The first loudspeakers designed to alert pedestrians of approaching electric vehicles (EVs) are now being produced. What happens if most cars are electric? More noise seems counterproductive - is there a better system?
The preceding article is a "sneak peek" from Automotive Technology, a newsletter
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A new year, a new decade, has us wondering what the next will bring. This video excerpt from Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan, comments on our tiny place in the universe, and our history. Think of all the blood that has been spilled — for a speck of a dot. (a paraphrase) Humans aren’t really all that significant or important, but we are slowly changing an entire planet’s climate and rendering it unsupportive of life as we know it. We are sort of like suicidal parasites.
The future is now being formed in the minds of people who see that we need to live another way in the coming decades, starting soon, or people won’t live at all. I hope that in this new decade, these ideas start to be taken seriously. People should not be in battle with nature, but realize it’s where we get everything necessary for life from, and take much better care of it. We don’t have a spare planet.
The following is excerpted from James Hansen’s “Storms of My Grandchildren,” the climate scientist’s new book about what is needed to stop global warming. [This is a book I got recently and from reading it so far, one I definitely recommend. You can order it from Amazon by clicking on it in the right-hand column.] Hansen never thought Copenhagen was the right approach or that it would amount to much, so he’s always had a “let’s move on and do something” approach to global warming, which is what his book is about.
“We have finally arrived at the main story: what we need to do to solve the climate problem, and how we can save a future for our grandchildren.
The problem demands a solution with a clear framework and a strong backbone. Yes, I know that halting and reversing the growth of carbon dioxide in the air requires an “all hands on deck” approach– there is no “silver bullet” solution for world energy requirements.
People need to make basic changes in the way the live. Countries need to cooperate. Matters as seemingly intractable as population must be addressed. And the required changes must be economically efficient. Such a pathway exists and is achievable.
Let’s define what a workable backbone and framework should look like. The essential backbone is a rising price on carbon applied at the source (the mine, wellhead, or port of entry), such that it would affect all activities that use fossil fuels, directly or indirectly.
Our goal is a global phaseout of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions. We have shown, quantitatively, that the only practical way to achieve an acceptable carbon dioxide level is to disallow the use of coal and unconventional fossil fuels (such as tar sands and oil shale) unless the resulting carbon is captured and stored. We realize that remaining, readily available pools of oil and gas will be used during the transition to a post-fossil-fuel world. But [...]
You can keep your neck snuggie and baby snuggie and space snuggie. Real ballers know that the Snuggle Suit is the be all and end all.
Not only is this actual product currently for sale, it's also 66% off at JC Penny. If you don't wish you had one of these to lounge away your New Year's hangover in right now, you're doing something wrong. Available in four colors and infinity style points. [Consumerist]
10 years ago, you could buy the HP Jornada 548 with a color screen, which let you listen to MP3s, surf the web, check your email, and keep a calendar. It had a touchscreen. It ran Windows. It was awesome.
Today, you can buy a smartphone with a color screen, which lets you listen to MP3s, surf the web, check your email and keep a calendar. It has a touchscreen. It runs Windows. It does everything—everything—better than its ancestor did, in a much sexier hardware package. Plus it makes calls! It will cost you less than the $450 Jornada 548, though you'll probably have to sign a two-year cellphone contract. Amazingly, though, its software looks and feels almost exactly the same as its ten-year-old brother.
I don't just want to beat up on Microsoft here, because disregarding aesthetics and UX, Windows Mobile has evolved a lot since it was just a twinkle in Windows CE's eye. But not as much as the competitors around it, and not fast enough to stay relevant. So instead of looking back, let's look forward: Microsoft, Windows Mobile 7, whatever it is, is your chance to win us back. The mobile space moves faster than it did back at the turn of the millenium, back when you had some of the best mobile software on the market, but it also has a shorter memory. Show us what you've got; we're eager to see it.
Why does it seem that American society is in decline, that fairness and decorum are receding, that that socialism and tyranny are becoming malignant despite the majority of the public being averse to such philosophies, yet the true root cause seems elusive? What if everything from unsustainable health care and social security costs, to stagnant home prices and wage stagnation, to crumbling infrastructure and metastasizing socialism, to the utter decimation of major US cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, could all be traced to a common origin that is extremely pervasive yet is all but absent from the national dialog, indeed from the dialog of the entire Western world?
Today, on the first day of the new decade of '201x' years, I am going to tell you why that is. I am hereby triggering the national dialog on what the foremost challenge for the United States will be in this decade, which is the ultimate root cause of most of the other problems we appear to be struggling with. What you are about to read is the equivalent of someone in 1997 describing the expected forces governing the War on Terror from 2001-2009 in profound detail.
This is a very long article, the longest ever written on The Futurist, and as it is a guide to the next decade of social, political, and sexual strife, is not meant to be read in one shot but rather digested slowly over an extended period, with all supporting links read as well. As the months and years of this decade progress, this article will seem all the more prophetic.
Executive Summary : The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.
The Cultural Thesis
The Masculinity Vacuum in Entertainment : Take a look at the collage of entertainers below, which will be relevant if you are older than 30. All of them were prominent in the 1980s, some spilling over on either side of that decade. They are all certainly very different from one another. But they have one thing in common - that there are far fewer comparable personas produced by Hollywood today.
As diverse as these characters were, they were all examples of masculinity. They represented different archetypes, from the father to the leader to the ladies man to the rugged outdoorsman to the protector. They were all more similar than dissimilar, as they all were role-models for young boys of the time, often the same young boys. Celebrities as disparate as Bill Cosby and Mr. T had majority overlap in their fan bases, as did characters as contrasting as Jean-Luc Picard and The Macho Man Randy Savage.
At this point, you might be feeling a deep inner emptiness lamenting a bygone age, as the paucity of proudly, inspiringly masculine characters in modern entertainment becomes clear. Before the 1980s, there were different masculine characters, but today, they are conspicuously absent. Men are shown either as thuggish degenerates, or as effete androgynes. Sure, there were remakes of Star Trek and The A-Team, and series finales of Rocky and Indiana Jones. But where are the new characters? Why is the vacuum being filled solely with nostalgia?
Modern entertainment typically shows businessmen as villains, and husbands as bumbling dimwits that are always under the command of the all-powerful wife, who is never wrong. Oprah Winfrey's platform always grants a sympathetic portrayal to a wronged woman, but never to men who have suffered great injustices. Absurdly false feminist myths such as a belief that women are underpaid relative to men for the same output of work, or that adultery and domestic violence are actions committed exclusively by men, are embedded even within the dialog of sitcoms and legal dramas.
This trains women to disrespect men, wives to think poorly of their husbands, and girls to devalue the importance of their fathers, which leads to the normalization of single motherhood (obviously with taxpayer subsidies), despite the reality that most single mothers are not victims, but merely women who rode a carousel of men with reckless abandon. This, in turn, leads to fatherless young men growing up being told that natural male behavior is wrong, and feminization is normal. It also leads to women being deceived outright about the realities of the sexual market, where media attempts to normalize single motherhood and attempted 'cougarhood' are glorified, rather than portrayed as the undesirable conditions that they are.
The Primal Nature of Men and Women : Genetic research has shown that before the modern era, 80% of women managed to reproduce, but only 40% of men did. The obvious conclusion from this is that a few top men had multiple wives, while the bottom 60% had no mating prospects at all. Women clearly did not mind sharing the top man with multiple other women, ultimately deciding that being one of four women sharing an 'alpha' was still more preferable than having the undivided attention of a 'beta'. Let us define the top 20% of men as measured by their attractiveness to women, as 'alpha' males while the middle 60% of men will be called 'beta' males. The bottom 20% are not meaningful in this context.
Research across gorillas, chimpanzees, and primitive human tribes shows that men are promiscuous and polygamous. This is no surprise to a modern reader, but the research further shows that women are not monogamous, as is popularly assumed, but hypergamous. In other words, a woman may be attracted to only one man at any given time, but as the status and fortune of various men fluctuates, a woman's attention may shift from a declining man to an ascendant man. There is significant turnover in the ranks of alpha males
As a result, women are the first to want into a monogamous relationship, and the first to want out. This is neither right nor wrong, merely natural. What is wrong, however, is the cultural and societal pressure to shame men into committing to marriage under the pretense that they are 'afraid of commitment', while there is no longer the corresponding traditional shame that was reserved for women who destroyed the marriage, despite the fact that 90% of divorces are initiated by women. Furthermore, when women destroy the commitment, there is great harm to children, and the woman demands present and future payments from the man she is abandoning. A man who refuses to marry is neither harming innocent minors nor expecting years of payments from the woman. This double standard has invisible but major costs to society.
To provide 'beta' men an incentive to produce far more economic output than needed just to support themselves while simultaneously controlling the hypergamy of women that would deprive children of interaction with their biological fathers, all major religions constructed an institution to force constructive conduct out of both genders while penalizing the natural primate tendencies of each. This institution was known as 'marriage'. Societies that enforced monogamous marriage made sure all beta men had wives, and thus unlocking productive output out of these men who in pre-modern times would have had no incentive to be productive. Women, in turn, received a provider, a protector, and higher social status than unmarried women, who often were trapped in poverty. When applied over an entire population of humans, this system was known as 'civilization'.
