Gypsy parasitism as an outgrowth of Ottoman multiculturalism

Gypsies are notorious for relying more on parasitic strategies than perhaps any other ethnic group of any substantial size. Banditry, welfare, whatever. Part of their way of life looks like a typical pastoralist / nomadic culture of honor, but it is so exaggerated in Gypsies -- way beyond the Bedouin, the Mongols, and the Hatfields and the McCoys.

What selection pressures could have led to their uniquely parasitic way of life? There's a post at West Hunter on the topic of sneaking embarrassing truths about Gypsies into the mainstream media. In the comments sections, I floated this possible explanation. Read the whole comment, the reference, and get into the broader discussion over there.

Briefly, the Ottoman Empire forced multiculturalism on a large part of southeastern Europe, which has always been the main region of Gypsy settlement. Ordinarily, a group that preyed so brazenly and so frequently on a host population would have gotten slaughtered centuries ago if they were sedentary and couldn't flee their attackers.

Or if they were nomadic, they would still have been reduced to "mere" occasional predation like the kind visited upon settled folk by desert Arabs, Mongols, or Irish highwaymen. And before any of those groups organized themselves into a national force -- just everyday opportunistic preying on people who can't chase after you without exhausting their resources, while you know how to live on the move.

The Ottoman Empire blocked that natural response by the host populations by denying them the right to take care of their own business. Only the Ottoman higher-ups could dispense justice, and they were not very interested in it. They just wanted tax money, and group vs. group feuds and conflicts get in the way of that steady stream of money. So, use your control and force to prevent the preyed-upon group from chastening their predators, and the money will just keep flowing in.

Westerners mistakenly believe that we live in some Brave New World of government-enforced multiculturalism. But the historical examples are pretty clear for those who are curious about others who've walked in our shoes before. Or I guess we're re-treading the path that they laid down. Liberals ignore these examples because the results are a damning indictment of the forced multiculturalism that they champion. And conservatives are too damn lunk-headed and incurious to feel like putting themselves in another group's place, even if it's similar to our own in some very important way, even if the outcome of the cross-cultural mind-meld would give them some ammunition against liberals.

One thing's clear: the longer we have forced multiculturalism, the more intensely one group preys on another group within the vibrantly diverse mix, and the more the preyed-upon group is prevented (by threat of force) from retaliating on their predators, the more likely we are to set the perfect lab conditions for the evolution of Gypsies v.2.0. But just like the Ottoman pasha and his elite, our rulers won't have to live next door to them and be preyed on, so only an overthrow of the entire regime would bring the parasitism down to the "ordinary" level you find among other nomadic bandit groups.

....Very interesting times lie ahead, that's for sure.

Children's toys only based on existing mega-franchises

Four years ago, I stopped into a Toys R Us and noticed how little innovation there has been in the basic categories of toys -- action figures, board games, video games, building sets, mini-vehicles, and so on. There doesn't seem to be a fundamentally new type of children's toy since the explosion of action figures and video games in the late 1970s and '80s.

I stopped in again and took another good look around, and that seems just as true four years later. The trend toward recycling older brands of action figures (etc.) was even more obvious. Star Trek is now in, thanks to the new movies, and so is ThunderCats -- apparently based on a reboot / re-whatever of the original cartoon. It boggles the mind to walk into a toy store looking for stuff for my nephew and see basically nothing new in terms of the type of toy, and even the brands within each type, compared to when I was his age.

But something else struck me that I didn't notice before -- whether it's old or new, it seemed like everything was based on a strong brand already in existence, with the toys being a kind of spin-off and cash-grab. There was hardly any toy line that was created to be a toy line first and foremost -- it had to be parasitic on some mega-franchise.

This marks a real decline in the imagination of children over the past 20 years. They don't want to play with toys whose elaborate backstory they do not already know, more or less. The unfamiliar does not provoke a feeling of curiosity but of boredom. "Oh, I don't know what that is. Hey look, trains from Thomas and Friends!"

Back in the '80s, when the toy culture was at its most recent peak, there were very popular toy lines that were launched alongside a cartoon or comic book series. However, for a lot of those multi-pronged attacks, most kids didn't see the cartoon or read the comics, whether because they were poorly advertised, were only around for a few episodes / issues, or whatever else.

For example, I never even knew that the Inhumanoids was a cartoon when I was little -- not until I read about it in Wikipedia. It only lasted 13 episodes and must have been on at a weird time or only in certain parts of the country. But those toys were really popular. Every major toy store carried them, and my two brothers and I had a variety of them. Ditto for the Dino-Riders -- instantly recognize the toys, no clue that there was a cartoon to promote the toys. Starriors had some kind of limited comic book tie-in, but again, I never knew about it, even though every kid would have recognized and probably owned some of the toys. And so on and so on.

If anything, it appears as though the toy lines were given the most emphasis, and the cartoons, comic books, movies, etc., were solely intended to promote the toys -- not to stand alone as cartoons, etc. Today it's the exact opposite: the movies and TV shows are highly developed, and the toy lines are cheaply and thoughtlessly spun off of them.

Sure, there are exceptions from the good old days. Everyone who was a child then remembers the cartoons that tied in with the toy lines for Transformers, G.I. Joe, He-Man, ThunderCats, and a handful of others. Not to mention the ubiquitous Star Wars toys.

But when I look through Wikipedia's category page for 1980s toys, and weight each entry by how popular it was back then -- like, do I remember it, did I own the toys -- the general picture is that we were interested in toys that were not spin-offs of some brand or franchise that we already knew a lot about. Give us something new and exciting, dammit.

This is even more striking outside of action figures. Boglins, Cabbage Patch Kids, Care Bears, Construx, Garbage Pail Kids cards, Madballs, My Pet Monster, Pound Puppies, Teddy Ruxpin, the Koosh ball, the Pogo Ball, Skip-It, Lazer Tag... It's hard to find examples of stuffed animals or dolls that actually were based on an existing franchise. Whereas now the plushies have to be instantly recognizable -- Mario, Sonic, or some other popular video game character, Disney / Pixar blockbuster characters, etc.

I became too old for toys during the '90s, but my sense is that this independence of the toy world from other worlds of entertainment had already begun to decline by then. When I was right on the edge, around 12 or 13 (circa 1993), there didn't seem to be line after line of toys whose brand was unfamiliar from the broader culture of TV, movies, and video games. But there were still things later like the Furby and tamagotchi, which weren't based on existing mega-brands. By now, there's not even that minimal level of unfamiliar toy lines.

I know even less about the toy culture of the mid-century, but my vague impression is that, like the Millennial era, it was more dependent on huge familiar brands. The Davy Crockett hat, the Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon ray gun, the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, and so on. I'd have to look more into it to be sure, but I'm not that interested right now. It would go along with the broader cultural inertia of the time. Like how everybody had begun to complain about how nothing new had swept popular music since the Jazz Age, and how dull and degenerate it had become by the 1950s. (Sound familiar?)

All kids really need is a basic sense of who the good guys and the bad guys are. Let their imaginations fill in the rest on their own. Maybe my idea of what some action figure was like differed from what my brother or my friend thought they should be like. Well, OK, suit yourself. Kids don't suit themselves anymore, do they? Every last little detail has to be fed to them pre-digested.

Have you ever seen them open up a new toy set, something with many different pieces, and the first thing they rush to do with them is re-create the way they're pictured on the box? Like, the same exact configuration. My nephew got some kind of vehicle and location set (like gas trucks and a gas station), and that's immediately what he did. My brother reassured him that he didn't have to just duplicate the picture on the box, y'know, encouraging him to have a little more fun with it. No, my nephew was dead set on it looking exactly like the box first.

Even worse with Legos -- there are no more blocks that you build into whatever you want. Everything is a part of a playset with a specific theme and specific final form to... I was going to say "achieve," but more like "snap into place." It's like coloring by numbers.

Children's toys are of no great cultural importance, but they do give us insight into the mindset and behavior of young people, especially as it changes over time. The fact that they still insist on not using their imagination when given explicit encouragement by their parents, just goes to show that this shift is not merely the helicopter parents warping and stunting their kids' minds. Somehow the children themselves, since the 1990s, have sensed that they're growing up in a world where OCD is the winning strategy, and not flexible thinking and curiosity.

Children are more perceptive of the world around them than we give them credit for, and are more active in creating their identities than the blank slate view would have it. Unfortunately in this case, that means a lot of the blame lies with the kids themselves when they turn out so rigid, boring, and incurious.

Man of Steel and dissipated visual tension

Updated

I haven't seen the movie yet and probably will not, mostly on the basis of the dull-looking visual approach that's evident in the trailers -- monochromatic, desaturated, uniform lighting, deep focus (information overload focus), jarring action tempos that you can't get into the groove of, and so on. "Bombastic" keeps coming up in reviews, both about the look and story.

I had hopes for this one looking cool, given Christopher Nolan's influence as producer. But his cinematographer Wally Pfister is absent, and pinch-hitting for him is Amir Mokri, known for such sublime-looking films as The Joy Luck Club, Coyote Ugly, Bad Boys II, Fast & Furious, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. And with the director of the hit video game 300 at the helm, a nerdy in-your-face overload look must have been inevitable.

Again, I haven't seen it yet, and you don't want to make too much out of a single frame, but it represents a larger problem with the movie's visual style. Now, we don't know exactly what's going on plot-wise in the image below, but it's clear that the butt-kicking babe type on the right is physically threatening Lois Lane on the left, with Lois' partner Superman looking on anxiously from further back.

