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.

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.

FDR's Day of Infamy

December 7 marks the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that led the U.S. into WWII.  In the U.S. this day is greatly memorialized for its tragedy and celebrated for the heroic response of the American military in what was the first battle of "the good war" against Japan and Nazi Germany.

My grandparents were very much your model Americans of the early-mid 20th century with a strong sense of service to country.  My grandmother's brother was killed in the war in the Pacific, something she was never able to forgive the Japanese people as a whole for.  However, I remember a couple conversations with my grandparents that always stuck in my mind and one statement in particular:  "No sir, I never believed that (the Japanese surprised us)."  Long before the internet or independent newspapers or radio, it seems that skepticism over the Roosevelt Administration's account of what happened that day in 1941 abounded in the taverns and coffee show shops of mainstream America.

The preceding video is a brief discussion of the questions surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack and tends to be aimed at debunking the argument that FDR allowed it to happen, but it's a cursory primer and largely based on Robert Stinnett's book Day of Deceipt.  The most explosive evidence in Stinnett's book is the recently declassified (1994) McCollum Memo which listed steps to provoke a Japanese attack, but there are many more facts exposed in the book that are largely ignored by critics.  If you've got the time, I highly recommend the book, because it sure convinced me.  The author is respectful of Roosevelt's probable motives, like the need to stop Hitler, but the justifications for baiting an attack should not preempt a historical analysis of the facts.

The most catastrophic loss on Pearl Harbor Day was to the U.S.S. Arizona, which lost 1,177 men when it was struck by dive bombers--nearly half the men killed that day.  Ironically, the christening of the Arizona in 1914 was presided over by then Asst. Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt--the very man who may have sent the ship its grave.  Even now after 73 years, many of the official government records concerning what was actually known about the movements of the Japanese fleet in the weeks approaching that fateful day remain inexplicably classified.  More secrecy exists around the events at Pearl Harbor than does the development of the atomic bomb.  Since the technology that existed in 1941 is now so completely obsolete, the only rational conclusion to draw is that the contents of those records remain politically explosive and that can only mean that they do not support the official explanation of what happened.  The casualties of World War II and their families deserve the truth.

Ferguson Ver-Dicked

The social engineering of the American populace to accept police brutality continues...

The more things change the more they stay the same, Brothers and Sisters, fellow Americans, compassionate members of the human race....

"When reason fails, the Devil helps!"---Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Battle of the Bands: Jesus, Satan, The Atheists live in Florida!

If you've ever been in a local band, you know that competition to get people to come to your shows can be intense.  So it is that a school district in Florida reluctantly brought about a Battle of the Bands, or something like that.  Turns out a local Christian group, Satan, and some cats calling themselves The Atheists (who also play under the name Freedom From Religion Foundation) created quite a stir in the Orange County Public Schools when they started passing out flyers.  Ironically, it was The Atheists (not the Satanists) who generated the most shock among parents.

Freedom From Religion Foundation Atheist Promotional Flyer

Marilyn Manson would have been proud.  Fans of Satan were shocked as the NWOBHM pioneers from 1979 produced some very un-heavy images, causing quite a stir in metal chatrooms until it was revealed that it was not the same Satan; rather it was more of a baby metal band.

So far Orange County Schools haven't had too much problem with stickers being plastered all over lockers and bathroom stalls, but the controversy seems to have proven quite enough for administrators.  The Atheists responded to the controversy by claiming that the local Christian group was "hateful, sexist, and cruel."  Personally, I think they just need to work on their image because they look really stupid.

 You know it's just plain wrong when a Christian musician stuffs a sock in his spandex to get attention, so maybe the critics have a point.  However, I just can't understand why people these days don't just chill the fuck out!  The Bible thumpers have always been around, because Christianity is the dominant western religion and makes up 32% of the world's population.  That we've reached a point where atheism/existentialism/secular humanism/etceteraism is so passionately proselytized that its believers have come to admonish any challenge to that belief system would seem to contradict its very purpose.  Existentialist super-philosopher Sartre wrote,  "And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own."  It seems like a progressive movement that once felt like an intellectual vanguard has become an ideological abstersion.  And as for Satanism, Spinal Tap summed it up best at the 2:20 mark of this interview.  Back in the 80's Satanists had class and didn't need to go stirring up trouble in high schools.  Classy like this...

