread the banshee wail of the Monday morning alarm. Now all you need to do is repeat this Groundhog Day endlessly until you retire, which is just a couple of weeks before you die.

So the same crap is being peddled again, now by a fly-eating lackey orbiting on the fringes of the financial world; just put your life on hold until you retire, which means you will hoe a row of cotton longer than the Great Wall of China before you can collapse and rest.

What is the point of being rich when you retire? So you can have linen Depends diapers? A platinum bedpan? So you can get the top bunk at the retirement home? To get lump-free oatmeal and genuine porcelain dentures?

Women as Property

2008-03-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite cliché moments is when a feminist or similar lackey builds up a dramatic pause in her diatribe, as the Phantom of the Opera maniacally swells the pipe organ in the background, “Women used to be regarded as....property.”

A nice touch at this point is to do a sort of Goth pigeon release to really sell the audience on the sheer evil of the Patriarchy, by letting a mass of shrieking bats out of the belfry. “...as property.”

Consider a hypothetical example if you will. You have an ape living in your house, and although most of the time it is a perfectly acceptable companion, you must pay its food and medical expenses. On occasion it goes wild, wrecks the home, and you must pay to have things cleaned up, or pay damages when it wrecks the neighbors house and car. Suppose this ape runs off and is now living at the neighbor’s house, which it stubbornly refuses to leave. At this point you would say something on the order of, “Oh well, I cannot own another living being. Apparently it has made its choice and I must learn to live with it.”

But imagine that you have trained this ape to speak via sign language. Scientists pay to study it, the public pays to see it, there is a book and movie deal in the works that will make you millions. Now when the ape goes next door and won’t come back, how do you respond? “Hey, that’s my ape! I have invested a fortune in it and you have no right to it! You had better return the ape or this is war!”

The crux of my allegory is that you regard as property things that are valuable. Suppose someone starts to cart off a dogpile from your front yard. Do you yell, “Put that crap back! It’s my property, dammit!”? Of course not. The sad truth is that wives have gone from being an asset to becoming a liability. When women became worthless as wives, they were no longer regarded as property.

A wife used to cook, to sew, to care for children, and to do a hundred things necessary for the maintenance of a home, from tanning hides, skinning animals, making candles and clothing, etc. The wife was a valuable asset and indispensible to man’s ability to make a living.

But what does a wife do today that can’t be outsourced? Food can be microwaved or bought cheaply at restaurants. Clothing can be bought, child care can be outsourced, a maid or cleaning service can be hired, etc. Given a woman’s spending habits, she represents a net loss.

In essence, a wife is a contingent liability, a hidden sinkhole threatening to engulf the entire home at any moment. A wife is something like a cross between the singing sword and the sword of Damocles, only more prone to bitching than singing.

Don’t Bet on Tomorrow

2008-02-25T18:11:00.000-08:00

This morning they called a last minute staff meeting, which usually means there’s bad news. Sure enough, one of the ladies I work with had a stroke yesterday. She’d been complaining of headaches, went to bed, and never got up. There’s almost no hope, and her husband is now faced with the decision of whether to keep her on life support or to pull the plug.

I’m stunned. The whole thing has been weighing on me like a thick lead ceiling.

I was just writing on how retirement is just a shimmering oasis that always seems on the crest of the next dune as you trudge across the sand. I had no idea I would be proven correct so soon and so tragically. What happened to her retirement plans? How much did she endure, and how much of her life did she put on hold until she could retire? Now the whole retirement scheme is seen for the cruel joke that it is.

The message comes through loud and clear to me. Don’t assume tomorrow is a given. Don’t put off for a single day the life you want to live.

Divorce Nightmare

2008-02-24T15:44:00.000-08:00

There was a knock at the door, and when he opened it, the sheriff handed him some papers. Since Dan was a landlord, he thought maybe some tenants were suing him. Later the sheriff returned. They were divorce papers, and now there was a retraining order placed against him.

“I need you to get only the things you need to stay someplace else tonight.” The sheriff said.

"But I need my computer. Everything about my business is on here,” Dan protested.

“Sorry, I have my orders.”

The divorce had come out of nowhere. And now, evicted out of his own house, Dan drove all day and into the night in a daze. He was so disoriented he didn’t know what do and couldn’t think clearly. At 3 a.m. he knocked at the house of his former minister.

“Sorry, but I’m not your pastor any more.”

What Dan didn’t know at the time was that his wife had gone to the bank and cleaned him out of $6,000 –money that was needed to pay bills such as the home mortgage.

Dan wound up at his brother’s house, trying to run a business without returning to his house and making frantic calls to the bank to try to bill bills so he wouldn’t lose his home.

Of course, he did lose his house, plus $40,000 in lawyer’s fees. All told, the divorce cost him something on the order of $375,000. His kids don’t talk to him any more. What his ex-wife told them, he has no idea, but it worked.

All through the divorce, which dragged through all of a year and a half, he was trying to reconcile due to his religious beliefs. I haven’t even begun to document here how devious, self-centered, and merciless his wife was, yet Dan’s religious convictions compelled him to keep turning the other cheek.

When faced with monumental betrayal, the appropriate response is war. You have to figuratively cut someone’s throat and dump them in the ditch. Rather than turn the other cheek, you should cave in their head with a Louisville Slugger –metaphorically, of course. It just makes no sense to continually play the chump and the doormat when someone is out to get you. No, it’s not very Christian, but that’s a good thing. That’s why I think Christianity is not a realistic or very sensible philosophy to live by. Yes, I see the point that you can’t be obsessed with vengeance, and you don’t always have to respond tit for tat, but at some point when you face enemies you have to treat them as such.

Last night was the first time I met Dan.... and his fiancée.

Don’t Retire!

2008-02-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

You may be thinking, “What? Are you crazy? Are you talking about working for the rest of my life?”

That most of us think that way is exactly the problem. Tim Ferriss of The 4 Hour Work Week asks the question, “What if retirement weren’t an option? What would you do then?” It shows how a monumental con has been pulled on all of us. The idea is that you will work your ass off for years at a job you loathe, until you’re almost dead, and then you’re going to start living.

Think about it for a moment, Social (In)Security and retirement age were set at just about the point that the average man was expected to die. The whole “retirement” fantasy is just a mind game to get you to work yourself to death. Who benefits? While you’re scrubbing toilets or deep frying chicken, eating paper bag lunches and taking work home on weekends, the boss is making big bucks and attending banquets serving steak and champagne, where he is lauded for his tireless work. Of course it’s you who has your tires slashed by the disgruntled student, it’s you who falls off the roof while shingling and gets a fractured vertebra, or it’s you who gets shanked by a prisoner in the yard.

So you wind up counting the days, like the teacher I worked with who at any point in the year knew exactly how many days there were until the last day of school. You slog through a “career” enduring Mondays and living until the end of the day, until payday, until vacation, until a time several decades on the horizon when it will all be over and you can finally live.

But think for a moment.

Does any pro athlete want to retire? Did Michael Jordan ever think, “Man, I’m tired of all this basketball playing. Oh hell, not another game”?

Does the Jack Daniels taste tester think, “Oh @$#! Monday again”?

Does a pimp think, “Oh God, another day of bitchslapping ho’s and cruising in a Cadillac”?

Jack Nicholson, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Emeril Lagasse, George Bush, Gene Simmons, etc., are not trudging through life until retirement. Neither was Steve Irwin or Jacques Cousteau.

The problem with the retirement mindset is that you have agreed to put your life on hold. To make matters worse, your idea of a sexual strategy is getting married. So you’ve consigned yourself to decades of dreary work both on the job and in your marriage.

The huge unforeseen problem is that if your wife divorces you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you can lose half of your retirement. I can’t see myself working for thirty years, dreaming of a payoff, only to have some wench take half of it. That’s about the time I start scanning Craig’s List for “Contract Killer 4 Hire.”

If you have a thriving livelihood that you can do forever, and will want to do every day, then you have a sustainable living. You also don’t have an entire lifetime of work invested in a single retirement egg that can be crushed.

The 30 Day Sex Challenge

2008-02-20T16:32:00.000-08:00

A pastor --and the moment I say “pastor” you know it’s going to suck—has issued a 30 day sex challenge to his congregation. He is asking married couples to have sex every day for 30 days.

Suppose I give you $100 every day and "challenge" you to spend it or give you gourmet food every day for a month and "challenge" you to eat it. Look at the photo of Raquel Welch. Now stop looking and keep reading the column. Imagine she is your girlfriend and I "challenge" you to have sex with her every day for a month. All of these so-called challenges are at a mind-numbing level of retardation.

But the catch is that you have to have sex with your wife. The problem here is that you’ve been having sex with the same woman for decades, and decades later she doesn’t look nearly as good as the woman you were having sex with twenty or thirty years ago.

Look, why don’t you marry a 50 year old woman? Because you're not attracted to old women. Sure, you marry Miss Sweet Young Thing now, but you will eventually be married to a 50 year old woman. What makes you think she’s going to look any better than the 50 year olds you see now? At 20 years of age you’re attracted to 20 year olds; at 50 years of age, you’re attracted to 20 year olds. Just because you turn 50 doesn’t mean you are suddenly repulsed by centerfold models and attracted to fat, withered women who are like ageing Shar Peis too tired to prick up their ears at the approach of the Grim Reaper.

But what happens is that when a guy gets sucked into marriage (often literally), he cannot see ahead. He can’t envision the endless drudgery and soul-killing hopelessness of being stuck with the same slowly decaying woman, typically accompanied by nagging, like a soundtrack from hell.

Marriage is Death to Your Sex Life

Pastor Wirth (or is that “Wirthless”?) refers to a study in which 20 million married Americans have sex 10 times a year or less. This is probably a lowball figure. As a high school student I remember a young teacher telling the class that married sex doesn’t happen every night. As a horny 17 year old, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around that concept. How could you be married and not have sex every night? Easy. This is why Sheepherder Wirth can issue a “challenge” to married people. Look at books like “He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore,” “The Sex-Starved Wife: What to Do When He's Lost Desire,” and ““The Sex-Starved Marriage: A Couple's Guide to Boosting Their Marriage Libido,” etc. These books are proof that sexless marriages are common.

And contrary to the stereotype of the frigid wife, it’s the husband who is more likely to say, “Not tonight, I have a headache.” Remember Al Bundy from “Married with Children”? I never did understand why he was totally uninterested in having sex with his wife. Now that I’ve been married twice, I know why. Although if you’re young you probably can’t understand this, but I can guarantee with greater certainty than the laws of gravity that you will eventually reach a point where you could care less about having sex with your wife. And that point may come much sooner than you think.

The Topsy-Turvy Nonsensical World of Christianity

You see, before you’re married, having sex every day with your girlfriend is the easiest thing in the world to do. Like “If I pushed you off a cliff, could you fall downward?” easy. But Goat Roper Wirth wants unmarried couples to abstain from sex.

If you were married, abstaining from sex for 30 days would be a piece of cake. Even someone as clueless as Calf Wrangler Wirth knows that at least 20 million married Americans do so every year without even trying.

But this is Christianity, so things must be contrary to human nature. Feel like having sex? Don’t. Don’t feel like having sex? Do it every day for the next month. Every thing you do that feels natural is a sin. Even feeling natural desires is a sin, as is thinking about those desires.

The whole principle of kaleidoscopic Alice in Wonderland Christianity is that you have a nature that you must resist. A Christian zookeeper would try to train fish not to swim, feed tofu to tigers, and put cats in the pool with penguins. Then he’d beat the hell out of any animal that got out of line. “Hey, you cows better stop grazing, dammit! And you monkeys, stay out of the trees!”

