Danimal archive, part 3

I have read posts from any number of women who claim they often go to bars, etc., "to be alone". When they go to these bars, they get "hit on" every time.

Nobody makes anyone go to any particular bar. In fact, enough women live in most cities that they could easily start their own bar where male patrons are not allowed to "hit on" women. However, I have never seen anyone try to open a bar that would cater to this supposed need. Instead, I hear adverts on the radio promoting bars as the places where "Cincinnati's prettiest ladies go", etc. These places are considered "meat markets" by everyone I know.

Now, if any woman elects repeatedly to patronize a bar that advertises itself as the place where "Cincinnati's prettiest ladies go", and spend her money there, I must conclude that the establishment is providing her with something she wants. She may not want to be "hit on", whatever that means, but she is certainly willing to tolerate it to some extent.

Life is plainly a competition. Why does this seem to bother so many people? What's the big deal? In any competition, plenty of room exists for cooperation. Ever heard of "team sports"? You can certainly find opportunities for cooperation and altruism on your way to stomping whatever and/or whomever needs to get stomped today.

I would hazard that in every situation where you have found yourself in pain, angry, depressed, malaised (sounds like something off a French menu---as in, "I'll have the Poulet Malaise"), etc., at least one person in the world would have been overjoyed to trade places with you.

I have said, repeatedly, that everyone I know is sexist. One of the people I know is me. Draw your own conclusions. Surprise! I am not a person who wants to believe he is better than everyone else.

Winning $1,000,000 is not guaranteed to improve your life. However, millions of people are more than willing to bet that it will.

For people who can't cope well with some particular mental state, then we see that they have a problem whenever another person contributes to them having that mental state. The courteous person will be sensitive to when they are causing a problem for another person, and will consider changing their behavior, within reason, to avoid causing so much of a problem.

The discourteous person, on the other hand, will try to argue that the person with the problem shouldn't have that problem.

So which would you rather be, courteous or discourteous? Which kind of people would you rather be dealing with?

If someone doesn't want to play the game, or is unable to play the game, then I won't fault them for finding comfort in their real or imagined moral superiority. Most of our "principles" are inconsistent with success, after all. Failure is stressful enough that I wouldn't want to deprive those who fail of a powerful psychological stress reducer.

Happiness based on ignorance is essentially transitory. Sooner or later it gives way to that unsettled feeling that something isn't quite right, but a person can't seem to identify just what is going wrong. Some may say "ignorance is bliss", but I don't buy it. True happiness can only come from understanding. Of course, understanding often causes a person to become less happy in the short run.

Being intelligent can be a great responsibility. It's amazing how many patients at institutions for the mentally impaired are happy.

If men weren't lining up to throw money at women, they wouldn't be majoring in French Lit in the first place, and getting away with staying home and living longer.

Most of us are not consciously aware of social pressure. We have been so heavily socialized that we often believe we really want to do most of the things we have been pressured into doing.

For social pressure to be effective, people must be identifiable and accountable to others. Privacy and anonymity tend to neutralize social pressure. Social pressure is less effective in large urban areas, because there are more definitions of "acceptable" behavior, and because urban dwellers have far more privacy and anonymity than rural dwellers. It's not unusual for a rural citizen to know most of his/her neighbors; this would be very unusual for an urban citizen.

A major ingredient in the increase in privacy over the past few decades is the personal automobile. (This is not my idea: I read this in some American Automobile Association propaganda against gasoline tax increases. The AAA believes that the automobile gives private citizens more privacy, and that this is a benefit.)

While people do seem more comfortable relating to machines than to their geographic neighbors, there is no free lunch. Neighbors still affect each other, but now they no longer know each other. To maintain some semblance of social order, we react by vesting more of the social control on behavior in institutions. The result is that antisocial offenders come to see "The System" as their opponent, rather than the neighbors they are harming.

Lots of people object to being pressured into having sex when they don't want to. The same people will sometimes turn right around and pressure a person who has had sex with them into doing things that person does not want to do. I find this egregiously hypocritical.

When you see a baby's face, you have a visually-stimulated emotional response which is not unlike what drives me to pursue MOTAS. Women who look at a baby's face and exclaim "How precious!" are not very different from men who look at a quality female body and exclaim "Nice tits!"

Parents get vicarious immortality from their children. They also get the chance to own another human being for 18 years. Not to mention the ability to exercise an influence over that human's life unequalled in all other human relationships. Power is gratifying, and parents have power over their children that despot could envy.

The Virginia Slims company has demonstrated that (millions of) woman can be convinced to spend money to poison themselves, if someone can dupe them into associating self-destruction with feeling "liberated." A similarly resourceful short man might be able to promote a scam whereby women prove they are escaping their traditional roles by actively pursuing shorter men, instead of waiting passively for a taller man to pursue them as women have done for the past several million years.

Lest this sound bizarre, I have actually heard at least one woman tell me she deliberately dated an overweight man to "show" that she did not select her dating partners solely on the basis of "superficial" criteria. Probably the overweight man was the unwitting beneficiary of the confusion sown by PC feminist "thinkers," but this does not mean fat men and short men need to rely on Naomi Wolfe et al. to do all the heavy lifting for them.

For example, last night I attended a SuperBowl party (my first ever, as I'm not much of a football fan). The venue was about 4 miles from my house. I decided to walk there. It was a pleasant enough walk, up and down some hills, with a refreshing snap in the 30 degree F air, and it took me an hour one way. This would probably seem like weird behavior to most people I know, but 100 years ago it was quite normal for people to walk these kinds of distances routinely. Of course, for probably a majority of the world's population this is still normal behavior, and if you go to countries where people have to walk just to get around, you don't find millions of fat people and the concept of a weight loss industry would bring howls of laughter once you explained it.

Look at that G.E. executive who got clobbered with the $10 million divorce settlement. For a small fraction of the same money, that poor bastard could have been having sex every week with the finest prostitutes money can buy, at no additional financial risk. Of course he'd have had an additional risk of STDs. But I saw a picture of his wife, and I have to say, there have to be better ways to spend $10 million.

Every time a woman strikes a blow for "equality" by ripping some rich guy in a divorce settlement, she's making prostitutes look like a better deal to some guy, somewhere.

The end of privacy harms some individuals in the short term (namely, those who were exploiting privacy), but in the long term the less privacy we have the better society will be. (With the exception of encryption which is necessary to safeguard financial transactions. But interpersonal behaviors that have public consequences need to be in the public domain. This is fundamental to reducing crime.) Thus I think paternity tests are great since they undermine a large component of privacy.

Eventually all governments interested in reducing crime will have everybody's DNA on file and then it will be simple to solve every rape case immediately in which the rapist is stupid enough to leave genetic evidence and the victim is smart enough to get to a hospital before washing off.

The number of assholes a woman finds herself surrounded by might have something to do with the woman herself.

Let's say I decide to buy a computer, but I only want to pay for half of it. I somehow pass a law that requires you to pay for the other half. Do you feel less robbed because I am paying for half of the computer that I want?

People are approval-seeking creatures. Everybody who is not autistic or sociopathic or similarly defective has a powerful urge to seek the approval of his or her peer group. For example, if you got up in front of an audience to speak and you suddenly lost bowel and bladder control, the memory of your embarrassment would haunt you for the rest of your life. This is part of your brain's system of rewards and punishments to insure that you will give maximum priority to conforming to most of the important demands of your tribe.

The process of bowing to social pressure involves at least as much pain and discomfort as pleasure. But people are adaptive.

Why do you think women want to get married? They want to lock a man in against the day when they can't just go out and pick up another man as easily as they can now. The logical fallacy there is when women (seem to) believe that by getting married they can actually change the way a man will react emotionally to their deteriorating attractiveness.

Just look at the differences between the way women talk about old women vs. the way men do (when they aren't under social pressure to impress young women). Men in the company of other men will express their revulsion for old hags quite clearly whereas women will phrase things much more delicately and try to call attention to an old woman's pleasant personality or apparently affectionate old husband or whatever.

Unless somebody is flat-out lying it seems quite clear that women perceive the consequences of their aging much differently than men do. And this manifests itself directly in the way women will tend to misunderstand a man's use of the word "love."

Japan is probably doing better than any other nation with such a small minority of Christians, but it could be argued that Japan owes much of its success to emulating the political and economic methods developed by nations that had many more christians. That suggests christianity deserves acknowledgement as being superior to utter barbarism but has now outlived its economic usefulness.

There was a "My Turn" article in Newsweek by some woman with five kids who was complaining that her husband's child support payments to his children with his ex-wife were significantly harming his ability to support her children. I thought it was a funny article.

I don't create stereotypes. I observe them.

In my experience, the less attractive a woman is, the better she treats a given man. The more attractive a man is, the better a given woman treats him. But a man cannot vary his own attractiveness as easily as he can vary the attractiveness of the women he chooses to pursue. Therefore a man who thinks women aren't nice enough to him can always aim lower on the attractiveness scale. Or look to a foreign market where his attractiveness is higher.

People generally do not volunteer to have less than they have now. For example, no advocates of "equality" in the industrial nations appear to be suggesting that we should cut our incomes down to the world average. People only desire equality with their betters. And once they are equal they desire to be better.

A woman generally does not need a man until the man creates that need in her, by asserting himself into her awareness, and doing all the right things. A man could just ignore women and wait for them to start needing him, but he would probably have to wait a very long time.

Most science fiction is all screwed up anyway, because most of it postulates this distant future in which people have all this fantastically complex technology and yet remain in control of all of it despite being much like humans are today. Not only are people still in control, they usually have to be in control. Like there's nothing that could beat a human at the job.

An example is how they still have humans flying the space ships in the Star Wars movies. As if a human with ordinary human intelligence and reflexes could keep up with the flood of information and drastically faster pace likely in future battles. Like there would be time for a human to decide what to do.

