Phase Frame

Expanding on this.

One of my best friends from high school is a veteran of the 2nd Iraq war. The guy is puking 10x a day because of something that happened over there.

He’s a hard worker. He’s smart. Brilliant when it comes to practical matters.

The 9-5 job in the office just doesn’t work for him. Because of what happened to him when he was serving our country. And because of who he is. I can relate to the 2nd part. Not to the first.

Recently, I was able to hire him through my business. He gets to work from home. Set his own hours. He just gets evaluated on accomplishments and productivity. And he gets performance based rewards as well. I run my business the way I think capitalism should work: where the people who are truly productive stand to become truly wealthy.

The point is: our capitalistic system is too rigid and inhumane and unhealthy as it is. And it just plain doesn’t fit everyone out there. Not the least of which are some of the people who’ve served our country, wounded physically or mentally, and then been abandoned by our government.

Some people want to work. They want better lives. They just can’t or won’t capitulate to the overlords of extreme croney capitalism.

You look at the Drudge Report on a regular basis and you’ll get the impression that Americans don’t want to work.

I say the picture is more complex. That many Americans do a cost/benefit analysis and decide they’d rather live minimalist lives with ubiquitous digital stimulation and close local friends than spend their entire lives slaving away their hours for some big corporation.

I’m no liberal, but I have to speak the truth here: conservatives are misguided when they establish our current workaholic, chronically stressed and chronically inflamed society up as a holy standard. You think I want to live my life like all those zombies I see each morning leaving their homes at 5am in the morning and returning to their homes at 7pm in the evening. Stuck in traffic. Riding the subway with donuts and croissants and getting all of the energy for their day from a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee? You think I want to die an early death from stress and heart disease like Andrew Breitbart or Tim Russert?

Nah. Not everyone out there lives to climb the social ladder, or to accrue fame, or to even change the world. Some people live to live. And work to live. To laugh. To eat meals together. To play together. To go on adventures together.

Our society affords people the chance to opt out of the corporate/government prison, often a choice of the lesser of two evils.

Ideally, we’d see the death of dependence on the mega-corporation and the emergence of a generation of people who work for themselves (not to make corporate executives and stock holders rich). The healthiest place to be in life is that place where you set your own hours, your own priorities, you own goals. And then you reap the full rewards of your hard work. Instead most people keep only a fraction of the wealth they produce and hand the rest over to the mega corporations and the government.

So I, for one, as a libertarian, have no problem with the fact that some people are choosing to value the fullness of life and liberty over the corporate prison. Sure, there are plenty of lazy people out there, but it’s not a bad thing that we live in a society where people can opt out of the rat race.

Rule #1: When a society fails to reproduce the next generation, that society will crumble.

Case in point: you know your society’s shit has hit the fan when adult diapers outsell baby diapers.

As stated here I believe the gender-divide in politics comes down to women’s biological impulse to prefer a provider in Government (afterall, the government can’t really, despite Obama’s ad, give her good Alpha sex).

The Economist has a short piece that basically confirms my theory.

Barring a real and present threat, women will collectively gravitate towards the party that presents itself as the provider.

Pundits all over the country love acting smart. But when it comes to the gender divide, they are dead-wrong.

As human beings, we like to offer explanations (a rational act) for why things happen. We often project the rational part of the explanation onto the cause itself. So when explaining phenomenon (especially of the human variety), “experts” like to assume that the cause itself was rational.

The gender divide in politics has nothing to do with thought or reason. It has to do with raw, primitive emotion.

If our country was being attacked by China, the emotional response would be quite different. Automatic. No thought needed. But right now, our country feels pretty damn safe. And so that affords the two genders a chance to let their less survival-oriented emotions to take over.

Men don’t want Obama because they have trouble respecting him as a man. He often comes off as weak (physically) and pandering. Among men, he does not feel like a leader of men. The one place some men can respect Obama is that he’s a fairly smart guy. Calm and restrained. But in terms of the surface signals, he’s not the guy you’d want as your football coach or your tribal chief or your military commander.

Women want Obama because they feel like he’s going to be a better provider to them. He’s got a good smile. He’s friendly. He’s not hiding anything. They feel that he’s going to keep giving them what they want. In the absence of a security threat, women lean provider.

Romney is more of an alpha male. More of a protector. But women don’t completely trust Romney. They think he has hidden agendas.

If they were out in the forest alone, Obama would make the woman feel comfortable, like they were on a picnic together. Equals on an adventure (although it would be Obama providing the picnic lunch). And they could probably laugh together as the butterflies fly by. Obama is Mr. Magic.

Romney might make a woman feel on edge, and could be a threat. Out in the woods all alone, who knows… he might chop them up and dispose of their bodies. And yet, he’d also be the one more likely to figure out how to escape a bear attack. The thing is… the US has no current bear attacking it.

And so women lean provider over protector.

I’m not voting for either men, so I have no hidden agenda here. I’m just trying to give an accurate explanation of the gender divide.

The one place that I haven’t touched is pure attraction. Romney has good looks. And he has physical presence. Women like that. But Obama is the master of charm and sexual innuendo:

The Obama campaign isn’t stupid. They are very in touch with behavioral psychology. They are the most number oriented political machine of all time.

All those housewives that never got properly ravished… taken… they can experience it by voting for Obama. And then there’s Joe Biden up close. Don’t assume for a second that these things aren’t choreographed to elicit primitive responses.

This is comical. I find what the news company and this news reporter did far more offensive than what the man does. Sensationalizing a story, turning a practical joke into a case of “victimhood” – really? Seriously?

The real victim here is common sense (and their sense of humor).