I’m Not Interested In A Relationship

I bought some music from Amazon yesterday. It has been a while since I have done this, so I was unaware of the changes they have made to their process. Once I bought the songs, I was asked if I wanted to launch the cloud player. There was no second choice so I agreed. Then I was informed my cloud player was out of date and I was asked if I wanted to download the latest. The only choice was yes.

Eventually, the cloud player opened and I saw my songs. Nice. A little looking around at the new interface I saw that the songs were in the cloud, not on my PC. I’m a prime user, but I don’t use the cloud service. I had configured my account originally to automatically download music purchases. Amazon decided we needed to take our relationship to the next level and changed that for me.

A little fiddling and I am able to download them. Not exactly. I kept hitting the download button and nothing happened. This was starting to remind me of every long term relationship I’ve ever had with a woman. I try again and I’m informed I have to change my settings. OK, we’re definitely in a relationship now. I fiddle with this for a while and I get no where. Well, I get frustrated. I guess that is somewhere.

I take a look at where I save my music and discover it is restricted for some reason. I then remember I was trying to get my PC to talk to my XBox. In order to do that I had to have an extended exchange with Microsoft Media Center and my XBox. I probably spent two hours trying to get that to work so I could play a video. I ended up watching it on my PC after two hours of dealing with Microsoft.

Somewhere in the process, Media Center locked down all of my media folders. I guess this is Microsoft telling me they are jealous of my relationship with iTunes and Amazon. And yes, iTunes was not working now because it could not read those directories. I also noticed that Media Center had created a new user on my system. I guess this is for the XBox to talk to my PC. Who knows? Microsoft is such a jealous mistress.

Anyway, I unriddle all of this and fixed the permissions. I finally download my music and my transaction with Amazon was complete. I still have the cloud player on there and I have to get rid of the crappy Microsoft junk that caused all of this. The point of all this is it is getting increasingly difficult to have a transactional relationship with these companies. They expect a much deeper relationship.

I’m not interested in building a relationship with Amazon. I just want to buy my stuff and move on. The word “share” has become this screaming siren, warning you that some multinational is about to waste hours of your time trying to get to know you. By “getting to know you” I mean gathering up details about your life that they will use to “monetize” you down the road. Monetize means ease you into a situation where they get to skim money from your wallet at will and sell your personal information to other skimmers.

This is the world in which we find ourselves as “citizens” in late empire America. You cannot be left alone. If you want to do just about anything, you have to have a relationship with some company that is usually working hand and glove with the state to “nudge” you in the direction they prefer. Simple transactions like buying a song suddenly turn into elaborate time wasting exorcises. The great tech boom has resulted in the exact opposite of what libertarian technologists promised thirty years ago.

The Clever Fraction

One of the interesting things about first millennium Britain is the role of cleverness in maintaining the family line. The shrewd rulers had to be both cunning and powerful, in order to maintain the family position. The ruling clans were always fighting among themselves and plotting against the other families. Much like the Old West, getting killed by treachery was more common than getting killed in single combat.

That came to mind when reading this story about that odious toad, Al Sharpton.

A drug trafficker who worked for Al Sharpton’s nonprofit in the 1980s said that despite the preacher’s denials, he was eager to get a slice of the lucrative drug deal captured on FBI surveillance video.

“It was greed. He just wanted money,” Robert Curington, 72, told The Post during a two-day interview at his North Carolina home, detailing for the first time how Sharpton stepped into the FBI’s trap — and was then forced to become a federal informant.

Sharpton has said he showed interest in the drug deal only because he feared the undercover agent was armed. He also claimed that he snitched for the feds — as first reported by The Smoking Gun this week — because the mob was threatening him.

Curington called all of that a tall tale.

He instead provided a detailed account of how Sharpton wined and dined a man he thought was a South American drug lord — and said Sharpton met him not just once, but three times.

Sharpton’s saga began in the Manhattan offices of boisterous boxing big shot Don King in 1983, Curington said.

An unnamed felon trying to duck a 30-year prison sentence promised the feds he could help them nail King on coke-dealing charges.

An undercover FBI agent, using the name Victor Quintana, set up a meeting with King to discuss a boxing match in the Bahamas — but King had a bad feeling about the potential business partner and pawned him off on Sharpton.