All societies that achieved great advances and lasted for multiple centuries followed this formula with very little deviation. Societies that deviated from this were quickly replaced. This 'contract' between the sexes was advantageous to beta men, women over the age of 35, and children, but greatly curbed the activities of alpha men and women under 35 (together, a much smaller group than the former one). Conversely, the pre-civilized norm of alpha men monopolizing 3 or more young women each, replacing aging ones with new ones, while the masses of beta men fight over a tiny supply of surplus/aging women, was chaotic and unstable, leaving beta men violent and unproductive, and aging mothers discarded by their alpha mates now vulnerable to poverty. So what happens when the traditional controls of civilization are lifted from both men and women?
The Four Sirens : Four unrelated forces simultaneously combined to entirely distort the balance of civilization built on the biological realities of men and women. Others have presented versions of the Four Sirens concept in the past, but I am choosing a slightly different definition of the Four Sirens :
1) Easy contraception (condoms, pills, and abortions): In the past, extremely few women ever had more than one or two sexual partners in their lives, as being an unwed mother led to poverty and social ostracization. Contraception made it possible for female to conduct campaigns of hypergamy.
2) 'No fault' divorce, asset division, and alimony : In the past, a woman who wanted to leave her husband needed to prove misconduct on his part. Now, the law has changed to such a degree that a woman can leave her husband for no stated reason, yet is still entitled to payments from him for years to come. This enables women to transfer the costs of their behavior onto men and children.
3) Female economic freedom : Despite 'feminists' claiming that this is the fruit of their hard work, inventions like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and oven were the primary drivers behind liberating women from household chores and freeing them up to enter the workforce. These inventions compressed the chores that took a full day into just an hour or less. There was never any male opposition to women entering the workforce, as more labor lowered labor costs while also creating new consumers. However, one of the main reasons that women married - financial support - was no longer a necessity.
Female entry into the workforce is generally a positive development for society, and I would be the first to praise this, if it were solely on the basis of merit (as old-school feminists had genuinely intended). Unfortunately, too much of this is now due to corrupt political lobbying to forcibly transfer resources from men to women.
4) Pro-female social engineering : Above and beyond the pro-woman divorce laws, further state interventions include the subsidization of single motherhood, laws that criminalize violence against women (but offer no protection to men who are the victims of violence by women), and 'sexual harassment' laws with definitions so nebulous that women have the power to accuse men of anything without the man having any rights of his own.
These four forces in tandem handed an unprecedented level of power to women. The technology gave them freedom to pursue careers and the freedom to be promiscuous. Feminist laws have done a remarkable job in shielding women from the consequences of their own actions. Women now have as close to a hypergamous utopia as has ever existed, where they can pursue alpha males while extracting subsidization from beta males. Despite all the new freedoms available to women, men were still expected to adhere to their traditional responsibilities.
Marriage 2.0 : From the West to the Middle East to Asia, marriage is considered a mandatory bedrock of any functioning society. If marriage is such a crucial ingredient of societal health, then the West is barreling ahead on a suicidal path.
We earlier discussed why marriage was created, but equally important were the factors that sustained the institution and kept it true to its objectives. The reasons that marriage 'worked' not too long ago were :
1) People married at the age of 20, and usually died by the age of 50. People were virgins at marriage, and women spent their 20s tending to 3 or more children. The wife retained her beauty 15 years into the marriage, and the lack of processed junk food kept her slim even after that. This is an entirely different psychological foundation than the present urban feminist norm of a woman marrying at the age of 34 after having had 10 or more prior sexual relationships, who then promptly emerges from her trim chrysalis in an event that can best be described as a fatocalypse.
2) It was entirely normal for 10-20% of young men to die or be crippled on the battlefield, or in occupational accidents. Hence, there were always significantly more women than able-bodied men in the 20-40 age group, ensuring that not all women could marry. Widows were common and visible, and vulnerable to poverty and crime. For these reasons, women who were married to able-bodied men knew how fortunate they were relative to other women who had to resort to tedious jobs just to survive, and treated their marriage with corresponding respect.
3) Prior to the invention of contraception, female promiscuity carried the huge risk of pregnancy, and the resultant poverty and low social status. It was virtually impossible for any women to have more than 2-3 sexual partners in her lifetime without being a prostitute, itself an occupation of the lowest social status.
4) Divorce carried both social stigma and financial losses for a woman. Her prospects for remarriage were slim. Religious institutions, extended clans, and broader societal forces were pressures to keep a woman committed to her marriage, and the notion of leaving simply out of boredom was out of the question.
Today, however, all of these factors have been removed. This is partly the result of good forces (economic progress and technology invented by beta men), but partly due to artificial schemes that are extremely damaging to society.
For one thing, the wedding itself has gone from a solemn event attended only by close family and friends, to an extravaganza of conspicuous consumption for the enjoyment of women but financed by the hapless man. The wedding ring itself used to be a family heirloom passed down over generations, but now, the bride thumbs through a catalog that shows her rings that the man is expected to spend two months of his salary to buy. This presumption that somehow the woman is to be indulged for entering marriage is a complete reversal of centuries-old traditions grounded in biological realities (and evidence of how American men have become weak pushovers). In India, for example, it is normal even today for either the bride's father to pay for the wedding, or for the bride's family to give custody of all wedding jewelry to the groom's family. The reason for this was so that the groom's family effectively had a 'security bond' against irresponsible behavior on the part of the bride, such as her leaving the man at the (Indian equivalent of the) altar, or fleeing the marital home at the first sign of distress (also a common female psychological response). For those wondering why Indian culture has such restrictions on women and not men, restrictions on men were tried in some communities, and those communities quickly vanished and forgotten. There is no avoiding the reality that marriage has to be made attractive to men for the surrounding civilization to survive. Abuse and blackmail of women certainly occurred in some instances, but on balance, these customs existed through centuries of observing the realities of human behavior. Indian civilization has survived for over 5000 years and every challenge imaginable through enforcement of these customs, and, until recently, the Christian world also had comparable mechanisms to steer individual behavior away from destructive manifestations. However, if the wedding has mutated into a carnival of bridezilla narcissism, the mechanics of divorce are far more disastrous.
So why are 90% of divorces initiated by women (she files 70% of the time, and the other 20% of the time, she forces the man to file, due to abuse or adultery on the part of the woman)? Women have always been hypergamous, and most were married to beta men that they felt no attraction towards, so what has changed to cause an increase in divorce rates?
Divorce lawyers, like any other professional group, will seek conditions that are good for business. What makes attorneys different from, say, engineers or salespeople, is that a) they know precisely how to lobby for changes to the legal system, bypassing voters and the US constitution, that guarantees more revenue for them, and b) what benefits them is directly harmful to the fabric of society in general, and to children in particular. When they collude with rage-filled 'feminists' who would gladly send innocent men to concentration camps if they could, the outcome is catastrophic.
The concept of 'no fault' divorce by itself may not be unfair. The concepts of asset division and alimony may also be fair in the event of serious wrongdoing by the husband. However, the combination of no-fault divorce plus asset division/alimony is incredibly unfair and prone to abuse. The notion that she can choose to leave the marriage, yet he is nonetheless required to pay her for years after that even if he did not want to destroy the union, is an injustice that should not occur in any advanced democracy. Indeed, the man has to pay even if the woman has an extramarital affair, possibly even being ordered to pay her psychiatric fees. Defenders of alimony insist that a woman seeking a divorce should not see a drop in living standards, but it is somehow acceptable for the husband to see a drop even if he did not want a divorce. I would go further and declare that any belief that women deserve alimony on a no-fault basis in this day age is utterly contradictory to the belief that women are equals of men. How can women both deserve alimony while also claiming equality? In rare cases, high-earning women have had to pay alimony to ex-husbands, but that is only 4% of the time, vs. the man paying 96% of the time. But it gets worse; much worse, in fact.
Even if the woman chooses to leave on account of 'boredom', she is still given default custody of the children, which exposes the total hypocrisy of feminist claims that men and women should be treated equally. Furthermore, the man is required to pay 'child support' which is assessed at levels much higher than the direct costs of child care, with the woman facing no burden to prove the funds were spent on the child, and cannot be specified by any pre-nuptial agreement. The rationale is that 'the child should not see a drop in living standards due to divorce', but since the mother has custody of the child, this is a stealthy way in which feminists have ensured financial maintenence of the mother as well. So the man loses his children and most of his income even if he did not want divorce. But even that is not the worst-case scenario.