P.S. Why don’t other professions besides clergymen call themselves by dumbass obsolete agrarian titles? Like truck drivers could start calling themselves “Cow Puncher Smith,” and plumbers could use elevated titles like “Swineherd Johnson,” you know, just to build their prestige. I mean, who would you want operating on your brain, Doctor Jones, or someone with a cutting edge, relevant title from the mists of antiquity like “Muleskinner Jones”?

Why Do Humans Feel Pleasure?

2008-02-19T18:18:00.000-08:00

I got this short response from a reader to my Bulletproof Pimp Philosophy page.

“hedonistic philosophy.... enjoy your pleasure... what you describe will never be true happiness.”

Of course, hedonism as a philosophy means that a person should do whatever feels good. My first impulse is to respond by saying my philosophy is not hedonistic –cocaine, for example, may feel good, but it’s a dumbass idea to start using it. My philosophy is deeper than that, and so on....

But I realize I need to start with a much more basic point. From the reader I get the sense that he is conflicted about pleasure. In his mind, pleasure is associated with sin, guilt, hostility to God, etc.

But let’s ask the question...Why do humans feel pleasure?

If you believe that God created humans, there has to be a purpose to pleasure. If pleasure is an obstacle that has to be overcome, or is a trap to lure a person into sin, then why did God create humans to feel pleasure? Either he screwed up, or was acting randomly, or has a sadistic streak in that he creates humans with weaknesses and sets them up to fail, so that he can punish them. None of which makes sense.

Whether you believe in evolution or in creation by God (and especially if you believe that humans were created), the only solution that makes sense is that all emotions are purposive. In other words, feelings are not random accidents, but serve a purpose. All emotions serve to guide us toward constructive behavior.

For instance, if I eat a fruit, it strikes me as tasting delicious. Why doesn’t a rock taste as good? Fruit tastes good because it is nutritious. Rocks taste bad because they are not nutritious. Is that an accident? No. If I see a dead animal I feel disgust, which is a healthy emotion that prevents me from exposing myself to germs.

I think we need to beware the Christian dichotomy in which some emotions are “bad” and others are “good.” A classic example is anger. Anger is supposedly bad, but what do you feel when you find out a child is being horribly abused? You feel like beating the hell out of the abuser. I argue that’s a healthy response. What kind of person would you be if you learned of a child being physically, mentally, and sexually abused and said, “Hey, it’s not my problem. Oh my gosh, I’m missing the Steelers game!”

Here’s where it gets juicy. Why do men feel attracted to young, beautiful women with big breasts? Why do men want sex with strangers and multiple partners? Either you believe that it’s an accident of evolution, that God screwed up, or that God made humans evil just so he could set them up to fail. Or, you believe as I do, that men’s sexual desires are healthy. Sexual pleasure guides us toward healthy behaviors.

For instance, scientific evidence shows us that there is sperm competition, in which multiple men have sex with one woman, and are engaged in a reproductive arms race to become the father of her child. If humans were monogamous by nature, this wouldn't be so. So we’re faced with a choice, either we’re the product of random genetic mutation in a simian ancestor, or humans were not designed by God to be monogamous.

If we’re supposed to be monogamous, why aren’t we designed that way?

Are Humans Sinful by Nature?

2008-02-16T06:19:00.000-08:00

The short answer: no. Let me explain.

A group of us were talking when the subject of Hugh Grant picking up a Hollywood hooker came up. One woman wondered why Hugh Grant would pick up a woman much less attractive than his girlfriend at the time, Elizabeth Hurley.

“A woman doesn’t have to be better looking than a guy’s current girlfriend or wife,” I explained. “Men want sexual variety.”

“It’s sin nature,” she replied. She was referring to the Christian notion that humans have a sinful nature.

I grew up believing that, but I had the uneasy feeling that something was wrong with the idea that humans are evil by nature. As I thought it through, I came to the realization that a belief in humans’ sinful nature makes no sense.

Sin Nature Is a Design Flaw

Suppose I want a go cart that steers straight, but when I build the go cart, it veers to the left. How does that happen? Simple –I screwed up. A go cart that veers to the left represents a design flaw, something that is inherently screwed up in its design and construction. I can screw up while building a go cart because I’m human and I don’t always know what I’m doing.

So how does God make something that’s screwed up? (Like Christians claim that humans are fundamentally flawed.) Either he unintentionally built something crappy, which is something humans do all the time, or he intentionally made humans with a design flaw. Neither makes sense.

Follow the logic:

God hates sin, so...

God makes humans who sin by nature.

If Humans Are Made to Sin, then Punishment Makes No Sense

It becomes even more nonsensical when we add the element of punishment. God hates sin, so he made you sinful by nature, but if you sin (and we know you’re going to sin because God made you that way) He will burn you alive forever.

Imagine I want a go cart that steers straight. I intentionally make a piece of crap go cart that veers to the left. I get ticked off at the go cart for behaving in the way that I built it, and run over it with my 4 x 4 monster truck.

Suppose I hate hopping. I detest jumping of any sort. I create a kangaroo that hops by nature. When I see it hopping in the backyard I yell, “You’d better stop that damn hopping or I’m going to beat the @#!% out of you with a baseball bat and set your sorry ass on fire!” These are the actions of a madman. And yet that’s nothing compared to hell, considering that any sane person would rather get whooped with a baseball bat and get set on fire than endure the eternal torment of hell. Logically, getting whooped with a baseball bat can only last so long before you black out.

Let’s look at the “reasoning” again.

God hates sin, so...

God makes humans who sin by nature.

God is going to punish if you sin.

A Rational Alternative

A key element of being human is choice. God didn’t make robots, but free persons who can make choices. If you’ve ever had children, you know how it works. They are free agents who can choose what to do. Inevitably, they’re going to make a bad choice. This doesn’t make them evil, it makes them human. The idea is to steer them toward good choices, and appropriate punishments are part of that. If children were evil or sinful by nature, you wouldn’t love them.

So Why Do Christians Teach That Humans Are Sinful by Nature?

Most people are not evil. Most of us know a lot of very good people. I’m guessing that your mom and dad are evidence to the contrary that humans are sinful by nature –mine certainly are.

The problem is that the rigid morality of Christianity is such a piss-poor lifestyle that people must be coerced into it. People might opt out of going to church and helping to buy Reverend Billy Bob’s new Cadillac, so the specter of hell has to be raised to keep people in line. Basically, God is going to beat the hell out of you (or into you) if you don’t get in line and start going to church. Preachers work to create the conception of human life as miserable, when research shows that most people are happy.

Here’s my question: Do you have a lifestyle that appeals to people, without having to throw in some kind of threat?

I'm Back!

2008-02-15T18:32:00.000-08:00

I'm finishing up a master's thesis on sexual attraction. Now I finally have the chance to get back to posting.

Check out the links section --there's a store to get Bulletproof Pimp shirts, and the real deal on how to meet women in the Philippines, written by yours truly.

Just recently I was at a friend's house and saw a picture of one of the hottest, most petite Filipinas. She was gorgeous. I was so fixated on her that I almost didn't notice the guy in the picture. He's a redneck sort of a likeable Gomer Pyle type, a big, gangly guy with bug eyes.

In America this guy would have no business being anywhere near this girl, at least if you believe the nagging voices that are telling you to get in line and get married. Supposedly it's a crime for a guy to try to get a woman who is "too good" for him, yet it's perfectly fine for a woman to demand that a guy spend endless amounts of money on her, forgo sexual opportunities for the rest of his life, and surrender half of everything he owns in addition to hundreds of dollars a month for decades if she decides to bail out. Don't fall for it.

The picture of the gorgeous Filipina with a plain looking, ill-spoken, hick of a guy is a real motivator for me. It was further proof for me that any guy can get an incredible woman in the Philippines.

If you're interested, a good place to start in dateinasia.com, which is a free dating site. In the future I'll give advice on how to make the best use of the Internet sites.

Pimpin' to Make the World a Better Place

2007-10-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

In my college course an emphasis is placed on social change, and the result is the usual claptrap...save the lesbian whales, open up a vegetarian orphanage, stop war by wearing tie-die t-shirts, etc. And the one possible way of changing the world for the better that is never considered by anybody is empowering men. If men had sexual success, the world would be the better for it.

Consider the tragic case of the sheriff's deputy who went berserk and killed 6 people after firing 30 rifle shots in an apartment. An ex-girlfriend was supposedly involved. How often does this happen, that some guy has his whole life so wrapped up in some woman that he can't accept losing her?

No, the answer is not become a callous SOB who wouldn't know an emotion if he clubbed it like a baby fur seal. The answer is empowerment, a feeling of control and possibility in your life. Of course, you're not going to feel good when a woman you love leaves you. It's painful, but you know it's not the end of the world.

When she dumps you at the altar to run off to a motel with your brother, a minister to whom you just donated a kidney, your reaction is not one of rage, but one of pity for the twisted bitch, and sadness at how desperate your brother has become. At least, that is how you react when you feel like you have options, when you know that there are far more, and far better women out there than the sick animal who ran off with your brother.

Men who are frustrated become violent, and people die. The root of that frustration may be sexual, may be social, or economic. Just as a wounded animal that is cornered, even one as meek as a deer, will fight like Randy Couture on a bad acid trip, a man with no hope and nothing to lose will turn on those around him and be totally unconcerned with who dies.

Nice Guys Finish Last: Richard Jewel, Exhibit A

2007-09-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

Richard Jewel should have been a hero. He discovered a pipe bomb and had authorities evacuate the area just minutes before it went off. Richard was totally dedicated to law enforcement. Even though he was in between jobs, working as a security guard, rather than slack off and eat hot dogs, he was relentlessly and vigilantly patrolling the Atlanta Olympic Games.

Within 3 days the FBI leaked that he was the object of an investigation. He was under 24-hour a day surveillance, with the FBI renting a house just across the street. A friend was talked into wearing a wiretap and inviting Richard over to dinner. The FBI got search warrants and cleaned out everything he owned. They even got his mom's Tupperware and Disney tapes, as the media filmed it all.

Don't Believe the Self-help Books: Why Hard Work Leads Nowhere

Richard had followed the advice of the self-help books, in his words "giving 110%." He worked extra hours. He was the perfect employee, with total commitment to his job, however menial that job might be. Yet all of his hard work was turned against him: His dedication to a less-than-perfect job meant he was "obsessed." Get it? Only a total loser would work hard at a dead-end job, somebody who was just desperate enough to plant a bomb to make himself look like a hero.

Think long and hard the next time you hear any bullshit like, "Be the best janitor you can be." When a child is molested at the school, your hard-working Gomer Pyle self is the first and most logical suspect.

It Pays to Get Laid

Men hate being without a girlfriend, probably most of all because of the stigma that goes with it. A gay man without a girlfriend at least has a reason, but a lone, heterosexual guy with no girlfriend? It is too easy to be branded as a dysfunctional loser, and Richard was an overweight sitting duck for the media. At first, Richard looks like a chubby teddy bear, a "Go-o-olly" good 'ol boy addicted to beer and beef jerky, but once you find out he's a 33-year-old bachelor with no girlfriend, it practically screams, "I plant pipe bombs in the park!"

This is why guys get married, because it saves them the crushing humiliation of having no girlfriend and broadcasting to the world what a loser you are. And no, I don't think a guy is a loser because he has no girlfriend. No one can admit it, but it's all too common, because guys are just supposed to know how to succeed with women. For the too many guys it's easier to crawl under a park bench and remove a pipe bomb than to approach a woman. If Richard were married to a fat slob, a total shrew and had no sex with her –or even worse, had sex with her—he'd be "okay."

No guy ever considers the fact that being able to score women may mean the difference between being a hero and being an oddball who is demonized and scapegoated as a bomber, or rapist, or molester.

Do You Look Like You Are Capable of Your Aspirations?

