Johnny Buffalo McInnes

It’s easy to be arrogant about parenting before you become a parent. Here are some insane beliefs I had about parenting before I tried it.

1. I’LL NEVER WEAR A BABY BACKPACK
I was so sure I would never wear one of those ridiculous baby holders that go on your chest, I bet another dad $100 that those straps would never touch my shoulders. “A baby only weighs 15 pounds,” I’d say to the beta males strapped to the BabyBjorns. “You can’t carry 15 pounds?”

No, you can’t. Not when the 15 pounds has a wobbly head with no neck muscles and you need both arms to keep him from flopping over. Not when this 15 pounds wants you to hold him all day. After trying the Bjorn, I felt like a war vet who magically got his arms back, and I happily paid that guy the $100 I owed him.

2. THEY’RE TAKING PIANO LESSONS AND IF THEY DON’T LIKE IT, TOO BAD
We tried piano lessons. They were really expensive and the kids hated them and sucked at them. The same thing happened with ballet and gymnastics. Trying to force them to do things they don’t like is as implausible as that gay Mormon dude who married a woman because he said his sexual preference is like smoking and you’re able to quit.

3. I WILL MAKE THEM FINISH EVERY MEAL
You think you can make a kid eat something he doesn’t want to eat? Go feed a cheeseburger to a salamander. He doesn’t even want to crawl on it. It’s too dry. The first time I forced my kid to eat something, she barfed and I haven’t done it since. If making your kids throw up is good parenting, I’m a bad parent.

4. I’M GOING TO BE VERY ATTENTIVE
I was very attentive at first. Time-outs were doled out after every fight and if they didn’t say sorry to each other, they went back in the corner. But after 347 fights you start to think, “You know what? You’re on your own.” Sometimes you might even catch yourself thinking, “Go ahead and beat the shit out of each other for all I care. You might learn something.”

5. WE’RE GOING TO HOME-SCHOOL THEM
Kids in public school spend something like 30 minutes a day actually learning. At private school it’s probably three times that. I have an hour and a half of spare time a day to spend talking about history, so why not pull the kids out of school? Well, for one, they’re already in my house way more often than I can handle. By contrast, sometimes I feel like going to work where I deal with getting sued, licking clients’ asses, and where firing people is some kind of party. What kind of maniac thinks 100% of their waking moments are about the right amount of time to spend with your kids? When I told a home-schooling parent that my kids go to public school, she said, “The only thing they’ll learn there is how to fight.”

Good.

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6. WE WON’T LET THEM WATCH TV
Pushing the “on” button on the TV is like pushing the “off” button on your kids. They just sit there like zombies. If you worked in a zoo and the howler monkeys had a magic button that shut them off, how could you resist pushing it? You love the monkeys and you think they’re cute, but when they’re really going bananas and you have to make an important phone call, that button becomes as irresistible as the “Get me a drink” button they have on airplanes.

7. NO LOGOS ON THE TABLE
Eating dinner with the family is a very important ritual that should not be sullied by corny logos on milk cartons and juice containers. So all beverages will be served from jugs and the butter will be unwrapped and placed in a small glass dish. The problem is that getting children to sit at a table and eat anything takes up more than all of your energy, so defining the design aesthetic for what’s actually on the table is about as high on your priority list as what underwear you’re going to wear.

8. I’M STILL GOING TO PARTY
After my first child was born, I continued to have parties at the house. My wife and I would wake up at 6AM the next day wondering what the hell we were thinking and then forget about it six months later and throw another party. One night during a break-dancing competition, a beer smashed on the kitchen floor. I thought I cleaned up all the shards, but my crawling infant daughter found one with her hand the next day. Since then, the only parties we have here involve piñatas and cake and “Happy Birthday” sung by very short people who don’t know the words.

9. I’M STILL GOING TO SMOKE POT
We stopped having people over, but what’s the matter with a small joint after the kids go to bed? It might make all these terrible TV shows kind of interesting. This seems like a fairly safe idea until you try it. You’re on call 24 hours a day when you have kids, and that means it’s fairly negligent to get yourself into a state of mind where you were worried about satellites but then you forgot and now you keep saying, “Wait, what was I talking about?”

10. NO PRINCESS OR SUPERHERO SHIT
I’m Canadian and I grew up with old French cartoons such as Barbapapa, so my kids should do the same. They don’t need all the corporate crap and merchandising that Disney shoves down their throats. Then I took the kids to see Toy Story and my son’s head blew off. Soon after, I got him Woody and the guy who was on that giant screen was now his best friend. To deny him this fun would make me feel like the guy who made Beethoven deaf.

Same goes for my daughter. I avoided all the princess stuff until she went to her friend Cassidy’s house and saw a huge trunk full of princess dresses. She convinced me to buy her a pile of princess costumes of her own, and I haven’t seen her since. I think she’s in her room.

Unite the Beards is a new and remarkably naïve organization that wants to bring hipsters and Hasidic Jews together. They’re based here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the Hasidic community has made it very clear they hate hipsters way more than everybody else does. Before moving to this area 13 years ago, I lived in Montreal, which is also lousy with Hasidim. I have a place upstate, too, which is probably #3 as far as densest Hasidic populations go.

After a good 25 years of being surrounded by them, I still don’t know the first thing about them. This is primarily because they’ve decided isolationism is the key to cultural preservation.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand I think, “Fuck you for not wanting to hang out,” but on the other hand, you have to admire a culture that can remain virtually untouched for over 300 years. It’s like Quebec. You hate them for enforcing their draconian language laws, but you admire them for resisting the Disneyfication of North America. People are baffled by the French Canadian accent, but it’s how most rural French people spoke hundreds of years ago.

I can’t tell you what Hasidic Jews are like or even if I like them, but I can tell you what it’s like to be around them. Here are 10 things I’ve noticed over the past quarter-century.

1. THEY HATE HIPSTERS
Orthodox landlords have begun renting to hipsters because it pays, but the Hasidim are pissed. They see this as an invasion and in a sense, they’re right. The Amish do well with Rumspringa because it’s not on their turf and it’s only two years. If you had chicks who dress like they’re in a ZZ Top video living in an Amish community, Rumspringa would quickly become a permanent RumSCHWINGa and the Amish would be done.

2. NO, THEY REALLY HATE HIPSTERS
The Great Bike Lanes War of Williamsburg has been raging since at least 2009. Hot girls on bikes ride through Hasidic communities flaunting their blasphemously saucy legs and ungodly cleavage. The Hasidim retaliated by painting over the bike lanes and the hipsters fought back by painting them on again. The Hasidim got the city involved and the hipsters fought back by having a topless bicycle parade. When Mayor Bloomberg told the Hasidim to get with the program, they pointed out that it’s almost election time and they hold a huge sway over who gets elected. The bike lanes were gone the next day.

That doesn’t mean the beef isn’t still on. Just last week a female friend sent me this video of a van full of Hasidim attacking a cyclist for riding through their neighborhood.

We didn’t have this kind of conflict in Montreal. Up there the Hasidim just make the most delicious bagels in the universe and leave everybody alone. Maybe women in New York are just sexier?

3. THEY CAN’T TOUCH WOMEN
I’m not bananas about menstrual blood, but my experience has been that most women wash their hands after inserting a tampon. If a woman wants to give a Hasidic guy change at his photography store, she has to kind of lob it at his hand. This isn’t usually a problem because Hasidim have developed almost freakishly good catching skills.

One of the more amusing side effects of this rule is when newbies accidentally touch them. I’ve seen girls pull back their arm and apologize before realizing, “Wait, why am I apologizing for violating your stupid rule?”

On the less amusing side, we have their total incompatibility with the modern world. While working at a high-tech firm’s marketing department, a colleague of mine and his female coworker were asked to conduct a job interview with a Hasid. Now, I don’t know if you’ve been out there in the real world but the vast majority of clients accepting your bids are women. Sure, the top brass is male but they don’t sully themselves with the day-to-day. I’m told we live in a patriarchy but all me and my peers see are cougars and if we don’t make them happy, we’re out of a job (yes, that has included sex).

Anyhoo, during the interview the female coworker puts out her hand and the Hasid yanks it back while apologizing for this ancient law. They continued with the interview knowing there is no way in Hades they could hire this guy. How are you supposed to schmooze a nation of cougars when you can’t even shake their hands? Of course, they couldn’t say any of this so they made up some excuse not to hire him and vowed to never tell a soul about this, except me, years later, anonymously.

4. THEY CAN’T TOUCH WHORES?
I wouldn’t believe this if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. When I first moved to Williamsburg, it was known more for crackheads than hipsters and I could see the most disgusting whores I’d ever seen from my office window. They didn’t even try. They’d have on one Ugg boot and a slipper and a sideways baseball hat that had puke on it and they’d write odes to state-confiscated children in our hallway that said, “Mami misses you my angels. Come home soon.”

Usually, the only people desperate enough to do business with these Ladies of the Day were truckers finishing a 40-hour drive and Hasidic Jews. The latter group would pull up in a minivan and the junkie hobgoblin would topple in to perform blowjobs half a block away. Ew.

I asked an Orthodox Jewess what this was all about and she said some of them don’t see goyim as human so it was about as sinful as using a blow-up doll. I still don’t get how that doesn’t constitute touching. Maybe if women wore condoms on their hands, they could do more business in the Hasidic community?

5. THEY MIGHT POSSIBLY HAVE A MINOR PROBLEM WITH INBREEDING
I know a guy who works at Mount Sinai and he told me the genetics-treatment center contains a wildly disproportionate number of Hasidic Jews. In fact, they have their own Genetics Disease Center. This may have to do with marrying close to one’s family. Or it may not. You know what? I’m just going to drop this and move on.