The Bradley Amendment, devised by Senator Bill Bradley in 1986, ruthlessly pursues men for the already high 'child support' percentages, and seizes their passports and imprisons them without due process for falling behind in payments, even if on account of job loss during a recession. Under a bogus 'deadbeat dads' media campaign, feminists were able to obscure the fact that women were the ones ending their marriages and with them the benefit that children receive from a two-parent upbringing, and demanding, under penalty of imprisonment, unusually high maintenence, much of which does not even go to the child, from a dutiful ex-husband who did not want a divorce. So the legal process uses children as pawns through which to extract an expanded alimony stream for the mother. The phony tactic of insisting that 'it is for the children' is used to shut down all questions about the basic humanity of the system, while avoiding scrutiny of the fact that the parent who is choosing divorce is clearly placing the long-term well-being of the children at a very low priority.
So as it stands today, there are large numbers of middle-class men who were upstanding citizens, who were subjected to divorce against their will, had their children taken from them, pay alimony masked as child support that is so high that many of them have to live out of their cars or with their relatives, and after job loss from economic conditions, are imprisoned simply for running out of money. If 10-30% of American men are under conditions where 70% or more of their income is taken from them under threat of prison, these men have no incentive to start new businesses or invent new technologies or processes. Having 10-30% of men disincentivized this way cannot be good for the economy, and is definitely a contributor to current economic malaise. Sometimes, the children are not even biologically his.
This one-page site has more links about the brutal tyranny that a man can be subjected to once he enters the legal contract of marriage, and even more so after he has children. What was once the bedrock of society, and a solemn tradition that benefited both men and women equally, has quietly mutated under the evil tinkering of feminists, divorce lawyers, and leftists, into a shockingly unequal arrangement, where the man is officially a second-class citizen who is subjected to a myriad of sadistic risks. As a result, the word 'marriage' should not even be used, given the totality of changes that have made the arrangement all but unrecognizable compared to its intended ideals. Suicide rates of men undergoing divorce run as high as 20%, and all of us know a man who either committed suicide, or admits seriously considering it during the dehumanization he faced even though he wanted to preserve the union. Needless to say, this is a violation of the US Constitution on many levels, and is incompatible with the values of any supposedly advanced democracy that prides itself on freedom and liberty. There is effectively a tyrannical leftist shadow state operating within US borders but entirely outside the US constitution, which can subject a man to horrors more worthy of North Korea than the US, even if he did not want out of the marriage, did not want to be separated from his children, and did not want to lose job. Any unsuspecting man can be sucked into this shadow state.
Marriage is no longer a gateway to female 'companionship', as we shall discuss later. For this reason, as a Futurist, I cannot recommend 'marriage', as the grotesque parody that it has become today, to any young man living in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia. There are just too many things outside of his control that can catastrophically ruin his finances, emotions, and quality of life. At a minimum, he should conduct research by speaking to a few divorced men about the laws and mistreatment they were subjected to, and attend a few divorce court hearings at the local courthouse. After gaining this information, if he still wants to take the risk, he should only marry if he can meet the following three conditions, none of which can substitute either of the other two :
1) The woman earns the same as, or more than, he does.
2) He has a properly done pre-nuptial arrangement with lawyers on each side (even though a pre-nup will not affect the worst aspect of divorce law - 'child support' as a cloak for stealth alimony and possible imprisonment).
3) He is deeply competent in the Venusian Arts, and can manage his relationship with his wife effortlessly. More on this later.
There are still substantial risks, but at least they are somewhat reduced under these conditions. If marriage is a very important goal for a young man, he should seriously consider expatriation to a developing country, where he ironically may have a higher living standard than in the US after adjusting for divorce risk.
Everyone from women to sadistic social conservatives to a young man's own parents will pressure and shame him into marriage, and condemn the request for a pre-nup, without having any interest in even learning about the horrendously unequal and carefully concealed laws he would be subjected to in the event that his wife divorces him through no reasons he can discern. But some men are figuring this out, and are avoiding marriage. By many accounts, 25% of men have decided to avoid marriage. So what happens to a society that makes it unattractive for even 25% of men to marry?
The institution of monogamous marriage requires at least 80% male participation in order to be viable. When male participation drops below 80%, all women are in serious trouble, since there are now 100 women competing for every 80 men, compounded with the reality that women age out of the sexual market much quicker than men. In the past, the steady hand of a young woman's mother and grandmother knew that her beauty was temporary, and that the most seductive man was not the best husband, and they made sure that the girl was married off to a boy with long-term durability. Now that this guidance has been removed from the lives of young women, thanks to 'feminism', these women are proving to be poor pilots of their mating lives who pursue alpha males until the age of 34-36 when her desirability drops precipitously and not even beta males she used to reject are interested in her. This stunning drop in her desirability to men is known as the Wile E. Coyote moment, and women of yesteryear had many safety nets that protected them from this fate. The 'feminist' media's attempt to normalize 'cougarhood' is evidence of gasping desperation.
The Venusian Arts : The Four SIrens and the legal changes feminists have instituted to obstruct beta men have created a climate where men have invented techniques and strategies to adapt to the more challenging marketplace, only to exceed their aspirations. This is a disruptive technology in its own right. All of us know a man who is neither handsome nor wealthy, but seems to have amazing success with women. He seems to have natural instincts regarding women that to the layperson may be indistinguishable from magic. So how does he do it?
Mars is the God of War, while Venus is the Goddess of Love. Study of combat is thus known as the Martial Arts, while the study of attraction, seduction, and romance is known as the Venusian Arts, as coined by Mystery, a pioneer in the field. The subject is too vast for any description over here to do it full justice, but in a nutshell, the Internet age enabled communities of men to share the various bits of knowledge they had field tested and refined (e.g. one man being an expert at meeting women during the daytime, another being an expert at step-by-step sexual escalation, yet another being a master of nightclub pickups, etc.). The collective knowledge grew and evolved, and an entire industry to teach the various schools of 'Game' emerged. Men who comprehended the concepts (a minority) and those who could undertake the total reconstitution of their personalities and avalanche of rejections as part of the learning curve (a still smaller minority) stood to reap tremendous benefits. While the 'pick-up artist' (PUA) implementation is the most media-covered, the principles are equally valuable for men in monogamous long-term relationships (LTRs).
Among the most valuable learnings from the body of knowledge is the contrarian revelation that what women say a man should do is often quite the opposite of what would actually bring him success. For example, being a needy, supplicative, eager-to-please man is precisely the opposite behavior that a man should employ for romantic success, where being dominant, teasing, amused, yet assertive is the optimal persona. An equally valuable lesson is to realize when not to take a woman's words at face value. Many statements from her are 'tests' to see if the man can remain congruent in his 'alpha' personality, where the woman is actually hoping the man does not eagerly comply to her wishes. Similarly, the 'feminist' Pavlovian reaction to call any questioner a 'misogynist' should also not be taken as though a rational adult assigned the label after fair consideration. Such shaming language is only meant to deflect scrutiny from the woman uttering it, and should be given no more importance than a 10-year-old seeking to avoid responsibility or accountability. Far too many men actually take these slurs seriously, to the detriment of male rights and dignity.
Success in internalizing the core fundamentals of the Venusian Arts requires an outside-the-box thinker solidly in the very top of Maslow's Hierarchy, and in my experience, 80% of men and 99.9% of women are simply incapable of comprehending why the skills of the Venusian Arts are valuable and effective. Many women, and even a few pathetic men, condemn the Venusian Arts, without even gaining a minimal comprehension for what it truly is, and how it benefits both men and women.
For anyone seeking advice on the Venusian Arts, there is one rule you must never break. I believe it is of paramount importance that the knowledge be used ethically, and with the objective of creating mutually satisfying relationships with women. It is not moral to mistreat women, even if they have done the same to countless men. We, as men, have to take the high road, and this is my firm belief.
'Feminism' as Unrestrained Misandry and Projection : The golden rule of human interactions is to judge a person, or a group, by their actions rather than their words. Feminists once had noble goals of securing voting rights, achieving educational parity, and opening employment channels for women. But once these goals were met and even exceeded, the activists did not want to lose relevance. Now, they tirelessly and ruthlessly lobby for changes in legislation that is blatantly discriminatory against men (not to mention unconstitutional and downright cruel). Not satisfied with that, they continue to lobby for social programs designed to devalue the roles of husbands and fathers, replacing them with taxpayer-funded handouts.
Despite my acute ability to detect and deconstruct leftists, I was unprepared for the level of unhinged lunacy that 'feminism' had sunk to, which revealed itself in late 2008 when Sarah Palin emerged onto the national scene. Here was a woman who actually achieved all the aspirations that feminists claim to value : a highly successful career as a Governor and VP candidate, a large number of children, a loving marriage to a supportive yet ruggedly masculine husband, and an attractive appearance despite being in her 40s. If anything, she should be hailed as a superb role model of a woman from modest origins who has managed to 'have it all'. Yet, the feminist reaction to her was quite the opposite, as she attracted far more hate from lefto-feminists than the woman-stoning Taliban, or child-raping Roman Polanski ever could. What is a parody so outlandish that even The Onion may not write it is actually true. In one shot, 'feminism' was revealed as being not just different from its stated goals, but perhaps the most extreme pillar of leftism in existence today. This is because it is far less challenged than any other subsect of leftism.