Most science fiction, to be entertaining, has to envision a kind of 1950's notion of the future. Everything bigger, gleamier, streamlined, antiseptic, with blinking lights and readouts and tailfins. But still with stupid fallible humans calling all the shots. And for some reason the men don't all have harems of stunningly attractive sexbots. That's the biggest flaw of science fiction.

Like all the Star Trek movies. Why would anybody ever leave the Holodeck?

You've got all these fundies putting the Ten Commandments everywhere. What about the verse from Mark that says they shall take up serpents and not be harmed? That's just as much in the Bible too. Did God say one part of the Bible is more divinely inspired than another part?

I think anybody who believes the Bible should grab the nearest rattlesnake and demonstrate some faith, just like the Bible says. I want to see some public demonstrations of snake-handling to go along with the Ten Commandments.

Information is the enemy of religion. For Christians to get on the Internet is actually a risky strategy. Christianity did not evolve in that environment. Christianity fares best when it is the state religion and other ideas aren't even mentioned.

For a Taliban to be a Taliban, it has to be in a country where only the richest people can afford one goat. Give everybody computers, and forget it.

In contrast, I'm NOT optimistic about the future of the petroleum economy. The energy industry, unlike the computer industry, is quite mature. There are not only no breakthroughs on the horizon (like portable cold-fusion batteries that could power your SUV for five years on one charge of tap water), but there are pretty good theoretical arguments against any reasonable possibility of breakthroughs arriving in time to save us from the backside of Hubbert's Curve.

Hybrids can help a little, but one way or another, when less oil gets pumped, gaswasters are going to have to drive less.

It's sad that it actually takes exhausting the world's petroleum to do that. What a waste! Oil is worth ten times as much as feedstock than as fuel. Burning oil is like burning money. It's like burning your furniture to stay warm in winter.

Religion only still exists because technology still sucks. Make technology stop sucking, and that's it for God.

Go to Afghanistan, and people are still living four families to a shack, with no electricity or heat and the nearest water a hand pump 2 miles away. Under those conditions, of course people are going to be slaves to the locally dominant stupid religion that provides false comfort. False comfort is all they can hope for.

Some day you will have your best sex, and after that you will never equal it again. Maybe you have already passed that day. Maybe it still lies ahead. Probably when it happens, you won't know it at the time. It's easy to imagine that whatever you can do, you can do again.

Every woman I have had sex with has greatly underestimated the difficulty I would have finding the next woman to have sex with. A woman who accepts me rarely has any concept of how unusual she is. All she knows is that I hit on her and she said yes. It's difficult for her to imagine the extent to which other women are turned off by the guy she happens to like.

Obviously it would be smarter to reserve real sex for what nature designed it to do: make babies. When people just want to have fun, they should have fun with safe machines.

You will not understand reality until you grasp the way a difference of degree eventually becomes a difference of kind.

This principle is all over biology. Human brain cells are not too much different than the brain cells of a rodent which are in turn surprisingly similar to the brain cells of an insect. But when you have a lot more of them, and hook them up in different ways, the result is like a totally different kind of thing.

You are actually a collective of 100 trillion cellular robots, held together in a ruthlessly fascistic order. But somehow, out of all those automata acting mindlessly and self-sacrificingly in concert, like a legion of microscopic Jihadis, a different kind of thing emerges which does not behave the way we normally think of robots behaving. Humans behave nothing like their component cells, and the cells that constitute you have no idea what they are doing!

If you read all the individual numbers contained on any DVD, they wouldn't look very interesting. But feed them into a DVD player at sufficient speed, and out comes an experience. At some point, the stream of numbers makes some kind of leap into seeming like something else altogether. But it's still just a stream of numbers.

Figure out how that happens, and you'll be on the way to knowing yourself. You are just 100 trillion robots, but somehow you are something else.

When sexbots get good enough, nobody will care what the human partner thinks, because human partners will no longer be necessary. Some women get jealous when their men watch football games on TV. A lot of women eventually come to terms with it somehow, I guess. It's like in the old days, when horses were a necessity. There was probably a market for any horse a person could ride. Today horses are luxuries, so the nags probably get turned into dog food.

Embarrass a man at the right time and see how fast his erection vanishes. Evidently it has been important for most people to desire approval even more than sex.

A real jerk is a master at projecting the exact level of disinterest necessary to attract a woman, and later he makes good on his disinterest by screwing around on her. This is the ultimate paradox: a woman who really wants a man who projects the ability to leave her for another woman whenever he wants is assuming a tremendous risk if she also wants to monopolize his attention. If a woman is really good at screening out the jerk imposters, then she really will get the jerk she deserves.

This is one reason why accusing a man of "not getting any" can be so deeply threatening. Because men have no natural defence against a woman's sexuality. Men instinctively understand the odds stacked against them. A man must learn to defend against letting a woman's sexual advantage undermine his confidence and poise---and he usually isn't born with this skill.

In this sense, a woman's sexuality is her only "weapon," i.e. device for inflicting destruction on a man's psyche. In all other areas---intelligence, personality, social skills, etc.---a man has a greater probability of being on an even footing with her, and these traits are not as obvious and intrusive as her sexuality. For example, if I saw a woman who was vastly more intelligent than me, it would actually be difficult for me to be aware of her intellectual prowess without meeting her and spending some time with her. And even then, I doubt that her intellect would ruin my day, because there is no sense in which I would be driven to "possess" or "experience" her intellect in a way beyond what I would already be doing.

I popularized the term "card" on soc.singles to describe any sort of automatic debate technique wherein the card "player" invokes an inherent special privilege when he or she is losing in an exchange of ideas.

For example, if you and I are debating something, no matter how much better my facts may be, no matter how much more clearly I present them, no matter how intellectually superior I may come off as being, in the end you can always force at least a draw if not an outright "win" by exploiting the undeniable fact that because you are a beautiful woman and I am a normal heterosexual male you have something that I want, you have to power to deprive me of it, and by depriving me of it you objectively harm me. My heart will go on, of course, but clearly your body is worth more to me than winning some silly Usenet debate. I know this, you know this, and everybody reading us knows this. So whatever I might have "won" by winning a "debate" you can easily blow away by playing your sex card.

The beauty of a "card" is that anybody who has one can play it. However, a card takes some skill to play well, and one must take care not to overplay any card, even the most potent ones. For example, if a black man tried to play the race card every time someone disagreed with him it would stop working after about the first three or so invocations. White guilt is an unreliable ally. Playing the sex card can be hazardous too, since it attracts the resentment of your women competitors who hold inferior cards.

If the mentally retarded were trying to promote ideas that would expand the numbers of mentally retarded at our expense then we would oppose them.

Fat acceptors themselves illustrate in stark horror just how deadly their ideas are. Have you noticed the rather short tenure of fat acceptance leadership before they drop dead from obesity related diseases or complications?

Humans have an instinct to mock people who violate social norms, and to feel intense behavior-changing embarrassment when they are mocked. Humans almost certainly evolved these instincts to enable themselves to form cohesive social groups. In primitive conditions, humans have difficulty surviving alone, given that humans are not naturally fast, strong, well-armed or armored in comparison with many other animals. Humans obtained their status as the world's deadliest animal by having the ability to form extremely elaborate societies and coordinate their actions better than any other species. Culture has given humans so much power today that not only are we able to exterminate other species of animals, but we must make a special effort if we are to delay such exterminations by a few decades. However, humans have to make huge sacrifices to enjoy the benefits of culture.

Given that maintaining the social order means everything for humans, the mechanisms for maintaining it must be potent indeed. The instincts which support the social order must be strong enough to rival even the instinct for individual survival. And this is clearly the case. People routinely risk their lives to gain social status and approval (this is most obvious among adolescent males and young adult men).

Humans play an interesting game with mockery. Even if everyone understands something to be true, it's dangerous to be the only person who comes right out and says it, because we have bizarre social rules forbidding us to speak the complete truth except in the rare event that everybody else is speaking it. The common mistake of wishful-thinking defectives is to equate polite browbeaten silence with tacit approval, when in fact most people are either afraid to speak their minds or don't want to hurt the defective's delicate little feelings.

For a stereotype to work, the average person has to be able to see some evidence supporting it. And indeed, the average person is able to see evidence supporting the view that most fat people do not find other fat people particularly attractive. Just go to any party that has a variety of people. The beautiful women are surrounded by men of all types trying to get their attention, while the fat women are standing around alone or with other fat women, being ignored by all the slender men and all the fat men.

It's clear that black people do not find other black people generally unattractive the way fat people find other fat people generally unattractive.

Obviously if society is telling everyone to be slender and 60% of the U.S. population is rejecting that message then you can't put too much stock in the effectiveness of cultural programming.

Most land mammals, including humans, are usually quite lean in a state of nature. Most of these mammals won't usually get fat until someone captures them, locks them in a cage to restrict their mobility, and provides them with unlimited food.

Obesity is the consequence of humans living like zoo animals. We no longer have to chase our food or run from predators or migrate long distances by walking. We live most of our lives sitting around in cages (houses and automobiles). But unlike zoo animals, we don't have keepers to regulate the amount of food we eat. Naturally, some humans give into the temptations of gluttony and become obese. We have removed nature from the struggle to obtain food, but we have not removed nature from our appetites. When finding food is a struggle, an animal needs a big appetite to motivate him to struggle. We still have the big appetite, but we no longer need to struggle. The result is predictable, but that doesn't make it pretty.

Suppose a random guy wanted to have sex with you. He'd prefer that you fucked him willingly, but if you said "No" he'd insist. Suppose the only way you could stop him from having sex with you would be to kill him.

Would you?

I'm not sure what emotional label you want to hang on that, but here's how I would relate. If I caught someone breaking into my house and stealing my valuables I would be very angry and I would want to kill him. It would be fair to say that at that moment I "hate" him.

