1. You find that you have no real opinions
TV "news" has a vested interest in keeping you from changing channels, to do this, to keep you there through the commercials, they have to not piss you off too much. They have no intention to educate you or inform you, they intend simply to reaffirm what you already know. If they must state some event that you could consider distasteful, then know that they will have have an "expert" on shortly who will voice your opinions and be indignant along with you. The time when the news was simply about detailed fact-reporting is gone, no more detail and the facts must be stated to be inoffensive to everybody.

Fox is biased, finding their niche in reporting for one set of people and to that one set only, very much like Black Entertainment TV news. Neither one, therefore, is technically "news", since the object is not to report facts, but to report what is convenient, and to conveniently phrase those things that are not.

2. You start eating more
Food looks better on TV. Not even expertly prepared food looks as good as it does in a Burger King commercial. Your average fast-food restaurant makes its money from people who confuse what they see on TV with what is handed to them at the drive-thru window. They get a soggy, lukewarm squished-together lump of white bread, grade Y beef, and cheese-like food product, and they imagine some kind of hearty gourmet feast. The same goes for Chili's, TGIF's, Red Lobster and all those other restaurants designed to give poor, unsophisticated people the illusion of fine dining.

3. Your sense of humor gets worse
Let me give you a hypothetical situation: you go to spend time with a relative in the hospital, this relative is a fan of a TV show called "Friends", which you have seen here and there and found to be disgusting. However, your visit to this relative in the hospital coincides with a Friends marathon on some basic cable channel. You took your afternoon off to spend time with them and they really want you to sit and enjoy their favorite show with them. 3 hours later you find yourself chuckling at the jokes and not wanting to miss the latest revelations about Chandler and Monica. Sitcoms are like those songs that you find yourself singing in the shower even though you would never ever deliberately listen to it.

4. You find yourself reading less and less
TV is hypnotic, you learn little from it, and you retain little of that little, but it keeps you there anyway because it's easy, you don't even have to turn a page, you just watch, let the images take you away from your miserable existence with no effort on your part at all.

5. You adopt the values that the people selling you stuff want you to have
You get told over and over again that you need to have this experience, that you need to own this thing, watch a certain movie, and in the absence of any opposing idea you start to feel compelled to do as they say. Watch enough religious TV, without any counteracting influence and you start to wonder if these things are true. Watch the shopping channels and you start to believe everything they say, you forget that the idea is to sell, not to be truthful. Your ability to think critically atrophies since you are going to see nothing bad about the products or ideas on offer.

Labels: Politics, Television

1. Get a life
Especially stuff that does not involve other people. Getting your own life is a great way to keep from resenting the person you are with for having one. Also, sometimes being passionate about something can be attractive to other people, especially in women as long it's not collecting designer accessories or stuffed animals.

2. Get yourself a sense of humor
Be able to laugh at stuff that is funny. Note that what you laugh at will reveal more about you than a million long late-night conversations. You can't fake it. If you think Mitch Hedberg was funny, faking amusement at Jeff Foxworthy will be easily detectable to anybody who is really looking.

3. Find the balance between cold bitch/bastard and snivelling dishrag
This goes out especially to women but to some guys as well. Both are hard to take, but if I absolutely had to take one it would be the cold bitch. The ideal you should be striving for is the appropriate reaction.

4. Be practical
Some guys like chirpy, shopping addicted long-nailed princesses who expect to be taken care them for the rest of their lives. Those guys are into the daddy role, they like that it makes them feel in charge and strong. The guys are as clueless about real life as their women. Real men like women, not barbie dolls who are surprised by the stench of a diaper or how much strength it takes to move a dresser.

5. Don't be a baby
Nobody likes snot-dripping hysterical bowls of jelly. Nobody likes to be thrust into the job of taking care of you because you are too weak to do it yourself. The job of being somebody's comforter is one that you have to choose, you can't get drafted into it without feeling some degree of resentment.

Labels: People, Relationships

You put the saddle on your back, the bit in your mouth and handed the reins over. Now you bitch about the rights they are going to take away from you. Fuck you. You gave them away.