As it is profitable to claim victimhood in this age, a good indicator is whether any condemnation by the supposedly oppressed of their oppressor could be similarly uttered if the positions were reversed. We know that what Rev. Jeremiah Wright said about whites could not be said by a white pastor about blacks, and we see even more of a double standard regarding what women and men can say about each other in America today. This reveals one of the darkest depths of the human mind - when a group is utterly convinced that they are the 'victims' of another group, they can rationalize any level of evil against their perceived oppressors.
Go to any major 'feminist' website, such as feministing.com or Jezebel.com, and ask polite questions about the fairness of divorce laws, or the injustice of innocent men being jailed on false accusations of rape without due process. You will quickly be called a 'misogynist' and banned from commenting. The same is not true for any major men's site, where even heated arguments and blatant misandry are tolerated in the spirit of free speech and adult respect. When is the last time a doctrinaire 'feminist' actually had the courage to debate someone like Tammy Bruce, Laura Ingraham, or Michelle Malkin on television?
Ever-tightening groupthink that enforces a narrative of victimhood ensures that projection becomes the normal mode of misandrist thought. The word 'misogynist' has expanded to such an extreme that it is the Pavlovian response to anything a 'feminist' feels bad about, but cannot articulate in an adult-like manner. For example, an older man dating women 10 years younger than him is also referred to as a 'misogynist' by the older bitterati. Not an ageist, mind you, but a misogynist.
Contrary to their endless charges of 'misogyny' (a word that many 'feminists' still manage to misspell), in reality, most men instinctively treat women with chivalry and enshrine them on exalted pedestals. Despite this reality, the unchecked accusations on the part of misandrists is thus creating ill will towards women among men who initially harbored no such feelings. The male resentment labeled as 'misogyny' thus becomes a reaction to many years of unopposed misandry heaped on him first. Kick a friendly dog enough times, and you get a nasty dog.
There are laws such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), that naturally concludes that violence against women is far worse than violence against men. VAWA is very different from ordinary assault laws, because under VAWA, a man can be removed from his home at gunpoint if the woman makes a single phonecall. No due process is permitted, and the man's Constitutional rights are jettisoned. At the same time, nearly half of all domestic violence is by the woman against the man. Tiger Wood's wife beat him with a blunt weapon and scratched his face, only to be applauded by 'feminists' in a 'you go girl' manner.
Rape legislation has also bypassed the US Constitution, leaving a man guilty until he proves himself innocent, while the accusing woman faces no penalty for falsely sending a man to prison for 15 years, where he himsef will get raped. The Duke Lacrosse case was a prominent example of such abuse, but hundreds of others occur in America each year. The laws have been changed so that a victim has 1 month to 'decide' if she has been raped, and such flexibility predicatably leads to instances of a woman reporting rape just so that she does not have to tell her boyfriend that she cheated on him. 40% of all rape accusations are false, but 'feminists' would rather jail scores of innocent men than let one guilty man get away, which is the exact opposite of what US Constitutional jurisprudence requires.
But, unimaginably, it gets even worse. Polls of men have shown that there is one thing men fear even more than being raped themselves, and that is being cuckolded. Men see cuckolding as the ultimate violation and betrayal, yet there is an entire movement among 'feminists' to enshrine a woman's right to commit adultery and use the resources of her husband to dupe him into thinking the child is his. These misandrists even want to outlaw the right of a man to test the paternity of a child.
So, to review, if a woman has second thoughts about a tryst a few days later, she can, without penalty, ruin a man financially and send him to prison for 15 years. 'Feminists' consider this acceptable. At the same time, even though men consider being cuckolded a worse fate than being raped, 'feminists' want to make this easier for a woman to do, by preventing paternity testing. They already have rigged laws so that the man, upon 'no fault' divorce, has to pay alimony, to a woman who cuckolded him.
This is pure evil, ranking right up there with the evil of Nazi Germany, Al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein. But every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
The greatest real misogyny, of course, has been unwittingly done by the 'feminists' themselves. By encouraging false rape claims, they devalue the credibility of all claims, and genuine victims will suffer. 'Feminists' devalued the traditional areas of female expertise (raising the next generation of citizens), while attaching value only to areas of male expertise (the boardroom, the military, sexual promiscuity) and told women to go duplicate male results. Telling women that emulating their mothers and grandmothers is less valuable than mimicking men sounds quite misogynistic to me, and unsurprisingly, despite all these 'freedoms', women are more unhappy than ever. This hurts average women who did not swear an oath of fealty to the 'feminist' life of rage.
So how did the state of affairs manage to get so bad? Surely 'feminists' are not so powerful?
Social Conservatives, White Knights, and Girlie-Men : It would be inaccurate to deduce that misandrists were capable of creating this state of affairs on their own, despite their vigor and skill in sidestepping both the US Constitution and voter scrutiny. Equally culpable are men who ignorantly believe that acting as obsequious yes-men to 'feminists' by turning against other men in the hope that their posturing will earn them residual scraps of female affection.
Chivalry has existed in most human cultures for many centuries, and is seen in literature from all major civilizations. Chivalry greatly increased a man's prospects of marriage, but the reasons for this have been forgotten. Prior to the modern era, securing a young woman's hand in marriage usually involved going through her parents. The approval of the girl's father was a non-negotiable channel in the process. If a young man could show the girl's parents that he would place her on a pedestal, they could be convinced to sanction the union. The girl herself was not the primary audience of the chivalry. as the sexual attraction of the girl herself was rarely aroused by chivalry, as the Venusian Arts have shown.
Hence, many men are still stuck in the obsolete and inobservant notion that chivalry and excess servility are the pathways to sex today, despite the modern reality that a woman's sexual decisions are no longer controlled by her parents, and are often casual rather than locked in matrimony. Whether such men are religious and called 'social conservatives', or effete leftists and called 'girlie men', they are effectively the same, and the term 'White Knights' can apply to the entire group. Their form of chivalry when exposed to 'feminist' histrionics results in these men harming other men at the behest of women who will never be attracted to them. This is why we see peculiar agreement between supposedly opposed 'social conservatives' and 'feminists' whenever the craving to punish men arises. A distressingly high number of men actually support the imprisonment of innocent men for false rape accusations or job loss causing 'child support' arrears merely because they don't want to risk female disapproval. These men are the biggest suckers of all, as their pig-headed denial of the Venusian Arts will prevent them from deducing that excess agreeability and willingness to do favors for the objects of their lust are exactly the opposite of what makes women sexually attracted to men. No woman feels attraction for a needy man.
Lastly, the religious 'social conservatives' who continue their empty sermonizing about the 'sanctity of marriage' while doing absolutely nothing about the divorce-incentivizing turn that the laws have taken, have been exposed for their pseudo-moral posturing and willful blindness. What they claim to be of utmost importance to them has been destroyed right under their noses, and they still are too dimwitted to comprehend why. No other interest group in America has been such a total failure at their own stated mission. To be duped into believing that a side-issue like 'gay marriage' is a mortal threat to traditional marriage, yet miss the legal changes that correlate to a rise in divorce rates (divorce being what destroys marriage, rather than a tiny number of gays), is about as egregious an oversight as an astronomer failing to be aware of the existence of the Moon.
Why There is No Men's Rights Movement : At this point, readers may be wondering "If things are this bad, why don't we hear anything about it?". Indeed, this is a valid question, and the answer lies within the fundamentals of male psychology. Most beta men would rather die than be called a 'loser' by women (alpha men know better than to take this at face value). White Knights also join in the chorus of shaming other men since they blunderously believe that this is a pathway to the satiation of their lust. So an unfairly ruined man is faced with the prospect of being shamed by women and a large cohort of men if he protests about the injustice, and this keeps him suffering in silence, leading to an early death. We have millions of fine young men willing to die on the battlefield to defend the values enshrined in the US Constitution, but we don't see protests of even 100 divorced men against the shamefully unconstitutional treatment they have received. The destruction of the two-parent family by incentivizing immoral behavior in women is at least as much of a threat to American safety and prosperity as anything that ever could have come out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. Men being too afraid to be the 'squeaky wheel' even when they have lost their children and their assets is a major contributor to the prevailing status quo. Alpha men have no incentive beyond altruism to act as they benefit from the current climate, and thus my altruism will be limited to putting forth these ideas.
Any serious movement has to start a think tank or two to produce research reports, symposiums, and specific policy recommendations, and the few divorce lawyers who were compelled by their conscience to leave the dark side have to be recruited as experts. Subsequently, televised panel discussions have to be conducted at top medical, business, and graduate engineering schools (where young men about to embark on lucrative careers are approaching marriage age, but know nothing about the law), documentary films have to be produced, prominent victims like Mel Gibson, Paul McCartney, Hulk Hogan, and Tiger Woods have to be recruited as spokespeople, and visibly powerful protests outside of divorce courts have to be organized. In this age of Web 2.0 tools and with the Tea Party protests providing an excellent template, all this should be easy, particularly given how quickly leftists groups can assemble a comparable apparatus for even obscure causes.