Now as long as all the have-nots know their place and stay out of my house and away from my stuff I don't "hate" them. But if our conflict of interest ever became an issue because they refused to know their place then my emotions of hatred would kick in to drive me to protect my interests by all available means.

That's what "hate" means to me. Is that a suitable definition for you?

I think it's funny how so many people accuse other people of hating but everyone seems so reluctant to admit they experience the quite normal human emotion of hatred. Of course it's obvious why nobody wants to admit this. Do you know why? Even though everybody hates, we are all embarrassed to admit we do.

It's normal for people to become angry when they believe something they consider important and they are unable to convince other people to believe similarly. In fact I don't know anybody who tolerates serious disagreement well. It's a joke when everybody tries to claim disagreement does not bother them.

If you think it's bad to write things that encourage people to kill themselves how can you tolerate the fat acceptors doing the same thing, only far more insidiously and actually contributing to early deaths?

A welfare recipient by any other name would smell as foul, to paraphrase the Bard.

No "racist" calls himself a "racist." No "welfare recipient" calls himself a "welfare recipient." Most criminals don't consider themselves to be criminals. Most drug addicts don't consider themselves to be addicts. I know a binge drinker who does admit he likes to binge drink several times per week, but he doesn't consider himself to be an alcoholic.

Because few people can acknowledge their own faults, only others are qualified to judge your worth.

It's interesting that you use the word "noble." Historically, the nobility maintained their status through the force of arms. Before the invention of firearms, nobles were typically the Europeans who were wealthy enough to afford weapons and armor. This enabled them to dominate their serfs.

So somehow language has twisted its way through some cranial-rectal inversion so a word that originally was used to describe a social elite of well-equipped thugs now no longer seems applicable to today's professional killers. Those nobles sure knew how to manipulate opinion.

A nation that never kills anybody or threatens to kill anybody does not remain a nation. Even a supposedly "neutral" nation such as Switzerland tightly controls its borders and uses armed force to control who gets in. A nation which does not kill is like a football team which refuses to tackle. The other teams will run over it.

If racist attitudes are still controlling the outcomes for large minorities of people in the United States, how is it possible that most companies can get away with firing employees for espousing what would have to be the majority view?

Clearly, a company would face outcries if it began firing employees for admitting the Earth is spheroidal. Most people firmly believe the Earth is spheroidal, so it would be difficult for a company to fire employees simply for admitting to that belief.

In general it seems for a democracy to persecute a particular belief, that belief cannot be popular. But don't take my word for it, ask everyone you know: if they heard someone described as "racist" would they tend tofeel better or worse about him?

Most crimes go unsolved. Most criminals do not travel far to commit their crimes (criminals being for the most part lazy). Therefore it's pretty simple to compare census data to crime reports to figure out the density of criminals in particular areas. Because most people in the United States prefer to live in apartheid neighborhoods, and most criminals tend to prey on their neighbors, harsher sentencing of black criminals (if it indeed occurs) works to the benefit of law-abiding black people who are the primary victims.

Not that I would necessarily enable a happily married woman who wants to increase her happiness by cheating. That's a complicated situation I wouldn't plunge into lightly. The potential for all sorts of negative fallout is pretty significant. What's the point when the world has plenty of single women? Even with single women, a guy can run into stalker ex-boyfriends. I have to suspect with married women the stalker husband factor might even be worse. It's bad enough when a stalker merely pretends he has a right to stalk.

If men were not generally horrified of being rejected by women, it would be very difficult for an attractive woman to walk down the street. She would have to run a gauntlet of men accosting her, asking for sex, asking her to let them fondle her boobs and ass, and continuing to ask because they wouldn't feel hurt no matter how many times she rejected them.

Inventive people have the rare quality of not being in love with their thoughts. They continuously test their thoughts against harsh unforgiving reality, and they quickly reject any thoughts that don't work. I.e., they aren't afraid of being wrong. They understand error is a natural consequence of thinking. Ironically, the tiny minority of humans who don't love their thoughts have made the world far safer for people who do.

A psychopath is basically a man who always tries to behave like a normal man behaves as part of an undisciplined conquering army.

In practice, here's how it seems to work: an older woman makes her meaningless chants about how she wants a "relationship" rather than "just" sex; then she goes out and has sex with every man who seems like he might be relationship material, most of whom end up leaving her pretty quickly. Eventually one of them sticks around for a while, enabling the woman to maintain her self-delusion that she's not really an aging beauty trying to compensate by becoming easier. But with each passing year that delusion becomes harder to maintain. Eventually, even being easy is no longer enough.

The odds are pretty good that I would not be alive today had it not been for money. There are a few primitive societies in which people live without money. However, the mortality rate in such societies is very high. I am already older than the life expectancy in such a society.

The modern population explosion could not have occurred without the present massive division of labor (probably only possible with some form of money, since direct barter could not work for all transactions). Out of all the people alive today, only a tiny fraction of them would be alive had it not been for money. The world population would be stuck at the pre-agricultural level of a few millions.

Men also need to use the bathroom, but we don't usually socialize with women over that activity. Why? Because feeding women makes them more likely to provide sex. This is easy to test empirically, by inviting a few dozen women to dinner, and then by inviting a few dozen women to the bathroom. The success rate will be higher with the dinner group. Something about a big stanky poo seems to inhibit most women.

As far as I have been able to tell, women decide whether to fuck a man long before they know much about his ideas. Usually women decide this after just one to three dates (they may take a bit longer to act on their decision). That is not nearly enough time for a woman to explore a man's opinions anything like comprehensively.

Sex isn't about ideas. It's about superficial cues that can be apprehended on time scales of a few seconds to a few hours. A woman decides whether to have sex with a man based on things like how he looks, how he speaks, how he moves, how he interacts with her, what sorts of material possessions he has, how others react to him (i.e., his status), how he communicates nonverbally, etc. The kinds of things people use to form first impressions. Sex is mostly about first impressions. If it was about ideas, people couldn't have sex after just the industry-standard three dates.

Insurance companies are not in business to practice social engineering or to discriminate irrationally against various groups.

Insurance companies are in business for one reason: to collect more money in premiums than they pay out in claims. They do that by collecting statistical information which allows them to predict fairly well the cost of claims likely to come from various groups.

We can expect insurance companies to get better at this, refining their predictions down to the level of human genes. Of course there will be a huge outcry against this from the people who are today enjoying a free ride off their neighbors due to ignorance.

But suppose you don't have some genetic defect. Why would you want to pay for people who have it? If you want to, you are certainly free to contribute, but why would you want to be charged as if you were generating the same costs?

Does it bother you to read words on your computer screen from distant strangers that read like something that might upset it you if it came from someone who matters?

Rhetorical question: when computers can converse intelligently, will they be able to hurt our feelings?

Anyone who has read my writings about the future of artificial companionship already knows the answer to that. "I know you are only a machine, but still I care what you say about me." Ethologists call this responding to a partial cue.

Women care more about relationships than they care about sex. Sex is just one small expendable part of the relationship package to most women.

Sure, some women care about whether a man has particular sexual skills, but if women generally demanded skill, there wouldn't be the current situation where something like 80% of women surveyed say they don't reach orgasm reliably with their partners.

Compare this to other requirements women have. Most women would not consider dating a man who doesn't own an automobile, for example. A typical woman cares far more about whether a man owns a car, and what sort of car, than she cares about how many orgasms he can give her.

Would 80% of women put up with their men not owning cars? I doubt it. But 80% of women are content to stay with men who can't or won't get them off. Most women view automobiles as absolutely essential, and orgasms as expendable.

Do you believe your life began at some point? And before that point, you did not exist?

If so, then what's the problem if you should return to that state of nonexistence? Why do religious morons regard the possibility of becoming what they were before---nothing---with such abject horror?

Did you have any problem not existing for the first 15 billion years? Was it horrible for you?

If your parents had never met, or one of the other five million sperm in the load that carried you won the race to the egg, and you never existed, would it make any difference?

I don't know about you, but not existing for 15 billion years was completely easy for me. I didn't have to exert myself at all! I wasn't even getting tired. I could have not existed for at least another trillion years without breaking a sweat.

Every year it gets tougher for anyone with scientific knowledge to remain a vitalist.

"Safe sex" is a contradiction in terms, because when people get horny they are least capable of reasoning about safety. After a while they get lax.

It's like a chick I talked to who has herpes. She said when she dates some new guy, at first he's paranoid about always using condoms and washing after sex. Then after a while the panic wears off and they're having good old dangerous sex. It's hard to keep viewing a familiar person as a risk after a while.

The Vietnam conflict cost a similar amount of money, but it killed far more U.S. servicemembers. That is why the Vietnam conflict stimulated an anti-war movement powerful enough to bring about U.S. defeat.

That's unlikely to happen Iraq simply over money. People care about money, especially their own money, but when the government borrows from the super-rich, the average person doesn't feel the pinch immediately. A bunch of rich people buy a bunch of Treasury bonds. Who marches in the streets over that? Should we call a general strike? Duh.

It's not tangible and emotive like tens of thousands of soldiers coming home in body bags. The onesie-twosie trickle of casualties from Iraq doesn't have the spectacular impact of the big battles in Vietnam where dozens of U.S. troops would die in single ambushes. Iraq casualties are more like automobile accidents than airliner crashes. Every day in and around every large U.S. city, one or two or three people die in motor vehicle accidents. After a while, the general public barely notices. Automobiles have been conditioning Americans for decades to completely ignore the onsie-twosie violent death thing. Unless the dead are people you know, it takes something massive and concentrated to get people's attention.

["Over-educated"] sounds to me like the knock against beautiful women, that they are somehow deficient in "personality" or something else that men would care about if we were halfway civilized. That's what the ugly women say, usually.

I have yet to meet an educated person who thinks there is such a thing as too much education.

At least most of the uneducated people are still smart enough to understand there's no such thing as too much money.