Don King is an exceptionally clever and cunning person. In fact, he is in the top-1% category. You will meet few men as cunning and sly as King. It is how he avoided the clutches of the FBI for five decades, despite being a criminal. It is how he maneuvered the Mafia out of boxing and largely ran the sport for decades – without killing anyone or going to prison. That’s an amazing accomplishment. Few mobsters ever die of old age and outside of prison. King is in a very small club.

The multidimensional thinking at work here is impressive. If Quintana was legitimate, King would get his piece as Sharpton was his guy. If the guys was just a crook, then Sharpton would get fleeced, not King. If the guy was a cop, then King avoids the FBI trap and Sharpton is out of the way without King getting his hands dirty. Intuitively, King saw the probabilities and charted the course most likely to benefit him. Sharpton, a first rate grifter in his own right, was a piker compared to King.

Then we have this.. The casinos do more to guard against cheating than any organization on earth. They bring all the toys to the party. They use surveillance, facial recognition, statistics, behavior sciences, you name it. If it can be used to catch cheaters, they have it. Talk to anyone working at the higher levels of casino security and you are talking to someone operating at a level only found in the upper reaches of the NSA and MI6. They are that good.

Despite this, exceptionally clever men find a way to beat the house. The cheat has to be right once, while the house has to be right every time. A small mistake like a defect in the playing cards can cost the house millions. The scammers have a million tricks to get the edge on the legitimate operator. They are full-time scammers, dedicating their life to finding the open door to exploit. Their targets – and the scammers know this – are part-time defenders, therefore never as good as the scammers.

There’s a lesson there that undermines all of the “isms.” Whether it is socialism, Marxism or libertarianism, they depend on people voluntarily going along with the spirit of the program. It is why socialism and Marxism always end in a blood bath. The clever fraction can’t stop gaming the system, It is their nature. Once the socialists or Marxists get this, they start killing the uncooperative. If libertarians ever gained control of a country, I suspect it would end the same way.

ePawnshop

The so-called new economy is, in most cases, just the use of technology to circumvent the rules and regulations of the old economy. By operating on-line, they can escape state regulators. This company is a good example. it is hard to tell from the site, but their marketing suggests they are an asset backed lender. That means they lend to people who can pledge an asset that is of greater value than the loan. That’s different from an underwriter, which fund a purchase of an asset.

Pawn shops are almost as old as prostitution. Mosaic law addressed lending, which in those days was exclusively asset based lending. The Greeks and Romans had pawn brokers. English law is based on Roman law as regards pawn brokers. In America, every state has laws regulating pawn shops. The pawn shop owner has to undergo a background check and be finger printed. They are required to keep detailed records of all items taken in and get positive identification of the customers. The state requires these records to be made available to police on demand.

That’s what’s puzzling about these on-line operations. Where are they licensed and how can they do business across state lines? Here’s an article from a couple of years ago on the growth of mega-pawn shops. It’s not hard to see where this is headed. Local pawn dealer will start buying protection from their state legislature. The Internet guys will try to do the same and we get a replay of Tesla in New Jersey.

Anyway, it is a good example of how we are running out of places to employ technology to squeeze out profits. The low hanging fruit from the information age has been picked. We are now into the great settling out as the dust clears. Just as the great fortunes of the industrial age were built prior to the Great Depression, the great fortunes of the Communications age have been built prior to the Great Recession. There are a few plumbs to be picked and maybe ePawn is one of them, but the pickings are slim.

Modern Sophistry

One of the things you always see with reformers and left-wing critics is the phenomenon of Chesterton’s fence. That’s the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The reformer and liberal critic never bothers to understand why the current state of affairs. They just want it gone and have no interest in why it exists. The reformer and radical is always the jury of one, where their whims trump all evidence to the contrary.

Homosexual marriage is the most obvious example. The advocates never asked why marriage has been boy-girl for ten thousand years. Instead they mutter some nonsense about religion, but that’s as far as they go. Libertarians are the worst offenders. When they start ranting about the state licensing marriage, they act like it sprung from nothingness. Their own ignorance is held up as if it were a mirror, reflecting a newly discovered hole in conventional wisdom. A good example is in this post.

I have a question that has only provoked a lot of confused righteous indignation in other forums, and I wonder if TBQ readers might have more thoughtful responses, if we phrase it as a logic puzzle.