Superman is the protagonist, the character we're supposed to identify with the most. We are meant to feel how tense he must be right now, not knowing how far the man-woman is going to escalate things. With her larger size, dark armored clothing, and colder stare, she looks like she could just snap Lois' neck if she wanted to. How far is she going to take it?

Since all of the action is taking place between the two women in the foreground, our attention should be concentrated there, and Superman should be far less intrusive visually. He is too in-focus -- more or less as in-focus as the foreground characters -- and we can read too much detail on his face. The shadows thrown on his face don't do enough to hide the details of his expression.

Instead it needs to be blurred enough so that we can tell in what direction his head is pointing, which tells us who he's looking at, and only the vaguest hint of what expression he's making. We assume that he's feeling worried and watching carefully for the slightest sign that things are taking a turn for the worse before he jumps in to save Lois. We don't need to have that telegraphed in crisp detail from the background -- it's a natural, normal reaction to the action in the foreground. Reactions that are not noteworthy or surprising do not need to be focused on, pulling our attention away from where it should be building up.

In addition to keeping our attention where it should be, a blurry focus on Superman would also heighten our concern for him. We assume that he has that look on his face, but by obscuring the focus enough, we don't get 100% confirmation. It keeps us anxious and uncertain ourselves.

We also would not feel complete reassurance that there's a deus ex machina waiting in the wings to rescue Lois if things go horribly wrong. With his determined, ready-to-sacrifice expression so clearly in focus, we're never in doubt that Lois is safe. I mean, just look at that face -- one false move, and that chick's ass is grass. We need to see a blurry face instead, just to keep us guessing about how prepared he is to intervene. It would feel like something bad could happen, that something is at stake, and worth getting on the edge of our seat about. As it stands, it looks like Superman is Lois' spotter at the gym.

This is such a glaring mistake, and the fix so obvious, that it leaves little hope for the rest of the movie's visuals.

To see what I mean, let's revisit an image from an earlier post on The Parallax View and sublime visual style:

The placement of characters within the frame is similar enough to the Man of Steel image, with the background figures looking on and from between those in the foreground. Since most of the action is going on in the foreground, those two are in good focus. But since there's little going on in the background, those two are out of focus. We can tell that the background character on the left is watching the foreground characters, sizing them up, biding his time until he sets a trap for them. And we can tell that the man on the right is turned toward him in a show of deference, so he must be the subordinate going along with whatever his boss' plan is.

All of that hits us immediately without being able to clearly read the faces of those in the background. Indeed the blurry focus heightens the menacing atmosphere of the bar, making the boss man look more shadowy and difficult-to-read.

The background character looking on does not always have to be blurred out of focus, though. Here is a shot from The Dark Knight Rises, where the Batman suit is staring at Bruce Wayne, practically calling out to him to put it back on:

Notice how sharply in-focus the suit is. Now if it were a human face in the background, this "calling out" image would feel too on-the-nose. But since it's a mask that has had most of the fine details of human facial expression stylized out of it, we don't attend to it that much, even though it's in crisp focus. The apprehensive look on Wayne's face provides more expressive detail, so we attend more to his face than the mask.

Particularly in action movies, a genre that should be about building up and releasing tension in catharsis, we need to feel a sense of mystery, uncertainty, and menace just from looking at the setting and the people and things moving around in it. If everything is so clearly in focus, anxiety cannot build up in the first place. Thus with nothing at stake, the action scenes are like watching a child swinging his action figures into one another.

The simplest way to fix these problems is to shoot with an anamorphic lens, which brings the things being focused on into even sharper clarity, while throwing everything in front of and behind that distance into a blur. And also refraining from racking focus so often -- that is, shifting focus from one distance to another, typically to focus on one character and then another within a single shot. That works well enough when it's shifting between two people chatting inside of a car, with one closer to us than the other, and switching focus to whoever is speaking at the moment. But when a sense of uncertainty is called for, we need for the character to remain blurry throughout the shot.

Probably the best use of these focus techniques to build and release tension in an action movie is Die Hard, but that's a topic for a post of its own. Aside from more effectively giving us the right emotional response to the plot, it helps to give the movie a striking visual style that has been lacking in the kickass summer action genre of the past 20 years, and that was absent before the rise of sublime-oriented filmmaking during the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

Update: It appears that Man of Steel was shot with an anamorphic lens after all... not that you can tell from looking. It takes a special skill to deaden the shallow-focus effects of shooting in Panavision. I should have looked it up on IMDb first, but if it's used the way it's supposed to, it should leap out and not be something you have to look up to confirm.

Going back to the first image, and contrasting with the one from The Parallax View, it's not only the depth of focus that's off, but also the depth of staging. Superman is standing too close to the foreground characters, again as though he were spotting Lois Lane at the gym. It's too close for the shallow focus to work its magic. He should be placed 5 to 10 feet farther back, close enough to still be connected to the foreground action, but far enough that he'll be blurry and not acting as Lois' training wheels.

And of course all the CGI stuff is deep-focus and information overload, not real things seen through the camera lens. CGI is either incapable of mimicking shallow focus, or its creators and consumers do not resonate with that kind of look, and dig the boring crappy look instead.

Pictures of teenagers in the good old days

Was just browsing through the photography section of the library stacks and saw a book called Teenage by Joseph Szabo, with an intro by Cameron Crowe (the writer of Fast Times at Ridgemont High). You'll have to find it at a library, too, since it was released in such small numbers.

Luckily Szabo has a website where he's put up a selection of teenage life during the '70s and '80s around Long Island, New York. See here, here, and here.

You don't see pictures like that from when the Silent Gen were teenagers in the mid-century, and you don't see them for Millennials either. Even Gen Y has pretty lame pictures from their teenage years -- the mid-'90s to early 2000s. I must emphasize this because so many people look at these as shots of a constant presence in the world called "teenage life." But they capture a very specific moment in the oscillating zeitgeist.

Perhaps the most succinct way to describe the differences between the '70s / '80s atmosphere and the mid-century before and Millennial age after is wild vs. tame, or animalic vs. machine-like. The teenagers in Szabo's pictures don't look like they've been programmed by engineers or trained by a team of handlers.

No entirely blank faces, nor caricatured kabuki masks to emotionally distance themselves from the viewer, whether by under-stimulation or over-stimulation. It's just the right level to engage a fellow human being. Even the goofballs aren't distorting their faces that much. They're all animated around their friends and peers, unlike today's and the mid-century's teenagers who sat still and showed little excitement in the physical presence of their friends.

But if they were looking at the photographer / viewer as outsider, they have this look like a feral animal has toward anyone who tries to approach it. Everybody looks streetwise. Slightly, not comically narrowed eyes, direct stare, inner eyebrows slightly raised in suspicion, corners of the mouth in a slight frown.

And look at how touchy-feely they were -- especially the girls. I sure was born about 10 or 20 years too late. It's not all exaggerated and hammed up purely for the camera or to whore for attention from the onlookers (that's more '90s and 21st century). It's more like the creatures you'd see in a nature documentary, entirely lacking in self-awareness and just going for it.

The strangest feeling you get looking at old (but not too old) pictures of teenagers is how mature their facial expressions are, yet how adolescent their bodies look. Some dude with hardly any hair on his chest has a genuine thousand-yard stare, and some babe with tight, glowing skin on her legs has a pensive mid-life-crisis look on her face. Teenage body and grown-up behavior -- that heady combination must have made heads spin among the older generations. (Though maybe it looked familiar to the Flaming Youth survivors of the Roaring Twenties.) You can see why there was such a fascination with them when the youthquake was in full swing.

I wonder if that's how the prevailing parenting style changes direction -- when a generation that grew up so quickly has kids of their own, they remember their own hurried youth and try to put the brakes on their kids' development. Then when the sheltered and stunted have kids, they want them to have the more footloose and fancy-free social life that they never got to enjoy as youngsters themselves.

Female heroines are boring who lack maternal motivation

Via Steve Sailer, here is an NYT article by some clueless queer about persistent sexism in American culture. He thought things would have changed so much in the past 20 years, i.e. as men cut off their balls and began to let pushy women get their way.

But what about movies? It was all the way back in 1986 that Sigourney Weaver trounced “Aliens” and landed on the cover of Time, supposedly presaging an era of action heroines. But there haven’t been so many: Angelina Jolie in the “Tomb Raider” adventures, “Salt” and a few other hectic flicks; Jennifer Lawrence in the unfolding “Hunger Games” serial. Last summer Kristen Stewart’s “Snow White” needed a “Huntsman” at her side, and this summer? I see an “Iron Man,” a “Man of Steel” and Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Channing Tatum all shouldering the weight of civilization’s future. I see no comparable crew of warrior goddesses.

Heroines fare better on TV, but even there I’m struck by the persistent stereotype of a woman whose career devotion is both seed and flower of a tortured private life. Claire Danes in “Homeland,” Mireille Enos in “The Killing,” Dana Delany in “Body of Proof” and even Mariska Hargitay in “Law & Order: SVU” all fit this bill.

All of the lame female lead characters fail to resonate with us (unless we're social retards) because they don't provide a convincing motivation for why a woman is so gung-ho and daring, when they typically are non-confrontational and cautious.

Perhaps the strongest motivation a woman might have to assert herself in a confrontation is her maternal instinct. In the feminized and faggotized culture of the past 20 years, that simple insight has vanished from common understanding. Hence she's given motives that are typical of men and totally out of character for women, like bold exploration for its own sake (Tomb Raider), honor and vengeance (Kill Bill), exercising authority to uphold justice (Olivia Benson from Law & Order: SVU, who should have been a social worker), et ceteraaaaaaa...