Instead, all that exists are Men's Rights Advocates (MRAs) that run a few websites and exchange information on their blogs. 'Something is better than nothing' is the most generous praise I could possibly extend to the sum of their efforts, and this article I am presenting here on The Futurist is probably the single biggest analysis of this issue to date, even though this is not even a site devoted to the subject. Hence, there will be no real Men's Rights Movement in the near future. The misandry bubble will instead be punctured through the sum of millions of individual market forces.
The Economic Thesis
Ceilings and Floors of Glass : Misandrists shriek about a supposed 'glass ceiling' of pervasive sexism that explains why 50% of the CEOs of major corporations are not women. What is never mentioned is the equally valid 'glass floor', where we see that 90% of imprisonments, suicides, and crippling occupational injuries are of men. If these outcomes are the results of the actions or choices of men who suffer from them, then is that not the same reason that determines who rises above the 'glass ceiling'? The inability of misandrists to address these realities in good faith tells us something (but not everything) about the irrational sense of entitlement they have.
One of the most dishonest myths of all is the claim that 'women earn just 75% of men for the same job'. Let me dispense of this myth, in the process of which we will see why it is profitable and seductive for them to broadcast this bogus belief.
It is true that women, on average, earn less per year than men do. It is also true that 22-year-olds earn less, on average, than 40-year-olds. Why is the latter not an example of age discrimination, while the former is seized upon as an example of gender discrimination?
If women truly did earn less for doing exactly the same job as a man, any non-sexist CEO could thrash his competition by hiring only women, thus saving 25% on employee salaries relative to his competitors. Are we to believe that every major CEO and Board of Directors is so sexist as to sacrifice billions of dollars of profit? When the 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' of a nun congregation wrote to TJ Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, that his company should have more women in its Board of Directors, Rodgers replied with a letter explaining why the pursuit of profit could not accommodate such political correctness. That a nun congregation pays a recession-proof salary to someone as a 'Director of Corporate Social Responsibility' is itself an example of a pampered existence, and I was unaware that convents were now advancing secular Marxist beliefs.
Furthermore, women entrepreneurs could hire other women and out-compete any male-dominated business, but we don't see this happening. Market forces would correct such mispricings in female compensation, if they actually existed. But they do not, and those who claim that they do are not just advertising an extreme economic illiteracy, but are quite happy to make similarly illiterate women angry about an injustice that does not exist. I notice that women who actually are/were CEOs of publicly traded companies never claim that there is a conspiracy to underpay women relative to their output.
I am willing to pass laws to ensure that 50% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are women (despite the accelerated turnover this would create in the ranks of the Fortune 500), if we also legally mandate that 50% of all imprisonments are of women, and 50% of the jobs that involve working with heavy machinery, being outdoors in inclement weather, inhaling toxic fumes, or apprehending dangerous criminals are also occupied by women. Fair is fair. Any takers?
The 'Mancession' and the 'Sheconomy' : I would be the first to be happy if the economic success of women were solely on the basis of pure merit. For many of them, it is. But far too much has been the result of not market forces or meritocracy, but political graft and ideology-driven corruption.
In the recent recession and ongoing jobless recovery, the male unemployment rate continues to be much higher than the female unemployment rate. If this was simply due to market forces, that would be fine. However, 'feminist' groups have lobbied hard to ensure that government stimulus funds were steered to boost female employment at the expense of assistance for men. The leftist Obama administration was more than eager to comply, and a forcible transfer of wealth was enacted, even though it may not have been the best deployment of money for the economy.
Maria Shriver, a woman who has the most fortunate of lives from the vast wealth earned first by her grandfather and then by her husband, recently published 'A Woman's Nation : The Shriver Report', consisting of gloating about how women were now outperforming men economically. The entire research report is full of all the standard bogus feminist myths and flawed statistics, as thoroughly debunked here, as well as the outright sexism of statements like 'women are better managers' (imagine a man saying the reverse). Furthermore, the report reveals the typical economic illiteracy (evidenced by, among other things, the ubiquitous 'women are underpaid' myth), as well as belief that businesses exist to act as vehicles of social engineering rather than to produce a profit.
The women, in the meantime, are having a blast. While public sector vs. private sector workforce distribution is not highly correlated to gender, it is when the focus is on women earning over $100,000 or more. 
It goes further. The vast majority of social security taxes are paid by men, but are collected by women (due to women living 7 years longer than men on average). That is not troubling by any means, but the fact that women consume two-thirds of all US healthcare, despite most of this $2.5 Trillion annual expenditure being paid by men, is certainly worthy of debate. It may be 'natural' for women to require more healthcare, since they are the ones who give birth. But it was also 'natural' for men to finance this for only their wives, not for the broader community of women. The healthcare profession also employs an immense number of women, and not just in value-added roles such as nursing, but even in administrative and bureaucratic positions. All of this is financed on the backs of male labor.
The left has finally found a perfect Trojan Horse through which to expand a tyrannical state. 'Feminists' can lobby for a transfer of wealth from men to women and from private industry to the government, while knowing that calling any questioner a 'misogynist' will silence him far more effectively than their military fifth columnist, environmentalist, and plain socialist brethren could ever silence their respective opponents. However, there is reason to believe that tax collection in many parts of the US, such as in states like CA, NY, NJ, and MA, has reached saturation. As the optimal point has already been crossed, a rise in tax rates will cause a decrease, rather than an increase in revenue, and the increase in Federal tax rates exactly one year from today on 1/1/2011 is likely to cause another recession, which will not be so easily transferred to already-impoverished men the next time.
When men are severed from their children with no right to obstruct divorce, when they are excluded from the labor market not by market forces but rather by social engineering, and when they learn that the society they once believed in and in some cases joined the military to protect, has no respect for their aspirations, these men have no reason to sustain such a society.
The Contract Between the Sexes : A single man does not require much in order to survive. Most single men could eke out a comfortable existence by working for two months out of the year. The reason that a man might work hard to earn much more than he needs for himself is to attract a wife amidst a competitive field, finance a home and a couple of children, and ultimately achieve status as a pillar of the community. Young men who exhibited high economic potential and favorable compatibility with the social fabric would impress a girl's parents effectively enough to win her hand in marriage. The man would proceed to work very hard, with the fruits of his labor going to the state, the employer, and the family. 70-90% of a man's output went to people other than himself, but he got a family and high status as a pillar of the community in return, so he was happy with the arrangement.
The Four Sirens changed this, which enabled women to pursue alpha males despite the mathematical improbability of marrying one, while totally ignoring beta males. Beta males who were told to follow a responsible, productive life of conformity found that they were swindled.
This superb article explains how men who excelled under the societal rules of just two decades ago are often left totally betrayed by the rules of today, and results in them refusing to sustain a society heavily dependent on their productivity and ingenuity. Rather than restate the case, go over and read that article, from which I will quote a few sentences.
"The media is now denouncing Sodini as a monster, which he is, but he is a monster that could only be spawned by a monstrous society. The sort of society that could send a hardworking, honest man down the path of insane, murderous rage is not only a society that will not survive, but doesn’t deserve to."
"A man like George Sodini, who listened to his cultural elites and followed their dictates to the letter only to get swindled, had no reason to love America. In fact, he had every reason to lash out at the society that screwed him over and make its denizens feel some of the pain that they had inflicted on him."
"You could stop this madness tomorrow by refusing to follow your vaginas straight into the arms of scumbags, and actually live up to your claims of wanting nice guys – but I doubt you will. You’ve made your bed, ladies – now sleep in it."
Women believed that they could free themselves from all their traditional obligations (only to find, amusingly, that they are unhappier now than they were then), while men would still fulfill all of their traditional obligations, particularly as bankrollers of women and protectors of women. Needless to say, despite the chivalry ground into men, eventually, they will feel that chivalry requires a level of gratitude that is not forthcoming.
To see what happens when the role of the husband and father is devalued, and the state steps in as a replacement, look no further than the African American community. In Detroit, the average home price has fallen from $98,000 as recently as 2003 to just $14,000 today. The auto industry moved jobs out of Detroit long before 2003, so the decline cannot be attributed to just industrial migration, and cities like Baltimore, Oakland, Cleveland, and Philadelphia are in scarcely better shape. For those who believe that this cannot happen in white communities, have a look at the white underclass in Britain. The lower one-third of the US white population is vulnerable to the same fate as the black community, and cities like Los Angeles are perilously close to 'Detroitification'.
Additionally, people seem to have forgotten that the physical safety of society, particularly of women, is entirely dependent on ratio of 'aggressor' men to 'protector' men staying below a certain critical threshold. As more men get shut out of the labor market, crime becomes an alternative. Even highly educationed men who feel betrayed can lash out, and just about every shooting spree and every recent terrorist attempt in the West was by men who were educated and had good career prospects, but were unloved.