My question: I don’t see why it’s good policy to give criminal defendants a Fifth Amendment right to silence in their own trial, as opposed to giving them the same rights and obligations as third-party witnesses (who can be subpoenaed and required to answer questions).

Notice how his ignorance of civics and the history behind this priovision in the law is treated as an asset in his argument. That would be fine if it were just an admission and a plea for help. Instead, it is wrapped in indignation, as if it is the fault of the rest of us that this guy does not know basic civics. The implication is that the Fifth Amendment is illogical because the author does not understand why it exists. The burden is now on everyone else to alleviate him of his ignorance.

This is a common trick from radicals pushing some cause. They frame their own ignorance as a sort of universal ignorance that they have just stumbled upon. Having discovered this hitherto unobserved irrationality, they offer up an alternative and then challenge everyone else to 1) justify the current arrangements or 2) offer an alternative to their proposal that they think is better. It’s rhetorical base stealing that turns their novel idea into the default, while convention is the novelty.

However, every time I’ve asked this question, people have reacted as if I was suggesting that the state should be allowed to torture people into confessing. Obviously that’s not what I’m asking. I just don’t see a principled reason why defendants can’t be required to answer a question that is relevant, subject to the rules laid out in paragraph 3.

Notice the claim that his innocent query has stumped the brightest minds on earth. He has yet to get the answer he likes, so that means no answer exists. The use of neutralized logic phrases is particularly annoying. “Obviously that’s not what I’m asking” avoids the charge, without ever addressing it. It also makes it appear the invisible audience to whom he is referring is irrational. The poor guy is an island of rationality in a sea of mean spirited loons!

The funny part is that he is suggesting the state torture people into confessing. Maybe he knows that and that’s why he is shifting the focus from what he is suggesting onto straw men. If the state can punish you for lying to agents of the state and they can force you to answer questions, the honest answering of which could lead to punishment, the state is compelling you to bear witness against yourself. Anyway, the comments are worth reading. Comment #6 takes the author’s tactic and turns it around on him.

You’ve done a good job of comparing fifth amendment rights to the ability of the state to subpoena third parties. It makes perfect sense to me that if it’s acceptable for state to subpoena third parties, it should also be acceptable to subpoena the accused. I hold the position that the state should NOT be able to subpoena the accused OR third parties though. To convince me, you’ll need to provide good reasons why the state should have this particular coercive power in the first place.

I don’t think it is intentional. This sort of sophistry is so common, people do it without even knowing it now. All logic expressions imply a set of conditions that would make them false. For instance, all men are human is a logical expression. To falsify this, we would need a man who is not human. That does not mean it can be falsified. There are scientific fast that cannot be falsified, because they are axioms.

What the modern sophist does is insert taste or opinion into the search for truth. “Vanilla ice cream is the best” is not true statement. Everyone knows that. All swans are white, however, is a logical statement. Bolting on “you have to convince me that all swans are white” invalidates the logical expression. Of course, it sets up a standard that can never be met. The judge in this case can simply claim you have to convinced him, no matter how much evidence is stacked up in your favor.

Putting it together you get what looks like a deductive examination of an existing rule, law or custom. What you really get is ignorance framed as a question and a petulant demand from the questioner. It is not an affirmative argument or even a logical expression. It’s a temper tantrum, except the performance of it shifts the focus from the person having the tantrum onto something self. It’s performance art.

Sunday Ramblings…

Every Sunday I head off to the market for my supplies. I’m somewhat of a cheap bastard so I bring a lunch every day.  It is not just the expense; it is the quality of food. I can’t keep my weight down without preparing my own food. I’m not sure what it is, but I can’t seem to judge the calorie content of restaurant food. I know restaurants load up their food with salt so maybe that has something to do with it. I don’t know. All I know is I would weigh 300 pounds if I went out for lunch every day…

At the market the checkout girl was a short little gal with a nose ring. It is the ball ring type, which almost always means lesbian. She also wears boy’s pants, another sign of being a dyke. Her causal hostility to the penis people also suggests she is a dyke. I’ve been on earth for a long time now and I have never met a dyke who was cheery. Even the pleasant ones seem to be struggling with rage or depression.