1. TV/Movies/Music
Why should you be held accountable for what other people want to hide from their children? Why should I not hear the word "fuck" on TV when I hear and read it several times a day? Ok, so you don't want your kids to see tits even if they have seen them before, that's your problem. They way you solve it is by turning the TV off, whether you solve it or not is not my concern. Your kid at age 6 or before will probably know every curse word there is. He or she may not use it, but they will know it. It is extremely hard to keep children in a state of ignorance. It all comes down to my life, my tastes, being controlled in by your morality.

2. The Police
Will people stop pretending that these people offer any real assistance? What do they do? Basically their job is to bring in additional funds for the state by ticketing you or arresting you for having narcotics. The rest of the time they referee domestic disputes and drive around aimlessly. They don't protect anybody, criminals have figured out that it makes sense to postpone their crimes till there isn't a police officer in the room. Basically, they exist for the same reason security guards exist, to remind you that nothing you see belongs to you and that you have only the rights they allow you to have.

3. Drugs
There are a million places online where you can find advocacy for the legalization of marijuana, it's not my drug of choice so I cannot get passionate about it the way I would if, say, they threatened to make alcohol illegal. The reason I like alcohol is because it is regulated, I know what to expect when I pour a shot. It is predictable. I don't drink for taste, I drink for effect therefore predictability is desirable. The fact that I cannot get passionate about weed does not stop me from noting that literally every reason for prohibiting its use is also true of alcohol, and that if it were regulated it would likely present much less of a social harm than alcohol.

4. Sex
Even though every man woman and child is a walking representation of not just the sex act, but the male orgasm, you are still not supposed to bring it up in "polite conversation". I don't just mean on the radio or TV, I mean in all aspects of life. You cannot talk about genitals without being "inappropriate", kids are still forbidden to learn about where they came from until some arbitrarily determined time. All sex is, apparently, obscene and shameful. I am not some hippie swinger type, either, I do not believe that life should be one big orgy, just that sex, and talking about it, should not be a treated as unnatural.

5. Guns
The government does not care about your safety as much as it does about looking like it cares. The goal is to render aspects of the citizenry manageable. Guns in the wrong hands would make the peasants dangerous. For this there is always the convenient armed whackjob mass-murderer to scare everybody into thinking that guns on their own present some kind of threat. They make you wear seat-belts and tax the fuck out of cigarettes so that they look all benevolent and parental. A few handguns are ok, but anything that threatens the armed superiority of the powers that be is illegal. The idea is that they are supposed to be able to kill you if necessary.

Labels: "Freedom", People

Who needs privacy if they have nothing to hide?
The only people who complain about the government keeping a watchful eye on us are pedophiles desperately wanting to hide their collections of kiddie porn, also music pirates who are preventing hard-working AMERICAN artists from making money. "Freedom" as the liberals describe it means another 9/11. They don't get how vulnerable our constitution (without revisions) makes us. It guarantees rights to LAW-ABIDING AMERICANS, not to anybody else.

Isn't it worth it to lose a little thing like privacy in order to serve the common good? We need to band together and make the sacrifices we need to, to keep America proud, strong and Christian! A government too scared to bend the rules is no help in times of crisis.

Labels: How to rationalize all kinds of stuff

1. Something to break the ice with
The same reason people talk about the weather, it's a common interest that can cut through pretty much any social barrier. Celebrity gossip has the added benefit of not being the weather therefore feeling almost like real conversation. The more "into" a particular celebrity you are, the more you have to contribute, therefore the more ice you break. In your social circle you get to be an authority if you can tell them what Clive Owen has been up to recently, or if you know the names of Josh Brolin's kids. Whether people like admitting this or not, if they know who you are talking about, meaning they can put a face with the name, they are interested. People only turn their noses up if they don't know who you are talking about. No matter how overplayed Britney Spears/Lindsay Lohan/Michael Jackson stories are, people still want to hear.

When something becomes social currency, something that can help people to feel connected to the others around them it will always be popular.

2. Get people discussing important things
Christian Bale's assault charge earlier this week got people around talking about violence against women and what was excusable and what was not. Michael Jackson got people talking about pederasty (a particularly ugly-sounding word) and bad parenting. OJ Simpson got people talking about racism and trials by jury. Most people would consider those tedious, irrelevant subjects without the familiar name of a celebrity which to make them interesting. It gives them a handle with which to grasp it, like drawing a picture for somebody who does not like to read.