The most believable and memorable female characters who risk violence in pursuit of their goals are all motivated by maternal instinct, whether toward their own offspring or toward others who push their maternal instinct buttons. Most notably, the Faye Dunaway and Isabella Rossellini characters from Chinatown and Blue Velvet. They represent a skillful and humbling subversion of the femme fatale archetype, where we're led to believe that she's going to be yet another one of those destructively self-focused women we've seen so many times from mid-century film noir. Yet it turns out that they are among the most praiseworthy characters in the movie, and have been acting all along out of a drive to protect their children -- among other, more questionable motives, of course. Wouldn't be interesting if their motives had no complexity and contradictions, would it?

The Rachel Ward character from After Dark, My Sweet is an interesting, though less successful example of this subverted femme fatale type. She hasn't been motivated by maternal instinct all along, indeed she feels callously toward a child she has helped to kidnap and hold for ransom. However, she does have a change of heart that introduces new tension among the criminal characters, and her change is believable because it stems from an irrepressible maternal instinct. This movie was made a bit too late within the heyday of neo-noir movies, 1990, to have been executed as well as Chinatown (1974) or Blue Velvet (1986), but the character is not unconvincing.

In fact, Ripley from Aliens doesn't feel so outrageously unbelievable because there's such a strong maternal motivation driving her to do anything in order to protect a small orphan girl whose entire family and community have been destroyed.

Even when they are not the lead characters and do not face so much danger, a mother whose child has been taken from her can still deliver a convincing damn-the-torpedoes approach to action, such as those from Poltergeist and Child's Play.

And then there are the female characters who are motivated to protect and mother those who are not their own offspring, but who they feel a big sisterly or surrogate motherly relationship with. Sarah Connor nurses Kyle Reese in The Terminator, where she is also motivated to violently confront an enemy that wants to kill her unborn son. The "final girl" archetype who survives at the end of the slasher flicks tends to be a babysitter (Halloween), camp counselor (the Friday the 13th series), and so on. The female protagonist in Labyrinth is driven to rescue her baby brother from a goblin king before it's too late.

The only real counter-example of a convincing female character who doggedly risks violence to pursue her goals, without maternal motivation, is Princess Leia from the Star Wars movies. She isn't acting on behalf of her kin, or to protect surrogate children. The character succeeds, though, because she isn't the primary or even secondary line of defense -- that would be all the male warrior types from those movies. And she relies less on physical strength or prowess with weaponry, and more on the forcefulness of her personality. Women have been known to be pushy and aggressive when you give them power.

And with human beings, it's not like with gorillas where it all comes down to brute strength -- having social influence and a dominant personality can take you pretty far without having to back it up with the threat of personal violent retaliation. Humans are more like chimpanzees, where politicking plays a much greater role than violent confrontation. And women have been known to be good at politicking.

Perhaps most importantly for the success of that character, Leia never reduces herself to petty cattiness, bitchiness, and pissiness. Getting easily offended, showing thin skin, and generally getting all huffy when something thwarts her goals would mark her as an immature middle school girl, incapable of rising to a position of power. No, she's more like the bossy Catholic school nun who ain't gonna take any shit from you buncha brats.

Although half-Jewish, Carrie Fisher did not tap into that side of her personality by portraying a guilt-tripping and castrating Jewish mother type, but something closer to a dominant Irish or Italian martinet mama bear. She's also part Scotch-Irish, so I'm guessing that's where she summoned that forceful rather than bitchy attitude from.

Well, now we're getting off onto another post altogether, so I'll end it there. But you get the idea: female characters who risk extreme violence must have some kind of strong maternal motivation, or else it will fail to convince an audience. I mean, an audience that isn't retarded about what men and women are like.

With higher levels of social isolation, more and more of the society is totally clueless about what women are like, and has no trouble consuming cultural products that feature butt-kicking babe types. That's just as true in our cocooning Millennial era as it was during the asocial mid-century, when butt-kicking babes were a staple of popular culture, most notably in the widespread comic book and pulp fiction media, and to a lesser extent in film noir. Once people start to come out of their shells again, they'll learn more about basic truths of human nature and find it unappealing and even off-putting to see warrior princess schlock.

Standing your ground against the killjoy hag army

Women are touchier and bigger control freaks than men, and they act more shrill and pissy when upset. So, places with at least a good minority of women, let alone half or a majority, will necessarily become joyless and soul-crushing.

Anything fun-loving and lively trips off the "Danger: chaos imminent" alarm located within the over-mothering lobe of the female brain. After pitching a little fit to the management, especially after recruiting a few other cackling hens to her side, the operators will bow to their pressure and extinguish the flames of fun before they begin to rage out of control (always just around the corner, don'tcha know).

At least, that's usually how it goes because no one bothers to stand up for themselves anymore. The current level of oppressiveness must be an overshoot if it represents zero force pushing back in the other direction. Start pushing back, and down it goes -- how far, you can't predict, but you'll never find out how low it can go until you begin to hold your ground. Women get away with so much, in part, because men allow them to.

There's also a strong age dimension in this struggle, with menopausal women being the worst offenders. The more childless, unmarried, and therefore bitter they are, the more strongly they'll channel their nagging and badgering instincts in anti-social directions -- that is, outside of their own domestic sphere, and into public spaces where they don't belong.

Virtually every temperance movement has begun this way, and became effected in public policy once the hausfraus with too much time on their hands managed to organize themselves and lobby the government.

Well, today I got a chance to strike a blow against all this oppressiveness, and I couldn't have asked for better results!

I brought some music to play at Starbucks to fit the leisurely, lazy Sunday afternoon atmosphere, so after sitting down with my drink, I started to play New Miserable Experience by the Gin Blossoms -- perhaps the last great all-American rock album, full of catchy riffs, melodic songwriting, real human feeling behind the vocal delivery, and spirited guitar solos. It spans such a range of emotions and styles that it's impossible not to groove to it, whether or not you'd rank it among your favorites.

And being recorded in 1992, it doesn't sound "dated" -- not that that's a bad thing in an era of crappy contempo culture. You don't hear infectiously enjoyable music like this anymore, but it doesn't sound like it belongs to an alien age. It ought to be a total audience-pleaser. Furthermore, I only had the volume at about 4 or 5 out of 10 on a portable speaker, in a fairly full room where in-store music was already playing, so it's not as though I'd be disturbing anybody, right?

Unfortunately I had chosen a spot near two fat, perpetually dateless hags, one of whom didn't even make it through the first 30 seconds without shouting out, "That's, REALLY distracting!" I was surprised she could even hear it -- she was obviously high-strung and over-sensitive, because it wasn't even very loud to me. At with sound decaying according to the square of distance, she definitely did not perceive it as loud either.

When I looked at her kind of puzzled, she spat back with "When there's ALREADY music playing… the two kinds, it's REALLY distracting." In a perfectly cool smart aleck tone, I enquired, "…and you don't like this one better?" Like, c'mon, it was the typical mopey lullaby music that Starbucks plays -- of course "Hey Jealousy" is superior. She almost laughed herself, and said, "No. I don't."

I was about to go back to reading my book, when she barked in addition, "You know, that's what HEADPHONES are for." And in that same cool irreverent tone, and without even acknowledging her with eye contact, defended myself with, "Nah man, you gotta share good music…"

Holy shit, she just could not sit still, she was fuming. She was one of those laptop drones who have slowly corrupted what should be a lively public hangout space like a coffee house into a dull, alienating computer lab. She couldn't get back to her busy schedule of posting micro-aggressions, I guess. The other fatso nearby was also a laptop drone, and she went over to ask if she could hear it too, to which she said yeah. In the busybody's mind, getting two huffy hags to feel upset at the same time constitutes majority rule, but I just shrugged that off too.

So then she storms over to the bar to complain, where luckily there were three young dudes, and not another fat woman or castrated husband who would have reflexively answered, "Yes, dear." None of them even bothered to come over to me, probably because they gave things a listen and determined that they could barely hear it, if at all, so obviously this neurotic old broad is just over-reacting.

Plus I've been a regular there since 2009, and they give me free drinks every now and then because they say I'm one of the most likable customers. And I've brought them free goodies too on occasion, to help them get through a day full of dealing with annoying dingbat shrews like this one.

They probably gave her a pro forma response about we'll see what we can do, or something, but again they didn't even give me a dirty look, let alone approach me and politely ask me to turn it off.

Reality check, honey: in the real world, victory does not go to whoever gets the pissiest.

She marched back to her seat and sat stewing in toe-curling rage for another 30 minutes, or however long until I'd finished my drink and left for the mall. I could see her shaking, fidgeting, or whatever she was doing out of tension, and heard her occasionally raise her voice to herself about "I can't BELIEVE bla bla bla."

Toward the end, another middle-aged female acquaintance of hers stopped by, and she started quietly bitching to her about the whole thing. But her friend didn't say anything to me, or try to frown as she walked by me -- not noticeably anyway, since I wasn't paying them much attention. I'm sure she felt similarly to the complainer, but figured that there was no point after I and the staff had already put an end to her silly little crusade against uplifting and life-loving music.

Now, I could see if I'd been blaring it really loud, or if it had been awful rap music, ranchero, stuff with offensive lyrics, or even something that was a bit too niche for a general audience -- Sisters of Mercy, or something like that. But the fucking Gin Blossoms, man? Get real. If you can't enjoy catchy all-American rock music, then you're incapable of feeling any pleasure in life, and your vote does not count in how we all decide to set the atmosphere in our public spaces.

