The NSA is Helping the Terrorists Win... Not Me...

Here’s the thing:

Every time I hear someone say that stripping the NSA of its ill-begotten power to dragnet all the metadata for phone and internet records would “help the terrorists,” I point them to the definition of terrorism.  It reads as such:

ter·ror·ism  (tr-rzm)

n.

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

The purpose of terrorism, by its very intent, design, and nature is to get us to do something that they want us to do, by using force and violence to coerce that out of us. 

And what, pray tell, is it that they want us to do?

They want us to undermine the core tenants of western civilization, out of fear and a desire to protect ourselves from their actions.  They want the destruction of western civilization; a civilization based on individual rights and freedoms, so that they may replace it with a theocracy; a civilization based on collective subordination and subjugation to higher powers.

So which of the below two options “helps the terrorists” more:

1.      Maintaining our core values of individual sovereignty and freedom – those things that the terrorists have explicitly stated that they want to destroy - and continuing to disallow our government to spy on us and, by extension, subjugate us?

OR…

2.      Allowing the government to whittle away idea of individual sovereignty, privacy, and freedom – those core tenants of western society which the terrorists want abolished- by allowing them to spy on us in a collective hope that we might be a little safer if we only genuflect and subordinate a bit to that higher authority? 

Being FOR the NSA dragnet is what helps the terrorists, folks.  Being FOR the NSA dragnet brings us one step closer to them winning the war, because we are doing exactly what they are hoping that we’ll do – using our fear of their actions as an excuse to destroy western civilization, one brick at a time. They are playing us like chumps - pulling our strings like we're a bunch of unthinking marionettes, and like puppets, we're doing exactly what they want us to do - or, at least the NSA is.  

So to anyone that wants to explain to me why me being against the NSA dragnet is me “helping the terrorists”, I’m waiting for your rebuttal…

Brewster Pool - Sockeye Fishing

I went Sockeye Salmon fishing on Saturday, and ran into something that has me perplexed beyond words, almost…

The sockeye at Brewster Pool this year are frigging tiny.  The biggest I hauled in was 18”.  I didn’t see an over 20” fish caught all day Saturday. 

 Mini Sock in the box...

I’m searching the web for some insight as to why the socks are all midgets this year, but haven’t found anything yet.  It has to be ocean conditions leading to reduced food supply – that’s the only thing I can think.  It was a little surprising – I was expecting to bring a couple 3 or 4 pound socks home and ended up with a couple fish the size of a medium-sized rainbow, instead…  

 Combat fishing on the Columbia

Sundown Friday Night

Be Valuable...

Furthering my discussion the other day about how no one but your immediate family gives a shit about you, other than for what you can do or provide for them, is this post by JudgyBitch over at, well, JudgyBitch’s blog.

Essentially, she is making a pretty decent effort to lay bare the ingrained selfishness of a common Jezebel contributor in her discussion about relationships.  The advice given by the woman is not horrible, but it is filled with very selfish undertones, and that is what JudgyBitch is touching on in her post.

But that’s not what I’m talking about today, because I could give a shit about selfish feminists – in fact, I think the term is a bit redundant, because it seems to me like nearly all feminists are incurably selfish anymore, but that’s another topic for another day. 

What I’m talking about it the fact that JudgyBitch hits the high points of every point I tried to make in my rant about being valuable to others, and how that will lead to others valuing you and end up making you a much happier, much more content person. 

Look at her advice on how to make a relationship work:

spend some time thinking about what other people might value, and cultivate those things in yourself.

It isn’t really that difficult.  Your mate, on your first date, isn’t going to know or value you simply because you are “you.”  As I’ve established before, they don’t give a shit about you.  Not yet, anyway.  What it all boils down to is that like every single other person on Earth, they are evaluating your worth based on what you can do or provide for them.  Her advice, essentially, is to think hard about what it is that your date will desire from you, and then work hard to grow the parts of your person that will provide those things. 

Don’t think about it in terms of finding a mate for yourself – think of it in terms of making yourself a mate that others would want.  THEN worry about whether he or she will meet your needs. 

As with most things in life, if you voluntarily put others first, you’ll find that everything is much easier and more fulfilling, and that you’ll be putting yourself first in the process. 

First things first – nobody likes a mopey, emo, “forever alone” type, so stop whining and get out there and start making yourself better.  

Conclusively Settled...

This XKCD comic made me laugh:

 

 But it did more than that, also.  It reinforced something that I’ve felt for years but never really had a good way to put it without flaming a bunch of people on.  It goes a little something like this:

Bigfoot does not exist. 

I know, right?  Pretty certain words for something so controversial.

It just can’t be.  PEOPLE get hit by cars all the time.  Are you seriously suggesting that Bigfoot has somehow figured out better than the most intelligent hominid out there, how not to get run over when crossing a highway for nearly 120 years now?  How about game cameras?  I see them out in the forest constantly.  They are less than $100, to get a motion activated, night vision, infrared, high definition camera trap.  Hunters put them everywhere.  No bigfoot pics?  Not one? 

How about bones?  Teeth? 

We have more bones and teeth from a giant hominid called Gigantopithecus, that died out 50,000 years ago, than we do from one that supposedly still walks the earth. 

How about the fact that other than humans, no other primate lives outside the tropics? 

How about the fact that no primate hibernates, but to live in temperate and sub-artic forests,  a large omnivore like bigfoot supposedly is would almost certainly need to hibernate through the winter? 

Or that very elusive, very rare creatures live amongst us as we speak, but we still totally know they are there?  Like, for instance, the wolverines of Washington State, or the forest caribou of northern Idaho? 

Or, as this  XKCD comic points out, the fact that we all have cameras on us all the time now?  