While professional men such as myself will certainly never resort to crime, what we could resort to is an unwillingness to aid a damsel in distress. More men will simply lose interest in being rescuers, and this includes policemen who may also feel mistreated by the prevailing misandry. Women have a tremendous amount to lose by creating a lot of indifferent men.
Patriarchy works because it induces men and women to cooperate under their complementary strengths. 'Feminism' does not work, because it encourages immoral behavior in women, which eventually wears down even the durable chivalry of beta men, making both genders worse off. The default natural solution is for the misandric society to be outcompeted and displaced.
Population Displacement : So we have arrived at a society where 'feminists' feel that they are 'empowered', 'independent', and 'confident', despite being heavily dependent on taxes paid mostly by men, an unconstitutional shadow state that extracts alimony and 'child support' from men, an infrastructure maintained by men, technologies invented by men, and a level of safety that men agree to maintain. So exactly what has society received from this population of women who are the most privileged class of humans ever to have lived?
Lefto-'feminists' will be outbred and replaced very quickly, and rural American conservatives of a Sarah Palin nature will be the only resiliently youthful population among all the world's white ethnicities. The state that lefto-'feminists' so admire will quickly turn on them once the state calculates that these women are neither producing new taxpayers nor new technologies, and will find a way to demote them from their present 'empowered' position of entitlement. If they thought having obligations to a husband was such an awful prospect, wait until they have obligations to the husband-substitute state.
The Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation
We earlier examined how the Four Sirens of Feminism unexpectedly combined and provided women with choices they never could have dreamt of before. Some women made positive contributions to society, but quite a few let misandry and unrestrained greed consume them, and have caused the disastrous situation we presently see. Technology always causes disruption in the status quo, always creating new winners and losers with each wave. In centuries past, Gloria Steinem would be a governess and Mystery would be a court jester.
The title of this article is not the 'Misandry Crisis' or even 'The War on Misandry'. It is 'The Misandry Bubble', because the forces that will ensure the demise of the present mistreatment of men are already on the horizon. So allow me to introduce the Four Horsemen of Male Emancipation as a coalesence of many of the forces we have discussed, which will shred the present, unsustainable hierarchal order by 2020 :
1) The Venusian Arts : Learning the truth about how the female mind works is a precious and transcendant body of knowledge for any man. Whether he uses it to become a fully immersed pick-up artist, to create a soulmate bond in a lifelong monogamous marriage, or even to engage in only infrequent yet efficient trysts with women, a man is free from the crushing burdens that uninitiated beta men are capitulating under.
When a man learns that there is no reason for him to buy a $50,000 car, $20,000 ring, $50,000 bridezilla festival, overpriced house contrary to any logical financial analysis, or a divorce lawyer to save him from ruin even though he was the victim of spousal abuse, there is no greater feeling of liberation and jubilation, equating to a windfall of $2 Million for all objective and subjective purposes. When a man realizes that reducing his income by half will now have little detriment to his sexual prospects, he can downsize to an easier job with a shorter commute and lower stress. When a man learns that appeasing a woman is the exact opposite of what he should be doing during the process of romancing and seducing her, that entire humiliating gauntlet of rituals can be jettisoned.
The ecstasy of two or even three concurrent relationships with women of substantially above average beauty are quite attainable to a man who has scaled the summit, which further deprives the hapless betas (again, male attractiveness to women is zero-sum in a way that female attractiveness to men is not). Thus, while 80% of men have no intellectual capacity to grasp and master the Venusian Arts, if the number of solid practitioners even begins to approach 20%, multiple parasitic beasts, from female moochers to the tax-swilling state to the corrupt real-estate and divorce lawyer industries, can be effectively starved.
2) Adult Entertainment Technologies of 2020 : What of the 80% of men who cannot conceptualize the Venusian Arts? Won't they be condemned to live a life of frustration, humiliation, and occasional thoughts of suicide? Thankfully, these poor wretches will experience a satisfactory release through technology, just like women did through technologies such as contraceptive pills, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners.
For a number of reasons, Internet pornography is substantially more addictive to the male brain than the VHS cassette or 'Skinimax' content of the 1990s. When yet another generation of technology diffuses into the market, the implications will be profound enough to tear the current sexual market asunder.
I have written in the past about how haptic, motion sensing, and graphical technologies would elevate video games to the premier form of entertainment by 2012. 3-D/holographic images with haptic interfaces and sufficient AI will make rudimentary 'virtual sex' a technology available to many men well before 2020, but by 2020 we will see this cross certain thresholds that lead to a dramatic market impact far greater than contraceptive pills and Internet pornography combined. A substantial portion of the male population will drift into addiction to virtual sex without even realizing it.
For those (mostly women) who claim that the VR sex of 2020 would not be a sufficient substitute for the real thing, that drawback is more than superceded by the inescapable fact that the virtual woman would be made to be a 10/10+, while the real women that the typical beta male user has access to would be in the 4-7 range. It is useless to claim that a virtual 10 is not as good as a real 10 (under 1% of all women), when the virtual 10 is really competing with real women who are 7s and lower. Women are largely unaware how vastly different the male reaction is to a 10 relative to a 7, let alone to women of even lower scores.
As single men arrive home from work on Friday evening, they will simply default into their VR immersion, giving a whole new meaning to the concept of 'beta testing'. These sequestered men will be conspicuously absent from the bars and nightclubs that were the former venues of expenditure and frustration, causing many establishments to go out of business. The brains of these men will warp to the extent that they can no longer muster any libido for the majority of real women. This will cause a massive devaluation in the sexual market value of most women, resulting in 8s being treated like 5s, and 35-year-old women unable to attract the interest of even 55-year-old men. The Wile E. Coyote moment for women will move a few years ahead, and the alphas with Venusian Arts competence will find an even easier field of desperate women to enjoy.
Another technology making advancements in Japan is that of lifelike female robots. While I do not believe that 'sexbots' will be practical or economical relative to software/gaming-derived solutions, the Japanese nonetheless continue to make surprising progress. Competition between technologies is always productive for the consumer.
Some 'feminists' are not blind to the cataclysmic sexual devaluation that women will experience when such technologies reach the market, and are already moving to seek bans. Such bans will not be possible, of course, as VR sex technologies are inseparable from broader video game and home theater technologies. Their attempts to lobby for such bans will be instructive, however.
Another positive ramification of advanced adult entertainment technologies is that women will have to sharpen the sole remaining attribute which technology cannot substitute - the capacity to make a man feel loved. Modern women will be forced to reacquaint themselves with this ancient concept in order to generate a competitive advantage. This necessity could lead to a movement of pragmatic women conducting a wholesale repudiation of misandry masquerading as 'feminism' that has created this state of affairs, and thus will benefit both men and women.
3) Globalization : The Third Horseman is a vast subject that contains many subtopics. The common theme is that market forces across the world eventually find a way around legislative fences constructed in any one country :
a) Islam : Aside from the higher birthrates of Muslims living in the same Western cities that 'feminists' reside in, an Achilles heel of leftists in general and misandrists in particular is their unwillingess to confront other cultures that actually do place restrictions on women. In Britain, Islamic courts are now in operation, deciding cases through Sharia principles. British divorce laws are even more misandric than US divorce laws, and so many British men, in desperation, are turning to Sharia courts in order to avoid the ruin that British law would inflict on them. The Islamic courts are more than happy to accomodate these men, and 'feminists' dare not protest too loudly. By driving British men to Sharia courts, misandry is beautifully self-defeating. The irony is that the group that was our enemy in the War on Terror will be indirect yet valuable allies in the 'War on Misandry'.
b) Expatriation : While America continues to attract the greatest merit and volume of (legal) immigrants, almost every American man who relocates to Asia or Latin America gives a glowing testimonial about the quality of his new life. A man who leaves to a more male-friendly country and marries a local woman is effectively cutting off a total of three parasites in the US - the state that received his taxes, the potential wife who would take his livelihood, and the industries he is required to spend money on (wedding, diamond, real estate, divorce attorney). Furthermore, this action also shrinks the number of available men remaining in America. The misandrists who project their pathology outward by calling such men 'misogynists' are curiously troubled that these same men are leaving the US. Shouldn't 'feminists' be happy if 'misogynists' are leaving? We thus see yet another example of 'feminists' seeking to steal from men while not providing them any benefit in return.
The more unfair a place becomes, the more we see talented people go elsewhere. When word of US divorce laws becomes common in India and China, this might even deter some future taxpayers from immigrating to America, which is yet another reason the government is losing money to misandry.
c) Medical Tourism : The sum total of donor eggs + IVF + surrogacy costs $150,000 or more in the US, but can be done in India for just $20,000 at top-quality clinics that are building a strong track record. While most customers of Indian fertility clinics are couples, there have been quite a few single men opting to create their own biological babies this way. While this avenue is not for everyone, the ability to have a child for $20,000 (and even two children in parallel with two different surrogates in a two-for-one bundle deal for $35,000) now exists. The poor surrogate mother in India earns more than she could earn in 10 years in her prior vocation of construction or housecleaning. It is a win-win for everyone involved, except for the Western woman who was priced out of the market for marriage to this man.