This is an aspect of joy-killing that we ought to emphasize more -- the utter lack of discrimination among cases, and the rigid insistence on no fun of any kind whatsoever. As though blaring reggaeton out of your car window is the same as playing catchy, jangly rock music at half-volume. Use you brain for a change -- that's what it's there for.

I also reminded her, during her fit, that it wasn't any worse than when there are four or five spirited conversations going on in the room. She thought it was different because I could have at least silenced my noise with headphones -- the implication being she wished everyone else would keep their big traps shut and be miserable like her forever and ever, just that unfortunately no one's invented a gizmo to confine the noise of a conversation only to its participants.

Seriously, lady, if you can't handle a basic level of liveliness in a coffee house, then go back to the library or computer lab that you probably work in. Or just stay home. Don't you dare disturb the carefree vibe that a coffee house should have on a leisurely Sunday afternoon.

I invite readers to try this out in their own neck of the woods. Large changes have small beginnings.

The demise of sensitive guys

If you haven't been there in a long time, it's worth looking around a Marshalls just to hear the most reliably upbeat '80s in-store music. They're guaranteed to show you something you haven't heard in years. Yesterday it was "Pure" by the Lightning Seeds.



This dude defines the shy, sensitive type of guy from the pre-cocooning era, when he would have transformed into a mumbling mousy type, a la John Mayer, or an affectedly cutesy-kiddie type, a la Jason Mraz. Those are two different ways to loudly broadcast your non-threatening nature to girls, both relying on the suppression of signs of a healthy libido.

Not like the guy from "Pure" is a balls-to-the-walls hair metal singer, but still notice the basics of normal human nature being intact:

- A willingness to open up, shown by at least a minimal range of intonation, rather than a straight monotone delivery (contra the mousy type).

- Doing so without resort to kabuki caricature (contra the cutesy type).

- And delighting the listener with something catchy -- the bouncy synth riffs throughout, and the New Order-esque guitar strumming at about 2:30 that's meant to tug just a bit at the heart-strings (contra today's music that avoids making such gestures for fear of appearing overly forward and eager to connect).

He clearly comes off as an introvert, but girls -- at least back then -- would be willing to give him a pass because he's making an honest effort to be social, engaging, and interactive. Not some off-puttingly mousy mumbler, or some spastic Peter Pan dork. Interestingly, he doesn't come off as gay either -- not spastic and childish, not whining and wailing a la the big gay singers of the time like Boy George or Morrissey. He's more of an awkward teenager than a bratty child.

He would hardly be at the top of their list of desirable dudes, but he passes the basic test, and there would have even been a small niche of girls who would've been really into this type of guy.

So what killed off the sensitive guy? The man-hating witch hunts of the early-mid-1990s, quite clearly. In an environment full of suspicion about the slightest signs of male advances toward females -- which were only two steps away from date rape -- you'd have to be out of your mind to open up to them. It's unwanted exposure, like some creepy flasher dropping his raincoat. And "shooting stars around your heart"? -- it doesn't get much more imposing and threatening than that, does it?

That's one of the greatest ironies of Millennial-era relations between the sexes: it was the guys who were the least threatening to begin with who were the main targets, while alpha males like President Bill Clinton got a pass from liberals and feminists, despite far sicker behavior like cigar-banging some fat Jewish broad at the office. O.J. Simpson did even better, getting off with double murder.

A typical feature of witch hunts is that the stronger groups team up against the weaker ones. If you think only in terms of male and female, then the '90s panic looks abnormal -- women teaming up against men. But if you look at all the variation in male status, then it becomes clear -- it was low-status and less desirable males who were the targets, not "males" in general.

Sure, there was also a hysteria surrounding date rapist jocks, but on an everyday level, it felt like it was the clingy-needy sensitive guy, or the desperate schlubby guy in his frat house, who girls saw as the most menacing. In the back of their minds, they thought the jock could get girls without resorting to date rape, while these eager virginal shy guys were more willing to go for broke.

So if you've been wondering why today's male singers practice such extreme musical hover-handing, that's why. Female audiences are just too easily creeped out by normal displays of human emotion, especially coming from males. In 1989, that was only beginning, and there was still room left in pop culture for endearingly awkward expression.

Gay potpourri

These don't seem to merit posts of their own, but still contribute to my ongoing project of explaining male homosexuality as psychological and physical pedomorphy (infantilization).

Before that, though, do you ever wonder what would happen if some group burned the rainbow flag in the midst of a Gay Pride Parade? Would the ACLU step in to defend the flag-burners' right of free speech, or would they help to indict them for a vile hate crime / veiled threat / etc. and hence beyond the protection of free speech? Google shows several results of people burning the gay flag, but not at a major demonstration -- just randomly in front of a gay center. With all the Pride Parades coming out this summer, there's only one way to find out for sure.

* * *

Speaking of Pride Parades, how do they fit into the big picture of the homophile movement being a surrogate save the children movement for childless women? Well, first note that unlike other marches about "We're here, deal with it" by minority or not-so-minority groups, the audience for sissies mincing around in their underpants are largely out-group members -- fag hags, supporters, enablers, doofus dad types, and so on. The audience at a Black Pride march would not be 99% white, nor would the Womyn's Lib army march before a mostly male audience.

Gays have accomplished nothing to deserve the applause they're receiving, so it's not like a standard awards march. They're all glitzed up and in full exhibitionistic mode, though again not in a way that deserves special praise -- unlike a ballet recital, a fashion show, etc. They get a free pass for dressing up like clowns and awkwardly shaking their butts before a crowd.

The closest analog seems to be the holiday pageant that elementary school children put on for their parents and teachers. The audience doesn't care that the performers look weird and showcase no talent -- the point is simply to make them feel comfortable performing before an audience, without feeling judged or criticized.

Children feel awkward before a group, and in the years leading up to puberty start to become anxious about whether or not a social group will accept them. The holiday pageant is meant to alleviate their anxieties, give them some safe training experience with group interaction, before the real deal confronts them in middle school. That way, they'll be prepared.

Neurotic faggots require the same amount of constant reassurance about being accepted, because their minds never matured to the point where they can sense whether they are or are not accepted by some social group, and what they can do to fix the problem of rejection. Gays are still stuck in that childish mindset of, "Well if you don't want to accept me, then you're all just a bunch of stupid-heads! Who needs you and your stupid group anyway?!" Rather than, y'know, make themselves likeable enough to merit acceptance.

Adolescents take it for granted that others are going to judge them, and that they'll judge others in their turn, as part of enforcing norms of group membership and cohesion. They occasionally bitch about the harsh atmosphere of all that judging, but they accept it and eventually get over it. Only pre-pubescent children stubbornly insist that no one ever judge them. "Well I'm not judging youuuu, so shut up!"

The Gay Pride Parade as a great big soothing head-pat for emotionally stunted brats. That also explains why liberals are so drawn to these things, even if gay rights are not a high priority for them in general -- it's that paternalistic attitude. They feel a rush from doling out reassurance because it pushes their helicopter parenting buttons -- "Awesome job, buddy!" Only here it's misdirected toward freakish man-children instead of actual children.

* * *

Why don't fag hags take it personally that their gay bffs are viscerally disgusted by the woman's sexual nature? Gays don't merely have a "preference" for dudes, the way that some people prefer Thai food over Japanese food. It's the squirming revulsion of the 6 year-old boy -- "Ewwww! You put your pee-pee in her vajayjay?! Gross!!!"

Women are into taking things personally, especially rejection, so why not in the case of such unforgiving repulsion coming from their little gay chia-pets? The "fag hag as allomother to Peter Pan" theory provides a simple answer -- the incest taboo. Mothers expect their sons to be grossed out by their own female sex organs. Indeed, they'd feel positively creeped out if their sons showed any other reaction. They understand that it's nothing personal.

The same goes for when the faggot expresses his disgust for female sexuality in general. To her, he feels like a son or a little kid brother, so it's only to be expected that he feel that way about "yucky" girls. However, in the case of mothers and big sisters, they let it slide because they figure he'll eventually grow out of it.

Do gay enablers really have that long-term forecast in the back of their minds -- that if she can make him comfortable interacting with females in a safe situation (with kin or imagined kin members), he might eventually grow up and appreciate female sexuality? Whether or not he chose to remain behaviorally homosexual, that is -- at least appreciating female sexuality instead of recoiling in disgust?

We'd need some kind of in-depth confessions, memoirs, or clinical interviews with chronic fag hags to get a better understanding of what motivates them to keep socializing with someone who finds their entire demographic group disgusting.

* * *

When I looked into the anthropometry of gays, there wasn't a whole lot to be found, and it mostly looked at standard measurements like height, weight, BMI, and so on. I noted that they need to look at waist-to-hip ratio because gays have totally straight hips like a pre-pubescent boy, whereas adolescent and adult men have hips (though not as pronounced as women).

How about an even more out-there measurement -- butt volume? Haha, no amount of "no homo" will ever scrub this blog clean after that. In all seriousness, I was at a second-hand clothing store where a real flaming Peter Pan type of faggot was working alongside two girls in their 20s. One girl said she tried on a maxi dress, but felt that it wouldn't work because it would show her pooch. The gay tried to commiserate by telling her that, "Yeah, I know -- if I actually had any ass, I'd have no problem finding jeans. But I just have like no ass." Something to that effect.