3. Provide work for untalented hack assholes
It does not matter how well the picture is taken, if you can see Britney Spears' vulva and Britney Spears face and it's not Photoshopped then it is a good picture. The same with gossip magazines and blogs. It's all about what you are relaying, not the quality of your relaying-skills. If you want to write for a living but cannot write well, then you can either stop your dream or find an arena where your skills are not important. That means that you have to find things that people are desperate to know. If there appeared, this morning, a badly-spelled, ungrammatical post on TMZ stating that there was a verified Britney Spears/Michael Jackson/Bubbles sex-tape nobody would give a shit about the about the writing skills.

4. People need glamor to identify with/lust after
People need somebody more successful than themselves, who they identify with, to give them hope. Geeks need Bill Gates (who is glamorous because of how rich he is), skinny chicks with tattoos need Angelina Jolie, black guys who are not thugs need Will Smith, and so forth. It provides them with a template for success even if they do not plan on becoming movie stars.

Without the ability to feel a personal connection with success, like "people say I look like Lindsay Lohan", people lose hope. If they are not striving to be like, or see themselves as being like, somebody who is famous and makes lots of money then they have no have no reason to feel good about themselves. They become ordinary, pathetic, common.

Openly lusting after a certain celebrity allows you to identify yourself to other people, if they lust after that same movie star then there, you have something in common.

5. Gossip is human nature
If you were arrested at work today, your coworkers, even the ones who did not know you, would have something to talk about. They would have something to talk about with the UPS guy, who also did not know you, with the security guard, with the cleaning staff, with the Chinese-restaurant delivery guy, with pretty much everybody who may possibly have shared an elevator with you at some point. There would be questions, and answers, and emails, and blog entries on Myspace. People love talking about other people's troubles. It allows them to feel better than somebody, to feel more fortunate, and it makes them a part of a clique. Celebrities provide that on the large scale. They are usually rich so nobody feels sorry for them, there is no personal connection either, no reason to expect that the gossip will get back to them, or to feel like you are betraying somebody. A common obsession is how you keep societies together, religion does not work any more, so other than gas-prices what else is there?

Labels: Celebrities, How to rationalize all kinds of stuff

Really, there are just 2 kinds of people, the competent and the incompetent. That's it, no race, not culture, no age-groups. There are the people who were meant to get things done and the ones who sit and around and watch them. Once you understand that life and the world will become clear to you, and you will learn to hate the dead weight. Sometimes the incompetents talk a lot, and are friendly, sometimes they learn to do simple, relatively meaning tasks by rote and so acquire minor usefulness. Do not be deceived.

1. They constantly fuck things up
They misunderstand instructions, misread situations, fail to pick up hints, and they keep barreling ahead anyway. They never think or consider, they just keep going, like cattle. They fuck up at work because they don't what they are doing, they fuck up their personal relationships because they have no interest in doing the right thing or even figuring out if there is a right thing.

2. They complain a lot
Incompetents love to bitch as a way of summon more competent, goal-oriented people to come help them. They do it because they are used to not solving their own issues. That's how they see life, as a series of rescues. They have no issues with being a perpetual victim, with whining or being seen as a whiner. For them the natural response to any problem is to complain loudly about it.

3. They do everything they can to get out of work
Laziness is indeed a symptom of the incompetent. For them the idea of being productive, of achieving or creating is meaningless. Those things are for other people. The idea of wasting time is impossible for them to conceive, since they cannot imagine not-wasting it.

4. They accomplish nothing
Ever. They are motivated to eat, shit and sleep. That's it. They think in terms of sensation, so their "aspirations" tend to be about feeling good. They would like to drive a Bentley one day, or have a threesome, or retire to Guam. These are not the people who write great novels, or start their own business, or learn to sing really well. They have nothing to offer, and nothing will change that.

5. They never admit any failure or wrong-doing on their part
Incompetents don't know that they are incompetent, they never even suspect it. More often they imagine themselves to to be expert at something and surrounded by failures. Of course, they have nothing tangible to base this on as they are constantly fucking things up (see #1 on this list), they do not need evidence to come to this conclusion. Everything wrong in any given situation is always due to somebody else.