Many beta males dream of the day they get their lucky break, and Richard got his, only to have it result in his life unraveling. Never mind that he actually was a hero, one of Richard's problems was that he didn't look like a hero. Being diabetic didn't help, but gave him a pudgy look that the media and Leno could so readily label as "Fat Loser."

Richard Jewel, rest in peace. You were a true hero. I just hope that I and other men can learn from your tragedy.

"I'd Feel More Comfortable with an Ugly Woman."

2007-08-27T17:35:00.000-07:00

"I'd feel more comfortable with an ugly woman." That's what my friend "Frank" told me in the Philippines.

At the time I hadn't seen his wife, but when I did I thought, "What the %$#!? Are you crazy?"

Of course, it's true that when you go to the Philippines a difficult change to make is to accept the caliber of woman you can get. After a lifetime of begging for women's attention and affection, of groveling, of paying for everything, it comes as a shock when you see the sort of woman that's available to the average guy.

But Frank has a problem much bigger than his wife's spending: He plans on taking her with him to Australia. This is like taking an alcoholic on a tour of the Budweiser factory in Milwaukee. Don't be surprised if he swan dives off a second story balcony when he sees a 25,000 gallon vat filled with beer, gulping all the way down.

Do a little thought experiment with me here. Let's say Joe is a retiree from Sacramento, California, who goes to a small, remote island in the Philippines. Everyone on the island is a fisherman, so the place is poor. With his $1200 a month pension, Joe becomes the richest man on the island when he goes there.

Now things get juicy. On this island is the most beautiful girl anyone has ever seen. In fact, even the oldest people on the island cannot remember ever seeing a woman as beautiful as she is. Joe knows from the magazines that he's seen, the TV, and the movies that this girl is model material. Surprisingly to Joe, but not to anyone who knows human nature, this beautiful girl falls for Joe and they get married.

But Joe becomes bored on the small island and decides to take his new bride with him back to Sacramento. Can you see what's coming?

Now Joe's $1200 a month, which was enough of a fortune to buy sardines for the whole neighborhood, can hardly pay the rent. Surgeons, bankers, and even --God forbid--school teachers make more than Joe, and his wife senses she is "in the market." She sees all kinds of men, and becomes aware of the existence of hundreds of thousands of them, who are younger than he is, who don't wear polyester sansbelt slacks, and who don't get their clothes mail order out of a J.C. Penny catalog.

Two years from now Joe returns to the island, alone. Looking at his face, it seems like much more than two years has passed. With alimony, the child support payments, losing the house and selling the car, he is now making $700 a month, which still makes him the richest man on the island.

He falls in love with the woman who is now the prettiest woman on the island since his ex-wife left. He marries her, because he realizes he married "the wrong one." In time he becomes bored, and decides to take his new bride to Sacramento...

Dumb as an Ox

2007-08-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

This summer I met a 55 year old Australian in the Philippines who had been retired since the age of 39. Sounds pretty good?

Alas, the wrinkle. He's married. His wife is a Filipina with a sexy full set of lips and curvy hips, who exudes sexuality.

No problem, huh? Well, it's just that whenever I see "Frank" at night he's bombed out of his skull. When I talk to him during the day, in his more sober moments, he constantly refers to his wife's spending habits. He tells me several times over the course of the weeks that I know him that he may have to go back to work.

Imagine being retired, with no problems at a young age, 26 years before the typical sap will be free from his life of drudgery. Now picture your sorry ass going back to work because your wife's spending is out of control.

I am reminded of the Hulk Hogan reality show, when he goes back into the ring. He's older now, and even if wrestling is fake, you still take punishment, like the knee that been killing him since his return to the ring. Hogan tells his wife he thought he'd be retired by now. God knows he's got money. The only catch is his wife's spending habits.

So Hulk Hogan stands in the living room, leaning to one side to favor a wrenched knee. He is in essence telling his wife, "I'm taking punishment and I'm in pain. I'm facing crippling injuries at an age when I should be resting and enjoying everything I worked so hard for, everything I sweated for. And all of this is to finance your out-of-control shopping trips."

She sits there, like a sallow pumpkin draped in a corpse's pale skin, strategically highlighted with an over-application of makeup that is completely wasted on her. "I'm worth it. You need me." Her response resembles a taunting laugh.

But he's trapped, and so is Frank. And so are millions of other men. You cannot control another human being, even if that person is your wife. She can blow through thousands of dollars in credit card debt and saddle you with the debt. You're the one who’s working, so it's up to you to somehow find a way to make ends meet. So if that means you need to get a second job, or come out of retirement, or drag your body into the ring for yet more punishment, at an age when the body doesn't heal and the pain doesn’t go away like it used--well, that's your problem.

"The Four-Hour Workweek" Kicks Ass

2007-08-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

I just read “The Four-Hour Workweek,” by Timothy Ferriss, and it is a mind-blower. It is the most radical, thought-provoking, and potentially life-changing book that I have ever read.

If you know my story, how I learned of my ex-wife’s affair, then wound up divorced and alone, getting drunk in my trailer home, and hating my teaching job at a ghetto school, you know that my first attempt to pull out of the death spiral I was in was to start reading every self-help and self-improvement book I could get my hands on. I’ve read a ton of the “Make Millions in _____” –you name it, stocks, real estate, Chihuahua breeding, etc., but they all miss one key point.

You can be filthy, stinking, disgusting, depraved rich and still not have a life.

Let me give you an example of being rich, yet screwed. I just got back from 2 months in the Philippines (more juicy details to follow). When I asked my supervisor what he did, he told me he had worked almost every day during the vacation. After his wife pressured him, he took a brief vacation, but was on the phone constantly, still working on pressing issues. He had several teachers to hire at a time in the hiring season in which few candidates are still available. If he can’t find teachers, he’s screwed. And if he can’t find good teachers, which is unlikely this late in the summer, he’s going to get parent and student complaints all year. His wife finally had to tell him to get off the phone on their brief vacation.

He makes $20,000 a year more than I do, and these are rural farm-state dollars, not New York or Los Angeles dollars. I can honestly say I do not envy him in the least. While he was working his ass off, I was on a tropical beach with a beer and a fine young lady half my age.

The problem is that most of us are too narrowly focused on income and totally ignore lifestyle.

Ferris points out there are several forms of income: Money (the most obvious), Time, and Mobility. If you earn six figures a year working 20 hours a day, it’s not only not worth it, but it’s not sustainable. It exacts too heavy a toll. If you have income but no time, life will be miserable.

Suppose I offer to pay you six figures a year working less than an hour a day at a very easy job. Sound good? Your job is lighthouse watchman. You must stay at a remote island and phone in when the lighthouse malfunctions or a ship crashes. You can see that your problem in this job is a lack of mobility. You’re stuck on the island and can’t leave.

But a lack of mobility also has economic implications. Suppose you are lighthouse watchman on this isolated island, and the only other structures on the island are an ultra-elite resort catering to multi-millionaires and a few restaurants and shops that cater to them. All of a sudden, your six figures are nothing. Because the average person is so much richer than you, you are relatively poor. (See here. ) On the other hand, if you could take that same income to Marked Tree, Arkansas, you’d be rich, and if you went to the Philippines, you’d be Bill Gates.

The beauty of things is that the internet allows us an unprecedented opportunity in history, to earn money with little effort while traveling anyplace in the world. And once you can move where you want, your income suddenly becomes a rhino on steroids. That’s the point –you can be very rich on little money if you have an income that is mobile and effortless.

This is what is most surprising –and exciting—about the book. While the title strikes many as the excuses of a lazy good-for-nothing (“What? Four hours a week? What a bum! I’m working my ass off!), the book is about finding deeper meaning and purpose in your life. Ferriss has the insight that our constant work, our busyness, serve like band-aids on a leper, masking the ugly truth that if we weren’t always busy we wouldn’t know what to do with our lives. If the average Joe had an Indian name like Kevin Costner, it would be something like Runs with Rats or Works with Weasels.

I’ve seen the book “The Purpose-Driven Life,” and I have to wonder how such an insipid book full of circular reasoning could sell a single copy to anyone other than the author’s mother, let alone millions. His solution: Your purpose is to forget about your purpose and hand your life over to God. The upshot is that you are a spiritual Kunta Kinte hoeing cotton, and God is the omnipotent plantation master on high sipping mint juleps and making occasional booty calls to the slave shed. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that millions of Americans have no purpose, and wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they weren’t working 60-hour workweeks without any vacations.

This explains the hostile reactions the book will draw. People are terrified of looking within, of examining their lives and finding out they come up short. A man spends 40 years working his ass off, coming to work sick, taking work home, being demeaned by bosses and customers, forgoing sexual opportunities to cater to his wife’s demands for more money (Hey, come on, Gucci purses aren’t cheap, you know.) only to have her leave him two months before the mortgage gets paid off. Now that he has reached the promised land of retirement he realizes that he’s empty. He just traded a third of his life in an effort to postpone answering life’s hardest questions, losing his house in the process.

The book has my highest recommendation. I’ve read it through once, and I’m now re-reading it with a highlighter that is rapidly running out of ink. The book is intellectually stimulating and in what must be a first for a see-the-big-picture book, filled with practical tips and applications. Get it.

Are We Like Otis the Drunk?

2007-08-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you remember the show Mayberry, RFD, starring Andy Griffith, and the very young future director and actor Ron Howard as a boy named Opie. The show also featured the comic genius Don Knotts as the deputy.

Otis was the town drunk, who would stumble into the sheriff’s office at night and go more or less straight to the key on the wall. He would unlock the cell door, go inside, turn the key to lock the door, and then reach through the bars to hang the key on a hook. Yes, that’s right, he locked himself in jail every night. The key was within easy reach, but he was locked in his cell, where he slept it off.

Are you and I like Otis the Drunk? We find ourselves “locked” in prison and don’t see any way out. I believe that our limiting beliefs keep us trapped. We keep repeating the same behavior, acting stupid due to impaired thinking, and feeling trapped because we can’t envision other options.

How many of these beliefs do you hold? It’s time to reexamine them.

You need to get a good job and become a model employee.
You need to work 40 hours or more a week.
You need to work 50 weeks a year.
You work until you retire at 65.
You must go out on dates in order to have sex.
Everybody gets married.
Everybody should have kids.
You should only have one woman at a time.

I just finished “The Four-Hour Workweek,” by Tim Ferriss, which is absolutely mind boggling, or as Chaz Michael Michaels says, “mind bottling.” Ferris destroys the first four myths, and has the audacity to suggest that your life shouldn’t be about a 40 year grind, but your goal should be to do little, but productive, work so that you are financially free and can go wherever you want to.

Poverty begins with a mindset concerning what is possible. When you begin to expand your possibilities, you can begin to envision your way out of jail, whether that jail means being trapped in a lousy marriage, a miserable job, or a rat trap of a town.

Marriage, Hell, and Siamese Twins

2007-08-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

Let us consider a couple of Christian propositions:

1) God has the perfect mate selected for everyone. And here, of course, we are talking about a life-long commitment to a single person.

2) Polygamy (being married to more than one person), although it was perfectly fine in the Old Testament, is a sin that will doom a person to hell.

3) God made everyone. If you’re tall and blue eyed, you can thank God for that. And if you were born a circus freak, well, God made you too, and as the very profound philosophical tenet goes, “God doesn’t make junk.”

If you agree to the above 3 propositions, it looks like God may have screwed up. I recently saw a TV show on a pair of conjoined twins. The two girls are two different bodies fused together from the waist up (2 hearts, 2 sets of lungs, 2 heads, etc.), but a single girl from the belly button down.

These conjoined twins believe that God made them. In other words, they are Siamese twins because God thought that would be just great. Now have you ever noticed that if your mom is a short white woman and your dad is a short white man, that when God makes you, He never makes you a tall black man? Ever notice how God makes you resemble your parents, so that skinny Chinese-looking people are almost never born to fat black families? It’s almost as though sexual reproduction and genetic inheritance are at work, rather than God whipping up a child from scratch.