Medical tourism also prices the US healthcare system out of contention for certain procedures, and the US healthcare system employs a large number of women, particularly in administrative and bureaucratic roles that pay them over twice what they could make in the private sector. Such women will experience what male manufacturing workers a generation earlier, despite the quasi-government umbrella that has kept these women's inflated salaries safe for so long.
So as we can see, the forces of globalization are far bigger than those propping up the current lop-sided status quo.
4) Male Economic Disengagement and Resultant Tax-Base Erosion : Earlier passages have highlighted how even the most stridently egomaniacal 'feminist' is heavily dependent on male endeavors. I will repeat again that there will never, ever be a successful human society where men have no incentive to aspire to the full maximum of their productive and entrepreneurial capabilities.
The contract between the sexes has been broken in urban America (although is still in effect in rural America). The 'progressive' income tax scale in the US was levied under the assumption that men who could earn 10 times more than they needed for themselves would always do so, for their families. A man with no such aspirations may choose an easier job at lower pay, costing the state more than he costs himself. Less tax revenue not just means fewer subsidies for single mothers and government jobs for women, but less money for law enforcement. Less tax revenue also means fewer police officers, and fewer court resources through which to imprison men. They feminist hypergamous utopia is not self-financing, but is precariously dependent on every beta man working at his full capacity, without which the economic house of cards collapses. A state with a small government is far more sustainable than a state seeking an ever-expanding government, which then cannot be financed, and leaves a mass of contradictions that is the exact opposite of what the statists intended.
These Four Horsemen will all converge at the end of this decade, and on 1/1/2020, we will assess how the misandry bubble popped and the fallout that women are suffering under for having made the mistake of letting 'feminists' control their destiny. Keep the Four Horsemen in mind through out this decade, and remember what you read here on the first day of 2010.
Who Should Care?
As we leave a decade where the prime threat to US safety and prosperity was Islamic terror and enter a decade where the prime threat is misandry, anyone concerned with any of the following topics should take heed :
Conclusion
I am just an observer, and will not become an activist of any sort. As a Futurist, I have to predict things before they become obvious to everyone else. Regular readers know of my track records of predictions being accurate, and heed my words when I say that the further inflation and subsequent precipitous deflation of the misandry bubble will define the next American decade. So here, on the first day of the '201x' decade, I am unveiling the article that will spawn a thousand other articles.
What you have just finished reading is the equivalent of someone in 1997 predicting the entire War on Terror in vivid detail, including the eventual victory in key fronts and situation in 2010 where America is sufficiently in control that the War on Terror is no longer nearly the threat it was during the recently concluded decade. The level of detail I have provided about the collapse of the Misandry Bubble will unfold with comparable accuracy as when I predicted the real estate bubble two years beforehand, and the exact level the stock market would bottom at, 6 months before the fact. I know a bubble when I see one, and misandry will be the, um, 'mother' of all bubbles. Bet against my predictions at your own risk.
I have maintained that the US will still be the only superpower in 2030, and while I am not willing to rescind that prediction, I will introduce a caveat that US vitality by 2030 is contingent on a satisfactory and orderly unwinding of the Misandry Bubble. While I had no doubt that the US would eventually gain the upper hand in the seemingly unwinnable War on Terror, I am less confident about a smooth deflation of the Misandry Bubble. Deflate it will, but it could be a turbulent hurricane. Only rural America can guide the rest of the nation into a more peaceful transition. Britain, however, may be beyond rescue.
I personally am an Indian-American, and have lived in India for a few years. My exposure to India helped me see an alternative view, however flawed, of ancient societal structure, which made it easier to deduce exactly what is ailing America. If my views on gender dynamics are unwelcome in the country of my birth, and if the costs of misandry asphyxiate the US economy to the extent that India is a greener pasture, I will leave my homeland and immigrate to India, where a freedom of speech exists that may no longer exist in America. Remarkably, the reverse was true just 20 years ago. For those misandrists who say 'good riddance' with great haste, remember that blogging can still be done from overseas, and your policy of making the top 1% of earners pay 40% of all taxes that your utopia requires depends on that top 1% agreeing to not take their brains and abscond from Western shores.
Required Reading :
The Contract Between the Sexes
A Proposed Manifesto to Improve the Male Condition
The Sixteen Commandments of Poon
The Cultural Devastation Wrought by Misandry
Patriarchy Works, Part I and Part II
Self-Control : A Masculine Quality
How 'Feminism' Will Consume Itself
Strategy and Tactics (for the Emancipation of Men)
The Feminist's Guide to Debate Avoidance
Globalization and the Future State of Men
Decivilizing : Human Nature Unleashed
How Mainstream Dating Advice Harms Women
After 46 years as a journalist (34 years of them writing OpEds for the Washington Post Writers Group), columnist Ellen Goodman is retiring; and she writes a terrific farewell column in yesterday's Washington Post.
Pondering what will be her response to the inevitable "what will you do now?" queries, she considers "coopt[ing] Susan Stamberg's one-word answer when she left her anchor post at NPR: 'Less.'" She is "more tempted to say, simply, 'We'll see.' After 46 years of deadlines," she concludes, "it is time to take in some oxygen, to breathe and consider."
Ms. Goodman recalls a column from three decades earlier, when she had written of another's retirement:
"'There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.'
"'It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out.'
"It was an odd experience to hear, let alone heed, my younger self.
"'The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well,' I wrote back then. 'It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully.'"
So what are Ms. Goodman's final concluding words in this final concluding column?
"[My younger self] knew then what I know much more intimately now," she observes. "So, with her blessing, I will let myself go. And go for it."
Well-done, Ellen Goodman, and godspeed.
Radio Active, a project by industrial design student Erez Bar Am, is a wall-mounted analog radio. That's all good and well. The frustration begins when you realize you have to rearrange it every time you want to change the station.
Radio Active consists of a main module—the blue one—and several satellite modules, three of which are attached to the central one by string. Those strings are the key to the radio's uniquely annoying conceit: you control the Radio Active's volume and tuning by pulling those connected pieces to different places on your wall.
Bar Am claims that the design allows the radio to double as decorative art, and I'd agree that having the Radio Active archipelago on your wall is a lot more interesting than sticking up some Salvador Dali poster. But its important to remember that it's a radio first and art second, lest you find out your masterpiece arrangement of the modules comes with an accompanying soundtrack of 92.4 WZYX, All Death Metal All The Time at full volume.
You can watch the Radio Active being pulled ever-so-slightly into action in this clip:
It's good to get people interacting with their gadgets in new ways, but I think I'll stick to knobs for this one, thanks. [The Design Blog]
Emily writes, “Ever since I was a kid, I have had a love for astronomy. I studied Earth and Planetary Sciences in college and am now in graduate school, studying to be a middle school science teacher. Another love I had as a kid was reading Calvin and Hobbes. My science tattoo combines these two childhood loves — with Calvin and Hobbes looking up at the 8 planetary symbols and the symbols for a star and water. Just like Calvin and Hobbes, I will always be gazing up at the sky with wonder and awe.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Why bore your fish with a humdrum aquarium when you can house them in the Spillarium, a spherical 5 gallon tank that features color-changing LED lights and a spilling waterfall that plunges into a bigger fish's ceramic maw.
Though the MythBusters proved that goldfish don't reallyhave a 3 second memory—they trained fish to swim through mazes and found that their times increased as they became familiar with the course—the Spillarium fish tank will constantly make your fish swim like its life depends on it. Lest that little fishy fall into a bigger fishy's mouth, carried to his cannibalistic fate by a stream of water that continually spills out of a hole in the tank.
The waterfall effect is designed to circulate water in the aquarium; the water is purified in the base and recycled back up into the sphere. But I like to think it's for keeping your fish on their best behavior. [Oh Gizmo]
UPDATE: SOLVED (exclamation point)
(update at 12:30 pm CDT) What? Thirty minutes without a guess? Don’t TELL me I stumped you!
(update at 2:00 pm CDT) Two hours up without a solution.
Solved by Alejandro at 3:10 CDT
Who’s feeling frisky today? I have a nice, easy riddle for you to ponder. You know the rules… and you know the answer. C’mon… you can do it…
Enigma Machine, circa WWII
This is a single object.
It is seen at different times in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
We think of it as fairly young, but to itself, it is old.
NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope – the NGC 4414 Galaxy – Gorgeous, isn’t it?
What it once was, it will be again.
It probably has a companion.
It serves as a baseline.
Many different things on Earth carry its name.
Ahhh… I’ve piqued your interest, haven’t I? I’m hanging out in the comment section, so drop by and solve this for me so you can choose my next post topic. I’ve had some REALLY good choices, and I look forward to today’s selection.
Everyone is clamoring about tablets these days—ourselves included—so it's not too surprising that Google and HTC are set to join the fray. They are reportedly working together on a Chrome OS Google Tablet.