Physicians know, from experience, that after you heal a sick person and start sending bills to him, his inclination to pay up is unreliable. Hence the need for insurance. Physicians aren't like terrorist supporting car dealers. They don't employ repo men. But if they did, imagine the possibilities for reality TV.

Look at all the time and resources that have been wasted on religion, with nothing to show for it. All religion does is insure the child's life will be no better than the parent's.

Humans have spent on science just a fraction of the resources spent on religion, and yet science has lifted a fraction of the world's people out of squalor and provided the only real source of hope humans have ever had that things might get better in the future. No guarantee, of course; but religion only guarantees that nothing improves.

The weird thing is that women are usually the ones who push for marriage, which in theory should give a man leverage to cut a favorable deal. But most men simply capitulate by getting married without first investigating exactly what rights they are signing away.

Most guys have no idea how divorce works until their wife divorces them.

When men take other sorts of risks, such as attempting to climb Mt. Everest, they usually prepare specifically for the risks in store for them. They talk to other climbers who have been there before. They read books. They get training on smaller mountains first. They hire Sherpas to help them out.

Nobody would just sign up for an Everest expedition without first doing a little research. I hope, anyway.

The failure rate for marriage is comparable to the failure rate for climbing Mt. Everest. And the consequences can be similarly catastrophic. A bit of research and preparation is in order for any man contemplating either one of these suicidal risks.

At least when you climb Mt. Everest, only Nature is trying to kill you. You usually don't have to worry about your climbing partners turning on you and deciding to push you off the mountain with no warning.

When a lawyer quits his job at the law firm, does he get to equitably apportion the law firm's assets? If not, could he have earned that right by having sex with the law firm's owner?

Evolution is the source of all our problems, or at least the reason why we perceive things to be problems.

When a poor person wins the lottery jackpot, then we see what their real material preferences were all along.

In my personal experience, it seems most women project their own dating goals onto the men they date. A woman dates because she wants to find a husband. Therefore, she assumes a man dates because he wants to find a wife. A woman views the dating period as a kind of trial run to evaluate a potential spouse. All this occurs without any mention of marriage in the early going. Then after six months of giving sex to the man, she is shocked to discover he has no interest in getting married at all.

It seems difficult for women to comprehend that men could view sex as a worthwhile end in itself, and not merely a means to some other end that would be "better." To a man, what could be better than having no-strings sex with a woman he finds attractive?

This is why I don't think women enjoy sex as much as men do. Women are less likely to be satisfied with just having sex.

Smart women have an even greater belief in their superiority and specialness and uniquess than even an average woman. And the average woman already thinks she is better and more unique and special than all other women. Therefore of course a woman, smart or stupid, expects her man to treat her better than he treated all the other inferior women.

I think every woman thinks she is way hotter than she is, in terms of her expectation that she is going to find some man who will commit to her and only her. As if he is not going to continue lusting after every attractive woman he sees.

Women seem to have a strange habit of simultaneously thinking they are more attractive and less attractive than they actually are. They look in the mirror and fret over all their flaws, real or imagined. But then when they find a man, they think their flaws should have no impact on his level of commitment. As if he cannot see what she sees.

Consider how boring women's sports are by comparison to men's sports. It's not so much that the level of play is lower---it is, but compensating for that, some chick athletes are hot---the real difference is that women athletes are so much better behaved than men athletes. Imagine if those women athletes were like male athletes, griping about their contracts, sabotaging their own teams, spouting racist/homophobic/mass-transitphobic views, occasionally murdering the odd spouse or significant other, throwing chairs into the stands, getting in fights with other players or fans, and spending more time in jail than on the injured list. Not to mention having sex with dozens of partners in every town they visit. Then women's sports would be a lot more interesting, don't you think? Even if most reporters tried to cover up most of what they saw. Just the little bit trickling out would fire the imagination so.

The first step toward embracing reality is to understand that its unpleasant aspects apply to people one dislikes. This isn't so hard because it provides an immediate political payoff, and if one selects the right people to dislike they will have difficulty counterattacking with the same tactic. From there the next great challenge is to understand that reality also applies to one's friends. That's a lot tougher because being honest with one's friends is a sure path to social ostracism. The final challenge is to understand that reality applies to us. Getting people to embrace that probably is pointless.

As a beautiful woman you cannot avoid triggering resentment in women who have less value to men than you have. If I were you, I wouldn't worry about that. Women are weak, so there's not much they can do to harm you that a man can't protect you from.

Notice that the objects of the mocking, and their aiders and abetters, respond energetically to the mocking. That indicates the mocking is having an effect: it is changing the emotional state of the targets. Simply ignoring the mocking doesn't seem to be an option. It's obvious that most people are intensely concerned with how others see them.

You have expressed resentment for men who boast about "conquering" women. You don't seem to realize that women's very reluctance to be "conquered" makes conquest such a boastworthy achievement. If women were easy nobody would boast about conquering them. Actually nobody does boast about conquering those women who are, in fact, easy.

When someone through deliberate action or inaction threatens my interests or merely fails to advance them it's normal for me to suspect that someone "hates" me. Of course reality is rarely so dramatic. Most people we imagine as "hating" us are usually just indifferent to us.

For example, when I describe worthless old people as "aging sacks of shit" people like Nilo gasp and wonder how I can "hate" old people so. But I don't hate them, as long as they know their place. I merely point out that most elderly people who can no longer supply any economic or sexual value are worthless to most people who matter. They generally have nothing of any value to me, so I am largely indifferent to their plight. Of course I will likely share their plight someday if I live long enough, but so what? I will be concerned about a problem when it is my problem but that doesn't mean I have to care about someone else who has the problem---particularly when anything I could do to help would be like a drop in the ocean.

Your computer is about as complicated as, say, an earthworm, if you count up all the parts. More than likely you value your computer a lot more than you value an earthworm, because your computer does more of what you want when you want it.

A farm does not exactly duplicate a naturally occurring jungle. That's the whole point.

Just look around wherever you happen to be sitting. How much nature do you see? Aside from the air I breathe and the light coming in through the window, I don't see anything natural where I sit. Everything around me has been modified by the hand of man. Beyond recognition in many cases. I probably would not recognize all the raw materials that make up the thousands of artifacts in my house.

But what word describes a person who objects to technological progress because it threatens his ego rather than his income? I don't know a good word specifically for that. "Pompous" is a little too broad. There really wasn't anybody like Ned Lud who was famous for doing what you are doing now. Most people like you are just forgotten.

I'm saying women are more fun when they are not a challenge. Is there any product we want to be less reliable? For example, do you enjoy your automobile more if it only starts once every month? Do you enjoy your computer more when it gets a virus and starts deleting your files at random? Do you enjoy women more when they think you are sexually worthless?

I would define an "adequate" sex life as one that would eliminate a man's desire to ogle other women. As long as a man still looks at other women with lust in his heart, his sex life could clearly be better.

That is the goal of every technology: to make life less challenging for someone. (Military technologies try to make life a lot more challenging for the enemy, so we can't say technology is about reducing everybody's challenges.)

If you want a challenge, spend a winter in Ohio without ever going inside a heated building. It gets cold enough here sometimes to make that pretty challenging. I don't know anybody who thinks that sort of challenge is very interesting. There may be some people who could see the sport in it, but usually when people subject themselves to cold environments, they seek out remote areas where there are no heated buildings at all. If a heated building is there, usually even the most rugged outdoorsman will go inside.

Basically, a challenge is only somewhat rationalizable when there is no easier alternative readily available.

Most people are extremely weak. They can barely tolerate anything more than the mildest sort of insults. Why? Because the truth is far too challenging for most people. And most people hate a challenge.

Have I been in relationships that were better than no relationship? Yes. Have I been in a relationship that I could not imagine a way to improve? No.

If you want to know what is really important to a person, read their checkbook, and observe their actions. People have finite amounts of time, money, and energy. They spend them on what they consider most important. For example, you and I think wasting time on Usenet is more important than joining relief organizations and washing lepers in Africa. We probably would not argue that, but we don't have to.

For a woman the problem is not getting sex, but finding a man who meets some long list of nonsexual requirements.

Why are you unable to control your eating without the aid of behavior-changing drugs? You have asserted your superiority to me many times, and yet you cannot master this simple aspect of life discipline without a chemical crutch. Why is that?

To me it's disturbing that there are critically important life advantages that currently cannot be bought. I find it sickening that some people cruise through life with unbelievable perks due to their luck in the genetic lottery, while others eke by in genetic misery, and there's not a goddamned thing the losers can do about it.

Besides, the genetic losers tend to create a disproportionate number of problems for me, each other, and everybody else. Improving people would improve the world.

The entire thrust of technological advancement has been to overcome human limitations. It has also been about leveling the playing field by elevating the inferior.

For example, some small percentage of people have the ability to do arithmetic with large numbers quickly in their heads. This used to be a valuable skill, until the invention of cheap calculating machines gave almost everybody the same ability.

Until now most technology has been exosomatic---outside the body. Eugenics is cool because it will let us build valuable traits and abilities directly into our bodies, right down to the DNA in every cell.

Imagine what it would be like to be as good at everything as the best people in every field are today. It might not be possible to jam that many abilities into one person, because there might be unavoidable trade-offs somewhere, but even if you could "only" get a maximum of 100 world-class skills and traits that would still put you ahead of anybody who is alive today.

It's nice to see that you comprehend the inevitability of positive eugenics. I find the necessary euphemisms entertaining. You remind me of the people who enjoy reading smut but have to call it 'erotica.' The euphemisms are necessary because most people confuse positive eugenics with negative eugenics. Which means Adolf Hitler wasn't entirely defeated: he is still winning the battle for human minds.

[That everyone has to settle] may be a little more obvious to men considering how many rejections we absorb. Clearly if we hit on woman A and get rejected before resorting to woman B it's hard to deny our greater attraction to woman A. But if woman B needs reassurance it's easy to simulate.