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6. THEY TAKE STUFF OUT OF YOUR SHOPPING CART
I’ve heard the upper-class Hasidim resent the ones in my neighborhood and see them as trash. I’ve also heard the ones in Brooklyn turn their noses up at the ones upstate where I also live. They do seem weirder in the country. Such a formal style of dress and such a rigid culture don’t seem compatible with nature. A bear even ate one of them. The locals don’t seem particularly fond of them, either, and I’m told it’s because the Hasidic community doesn’t pay their fair share of tax. Residents of upstate New York are big on “What can the state do for me?” which doesn’t jibe with organized religion though it does jibe heavily with my libertarian beliefs, so I’m going to call this more wonderful than weird.

The Home Depot in Monticello, NY is always packed with Hasidim and one of them went up to a female friend of mine, took something out of her shopping cart, and put it in his. When she said, “Oh, hell no” and put it back in hers, he looked like he just heard a ghost say, “Oh, hell no” and then saw the object float from his cart back into an abandoned one.

7. HERPES IS A THING
There have been stories of Hasidic women getting herpes from the prostitutes their husbands frequent—AAAWKWAARD. This trend becomes disturbing when babies are involved.

Brit milah is a Jewish circumcision practice that involves a mohel putting his mouth over the baby’s bleeding penis afterward and sucking the blood. I have heard a lot of pedophile jokes about Catholic priests, but this ripe arena for comedy remains untouched (except for one episode of Freak Show written by two hilarious Jews, David Cross and Jon Benjamin). If the mohel has herpes, he’s likely to give it to the baby and since 2000 this has happened more than a dozen times, including one baby who died from it. Health chiefs in New York are now pushing to have the mohel use a tube to avoid spreading the STD, but there’s no word on how well that’s going. It’s not really my place to say, but I vote they let this practice go along with this dance. Also, try bacon. It will blow your mind. And finally, if your main thing is to increase the Jewish population, maybe get some slightly sexier costumes for the ladies. At least Arab Muslims have that thing where she takes off her burqa when she gets home and puts on Louis Vuitton.

8. THEY’RE NOT CHEAP
I’m a little biased in this area because I’m Scottish and nobody can hold a candle to us. I like doing business with Hasidim because they’re inexpensive and frugal, but it takes some real heart to earn the word “cheap.” I will happily spend $5,000 harassing someone until they pay me the $5,001 I’m owed, but Hasidic Jews would rather just cut their losses and move on. Every time I negotiate with them I see their eyes bulge when I spend way more than $15 of our time arguing about $15. I can tell they’re thinking, “This nigga is on some next-level shit.”

9. ONE OF THEM IS NAMED LEMON JUICE
There was an infuriating case in the news last year where a Hasidic counselor was convicted of 59 counts of sexual abuse. Fellow Hasidim harassed his victims and took pictures of a 17-year-old girl he had forced to reenact sex acts. When confronted with charges of obstructing justice, one of his supporters said, “Even if it’s true, he shouldn’t go to jail. A Jew doesn’t belong in jail.”

It would be unfair to say the rest of the Hasidic community didn’t despise this guy and rejoice when he was sentenced to 103 years. There’s an entire website devoted to hating him and it was created by a member of his family. However, one of the guys harassing the victims is named Lemon Juice and I haven’t heard anyone criticize that.

10. THEIR E.M.T. GUYS ARE BASICALLY TONY SOPRANO
If you go to the ER in New York, you’ll see Hasidic Jews have their own EMT guys who wear yarmulkes and have vests with Hebrew letters on them. They’re called Hatzalah and like the Hasidic police force Shomrim, they are volunteers whose job is primarily helping Jewish communities.

Unfortunately, the “primarily” can often drift into “exclusively” territory. I was talking to an EMT on a shoot recently and he told me about a car accident where a guy from Africa was mangled beyond belief and the Hasidic Jew in the next car may have possibly hurt his neck. Hasidim are not known for their driving skills and I think it’s because they trust God a little too much. In the book Unorthodox, ex-Hasid Deborah Feldman describes a life-threatening car accident she endured because her husband refused to get new tires based on the belief that God would protect them. It’s quite possible this attitude led to the collision with the African.

So when my EMT pal shows up, he realized he was going to need help getting the black guy out of the car. He asks the Hatzalah to assist, but they refuse and focus all their attention on their comrade. When the cops show up, a rookie demands they help and after getting refused, he vows to make them pay. It’s illegal for a civilian to refuse to help a cop. These guys were registered emergency responders. According to the EMT I spoke to, the cop wouldn’t let it go and kept demanding these volunteers be punished for breaking the law. The cop was eventually rewarded with a brutal night shift in the middle of nowhere. The understanding from both the EMT and the cop was that Hatzalah are so well-connected, criticizing them will ruin your career. I asked him if I could use his real name in this story and he told me I shouldn’t even tell it. I told him it was too late.

The author in 1975

I’m a middle-class child of immigrants. I’m told we were poor when my parents emigrated from Scotland to Canada in the 70s, but I don’t remember any of that. All I remember is a bucolic childhood where I was never in want for anything I needed.

Everything I wanted, however, was another matter entirely. You see, like most middle-class children of immigrants, my parents were born and raised working class. That means they were never quite comfortable in the new world they created for themselves. It also meant problems. I didn’t have the kind of problems they had. I didn’t have to fight every day in Glasgow’s slums like my father did, and I didn’t have to make my own meals at 13 because my single parent was on vacation again, as was the case with my mother. That doesn’t mean my problems weren’t problems, though.

For example, you’re not allowed to use the front door. Unless the president is coming for dinner, everyone has to walk around to the back and take off his or her shoes there. There’s also a fancy living room nobody sits in unless front-door guests arrive, which is basically never. Here are ten more problems they created for me.

1. FOOD
Scottish people are cheap. Boomers who grew up with parents from the Great Depression are stingy. Immigrants are frugal. Put them all together and you might as well have a tattoo on your face that says, “Take care of the pennies and the pounds take care of themselves!” But you can’t get a tattoo because Scottish immigrants still think it’s the 1950s when tattooed people were uneducated and doomed to a life working on the docks.

Despite the low price of food, the meals my mother made looked like a dietitian put them together for someone dying of obesity. You’d get a third of a potato, a slice of meat, maybe a few leaves of spinach, and that’s it. My brother and I coped by pigging out on apples and ice cream for dessert and then making a ginormous bowl of popcorn. But my parents were also hungry after dinner and they’d loom over us like vultures. My father has a degree in physics and was able to somehow fit 80% of the bowl’s contents into one handful. As he pulled his hand out and balanced this Dr. Seuss-like tower of popcorn away from us, my stomach would growl, “You bastard.”

2. FACE CLOTHS
Automatic dishwashers often use less water than doing the dishes by hand, unless your parents are Scottish immigrants, in which case the same Tupperware container of tepid water will do you just fine for several days. The washcloth that sat in this disgusting mess smelled like rotten garbage because it was. When my mother would wipe my face with this thing, it was like getting a facial with a used diaper. I could smell the thin layer of fermenting food for hours afterward. I still can. Today, when my kids have dirty faces, I take a silk handkerchief from the linen chest and wipe them with scented orange soap dipped in rose petals.

3. BATHS
Immigrants don’t have showers. Why let all that money go down the drain? Instead, they have baths and who goes first is based on the family hierarchy. That meant my brother and I were last, and getting clean consisted of lying in a lukewarm tub of dead skin and old pubes.

4. BEDTIME
I used to love going to bed because it meant I could stop going through my times tables. 8 x 7 is 56, but if you didn’t say it fast enough you had to do a dozen more including that dreaded 13 x 13, which I had to work out aloud every night. “OK, first I’m going 13 x 10,” I’d say nervously, “and now I’m adding 13 three times,” to which my father would reply, “No you’re no. That’s bloody ridiculous. You know 12 x 12 is 144, so just blah blah blah,” then my mind would start dreaming of my sheets which I no longer cared were not the Star Wars kind.

5. TOYS
I think my mom might have had a doll when she was growing up but all my dad had were these short cylindrical wood blocks his father used at the printing press to keep the newspaper rolls in place. He didn’t even know they weren’t toys until he invited a friend to play with his cool toys and his friend said, “These aren’t toys!”

When I would ask them for the awesome action figures I saw on commercials, it was like I was asking to have a chandelier installed in my room. Going to a friend’s house and seeing all his incredible Star Wars stuff was like visiting FAO Schwarz on “Everything is Free” day. Not only did they have all the figures, they had Millennium Falcons and Death Stars in which to put them. I was in awe.

They even thought the Six Million Dollar Man doll was too expensive but after a year of begging, I got his boss for Christmas. That’s right, his BOSS. Oscar Goldman was the guy who gave Steve Austin his assignments and he came with a desk and a cardboard façade of an office. Oscar also had an exploding briefcase but that came separately so I didn’t get it.

I recently asked my mother if I ended up with Goldman because it was near Christmas and all the Six Million Dollar Men were sold out or was it because he was cheaper and she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

6. CLOTHING
Because my parents came from a world where you were either working class or upper class, they were very strict about clothing. In their mind, my brother and I were one jean jacket away from a life in the gutter. I drooled when I saw Dale Aiken’s Iron Maiden baseball hat and Donny Hickling’s Def Leppard shirt. In my teens, this lust exploded and I got into punk rock just to spite my parents. I wasn’t allowed to wear my Sex Pistols shirt to school, so I stored my punk clothes in a plastic bag in the hedges by the bus stop and would do an impromptu wardrobe change there every morning before school.

7. SLEEPING
In the daytime, my dad has an affected posh Scottish accent that sounds like Sean Connery. Things are very different at night. He talks in his sleep and his mind goes back to Glasgow’s violent slums, where his accent sounds like a cross between Groundskeeper Willie and Beelzebub. Waking him during this time is suicide as I learned in 1979 when I flashed the side table light in his face because I wanted to watch TV. (For some reason the family TV was in the bedroom, not in the living room.) In his dream, he thought going toward the light was death and someone was trying to kill him, so before I knew what was happening, a naked man had leapt out of bed, put me in a chokehold, and smashed the lamp against the wall. Uh, take it easy, guy. I’m just trying to watch CHiPS.