6. They boast
They need the world to see what cool things they have done. They will boast about being able to get out of bed, being able to walk out the door, being able to wipe their own asses. The incompetent has no ability to rank his or her "achievements" on a scale with other people's achievements, everything they do exists in its own universe, as a masterpiece, showing great intelligence and skill.

7. They have no ideas
Yes, this is possible. There are people who go through their entire lives without ever coming up with a fix for something, a solution. Not even for the simplest thing. Their brains simply are not built for the occurrence of outside-the-box thoughts, or sudden memories with applications to the present. They literally are without the ability to imagine or to create on any level.

8. They fail to learn from their mistakes
That's because their mistakes were due to somebody else fucking up, so it was that person's fault. They have no guilt, no feelings of having done wrong because in their minds they never do anything wrong. The incompetent therefore is a creature of denial, whose world is make-believe, a movie with them as the hero.

Labels: People

Episode 1 here.

Not only do you need to keep your mouth shut about it afterward, you have to make sure that nobody but you knows about it in the first place. You don't get seen and you do it alone.

No Accomplices
"Accomplice" is another name for "really dangerous witness". If you can't figure out how to pull something off without help, maybe you should just not do it, maybe you are the kind of person who gets caught every time.

Here are the keys to not leaving a trail of onlookers:

Know your surroundings
Know what happens when, know who watches, and where they watch from. Learn how to either give your presence a rational explanation or to prevent anybody from seeing. The latter is better.

Fear getting caught
I don't normally advise people to fear anything, but here fear can be a useful motivator. It needs to be stronger than the need to get whatever it is that you want.

Be patient
Wait. There is a point where hesitation kills all your chances, wait for it, and remember out what it looks like, then work faster on the next go-round. The consequences of hesitation are usually much less heinous than being rash.

Have an excuse
Something rational, something that they won't expect too. Have your alibi ready, and have a back up alibi just in case as well. Something more plausible, that will explain the first one as well as why you did what you did.

Disguise
Kind of dramatic in any setting, but they work. In many cases a simple fake-beard or eyeliner-pencil mustache can completely exonerate you.

Labels: Effectiveness, Getting Away With it, People

1. Find poor people who believe that they are owed something
This is most of them, so it's not that hard. Poor people tend to excuse their poverty and always have a scapegoat at hand. People rarely ever admit their own role in their underachieving lives, it's always *their* fault, the oppressors, the parasites. Everybody else is either an oppressor or a parasite.

2. Tell them why
Give them a back-story that goes like this: "we were great once, but these people came and fucked it up. These people are why we are not great now. They are holding us down, keeping us back." There is more to come, but this is where you start, you don't get into the heavy stuff until you are certain that they believe that one.

3. Make them skeptical about learning
You can switch off somebody else's ability to think critically by making them distrust the unknown. Tell them that that book that they haven't read is full of lies and here's why they wrote it. If they don't think to question you then they will probably accept that it is full of lies, or at least might be full of lies. That usually stops them from reading the book.

4. Offer them acceptance
People crave it, they need to be part of something, a community, an organization, a family. Offer them that. It's a tried and true method having built many an established religion. You feel more accepted among people that look like you, and you probably will be since everybody is scared of the people who don't look like them.

5. Make them scared
If they don't act this will happen (insert catastrophe). They will do this (horrible set of acts) if we continue to languish in complacency. In other words, join me or die. This is another point on which it looks very much like religion.

Labels: People, Racism

You don't learn to fight by watching Jean Claude Van Damme movies. You can't even learn by watching real fights. To know who you are, and what to do, you actually have to be in one. There are a lot of guys out there who talk like badasses, who have confidence about about their ability physical confrontation because they can bench 200 or because they participated in a brawl back in '01 and kicked some drunk's ass. The truth is none of that matters. Each fight exists in a universe of its own, with rules that get made up when the fight starts. Please understand that I am talking about a spontaneous fight here, one that arises out of a heated dispute, not some kind of organized sport, though I am sure that some of the rules apply.