These twins want to become mothers, which is perfectly fine, as long as they don’t mind deep-frying forever in hell. Hey, motherhood is a big responsibility, which entails things like diaper changing, sleepless nights, and eternal damnation.

You see, if one girl has sex, then the other one is having sex, too. This is adultery, which is punishable by hell. They could each marry a different man, but that would be polygamy, which is also punishable by hell.

Let’s try this solution. These girls marry one guy or two guys. The biggest obstacle to them getting married is finding a wedding cake bride figurine with two heads. As we all know, marriage is a beautiful, sacred ceremony that entails the spending of thousands of dollars as part of the whole spiritual experience. Although in Christian eyes their marriage is an abomination, a veritable buffet table of filthy sexual sin, the two girls become mothers. For two young women who struggle mightily to live normal lives, it’s one more way for them to experience life like the rest of us. Yes, it’s a little bizarre, but so is being born with two heads.

The original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, were married and fathered 22 children; one can only imagine the sorts of kinky goings on. (Talk about a bummer, the only thing worse than being a side show freak is being a married side show freak.) I was wondering, is it a sin for you and your brother to take turns watching the other having sex with his wife? Maybe I’m wrong, but God just might cut some Chang and Eng some slack, and perhaps in the long run they might not end up on a spit in hell’s rotisserie, rolling like charred suckling pigs alongside the two young American twins.

The neat thing about the Bible is that it has all of the answers to life’s questions. I can hardly wait for a reader to e-mail the Bible’s solution to sex for conjoined twins, which if memory serves correctly is in either Ezekiel or Habakkuk.

Paradise Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

2007-08-03T02:07:00.001-07:00

I was recently at Alona Beach, Panglao Island, Bohol, in the Philippines. The picture speaks for itself, but it’s a gorgeous white sand beach with gentle white waves and coconut palms framing a view of the sapphire ocean.

At first I thought, “God, these people are so lucky to live here. I’d have it made if I lived on this beach.”

But then I saw a local woman slumped over a table, sound asleep, at two in the afternoon, and I had to reconsider. The girls at this one shop had been there since seven in the morning, and at four in the afternoon they were still there. That meant there were often portions of hours and entire hours when she was doing nothing but sitting. Yes, the beach was beautiful, and the job of selling drinks and snacks to foreigners was entirely stress free –but minute after minute, hour after hour, day of after day of the same store and the same scene is bound to drive a person insane.

Milton in “Paradise Lost” tells the story of Satan being kicked out of heaven. Satan says, “The mind itself is a place, and can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.” Milton unintentionally makes Satan the hero, stoically trodding on the glowing coals of a sulfurous island hurtling through space. In his mind, he is in control, and in heaven. It’s not the place that creates happiness, as much as it is the attitude of the person there.

At some point a person, and I would argue most particularly a man, needs a sense of purpose in order to be happy –even in paradise. The result as I’ve unfortunately seen too often, is a shell of a man already drunk at 10 o’clock in the morning because he has nothing constructive to do with his day.

Suppose this same sales girl comes to work and works on a novel. Each day she writes a chapter. True, maybe she’s dreaming and the book will never be published, but she has a sense of purpose and accomplishment. The days no longer blur together: yesterday was Chapter 1, and today is Chapter 2.

I want you to have the best of all possible worlds. Find your version of paradise, and bring to it a sense of purpose.

Wedding Crashers

2007-07-31T20:48:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to seeing the movie “The Wedding Crashers” and I loved it. Of course, anyone interested in seduction methods is asking the question, “How applicable is this, or is this just a funny, nonsensical movie?” I believe the answer to that question is that the movie represents solid seduction principles.

Find a Niche. The two men in the movie don’t need 101 different seduction techniques and strategies. Their niche is weddings, and that’s all they need.

No Dating. This echoes an idea of Gunwitch’s, which seems impossible: You can have a sex life without dating.

Free. Married sex is the most expensive sex on earth. Compared to marriage, $200 an hour hookers are cheap. For the wedding crashers their food, drinks, and sex are free. It’s the poor bastards who are getting married who foot the bills.

Demonstrate Higher Value. The movie is replete with examples of the wedding crashers scoring by virtue of demonstrated excellence. They excel at balloon animals, making toasts, dancing, etc. Their rapport with children is an easy way of demonstrating sensitivity and vulnerability, which validates a guy in women’s eyes.

Live in the Now. The wedding crashers are totally in-the-moment, so caught up in the spirit of fun that it’s infectious, and women want to be a part of that experience. Sure, women plan for the dirty work of marriage and a to-the-death lifelong commitment, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also enjoy escape, a man who pulls them into a world without worries, where everything is fun and NOW, and tomorrow will 6take care of itself.

Make the Ho’ Say No. Gunwitch strikes again. The wedding crashers’ mindset is not three dates and sex, but to progress to sex today and now. This is the other part of the in-the-moment mindset –sex is now, not tomorrow or after a ring and several dates. This time constraint (i.e., sex today) blows out procrastination and excuses and provides a laser-like, intense goal focus.

Lastly, note that Chaz (played by Will Farrell) must be portrayed as a total loser, a 40 year old schlep who still lives with his mom. Oprah has never been married, but she’s not portrayed as a loser. Derek Jeter has never been married, and neither has Filipino actor, singer, and heartthrob Piolo Pascual. These two lifelong bachelors are among the most intelligent and successful men on the planet, yet the propaganda juggernaut can’t allow any dangerous ideas like the existence of a successful, intelligent bachelor who is smart enough to stay single.

Rat on a Treadmill

2007-07-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

A psychologist named Brickman performed what has become one of the most well-known studies within psychology. In his study of lottery winners and paraplegics, he found that while lottery winners were initially happy, they soon returned to the same level of happiness they experienced before the big win. Similarly, while victims of spinal cord accidents were depressed at first, they soon returned to previous levels of happiness.

This lead to Brickman’s theory of a hedonic treadmill, which basically says that we’re rats on a treadmill, chasing happiness like a Cheeto dangling on a string just beyond our reach. No matter what we do or what happens, we’re doomed to the same level of happiness.

This is hardly a morale-boosting theory. If winning the lottery results in no more happiness than getting hammered by a White Freightliner filled with cattle, then what’s the point?

Yet I have to ask the big question: In a society in which 59% of the population is married, 10% is divorced and another 7% widowed, is it any wonder that people are miserable, and even hitting the lottery is not enough to counter the soul-killing effects of marriage and its aftermath?

(Statistics from http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsUS.shtml)

Carpe Diem

2007-01-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

I have only today.

Today I will…

Eat, drink, and rest well

Stand tall

Be strong

Learn something

Create something

Be sexual

Envision a grander version of myself

Notes:

“Eating and drinking well” refers not only to eating healthy, but eating good food.

Resting is not just getting enough sleep, but relaxing as necessary, perhaps taking a brief time out when stress builds.

“Stand tall” means not just maintaining an upright posture, but respecting myself and demanding respect. It signifies seeing myself as someone noble.

“Be strong” is a reference not just to exercising, but taking a dominant posture, of not giving up, and imposing my will upon the world.

“Be sexual” means that I am not afraid to express myself sexually. I am not ashamed to flirt or to acknowledge a woman’s beauty. I should not feel that there is anything shameful or dirty about my sexual desires.

Personal growth means being able to see yourself as someone greater than what you currently are. If you feel completely comfortable with the greater “you” that you envision, throw it out in favor of something more outrageous.

Would Jesus Give a Rapist an XBox?

2006-11-28T20:12:00.000-08:00

A couple of young punks vandalized a church, set off a fire extinguisher, destroyed windows and computers, and took cash and electronics. The three miscreants were charged with felony burglary.

If you’re expecting me to go in the direction of how I weep for this generation, what has happened to today’s youth, when I was their age, why we never blah, blah, blah, you’re mistaken. You see, the church that was vandalized is now going to give these jerkoffs “several hundred dollars' worth of gift cards, Xboxes and controllers, a DVD, a VCR,” according to Reimer, the church’s oh-so-hip and with it pastor. (And how frickin’ retarded is it to name yourself after a sheepherder? Why don’t clergymen call themselves “Cowpoke Reimer,” “Manure Shoveler Graham,” “Mule Skinner Jackson,” or some other equally lame-ass agrarian job title?) Pastor Reimer is so cutting-edge and way too cool for the room that he has ghost-white Susan Powter hair and his church has a skating rink for teen punks.

Sheepherder Reimer wants to show forgiveness, just like Jesus did, but he comes across as a pussy. I remember Jesus blowing up when people were disrespecting God’s house. The same Jesus who is painted as a blue-eyed flower child (“Thou art groovy, my child.”) in the Sunday school workbooks made a whip and went off on people who’d set up the temple as their own flea market. Look, kick those dorks’ asses, then talk about forgiveness once the bleeding begins to slow to a trickle.

I don’t want to pile onto Christianity here: there are way too many people slamming on Christians and belief in God. My parents believe in God, and I believe in God. For me the problem begins when we move beyond faith in the existence of God and ultimate accountability for our actions and into the realm of real-life, rubber-hits-the road living. Christianity is just not practical.

When you give vandals gift boxes, what about the decent kid? What does he get? Common sense tells us that your intended message of love and forgiveness comes across as panty-waist weakness when you give gift packages to people who disrespect you. If I rape Tanner Reimer’s wife can I get a .45 caliber Glock with a four-inch barrel? Suppose I don’t have enough money for one of those new Wii game boxes, or I’m too cheap to spend my own money, all I have to do is tear the hell out of Goat-roper Reimer’s church.

What self-respecting man wants to bend over and take it, smiling, from hoodlums who are laughing at how soft and doughy he is? In the words of Limp Bizkit, you’re like a chump, hey, like a chump, hey, like a chump, hey, and you’re not even doing it for the nookie. Christianity is just fine with this kind of weak, humiliating groveling. In my book, this is retarded, and it doesn’t cut it.

New Light

2006-11-27T20:26:00.001-08:00

Now we have the author of the article I reported on clarifying his study, which found that women are physiologically aroused as quickly as men.

Binik, the study's author, said he didn't actually show that women like pornography — just that their bodies react to it…Others before him had seen the same effect, he says, and he doubts the prospect that women secretly like pornography as much as men do.

"In women, you get a lot of disagreement between what the body is saying and what the mind is saying," he said.

All of which goes to show that, at least for women, arousal doesn't necessarily imply desire.

This is more in line with other studies that I have seen. While women show physical signs of arousal, they may not be intellectually as aware of those feelings. My hypothesis (a fancy word for “guess”) is that since women have so much more to lose than men if they have sex and become pregnant by a creep, females are more likely to have a mental “brake” that prevents them from screwing every guy who arouses them.

We know from this study and others that in a seduction scenario, a woman is as sexually charged as a man, yet what I think may be emerging here is a barrier that stands between a woman’s sexual feelings and her becoming aware of those feelings and yielding to them. It may be that the successful seducer is able to “flip the switch” that causes a woman to embrace the arousal she is feeling, while the AFC leaves her in a state wherein all the physiological symptoms of arousal are distant and unrecognized, or not urgent and compelling.

Paradise Now

2006-11-27T20:01:00.000-08:00

"My suggestion is to start looking for your paradise now. Life is too short not to dream of paradise, whatever it looks like to you."

Robert Kiyosaki

New Research on Arousal

2006-11-25T09:53:00.000-08:00

Just recently I saw a set of seduction CD’s by a big name PUA. I choked on my coffee when I saw the price was nearly $800! (Yes, that’s eight hundred dollars.) I don’t see what justifies such an outrageous price, even for the most professionally produced CD’s, other than a cold, avaricious calculation of how much some desperate guys will pay to be successful with women. And you don’t have to be a total zero with women in order to be tempted: who among us would not give $800 to significantly improve our sexual success?