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8. BED
Immigrants in the 70s may have grown up poor, but immigration was based on merit back then and if they had the tenacity to take advantage of this, they were destined to cash in on the boom. Instead of enjoying the extra surge of cash, many of them said, “This paycheck is way more than we need. Let’s take out the most intense mortgage ever taken out,” and it was back to a life of poverty. When my dad paid off one mortgage, he bought more property and they didn’t cash in until right after I moved out at 18. Thanks, guys.

If it was a necessity, however, no expenses were spared. When I was a teenager, I convinced them a waterbed was orthopedic and a great investment and after growing up sleeping in a bed with his two brothers, my dad figured getting me one was the fatherly thing to do. I didn’t want to set up the bed in my room like I was told to because I was punk and it seemed too bourgeois, so I set it up in our basement which was unfinished and looked like a squat. That’s a way more punk-rock place to put your waterbed when you’re living in the suburbs. I also didn’t use the instructions, and my dad is fanatical about instructions. When I heard him storming down the stairs after work that day holding the instructions, I knew I was in big trouble. As I saw him marching toward me, I put the whole thing into overdrive by smirking and saying, “Can you believe this thing didn’t come with instructions?” He grabbed me by the collar and threw me toward the unfinished wood bed frame. As I soared through the air, I remember time moving slowly and thinking to myself, “Oh, apparently you can’t fuck people over when they’re good to you,” and then BANG my frame crumpled into the bed frame.

There were a few of these incidents. When I was arrested for drunk driving, he didn’t speak to me for a year. One time when I was three hours late for a vacation, he lifted me up by the throat and walked me back in the house. There were no beatings like when my dad was a kid, but we never had any mammy-pamsy “grounding” or “removing of Internet privileges,” either.

9. FANCY RESTAURANTS
The best part of having immigrant parents is the work ethic they instill. I was never without a job including the four years I was in college and have since had a very lucrative career as an entrepreneur. Daddy could have afforded to pay my rent after I moved out, but asking him would have been as absurd as me asking you. He’d assume I had a head injury or something.

I consider their discipline a big part of my wealth so I like to reciprocate. For the 2000 New Year’s Eve festivities I invited them to a vacation house I have in Costa Rica, and every time I spent money, they recoiled in horror. That’s the way it is with these people. They think spending money is gross. One night, as we had a very expensive meal at a fancy restaurant overlooking the ocean in Montezuma, my dad was talking about how delicious the food was. When I told him how much it cost (big mistake), it instantly turned to shit and he let it topple out of his mouth.

They refused to eat there again even though it was on me. When I asked them why, they said it was “pretentious,” which is immigrant for “expensive.”

10. CARS
One night I was arguing with my dad about advertising. I’ve made good money in the business, but I’m not convinced advertising actually works. He disagreed and said he’d always wanted a Jaguar and that’s because the ads had been rammed down his throat since he was a kid. I bought him a Jaguar soon after that and got hugs and tears from mom and the “You’re a good boy” I was going for. It was my way of wiping the slate clean with them. Although I would have preferred at least one Star Wars Stormtrooper doll, I’m very happy with the childhood they provided my brother and me. After the effusive thank-yous, my parents bought a much cheaper car and today the Jag is sitting safely tucked away in the garage where they don’t have to worry about it getting scratched. It’s fun to drive, but let’s not mince words: It’s pretentious.

They haven’t changed since Glasgow and they don’t want to. That’s not why people immigrated here in the 70s. They came here so they could work their asses off building a nest egg and have kids who didn’t think wealth was pretentious. This seems like a pretty good system to me. Why did we change it?

Rush Limbaugh and Elton John

On Tuesday, French iconoclast Dominique Venner blew his head off inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame to protest gay marriage. Venner is a hero who fought in the Algerian War as a teenager and ransacked the French Communist Party’s office when he was 21. Like the face of the anarchist movement Guy Fawkes, Venner is a martyr who died defending Catholicism.

As a reformed atheist who recently rediscovered his Catholic roots, I’m inclined to agree with Venner. Unfortunately, marriage died long before homosexuals got involved. Divorce is what killed it.

When gay marriage first began to take over all political discourse I called bullshit because I could tell they were using it as a venue to showcase their rights and they didn’t really want to get married. When pressed for reasons why such a polygamous demographic with so few kids would want to get married, they brought up bizarre scenarios such as a lesbian who wasn’t allowed to visit her sick girlfriend once and some bullshit about health benefits.

As usual, the libertarians seemed to be the only sane ones in the fight. They kept calm and asked: If two consenting adults are in love, why shouldn’t they be allowed to get married? Venner’s response would be, “Marriage is the union between a man and a woman for procreation. If we remove the difference of sex and procreation, nothing remains except love, which can evaporate.” Few stood behind Venner’s definition because they lack the conviction to stick around when the going gets tough in their own lives. Gay marriage wins because straight marriage loses and straight marriage loses because the Me Generation ruined it.

Glenn Beck was against gay marriage but recently came around and said he approved of it in “principle.” Bill O’Reilly says he thinks there is a “compelling argument” for gay marriage and calls the opponents “Bible thumpers.” Rush Limbaugh took umbrage with that quote but admits the debate is already over and the gays have won.

They won me over, too, and it was because of wimps such as Glenn and Bill and Rush. My peers are the children of divorce and I’ve seen it permanently scar almost all of them. Both Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly have been divorced. Rush Limbaugh has done it three times. You can’t be sanctimonious about marriage when you’re on your fourth. You can’t keep quitting your job while lecturing us about how important jobs are.

A few generations ago, there was no concept of “self.” You went to work and busted your ass so your kids (the baby boomers) could have the education you never had. Today, those kids are in their 60s, and the few that are grandparents don’t like being called that because it makes them feel old. They make up alternative titles for themselves like “Baba” and “Zubi.” (My friend Sid fought back by insisting his kids refer to grandma as GRANDzubi.)

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I heard that when a plant is about to die, it may use its last burst of energy to produce more seeds. The same has been said about animals in danger. They tend to produce more female offspring as a desperate attempt to continue the species. This is what we have been forced to do with marriage. That means yes polygamists, we need you too. You shouldn’t be allowed to marry anyone under 18 but there is nothing in the argument for gay marriage that cannot be equally applied to polygamists. For all the politicians and pundits telling us how sacred marriage is, it’s not easy finding one who hasn’t flushed it down the toilet at least once. Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan are the only two I can think of right now.

American Indians are very touchy about their culture and are turned off by white sycophants who want to get involved. My wife’s tribe is down to about 3,000 people, but my argument is that beggars can’t be choosers. Let whites come to powwows and take all the pictures they want. Let them learn the language. If a culture is in danger of becoming extinct, lower the bar on membership. We live in a culture where divorce is all but applauded, so we should make it easier to get married. Boomer selfishness damaged marriage beyond repair and if someone wants to come in and breathe some life into it, then by all means, breathe.

Here in New York, comedian Louis CK is a God. He divorced his wife when his youngest kid was three years old, but he still jokes onstage about how awesome divorce is and what a great dad he is now that he has half the week to himself. That’s not a great dad. That’s a half a dad. Why did he have a kid if he only had three years of marriage left in him? When you get divorced, you’re telling your kids that the love that created them was a myth. The media empowers single moms, and while children of divorce will tell you it’s no big deal, that’s not what I see. As I scroll through the contacts on my phone, I see almost nothing but children of divorce who will die childless. I can only find about five friends from college and high school who have families. The rest don’t want anything to do with it. In that sense, the baby boomers’ flippant attitude toward marriage has led to a kind of invisible genocide.

People don’t want to criticize divorce in America because they’ve either done it, are about to do it, or love a parent who did it. Today a man can marry a woman, knock her up, and leave a couple years later citing excuses like, “I wasn’t happy” or “We fell out of love.” Ann Coulter describes this as a form of child abuse. Who has time for emotions when they’re raising children? I have three kids right now and barely have time to brush my teeth. Having kids is like moving to China. You can’t go, “Ew, it’s way too Chinese here” and move back when winter hits. You have to dig in your heels, learn the language, and make it work.

As Michael Moore so aptly pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, the root of the American dilemma lies deep within the American psyche. We are a machismo-addled culture where bullies are rewarded and “wimps” get sand in the face. We live in an age of school shootings, rape, and ceaseless war. You can keep throwing the petty thieves in jail and try to impeach the big boys, but until you get to the source of what makes a guy a guy, you won’t stand a chance against the patriarchy.

This is what’s so wonderful about the war on boys. Teachers (who are roughly 75% female) have bolstered girls’ grades in England by including bad behavior in test scores. Where Sally may fail at math, Johnny gets an F in “sitting still,” and the bell curve evens out. When I was a kid, bad behavior was rewarded with a trip to the principal. Worse behavior got a suspension. Really, really bad behavior got a visit from the police, who scared the crap out of you. Today, we call the police for all infractions and everything is written down. This is effective because the government can keep tabs on who is a bad boy and ensure he is monitored for life. If we had this kind of system back when most school shooters were young, we never would have had school shootings.

The fight against bullying is a great way to eradicate masculinity,  but that’s only the beginning. The evil males of tomorrow can be difficult to spot today. It may seem subtle to a layman laywoman, but boys commit their acts of patriarchal violence almost from birth. Last year, first grader D’Avonte Meadows was so sure he was sexy that he sexually harassed his teacher by saying, “I’m sexy and I know it.” Luckily, his (presumably) strong womyn teachers saw where this mindset was going and suspended him immediately. This all went down as Colorado was finally considering a zero-tolerance policy toward steel penises (guns) more than ten years after Columbine. In January of this year, another first-grader, Rodney Lynch, was suspended for making a gun gesture with his finger. Unfortunately, the school chickened out in the face of patriarchal outrage and removed the charge from his permanent record. Two months later, a seven-year-old worked tirelessly through lunch, biting and chomping his Pop-Tart until it resembled a gun. Josh Welch was suspended a good eleven years before he was able to buy an assault rifle and start killing his classmates. Now that’s what I call a preventive measure. Most recently, a violent little assassin was caught red-handed while seemingly pointing a pencil like it was a gun and pretending to be a Marine—ALL AT THE SAME TIME! Being a Marine is being a government murderer, but pretending to kill people with an imaginary gun is even worse, so the school suspended him.