Homosexuals have a significantly higher rate of mental problems, as well as drug and alcohol abuse.  Lesbians struggle more than homosexual males so perhaps that’s why I notice the angry/depressed dykes. Women, by design, are more expressive than men. Their unhappiness seems odd, though. Straight men find male homosexuality to be disgusting, while no one really thinks that about female homosexuality. But, maybe the cause of female homosexuality carries a high incidence of depression as well…

I’m fond of pointing out that the easiest way to refute libertarian arguments about market genius is to go to a market. Today, I saw a dozen or so couples, with small children, at the market. That’s common. It is also is entirely irrational. They spend a lot of time and energy bundling up the kids for the trip. The kids are a hassle in the store. Nothing about what they are doing is rational, yet they are always there. Worse yet, they are spreading their irrationality because the kids and the giant carts they use slow down the rest of us…

This trend of making mundane tasks a family event is new. When I was a boy, parents rarely took their kids to the store. Mothers during the day would drag pre-school kids around on errands, but that was it. It was considered inappropriate, for example, to take kids to the hardware store or to the furniture store. Today, people expect the rest of us to help mind their kids. Everywhere you go there are kids running wild. Home Depot has carts shaped like race cars for the kids to ride in while mom and dad shop….

People believe all sorts of weird things about food. It is because we are programmed, I think, to accept direction from authority. When Food Inc. or Uncle Sam says something is good, people believe it. An example of this was in the cereal aisle. I rarely eat cereal. Health-wise, it is no different than ice cream. As a treat it is fine, but not as a meal. That includes the healthy stuff. Carbs are carbs.

I’m looking for something and I hear a couple debating one form of Kashi to another. All of it is crap, but you can see from the website why moonbats like it. They have all the buzzwords and tribal chants packed into their marketing. The couple truly believed that stuff is superior to a bowl of Fruit Loops, which it is not. They would be better off snorting a bowl of sugar…

A commenter mentioned his conversion to a low-carb diet. When I wrestled, our coach called this an athlete’s diet. In wrestling, the goal is maximum strength and stamina at the lowest possible weight. Wrestlers are always cutting weight and are obsessed with their diet. You have to be. Our coach preached a diet of chicken, turkey, eggs, green vegetables and fruit as a snack. When I hit my middle years I went back to that diet and lost most of the weight I gained in my 30’s. I eat a dozen eggs a week and all the meat I can stand. My cholesterol is low so my doctor tells me to stick with it…

Another commenter complained that I ignored the real issue facing our electric grid when I went off on that fat tub of goo, Newt Gingrich. Here’s the thing. There’s nothing we can do about the electric grid. The chances of someone getting a nuke here and setting it off are infinitesimally small. Even if they manage it, the chances they do so in a way that wrecks the grid is equally low.

I’m old enough now to have a few scares under my belt. Every one of them comes with hands out demanding cash from the public till. In the fullness of time, all but a few were shown to be scams. Air pollution from cars is a notable exception. Lead in gas is probably another. Given Gingrich’s habit of selling his opinion to the highest bidder, we should assume he is being paid to lie in an effort to scam money from Congress.

My advice here is simple. Never trust a dishonest man…

Me & LED

I’m fond of saying that government makes liars and weasels of the citizenry. A good example is the light bulb. Like everyone reading this, I have used incandescent bulbs by default for my whole life. Modern hipsters insist on calling them “Edisons.” The young guy who sold me the fancy new LED bulbs the other day seemed proud of himself when he had the chance to say “Edisons” with confidence of someone who is sure he is about to bring a new believer into his cult.

Anyway, I got talked into trying an LED the other day, so I decided to go to the local light bulb emporium. These stores are popping up all over. I guess that means we have joined the future in the same way small towns used to celebrate getting a McDonald’s. Right out of the chute you know we are headed to a bad place when you can build a nationwide retail chain around batteries and light bulbs. Then again The Christmas Tree Shops are built around a single holiday.

The store is not big and probably exists mostly on batteries. We have all sort or weird battery needs these days. I asked the kid for the LED bulbs and he took me to the display and started in on the sales pitch. While he was talking I’m looking at the price of these things. Looking at $19.99 for a light bulb is a bit of an eye-opener. I then hear the guy say something about the LED bulb producing the same amount of light as a much higher watt incandescent bulb.