1. Shit doesn't usually work the way it did in your head
If you train, hit a speed bag regularly and push yourself, and the the guy you are going up against is terrified and also slow and old and fat, then maybe, on the 3rd or 4th attempt you might be able to land that perfect uppercut, or a balletic roundhouse kick. The odds still aren't in your favor though. Your hardest blows miss, when they connect the hurt you worse than they do him. People don't usually just stand still and let you deliver accurate punches. If they are genuinely pissed or scared, or scared AND pissed you will mostly find out that adrenaline can do wonders for a pussy's pain-threshold.

2. It's dramatic
Mostly, in the civilized parts of what have been incorrectly termed "civilized countries", people have trouble with confrontation. For things to escalate to the point of blows it has to be really bad. Really bad things have to come into play before it gets physical. Your state of mind is not going to be what it is normally, you won't be able to calmly deliver punches.

3. Pain
Brawls aren't usually one-sided. Watch a boxing match. Note how if it lasts past 3 rounds even the guy who is clearly winning the fight has swollen eyes and looks exhausted. Remember, that's with breaks and padded gloves. An all-out brawl will last maybe 45 seconds for most people and there will probably be pain on both sides. If nobody grabs a baseball bat there will likely not be a knockout. It's mostly about stamina, who can duck more, or tie the other guy up till he gets tired.

4. Consequences
At some point during the fight you may hear sirens, or your boss/principal telling you to break it up. There are a few men who will say fuck it, I get more pleasure here than I would from a million paychecks, and then there are other guys who immediately start thinking about living out of a shopping-cart, and who start toning things down. You will not know which group you fall into until the time comes. There is also the fact that in those places where fights occur rarely they usually look far worse than they are. People get hysterical and start freaking out calling the police and paramedics. If either participant is not white then somebody willl be going to jail.

Labels: Fighting, People

Keep your fucking mouth shut
One of the main reasons people wind up in prison is that they want people to think they are cool for pulling it off, so they talk. They have to impress at least one person. In their heads the frustration of not impressing somebody is worse than a lifetime of prison, so desperately do they need the validation.

Trust
People love to say that they don't trust anybody, but they always do. There is always one person that they think would never ever tell a soul. This is because they want to believe that somebody loves them. Their lives would feel desolate and hopeless without having that validation. Let me tell you this, just so you know: never trust anybody. I don't say this because it sounds like something some movie tough-guy would say and thus makes me sound like a movie tough-guy. I say it because life is unpredictable and people can snitch without consciously trying. I say this because if at some point you have an anxiety attack it will drive you crazy because they know. I say it because everybody is weak.

Attention-lust
People like being able to see awe in other people's eyes, or what they think is awe. Sometimes that awe is really dollar-signs as they look forward to taking your job after you get fired, or informant money depending on what line of work you are in. Even if it was real awe, what exactly is the point? People like and look up to you what does that do for you in a practical sense? Nothing, that's what. It's better to keep your mouth shut and never let them know who they are dealing with. There will come a time that the ignorance of you is useful.

Labels: Effectiveness, Getting Away With it, People

1. Greed is stronger than anything else
It's easy to talk about not being greedy or materialistic when you are poor, when you have money, though, it's almost impossible. When you are broke, having money looks pretty good, like a distant far-off city populated by happy people, when you are rich, and actually have the money to visit that city, it's fucking fantastic, like paradise on earth. Having money is better than anything here. It's better than sex, better than health, better than having happy, successful kids, better than heroin and cocaine. I am saying that with no sarcasm whatsoever. It really is.

2. Always a scapegoat
There are a lot of divisions in these multi-billion dollar conglomerates. When things go wrong, a product malfunctions, or there is mismanagement of funds, or they are found bribing politicians, you cannot really point out an individual to blame, sure you can blame it on the guy ostensibly running the show, but it's unlikely that he came up with it. He was put there by the people in control so that you could blame him.

3. Full of Rich People
Not only are rich people almost always afflicted with severe cases of greed (see above) , they also are afflicted with severe senses of entitlement. They have no intention of suffering quietly like the little people, or being forced to abide by the same rules, not when they paid for the mayor/senator/governor to get elected.

4. Being a salesman is not compatible with ethics
If salespeople could only sell quality products or had to be completely honest, then that would reduce all the merchandise in the world by maybe 80%. Selling is about selling people shit more often than it is about anything else.