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It may sound like the war on boys is succeeding, but that’s only four cases in the past year. How many children have to die before we get tough on boys who sort of make gun gestures with their hands? How many countries have to be invaded before we stop boys from learning how to hate? If we’re going to reverse the tide of American fascism, we’re going to have get tough on male thoughts.

White men are rapists. All women are potential rape victims. Patriotism is fascism. Can you imagine a world where women ran the government? It would be nothing but peace and harmony, just like when the Indians ran things. We need to get women out of the kitchen and into the workforce, where they can prosper and be happy. If we want the utopia we all deserve, there must be some collateral damage along the way, and who deserves to suffer more than the tiny ticking male hate-bombs that sit in our first-grade classrooms?

Boys are jerks. They punch you in the balls and jump all over the place. When they draw pictures, they include guns and nunchucks and shit that explodes. Girls sit quietly in their chairs and if they draw anything other than a cute animal or a family member, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

That’s not to say girls have to act a certain way. They can kick ass just like boys and be just as tough. Boys can’t, though. We’ve seen what happens when we let boys be boys. They create the America we have today: a racist, sexist, homophobic, war-mongering hellhole. Let’s let girls be girls or girls be boys or girls be whatever they want to be, and let’s let boys be anything but boys. What could possibly go wrong?

Tyler the Creator

Whereas comedians or artists may want to ostracize a large group of people, an ad exec can lose his job for offending even one person. This makes sense, because a commercial is a short film meant to please everyone in the world. As a result, advertising agencies are drowning in capitulation.

The hot new thing for advertisers is viral comedy videos. Companies know that funny sketches that cost virtually nothing get millions of views, and they want to recreate that reaction in a lab. But pleasing everyone while making them laugh is virtually impossible. I run an ad agency and find this challenge pretty fun. We did a shoe ad about public urination that got 1.7 million views. We got 11 million views when we depicted a rapper as too incompetent to promote his new album.

Those were the highs. The lows are having entire campaigns canceled because the spokesman had the word “boner” in a Tweet last year or someone decided some random accent is offensive. Alarmists thrive on apologies, and they get way more than they deserve when someone’s job is on the line. This is why feigned outrage does so well when applied to commercials. It’s also why it’s only a matter of time before the entire country turns on these overly sensitive pussies and revokes their Indignation Licenses for good.

1. TYLER THE CREATOR FOR MOUNTAIN DEW
Earlier this month, Mountain Dew was accused of making “the most racist commercial in history.” It featured a battered woman too scared to press charges against a goat who was standing in a lineup amid black thugs. This retardo joke was the brainchild of a very popular rapper named Tyler the Creator who has more than 1.6 million Twitter followers. He obviously speaks the Beavis and Butt-head language of today’s youth, but that doesn’t stop the Thought Police from accusing this black man of being racist toward black men. Mountain Dew has devoted an entire website to their apology. Tyler’s manager issued a statement that said in part, “Offense is personal and valid to anyone who is offended.” I would have added, “but it is only valid to that one person and is not our problem.” Tyler called his critics “IDIOTS.”

(It’s been pretty bad recently for rapper endorsements, as Mountain Dew had to explain why another spokesman, Lil Wayne, used the lyrics “beat that pussy like Emmett Till” to describe a sex act. And Reebok dumped Rick Ross for a song seen as supporting date rape.)

2. FLAPPER FOR GENERAL MOTORS
A time traveler is listening to old-timey music as he checks out how awesome 2013 is, but the lyrics are apparently so painfully out of date, a Chinese newspaper has labeled them racist. The “Land of Fu Manchu” is mentioned in the song and then we get the line, “ching, ching, chop-suey” which is racist because, well, actually, we’re just supposed to know. The closest the South China Morning Post gets to explaining its outrage is saying the song “might have been considered acceptable, even amusing, when the lyrics were originally penned in the US in the 1930s.” Yes? And? GM scrapped the track and released the commercial using a different song.

3. SOME ARAB GUY FOR COCA-COLA
This one’s a stretch. In this year’s big-budget Super Bowl ad, we see an Arab walking through the desert and discovering swarms of different groups chasing down a giant bottle of Coke. When they get to the bottle they realize it’s a sign and the race continues elsewhere. Arab-American groups decided this was racist because the Arab isn’t in the race. Imam Ali Siddiqui, president of the Muslim Institute for Interfaith Studies, claimed the ad says Arabs “have no chance to win in the world.” Instead of asking, “What the fuck are you talking about?” Coca-Cola apologized. 

4. WHITE GUY DOING A JAMAICAN ACCENT FOR VOLKSWAGEN
During the same Super Bowl, Volkswagen got in trouble for allowing white actors to do Jamaican accents. This is racist because it implies Jamaicans are known for being laid back, even though they are. Nobody had to explain what’s wrong with doing a goddamn accent. There are plenty of Jamaican whites, from the island nation’s “Founding Fathers” to Bob Marley’s dad.

5. ASHTON KUTCHER FOR POPCHIPS
Popchips is a tiny company, but they spent over a million dollars last year getting Ashton Kutcher to promote their snack. The ads did pretty well until a tiny group of infants decided to be offended by Ashton’s Indian accent. One brown gentleman claimed the depiction was “extremely offensive” and said Popchips were racist “subconsciously.” Popchips apologized, and as is always the case with these things, nobody was asked to explain why an actor acting like he’s someone else is wrong.

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6. BLACK CRICKETER FOR KFC
In 2010, Australia showed a West Indian cricketer appeasing his rivals by sharing some delicious fried chicken. When the commercial made it to America, KFC was forced to apologize. It is wrong of them to imply blacks enjoy fried chicken. Regarding this awful stereotype, black comedian Dave Chappelle famously quipped, “if you don’t like chicken and watermelon, something is wrong with you.” Apologizing for implying that many black people enjoy fried chicken sounds funny, but it’s kind of scary, too. The Canadian Human Rights Commission recently declared that hate speech can include things that are true, AKA “hatefacts.” Soon censorship will be entirely based not on what a smart person said but how it made some irrational idiot feel.

7. MARY J. BLIGE FOR BURGER KING
Last year Blige got in hot water for appearing in a commercial that mentioned chicken. African Americans did not react favorably to the ad because they are sick of being portrayed as leather-clad greasers who stand on tables in restaurants and sing about chicken wraps, even though Mary J. Blige is the only black person on Earth who has ever done that.

8. MONKEY FOR ANIMAL PRACTICE
Last year NBC was accused of racism not because they aired a racist ad but because the time they chose to air it was racist. The ad depicted a monkey gymnast shortly after we saw an African American gymnast compete at the Olympics. This controversy is proof the outraged don’t really think the people they vilify are actually racists. This outrage is all about not being sensitive enough. It’s all about your subconscious and knowing how that might make other people feel.

9. PETE HOEKSTRA FOR PETE HOEKSTRA
Last year, the Republican Senate Candidate made a campaign commercial that criticized America’s investment in the Chinese economy. The commercial shows a woman living in China who does not speak perfect English. Despite this being the norm over in Asia, Hoekstra’s commercial “sparked outrage” mostly because…oh, Jesus, I give up.

10. EVERYTHING
Basically, if you depict actors playing anyone but themselves or show any group doing something they tend to do, you are enforcing racist stereotypes and you need to apologize. Only a minute fraction of the population sees all these commercials as anything but harmless. They are usually white and educated, but technically they are a minority. The problem is, this minority is very loud and the more we kowtow to their shrill hysterics, the more powerful they become. 

The most amazing thing about Josh Fox’s anti-fracking documentary Gasland is that despite valid factual criticisms of the film, he forged ahead and made a sequel. Hollywood loves the war on fracking because at first glance, it looks like big oil getting rich by destroying farmland. Matt Damon made a movie about it, The Stones wrote a song about it, Mark Ruffalo is on a crusade to stop it, and Yoko Ono took out a full-page ad in The New York Times insisting we “Don’t believe the hype.”

Before the sequel, Fox doubled down on his hysteria and pinned breast cancer on natural gas mines, a hypothesis that according to one epidemiologist was “not based on a careful statistical analysis of the data.” However, bleeding hearts don’t like statistical analysis. They want color, and seeing Pennsylvanians light their tap water on fire is all the proof they need. Hey, Debra Winger, Robert Redford, and Mario Batali—naturally occurring methane is what allows people to light their tap water on fire. That’s why the gas companies chose to drill there in the first place, you fools.

The Irish have been accused of “never letting the truth get in the way of a good story,” but Irishman Phelim McAleer has been ramming the truth into Gasland’s good story since it came out. His new documentary FrackNation carefully exposes the holes not only in the Gasland films but also in the entire debate. Of course there is a risk with fracking. There is a risk with going to the grocery store. But fracking is one of the least dangerous ways to get gas from the ground. That’s why it’s been done since the 1940s all over the country. Fracking is used in about 90% of American wells. You’ve probably benefited from it today. As Obama said while discussing the 600,000 jobs fracking will potentially create by the end of the decade, “We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years.”

Phelim’s documentary is doing well with sold-out shows across the country and rave reviews. But being the fighting Irishman that he is, he is not satisfied with that and keeps confronting Fox and the anti-frackers everywhere they go. In 2011, he confronted Fox at a speech and asked, “Isn’t it true that there were reports decades before fracking started that there was methane in the water there?” In 2012 he asked Matt Damon about the Arab interests who funded Promised Land. A couple of weeks ago, he was ejected from the Gasland sequel for “being disruptive” along with many other journalists and activists who are now planning legal action.

