Saturday, February 14, 2015

Valentine's Day: Sounds to Shag By

It's time for a lighter post and it just happens to be Valentine's Day, so I thought I would share some wisdom with all the love birds around the world...  It's an interesting human trait that sharing tips for courtship (or at least to initiate mating) is something we do all our lives.  It really starts to become a preoccupation when we become teenagers and are sent to those incubators of human lust--called high school in America.  For me this would have been around 1980, when the rituals of seduction were transitioning indoors from "dragging the gut" to hanging out at the shopping mall, and millions of teens learned the advice of Damone's Five Point Plan.
For the most part, it's not bad advice, but young Mark Ratner must not have had a copy of Led Zeppelin IV, so he ended up going with Physical Graffiti, which I personally think is a better album to fuck to anyway.  So I'm trying to come up with a WARR Blog Five Point Plan and reflecting on memorable bits of advice on sex and love that I was given during my life.  Here they are.  [1] Once I was riding with a surfer friend of mine in his Trans Am down by Torrance Beach and he told me how to make sure a girl wants to see you again:  "The first time you just keep going and keep going all night, no matter how tired you are, just keep getting her off and I guarantee she will start calling you every day."  This guy was a big wave rider.  There are limits to his advice, but it is true that if you are spectacular in bed and leave a lover fully sated, they will come back for more.  [2]  I once had a boss who had been a serious playboy in this younger days and liked to give me advice.  He told me, "Women love to be told what to do.  They love it."  It's a variation on Damone's "kiss me you wont regret it" meme.  On one date I tried the forceful seduction approach and did manage to round the bases and steal home plate, but she never wanted to talk to me again after that night.  [3]  I remember sitting at a bar with a buddy who is a small-scale rock star--played on several albums, performed to big crowds, etc.  I was chatting up a couple of girls and gave my friend a full introduction, seeking to impress them.  "I never tell a girl all that stuff when we first meet," he said.  "Save it for later and then when they find out, it blows their mind."  In other words, don't oversell yourself.  Let the person you're interested in discover what makes you special naturally, whether that is later in the conversation or on a future date.  I swear by this point.  [4]  When working on my psyche degree I did two significant research projects on my favorite topic at the time, sexual promiscuity among college girls.  Some of my Likert scale surveys came back with comments written on the form like "you either do it or you don't" or "if you're going to go half way, you might as well go all the way."  We all have different attitudes toward sex, so know who you're dealing with.  [5]  Skip the Zeppelin and put on this sexy number, which seems to work even with women who don't like hard rock:
Happy Valentine's Day and I hope my advice serves you well.


Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Greek Triumph

I am happy for the people of Greece and the EU this week after voters elected Alexis Tsirpas as its president.  The Greeks were able to achieve what so far the Scots and Spaniards have not--a blow to the Eurocratic Empire.  It's interesting that a desire on the part of the Greek people to self-govern is somehow considered "radical" in the west.  The radical part seems to be a desire to escape a fiscal austerity program that has been imposed by the EU.  It's only the beginning, but the Greeks are euphoric for the moment and having a grand party of it all.
Now the dilemma for Tsirpas is how to do this while remaining on the Euro currency and that has Eurocrats nervous about Greek payments.  The New York Times reports, "Some of the creditors still seem to feel that a debt is a debt to be repaid in full, and that the Greeks 'deserve' punishment for their history of profligate spending and habitual tax evasion."  Again a very one-sided view from the west.  Nothing is said of the shenanigans of Goldman Sachs to crash the Greek economy so that vulture capitalists could buy up Greek bonds on the cheap.  As investigative reporter Greg Palast revealed in his excellent book, Vultures' Picnic, Greece is a crime scene, and the people are being looted.  Now the Greeks have had enough and they've begun to fight back.
This is a small victory for the people of the world against multinational corporations and international bankers, not just for Greece.  The best government is local government.  The frictions that borders cause for international trade are not just costs to be removed from a value chain, but cellular walls that protect nations and the people of the world.  They create jobs, protect cultures, preserve local environments, and ensure that the will of the people is not abrogated by central planning or a bureaucratic elite.  One of the great oxymorons of globalization is that the destruction of nation states and their sovereign cultures in favor of large, homogenous regulatory unions is somehow a way of embracing "diversity."  The Eurocrats have shown their predisposition toward Orwellian state-craft and there is no uglier example of that than what has happened in Greece.