If you tell a woman that to you she is the most beautiful woman on the face of the Earth, will she believe you? If telling her this makes the sex more frequent and better, should you? Being "romantic" always involves misrepresenting reality to some degree.

I've noticed an interesting thing by dating a variety of women. A personal trait or preference of mine could be a "problem" with one woman or an "advantage" with another woman, depending on whether the woman likes or dislikes that trait or preference.

As far as data goes, try asking out a number of women. Record which ones say "Yes" to your offer. Then, if possible, find out how much time has elapsed since each woman previously went on a date. With a reasonably large sample I'd expect your success rate to increase in proportion to the length of a woman's dry spell.

If my hunch is correct, there are probably women you could seduce eventually if you were stranded together on a desert island long enough who you could never seduce in the presence of competition. This is not to say you could seduce every woman under conditions of isolation, but I bet plenty would consider enjoying you to be better than never having sex again.

I mention reality whenever it applies.

Chicks dig guys who dis other guys. This is another example of alien behavior. As far as I can tell, a man does not revise his estimate of a woman's attractiveness upward when she maligns other women.

That's because men do not have the "gatekeeper" mentality when it comes to "protecting" our "precious" sexual resources. Thus we do not instinctively feel like rewarding women who help us defend against other women.

Denying reality is a rather odd thing to do when one's own nature and actions demonstrate that reality every day. I am speaking of all the people with high test scores who post to soc.singles, who demonstrate by their accomplishments, social status, opinions, and life choices that the claims in The Bell Curve about them are substantially correct.

In the real world, only a subset of all possible moral systems can be the basis for a sustainable culture. So to say morality is entirely subjective is as stupid as saying the direction of biological evolution has been entirely subjective. There are hard constraints. For example, all animals that live in polar regions have obvious and significant adaptations to the cold (dense fur, thick blubber, anti-freeze chemicals for the fish, etc.). There are many possible ways to design an animal that can survive near the poles but there are even more ways that absolutely will not work.

The same is true for moral codes. There are lots of moral codes that would prevent a civilization from working. If a civilization allows brutality, it must always have some sort of caste system or hierarchy in place to keep from brutalizing too many people at one time.

It would be interesting to decode the genes that give the wolverine its great strength, and then use them to genetically engineer super-athletes.

I read somewhere that birds (that fly) have more than twice the aerobic efficiency of the best human athletes. A genetically modified human with the same endowment could utterly destroy every endurance-sport record.

The future of sport will be very interesting once people get over their squeamishness about breeding people for athletic performance. Given that a top athlete is worth more than $100 million it's only a matter of time once the technology is available.

Every physically attractive woman I have talked to knows perfectly well that the number of men who lust after her is excessive. She is always able to grasp the implications of the resulting competition when I explain them to her.

And explain I do, because when I am lucky enough to date a physically attractive woman I tell her exactly why I am doing so. My enjoyment of her physicality will be better if I can express it overtly and not have to play silly games. This works because deep down inside, every woman has the capacity to enjoy being appreciated for her looks. The trick is to make sure she feels appreciated for other reasons as well.

There seems to be a popular misconception among women (perhaps fostered by the commercially-driven beauty industry) that "sexy" is something you do (or more correctly, purchase). However, the truth is that "sexy" is something you are. If you are sexy, you will have to work hard to hide that fact. If you aren't sexy, then not even Tammy Faye Bakker-scale cosmetic interventions are going to help one little bit. The practical test of sexiness is how often men hit on you when you are not consciously trying to attract them. If this is a common experience for you, then you are almost certainly sexy.

I have to modify the above claim to account for long-term vs. short-term interventions. A person can "purchase" a more attractive body with the tried-and-true methods of behavioral choices (i.e., diet and exercise). However, the results of these choices accumulate over months and years and do not fluctuate much from day to day. Thus if you have spent years pounding your body into shape, and you have the bone structure and genetics to get attractive results, your body will look just about as great today as it did yesterday. Even on a bad hair day you've still got that body.

Another thing to remember is that straight men usually do not tend to pick on minute details the way women seem to. Some women worry about things like whether their eyebrows are too thick or whether their nose is slightly crooked. I.e., details that take some extended close examination for most people to detect. Men tend to see the "big picture" more and overlook minor cosmetic flaws. (At least, this is my hypothesis.) If you spend your whole life looking at your face in the mirror, you may think your appearance changes dramatically from day to day. However, from a man's point of view your appearance probably does not change very much compared to the much larger difference in attractiveness between you and some other woman.

Are you saying humans are unknowable? That every aspect of human behavior is utterly random, whimsical, unpredictable, and uncategorizable? That there is no possible utility in the seemingly universal subconscious human tendency (oops, there I go, generalizing again) to categorize other people and generalize about their future probable behavior?

On a practical level, if you really do believe humans are unpredictable, you would respond in exactly the same way to every human stranger, regardless of age, sex, manner of dress, facial expression, stance, etc., and you would not further refine your categorization after filling in a few initial gaps such as education level, speaking ability, etc. Thereafter, everything that person did would surprise you, if not flabbergast you.

I have never seen a person who reacts to other people as though it were impossible to predict anything about a stranger's behavior from readily apparent cues. That is, until now it seemed to me that everybody I know behaves as though they believe (perhaps subconsciously) that a science of psychology is possible, at least in principle.

Who your parents were ceases to matter pretty quickly when you are sitting in front of a locked-up computer. If you persist in an incorrect belief about why the computer is not working, nothing else matters. Unless, I suppose, you are so sexy you can persuade some bedazzled computer geek to fix it for you. But that can only get you so far, because the boss will soon figure out who is able to fix the computer.

I imagine there are other kinds of businesses where posturing is more important than performing, but computers don't give a shit about anything except the right commands.

People still in school they have not tested their grasp on reality yet. They are still marching through a highly structured educational environment in which the game rules are 100% clear compared to what awaits them when get out into the vague, unstructured world. Of course there are lots of kids whose grasp on reality is so weak that they can't even get through school. And that's pretty amazing when you consider that in school the game rules are completely spelled out for you: go to class, read the books, work the problems, take the tests. When you get into the world of business, 95% of the people out there have little idea what the real problem is in any given situation. Enormous business enterprises fail and go bankrupt because somebody guessed wrong about what was feasible to build or about what the customers wanted to buy.

Billy Graham can be as incorrect as he likes everywhere else as long as he holds correct beliefs about what it takes to sell tickets to hear him speak at Yankee Stadium.

It would be nice to have a second lifetime in which we could relive our youth, but where we get to keep the wealth and knowledge we accumulated in our first life of relentless toil. That way, instead of having to choose between academic achievement and partying, we could focus on achievement the first time through college and then savor the fruits of it on the second round.

This is an example of why purely voluntary population growth seems doomed to fail: over time, the percentage of people living in cultures which do not practice family planning keeps rising. Soon, growth in their numbers overwhelms any loss in numbers among cultures that do limit births. That is to say, as long as any group of people continues to double in number every 33 years, in the long run it makes no difference what everybody else does.

Most men learn early on not to be straightforward about what they find most attractive about women, because (oddly enough) most women find men's emotions to be offensive.

The best way to judge what men find attractive in women is to observe the choices men make when they are completely free to choose. Most men do not have anything like a free choice in relationship partners, but they do have a free choice from the entertainment industry.

My take, which may be skewed by the hagiographers, is that Darwin was the first to recognize evolution by natural (and sexual) selection working on variation. Darwin did not know the source of variation nor the mechanism of inheritance, of course.

If Darwin's view was Lamarckian, it's hard for me to understand why he needed to add selection to the mix. If animals can obtain new characteristics by their behavior or environment and pass them on to their offspring, it gets difficult to understand why selection would be necessary, or indeed even possible. For example, if the weather is getting colder and animals need thicker fur, why wouldn't the entire population of animals get furrier and produce furrier offspring on schedule? Why would there be any need for the less-furry ones to freeze and die off, and for the more-furry ones to breed more successfully and rebuild the population in their image? The notion of selection was, as I understand it, Darwin's greatest single contribution.

If you look at the way the animal kingdom behaves, you might find that what we would call "rape" is often the order of the day. Among mammals where the male is bigger and stronger, female choice is not preserved. I read an article in Scientific American about the humpback whales, where female whales do exercise choice (although we can only speculate on what their exact criteria may be! Sonar returns?). When a female whale rejects a suitor, and he persists, then she swims on her back at the surface, placing her vulva in a position he can't reach. The male whale response is to call for a few buddies to swim up alongside her, who ram her in such a way as to turn her right-side up so he can get into position from below to do the dirty deed. You'll never guess how the lucky fellow returns the favor to his pals. Remember, these are among the most intelligent mammals.

Similar behavior occurs at walrus rookeries. For example, if a female walrus has the bad sense to wander away from the protection of her harem, then all the subordinate males who got the shit beat out of them by the dominant bulls will do their best to make up for lost time. If they can't find any stray females, they use each other.

I'm not using these illustrations to condone animal behavior. Rather, I'm saying that protecting female choice---a fundamental function of civilization---is a substantial task.

A very large fraction of the smell, noise, and traffic congestion in cities is the result of automobile commuters piling in and out every day. You are blaming the city for the problems people like you are creating by trying to escape them.

The truly sad aspect of suburban sprawl is that is self-defeating. I recall growing up in a fairly pleasant suburb as a child. Considerable tracts of undeveloped land provided forested areas where we could hike, ride bicycles on trails, and explore. Today the same suburb is an almost unbearable nightmare. All the forested areas have been developed into automobile-oriented low-density housing and commercial space. Motor traffic congestion and noise are inescapable, and virtually nothing is accessible without a car. The once-spacious interstate highway is now the scene of daily traffic jams. I pity the children who are trying to grow up today in such an environment. Without the ability to drive, they essentially do not exist. Their parents barely exist either, outside of their cars.