After he mentioned that, I drew up my stereotypical gay image from memory, and then checked it against reality from the thousand queers I have to be around every day. His remark was not unrepresentative -- gay guys don't have a normal adolescent or adult male level of volume, whether from fat or muscle. You don't have to look very hard to see it (thank god) -- the back of their jeans or shorts are often totally flat, and kind of hanging down because there's no butt there to hold them up.

This is probably just one aspect... er, one piece... I mean, one chunk... or whatever, of a larger pattern of gays having less musculature. Yeah, there are a few gays that have a normal level of fat and muscle, but most of them look not only thin but also having nearly no muscle. They don't look slim and wiry like gymnasts, dancers, or lead singers. They look like a pre-pubescent boy whose hormones don't allow him to build any muscle just yet, blown up to adult-like size.

* * *

As another way of evaluating these ideas about gay pedomorphy, when have you ever heard a girl say that "gay guys have such better" body part? I've heard girls spontaneously get all excited about "omigosh, ballet boys have the nicest butts" (and few of them are gay). And though I've never heard them in person, women do discuss online about which groups have bigger or smaller dicks, and can agree on the rough outlines of who goes where. Or that Italian or French or wherever men are better in bed than men from some other country (you don't hear much about Swedes, for example).

With all their desire to praise gays being so much more sensitive, caring, and understanding than straight men, why do they have nothing to say in favor of faggots physically? Handsomer faces, stronger brows, more angular jaws, nicer butts, male presence and charisma, arms, legs, feet -- anything? Not as obese, sure, but that's only an advantage over lardass males, not straight males in general.

Women show a variety of tastes in male physique, from lean lead singer to mesomorphic athlete to big cuddly teddy bear. But all of them fall within the adolescent-to-adult range. Even teenage girls, let alone older women, aren't attracted to kiddie-looking anorexic types with weak bone structure, unless they're only looking for a "practice boyfriend" or a "non-boyfriend."

So, women have nothing good to say about the homosexual body because it's all so undeveloped.

* * *

Hopefully these extra links in the chain will serve to establish male homosexuality as a syndrome -- not just an error in some single, tiny circumscribed part of psychology, but an entire suite of abnormalities that all appear to stem from a disruption to normal psychological and physical growth. Not throwing it off onto an entirely novel developmental path, but simply freezing it in place in the childhood stage.

Impaired sense of smell by race / ethnicity?

I've been trying to find out how racial groups differ in their sense of smell. Anosmia is lack of smell, hyposmia an underdeveloped sense. Nothing leaps out at me from googling around, or looking through books on olfaction.

There are cross-cultural Smell Identification Tests, but they seem to give conflicting stories about which groups have a better overall sense of smell, i.e. if you tested every odor possible, and not only those that one group has lots of experience with and other groups little.

But, I haven't devoted research-project time to sifting through everything here. Anyone who wants to find out and broadcast something exciting and new in the world of human biodiversity should look into it and write it up.

I have this vague hunch that modernizing is causing us to lose our sense of smell, as part of the broader pattern toward becoming more cerebral and less corporeal. I also get the impression that pastoralists are more likely to wear cologne and perfume, suggesting they have a more developed sense of smell than folks in agrarian societies. Then again they may have the same olfactory sensitivity, but just more of a flair for living.

Any anecdotes you guys have, or patterns that are well known but little talked about?

When to step in

One of the most understandable yet still bewildering effects of a falling crime rate is how invincible people come to see themselves, especially women. There were no glib girl-power martial arts or self-defense classes in the '80s because women had learned enough through personal or indirect experience about what they would actually be up against if the shit hit the fan.

So, why bother trying to become G.I. Jane when you could just hang out with a guy, or a group of guys, who would provide a way stronger deterrent to potential harassers? A two-bit punk is going to go after the isolated woman, not the one with several males around her.

Or how often you see 19 year-old girls jogging alone at night on city streets -- with earbuds jammed in their head to even further weaken their situational awareness. But, if there aren't as many bad guys roaming the streets as there used to be, they never get that reality check and learn to go out in social groups, like human beings were meant to.

Last night at a crowded train stop, some wino bum came up to a woman and started mouthing off -- I couldn't hear what, probably his standard crude attempts at pick-up lines. It wasn't clear if he was insulting her, too. But still being very confrontational, loud, and pushy. She looked like in her 20s, very tall, maybe 6'2 or 6'3, and with a statuesque build -- so, not some petite little thing that he could have easily intimidated. She was unaccompanied. He was in his 40s, fat, maybe 5'10, and drunken / surly.

She must have felt incredibly uncomfortable, and wishing someone would put a stop to it, though again because of her size she seemed to hold it together while looking nervous. It's always a tough call to make on the spot, but I figured she was in no real danger, and that I'd only move in if he started touching her or darting his arms and hands in her personal space.

As long as he was just up close but staying put, I figured it would be good for her long-term character to get harassed by some disgusting wino with no friends there (male or female) to back her up -- then she'd learn a valuable lesson for the future about how vulnerable you make yourself by choosing social isolation. Unwanted attention is just part of the price you pay by going out in public, and you can easily diminish it by going out in a group. You're supposed to get a feel for that logic during adolescence, but the satellite children of helicopter parents never quite got it.

Anyway, so some white knight dude steps in pretty early -- after only 20-30 seconds, and again when the wino hadn't touched her or moved his hands in her personal space. He was in his early-mid 30s, also about 5'10 and fat, and dressed like a well-meaning, meek schlub. With "Date Rape" by Sublime running through his mind, he goes up to the wino and tells him that he's bothering her, and bothering everyone else around.

So then the wino gets all in the guy's face, cussing at him to shut the fuck up, I'll kick your ass, etc. He even shoved the guy, with no response. The intervener just says that he doesn't want a fight, OK I'm walking away, etc., instead of sticking up for himself. Fuck the girl at that point -- it was a matter of personal disrespect. I halfway felt like moving in at that point, because he shoved the guy a second time, but it looked to be a mere shoving match to establish the pecking order, not an imminent fistfight.

A couple minutes later a cop drove by and several bystanders waved and pointed at the wino, who sensed some heat about to come down and made up some excuse about wanting to leave all of a sudden. The cop sat him down and probably didn't even haul him in or rough him up a little -- I couldn't stick around to see because my train showed up just then. But he'll probably be at it again next weekend.

So what did the white knight get for all his troubles? Verbal and physical harassment by drunken parasitic scum, no applause from the other bystanders, and in particular no word or gesture of gratitude from the woman for drawing fire away from her and onto himself. She was just relieved that once the schlub stepped in, the wino had locked onto another target and she could coast through the rest of the night in mere discomfort, rather than outright fear that he might escalate to groping her.

I don't think most people appreciate how thankless the Millennial generation is, how reluctant they are to ask for help when it's clearly needed, and how insistent they are on not accepting it when offered unsolicited. I don't even bother anymore. I only extend a helping hand to Gen Y, Gen X, Boomers, and even the odd Silent Gen member who's venturing out in public. Millennials just want some deus ex machina to swoop in and make everything go away, and breathe a sigh of relief that their stress level can go back down now. It's total self-absorption from beginning to end. They show so little appreciation for their fellow man, and are devoid of gratitude.

You have to know when to step in to fight someone else's fight. You don't want to jump in too quick if it's two guys, since the one you're stepping in for won't get a chance to redeem himself. Just shoving -- let them sort it out themselves. And if it's for a woman, you don't want to encourage her anti-social parasitic tendencies. If she expects an army of schlubby white knights to swoop in if called upon, yet refuses to go out in groups with males, then she's just trying to get all of the benefits of male protection without giving anything in return, like providing some fun female company, making her male companions look normal and even desirable because they've got girls in their group, and so on. You gotta give in order to get. Short of the harasser laying hands on her, poking / stabbing / waving his arms or hands in her personal space, or shouting right in her face, let her learn her lesson.

Somehow you're more likely to step in when it's a carnival atmosphere, like at a dance club. I've stepped in a lot more to displace pushy loser males from girls, whether I was with them or not, when they were making them uncomfortable. It's like the party atmosphere is so fragile that even small ruptures in the skin of trust threaten to dissolve the entire social tissue. (Or something.) And girls are a lot more grateful in those situations -- even the Millennials. I don't mind helping them out then. And I think that's the one place where they're more aware of the reality of traveling in groups rather than showing up alone.

Those places also have more security guards roaming around, unlike train stops, because the patrons are letting their guard down so much by submerging themselves into the action of the crowd.

But, with people cocooning so much over the past 20 years, they spend a lot less time in nightclubs than they used to, and a lot more time in generic open public spaces like a train stop, supermarket parking lot, jogging around the block, etc. Sure, they occasionally get harassed by bums or losers while waiting for the train or on the way out to their car in the parking lot, but it's not very often, not very intense, and not that alarming since they didn't really let their guard down in the first place. They're choosing situations where they won't learn very much from experience.

So long as the crime rate keeps falling, they won't care -- they'll act even more recklessly, in fact. Once that naivete becomes widespread enough, the predators or parasites will pick up on it and start driving the crime rate up again. In its own sick way, that's what restores people's awareness of what human nature is like, and how human behavior ought to be -- social and supportive, and humble, not glib and isolated, with a phony hubris of invincibility.

Why do people trust knockoffs when it's a matter of life and death?

Steve Sailer posts about an article in Fortune that details how an Indian generic drug maker, Ranbaxy, defrauded everyone they dealt with, from American regulators like the FDA to the ultimate users of their drugs. Their drugs were "useless at best," but they didn't mind endangering who knows how many lives as long as they kept getting away with it, laughing all the way to the bank.