5. You all are stupid
You keep buying shit no matter what. Corporations are like crack-dealers surrounded by addicts. Even if they wanted to go straight you wouldn't let them because you would need your next fix. Of shit. It's not just America, either, the whole world is awash in all kinds of worthless status symbols, things that people want but don't need, the desire to feel like they have the best of something that money can buy and the belief that they should be looked up to for that. You fund the Enrons and the Halliburtons, you support Wal-Mart as it drives small businesses out and oppresses its employees, you gave your money to Monsanto, Microsoft and every symbol of corporate evil that you now claim to hate. You handed them the reins.

Labels: Business, Money

1. They are tired
This is by far the most popular. They work too hard to discipline their kids. Do they work too hard to make sure that their kids eat? If not then why ignore an equally important aspect of parenting? What they really mean is that they have gone into denial about how shitty their kid are and suggest you do the same. They would rather not have to yell, have to admit by yelling that the little wretch is out of control.

2. It's the other parent's fault
That way they can blame somebody and move on, leave the responsibility for clean-up in the hands of anybody but themselves. It's parenting with no interest in the kids, and no concern for what kind of adult they are going to be. The fact is that you never stop being an accomplice, no matter what. It's your genes, and nothing can change that.

3. They will learn eventually
Maybe, but what happens until then? How much shit till then? Badly parented kids tend to cut a broad swathe of collateral damage, they are bullies, they cause trouble between neighbors, within families, and for the police.

4. Childhood is the time to be free
No it's not, that's bullshit. That happens because people look back fondly on their youth when they were naive enough to think that life was good. They mistake naivete for innocence and being sentimental makes them long for it.

5. You have a stick up your ass
Of course, it's your fault for thinking that their innocent little piece of womb-excrement is annoying. The choice is between looking at their kid and making an honest assessment of it, and transferring their life's bitterness to you. Guess which one is easier.

Labels: Parenting

1. You will watch anything
Seriously, the No 1 grossing movie of all time was Titanic, a sentimental, orgy of special effects and teeny-bopper sex-idolatry. 3 hours of nothing much to think about. Hollywood is deliberately trying to make you stupid in order to better sell to you, which they are, and they are shitting on better, more creative art-forms in order to do so. Take The Watchmen movie which is supposed to come out next year, and is possibly the most profound graphic novel ever written, one of the relative handful of books than can draw in people previously uninterested in reading and get them obsessed with it. I was reading long before I came across Alan Moore's masterpiece, but I didn't at that time own a single graphic novel. That changed shortly after I finished it. Basically, it's unfilmable. What they will do is take all the design elements of the book, do a faithful rendering of those, then water down the truly important aspects of the story.

2. They are rich/you are not
Rich people see you and everybody else in your income bracket as a market. Rightly so too, that's how they got rich, but one result of that is that they have no idea what it is like to be where you are. Even if they were there once, poverty is not a thing anybody wants to remember in detail. Nobody holds poor people in contempt like somebody who has pulled themselves up out of that kind of life. If they were born into money then they just have no idea.

3. They won
They have made money selling you a product with no real value. They have gotten you into the mindset of paying for a set of sensations with no practical purpose. There are people whose mansions the money you made at McDonald's helped pay for. They are the con-artists, we all are the rubes.

4. The idiots are on their side
One way to identify dimwits is their adoration of those more fortunate than them. Celebrity-worship is fuel on which Hollywood runs. Idiots, also are willing to accept hastily written scripts, weak performances, and crass manipulation by men like George Lucas. This week, the week before The Dark Knight opens across America, the blogosphere has been chattering on about how awful the Joel Schumacher movies were and how he helped kill the first franchise, except many of these people paid money to see Batman and Robin, so many of them, in fact that it grossed $238,207,122.

5. They know the buttons to push
Hollywood works by taking ingredients from previous movies made popular and reworking them to promote a celebrity. The reworking is done by switching around plot elements and locations, and slightly altering the dialogue. Basically, if it works in one movie it tends to keep working no matter what because the audiences are too dumb to realize that you are feeding them thier own excrement.

Labels: Humanity, Movies