The problem is how do we know that the CD’s will actually deliver the goods, and are not just a high-tech version of snake oil, guaranteed to cure baldness, arthritis, hearing loss, hang nails, cancer, dizziness, whooping cough, liver spots, nausea, etc.?

My goal is to offer a scientifically based program of empowerment for men, beginning with seduction. Sure, lots of guys can make claims, but what can be proven? I think we also need to be careful: Just because big-time PUA Daddy Mack Shark scores chicks like crazy doesn’t necessarily his program is worth a damn. Michael Jordan is a basketball legend, but does that automatically mean that any product with his name on it will transfer his basketball skills to the average guy?

Let me start with the latest research, and then offer my conclusions and applications.

The Latest Research

Researchers studied the sexual arousal of men and women. There are more studies of sexual arousal in men, because a man’s sexual arousal is obvious. (Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to help with research?)

But how exactly do we know when a woman is sexually aroused? Some time back I read about a study based on the principle that if you hold your hand up in front of the TV you’ll see a red glow. That is due to the blood in your hand. If you increase the blood flow in your hand, the hand becomes less transparent. By inserting a light source into a woman’s vagina, researchers were able to measure blood flow, or vascocongestion, the primary physiological response of sexual arousal.

As you can imagine, this means of measuring arousal is intrusive to say the least. In the latest study researchers used an infrared camera to measure arousal. Sexual arousal leads to increased blood flow in both males and females, which in turn leads to increased genital temperatures. We intuitively understand this when we say we have the “hots” for someone or are making out “hot and heavy.”

Subjects viewed a series of videos to establish a baseline. Then they were shown pornographic movies. The infrared camera trained on the participants’ crotches was able to measure increased arousal.

There were several findings:
1) Men and women reached peak arousal in about the same length of time, 11 to 12 minutes.

2) Both men and women’s reported awareness of their arousal corresponded with how aroused they were physiologically, as measured by increased genital temperature.

The Implications

This research pretty much kills the old wives’ tale about how slow women are to become aroused. According to this study, women become just as easily and as quickly as men.

It has also been widely believed that women are not aroused by pornography. Although the research clarifies that the videos used were those found by the Kinsey Institute “to be sexually arousing to specific genders.”

I believe that this research has important implications for seduction. One of Gunwitch’s foundational points is that women are just as sexual as men. From Gunwitch’s 2002 pre-release guide, section 9.1: “A champ knows women love sex just as much as men so therefore the gift that is given in return for sex with a woman is the sex itself.” I believe the research proves this.

If you lack this key belief, as I did for years, you will think that women don’t really like sex as much as men do. This will lead to try to compensate women for “reluctantly sacrificing” to “give you” sex. You will think that you must buy dinner or movies, pay for dates, get married, buy engagement rings, etc., all to persuade a woman to undergo the equivalent of a trip to the dentist’s office.

The mistaken belief will also lead a guy to try to hide his sexual agenda. Once again, Gunwitch teaches that a man should not try to hide his sexual agenda, but in fact the goal is for a man’s sexual aims to be known to his intended target, even though the man must not crudely verbalize his intentions (e.g. “I wanna $#@! you like a $#@!’in animal.”). The guy who mistakenly tries to conceal his sexual goals because he thinks she’ll be disgusted ends up coming across as devious, indirect, conflicted, etc. The man who is secure and direct in his sexuality is more likely to be successful.

But I think we must also recognize that in the study women were exposed to ideal sexual stimuli –we can’t just assume that some meek, wimpy Nice Guy is going to create peak sexual arousal in a woman in the same lengthy of time as in the study. I believe we still must take into account Warren Farrell’s observation that women are interested in a relatively small portion of the male population. So women will respond sexually as quickly as men, given the right circumstances. The purpose of seduction skills is enabling you to be that ideal set of circumstances.

What Do Women Want?

2006-11-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

I’d like to thank reader Ronin for the following quote from Salma Hayek, which provides me with an excuse to post another of her pictures:

“Women have been taught that in order to have a place in the world, an identity, they must marry and have children. If that's the life you truly want, great. But for many women, marriage is only about needing the world to know that someone desires them enough to say, "Here's a contract to prove that I love you and will commit to you for the rest of my life." For these women, no contract equals no validation - and, thus, no reason for existing.”

Read these quotes of Salma and observe the contrast:

Quote A

"I keep waiting to meet a man who has more balls than I do."

Quote B

“What worries me the most is that most men are so weak. Because of that they act like they don't care and like machos - because they are too fragile inside. They're scared of confrontation and afraid of so many things. And because of this they build up their life so they have to deal with their feelings as little as possible. I find feminine men unbelievably sexy. But most men are completely incapable of getting in touch with their feminine side. What am I supposed to talk about with a man who doesn't know what it's like to be a woman?”

The two quotes are contradictory. In the first she wants an aggressive, fearless man, but in the second she wants a sensitive man who is “in touch with his feminine side.” (Excuse me for a moment while I wipe the last residue of vomit from my shirt.) Which one is it? What in the hell does she want?

Men rarely, if ever, hear the sort of honesty contained in quote A, asking for a man to take charge, but they do hear a hell of a lot of namby-pamby crap like quote B, looking for a sensitive, weepy “man.” The mistake men make is they try to provide the sensitive guy, which is a huge turn-off, because they come across as sissy boys.

The secret is to be aggressive and take-charge, with occasional hints at a sensitive side. Throughout the date you are brash, cocky and funny, but you “accidentally” let slip some oblique mention of your volunteer work, or affection for your parents or little sister, or your visit to a museum or art exhibit. Suppose she comes to your apartment and nestled amidst your collection of weapons is the dog you rescued from the pound or nursed back to health after he was hit by a car and limping along the street. That your dog now has no noticeable limp despite such massive injuries is merely proof of your nurturing abilities.

The key is that you do not broadly proclaim your sensitivity, but it becomes a secret side of yourself that she “discovers,” supposedly without your awareness. This fuels her romantic fantasy that only she is able to see another side of you, and only she is able to bring it out. Imagine this conversation being played out between her and her friend:

Friend: Megan, your new boyfriend is the most callous, evil, sadistic bastard I’ve ever met.

Her: I know. Isn’t he dreamy? Just thinking about it makes me want to %$#! him.

Friend: You’re so lucky. My last date was some nerd who is working on a cure for cancer and like makes fake legs and stuff for crippled kids. Gross!

Her: You know, a lot of people look at Skull and all they see is the tattoos, the automatic weapons, the rap sheet, and all those unfortunate killings in Alabama, but if only they knew Skull like I do, they’d see a side of him they’d never imagined.

I should be writing for the Lifetime channel. Of course it’s just a matter of time before Skull kills her, and despite the fact that every show on the Lifetime channel is just a variation of the same Supposed-Nice-Guy-Is-a-Killer plot, women will continue to look for a killer with a sensitive side. How else can you explain the women who are eager to marry guys on death row?

Phone Sex

2006-11-24T07:42:00.000-08:00

In what may seem to be a “duh” moment, researchers found that Japanese teens who regularly sent e-mail on their cell phones had more sex than teens who spent time at the computer. One researcher explained the obvious results:

“E-mail leads to a strengthening and expansion of communication, which is probably why users are more sexually active," said Masahito Takahashi, a professor at Yamaguchi University who analyzed the results. "On the other hand, it appears that using the Internet on computers often does not lead to sexual activity."

Yet even among cellphone users, those with the most e-mail messages were more likely to have kissed than those who sent fewer e-mails.

Philippines Travel Tip

If you’re traveling to the Philippines (and if you’re not, then why the hell aren’t you?), buying a cellphone is one of the first things you should do. (Your foreign phone won’t work in the Philippine network.)

Having a cellphone allows you to make contact with huge numbers of women. If you meet a Filipina who is not interested in an older foreigner, or just not interested in you, she knows hundreds of other eligible women. Once you are in the Filipino social network, women you’ve never even met will be contacting you. On my last trip my friend had some girl texting him, but he had no idea who she was. It turns out that she was a luscious 19 year old who ended up traveling with him, and they shagged like crazy.

This last example is not at all uncommon. There is a larger principle at work here: every man must decide whether he is going to withdraw and engage in activities that isolate him, or if he will enlarge his social circle and participate in activities that expose him to larger numbers of women. You’ve got to decide whether you’ll go to the party or stay home. At the party you have to choose whether you drink and watch everyone or get out and talk to people. You have to decide whether you’ll talk only to your friends and acquaintances or screw up the courage to introduce yourself to new people. Every choice that enlarges your social network not only increases your contact with eligible women but makes you more attractive to women by providing social proof and showing your outgoing, assertive nature.

Food for Thought

2006-11-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

Consider this quote from the goddess Salma Hayek:

On her ideal man Hayek said, "I keep waiting to meet a man who has more balls than I do."

This is how every woman feels, only she can't tell you this, so she must engage in a frustrating series of testing behaviors to see if you measure up. Recognize that every time a woman starts to consider you as possible sexual material, she must see if you meet to her standards as a man. Since she can't tell you this outright (because she needs to know that you're naturally assertive and confident, not just putting on an act) she will resort to devious tests.

Your goal should be throughout your life, and especially with women, to be the most assertive, brash and ballsy you can be. You'll like the results.

Made Man

2006-11-22T06:37:00.000-08:00

I was fascinated by the MTv show “Made,” in which a superdork with the world’s most bizarre behavior decides he wants to be both the prom king and “boyfriend material.” This might not seem like the most difficult of goals to achieve, until you stare in open-mouthed horror at his looney tunes behavior, which might be described as Tourette’s Syndrome meets schizophrenia. Walking down the halls of his high school, dragging a blue suitcase on wheels (which he has named “Figaro”), he suddenly bursts into a warbling macaw call, or will ask a girl if he can smell her hair. All of this might be amusing if it weren’t for the ominous stack of slasher films in his closet, which you know someday will be prominently featured as exhibit B during his trial.

Let us start by acknowledging that the show is made by MTv, and that a large part of what we are watching is rigged, if only by the fact that bringing in TV cameras must influence everyone’s behavior. Still, by the end of the show I am convinced that I have seen a startling transformation for the better.

All Behavior Can Be Changed

The biggest excuse we all drag around is the idea, “Well, I’m just shy.” Of course, feel free to insert your characteristic here. At the root of this pathetic excuse statement is the idea that I am shy by nature, and since my nature is unchangeable, I will spend the rest of my life being shy. Bullshit. The truth is that you behave shyly. Behavior is learned, and it can be unlearned. Look around you and find the person who is least suited to be a soldier. Now put that person in boot camp, and watch those excuse labels (“I’m shy.” “I’m not athletic.” “I’m not rugged.”) slough off with the flab. Perhaps this is why the seduction community refers to an intense training period as “boot camp,” because given the right sort of experience, new behaviors are learned and old behaviors are dropped like a 50 pound rucksack after a 10 mile run. How many people in the military, in the Special Forces, flying as fighter pilots, serving as drill sergeants, and so on, were people who before their training would have been universally judged as incapable of the job?

Take any aspect of yourself, whether it is shyness, lack of confidence, social awkwardness, forgetfulness, etc., and you will find a group of behaviors that reinforce that characteristic that you mistakenly believe is your “nature.” When you replace those behaviors with new behaviors, those traits that you once thought were ineradicable parts of your nature wither on the vine. For Brandin, the advice is simple: Stop acting weird. When he stops making odd noises and acting in ways that no normal person would behave, the trait of “creepiness” –which otherwise would have plagued him for the rest of his life, dies. When there is no behavior to reinforce his creepiness, and his self-image as a creepy person, the supposedly unchangeable aspect of Brandin, his weirdness, simply shrivels up like a desiccated corpse in Death Valley.