Why do so many women's fashions appear to be on the verge of falling off? They are constructed of seemingly frilly and flimsy materials. The obvious quality conveyed is that the wearer might be as yielding as her clothing. Men's clothing, on the other hand, usually conveys ruggedness, etc., heavier materials, the stuff you could tie around a trailer hitch, or run through a thicket in. No nonsense, he's ready for the worst the world can throw his way.

Think about it. If you went outside today, and you saw someone mowing your grass, trimming your bushes, landscaping your yard, would you just say, "How nice", and go back inside? Then, if they knocked on your door at the evening and asked for dinner, would you start calling them a bunch of names and accusing them of trying to control you?

I don't know how the rest of you operate. But if I see somebody doing nice things for me, I hurry to find out exactly what kind of deal they think I'm making. I don't cruise through life looking for Free Lunches. And I don't expect anybody to hand me any.

Relationships are transactions, and the best possible relationships occur when we make the best possible transactions. In other words, the best relationship is the one where you manage to sell yourself for the highest price (measured in benefit to you, which is completely up to you to decide---maybe you value some person's smile and good vibes more than anything).

If you abhor selling yourself, I would not predict that you would be successful in many relationships with other people. However, you need not be aware of what you are doing to do it well. But I think you will do it better if you are aware.

Can someone please explain to me why people get so uncomfortable with the idea of relationships as transactions? I.e., why do people get so uncomfortable with what they all do?

Most of what people are putting forward as "altruism" here is nothing more than the social equivalent of the farmer broadcasting seed. The farmer knows that to grow 1 plant, he must scatter N seeds, where N may be some respectable number. The farmer is not concerned about getting a payoff from every single seed. All that matters is that enough seeds bear fruit. If every single seed failed to grow, the farmer would have to look for other work. If the farmer continued to throw seed into a barren desert year after year, would we not start to question his sanity?

Consider, however, a person with the sort of organic brain damage common among persons who were chemically abused before birth by their substance-dependent mothers. These people sometimes have trouble obeying all the complex social conventions most of us have long ago subconsciously incorporated. One of these persons may have to expend considerable effort to refrain from inflicting violence upon me if I offend him/her.

In that case, I have much to thank him/her for. However, most people would not appreciate being given such a gift. They would take it for granted.

Over the past decade the prison population has climbed in lockstep with the decrease in crime. The more prisons we build, the safer we are. If you have a different explanation for the observed correlation let's hear it. I'm going with Occam's Razor on this one. Given that a career criminal commits dozens of crimes for every one where he's caught and punished, by keeping a repeat offender locked up you are preventing an enormous number of crimes from happening.

I guarantee that if you go down to the homeless shelter, you will not see nearly as many physically attractive people as among the established upper class. The difference would still be obvious even after you cleaned the homeless people up.

There are, of course, some women who think it's impossible to live without a car and for whom my pleasant existence is therefore an extremely disturbing impossibility. It's easy enough to detect such a woman in the early going because she'll launch into a strenuous interrogation to determine just how I get the groceries but even after she rewords the question a dozen or so ways and throwing in side questions like "How do you cart home full-grown sequoias from the nursery??!!!?!?!" it becomes clear that the answers aren't registering. Even if such a woman was really, really hot I have to say I don't think I'd be able to tolerate her for very long anyway. If reality was much crueler than it actually is and I unavoidably had to buy a car if I wanted to date hot women then I might pay the automotive slavish conformance tax, but it would be difficult for me to feel much in the way of respect for any shallow airhead for whom this would make a difference.

Try hanging out with groups of people who are in different age ranges. For example, a group of 20 year olds followed by a group of 50 year olds. It can be difficult to believe the 50 year olds were 20 at one time.

People change their behavior and attitudes a lot as they age. In fact you might have more trouble recognizing a personality than a body after 30 years of aging.

In the real world it is quite common to have to justify one's actions to others. In fact this is often an essential condition for freedom.

Even if we don't risk going to jail by sharing the majority sexual preference, it's still a worthwhile exercise to try to "justify" what we feel. The practice might come in handy someday on something important. Because what is "justifying," anyway? It is nothing less than explaining oneself to an alien intelligence. That is a fascinating intellectual problem in its own right. A person who knows how to do this has a useful source of power.

Cities certainly do destroy wilderness, but they also preserve wilderness, by packing the destruction into a smaller area and containing it to some extent. If the population of the USA were uniformly distributed, there would be no remaining wilderness at all. It would come out to about 80+ persons/mi^2 (considerably more if we neglect Alaska), which is plenty to spoil all the nice views.

People who want to preserve wilderness areas actually have a great interest in (somehow) making densely populated cities nicer places to live. By disparaging cities, wilderness advocates may well be undermining their own cause. What if everybody in the cities said, "Yeah, I guess those tree-huggers are right. Let's get the hell out of this concrete beehive!"

Never underestimate the power of tradition for masking logical incongruities.

If you believe human intelligence has evolved then you really have to jump through some serious anti-Occam hoops if you want to believe intelligence has nothing to do with genes and that it can't be measured.

Whether or not IQ tests can measure intelligence, if you believe intelligence evolved then you can be damned sure natural selection was able to measure it. Unless, of course, intelligence evolved purely as an accidental side effect of something else that was selected for.

It would be interesting to try an experiment. Compile data on a large number of men relating their heights to their incomes. Then relabel the plot so instead of "height" the abscissa read "IQ" and show it [leftists].

The human capacity to sustain contradictory notions knows few limits particularly when real life doesn't make the contradictions unavoidable with hard choices.

In general everybody hates diversity and most people naturally interpret differences as faults except when they have systematically developed anti-normal some-of-my-best-friends-are responses.

I recall an instance in a weight room where I was talking to another man and a quite overweight woman joined the conversation and lamented about the fact that she didn't receive anything for Sweetest Day except from some man she found totally unacceptable. My bud and I both muttered something as bland as we could manage to the effect of "well, that's the way it usually goes" and we managed to carefully sidestep the obvious bait without appearing to take it. But basically our implicit response indicated that neither of us found the woman who was complaining anywhere remotely near acceptable.

In contrast during my years hanging around in gyms I have never heard one of the sexy aerobics instructor female elite uttering so much as a peep of a complaint about failing to get enough attention from men, around men. That's because all such women know that this would elicit hordes of unwelcome suitors who would then require tedious and unpleasant individual rejection. It's much better for such women to screen out the undesirables by feigning an utter lack of any interest in men and waiting for the few men with balls to take the game to them. And of course by holding the "I'm already seeing somebody" card in reserve for softening the drop to the reject pile. Which is almost never a lie in any case for a member of the female elite.

It can be counterproductive for a man to compliment a staggeringly attractive woman to the extent that her staggering attractiveness warrants. Heavens, this might confront her with the obvious reality that men find her attractive because she's attractive.

I do not think it is "right" that I was born physically attractive to some women and unattractive to others. It is also not "right" that I was born physically attractive to some men, yet I must reject all of
them.

It's also not "right" that we are living in relative material comfort in the First World, while over a billion people live in the most debasing poverty we can imagine.

It's not "right" that all of us are going to age and die, and many of us will die excruciating deaths.

But the real question is, why do we complicate these questions with notions of being "right"?

If a woman is attracted to me, then she is not attracted to someone else. The fact that my girlfriend loves me (I know, it amazed me too) means that she is not loving the next guy. Is it "right" that I should be having fun and the next guy stays at home staring at the walls? Is it right that the rich American man who strikes out with all the American woman can go to Thailand and buy a wife, thereby screwing over the Thai men? Of course not. But who cares?

Take a stroll over to alt.support.fat-acceptance and read the FAQ thereof to learn what the Web would have to be like to seem unintimidating to (a goodly fraction of) women. That particular newsgroup appears to have a sex ratio where women dominate about as completely as men dominate on alt.seduction.fast. If you read the fat group for a while, you'll marvel as I did at the number of articles where people apologize for having offended each other unintentionally. But unintentional offense is inevitable in any group of hypersensitive people determined to suppress gigantic noncoincident subsets of possible speech. What can two people possibly talk about if any suggestion that either of them should change even slightly triggers hysteria? A group of people cannot affirm each other exclusively and stay interesting for very long. The only way a person can learn something useful from another person is to first admit that (s)he has something yet to learn, and that is equivalent to admitting imperfection. A person whose primary aim is to obtain reassurance that she is fine just the way she is will not have an enjoyable out-of-box experience with Usenet. That kind of person would be better off purchasing a dog, one of the few organisms capable of indiscriminate loyalty.

Until rather recently, it was quite common for most peoples in the world to view themselves openly as being superior to all other races and ethnic and religious groups. The Chinese, for example, regarded European traders and warriors as outright barbarians who resembled and behaved like apes, etc., and the Europeans regard for the Chinese is probably familiar to us all. Now of course it has become politically incorrect, at least among the descendents of European conquerors, to malign entire ethnic groups. But historically this is what everybody did. The anti-semitism of the Nazis wasn't close to being the worst thing about the Nazis in the eyes of the Allied nations, at least before the war ended and the appalling scale of the Shoah became fully evident.

Gene Simmons of the rock band Kiss also claims thousands of partners, and I think I read somewhere that he takes photos of all the women he screws and keeps them in a shelf of scrapbooks.

I was talking to some guy from Bangladesh I worked with once, and he told me the same thing happens in his country when famous entertainers come to perform. He said "The most attractive local women just go to the hotel and line up."

These incredibly lucky men are fascinating not so much because of their behavior, which is in some sense almost appalling---I mean, come on, using that many women as cum-dumpsters would preclude getting to know most of them as persons on even a superficial level---but because of what they tell us about women.

Women are always feeding men this constant line of bullshit about how they need to feel comfortable with a man, develop trust, have commitment, be friends first, etc. etc. etc. and that's why they aren't ready for sex now. But practically every woman who says this to a bunch of guys will, sooner or later, meet some guy she hurls herself at almost immediately. And all that noise about trust and commitment goes flying right off with her panties.