At that point I started focusing again, realizing that it takes a good sales pitch to sell a $20 light bulb. He’s telling me about lumens and watts, while I’m thinking about physics.  A watt is equal to the amount of energy in 1 ampere of current flowing at 1 volt. A lumen has something to do with the amount of light visible to humans. It was one of those moments when I wish I had retained more of my physics training. It’s a safe bet the retail clerk really has no idea what any of this means.

I’m thinking about the lumens, trying to remember if there was a conversion to watts when he says, “The real benefit of the LED is that it will last 40 years.” I’m 48 so that means the bulb will still be going strong when I’m 88 or dead. I look at the kid and say, “So I can leave these bulbs in my will?” He just looks at me, probably trying to wrap his mind around the idea of his light bulbs lasting longer than my life. When you’re young, death is a foreign concept. I just give him the stony face to see what he will do.

Eventually, he just says, “I guess you could. I never really thought of that.” I take some pleasure in the knowledge he will now be thinking about that the next time an old person comes in the shop. When he gets ready to tell some old guy that the bulb will last forty years, but the old guy may not make it forty months. It underscores the ridiculousness of selling something people still think of as disposable, on the argument that it will last two generations.

Of course, no one thought about putting light bulbs in their will, unless they were a vindictive jerk. For close to a century now light bulbs cost a few pennies and you threw them away when you moved. The typical house may have a dozen or more bulbs. The total cost of all of them less than this one LED he was holding. Never have I heard someone complain about the bulbs in their house. Sure, you have to spend money on an outside spot light or those weird little bulbs in a dining room fixture.

Like everyone else to this point, I’ve never needed a professional consultation on my home lighting. At most, you spend time with an electrician on how best to wires the house or an outside area, so you can get proper lighting. That’s a different matter than getting professional advice on where to place the lamp. Government has created a whole class of people, who make a living helping people do what generations took for granted. We live in the age of make-work.

That’s not the end of it. The reason we’re now including our lighting choices in our wills is corporate titans figured this was a good way to monetize their country’s green obsession. In this case, “Big Bulb” got Congress to ban the cheap alternative so we will be forced to spend a mortgage payment to replace the light bulbs in the house. Phillips and GE are not even lubing up before they monetize us. It is just a full on prison rape with light bulbs. Yeah capitalism!

I know, these bulbs will save me money. I can do math. Looking at my electric bill, I fail to see how the energy savings is worth investigating. If I lived in a stadium or an arena, I could see it. The only real savings I can see is the replacement. Let’s pretend the guy at the battery store was right. My “Edisons” will cost about $20 until my death. That’s about the same as the LED. Since we know the LED will not last that long, I’m losing on that score. In fairness, the LED’s will get cheaper so the math will get better over time.

Here’s the math that matters. Big Bulb was making about 10% profit on bulbs before the green lunatics got involved. That’s about a penny per bulb when you consider the manufactured cost. If they have the same margins on the LED, they are making 100 times that per bulb. The bulb-person ration will not change anytime soon. Initially people will be buying these expensive bulbs in the same volume as the normal bulbs. Big Bulb gets to see their profit soar for a couple of years.

What are the odds that Big Bulb will go out of business in a few years after all of our bulbs are replaced with these lifetime bulbs? After all, if everyone goes to these new bulbs that last forever, how long before bulb sales collapse? That’s where you know the longevity argument is bogus. The LED will last longer, for sure, but the smart people at Big Bulb did the math and they know their new bulbs will not so long as to make the bulb business irrelevant.

The topper is the bulbs I bought are not all that great. Maybe it is just a matter of getting used to it, but my bedroom now looks like a film school scene. The area immediately around the lamps is brighter and whiter. Everywhere else is in shadows. Maybe I got bad bulbs, but for $20 a pop, well, I expected more. Forty bucks is not what it used to be, but it is lunch for the week. Thanks to the helping hand of government, I spent $40 to get monetized and I sleep in a film noir movie.

I hate When This Happens

You go out for a long weekend and come home to a house full of plumpers.

A comedian under the impression he had rented out his posh Chelsea pad to a man with family in town for a wedding returned home to a wild orgy, he said.

Ari Teman, 31, claimed he left his apartment keys with David Carter, 32, on Friday night and stepped out for dinner before leaving town.