You Are the Product of your Environment

Brandin constantly feeds his weirdness by watching slasher flicks. At some point in the show the guy-in-a-hockey-mask-with-a-chainsaw movies are packed up and carted off. He is NOT happy, yet the films must go if he is to have a chance of normalcy. When Brandin visits his father, an inert slob who does little other than lie on a couch ill-equipped to support his massive weight, we see another source of Brandin’s weird behavior. Brandin is smart enough and serious enough about change that he repudiates his father’s influence. This moves him closer to his goals. On the other hand, imagine if he were to hang out at his dad’s house and bitch about his life, it’s not very difficult to see him continuing with his odd, self-defeating behaviors.

Later in the show, he gets a haircut and some clothes. Something as simple as Brandin’s hair, which is unkempt and hanging down in his face, isolates him from others and supports his weird guy image. No, he doesn’t look like a Ralph Lauren model, but a decent haircut and clothes make him look like a normal guy and place him in the game.

Putting items one and two together, drop all the bullshit about you having an immutable nature that you are doomed to go through life with. Start replacing behaviors and start changing your environment, and you will change.

Be Honest

Excuse me if I’m straying into Disney territory here. (Just bee yourself!) Brandin starts by admitting he sucks with women. He recognizes that he is a social goofball, who’s kept around because he’s oddly amusing, like the organ grinder’s monkey. Furthermore, he makes the next important decision: his current life is unacceptable. When he goes out on a date and bombs, he readily confesses things fell apart. Of all the makeover programs I’ve seen, Brandin is the most coachable, because he is smart enough to recognize the changes he needs to make and honest enough to admit them.

Get Help

Brandon gets a coach. Being real enough to admit you have a problem and humble enough to get help is difficult for men, because every man is supposed to be self-sufficient. I’ve been in those locker room conversations, where guys are talking about their sexual experiences, and there I was, a virgin. i felt like the child with progeria entering the “Cutest Kid” contest, or a leper auditioning at the Ford modeling agency.

I realize how lucky I was when I stumbled across my mentor in the Philippines. When he asked me if I knew how to get hot young Filipinas, I honestly answered “no.” Admittedly, that was not the most macho response, and it was embarrassing at the time, but it enabled me to get life-changing help.

The most unexpected twist of the show occurs when Brandin’s coach, a guy who was a very popular guy in school and college shows a picture of himself as a high school freshman. I about fell out of my chair when I saw in the photo Brandin’s coach was an über dork with fishbowl glasses. I mean, the guy made Stephen Urkel look like Fabio. So yes, change is very much possible, but you have to be real enough to get help.

The Intention to Change Creates Resistance

Brandin finally ditches his rolling suitcase that he has been dragging through the school hallways for years. If the world weren’t such a cold place and nature weren’t so implacably cruel, the school would cheer his attempts to live a normal life. But no, Brandin’s “friends” all universally proclaim that his new backpack resembling those worn by normal students “sucks.” The truth here is a real bitch: Everyone you know somehow benefits by your dysfunctional self and feels threatened by any “crazy” talk of change. Brandin’s audience stands to lose a constant source of entertainment. Sure, he’s a dork who will never get laid, but who’s going to make them laugh if he gets a life? Brandin’s father is not alone as a loser if his son is a loser, too. It is no coincidence that Brandin’s dad is hostile and dismissive about Brandin’s intended change.

This is the surest way to find out who your real friends are: Who supports your efforts to change? Just be certain to put your heart in a crushproof box first.

A Woman as a Friend Is as Useless as a Screen Door on a Submarine

Brandin has a female “friend.” He has secretly had a crush on her for years. Since Brandin has no real girlfriend or even a real date, this lackluster chick becomes airbrushed by his fantasies. Look, you are going to have more in common with men than with women, unless you’re homosexual. Your time with women is better spent looking for sexual partners than buddies. It’s like every time I met a dentist I tried to turn him into a golf buddy and then wondered why I had lousy teeth. Or suppose you go to see a dentist, and he says, “I don’t want to work on your teeth. Let’s just be golf buddies.” You need to say, “Sorry. If you don’t want to work on my teeth I’ll find someone who will.” This doesn’t have to be acrimonious, nor does this mean that you hate dentists; it’s just that you have a realistic appraisal of the role dentists play and the importance of your teeth. Time Brandin spends on a pseudodate with his fantasy girlfriend is wasted time that he could be spending on a real date with the potential of getting laid.

7. Just Do It

Brandin screws up the courage to ask a girl out, and she says yes. The presence of the cameras is a factor, sure, but many, many women are longing for the validation that comes from having a guy express interest in them. The girl is not a supermodel, but she is attractive. Note that once Brandin dates her, his masturbatory fantasy girlfriend drops out of the picture. Once you have the real thing, fantasy just doesn’t cut it. On the date Brandon acts normal. He also makes a gallant gesture and establishes touch (i.e. kino) when he helps her with her golf swing by wrapping his arms around her.

If nothing else, the show establishes the fact that you don’t have to be Apollo to get chicks. For every guy out there feeling like a total loser because he’s no Tiger Woods or Arnold Schwarzenegger, there’s a girl who wants to throw herself out the window because she’s no Jennifer Aniston or Kate Moss. If the Brandins in the world would get past their insecurities, start on a program of change, stop obsessing over the prom queen types, and ask out the girl next door, they’d be getting laid, and would be a hell of a lot happier.

In Defense of K-Fed

2006-11-16T05:15:00.000-08:00

DISCLAIMER: I do not like Kevin Federline. Like anyone else in his right mind, I think he is a greasy specimen of trailer park trash. Nor do I think Britney Spears is the hottest chick on the planet.

Yet, the magnitude of Kevin Federline’s accomplishment must be recognized. How does an unappealing guy from Fresno, California, --a guy who is nearly broke, with a child and a pregnant live-in girlfriend, get one of the wealthiest, most sought after women on the planet to fall madly in love with him? As much as we all enjoy seeing Kevin fall, he’s going to walk out of his marriage to Britney Spears with several hundred thousand, perhaps millions, of dollars. All in all, weigh being married to Britney for several years, with all of the perks and a hefty cash severance sum, against working at Hot Dog on a Stick for the same length of time and begging chicks to go out with you. And when you get fired at Hot Dog on a Stick for failing to kiss the boss’s corpulent ass, how much money will you take with you when you leave?

How many guys practically spitting at the TV screen in contempt of Federline every time he appears on the news could even begin to land a hot, wealthy, never-been-married woman? Don’t let your entirely justified hatred of “K-Fed” keep you from learning from him and accomplishing the seduction of a lifetime.

As usual, let me break this down into key principles.

1) He Acquired Skills

In all of the hullabaloo, it’s easy to miss the fact that Kevin has a skill: He can dance. Let me interrupt your laughing to point out that he toured with several big name acts, such as Justin Timberlake. Although he started out street dancing, Kevin struggled to keep up with a dance class he took in Fresno. He couldn’t keep an 8 count, and fell behind the rest of the class. (Note that I said he had skills, which can be learned, rather than talent, which is innate.) He was considering dropping out, but decided to stick with it. After a lot of frustrating work he reached the point where he could audition in the competitive LA market and land work with top acts.

2) Get Noticed

It is your skills that make you visible. They enable you to rise above the mediocre crowd and get noticed. Even though Kevin wasn’t a star, his backup dancing put him on stage with stars. The night that he met Britney he was at a club in Los Angeles. If he had stayed home, and if he had never left Fresno, he would never have met Britney. Even if he had never met Britney, Kevin was in a position to meet other women, or talent scouts, producers, up and coming stars, etc. He was in the arena, in a leveraged place where sooner or later something was bound to go his way.

Sure, you despise him, but you recognize him. How many millions of chumps are laboring in broke-ass obscurity in their equivalent of Fresno or Goshen, California?

3) Go for the Dream

Kevin left Fresno for Los Angeles, with no guarantee that he would succeed at anything. He shared an apartment with 5 or 6 other guys, and auditioned in a fiercely competitive market. This is the part that gets glossed over in biographies, but have you done anything like Kevin, abandoning the familiar and taking a huge risk on your dream?

4) Have Rock Solid Self-Belief

“He looks like crap,” was how one female commentator put it. This was the can’t-take-my-eyes-from-the-car-wreck appeal of the K-Fed/Britney pairing: what in the hell does a hot, wealthy, famous woman see in an unattractive, scraggly, broke nobody? Yet from his middle school days Kevin had belief in himself, and formed a self-image as a ladies’ man. The E! show I watched featured his ex-girlfriend describing his teen years in Fresno, and she was a delicious looking Filipina. The camera captures only the look-what-the-cat-dragged-in exterior, but any woman in his presence (including rich pop stars) would detect a vibe of self-confidence.

If Kevin can do it, so can you.

Love Is (Face) Blind

2006-10-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

Standing at the bar was a teenage model under contract with the prestigious London modeling agency, Models 1, which also represented Stephanie Seymour and Linda Evangelista. Zoë earned $1,500 a day in her photo shoots.

At the same bar was a struggling 44 year-old mime named Mick.

Would a middle-aged, broke mime stand a chance with a model half his age with a rising career? Would there be any point in Mick going over to talk to her, or should he learn to be more realistic and spare himself the embarrassment of being humiliated in public?

It turns out Mick did have a chance. You see, his was the first face that Zoë had ever seen. Despite her status as an in-demand model, she was born with a rare cognitive disability that made her “face blind,” meaning she was unable to recognize faces. Like her father, she had a hard time telling whom she was talking with, or whom she was passing on the street, so she tried to compensate by identifying voices or clothing. Her inability to recognize people inevitably caused social missteps and embarrassment.

Ironically, she was a beautiful model who could not even recognize her own face on the magazines she appeared in. Her career was taking off, but she stayed at home, because she felt emotionally distant in a world that –to her- was filled with faceless people.

She had seen Mick perform on stage earlier in the day, and with his height, his white hair and contrasting black eyebrows, she felt for the first time that she was able to “see” another human. Even more surprisingly, she was able to recognize Mick later that night at the bar. She approached him, so great was her urgency to connect with the first face that had emerged from a gray sea of anonymous mannequins. Soon she was living with him.

What are the lessons here? While you may be tempted to dismiss this encounter as merely luck, which is one point of the story –lightning can, and does strike. But more than just (face) blind luck is at play.

1) Get Up on Stage

It was Mick’s appearance on stage that made him visible to large numbers of women, one of whom turned out to be a young, hot model seemingly destined for him. If Mick had been a janitor, or a plumber, or a school teacher, would they have ever met?

You may not necessarily be up on stage, but in the mating world the boss will be at an advantage over his employees, the author will be more appealing than the Joe who reads his books, and the preacher will draw more women than the schlep on the pew. Not only is the Alpha Male more visible and higher in status, but he shows that he is ambitious, focused, able to set goals and achieve them. These are qualities that appeal to women.

Appearing on stage as a mime entails the risk of bombing. Being the entrepreneur restaurant owner is riskier than being a fry cook. And principals are fired more often than teachers. Beta Male chumps reflect a fearful mindset, while the man who fights to be “on stage” shows courage, which is attractive to women.

2) Get Out of the Frickin’ House

This is obvious, but women aren’t going to come to you. If Mick had stayed at home that night, the potential connection he had made with a model in the crowd would have come to nothing. Your biggest enemy is frustration and despair born of past failures. Screw it: Go out anyway.