I called one of the protesters who was booted. Chuck Petersheim is a builder in upstate New York on the border of Pennsylvania where this debate is polarizing the community. He admits they got confrontational after being asked to leave but says it was “child’s play” compared to what the anti-fracking movement does. “Their whole movement is based on disruption,” he said, “from town-hall meetings to actual mines. They’re insane.” Chuck started out as an opponent of fracking back in 2008 but says the debate has changed. Chuck’s new take on fracking is not popular with the area’s middle-class weekenders. “The new left seems incapable of nuance,” he says. “I’ve been getting Google alerts on the subject for the past six years and I read them all. If more people just looked it up, we’d have a much more rational discussion, but they can’t. They have their heroes and their villains and they’re too busy to disturb that fairy tale. This is a national opportunity for energy independence, for chrissakes.”

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I then called Phelim, and he took umbrage with the term confrontational: “The Tribeca Film Festival is charging a journalist with trespassing when all she was doing was asking questions.” He agrees it’s the anti-frackers who are the disruptive ones. “Gasland has virtually no history of disruption, but there is plenty at FrackNation screenings.” Phelim says he isn’t surprised Fox made a sequel. “It was a wildly successful documentary,” he concedes. “It makes sense he’d want to make a sequel.” Phelim says he was still surprised to see the film’s actual content. “I thought it would confront the holes in the first one, but it just moved on. He didn’t even mention the breast-cancer scare. What happened to that?” When I asked Phelim if all this celebrity outrage was really only politics as fashion, he said the whole fracking debate “isn’t really about fracking. It’s ultimately about anti-Americanism.”

A generation ago, only dull-minded dads were interested in the subject of mining techniques. Now that everyone is invited to every debate no matter what their qualifications we have teens, soccer moms, comedians, musicians, artists, and Hollywood actors giving their two cents. It should come as no surprise they avoid nuance and prefer fairy tales. Gas companies profit from fracking and the water looks weird in Pennsylvania; ergo, fracking is evil. That’s how it works when you’re a fucking baby.

This naiveté extends to a good 50% of America’s voter base. It’s difficult to quantify how many guns discourage crime, but reading about a toddler who accidentally shot a baby in the head is much likelier to inflame the masses. Counting the number of illegals in this country would take forever, so let’s just go with a heart-tugging story about an impoverished family who came here for a better life in the middle of the night while wrapped in handmade blankets. America’s K-12 spending has ballooned to $600 billion a year without improving test scores, yet Matt Damon says we need to spend more. When Muslims attack us we’re told they’re “lone wolves,” yet if polls show that around 25% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims say they think suicide bombing is sometimes or often justified, we’re xenophobic for even mentioning it. When stories of third-term abortions or fake rape charges or racism hoaxes emerge, they’re also ignored. The feel-good universe is simple: Our president is black, America is racist, there is a war on women, children are getting shot, and oil companies are out to get us. That doesn’t make me feel good at all.

What makes me feel good is the truth, no matter how inconvenient.

More than half the country says they think pot should be legalized. This is due in part to a brilliant PR campaign that frames cannabis as a valuable medicinal herb instead of a party drug. “[T]he medical marijuana movement has refurbished cannabis’s image,” says a recent cover story in Fortune, “properly reorienting connotations away from intoxication and irresponsibility and toward wellness and spirituality.”

However, a funny thing happened on the way to the courthouse. As the talk of decriminalization became more mainstream, the drug itself became more hardcore. The cannabis they’re talking about legalizing today feels more like magic mushrooms than the joints people were smoking when the discussion began.

A Slate article from last month entitled “Not That High: Today’s Marijuana is Too Strong, and That’s Bad for New Business” claims the technology has become so advanced, THC levels are now running at 25%.

I quit smoking weed because when you have kids, you need to be on call in case someone has a nightmare. You can’t tell your daughter monsters don’t exist when you’re starting to think that maybe they do.

I spoke to some young pot-smokers, and they all agree things have gotten out of hand. An intern named Dan told me he has to dilute his joints with 75% tobacco. Another said that she had to give up joints and that even one small puff of a one hitter can be too intense.

That’s all fine and dandy, but to really understand how intense marijuana has become I can’t merely harass kids all day. I need to try it. So I had a friend of a friend hook me up with a very strong strain called “Master Kush,” and I’m going to smoke it right now.

(The remainder of this article was written—and published unedited—after half a toke of today’s weed.)

A half hour has gone by and this is what happened. First of all. It’s very hard to type. I don’t think I could write with a pen. I had a big rip off a bong (I sound like a narc) and had a huge coughing fit that got so intense I honestly thought about calling 911. It was totally involuntary and it kept going on and on and on. People were laughing at first but then I could see them get concerned and that got me concerned. It was one of those coughs where you start thinking you’re going to barf but you never quite barf. Man, just thinking about it makes me want to barf.

I felt like I was going to throw up or maybe just have diarrhea so I went to the bathroom but nothing happened. I was still coughing at that point. The guy in the stall next to me must have thought I had the plague. I was acting like a guy in one of those virus outbreak movies where you see the first few people dying.

So, I come back to the couch and then things get really bad. I was panting and having a slow tortuous panic attack that made both my hands go numb with pins and needles. I took my shirt off and lay on the cold floor to cool down but then my feet went numb too. It was hell. And it kept getting worse. I was writhing around on the floor trying to find a position that didn’t feel like the world was going to end. The room was spinning and every time I opened my eyes, it felt like I was looking through someone else’s glasses. My friend said, “I’ve never seen pot do that to anyone before” and I could sort of laugh but it was hard work. I vascialted [sic] from panting panic attacks on the couch to lying on the floor to cool down. I started thinking about calling 911 again but the thought of being in a loud ambulance seemed too scary.

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I just remembered a part. I remember thinking about.

I forgot what I was talking about but I’m going to leave that in so it means something.

Whoa, I think I am being hit with another wave. Oh. Yeah. No, I don’t mean “oh yeah” like “Oh yeah, baby.” I mean it like, “Oh yeah, I remember.” It was a thing where I realized something can feel so terrible it’s interesting. Oh I do remember. You know that feeling when you’re blind drunk and you realize you had better throw up or you’re going to die of alcohol poisoning? That’s what this felt like. I couldn’t even see straight.

Okay, I’m back now. The wave has passed. I’ve done heroin and MDMA and acid and I gotta say. This is about the same level of intensity. It’s about as intense as anyone can feel without throwing up or passing out.

I think you get the idea. I’m baked. I think I’m going to stop typing now and come back when it wears off. One last thing though. I forgot to tell you that I had a guy go get me some tequila and put it on ice. I still felt like I was going to barf but I drank it anyway and soon after, the room stopped whipping through the galaxy like a fucking syndrome! I’m going to let this wear off a bit more and wrap things up after this wears off. It feels about as strong as half a bottle of bourbon and I’m not exaggerating.

It’s been a couple of hours now. I think we can clearly see that this is not like drinking a beer at lunch. The above rant sounds like a shrieking babysitter on cocaine. I have always been pro-legalization, but what I just endured has made me reconsider the whole discussion.

When they talked about legalization in the 80s and 90s, they kept saying it was just like having a few beers and it was. Today, while advocates push the medicinal angle, the benign drug they’re defending has morphed into a heavy drug. It’s been an hour and a half since I looked death in the face and cried. I am obviously still incredibly high. I’m so high, in fact, that I no longer see legalization of marijuana as such a no brainer. The debate has shifted to, “Should we legalize a really, really heavy drug?”

Jim Carrey

Obama is in a huff this week because his gun bill got shot down like a clay pigeon. Like most of us, he was deeply affected by the massacre at Sandy Hook. Like much of the country, he seems to think emotions should drive public policy. Celebrities such as Jim Carrey agree.

As I write this, some numskull on Twitter is telling me, “regardless of numbers, better gun control is just a good idea.” This is despite the recent amendment being “too vague for law abiding citizens to understand and too easy for criminals to avoid.” Emotions drive modern political discourse because we are living in a nation of mathematical illiterates. Gun violence is mostly blacks killing other blacks, and even then yearly gun-related deaths only kill about a hundredth of one percent of the American population.

You know what else is responsible for killing at least 0.01% of Americans? Cars, prescription drugs, prostate cancer, and breast cancer. All of these threats to our survival cause a minimum of 30,000 deaths a year. (Some estimates put yearly prescription-drug and auto-related deaths at over 100,000.) The media cherry-picks which topics it decides are fashionable and so does the president, numbers be damned. This is what happens when you throw math out the window and let photos of dead children dictate legislation.

I don’t mind that car accidents aren’t on the news every night. Ralph Nader has already made enough money scaring us into thinking that driving is dangerous. When you factor in the countless accidents that are avoided every millisecond of American life, a hundredth of one percent is a goddamned miracle. Cars are not in the news any less than they should be.

However, the danger of prescription drugs should be in the news way more than it is today. While everyone blames the recent shooting sprees on access to weapons, few writers noticed how many shooters were on psych meds. The American pharmaceutical industry makes over $300 billion a year—compared to only $12 billion for America’s allegedly “powerful” and “well financed” gun industry—so there’s a real economic disadvantage to questioning the efficacy of prescription drugs. I think celebrities avoid this topic because they are so high on their own pills, the hypocrisy would give them a bad trip.

Prostate cancer kills only about 10,000 fewer people than breast cancer yearly. We supposedly live in a sexist patriarchy where evil men dominate poor, helpless women. But if you think prostate cancer should get at least 75% of the attention breast cancer does, somehow you’re trivializing women’s suffering.

The same goes for any discussion of late-term abortions. If you don’t see the Gosnell carnage as an irrelevant local news story, you’re against women’s rights. The general consensus seems to be that partial-birth abortions are incredibly rare and used only for emergencies. I had a Hispanic med student tell me to “Take this one in a million abortion clinic example and shove it up your ginger ass.” By my calculations, this clinic is closer to 27,000 in a million.

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Bill McGowan’s book Coloring the News confronted the media’s hatefactphobia long ago. His chapter on abortion discusses a small-town reporter named Ruth Padawar who decided to ignore the dogma and do some good “old-fashioned legwork and basic mathematics.” By cold-calling clinics all over New Jersey, she calculated that 1,500 partial-birth abortions had occurred that year. Considering there are approximately 54,000 abortions a year in New Jersey, that means 2.7% of them are partial-birth. If one were to extrapolate New Jersey’s statistics nationwide, 2.7% of 1.6 million equals 43,200. That’s 10,000 more than gun-related deaths. So why isn’t Obama in a huff about Gosnell? Where’s the hilarious video mocking abortionists?