Eleven Eleven Eleven

Though I never knew him, the story goes like this...  My Great Uncle Nils, the day after the United States entered the Great War, went to Sausalito and took the ferry to San Francisco (the Golden Gate Bridge did not exist at that time) where he enthusiastically enlisted in the Amry.  After basic training, he was shipped to France and was immediately sent marching to the front to counter the Ludendorff Offensive which had made huge advances toward Paris.  With little rest and probably still a bit seasick from the long ocean voyage, he went over-the-top and into the Argonne Forest.  Whether he was one of the famous "Last Battalion" I honestly don't know, but what I do know is that he was cut down by machine gun fire not long after the assault began.  He took a ride across the river Styx, departing in Northern California and reaching the other side in a wasteland called a forest.  He rests someplace here now...

Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery (France)

Has there ever been a war so terrible to have been a soldier in?  Only a few battles from other wars are comparable in their scale of brutality and certainty of death (e.g. Stalingrad, Gettysburg), unless you start to take into account civilian casualties and events such as the firestorms of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, the Battle of Berlin, Hiroshima, etc.  Whether you are talking about WW1's Eastern Front, Western Front, Gallipoli, or Isonzo, the casualty and death toll were horrifying.  There's no doubt in my mind that if it possible for any of the soldiers stuck in the thick of those battlefields to transfer through time to Okinawa, Tunisia, Khe Sanh, etc, and trade one version of Hell for a seemingly lesser, they would have done so.

I've sometimes felt that I've been reincarnated from a prior life that ended in those cryptic trenches.  I remember taking a train from Frankfurt to Paris and for whatever reason, the train had to stop somewhere on route.  Passengers were allowed to disembark temporarily and as I did I immediately recognized the tortured landscape around us.  I remarked to the people I was with, "Do you realize where we are?"  None did, though we stood in a giant killing field.  The trench lines were still recognizable.

Why do we take time to remember the mistakes of the past if we continue to repeat them?  God damn the people who have the power to prevent war, but let it happen anyway.

Ivy League Sex Education: Anal Sex, Jungle Fever, Online Hookups

Here in America, the old English system of perpetuating the division between "the classes and the masses" (Quigley, 1966) that the Brits have with Oxford and Cambridge can be found in the Ivy League--a group of prestigious and expensive universities that produce many presidents, senators, blue chip CEOs, and the like.  Harvard is arguably the most recognizable of these institutions which have a profound impact on the direction of higher education at large through influential publications (e.g. Harvard Business Review) and alumni, though intraconference pomp and rivalry are intense.  So it was that after Yale University introduced "Sex Week" in 2002, Harvard was quick to join the race and has taken Ivy League sex ed to a new level.

You can go to Harvard's class schedule to see the courses on offer.  I'm a straight guy, so I'm interested in taking Jungle Fever, Sex Ed 101 (because I honestly don't know what a "dental dam" is), and Online Hookup Culture so I can improve my "technique."  As an aging single, I can use all the help I can get with sexting and mobile dating apps.  Unfortunately, I don't live in the Boston area and Harvard has yet to put these courses online with edX.  If they did I might even go for a certificate program, but I'm afraid one of the required courses will be What What In The Butt.  I'm not a homosexual, but the course instructor says that's just due "repressive patriarchical conceptions of sex."

I'm sure I could successfully challenge the Losing Your Virginity course given all my undergraduate credits.   ...And I've yet to look into the award winning sex program at Yale, but since it is home to the elite secret society known as Skull & Bones where ex-members like George Bush (father and son) and John Kerry would lay naked in a coffin and reveal their darkest secrets, I suspect it's pretty good.  I'm not sure if "Boffin In A Coffin" is being offered, but past courses have included Fantasy Rape and Sex Geek Chic.  It's unclear what the career prospects are for students who go through these workshops, but like many college majors these days, it's really not so much about pulling six figure salaries as it is about personal development and becoming a better person.  An Ivy League education in "sexology" can help you accomplish that.

It remains to be seen if America's Ivy League can even begin to compete with the centuries old tradition of sex education that has been perfected by the British, but its a start.  I'm probably behind the curve, given that I only went to flagship public universities where we didn't have anything like Sex Week (nothing official anyway), but one of my alma maters now has "gender neutral" restrooms.  Last summer I visited the old campus and must say I found it quite liberating to expose myself to pee in a room with young ladies without fear of being arrested, though I'm not sure that's exactly what administration had in mind.  Overall, I think what Harvard is doing is a good thing, and it's important to remember that classes like What What In The Butt have something to offer heterosexuals too.