Smarthouse, an Australian publication, reports that HTC and Google have been collaborating "for the past 18 months" and have produced "several working models of a touch tablet," including one outfitted with Google's Chrome OS. We wrote why a Google Tablet would be a good idea last month, and with the Apple Tablet discussion reaching a fever pitch, it's harder and harder to get excited about a Chrome OS netbook from Google.
Having collaborated on the Nexus One, a smart phone that impressed us with its design as well as its hardware, HTC and Google partnering on a tablet seems like a promising prospect. But will it "compete head on" with Apple's tablet as Smarthouse claims? Probably not.
From what we know, it seems like Apple is putting as much effort into their tablet's content as they are into the gadget itself. We've written extensively on how an Apple tablet could redefine newspapers, textbooks, and magazines. In the last case, we've already salivated, more than once, over concepts for how magazines might evolve in a multi-touch future. Add that to Apple's recent acquisition of Lala, a move that likely points to a cloud-based future for iTunes, and the reports that Apple is trying to secure TV show subscription packages for the iTunes store. Admittedly, not a whole lot is certain about Apple's tablet. But you start looking at all of those pieces and how they might fit together around one device, you can easily envision a gadget that is focused on streaming the stuff you read, the stuff you listen to, and the stuff you watch.
It's hard to foresee a future in which a Google Tablet tries to go head to head with Apple on the content level. That's not to say, however, that there aren't some compelling things that could be offered by a Google tablet. As the launch of Google's Chrome OS made clear, they're looking toward a future with a multitude of devices that can access the Internet quickly, cleanly, and cheaply. A Google Tablet could be just the thing to realize all of those goals. When we tried out the JooJoo tablet, we saw how a well-designed tablet for consuming web content could provide an engaging experience. A Chrome OS tablet by Google would likely work the same way, keeping typing to a minimum and offering a literal hands-on web surfing experience. [Smarthouse via Business Insider]
The 2000s are gone. They didn't bring the future, those Aughts. Doesn't matter. 2010 is rolling. Watch out for those flying cars when you go to pick the laundry in your jetpack. [Nedroid Comics via The Daily What via m0ddie]
Motorola making a device in more that one color? You don't say… One of our connects sent us the above photo of the Motorola Calgary / DROID Devour / Whatever, and confirmed the specifications we posted a few months back.
We're told the keyboard was "nice" and the phone itself was "easier to use" compared to the Motorola DROID. Obviously that's personal opinion, and maybe the BLUR OS simplifies things for some people, but the trackpad apparently is killer as a navigational input device. Oh? The device has Wi-Fi, GPS, a 1420mAh battery, but unfortunately no SIM card slot as it is not a global device. Whether the unit will come in multiple colors or not is not confirmed as these are still non-final units, we're told, but we'd probably bet on it being available in black as well as silver. If only they kept that RAZR-keyboard…
BGR features the latest tech news, mobile-related content and of course, exclusive scoops.
With CES only a week away, photos and incomplete specs for 8 new machines from HP have leaked, including an upgraded Mini 210 HD netbook now touting a N450 Pine Trail processor.
The HP Mini 210 HD, to be officially announced next week, boasts a 1.66GHz N450 Atom CPU and GMA 3150 graphics. The N450 is half as small as and nearly 20% more efficient than its predecessor. The HD designation will likely come courtesy of Broadcom's Crystal HD video chip.
The netbook will be available in Sonoma Red, Solid Black, Silver Crystal or Pacific Blue and is expected to ship for $330 next week after its official announcement at CES. [Logic Buy via Engadget]
Does the Sun look a little brighter to you? Maybe that’s because at nine minutes after midnight (UT) tonight, January 2/3, the Earth will be at perihelion, the closest point on its elliptical orbit to the Sun.
At that moment, the Sun’s center will be 147,098,040 kilometers away from the Earth’s center (that’s 91,402,484.5 miles for you Murricans). That is, assuming the distance from the centers of the two bodies is 0.983289667 Astronomical Units, and one AU is 149,597,870.7 kilometers. You can compare that to when we reach aphelion, our most distant point from the Sun, which in 2010 will occur on July 6 at 11:30 UT, when we’ll be 1.016701958 AU or 152,096,448 km (94,508,351.3 miles) from our star.
That change in distance — about 5 million kilometers, or 3 million miles — is only a small fraction of our distance from the Sun, so it doesn’t change the Earth’s temperature very much: a few degrees Celsius, but that’s about it. So, of course, that’s not the reason we have seasons. If it were, then we’d have winter in July in the northern hemisphere! But of course, the international cabal of astronomers covers this fact up.
Still, when you think about it, the Sun is a frakkin’ long way off. Even now, at our closest point, it would take over 20 years to fly to the Sun in an airplane at 800 kph (500 mph)! And the TSA would make you sit silently with nothing in your lap for the last 3 years of the journey, too.
But my point is (in case you were wondering if I had one) that the Sun is hot, and there’s a lot of it. I’m glad it’s so far away, even when it’s at its closest.
While it was initially suggested that Google Latitude was rejected from the app store to keep iPhone users from confusing it with Maps, this new patent shows that Apple might be working on their own friend- and ex-girlfriend-tracking app.
9to5 Mac points out that the iPhone diagram seems to show a front-facing camera, a feature that we've seen before in such patents and could well make it into the next iPhone.
An additional patent, filed here, suggests that location-based information could be sent via text message:
Location Sharing: Abstract - Geographic location data is sent from a first device to a second device with a modified message to signal the presence of geographic location data associated with the message. The message can include (or attach) the geographic location data or file, or the message can include a link to a network-based resource which the second device can use to obtain the geographic location data. In some implementations, when a user of the first device views a location on a map display of the first device, a graphical user interface is presented to allow the user to select an option to share the geographic location with the second device. The second device receives geographic location data or a link from the first device which can trigger a map display on the second device showing the location of the first device and, optionally, the location of the second device.
A built-in, location-based social app for the iPhone makes perfect sense. Apple said they didn't want iPhone users to get Google Latitude confused with Maps, but it seems like they might not have wanted them to get it confused with their own location based app somewhere down the road. [9to5 Mac]
The intruder is said to be a Somalian with Al Qaeda links...
He has ties to a Somali terror organization and to Al Qaeda leaders in East Africa...
In 2008 Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said that Europe would be punished for the
cartoons...
UPDATE!
Al-Shabaab official praises Axe-wielding Somali. More attacks to come...
From AFP:
"We appreciate the incident in which a Muslim Somali boy attacked the devil who abused our prophet Mohammed and we call upon all Muslims around the world to target the people like (him)," Shebab spokesman Sheikh Ali Muhamud Rage told AFP.
Major hat tip to Creeping Sharia and Jawa Report who are just breaking this news...
Creeping Sharia has the English translation from the Danish website Indland:
(Note - Some of the translation is rough)
Jyllands-Posten’s 74-year-old cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was Friday evening face a violent assassination attempt.
It happened in character’s private home in Viby J, near Aarhus, where a 28-year-old man with a Somali background broke into the home and tried to beat Westergaard death with a knife and hatchet.
The offender was subsequently shot by police, but survived. He is now arrested and in hospital.
Attempted murder of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is in police intelligence assessment (PET) terrorist-related, and the offender has “close ties to the Somali terrorist organization al-Shabaab” and part of the “Al Qaeda” states PET.
The offender also suspected of having been “involved in terrorist related activities” in East Africa and to be “part of a terrorism-related network linked to Denmark”.
Kurt Westergaard apparently survived the violent attack because he hid in the bathroom, which is converted to a so-called sikringsrum (safe-room).
His granddaughter in just five years was present during the attack. A shaken Westergaard have no doubt that the perpetrator would try to kill him.
“That was close. It was really close, “he says to jp.dk.
According to PET has the man as ‘close relationship’ with the Somali terrorist organization al-Shabaab and al-Qaida leaders in East Africa, and he is “suspected” of having been involved in previous terrorist attacks in East Africa.
According to PET is the man also part of ‘a terrorist network associated with attachment to Denmark, which for a long time has been the subject of PET’s investigations, but without the context of the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.
Note - See related article here at Libertarian Republican which ran just last week - "Al Shabaab Militants seize 5 Islands, Advance on Kenyan Border," which highlights the increasingly expansionist Jihadist actions of the terrorist group.
If you're on terra firma, it's pretty obvious when you need to grab your make-out partner. But how, asks Slate's Explainer, do you know when to celebrate "when you're hurtling through time zones at 17,500 miles per hour?"
The obvious answer is something like: "you don't pick a single moment, you celebrate once over each of the 30 different time zones in an all-day, space beer kegger.
The actual answer is a little less exciting. The ISS astronauts set their clocks to Coordinated Universal Time, which is the same thing as Greenwich Mean Time, just with a cooler name. That means they were debating if it's "two thousand and ten" or "twenty ten" at the same time Londoners were doing so back here on Earth.
But they still got some time zone-hopping fun: the ISS crew celebrated New Years with mission controllers in Moscow and Houston when the clock struck midnight in those cities. [Slate's Explainer]