I think it makes sense to give everything that kills 0.01% of us an equivalent amount of attention. Things that kill a fraction of a tenth of a percent can certainly be mentioned on page 37, but we don’t need to worry about them. Thanks for the heads-up, Hollyweird. I’ll keep an eye out for bee stings, too.

It’s not a fashionable time to be talking about domestic terrorism or terrorism in general, but only 16 Americans have been killed this way since September 11th. Salon laments that “White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves,” while “Islamists are existential threats.” So? White terrorists are lone wolves and if you include Islamic terror across the globe, the tally of their attacks hovers around 20,000. Islamic terror is not only existential; it’s downright ubiquitous.

If we can all just pull our hearts out of our brains and not allow trends to dictate what matters, we’re left with three things worth discussing: Gay marriage, smoking, and obesity. Believe me, I was as disappointed to see these numbers as you are. I hate talking about all three of these things, but hate is an emotion and emotions lie.

Gays are only 1% of the population, but that’s a hundred times more people than any of the topics mentioned above. I am very dubious of their quest to get married. They have huge problems with infidelity, and I’m convinced many of them are just stomping their feet because they think this is a good venue to showcase their “rights.”

Smoking kills an estimated 443,000 Americans a year. That figure may be exaggerated, but you’d have to divide it by at least ten to make it as irrelevant as gun deaths. Bloomberg’s nanny state is bordering on Stalinist. You’re not even allowed to smoke in a public park in New York. In California, they want to ban you from smoking in your car. It’s infuriating, but it’s a relevant discussion because it involves ten times more deaths than breast cancer.

Which leaves us with a bunch of fatsos. An estimated three hundred thousand Americans die each year from obesity-related causes—ten times as many as gun-related deaths. I hate the nanny state and believe every American should be able to eat whatever he wants whenever he wants. But I’ve interviewed doctors about this, and the epidemic is worse than you might think. Libertarians say à chacun son goût, but we’re already paying for the immense costs that result from bad eating habits. Being gigantic tubs of lard isn’t only making our pants too tight; it’s emptying our pockets. I hate to admit it, but in the case of obesity v. gun deaths, Michelle Obama’s pet cause is about ten times more germane than her husband’s.

The only way to retain our sanity and make sound policy that provides a future for our children is to stop worrying about what issue is fashionable and do the math.

Anthony Weiner

Examining New York politics is like dipping a ladle into the sewer: Any random sampling will yield nothing but toxic shit water.

New York City’s 2013 mayoral election is seven months away, but the stench of New York politics is already intense enough to make you gag.

Early this month, State Senator Malcolm Smith was charged with bribing his way into the mayoral candidacy. On page 27 of the Criminal Complaint against Smith is a taped conversation where he offers to help out someone’s kid in exchange for allowing Sen. Smith to be reborn as Mayor Smith.

SMITH responded, “You know what you do? Tell him, tell him ‘I got a kid in Albany that needs to be born. So, when you birth him, when you birth my child up in Albany, I’ll help you with your kid.’”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver claims the Smith scandal and the seemingly endless other examples of recent corruption are simply a matter of a few “rotten apples.”

Along with Smith, three other “rotten apples” were arrested as accessories. Last summer Smith told lobbyists:

The longer you wait to get in…the more it will cost you and if you don’t get in at all, then it will be painful after November, after the Democrats win the majority.

In February, he was accused of blowing $100,000 in campaign funds on himself.

Smith was involved in the “New York State Leadership Crisis” of 2009, which occurred shortly after the Democrats won the upper chamber for the first time in four decades. A “Gang of Four” senators refused to recognize Sen. Smith as their leader. The gang became known as the “Gang of Three” after Queens Rep. Hiram Monserrate split to do a curious deal with Smith that included appointing him the chairman of the Consumer Protection Committee. Ex-cop Monseratte was facing serious jail time for allegedly slashing his girlfriend in the face with a knife but was acquitted around the same time the deal was struck. It was now up to Sen. Pedro Espada to run the Gang of Three’s bizarre coup, but his rap sheet was so chockablock with allegations of embezzling, corruption, and tax fraud, he appeared to spend more time in court than in office. Ultimately, the Gang of Three bungled their mutiny and the Democrats lost their majority.

Smith’s rotten-apple career and the fermented cider in which it stews isn’t an exception in New York politics. It’s the rule.

Two days after Smith’s bust, Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson was charged with accepting $20,000 in cash bribes. His secretly taped conversations sum up New York politics nicely:

Bottom line…if half the people up here in Albany were ever caught for what they do…they…would probably be (in jail). So who are they bullshitting?

When US Attorney Preet Bharara revealed the corruption charges against Smith and his cronies he was so jaded by it all he said, “Every time a politician is arrested in New York it should not feel like a scene from Groundhog Day. Yet it does.” This is the OB/GYN through which our mayors are born.

Political corruption in New York—both the city and the state—didn’t end with Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. That whole scandal was more like the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

In March, Assemblyman William Boyland, Jr. was charged with embezzling.

In 2011, Assemblyman Anthony S. Seminerio died in prison while serving time for influence peddling.

In 2009, labor leader Brian M. McLaughlin got ten years for racketeering.

That same year, Assemblywoman Diane Gordon was jailed for bribery.

Spitzer told us he was going to clean up Albany, but even he got caught with his pants down. You’d have to be blind not to see how corrupt it all is. Fittingly, Governor Paterson is both corrupt and blind.

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Mayor Michael “I’ll Crush Your Freedom” Bloomberg turns his nose up at Smith’s follies, but the whole thing is rooted in Smith switching his registration from Democrat to Republican because it’s easier to win as mayor in a crowded Democratic field. Bloomberg’s changed parties so many times I’m not even sure what he is now—Independent? It’s hard for a billionaire who made his money trading stock tips to complain about powerbrokers running politics. Especially when he changed the term limits from two to three (don’t get any ideas, Obama) under the auspices of helping us with the Wall Street crisis. This “help” has left the next mayor with a projected budget hole of “at least $3.1 billion.” There is an entire website devoted to listing Bloomberg’s lies.

One of the biggest proponents of Bloomberg’s third-term shenanigans was City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Coincidentally, many see this feisty lesbian as the mayoral frontrunner in 2013. Like Bloomberg, Quinn seems to feel justified in abusing her power. When a recent TV ad attacked her by claiming “NYC is Not For Sale,” she threatened to sue Time Warner Cable for airing it. If she’s elected into office, TWC’s existence in NY will depend on her approval. This is the same woman who told Chick-fil-A, not “in my city.” Other potential candidates include Alec Baldwin, Tony Danza, Kelsey Grammer, and of course The Rent is Too Damn High guy (who may not pay any rent).

They’re in good company. Before Bloomberg, we had Giuliani, who cleaned up the city by arresting everyone, including people who dance. He also assigned a police escort to his mistress and then made his driver the police commissioner.

Giuliani beat out Dinkins, who’s been accused of letting the Crown Heights Riots roll on for days so his brothers could let off steam. Dinkins was elected on the heels of rampant corruption charges against Ed Koch.

The affable fag Koch was probably our best mayor, but things were still so bad during his tenure that when Bernhard Goetz shot some black kids for trying to rob him, a “Bernie Goetz for Mayor” campaign started. (Goetz ran years later after he got out of jail for his vigilantism.)

Finally, The New York Times announced on Tuesday that the King of Dick Pics is considering running.

But amidst all this putrid filth, a philanderer who Tweets his erections to strangers looks like a saint. The New York Times piece about Anthony Weiner this week was fawning to the point of being obsequious. Their chronology of events made Weiner look noble, while they called Breitbart “not entirely reputable.” However, they rightly point out his only other huge blunder was acting like a complete fucking lunatic on the House floor when discussing 9/11 compensation. Those are the only two major screw-ups. The Times didn’t have to spin his career into a fluffy PR piece. All they had to do was hold Weiner up next to all the other mayors and the history of New York politics in general. In that sense, Wiener’s a winner. And, as is the case with most of politics, we’re the real losers.

Women say they are sick of the impossibly high beauty standards men ruthlessly impose upon them. They are tired of having to spend hours at the gym and weeks recovering from surgery just to please men. The American Body Police now audit every increment of a lady’s BMI.

And the victims of this patriarchy-imposed demand for flawlessness are getting younger. When I was 18, it was completely unheard of for girls to get plastic surgery. In 2008, “219,000 cosmetic procedures were done on patients aged 18 and younger.” Even seven-year-olds are considering it.

But finally, the women are trying to fight back. A photo of a normal-sized female mannequin, deemed exceptional because it is normal, is exploding all over the Internet. As of today, about 200,000 people have “Liked” it on Facebook, and thousands of women have left empowering comments such as, “It’s about time!” and “Finally!”

But ultimately, they’re fighting a losing battle. Men will always hold the carrot of perfection at the end of a long stick of suffering simply because they can. What a vile bunch we are.

(Record scratch) Wait a minute! Nobody consulted me about all this.

I didn’t come up with the idea of fake tits. I think they’re bizarre. I’ve met about two men in my life who disagree, but they’re both obese losers who never get laid. Same goes for any man who has uttered the phrase “No fat chicks.” Sure, we’re not into women who are so gigantic, they have a flesh-colored Santa beard like Honey Boo Boo’s mom does. But when we see a truly enormous woman waddling down the street, the worst we think is, “Yeesh, not my cup of tea.” When women see her, the nicest thing they say is, “Look at that disgusting BEAST!” If some enormous female feels too oppressed by all this scrutiny, all she has to do is burn more calories. Women have nobody to blame for all this “oppression” but themselves. Men are way too horny to notice. Before there was porn, we would masturbate to National Geographic magazines and Sears catalogues. Why would women think we have unattainable expectations?