When he returned to the building to grab his luggage, a rowdy sex party featuring “Big Beautiful Women” was in the process of being shut down by building management.

“This was just so bizarre,” said Teman, who had rented his apartment via the Web site Airbnb.
“The worst part of the Internet right there was in my apartment.”

“There were all sorts of people walking out of my apartment and people coming in from the back yard. It was a huge mess.”

Teman said his apartment was trashed by a group of nearly nude, overweight people. After the shindig was broken up, Carter was a nervous wreck in the lobby, Teman says.

“This guy had a look of horror on his face,” Teman said. “He didn’t expect to see me for a few days. He said, ‘They shut us down, man, they’re shutting it down.’ ”

Carter, however, claims he just had a small, quiet get-together and that Teman was overreacting.

“I had six people, friends and family,” Carter told The Post. “He is making a big to-do because he is being evicted.”

Carter posted on Airbnb that he wanted a place for his in-laws to stay while they were in town for a wedding, Teman claims.

“He had a verified account and he seemed legit,” Teman said. “He had three positive reviews and so I approved the deal.”

When Teman later searched Carter’s phone number on the Internet, he found the raunchy soiree involving plus-sized women advertised online as “Turn Up Part 2: The Pantie Raid.”

One person even blasted out Teman’s Seventh Avenue address in a tweet for an “XXX FREAK FEST.”

Carter denied he had anything to do with the ad.

A web ad that was displaying information on the alleged orgy.

“There was no address on the advertisement and I had nothing to with it,” he said.

The professional comedian called police, but no charges were filed. He now claims he wants to move.

“I just don’t want to touch anything in there,” he said. “I threw sheets all over everything.”

Carter claimed that a little partying never hurt anyone.

One of the reasons to be skeptical of economists is right here in the story. People are liars and unreliable. Economics has as an axiom that in the aggregate, people are honest. Simple observation and 5,000 years of history says otherwise. It is similar to the complaint about crowd-sourcing. You see it in the story. One person is dumb and foolish, but we’re supposed to believe that a million morons are smart and wise, just by the magic of numbers. Similarly, a million liars is not making for an honest market.

The Trouble With Mel

This is an interesting story. Mel Gibson got in trouble for, among other things, claiming that the Jews run Hollywood. The Jews who run Hollywood did not like Mel saying they run Hollywood, so they have banned him from Hollywood. Gibson is now called an anti-Semite because the Jews who run Hollywood don’t like him. It used to be than an anti-Semite was someone who hated Jews, but now it is someone who is hated by the Jews, which is why Mel Gibson in on the blacklist.

Now, the Jews who run Hollywood and the Jews who run the media, claim that Gibson is blackballed because he is bad for business.  I suspect most people don’t care about what Gibson thinks about anything. Danny Glover, for example, is a raging bigot and paranoid lunatic. Susan Sarandon is probably a schizophrenic. Her former paramour is a communist. Who is worse? A Holocaust denier or a guy in favor of murdering people with whom he disagrees?

No one really knows if Gibson is toxic with the public. He could be. Perhaps the public will not embrace a crazy, drunken anti-Semite. Worse, they could hold it against the studio that hires him or the actors who work with him. There are a lot of unknowns and for any business, unknowns are scary. Even so, the real issue here is the Jews running Hollywood can’t bring themselves to forgive Gibson. These are a people whose holy book is mostly a list of past enemies, so Mel will be waiting a long time.

The Sex Rackets

A popular way for campus degenerates to get attention to host a workshop of festival celebrating a depraved sexual act. Sometimes these are part of a whole week of degenerates performing from the public. On the one hand, the left-wing media loves pushing this stuff in the face of white people. On the other the left gets to pretend they are edgy outsiders challenging orthodoxy. This story posted on National Review is about a recent one of these events at Rutgers University.

University of Michigan had a BDSM class. University of Arizona had the Condom Olympics. Many more have Sex Weeks, or some variant of that sort. Now Rutgers, a public university, has jumped into the fray.

On Tuesday, Rutgers hosted a female orgasm workshop as part of a week-long event called “Sexapalooza.” Sex educators Marshall Miller and Maggie Keenan-Bolger conducted the Tuesday night event for “orgasm aficionados and beginners of all genders.” Participants came to “learn about everything from multiple orgasm to that mysterious G-spot.”