There are no women who are comfortable with the notion of men they find sexually abhorrent having sex drives as powerful and insistent as the drives of men they find attractive.

In much the same way it's very difficult for a straight man to be 100% comfortable with the idea that there are gay men who would like to do unwelcome things to them. So I can certainly relate to unquestioning acceptance of your primitive emotions even if I simultaneously recognize them for what they are.

Of course, people do want to be generalized about. When someone generalizes about us successfully, millions of us vote with our dollars to turn that person into a billionaire. We love it when Steven Spielberg hits on the right formula to create a movie that generally appeals to people. We love it when some brewer shows us entertaining frogs, lizards, or Swedish Bikini Teams. We applaud when some car maker figures out how to build exactly the car we want based on our age, budget, sex, education, income, zipcode, and other simple demographic variables. We relish the opportunity to move in lockstep with millions of other lemmings and be part of mass culture. When all our friends go to see Titanic then we have to go see it too. Or when some critical mass of influential young people define "cool" by punching holes in their bodies, then pretty soon all young people feel an urge to express their individuality by conforming to the norms of their tribe.

We go to bookstores and buy self-help books on the premise that people we have never met can comment intelligently about the lives of millions of other people they haven't met. We sustain ancient religions on the premise that it is even possible to do this across thousands of years.

Practically every aspect of our culture only makes sense if we conclude that most people are more alike than they are different, and that easily recognizable demographic subgroups of people are even more internally similar still.

Physics is a massive structure of knowledge which seems miraculous when viewed all at once (much like life itself), but which arose through a basically algorithmic process which is not as mysterious when one repeats the essential steps. Actually, the development of physics is more mysterious than the evolution of life, because life evolved in smaller steps (gene mutations). Some advances in physics have resulted from one or a few great thinkers adding large amounts of value at once. The mental processes which produce genius are (currently) mysterious, but the results of genius are not.

Tell me, do you harbor the fear that so many women feel that if it weren't for their sex, men would be about as disinterested in women as they tend to be, on average, about other men? As you probably know, men tend to make most of their male friends as a result of being pushed together by circumstances (the guys they work with, the guys they see in the gym all the time, etc.). It's pretty rare for a man to see another man he doesn't know and walk right up and introduce himself and try to start a friendship. In fact, I would think that would be kind of weird. But guys go well out of their way to try to start "friendships" with women, implying that they have a very strong additional incentive to motivate them.

Or take a look at elderly women who have declined to nearly zero in terms of sexual attractiveness and see how many men approach such women attempting to express interest in them as persons. I'm sure this happens occasionally but it can't be anything like as common as the "friendly" attention a young, sexy woman gets from men.

Most people tend to forget how they got what they have once they have it.

I read a hilarious interview with the lead singer of the band Oasis, whatever his name is. He was mocking celebrity crybabies like the angst-ridden clowns in Pearl Jam who actually expect sympathy for the terrible burden they bear, having to get paid vast sums of money for enjoying themselves immensely a few hours each day.

Actually what sounds cold to me is knowing how much people like to kid themselves about basic realities. A person who goes a whole lifetime never allowing himself to fully embrace the truth---now that is as cold and horrible a fate as I can imagine. The truth is the greatest thing that ever happened. To deprive oneself of it---what a loss!

When I go to the store and the salesperson is friendly to me, there's some chance the salesperson sincerely enjoys at least some aspects of selling.

But if I had no money the salesperson would become far less likely to help me walk out with the goods I want.

If I were so insecure that I got worked up over this, I would have a problem. If I felt like I should be able to get everything in every store for free, I would be unable to function well in the real world. In a world of finite resources and infinite needs you get what you give, which means you have to have something to give if you want to get something.

If people were habitually honest we would live in a very different world. After everybody got over the initial shock we would immediately embark on a steady program of improvement.

It would be interesting for a woman to document her aging process with an annual collection of high-resolution photographs in the same selection of poses and outfits with all lighting, etc. conditions held constant. A selection of such photos stretching over 50 years, documenting her "personal growth" from age 20 to 70 would tell the studio audience everything it needs to know about the true horrors of aging.

There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that sex doesn't play a very large role in the relationships of many older couples. And small wonder. It's difficult to imagine, for example, George Bush getting a stiffy watching Barbara Bush undress. Barbara Bush doesn't approve of George jumping out of airplanes, but what else does he have to live for at this point?

Your insistence on droning on meaninglessly about Camryn Mannheim tells every man reading this everything he needs to know about your insight into male nature.

I'm waiting for some Olympic gold medalist to come out and admit that the best part of winning the gold is not all the usual platitudes but to know that he caused everybody else in the race to go home with shattered dreams after wasting four dreary years of their lives.

100 years from now the eugenic gloom-and-doom quotes from today will look as ridiculous in retrospect as all the early pronouncements about the horrors of "high speed" rail travel. Yes, there will be accidents and disasters from positive eugenics just as there have been accidents and disasters with every powerful technology. But the benefits of positive eugenics will be so overwhelming that people will ignore the risks. It would be more accurate to say that the risks of positive eugenics will be substantially less than the risks of leaving your childrens' fate up to the genetic lottery.

But getting back to Space Seed: if Khan had been really superior he would not have needed to fight. He would have been genetically engineered to be stunningly handsome, overwhelmingly persuasive, irresistably charismatic, and just plain can't-turn-him-down likable. (Much like me.) Within days of beaming aboard the Enterprise he would have had the entire crue worshipping him and willing to lay down their lives for him.

I suggest that you try actually dating an attractive woman, to the point where you see her without her war paint occasionally. For example, when she wakes up in the morning.

Try this, and you'll discover that even if her hair is mussed and you can discern her real facial complexion, you'll find she still has the same features and bone structure. Not to mention that ass, which looks and feels exactly the same in the morning as it did when you were squeezing it the night before.

The impact of makeup is most dramatic on women who aren't that good-looking to begin with. Not that it makes them look great, but without makeup they really get scary. A really attractive woman does not have to hide from the world when she's sans makeup.

This is, incidentally, why the average woman seems to look better than the average man. Go visit an Amish community where the women don't wear makeup and compare the sexes.

For example, if a man you did not know walked up and pinched you hard on the ass, would you mind? Some woman did this to me at a concert once and I was amused even though she pinched me hard enough to make it sting for a minute. If a man does this to a woman it's more likely to be perceived as a crime by the woman. She would feel violated, angry, sense a loss of control, and so on. For a man getting mildly assaulted by a woman he doesn't know is usually not a big deal.

Women find male sexuality threatening when it's aimed at them and they don't want it. The same goes for men. In contrast, neither men nor women feel threatened by women. You don't hear men expressing horror about being raped by women, and you don't hear women expressing horror about being raped by women. Women basically get a free pass to do whatever they want without scaring everybody.

Women do not require death threats to accept subservience to men. Most women appear to be intrinsically uncomfortable with real equality. I did not notice that death threats were necessary to persuade most women to accept OneWayAskOut, ManPays, and ChoiceForWomenOnly. These are all statements of subservience that most women make willingly.

You've called men selfish, immature, stupid, inferior to dogs, and a number of other not-nice things. If we are so bad, how do we "hurt" women by keeping our bad selves out of their lives? Wouldn't we actually be doing them a large favor by staying away?

Also, why are you blaming men? Isn't the real problem attractive women? They are the ones who are making the rest of you seem undesirable by comparison. They are your competition. By refusing to pork themselves up into bloated manatees they show men how much pleasure a woman can give to a man when everything is working. By displaying their beauty in public to maximum advantage, they continually remind men of what they can't have and make it much harder for men to appreciate the less-attractive women. If the frumpy women of the world had any brains at all, they would demand that all the attractive women wear veils.

If women want to fuck rock stars, then I am jealous of rock stars. I don't tell women they should stop being women. Only the guy who is the rock star has any real say here. He's the person who is kicking my ass. He could have chosen to pump gas for a living instead.

I'm trying to recall, have you always had this weird affectation with the all-lowercase letters? The one that was popular in the 1950's with the Beat Generation? The one still popular with people struggling to appear cool? But which only makes them look pathetically stupid?

If you have to play the Nazi card then it's pretty obvious that your position is logically bankrupt. It's amazing that Hitler has been dead for 54 years and yet he is still claiming victims today.

There aren't many people who can make a serious claim to being single by preference. At best such a person can claim that being single is more enjoyable than being with anybody (s)he can currently attract.

Even people who seem to believe their claims that they "don't want to be in a relationship right now" tend to toss that notion aside quickly when a sufficiently attractive prospect comes along.

A "professional" is a person who manages to behave differently while on the clock.

That [ women are attracted to success] is an empirical observation. It has been tested repeatedly by men who have undergone drastic upward and downward changes in "success." Most men who have become celebrities will say their success with women has increased in lockstep with their fame. A few will say they were always successful with women. I have never heard a celebrity say his attractiveness to women dropped after he became famous. About the closest approximation I have heard was in a Bruce Willis interview when he said something like he got laid more as a bartender before he became an actor. However, he probably would not have enjoyed 10 years with Demi Moore if he had stayed a bartender, so I'm inclined to believe he just tossing out a bone for the liberal hivemind.

A smart man's intelligence by itself is not as interesting to as many women as is a handsome man's physical attractiveness by itself. I have had many women tell me they think I am one of the smartest men they have ever met. From what I can tell, they admire this trait, but not with anything like the intensity of admiration they might have for the trait of, say, looking like Antonio Banderas or Keanu Reeves.

Intelligence combined with years of hard work plus a measure of luck can yield something that women find attractive, although I think it still requires more effort to showcase well. Consider who would probably have to work harder to seduce the most attractive women: Antonio Banderas or Donald Trump. A rich man has to act rich, while a handsome man merely has to show up.