In the same article in Wired there is a young man who is also face blind. At a bar he senses an attractive woman, but her facial features are meaningless to him. He approaches her, and she recognizes him, addressing him by name. Since he cannot recognize her, he stalls by talking as though he knows her, hoping she will say something that will help him figure out who the hell she is. It turns out she is his ex-girlfriend! Imagine the guts it must take for this guy with his handicap to get out and approach women, yet he doesn’t stay home and bitch about the unfairness of life.

3) Be Unique

Mick was tall, with white hair and dark, exaggerated eyebrows. You think he didn’t take crap for his odd looks? How can we explain a chump like Carrot Top having a career, if not for his distinctive hair? How did Pink get her break, for that matter? History is filled with distinctive people whose unique appearance gave them the edge (ex. Oscar Wilde, David Bowie, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Teddy Roosevelt, Napoleon, and Cleopatra.)

You might think of all women as being face blind, each day passing through hordes of faceless drones at work and on the street. These men may approach them, but they are faceless in their similarity, working at jobs, trying to impress with their empty bragging, stammering the same tired lines and desperate compliments. This explains the invisibility syndrome that I have talked about –she cannot tell you from another other guy, nor does she care to.

4) Don’t Blow It

You think that because she approached him, that it was a done deal. Wrong. He was older, odd looking, and poor. How many men would have crumbled in the presence of a young model? I have choked when approached by much lesser women. Don’t kid yourself, this was anything but easy. At some level Mick had to convince himself that he was worthy and that as far-fetched and unreal as it sounded, a gorgeous model was interested in him.

5) She’s Not a Goddess, But She Plays One on TV

A guy sees a young model appearing in the top fashion magazines, jetting between glamorous cities and strolling down the catwalk like a goddess, and then he imagines how great her life must be. A woman like her, why, she’s an angel, she’s perfect, she has everything in the world she could ever want. Because of her flawless looks he naively assumes that the rest of her life, her character, her intellect, and her relationships are divinely flawless, too.

He cannot imagine that the stunning Halle Berry is deaf in one ear because she was beaten by a loser boyfriend. It never occurs to him that a young model cannot recognize faces, and lives in painful isolation. Do not ever be intimidated by any woman, and certainly not by her looks.

Marriage Is Really Gay

2006-10-25T21:20:00.000-07:00

From Ace of Spades blog, comes these oh-my-prophetic-soul words:

I really could give a rat's ass about gay marriage. Personally, I see no reason not to allow it. I mean, shouldn't gay people have the right to be as miserable as other married people. Shouldn't they fear losing 50%+ of everything they have for, you know, scratching an itch? I say, be careful what you ask for, because once the divorce sharks get you, you're going to wish you never asked for such a "right."

A Temporary Hiatus

2006-10-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

I've just begun work on an online master's degree program, so a lot of my time has been taken up doing coursework. For a while I stepped away from the blog.

I've preached it for ages here, to take things up to the next step, and I've begun heeding my own advice. In fact, as I've begun thinking about my career goals, I realize I need to pursue it as far as a doctorate.

Years ago when I had hit rock bottom I asked myself a difficult question: "Why am I such a failure with women?" Why were my relationships with women so frustrating, and why was approaching so damned difficult? Sure, there were the occasional successes that represented lightning striking, and I began to think that lightning would not strike twice, that my luck was running out.

So I resolved to find out why. Why is it that some guys are so successful with women? It was tough, like a sucker punch to the gut, having a crush on a girl, telling her how I felt (Aaargh!), and finding out she was hot for my friend Marc. Of course, every chick was hot for Marc, who would eventually screw her, and it left me wondering if I was destined to be the butt of a cosmic joke.

Then I came across the seduction community, which looked like the lost city El Dorado. What was being offered was the chance for any guy (including me) to dramatically improve his success with women. Regardless of the guru, the core philosophy is that attraction and seduction are not random, but based on certain universal triggers within women.

The question is, how do we know any of this is true? How do we know that seduction gurus aren't just snake oil peddlers? Sure, Style picks up, and Mystery does, but is that because they're young and good looking? Or successful, in the case of Style? Even if these guys succeed due to certain skills, are those skills transferable? Imagine Michael Jordan teaching "7 Keys to Basketball Dominance." We realize that a class is not enough to bring the typical guy anywhere near Mike's level, and may not make him successful at all in basketball.

This blog is my attempt to answer those questions, and related questions, such how does a man become successful and happy? I have resolved in my master's program in psychology to find what scientific research says about science and seduction. As I find answers, I'll share them with you.

Master Sonny Umpad, RIP

2006-09-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

I was saddened today to learn of the early death of Filipino martial arts legend Sonny Umpad.
(See here here )

I met Sonny only one time in the early 90’s. My friend Ryan Osborn, our teacher Ramiro Estalilla and I were attending a seminar on the Filipino martial art of eskrima put on by Cebuano master Cacoy Cañete. Although he was in his 60’s, Cacoy was amazingly strong and gave an impressive demonstration of his style called eskrido, in which he used a stick to help throw his opponent by means of leverage, locks, and enhanced judo throws.

Sometime during the course of the day I saw a wiry Filipino with deep-set eyes standing off by himself. I don’t know why, but I knew I had seen him before. When I talked to my friend Ryan it suddenly occurred to us –we had read his book on Filipino knife fighting.

“Excuse me,” I began nervously. “Aren’t you the writer of the knife fighting book? My friend and I really enjoyed by it.”

He said that was him, and he invited us outside. Seeing the Spyderco knife on my belt, he asked to borrow it. He then opened the knife and went into the most stunning impromptu demonstration of martial arts prowess I have ever seen.

With a sharp edged, unfamiliar knife he went into a series of cut and check drills. The knife moved in a circle coming dangerously close to his stomach, while his checking hand moved outward, then in a whir the hands changed positions. As his knife moved to cut it “popped” audibly. So great was the snap on the knife I could hear it whipping into a cut, even though it had traveled only a foot or so.

My friend and I were stunned. We both knew that those strikes, delivered rat-a-tat-tat would not have sliced, but cut to the bone. Having seen the pictures of Sonny doing blindfolded knife drills, this guy was scary in the extreme.

Sonny continued to show us empty hand and stick moves. In a rarity for a martial artist, he was an inventor. Most guys who “invent” styles merely combine a bunch of different moves. But Sonny had actually created the most ingenious, unique techniques I have ever seen.

I only met Master Umpad that one time, but my friend and I were blown away, so much so that I remember it years later. What was also amazing about Sonny was that despite his scary deadliness, he was quiet, reserved, and friendly.

The purpose of this blog is to serve as a tribute to a great martial artist and to illustrate a lesson: real men teach. One of the most meaningful things you can do as a man is to share your knowledge with other men, particularly the younger generations.

I know magicians read this blog, and while I don’t expect you to offer a year-long series of lessons to all and sundry, you can either choose to help somebody by teaching a simple trick or sleight, or even just demonstrating how a move should look, or you can keep it to yourself. My mentor was invited into the home of Aldo Colombini, where Aldo taught him for several weeks and allowed him to stay in his home free of charge! Aldo doesn’t advertise that sort of generosity, but those two weeks were my mentor’s start in magic and a turning point in his life.

In contrast to Master Sonny Umpad’s openness and generosity, I knew the late Ted Lucaylucay, who had been a student of Bruce Lee’s. Unfortunately, I never learned a damn thing from Ted. Maybe he was a guro (teacher) to somebody else, but he never taught me anything.

Oh, he would have taught me plenty, but only if I paid a huge amount of money up front, plus a monthly amount, and so on, all of it adding up to a staggering heap of cash. I was driving an hour into Hanford, then several hours into Bakersfield, and training for a couple of hours before driving back. And in all the “lessons” I had with Ted, he was stalling, just going through the motions until somebody coughed up big money for the real stuff.

My friend and training partner Ryan and I paid to attend a seminar of Ted’s, and were furious and disgusted afterwards. After paying money for the seminar, it was more of the same stalling-for-time bullshit: How to hold a stick, how to twirl a stick, etc. It was at that same “seminar” that the late Grandmaster Leo Giron’s students put on one hell of brief demo, so the day was not a total loss.

Somebody’s going to get upset that I am profaning the memory of Ted Lucaylucay, but I haven’t said anything that isn’t true. I could be flippant and say he has to live with it, but that’s the bitch of dying: you can no longer spin your way out of the truth, because there’s nothing left but the memories you’ve created.

Some readers think that I’m a shallow guy fixated on money and sex, yet the truth is that we’re all hurtling toward death, and we ought to see the big picture. We know that the world is careening through space and spinning like a top at the same time, but to our limited view it seems to be standing still. Believe me, your life is not standing still, but is racing toward its end as quickly as the earth whizzes through the cosmos like a wobbly bullet.

In his brief time on earth a man can choose to leave a class legacy of generously sharing his knowledge, such as masters Sonny Umpad, Leo Giron, and Aldo Colombini, or he can leave no legacy other than the faint memory of a tight-fisted guy wrapped up in himself and angling for the next big windfall.

Master Sonny Umpad, you were a great warrior and a gentleman. I am grateful that I could meet you, even if just once.

Vox Popoli on Sex and Marriage

2006-09-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

Vox Popoli has an interesting take on marriage and women's sexual value here.

Here's the money quote:

What does God have to do with it? Precisely none of my valuation argument in yesterday's column was based on God's Will, except that Christian and other religious men retain a duty to marry in a society where it makes no logical sense for a man to marry otherwise. Marriage provides a man with nothing except increased financial and emotional risk today... he can already obtain sex, children, companionship, emotional bonding, a modern dowry equivalent and/or household services without having to commit to a state marriage contract. I defy anyone to give a single reason why a modern American man should marry that does not ultimately rest on a religious rationale.

You should take a walk around the block and mull that one over.

Thoughts on Money

2006-09-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

At the lowest point of my life I was sitting alone in a trailer park, divorced, with an old Honda station wagon in the driveway. A fat woman with a mustache sat on the porch of the trailer home across from mine, and blurted out crazy, incoherent statements at all hours of the day and night. I had no girlfriend and couldn’t get the time of day from women. (Perhaps my trailer home was a factor.) Whether I went to the mall or the nightclub, it was as if I was invisible: no woman ever seemed to notice me, nor could I catch her eye.

I taught at a ghetto school where I frequently broke up fights –some of them in my own classroom- and was so stressed that at the moment the last bell rang I headed to the nearest store, bought a couple of very tall beers, and began drinking in my station wagon on the way home.

I was in a dark pit, and I saw the faintest hint of light somewhere high above me when I believed that I could figure out why I was struggling. (As hard as it may be to believe, at that point I could neither grasp nor accept the fact that I was a failure.) Frankly, I wasn’t confident that I was able to solve my problems, but I did believe that I could come to understand them.

I was particularly at a loss to understand my total failure with women, until the day I stumbled across the insight, “Would my success with women improve if I had a million dollars?” The obvious answer was “yes,” so the first of the solutions on my list of Ways Out of This Mess was MONEY.

Perhaps this seems obvious to you, but having been raised in a “money is the root of all evil” church background I was in denial about money.

I eventually realized money wasn’t the easy answer it seemed to be –there were other missing pieces of the puzzle. Then I began to see that money was more complicated.

1) It’s Not What You Make, It’s What You Keep

This is an old saying I first heard from a rich friend of mine. Question: If you make 5 million dollars a year, are you rich? If you spend 6 million dollars a year, you are broke and digging a very deep hole of debt. Dr. Stanley in The Millionaire Mind describes people with six figure incomes who are financial wrecks because they spend as much or more than they earn.

It’s not enough to make money; you must manage it and control it. Get rid of empty purchases, and avoid debt at all costs. If you put your money into investments, things that increase in value, you can eventually quit working.

2) You Need Meaningful, Productive Work

Suppose I pay you a million dollars a year to shovel dirt. While the money sounds good, eventually you will feel empty. Purposeless work, working at a job when you feel that what you are doing doesn’t really matter, poisons the soul.

