Bitcoins: Get Out While The Getting's Good

“It’s so pretty!
Almost like gold . . .”

Everyone hates the dollar and the euro—and with good reason. By the lights of any thoughtful observer, the two reserve currencies are being crashed by their respective central banks: The dollar by the insanity which is Quantitative Easing, the euro by the insanity which is German intransigence.

So everyone in the blogosphere is looking for a savior, a way out of this looming inflationary/deflationary collapse.

Enter bitcoin.

Bitcoin presses all the erogenous zones of nerdy tech guys everywhere, who are after all the dominant demographic of the internet, and who are not coincidentally wild about bitcoins.

Read more »

I Have A Kid

Hulkita and me.

I have a kid. She’s five-and-a-half months old, weighs about seven kilos two-hundred, measures 65.5 cm, and as of a week ago, has two lower front teeth, each about two milimeters wide.

Once a couple of days ago, she was sitting up on my lap when I got a random hiccough. It so startled her that for a moment, her expression froze as she stared into my eyes—then she burst into tears, terrified.

But no matter how bad her mood, if I raise her over my head and say, “Airplane! Airplane!” while I smile and blow kisses at her, eventually, she smiles back and starts laughing. If I rub her upper chest with the tip of my nose, she giggles. If ever I start singing Iggy Pop and The Stooges’ Search & Destroy in her presence, she begins kicking and waving her arms, revved up to rock out; it’s her favorite song, hands down—bigger than Barney in our household.

When her diaper is full, she’ll complain. She complains in two ways: One is, she babbles incomprehensibly, but with the rhythms of speech of someone dressing somebody else down (namely my wife and me). This babble often sounds vaguely like Mandarin. The other way she complains is, she lets out a low flat growl from the back of her throat, her face turning bright red as she stares fixed at us. My wife calls this her “Hulkita” growl, as she looks like a tomato-red version of a miniature Incredible Hulk.

My wife and I were walking her in her stroller a few days ago, and some asshole came tearing into a driveway immediately in front of us, his pickup truck crossing our path barely three feet from her stroller. His window was rolled down, and the driver shot me an unconcerned look. In that split second, I seriously considered killing the guy, and the guy realized it, ‘cause he apologized and backed the fuck off.

Read more »

“I Had A Dad”

“I tried hard to have a father
Instead I had a dad . . .”
—Cobain

In America, you probably grew up with this shlubby dude who wanted to be your buddy, your pal, your amigo, your confidante, your friend.

"So Dad . . ."

He didn’t want to be your father—he wanted to be your dad.

So he didn’t teach you as a father should. And you knew it, even if you couldn’t articulate it.

You wandered through elementary school, high-school, college, without a fucking clue as to what to do, how to behave, what to pay attention to and what to ignore. You didn’t even realize why you were wandering through these halls, supposedly getting this great education. So you either blew it off—to your later deep regret—or you took it at face value—again, to your later deep regret. Your dad kept sighing, giving you a shit-eating grin, and saying, “Son, you need to get good grades,” or “Son, you need to get an education,” without telling you that good grades and a good education are two vastly different things. No one ever told you what all that schooling was really for, or how to get a real education in spite of (rather than because of) the dangerous joke that is the educational system.

Women? They might as well been martians for all the help you got from dear old “Dad”. From the first boy-girl dances you went to in junior-high, to the hook-up culture of college, to twenty-something girls on their Slut-Trek through the big city, to the Biological Alarm Clockers who accost you like beggars in Calcutta now that they’re in their early-thirties, trying to trap you into marriage: The “Dads” (“Dicks”?) gave you nothing smarter than “Follow your heart”, or “Be true to your feelings”, or most despicably of all: “Tell her how you feel—but always respect her wishes.”

Read more »

Game, the Art of Archery, and the Business of Selling

Recently, I’ve been getting into the so-called “manosphere”: Blogs, sites and forums devoted to men’s interpersonal relationships, especially with women.

Game: Apply as required.

Contrary to what critics who have never bothered reading any of these sites would have you believe, the best of them (Roosh, Chateau Heartiste, Solomon II and others) aren’t misogynistic. Quite the contrary, the writers of the better sites clearly love and appreciate women.

Their sin is, they don’t idealize women.

They cast a cool eye on women, and interpret their actions not from any Romantic, quasi-Victorian ideal of “female fragility” (which if you get right down to it is how feminism implicitly regards women, even as they are loath to admit it). Instead, these sites and blogs interpret women’s actions through a combination of evolutionary biology and social Darwinism.

The underlying assumption of these sites is that women, no different from men, seek more: More status, more reproductive success, more possessions, more ease of life, more stuff, more etc.

These sites all explicitly posit that, just as men judge women on characteristics that they value—be it youth, beauty, sexual attractiveness, etc.—women judge men on characteristics that they value—such as objective social status, localized social dominance, professional success, apearance, etc.

Therefore, according to these writers, it behooves men to understand what it is that women are judging in men, in order to improve themselves so as to become more attractive to women.

Read more »