Here in the real world, love is blind. So are erections. We don’t really care what you look like as long as you have a vagina and don’t dry-heave when you see us naked. If women knew how unbelievably perverted we are, they wouldn’t even brush their hair. Napoleon said to Josephine, “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.” We want to inhale your flaws. As my buddy Sharky said, “Smelling a woman’s ass is a poor man’s Viagra.” Our testosterone is already airbrushing you into perfection the second you walk into the room. We have virtually no deal-breakers.

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Sorry, ladies, but if you want to obsess over gluten and carbs and let a doctor slice off your nipples and shove basketballs inside, that’s your hang-up, not ours. We enjoy a vast assortment of breast types. We like droopers and flapjacks and we’re not even mad if there’s barely anything there. The only ones we’re not bananas about are the 100% deflated pizza slices, but even then you can just keep your bra on and we’ll work around it. Got a gap in the front of your teeth? Sounds good to me. We couldn’t care less about your dental plan. That’s why Japanese women and British chicks have no trouble getting laid. Women say, “Men don’t make passes at women in glasses” at the same moment we’re wondering if she’d be willing to keep them on during sex. A wandering eye—or even a glass one—would be considered icing on the cake.

We only have one deal-breaker: women who are balding. I’m not talking about slightly thin hair that could afford to be a little more luxurious. I’m talking about hair so thin, a middle part leaves a half-inch trough that gets sunburned in July. This problem is easy to solve, however. My barber told me the medical procedures they do now are so incredibly convincing, he can’t even tell. This is someone who stares at scalps every day. So the only thing men really have a problem with affects only a teensy fraction of the female population and it’s easy to solve. Nice “problems.” Some “oppression.”

Straight men are a great scapegoat because we rarely complain. Virtually every time you hear about a woman getting breast augmentation or a facelift or liposuction, her husband is saying, “I thought she looked just fine, but if it makes her happy, go nuts.” Go ahead and bleach your anus. Have all the labiaplasty you want. Just don’t blame us when normal-looking women feel like freaks. You gals set the standards, not us.

If my kids turned out to be gay, I’d say, “Oh great, there go my grandchildren” and move on. But if my son turned out to be the guy at The New York Times who covered modern dance, I would lie in the bath and dig a razor blade into my wrists so deep, you’d think there were vaginas living there. And if my daughter ever moved to LA, I’d send her my head in a box. Los Angeles is to life what New York City is to a woman’s ovaries. It’s an elephant’s graveyard where stupid losers go to die. Here are 10 reasons why.

1. EVERYONE LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE ON METH
If they’re not going to an audition, they wear floppy sweatpants that scrape along the ground, worn-out flip-flops, and a tank top that doesn’t fit. They carry around tiny dogs as if they were purses. Their hair is ratty and dyed blonde and they’re always smoking a cigarette like a guy in jail hoping not to get caught. Even cool people in LA dress terribly. They either look like dads dressed up as hipsters for Halloween or giant babies who have been locked in the grunge closet since 1993. I think this is because they never go out, so they never have a New Yorker goin’, “Where you goin’?”

2. IT ALL LOOKS THE SAME
Beverly Hills is hilly, Venice is a nice homeless beach, and Santa Monica is a pretty place for gays to eat lunch, but the rest of it consists of highways, byways, and billboards. All you do in LA is drive and it’s amazing to be in a car for nine hours and see nothing but billboards for The Voice next to ratty palm trees and abandoned carpet stores. Does anyone live in this city?

3. TRAFFIC IS APARTHEID
I’ve always thought that people who live under communism slowly lose their souls. LA is worse. The place is so sprawled-out, grabbing a beer means going to jail for drinking and driving. You’re left with no choice but to stay indoors, unemployed and alone. For a city virtually made of cars, you can’t get around. If you’re in Venice and you need to get downtown, you had better wait until 10AM after the traffic dies. When you’re there, you had better get out before 3PM or you won’t be able to get back to Venice until 6PM. Your whole day revolves around these tiny windows of unclogged freeways and that means you’d be lucky to squeeze in more than two meetings a day. Trying to socialize is futile. I met a Jewish guy there who grew up near West Hollywood, and he said he never bothered making black or Hispanic friends because he knew a regular commute to East LA would be impossible.

4. NOBODY DOES ANYTHING
Every time you ask someone in LA what they’re working on, it’s always the same pilot from last year and it’s always the only thing they’re doing. A pilot is about 40 pages. That should take a day to write and maybe six days to shoot. What are you doing for the other 51 weeks, masturbating? How can you afford it? We’re told film is their biggest export, but when I check the OnDemand on my TV, I’ve seen everything. There’s only about a new movie a month on that thing. There are almost four million people in Los Angeles and they can only give me 12 movies a year? Costa Rica has the same population and they give us 200 million pounds of coffee a year. Get to work, you fucking flakes.

5. SPANISH ARCHITECTURE
What is this, Zorro? You can paint the cinderblock walls of your home orange and have illegals plant all the exotic trees you want, you’re still living in the same cement house they use to hand out free condoms in Mexico. What was Randy Newman talking about?

6. HUGS
Why are you hugging me? Was I lost at sea for seven months? Are you my twin sister? You hug your kids because you want to wrap your arms around their funny little torsos. You hug your wife because she likes that and it may lead to something after the kids go to bed, but I don’t hug my friends’ friends. People in LA don’t just hug you. They squeeze the shit out of you and hold it there. I find the only way to get these bitches away from me is to put up my hand for a high five but when you do that, they look at you like leprosy is back. Sorry, hugging someone you don’t know screams, “I’m full of shit” so loudly, it’s even more insulting than calling someone a leper.

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7. RELENTLESS COMPLIMENTS
When you first talk to someone in LA, they’re so flattering you wonder if the mirrors work at your house. I don’t care that I’m ugly but when people say, “Oh my God, you look AMAZING,” I start to wonder if I’m in an area with different standards of beauty than the rest of the world. Later you come to realize what that really means is, “Hello.” It’s the same in business. You’ll write a pilot or map out the idea for a screenplay and you’re told it’s the most incredible thing on Earth—by the client! So you start making plans for the next six months and don’t know you’re fired until you see it in The Hollywood Reporter. Looking like a hairy turtle with AIDS means I’m used to rejection, but I’ve seen writers go into deep depressions because they put all their eggs in one project’s basket and never considered that some square-toed shoe would step right into the center of the thing. Shit, LA is so backwards and disorganized, it’s not unusual to walk into the place the project was commissioned and discover the entire staff has been replaced. Nobody has a job there for more than four months and I suspect it’s because they are all incompetent.

8. THE AIR SUCKS
The atmosphere is so dry in LA, you have to order a Big Gulp just to get a sip. It feels like Mad Max in an outdoor shopping mall and every time you inhale through your nose, your nostrils stick together. Venice is refreshing, but being asked for a cigarette every 13 seconds is not. Santa Monica also has air that’s not in a desert but that’s just one street and a beach, which is freezing cold.

9. CELEBRITIES
I’ve slowly started to realize that acting can be fun. Writing a story and having it come to life is also pretty exciting, but being famous? What kind of person is attracted to a lifestyle where most of your day consists of strangers interrupting you? When people get really famous, they’re like burn victims who instantly quiet a room and make everyone uncomfortable. Famous people are freaks. That’s why Tilda Swinton is sleeping in a Plexiglas box outside MoMA right now. The reverence these people get is even more disturbing. An actor is merely repeating lines he read an hour ago, and he’s doing it the way the director told him to a second ago. It’s not a craft. It’s karaoke without singing. Even the director’s job is overrated. All he’s doing is watching TV live and noticing when he doesn’t like something. You know who else does that? Oh, everyone. 

10. IT WAS SIMPLY NOT MEANT TO BE
You start to wonder as you walk around in this blindingly sunny nothingness, “Is this place supposed to be a city?” It’s like Vegas without the casinos. Just desert air with dying plants (fed by someone else’s water) and cement buildings built to be torn down. The movie Battle: Los Angeles is a $70-million apocalypse film about aliens destroying the City of Angels. I guess it scared some people, but most of us (including people in LA) watched the city burst into flames and thought, “Good.”

Augusto Pinochet

With the passing of Hugo Chávez, we got a lot of crocodile tears from liberals claiming we had “lost a friend” who “lifted the poor and helped them realize their dreams.” Jimmy Carter told us that he “never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment.” The Nation lamented that “he wasn’t authoritarian enough.” I haven’t seen this much love for a Latin American tyrant since Che Guevara became a T-shirt.

But if we’re going to perform oral sex on every despot who can’t pronounce the letter “J,” why not Pinochet?

In 1973, Augusto Pinochet was faced with a dilemma: Let the communists control his country or stand and fight. McCarthyism and the Cold War get a bad rap these days, but communism was responsible for millions of deaths and was spreading all over Central and South America like a red plague.

Pinochet chose Door #2 and led a military coup against President Salvador Allende that was nasty and brutal but pretty much the norm as far as coups go. He killed thousands of people, but so did Che. Where’s Augusto’s T-shirt? Why did The Nation call him “murderous” while acting as if Che and Chávez were the greatest things since sliced tortillas?

Where Allende had taken land from the rich in a Castro-like redistribution program, Pinochet gave it back. He traveled the world talking to economists, politicians, and academics. Critics of libertarianism call Milton Friedman a “Pinochet sympathizer,” but all Milton did was take a meeting where he told Pinochet that dictatorships don’t work in the long run. He also explained that Chile would thrive if the market were given free rein.

He was right. Chile’s GDP is soaring, and it’s mostly because of the policies Pinochet enacted in the 80s. When he met with Margaret Thatcher in 1982, she told him she’d like to set up a military base there so Britain could better protect the Falklands. They became best pals, and rumors abound of backroom copper deals made with Britain due to his cooperation.