In the “money” corner of the triangle I saw that a man’s work fit there, and that it was not enough just to make money, but that a man needs meaningful work that provides him more than money, but respect and freedom as well. A man’s work should be a meaningful and individual expression of himself. You can be a lawyer or a rock star and be miserable in your career if it isn’t a “fit” and your working conditions deny you respect and freedom of expression. The meaningfulness and expressiveness of your work is more important. Think of it, could your work be described as “leaving a legacy”?

3) Money Doesn’t Create Happiness

I have the hardest time believing this, but the evidence says so. For the guy sleeping on the park bench, not knowing where his next meal is coming from, money results in a huge increase in happiness, but for the guy moving from 50 to 60 thousand a year, there’s no real increase in satisfaction.

I know this is counterintuitive. Every time I hear some rich person complaining about how hard is life is and how money doesn’t lead to happiness, I am so outraged at such sacrilege that I want to bitchslap him. Just because we have a hard time imagining a miserable rich person doesn’t mean that it isn’t so.

4) More Money May Be Counterproductive

Consider the following research:

The researchers also looked at a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey on how folks at various points of the income spectrum spend their time. They discovered that women who make over $100,000 a year spend 19.6 percent of their time on passive leisure (i.e., fun), compared to women who make less than $20,000, who spend 33.5 percent of their time kicking back or socializing. The findings suggest a "focusing illusion" that leads people to work for more money even when happier pursuits would ultimately do them more good.

Before you accept the new job with a two-hour commute, or the new managerial job that requires working on weekends, ask if it’s really worth it. It’s not called a “rat race” for nothing: we are as dumb as rats on treadmills in our pursuit of money. We’re convinced that the next five thousand will make us happier than the last 5 thousand, which for some mysterious reason didn’t make us any happier.

If more money isn’t going to make you happier, why shouldn’t you be doing work that you love?

Fear

2006-08-28T04:54:00.001-07:00

I am currently reading "Get Out of Your Way," by Robert K. Cooper. It is one of a growing number of self-improvement books based on science rather than rah-rah feel goodism and weepy stories about quadraplegics who taught themselves to play the banjo with their teeth.

We know that our brains are primitive. They function as though they are still focused on danger in the form of the snake, the tiger, or the maurading band from a rival tribe. In this environment, the guy who strode out at dawn, raised his arms to the sky and sighed, "It's going to be a beautiful day and I can do anything!" soon caught a spear to the chest or took a lion's fangs in his throat.

Although we live in safety (at least those of us outside of Compton), our minds still react in panic. The thought of approaching the good-looking girl creates the same physiological reaction as the sight of a charging bear. You want to ask for a raise, or start your own business, but you're like the hunter in the forest who smells smoke and must run for his life before he is caught up in the raging fire.

It used to be that going into a dark cave or into a new part of the forest could mean death, so the brain prefers safety. If you start to do something new, the brain sends out panic signals and steers you back to the routine, even if that something new is taking a different routeto work or trying a new artificial sweetener.

To overcome a brain based on fear and survival, one that prefers routine and safety at all costs, you must first realize what you are up against. Recognize that your brain amplifies its fears and manufactures catastrophic outcomes for actions with the slightest tinge of boldness.

Do It Now

2006-08-23T21:21:00.000-07:00

I saw him last week and I’ve been troubled ever since. The look is familiar: the neck stretched forward, the elbows tucked into the sides with the fingers splayed and poking outwards, and a look that is both innocent and vacant. He looks nothing like he did; rather than 17, he looks like a boy of seven. A thin spider’s web strand of saliva drifts from his lower lip as his wheelchair is pushed into the room next door.

Not this summer, but last summer, while fishing his boat capsized and Bobby (Let’s just call him that.) nearly drowned. But not quite. He was under long enough, and his brain was without oxygen long enough, that he is now profoundly retarded.

It made me think of the parable Jesus tells about a boss who goes on a trip and gives 3 employees differing amounts of money. When the boss returns he asks each one to account for what he did with the money.

The first employee, who was given the most money, announces he invested and earned a handsome return. The second employee was given less money, but he too was able to get a return from his investment.

The third employee wasn’t given much. He tells the boss that he was scared, so he buried the money in the backyard. “Here it is, Boss,” he says timidly.

In the parable the boss is God, and evangelical churches are so big on the God-is-love theme that they tend to gloss over the fact that God gets pissed off. And in the parable, he’s ticked off. The boss/God tells the guy he could have at least put the money in the bank and earned interest. So he sends the employee to hell.

As a kid in church I never did get that parable. How does a person go to hell for burying money in the backyard? In the parable, each employee and his money represent the life and the abilities we’ve been given, and God expects us to do something with what we’ve got. Cowardice in the form of taking the easy way and living the safe life really ticks God off.

For the two employees who invested the money, there was risk involved. But when did you ever hear this uttered by a single churchgoer ever? If you believe the Bible, God sends to hell people who avoid risk.

The crime of a dull, safe life figuratively buried underground is that there are millions of people who are too old, crippled, or incapacitated in some way, people like Bobby who have been stripped of everything, and yet we tend to bitch while we’re perfectly healthy.

Are you going to approach a woman today? Bobby will never approach another woman in his life.

Are you going to work out today? Bobby can’t work out. He doesn’t even understand what fitness means.

Will you have an original idea today? Will you do one constructive thing today to help you progress toward your dream? In a single instant Bobby lost any ability to write a book or start a project or envision a better life for himself.

I’d really prefer not to have to see Bobby, because it’s an unpleasant reminder of how fragile life is, how in a single, horrifying instant the world can be stripped from us. We want to work out tomorrow, quit our horrible job next year, wait until we’re retired to live the life of our dreams, approach the hot chick after we finish our drink, etc. For the Beta Male life is always tomorrow, and action is never now.

Bobby confronts us with the fact that even the next moment is illusory. We use the future, a distant, dreamy future in which we act and stand up for ourselves as a crutch to help us live with a disappointing life. Life must be lived, fought and earned NOW.

Take your most cherished excuse and hold it up against a lifetime in a wheelchair with a devastated brain. If Bobby had a single moment of clarity, what would he give to step out of that chair and into the life that you take for granted, regardless of whether you’re fat, skinny, old, ugly, bald, unlucky, etc.?

Spiritual Women Go for the Money

2006-08-22T21:34:00.000-07:00

“THE richer a woman becomes, the more likely she is to divorce her husband, new research has found.”

There you have it, the opening line of an article on divorce and women’s increased earnings.

The findings suggest a marriage becomes destabilized not simply because a woman’s income has risen, but because her success starts to outstrip that of her husband.

According to the researchers, this may be because the balance of power shifts, making the woman less likely to accept being lumbered with most of the household chores and increasing the chances of rows.

Once we know that women are more likely to be the first rat down the mooring cable and off the USS Matrimony when they start to make more money than their husbands, the article becomes an exercise in excusing women for their behavior. Remember the formula, “Women are noble and spiritual, while men are self-serving, violent bastards.”

In what marriage is a woman “lumbered” (a nice, neutral word) with household chores? Like husbands all over the civilized world are saying, “Hey, wench, get started on the dishes; that’s woman’s work.” What typically happens is that a woman perceives some sort of imaginary defect in the house, like the underside of the coffee table has not been polished in the last two days, and becomes huffy because hubby no longer cares. Like Desdemona futilely trying to wipe the away the damned spots, she is constantly flitting from one illusory flaw in the home to the next, all the while working herself into a lather because her husband wants to sit down and watch TV after work. It’s like complaining that sane people do not feel the same sense of urgency concerning the voices the lunatic is hearing.

Another reason may be that a woman’s greater earning power makes her more confident that it will be financially viable to leave her husband and pay a good divorce lawyer.

In other words, just as a catfish can smell a rotting corpse with every pore of its body, even in the muddy dark, a woman in the muck of money-grubbing depravity is able to sniff out a payday in every decaying marriage.

“It also appears that a female’s economic success may, indeed, cause friction within the family.” Kesselring cites “fragile male egos” reacting negatively to women’s raised status as an additional source of tension.

Can you imagine this sort of tripe being written to favor men? Try this:

“As a man becomes more successful, his wife become increasingly insecure, and her ‘fragile female ego’ causes her to ask paranoid questions like if she looks fat in her new dress, thus driving her husband into the arms of a trophy wife.”

His findings suggest that women’s growing financial success has been a strong factor in the rising number of divorces. In 2004, the number of divorces granted in the UK rose 0.2% to 167,116, the fourth successive annual increase. He argued that for every £10,000 a wife’s earnings increase relative to the family’s overall income, the chances of marital break-up rise by 1%.

Lawyers confirmed this weekend that greater financial independence for women was leading them to take the initiative in divorce in growing numbers. Louise Spitz, a divorce lawyer at Manches, a London law firm, said: “Financial independence for women has given an impetus to divorce for the simple reason that they don’t have to put up with what they otherwise might have had to.”

Because men are being skewered, the outrageousness of the last sentence flies right by the average reader. Could this sentence ever be written without a lynch mob gathering outside the office of the author?

“Financial success for men has given an impetus to divorce for the simple reason that they don’t have to put up with what they otherwise might have had to.”

Some high-earning women have found that divorce comes at the cost of making a pay-out to their less wealthy husbands. Kate Winslet, the star of the film Titanic, paid out £500,000 to her husband of three years, film director Jim Threapleton, when they divorced in 2001.

I just love the breathless tone. “Oh my gosh! Somebody had to pay out huge sums of undeserved money to a worthless leech! What has gone wrong with the world?!” This is SO scandalous when a woman gets cleaned out in a divorce, and yet totally unremarkable and to be expected, Mr. Cheapskate, that a man should be financially sodomized in a divorce. For eons, men have been stripped to the bone like a bloated cow with cerebral palsy trying to ford a piranha-infested river, and no newsroom douche feels the need to pen a concerned letter.

(By the way, James Threapleton, get a damn job. You don’t deserve 500,000 thousand pounds for screwing Kate Winslet. Hell, if anybody deserves a half million pounds, it should be any one of a billion poor blokes having to put up with their fat, nagging wives.)

Nicola Horlick, the City fund manager and mother of five, now divorced from her husband Tim, said some successful career women now preferred to avoid marriage altogether.

“They may prefer not to get married in the first place . . . because they don’t want the hassle of divorce,” said Horlick. “They will have a baby with a partner, but they won’t get married . . . if they think they are going to make reasonable sums of money they don’t necessarily want to give it away to a partner.”

Who couldn’t have seen this one coming? If a man refuses to get married he’s immature, selfish, self-centered, a playboy, a coward afraid of commitment, and so on, but if a woman refuses to get married because she might not be able to make a buck, she’s a rational, mature individual making a fully-informed decision.

This is the ugly truth behind this article: WOMEN WILL NOT GET MARRIED UNLESS THEY CAN MAKE MONEY FROM THE DEAL. Remember, 90% of women marry a many who makes more money.

Of the remaining 10%, a good portion are marrying a potential money-maker, such as the creepy, ignorant hick who is so unattractive, especially when he hollers like a moron in the middle of a 7-11. Only maybe he actually is quite handsome in a cute, rough sort of way because he is shouting after discovering that he has just hit the powerball jackpot. A nearby woman who has just now noticed his rugged appeal offers to help him carry his case of Pabst lite out to his pickup truck, and they are engaged before he can drop her off at her house. Ain’t love grand?

Of the remaining 5% or so, these women marry poorer men because they are dysfunctional psychos.

The last small fraction (1% or 2%?) are women who marry a guy because they love him, without regard to income. These women do exist, I know they’re out there, but you’re more likely to find a California Condor mistakenly being sold as a parakeet at a pet store.