The event was particularly marketed to struggling boyfriends who want to help their girlfriends to orgasm.

Other events at Sexapalooza, which ends on March 12, include a Sex Toy Workshop, complete with a sex-toy raffle,  a lecture called “Having Great Sex,” and a Sex Fair with “condom races, condom lollipops, and education tables.”

Sex Discuss Here!, the organization that ran the event, describes the female orgasm workshop as “our most popular program.”

It’s always fun to look up the bios of the people involved in these things.

Kate Weinberg
Kate graduated from DePaul University in Chicago. She describes a “lightbulb moment” she had while taking an intensive HIV/AIDS course in college, when she realized how sexuality “is a thing so intimately connected to politics, religion, guilt, expectation, the ways in which we live and are allowed to live. It’s one of those things that seems to explain the world around it.” Little did she know at that moment, but she had begun her journey toward becoming a sex educator.

Dorian Solot
Dorian co-founded Sex Discussed Here!, co-created all its programs, and trains and supervises our fantastic team of sex educators. She has presented over 500 programs around the country at colleges and universities, businesses, churches, regional and national conferences, and adult education centers, and continues to present a small number of programs each year. However, these days you’re more likely to work with Dorian during the planning process for your event: she is the person who answers our phone and emails, guiding hundreds of students and staff people through the process of making each event a success.

As a breast cancer survivor who discovered a lump in her own breast at age 26, Dorian knows that being comfortable with her own body may have saved her life. As a result, she is passionate about increasing people’s knowledge and comfort with their own bodies. Trained as a sexuality educator at Brown University, Dorian has authored several articles about the scientific study of female orgasm. In addition, she is a certified birth doula, providing professional labor support to women and their partners during childbirth. (As she jokes, “If I’m gonna teach how babies get in there, the least I can do is help women get them out of there, too.”)

One of the fascinating things about this age is that the Jews seem to be trying very hard to prove the anti-Semites are correct. Every single time one of these degeneracy festivals turns up, the people behind it are Jewish. The counter is that it is just a coincidence that two percent of the population is so wildly over-represented in anti-Western and anti-white activity. Maybe, but string together enough coincidences and you have what experts call a pattern.

These women put a lot of importance of “being passionate” about stuff. Hitler was passionate too. At least that’s the claim from the professional anti-fascists, but that is not something they ever consider. For them, passion is always good, while things they don’t like are extremists. Now, the “doula” is a new one. This is not something that comes up in these stories. Wiki provides an interesting story.

A doula also known as a labour coachand originating from the Ancient Greek word δούλη meaning female slave),is a nonmedical person who assists a woman before, during, or after childbirth, as well as her partner and/or family, by providing physical assistance, and emotional support.  The provision of continuous support during labour by doulas (as well as nurses, family, or friends) is associated with improved maternal and fetal health and a variety of other benefits.

Dana Raphael is credited with inventing the term.

Dr. Dana Raphael is a medical anthropologist, writer and lecturer. Her interest in breastfeeding inspired her to found The Human Lactation Center in 1975 with Margaret Mead, an institute devoted to researching patterns of lactation worldwide. The Center is now a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that has consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. She is also the Executive Director of the Eleventh Commandment Foundation, a NGO that researches the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse on women’s experience of pregnancy, labor, childbirth and lactation.

She is credited with initiating the role of the modern doula, a supportive person who pairs up with women during their labor and delivery and helps the new mother to assure her success with breastfeeding.

Dr. Raphael has served as an adjunct professor at Yale University, School of Medicine, and as an invited lecturer in the United States, China, India and Japan. She has received two Fulbright awards, chaired or participated in more than fifty conferences and symposiums, written or edited five books and over 50 articles.

She is not obviously a lesbian, but no mention of children is usually a tell. Even feminist women include the names of their children on the resumes and official bios. It is their signature accomplishment. When you get into the earth goddess type feminism, the children are an even more important totem. Despite the oogily-boogily from feminists about “gender roles” they cannot escape the gravitational pull of biology.

There’s been a theory kicking around for years that the expansion of the state has been about putting people to work in nonsense jobs to keep them busy.  The collapse of the manufacturing base meant millions of idle people looking for work. Putting them into government jobs, where they have something to so was the answer. Walk into any government office and you see lots of people siting around looking busy. Maybe that’s true, but the permission state does result in a high number of grifters.