Offended by the Tide

I’ve recently had the displeasure of reading another angry, exquisitely violent rant from another angry woman marinated in the toxic spew of feminism 2.0. 

In summary, it is a woman’s response to another article, posted here, from a man who claims to be a feminist, who is ashamed to admit that (shocker!) he still likes to look at beautiful women, and is aroused by the sight of them. 

Holy fucking fuck, Batman!

She goes off on a long, angry, violent rant about how she’d like to physically assault and torture this man for being so obtuse as to admit the truth – that men, horrifyingly enough, are attracted to beautiful women. 

I will leave it to Judgy Bitch to disassemble the hypocrisy of a person who spends as much time decrying violence against women as the author does, who then turns around and promotes really horrible amounts of violence towards men for something so petty as them liking to look at beautiful women.  JB does a good job dissecting a world view where one-way violence is acceptable to the likes of these angry modern feminists, and concludes, as I have numerous times, that feminism 2.0 isn’t about equality; it’s about superiority.

The modern iteration of feminism, which I call feminism 2.0, is a supremacist movement, desiring a world where women have all the power and privilege, and men have all the responsibility to ensure that women’s every need and desire is met.  But I’ll leave Judgy Bitch to talk about that. 

The concept that she wrote about in her article that I want to discuss is the part where she is shocked that millennia of evolutionary forcing for men to find the most fertile, healthy women to bear their children has lead men to use visual cues to find those women who are most attractive and therefore desirable.  It is no coincidence that the things that men find most attractive in women; large breasts, physical fitness, and a good hip to waist ratio, are also the best way to determine a woman’s fertility and fitness to be a mother. 

I liken this to someone being shocked and offended that the tide came in despite their wishing very hard that it wouldn’t, because the similarities in being appalled or surprised by either phenomenon are amusingly similar.

You may as well stand in opposition to the tides, as King Knute tried to do so many centuries ago, than try to stop eons of biological  conditioning in men to favor beautiful women. This isn’t a choice for men to do this – we do it even if, like the author of the target article, we consciously try to stop it.  It is in our biological hard wiring.  It is part of our lizard brain.  We can’t control it any more than we can control our heartbeat or our need to sleep.  She is angered by that, and refuses to understand that she is not trying to undo some socially-created patriarchal institution – she is trying to unravel the basic fabric of human biology; the very things that are necessary for our species to continue to exist!

If it weren’t for men “objectifying” women, as she spins it, our species would have failed to exist eons ago.  She’d better thank her lucky stars that her father once “objectified” her mother, or else she would never have been born. 

She rather reminds me of a more earnest, less intelligent, and less ironic King Knute, raging against the incoming tide; telling it how she would rather it didn’t wax twice a day, and how its failure to bend to her will on how things should be is offending her; angering her; filling her with so much rage that it is making her violent.

At least King Knute wasn’t seriously of the opinion that he could influence the tides, and was merely pretending to try to do so in order to make a point about the power of men.  This woman seriously thinks that she can. 

The part I don’t get is why she would want to???

Why would any woman want to stop men from admiring beautiful women?  From desiring them?  From, as she puts it, “objectifying” them? 

If I found out that everywhere I went, people were looking at me with desire, undressing me with their eyes, and desiring to be with me, I would not be angry at all - I would be flattered.  It is our biological imperative to be desired; to be sexual in nature, and to have other people want you sexually.  It’s how our species has continued to exist despite countless pressures otherwise.  

So why is this woman so pissed? 

And so it comes down to it, in the end, to the same thing that most of these angry, violent rants from feminism 2.0 boil down to:

Sour grapes. 

Yup, its no coincidence that feminists tend to be ugly as fuck.  Not physically ugly, necessarily, but ugly in a way that seeps through her physical façade.  Though she’d never, ever admit it, secretly, deep down in her lizard brain, she isn’t mad because men are undressing her with their eyes, or wanting her sexually – and why would they?  She’s walking around with a perpetual grouch on – always angry, and always showing that to the people around her.  She’s mad because they are doing those things to other women and not her.  Because they won’t bend to her will, and cater to her needs, she thinks men are all pigs: obsessed with beauty and physical fitness, and ignorant of the things that make a woman truly beautiful, like being an angry, violent, supremacist harpy shrew, like her, and she just can’t understand why she isn’t appealing to men.

She can’t get a man, and since she is a perfect little fucking princess who deserves to have an obedient, beaten-down Prince Charming cater to her every whim, she’s pissed.  Since modern society, and feminism 2.0 in particular, has made sure that a person’s problems can never be their own fault, she’s looking for someone to blame, and who better to blame than a man who admits his true desire for a woman who cares enough to be beautiful?

We don’t want to be with ugly, shrieking harpies who would break our fingers with a hammer if we don’t please her, and that pisses her off. 

Here it is in a nutshell – men care about physical beauty.  It isn’t everything, by a long shot, but it is a sign that the woman possessing it cares enough about your needs and your desires that she’ll work to fulfill them.  We are visual creatures.  That’s why men look at porn, while women read it.  We see women that are beautiful and desire them because beauty is a good indicator that she cares, and a woman caring is important to us.  Newsflash, sweetheart – we don’t want to be beaten-down Prince Charmings.  We want to be self-determinate individuals who have a right to search for self-actualization and happiness that doesn’t revolve around pleasing you.  We want a relationship where we get back what we put into it – when we do nice things for you, we’d like to have you do nice things for us in return.  I know that this is shocking, and I know that your first reaction to this is going to be “PATRIARCHY!!!1eleventy!” but hear me out – I know what I’m talking about.

And here’s the most important part – we won’t, all of us, necessarily give up on a woman because she isn’t physically beautiful, but if you aren’t, try being nice, for fuck’s sake.  It will go a long way to your being desired instead of avoided like the plague, and then you won’t have to be so damned angry all the time.