In the comments, someone extends this case to include all kinds of other cheap junk made abroad and fobbed off on the American / Western public as quality stuff, such as a washer from GE (foreign) vs. Whirlpool (American).

I don't buy the extension -- if you knew your GE washer was made in China, you already half-expect it to be a typical Made-In-China piece of shit. You feel angry that GE, an American firm, duped you into believing it was American-made, but once you realize it's effectively a foreign knockoff, you start to prepare for the inevitable.

It's not too different from finding out that the Fendi leather purse you bought for your Jersey Shore girlfriend on eBay is just some Canal Street knockoff made in China. Or remember when you were a kid and you were over at a friend's house, ready to pour yourself a bowl of what you thought were Fruit Loops from one of those tupperware-type cereal containers, and your friend advised you that it was actually second-rate Fruit Rings inside? You knew what to expect after learning of their generic status.

In the Ranbaxy case, we didn't think it was a high-profile, reputable, name-brand American firm who was making the drugs. We knew at least that they were a generic manufacturer, though not necessarily suspecting that they were also foreign. The key point is that their status as a mass producer of knockoff products (generic drugs) did not send up any red flags about quality. Indeed, we may have even felt grateful toward them for sticking up for the little guy, giving us the drugs that those fat cats in Big Pharma would never part with for so little money.

We are so angry at name-brand drug makers charging so much money for their products that we are eager for their monopoly phase to end, when the government regulators open the cages on all the Robin Hood generic companies who will pounce on the name-brand company, rip the product right out of their hands, and hand it over to us, the users -- for a small finder's fee, of course, but still way less than what the originators would have charged us.

Our love of Robin Hood type narratives blinds us to the fact that in cases like generic drugs or open-source software, they aren't simply lifting the name-brand goods and selling them to us at a deep discount compared to retail, in the way that a common thief rips off an iPad from the Apple Store to sell for $50 on Craigslist. They're selling us their imitation, their interpretation, their best guess, their took-a-stab-at-it project.

The common thief tries to keep it quiet that he ripped the iPad off from the name-brand store -- uh, I got it as a gift and don't want it. Just don't ask why I'm selling an unwanted gift, unopened and in high demand, for only a measly 20% of retail rather than 50% or 80%. I don't want that extra money because, uh, I just want to get it out of here fast, and a lower price will move it faster. Just don't ask why I'm in such a hurry to get rid of it...

The makers of generic drugs and open-source software, however, boldly preen before an assembled audience about skillfully ripping off the name-brand products, more or less, and passing them on so cheaply to average consumers. You can't score Robin Hood status points without proclaiming that you're robbing from the rich.

That narrative hits such a primitive pleasure button -- the adrenaline rush from seeing a noble underdog dethrone a corrupt Establishment figurehead -- that it short-circuits the parts of our brain responsible for checking the provenance of stuff that seems to be too good to be true, and that's being peddled by some unctuous salesman who seems overly eager to get them into our hands.

Sure, in the back of our minds, we know that a generic drug or Open Office can't be fully as good as the original, but it's so cheap -- and a tiny amount of quality dilution is worth it, just to fuck those price-gougers up the ass and boycott their overhyped products.

But boycotting is not the same as patronizing their competitors. Once you go down the latter path, you open yourself up to being preyed on by the competitors -- they know that you're so blinded by rage to stick it to the Establishment, that you'll buy whatever shit they peddle. They'll goad you on by shouting how smart you are to have lifted the veil of name-brand fetishism -- Step Right Up, ladies and gentlemen! And take your best shot against those fat cats we've rounded up and trapped in the dunk tank! Only $10 a pop! Go ahead -- you know you've been waiting your entire life to stick it to 'em!

Carnival hucksters could probably get ordinary people to shoot their own children between the eyes, as long as their faces were covered with burlap sacks, and as long as the pitch was about letting your worst enemy have it -- and for only a measly couple-a bucks. Just don't ask how I managed to overpower your worst enemy and serve them up for you on a silver platter, all without you ever asking me to do so. I'm just a justice-oriented kinda guy, y'know -- a modern-day Robin Hood, some might say.

The main alternative idea for this kind of stuff that I've read has to do with us trusting those who are in control of life-and-death parts of the economy because we view those areas as sacred, hence beyond normal market forces, and although plagued by a few bad apples, still presided over by more or less honest folks -- not by used car salesman types, at the very least.

But I don't think that idea captures the full richness of the picture. We don't just trust the generic makers more than we ought to -- we halfway worship them as Robin Hood figures, enlist them on our side to fuck over the big companies who've always been gouging our wallet. And there's a strong undercurrent of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," which is easy to fit into the Robin Hood narrative, but not really into the story about trusting companies that deal with life-and-death matters.

Why don't we behave the same way toward cereal makers, then? Buy Fruit Rings by the barrel-full just to stick it to those fat cats over at Kellogg's who make Fruit Loops? Probably because we don't see the higher price of Fruit Loops as gouging, whereas expensive name-brand drugs jump out as a repeating heavy blow to our wallet. The prediction then is that the more some name-brand product costs, the more willing we are to blindly trust the generic makers who sell an alternative.

"I don't care if the Gucci bag is fake -- I mean, it's good enough, and looks close enough. I'm not gonna, like, let some huge company steal all my money for something that's only a little better."

This airheaded girl doesn't stop to think that maybe her Made-In-China knockoff is made from "leatherette" that's 50% used asbestos, and that's why it's so goddamn cheap. In a world where everyone's so obsessed with Keeping Down Costs, the producers will sell us lemons, and we'll be only too happy to buy them. All we need to do is take a look at life in China to find out how degraded and sub-human that mindset will make us.

Gay Peter Pan-isms: No interest in cologne or perfume

I've started to get back into cologne for the first time in awhile, and whether it's browsing through the men's fragrance area in a department store or reading through online forums to get opinions on stuff I can't sample in person, it's striking how minimal the gay presence has been -- like, practically non-existent. Not just on the customer side, but on the store assistant side as well. It's either normal men or women who take care of that part of a department store.

Furthermore, you don't see them in the world of perfume either. That's a woman-only domain, on the customer and service sides alike.

This is in stark contrast to many other areas of apparel, grooming, etc., where if there's a sizable queer presence in your city, you can bet on over half the "men" in H&M being gay during any given visit. Gays also express interest in all kinds of female fashion and beauty -- styling hair, make-up, clothing and accessory design, and so on -- but not in fragrance. They like the idea of playing dress-up because they're infantilized. Somehow fragrance doesn't play so central of a role in dress-up games -- too overpowering.

They just don't like the stuff. Here is a short thread from Yahoo! Answers asking what the best cologne for gay men is. Unlike other questions that ask what your favorite cologne is, which will restrict respondents to those who actually do like to wear it themselves or smell it on others, this more open-ended question allows for more general and less personal answers, like this revealing one from a real-life homosexual:

"In my experience, gay men aren't that into cologne. I've known some who wear it but mostly not."

Looking around the answers of the small minority that is into it, they go for the standard unassertive effervescent stuff that is sold to awkward teenagers in Hollister, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc. At a forum for users of "powerhouse" fragrances -- i.e., ones that last long, project far, and smell in some way imposing -- there's no apparent gay presence at all. Looks like metalheads from the '80s are the only detectable over-represented group there, not airheaded faggots.

All of this points to the gay fear of self-assertion, part of their broader syndrome of infantilization. You're too afraid to take up lots of space when you're just a little dork, but that all changes when puberty hits. You start to compete more with other males, and you also want to assert yourself more around girls. The same is true for females: they get more catty and boy-crazy during puberty, and assert themselves more.

Part of that naturally expresses itself as a sudden interest in fragrances, both to wear yourself and to smell on others. They don't bother putting sample strips of cologne or perfume into Highlights magazine, or advertise on Nickelodeon. When I started out as a teenager, it was Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated where you first learned about cologne. I'm sure there was something similar for girls reading Seventeen or whatever to learn about perfume.

Not to mention the rite of passage of going to the cologne / perfume section of the department store and actually getting to sample all of the dozens of scents they had there. Dude, what if we run into some babes at the food court? Better spray on a little Obsession first at Hecht's. You never know...

Gays never felt that normal inclination that both heterosexual guys and girls felt as they matured into adolescents. Sure, some normal people don't find it attractive either, but not across the entire demographic group. The only group that is unequivocally uninterested in and even mildly weirded out by personal fragrances, especially the more assertive ones, are children.

This goes to show that it's not helpful to see gays as hyper-masculine (lol) or as feminized -- which is plausible in some cases, but not all. Females tend to be more juvenile than males in appearance, mindset, and behavior, so many cases will support both the idea that gays are infantilized and that gays are feminized. The crucial cases pit the two against each other, and infantilization always wins.

Most notably, gays have no nurturing or parenting instinct, whether of a mothering or a fathering kind, even when they're well into middle age. Here we see another example where both guys and girls, in their own sex-specific ways, develop an interest in fragrance during adolescence, while gays remain stunted in childhood.

That's true for other aspects of how both normal boys and girls start to change their appearance during adolescence, both to compete against same-sex rivals and to attract mates. Hairstyles get bigger, jewelry begins to accumulate, and designs or patterns get bolder. Gays wear minimal haircuts, don't adorn their bodies, and rarely wear striking patterns like plaid, geometric prints, and so on, only feeling comfortable to go as far as stripes and the odd gingham shirt. Their childish nature keeps them from being very assertive.