Also, hard work alone is not enough. A garbage man who works hard at emptying cans into the truck is not going to score as many points with women as will the man who works just as hard at learning to play the electric guitar well. There are some forms of "success" that (most) women admire spectacularly more than others. It seems that "success" without accolades is not as appealing to women. A man does better to succeed in some field that earns him widespread visibility. Becoming, say, the world's greatest authority on nematodes might be a truly staggering achievement, but probably wouldn't increase the average woman's heart rate by one beat per minute.

If the majority of fat women were happy, I doubt they'd find the need to agitate for "fat acceptance." Any way you slice it (or, perhaps, flense it) the very notion of lobbying for "fat acceptance" has "loser talk" plastered all over it. Are thin, pretty women organizing to browbeat people into finding them attractive? I think not.

Everybody who is old now was young once and therefore remembers what it was like to be 20 years old and completely turned off (sexually) by the spectacle of aged, withered flesh. This eliminates any possibility that still-lucid elderly women would seriously try to mobilize and agitate for "age acceptance."

I'll confess that I'm absolutely mystified by the fat women who boast about their sexual prowess and try to tell men like me that we are incapable of comprehending how our own sexual attractions work. This is just about as comical as the oft-portrayed dork-male character in the movies who keeps hitting on the hot babe in his terminally dorky way and never comprehends how dorky he is. An example was the nerdy neighbor of Sigourney Weaver's character in one of the Ghostbuster films, and the Joe Jr. Italian-retard stereotype in While You Were Sleeping who never abandonded the delusion that he had anything like a chance with Sandra Bullock's character.

The only kind of "fat acceptance" that works is accepting the simple reality that choosing to be fat means choosing to be less attractive. This isn't a mortal sin, of course. Maybe for some people it really is more fun, on balance, to enjoy the pleasures of sloth and gluttony more than the pleasures of lust. And maybe for a few lucky people it's possible to enjoy all three in some truly meaningful sense. But most people are going to see some kind of tradeoff, and it is 100% reasonable for most people's sexual preferences to produce this tradeoff.

Everybody who drives a single-passenger car into a dense city owes a debt to everyone who takes transit or rides a bicycle there. Without space-efficient transit, the city wouldn't even exist. It would simply be a large parking ramp. This is common knowledge among traffic engineers, which is why every city subsidizes transit. Without transit, there is no city. If you look at the changes in USA cities after WWII, the effect is not much different than saturation bombing. Everywhere, buildings get demolitioned, and parking ramps replace them. In effect, as more people drive cars, the cities must be dismantled gradually to create the extra space necessary. Eventually, when everybody is driving, the city is gone, because people cannot live and work in parking ramps.

Oglesby and Hicks, in Highway Engineering, 4th ed., point out that all cities must provide incentives away from the single-passenger automobile. They claim that central business districts allot 100 ft^2 per employee or customer, while a small car requires 250 ft^2 for parking, and a large car requires 350 ft^2 (including necessary lanes and clearances.) (Keep this 3:1 ratio in mind next time you visit a shopping mall. The malls I have seen are surrounded by parking lots which dwarf the mall proper.)

They conclude that any sizable concentration of population simply will not have room to permit everyone to drive their own car.

f you want to experience coercion, come to Cincinnati and ride a bicycle. The friendly local motorists will immediately provide a practical and illuminating education about the meaning of the word "coercion".

The pity is that most of these people are not violent persons at heart, but they are the victims of a system which fails to deliver on its promise. Consider the differences between the illusory picture of effortless mobility we see in the car commercials---a happy driver enjoying breathtaking scenery and a challenging, but perfectly maintained highway---and the actual picture of everyday congestion, pollution, noise, stress, drunk drivers, potholes, and conflict with the law and bureaucracy that is the real legacy of the automobile.

Drivers are pissed off because they have been ripped off. Here they spend a large fraction of their income to buy an automobile, and then they have to spend their lives fighting for the space to use it. Such space is not available in human communities, so those who pursue the siren song of convenient mobility wind up spending a good part of their lives locked into a state of conflict with their neighbors, which leaves them understandably irritable. That is why many drivers seem to spend the bulk of their time behind the wheel growling, snarling, swearing at everyone around them, but mostly in front of them.

Even professional bleeding hearts who try to avoid being judgemental will typically prefer to respect stupid people from a safe distance.

Intellectuals are typically some of the most prejudiced and intolerant people alive. Look at how dullards who don't write well get treated when they post their fumbling attempts at writing on Usenet. They are either ignored or savagely ridiculed.

I'm not the smartest person around but I find it taxing to deal much with people who are of merely average intelligence, let alone people who are below average. It's like pedaling a bicycle through deep mud, trying to get them to grasp the simplest ideas.

To me it's fascinating how simple music can sound "heavy" when you play it on some instruments but not on other instruments. Even at high volumes, a piano doesn't really sound "heavy" the way distorted electric guitars do. Something about how the harmonics fill up the audio spectrum.

Some lawyers are very good at what they do: biting the arm off a compassionate society.

Are you one of those people who enjoys tormenting defectives but feels a need to be in denial about it? I find such people strange. If you're going to get your jollies by kicking cripples, get over the guilt first.

I can't for the life of me understand why women are not marching in the streets demanding a national DNA database. There's a serial rapist who has been targeting girls aged 8 to 15 in their suburban homes. He's left his calling cards at every crime scene but the cops don't have a suspect because there is no national DNA database. That is absurd. How many girls do we have to sacrifice to defend privacy and anti-government paranoia?

The rapist wants to rape you with the same intensity of emotion that you feel for wanting not to be raped. You've already stated for the record that you would do anything in your power to stop a rapist.

Pakistan is not such a horrible place. If you enjoy mountain climbing some of the best in the world is in the famed Karakoram range, home to K2, the Trango Towers, and a long list of other natural wonders. It may not be the smartest destination for Americans these days, but once you're up on a 6,000 foot vertical granite face I don't think too many of the locals will be there to bother you.

Virtually every sentence in a modern fire safety code or maritime safety code is there because of someone's death. Things we take for granted today like sprinkler systems, fire doors, exit signs, fire alarms, fire departments, etc. did not exist the first time somebody needed them. It usually takes a tragedy to get people to take safety seriously. And then over time people get lax about safety rules unless authorities strictly enforce them.

And, of course, the concept of sex robots is a rational response to all the disasters associated with trying to get recreational sex the natural way. Nature has no concept of "recreational" sex.

Many features of our future sex robots will reflect the painful lessons learned by men during their groveling ordeal of trying to obtain quality sex from women.

Note that jerking a man around and making him wait and wonder when and if he might get sex early in a relationship is likely to create long-term damage later when a woman starts asking the man to care about her needs. If the relationship starts off with the woman ignoring his needs, she shouldn't be surprised if he similarly abuses his power when the power balance in the relationship shifts slightly to his favor.

A woman holds all the power early in the relationship. The message of respect or disrespect she sends at that time sets the tone for everything that follows.

I don't understand how there could need to be helmet laws. How could anybody need to be told to wear one?

One woman I dated told me that her grandmother used to roll her breasts up before putting them into her bra. I have to admit that is one of the grossest visuals I have ever associated with aging.

If I were to tell a woman I didn't want to sleep with her because she is too fat, she would most likely think the problem was with my preferences, not with her size. Most people are too egotistical to fully agree with someone else's rejection of them. Asking a man to agree that he is sexually horrifying is asking him to be more humble than most people are.

We remember winners and forget the losers. We even have trouble remembering Vice Presidents.

Native American cultures are far more conservative and resistant to innovation than European cultures. Notice how even today many Native Americans still cling to their obviously failed ideas.

Suppose there are two insurance companies competing for my business. Company A uses government data to determine my flood risk. Company B charges all its customers the same rate regardless of their actual risk.

What will happen to these two companies in the free market? Obviously, Company A will be able to charge lower premiums to property owners who are not at flood risk, whereas Company B has to charge them more to pay for property owners who are at flood risk. Over time, Company A will have all the non-flood-risk customers and Company B will be left with the flood risk customers. It will have to charge high premiums and probably won't be able to stay in business after the next flood, when all its customers file claims simultaneously.

Health insurance doesn't work as well as flood insurance, yet, because floods are simpler than human health and people have figured out how to predict flood risks quite accurately. But DNA technology will help health insurance companies improve their actuarial calculations and thus provide better service at lower cost.

Passing laws to stop insurance companies and employers from using DNA technology to increase the efficiency of their private businesses is one way to set up socialistic governments to protect people who can't compete in a free market.

A market is "free" only in proportion to the market participants' ability to compute value. I.e., the more completely and accurately people know what they are buying and selling, the more efficient the market becomes.

Transactions like health insurance are a mess right now because those parts of the market aren't smart enough to be completely "free" yet. Insurance companies have to charge everybody high premiums because they don't know what your real health risks are.

If you think I'm harsh, try going out and talking to women. I don't know everything there is to know about picking up women, but I will tell you this: if a bit of mild criticism rattles your cage, you'd better stick to safer pursuits.

If a person is a glutton and is thereby degrading her health and much of her potential attractiveness to men by being obese, then it would be interesting to know how a counselor would handle that. Would a counselor address the real problem---gluttony which leads to obesity---or would the counselor dance around the real problem and simply try to help the obese glutton feel better about herself as she continues to self-destruct?

There is a term which describes helping people with problems feel better about themselves while making no effort to break out of their real problems. It's called "enabling."

The counselor has a problem, of course, in that he's taking money from the client. The client probably isn't going to pay the counselor to tell him or her any unpleasant truths. Thus if the counselor is to get paid he will have to lie to the client, or at least prevaricate.

If you don't want your children to be bullied, make sure they have the traits necessary to land up near the top of the social hierarchy for children. For boys, the keys to social dominance are size, strength, and athletic prowess. For girls, the keys are being pretty and fashionable. Parents who lack the genes for these traits are simply dooming their children to the same fate the parents endured a generation earlier.