These people in the sex education rackets are entirely dependent on government and it appears their primary target is the public schools. They are flush with tax dollars to spend on this stuff. They most likely ride the grant rackets too. Billions are funneled to semi-employed social science majors through the grant system. Without it, many of these people are stocking shelves at Target. Instead, they get to fill your kid’s head minds with agit-prop intended to make them hate themselves and their ancestors.

Female Trouble

The awfulness of feminism was not always obvious. The “first wave” of feminism, conveniently called first-wave feminism, was about women getting the vote and some legal protections. A lot of men knew giving women the vote was a bad idea, but not so bad that they were willing to fight to stop it. A century ago when women were demanding the vote, feminism did not look like an assault on nature. It was just unattractive women making a nuisance of themselves in public.

Second-wave feminism is where the nuttiness bobbed above the water line. That’s where we get words like “gender” worming their way into our vocabulary. That is, sex is an arbitrary construct created by men to oppress women. The remedy was to smash up family life, give women a handful of rubbers and money for cab fare as dating aids and demand that men stop thinking about sex. That sounds crude, but crudeness was the most obvious feature of second wave feminism in the 60’s and 70’s.

Third-wave feminism takes this to another level of crazy where reality is infinitely negotiable. Here we get a variety of new sexes, claims about women being witches from another planet and the sun revolves around the earth. That sounds like mockery, but it is hard to satire this stuff. When people are claiming the biology is not just a social construct, but part of a grand conspiracy, it’s hard to not mock it. Despite this, the lunacy has just started. Soon, men will be afraid to around women in the office or even in public.

Crazy rants against nature in the abstract are one thing. Sitting in your college office ranting about males has a different result than throwing yourself off the roof claiming you can fly. But, the crazy rants eventually lead to someone testing the theory. The insanity of feminism is now showing up in the emergency rooms of America as women and girls test the theory that there is no biological difference between men and women. At the Olympics, girls competing on courses built for men are getting hurt a lot.

Sarka Pancochova, a Czech snowboarder, led the slopestyle event after the first run. On her second trip down the course of obstacles and jumps, she flew through the air, performed a high-arcing, spinning trick and smacked her head upon landing. Her limp body spun like a propeller into the gully between jumps and slid to a stop.

Pancochova was soon on her feet, and the uneasy crowd cheered. Her helmet was cracked nearly in half, back to front.

She was one of the lucky ones, seemingly O.K., but her crash last week was indicative of a bigger issue: a messy collage of violent wipeouts at these Olympics. Most of the accidents have occurred at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, the site of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events like halfpipe, slopestyle and moguls.

And most of the injuries have been sustained by women.

The rants against nature are not just showing up in silly snow activities. The US military is putting women in combat units. It is one thing for a gal to break her neck trying to ski like a boy. It is unfortunate and sad, but not the end of the world for anyone but her. Putting physically and mentally inferior soldiers into combat units is another matter. That’s where mother nature let’s you know reality is not negotiable. Men in combat have a way to handle the physically and mentally unfit within their ranks.

Women are not men. Men are bigger, faster and stronger than women. Studies have been conducted using the mountain of data collected by the military over the last 100 years. One of the ancillary benefits of having a massive standing army is a massive amount of data about the humans entering and serving in that standing army. It provides the best cross-section of the American population possible. Since America is a mixed society, it works as a handy proxy for the human race in general.

“Using the standard Army Physical Fitness Test … the upper quintile of women at West Point achieved scores on the test equivalent to the bottom quintile of men.”

West Point is a training center for the very best who are willing to join the Army. What the data shows is the best women are physically the same as the very worst men. That may not sound so bad, but according to the data, “the average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man.” Anyone who has played sports, goes to the gym or lived on earth knows this is fairly obvious. There is a reason why girls don’t play football and boys are not allowed to play in women’s sports.

There’s another bit to this. Women and men think differently too. For instance, there are differences in IQ. Males are over represented in fields like math and science, but under represented in nurturing professions like education and medicine. The difference between men and women show up across the range of human attributes. Men and women are different and they are complimentary. For all of human history, people, both sexes, understood and excepted this.