Wearing short shorts, a field report

Yesterday in a trendoid part of town I saw, for the first time in 20 years, a chick jogging down the street wearing just booty shorts and a bikini top. Not young young, maybe later half of her 20s or early 30s. And by now it's not totally uncommon to see dudes walking around or chillin' with no shirt on -- at least out here in the Mountain states. I assume it's still more stuffy back east.

That told me that the moment has arrived to take things one step beyond and start wearing short shorts. Keep the early momentum going away from the Victorian zeitgeist. Help usher in that Late Victorian / Late Fifties atmosphere where things started shaking up a bit.

I'd planned ahead awhile back and bought the closest thing I could find to short shorts, these swim trunks by H&M in navy (minus the suss-looking belt). As the pictures show, they just look like jogging shorts or tennis shorts from the '70s and '80s. Although made from synthetic materials, they're not really clingy and don't cover a huge area of your body, so they don't make you sweat any more than normal. Not like a polyester leisure suit or whatever.

In fact, aside from being comfortable to wear, they're much more comfortable to walk around in because your legs are free. I haven't worn shorts this short since like 1990, and holy shit, locomotion feels noticeably more natural. Not as though today's shorts feel like burlap sacks, but they do trap some heat and rub against your skin more than they need to (i.e. not at all).

Sitting down, squatting down, and standing up all feel more natural too -- especially when squatting down to look at or pick up things near the ground. That's when longer shorts get pulled more against your legs. None of that feeling with real shorts. There's no "riding up" feeling on the mid-to-upper part of your thigh because there's hardly any material down there to ride up in the first place.

Needless to say, I can't see going back to medium-length shorts anymore, and will get the couple pair that I have hemmed, as well as turn slacks and jeans that I don't wear much into shorter-length cut-offs. If it's good enough for Clark W. Griswold, it's good enough for me.



Ha, I know... I heard you asking it already -- what was everyone else's reaction? You must have looked like a traveller from another planet with your legs showing in public.

For the most part, no strong reaction, visible, audible, or tangible. I noticed chicks checking me out a little more than normal, but nothing out of this world. Then when I was walking through a crosswalk, a car full of teenage or college girls who had to stop for me, let out a fanfare of catcalls -- "Yeah!" "Uh-huh!" "All right, get it!" Typically, even if girls think you're cute, they don't make catcalls unless you're dressed in some striking way, like wearing a suit with a bold pattern. It shows the guy isn't so self-conscious and feels a basic level of comfort with himself, even somewhat daring. In the back of their minds, if they had your baby, it wouldn't grow up to be a total wuss or a wallflower.

I didn't notice any disgusted or creeped-out looks from girls, though there could have been some, just given how prudish the culture has become. Most of them merely noticed a dude walking around with unusually short shorts and it didn't faze them enough to have it show.

As for guys, there was a tiny bit more of a backlash, but only among losers. Some fat black teenager turned around and gave me a mild "WTF?" look on the train, and a wigger or juggalo guy who rode past me on his bike turned around to give me what I assume was a "WTF?" look (he had sunglasses on). Both were wearing dumpy trashbag shorts themselves, so I took their reaction as a good sign.

Oh, and there was a sexually frustrated chump in that car full of girls, and he tried to yell something at me but got cut off or shut down by one or more of them. I couldn't hear exactly, but the tone was of a generic insult. The girls said something like, "Pssh, please" or "Oh, hell no" to rebuff his attempted cut-down. You can't try to slam a guy who is too much higher up on the attractiveness scale because it comes off so obviously desperate and pathetic, and by calling attention to the contrast or gap between you two, makes your own ugliness / dorkiness more palpable.

Overall, though, again the reactions were nothing noticeable from guys. I was hoping for one or two reactions like shouting out, "You cannot be serious!" in a John McEnroe voice, but I guess it's good enough that I didn't hear anything like, "The '80s are dead, faggot!"

It's weird, I didn't even notice the queers looking over or stalking me around any more than usual. That's what I was the most afraid of -- a whole gaggle of them flocking over and ejaculating their lisping, buzzing voices all over the room. Really dodged a bullet there.

So if you're the easy-going, no self-consciousness type, I say give 'em a try. You'll be surprised by how little people will react to them, and by how comfortable they feel to walk around in. It seems like people's reaction was mostly on an informational rather than an emotional level -- noting an occurrence, and ever so slightly updating their expectations of the world to be in a more informal and carefree direction than they'd believed earlier.

Children of helicopter parenting grow up gullible and naive

You can't help but be struck by how credulous young people are today. No single instances come to mind for me to showcase as examples, but taking so much of what they read at face value, and not questioning the reliability of sources.

In particular, within the naturalistic / mundane / profane / materialistic realm of things -- I'm not talking about belief in things that we can't investigate so easily, such as Santa Claus or the nature or existence of God. And also not narratives that are part of oral tale-telling -- they don't do that anymore either. Factoids, party line talking points, things like that are what I have in mind. Not necessarily ideological either; I'm amazed by what kinds of shit you can make up to little kids today and they'll believe it right away (not that I have, but I hear stories about my nephew, or about people's kids who grew up in the '90s).

Like buying into Citizen Kane and Sgt. Pepper's as among the greatest movies and albums just because some authority figure told them so, when both are mediocre though not unlikable. Zipping over to Wikipedia and being 90% certain that they've heard the final word on whatever they're looking up. They read something on Slate or the HuffPo, and no mass media outlet would lie or distort the picture, would they? How ironic for a generation that considers themselves to be sophisticated skeptics.

So, that interacts with their glib, superficial, spastic tendencies as well, but there's another part that is credulity, gullibility, and naivete.

I think this stems from being cut off from non-family members when they were growing up in the '90s and 2000s. Hamilton's Rule says you should believe your close kin a lot more than genetic strangers, because they have far less to gain by lying to you. Your loss is partly their loss, too, after all.

Only by being raised by peers and unrelated adults -- by the broader community -- does a growing child learn, often the hard way (the only way), to take things that others say with a grain of salt. Does anyone who was a kid in the '60s, '70s, or '80s remember how often you used to flat-out deny whatever your friends were claiming. Oh yeah right! Nuh-uhhh, nuh-uhhh! Psssh, please!

You weren't so confrontational toward unrelated adults who told you things, but you still learned that from all kinds of different opinions that you were exposed to, there was apparently some honest disagreement, so don't just swallow what any particular one of them tried to feed you. And on the other hand, if they all seemed to say the same thing, that was robust independent confirmation -- for example, that "life isn't always fair." (Damn right. Something Millennials never learned...)

My guess is that since the '90s the only steady, reliable source of this stimulation to growth has come from sibling rivalry. Again, even that is pretty weak, given Hamilton's Rule. No substitute for interacting with a broad range of others, and learning from those experiences. Male and female, young and old, poor and rich, outcast and popular. We actually learned quite a bit about what makes people tick back in the good old days.

These dynamics probably also explain the similar traits of the Silent Generation when they were young in the mid-century, the previous heyday of helicopter parenting and social isolation. I'm not sure whether they also had the glib, superficial, bratty thing going on too -- I'd have to check into it to see what people said about young people back then. My vague impression is that while they were credulous and naive, they weren't so glib and dismissive. That may be more related to trends in economic inequality, which would create more individual vs. individual antagonism, all else being equal.

That's one major thing to keep in mind that I don't think I've stressed before -- that because economic cycles and social-cultural cycles are distinct, you don't always see the exact same picture across all rising-crime or falling-crime periods, even though the trend in the crime rate is the stronger force. I'd say the Millennial era is actually closer to the Gilded Age -- falling crime and violence after the American Gothic / Civil War period, but also plagued by widening inequality, Robber Barons, rampant immigration, and so on. People did seem a lot more snarky and show-off-y back then, compared to the mid-20th century.

And of the two dominant revival styles today, I'd say overall the neo-Victorian one is stronger than the neo-Fifties one. Especially with how dark, drab, and covered-up everyone is today, across all demographic groups. Anyway, I'm getting into another post here, but I may come back to this topic soon.

The gay haircut fetish

Earlier I threw out the question of why gays are so against long or even medium-length hair, both as the way to wear their own hair as well as what they find attractive in others.

Since the major source of their disorder is being psychologically and even physically stunted in childhood, I figured their obsession with short hair -- permitting no room for variety -- was linked to children having much shorter hair than adolescents or adults. It's part of their way of cultivating and treasuring a childlike way of life.

But the second major source of their disorder is an addictive personality. Perhaps obsessing over hair length, compulsively getting it cut -- not just frequently, but having detailed / high-maintenance instructions, checklists that must be completed or else they're going to melt down... is just another one of their mild-to-severe addictions and fetishes.

Here is a blog called The Psychology of the Haircut Fetish, which only has one post. I won't bother quoting it since it's not very long, but basically a queer with a haircut fetish himself asked some therapists to read through a couple relevant online forums. The guys are gay, and they all share a fear of emasculation. In their minds, short hair = masculine, so "I must always have short hair, or else everybody will think I'm a sissy." Too late for that -- you're going to need major vocal chord surgery to fool anyone who isn't a total retard.

This fetish angle seems to make more sense than the infantilization angle, in this case anyway. Little boys do have shorter hair and feel weird growing it long, but they're not all OCD about bugging their parents to take them to get it cut every two weeks. Faggy fastidiousness is more addictive/compulsive than infantile. And of course it doesn't stop with the hair on their head -- they have an addiction/fetish to shaving off body hair in general.

Unfortunately I have to see or be around faggots every day in this city, and now that I think about it, they do play around with their scalp in that quick, jerky, fetishistic kind of way. You never see normal men running their fingers through their hair unless it's medium or long, and even then it's a slow show-off kind of motion.

But then queers have nothing to run their fingers through, and it's faster and more nervous or frenetic. It's more like rubbing or stroking the skin of their scalp to feel a little rush, not to show off their flowing locks to the babes or to functionally get their messed-up hair in a neater order. It doesn't matter if they're mostly bald and the remainder is buzzed -- they still play around with their scalp.

Through a google image search for "gay hair," I found this guy's profile that shows an animated gif of him playing with his short hair. Again, not fixing it, not showing off its length (it's short on top and buzzed on the sides), but using it as another outlet for public masturbation.

Christ, now it's going to be even sicker when I see them doing it. Just knowing that it's not some generic spastic tendency, but their socially acceptable way of beginning a jerk-off sensation in public once they see some guy whose butthole they want to lick out. Sorry if that offends you, but why bother trying to whitewash their rotten nature?

The Social Darwinist roots of Chinese mediocrity and amorality

Yeah, we know -- the Chinese have a higher average IQ and lower propensity toward violence than blacks or Hispanics. Real high standard to hold the non-whites to -- are you more tolerable as neighbors than the average black/Hispanic.

East Asian mediocrity looks like a puzzle, then, given their higher test scores. And while most people wouldn't come right out and say it, they think that being smarter makes you more morally sensitive and perhaps more moral in conduct as well. So Asian amorality presents another puzzle.

Earlier I suggested that the relative lack of disgust in Asians is the main factor behind their amoral nature. They don't get as easily grossed out by a range of gross things as Western people would. And throughout human evolution, disgust has gotten put to new use in the moral domain -- we refer to something as "morally repugnant," we make a disgusted face and shrink back when we hear about something puzzlingly immoral, and our entire concept of a hypocrite or a traitor seems to be derived from disgust -- ingesting something you had believed to be healthy, but was actually poisoned.

I don't think I've ever had a big theory about why Asians don't accomplish as much as their brains would suggest.

But after reading Ron Unz's article about the Social Darwinist pressures that shaped the Chinese population, in particular the grinding meritocracy, the two puzzles make more sense.

Basically, everything bad you could imagine was constantly nipping at the heels of the average Chinese -- famine, downward mobility, epidemic disease, and so on. Worse than in Europe, where folks were more spread out, sparing themselves the nastiest effects of insectoid hive living. And social mobility was based on meritocratic principles, rather than strictly inherited rank / caste, or joining an upstart armed faction that hoped to dethrone the established faction by force (life has been more peaceful in China for awhile now).

The constant rising and falling of an individual's social status meant that he could not consider any set of tasks to be beneath him -- whatever it took to get through the here and now, and perhaps save up for later, he had to take. Work as a farm laborer one week, rent himself out as a soldier the next, use his new wealth to open a shop and supervise laborers, and then work as a laborer for some other merchant once he went under himself, and so on. Nothing could be felt to be out of bounds.

Unz says that this would have selected for more hardy people even among the brainy -- they would only get to profit from their brains some of the time, and would have to do manual labor the rest of the time. They had no niche to continually colonize, as the Ashkenazi Jews did with white collar finance jobs. That sounds true enough to me. Your typical elite Jew is pretty pathetic with around-the-house kind of stuff, while the Chinese might know something about drywall, planting shrubs, fixing leaks, and so on.

So, there we have the explanation for Asian mediocrity -- they never had a brainy niche to thrive in full-time, and instead were selected to be a Jack-of-all-trades.

That would also seem to explain the relative disappearance of disgust in Asians (at least the Chinese). If nothing could be felt to be out of bounds, what happens if your next set of tasks is disgusting, either viscerally or figuratively? And what happens when you find yourself in such a cheek-by-jowl environment, surrounded by sick and dirty neighbors? These aspects of the Chinese ecology would select for folks with a dialed-down sense of disgust.

This is important to keep in mind any time you hear about how the Chinese are going to best the Americans or Westerners in some area because we are too timid, while they plow ahead. It may be true in some limited range of cases, namely those where political correctness ties the hands of Western researchers or other actors. In all other areas, we're still going to come out ahead.

Even in the domains under PC quarantine, we shouldn't confuse ourselves about what path the Chinese (or whoever) will take. We like to romanticize those who are doing what we are too weak to do. But the Chinese are not iconoclasts -- not daring, not bold, and not anti-authoritarian. They are not the schoolyard rebel who goes where the teachers have told him not to, just because he likes acting recklessly and putting would-be authorities in their place by disobeying them.

Rather, they are more like the autistic children who wander out beyond the prescribed boundaries because they've tuned out other people's demands on their behavior in the first place.

I'll be glad if they do work in fields that are out-of-bounds in the West, but I'm also realistic about the broader prospects for cutting-edge Asian science, whether hard or soft. Iconoclasts have struck a nerve, and so that's a sign that there's really something there to extract. Asians are more blind wanderers than iconoclasts, so in addition to getting some work done where we could not, they're going to waste far much more time, money, and effort in other pursuits. The schoolyard rebel must know where a truly enjoyable place is, whereas the autistic kid may stray over there for awhile, but will also spend most of his time in boring places.

The lack of passion that characterizes autistics also means that we shouldn't expect a whole lot to get done even when the Chinese do hit upon a profitable spot to dig. They'll dig, and dig a little more, and then that'll be it. Their mindset seems to have been selected to not count too much on one narrow range of tasks to make a living from, hence no obsessive single-mindedness. While they may be driven to succeed in some general sense, like how much wealth they own, they don't seem ambitious to rise to the top of any particular domain of life. Whatever will boost their status this week, they'll do it.

To conclude, the main contrast is with Ashkenazi Jews. They had a narrow specialized set of tasks that served as selection pressures. They are more single-minded and driven to make it in whatever they set their minds to in early adulthood, and no matter how weird the domain may seem, their goal is to be #1.

To take a random example, Lloyd Kaufman, the co-founder of Troma Entertainment, has obsessed over how to be the best of low-budget horror / sleaze / farce movies in the world of home video. It's not Harvard Medical, Stanford Law, etc., but he's going to be #1 at something. And he graduated from Yale, so he could've tried to go that route if he'd wanted to. I assume he also had plenty of nagging from his Jewish mother to do something more respectable.

If he'd been Chinese, he might've wandered into making movies like The Toxic Avenger, but probably wouldn't have felt it was his calling in life. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard an Asian talk about what they felt their "calling" was, what they "were meant to be" in life, and so on. Meh, maybe this, maybe that, I don't mind doing whatever. I'm sure his tiger mother would push him toward the same professional careers that the Jewish mother would, but he's going to be more acquiescent since he doesn't feel a strong inner drive toward a specific goal in the first place.

Amphetamines on campus -- an initial pushback?

Here is an NYT article about a handful of colleges that have begun to tighten the rules for their health centers in dispensing Adderall and other amphetamines. Who knows if it'll catch on more broadly, but it sounds like we're near the point where, although amphetamine use will continue to increase, it'll be at a decelerating or plateau-ing rate.

Earlier I reviewed the history of mainstream drug use over the 20th century, which tracks the rising vs. falling-crime trend. Casual drug use was way worse during the mid-century because amphetamines, barbiturates, and minor tranquilizers were protected by a fig leaf of medical necessity -- to squeeze out the volatility of everyday life, to keep everybody's nerves within a narrow optimal range, neither too high-strung nor too sluggish. We've seen that return in the last 20 years with anti-depressants, the amphetamine revival, and sex-life drugs.

The harsher effects of opiates (the drug of choice during the Jazz Age) and crack / cocaine (during the New Wave Age) makes it harder to slap together a medical rationale for their use. Hence when the drug culture centers around out-there drugs, it becomes more of a fringe thing, not where every other housewife is hoovering a line here and a line there to make it through her daily housework. People become more wary of drug use. And rising-crime times see less cocooning and more social connectedness, reducing people's feeling that they need to take a pill in order to feel better. They already feel better from their sense of belonging and social support.

The transition between the mid-century attitude of "take whatever drugs get you through the day" to the New Wave Age attitude of "I don't know, that's some pretty serious shit you're fucking around with there" began in the late 1950s and early '60s. There was a growing awareness that casual drug use, no matter how medically rationalized, was messing up their ability to live a fully human and dynamic life. We're not quite there yet, since there's only a handful of colleges starting to push back, not a broader movement among the users themselves. But in the next 5-10 years, I see a repeat of that awakening circa 1960 against casual drug use.

The article doesn't draw a very rich portrait of the students, but the basic pattern is there to recognize if you've had much contact with college kids in the past 5-10 years. Fundamentally, Millennials are amoral bullshit artists who lie for boring, trivial reasons. It's not the mischievous prankster kind of truth-bending, or the kind that advances Machiavellian ambition. There's no larger scheme behind their lies, and hence no attempt to justify or rationalize lying per se as actually moral when you think about it, e.g. to protect someone else's feelings. They rationalize their individual actions, not the entire pattern of chronic lying.

They're only looking to minimize the volatility in their mundane daily lives, and whatever it takes, it takes. If you're feeling sluggish, lie to some quack who'll give you Adderall. If your cash flow takes a sudden dip, lie to some quack so you can re-sell your Adderall pills for $5-10 apiece. If you've been putting off your three-page paper, and face a sudden huge demand of your time and effort, well screw that, just BS your way through it. If you're caught doing anything that makes you look bad, just BS your way out of it. More than any other generation, the Millennials act according to the credo of "Just BS your way out of it."