Yes, Pinochet enforced curfews where nobody was allowed to be on the streets from midnight to 6AM. So what? This happens in Glasgow every time there’s a crime spree. Besides, having a curfew doesn’t mean you can’t party. All it means is that at 11:30 you have to decide if it’s worth staying all night at this party. If the curfew ruined your party, it wasn’t a good party. And isn’t that what’s behind all this whining about Pinochet? People who didn’t have much going on are blaming the guy who kicked out a communist dictator and turned Chile into a civilized, clean, wealthy, and prosperous nation. If you wanted to make money in Chile, the doors were open. If you didn’t, well, that’s your fault. He may have started out as a dictator, but he left voluntarily when he was voted out of office in 1990. That’s not a fascist. That’s a great guy.

This theory looks great on paper, but it behooves a writer to do a last-minute check with “the people” before sending his essay off to the editor.

I started talking to Chilean expats here in New York. Raving homosexual Mauricio Santelice is an executive pastry chef at the Dream Hotel in Chelsea. He came here in the 1990s after spending his entire childhood and adolescence under Pinochet’s rule. When I told him my theory about the parties, he told me to go fuck myself. “If they caught you on the street at night they would beat you bad,” he told me angrily. “They’d knock out your teeth and break your bones. They’d even pull your hair out. And if they caught you more than once it would count as a felony and you’d be off to jail without a trial.” Mauricio said that the curfew also meant no nightlife, which ultimately meant no youth culture. I told him Pinochet had to be strict because he was up against the communists, and Mauricio looked at me like I just took a shit inside his head. “My sister would protest him a lot growing up,” he said. “They would spray the protestors with water cannons filled with sewage that had permanent blue dye in it. When the police saw someone on the street who was blue, they would beat them worse than someone out past curfew.”

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Hmm, maybe Pinochet’s Chile wasn’t as Smurfy as I’d first thought.

Patricia Marandio came here with her family during the coup. She runs a cleaning company in Manhattan and was mortified to hear me defend Pinochet. “We had our own September 11th,” she told me, referring to the day in 1973 when troops took over the country and bombed Santiago. She talked about a writer named Pablo Neruda whom Pinochet killed, adding that murders were spread throughout his 17-year reign. Apparently they’d throw the bodies out of a helicopter over the Pacific Ocean so there’d be no evidence. All right, but Obama is responsible for the deaths of 1,521 Americans and he had a coup-free election.

Finally, I spoke to an ad exec named Edgardo who insisted I only use his first name. His family was forced out shortly after Pinochet came into power. Edgardo’s father was a Social Democrat who had become blacklisted under the regime and was unable to find work. His parents were both in theater and were part of a massive exodus in the early 70s that included so many of Chile’s educated class, the country suffered an immediate brain drain. When I offered up Chile as a great example of free-market capitalism I was reminded that copper, the very engine of Chile’s economy, has been nationalized since 1969. Edgardo said Chile’s business elite had trouble getting international investment because other countries are wary of dictatorships. “Many European countries were embargoing Chilean products,” he added.

Edgardo’s family is divided on Pinochet. Some of them like what he did and all of the ones who were in exile moved back in the early 2000s. I asked him if support for Pinochet was as simple as liberals v. conservatives, and he said no. “What people don’t understand about Chile,” he said “is that it is fundamentally a very conservative country. It’s a very Catholic country. And it’s quite likely Allende would have been pushed out of office democratically, without a coup.” He told me many Chileans continue to support the coup but don’t support the Pinochet regime. “You don’t have to brutally torture your countrymen to fight communism,” he said. I wasn’t totally convinced but then he added, “Your career wouldn’t exist in Pinochet’s Chile. Your comedy, your writing, even this article would be banned.”

And with that, I changed my mind about Pinochet. When my livelihood gets caught up in the mix, I’m out.

That’s the problem with talking to “the people.” They have a tendency to destroy the silly theories you dream up while sitting on a barstool in a free country. Opinions about dictatorships make for amusing banter and great T-shirts, but they don’t take into account the victims of the totalitarianism involved. Whether you’re on the side of Chávez and Che or that of Pinochet, the truth is that choosing sides and having these discussions is a luxury that wouldn’t be possible under any of those regimes. They are all oppressive. I judge a culture on its ability to handle ridicule, and by those standards the West is still the best. 

Ambassador John Bolton

Why are we in the Middle East? Liberals tell us that buying oil from Canada and fracking here are dangerous, but what’s more dangerous than war?

The Cold War made sense. Communism killed 100 million people and is the antithesis of what we believe. Reagan was a hero for dismantling the USSR.

But there’s no such excuse these days. I say we leave the rest of the world to blow up each other. We have our own problems. Can we at least cut the trillion or so we spend annually on defense? What about the $3 billion we send Israel? Please?

What would happen if America became as isolationist as the libertarians and the paleoconservatives want it to be? I’m not smart enough to know the answer, so I called Ambassador John Bolton (yes, you still call him “Ambassador”) and asked him.

I get why we have troops along the DMZ in Korea. We’re there to discourage North Korea from invading the South, but—
We actually don’t want our troops along the DMZ.

We don’t? I’m sorry; I thought I was talking to John Bolton.
Ha. We actually prefer to have our troops along the southern part of the peninsula so if there was another invasion, we would be in a better position to respond in a strategic fashion and not be pinned down along the DMZ. Also, with the troops in the South they’re easier to deploy elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific area.

OK, so the case for troops in South Korea is strong. Got it. But why have over 100,000 troops stationed in Europe? Why do we have bases in Italy?
Well, a lot of the facilities we have in Europe today will be very helpful in combating al-Qaeda in North Africa, for example. Italy is right across the Mediterranean, and a lot of people thought they could have been used in the 9/11 attack on the consulate in Benghazi.

That wasn’t an attack. That was a riot based on a YouTube video. Hillary told me so.
Sure. Look, it isn’t a question of where exactly our troops are stationed. It’s a question of what kind of presence the United States has internationally and whether our presence is enough to help keep whatever small measure of stability and security there is in the world.

Can’t we just bring the troops home and then hop in some jets if the shit hits the fan?
Whether they’re based overseas or whether they’re based in the United States is more a question of logistics than philosophy. In some cases, it’s a matter of having supplies prepositioned. You’re obviously going to be less prepared to fight in an area when you just arrived.

It all just seems like a waste of money.
The Pentagon should be made repeatedly to justify how cost-effective it is to have bases overseas instead of here. These are legitimate questions but they’re less about geostrategy and more about logistics and cost-efficiency.

Couldn’t all this presence abroad be having the reverse effect? Haven’t we increased the number of Taliban since invading Iraq and Afghanistan? Alan Dershowitz and even the Tel Aviv media say they don’t want us meddling because it pokes the hive and makes life worse for Israelis.
We defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan right after 9/11 and forced them to withdraw. If you could show our presence caused a negative reaction, that would be a legitimate cost to weigh in the cost-benefit logistics, but I think you’ll find our presence is simply an excuse the Taliban and al-Qaeda use when recruiting. If it wasn’t that, it’d be Guantanamo or even what a “libertine society” the United States is.

Good point. It’s hard to say Muslims attacked Glasgow and Toronto because of foreign policy. Some say they hate us because of Israel and others argue it’s simply because we’re infidels, but maybe it’s both.
Of course it’s both. That’s why the ayatollahs call Israel “The Little Satan” and the United States “The Great Satan.” Israel is part of the West and they hate the West. Osama bin Laden called us crusaders but there weren’t any Jews on the Crusades. In the end, the radicals don’t like Christians and they don’t like Jews.

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Can’t we just cut Israel off anyway? They’ve got a good GDP and the amount of money we give them isn’t what’s keeping them afloat. Let’s leave them be and if they get seriously attacked, we’ll jump in.
The economic assistance we give them is much less than the military assistance, but most of that money is spent in the United States. We helped create Israel because we thought it was justifiable for historical reasons and because of the Holocaust. Having created it implies a need to defend it. It’s a democratic society and a difficult territory and is often a surrogate for attacks on the United States, hence “Little Satan.”

I heard you once make an argument that it would be bad for the American dollar to pull out of everywhere because it would make us look weak and the dollar is a brand just like any other. Like Coke, people say they don’t need to advertise anymore because they’ve already established themselves but if they didn’t, their shares would plummet and Pepsi would move in. If that’s true, even a president that was against foreign intervention would have to continue because America would go bankrupt without it.
I don’t think I made that particular analogy. It’s not so much the American dollar as it is the economy as a whole. We are in a globalized economy and if you don’t have security and some degree of stability internationally, you’re going to have less international trade and investment, less international travel, and less finance overall. Free trade and open markets lead to prosperity for everybody. If you reverse that, those kinds of economic interchanges can’t take place and we can’t sustain our economic way of life at home.

But you don’t blow up Walmart when you want to buy a shirt. We get [much] of our oil from Canada and we haven’t fought with them since 1812.
I’d be delighted to have more access to North American fuel for all kinds of reasons, but the Obama Administration is standing in the way of that. We’ve got environmental policies preventing us from exploiting our resources, so we’re thrown to the international markets. If we became an energy exporting country again, it would have huge geopolitical ramifications and we would be safer.

Wait, that’s what I’m saying. I think the world is more anarchic since we invaded Iraq post-9/11. Isn’t it easier to buy from someone you’re not invading?
If a Saddam Hussein takes over Kuwait and then invades Saudi Arabia (as he likely planned to do in 1991), he’s got control of the oil and like any monopolist, up goes the price. It’s like the OPEC cartel, only worse. That’s why Jim Baker said, “Jobs, jobs, jobs” when he was asked what that war was about. You want to keep open markets in petroleum and a Hussein or the Iranians today have something very different in mind. They want control and they want to raise the price.

OK, but outside of oil, you have to admit it’s a waste of time trying to impose democracy on people who don’t want it. We can’t even fight them because their values are so different. As Buchanan pointed out, our soldiers see death as a loss and theirs see it as a victory.
Democracy isn’t the objective per se. The objective is pursuing ascending American interests. That’s the difference between traditional conservatives and neocons. I’m a Cold War conservative. I’m not a neocon. I’ve never been a liberal.

So the neocons are in it for Israel and the paleocons are in it for the oil?
The war is for American interests. Until we’re able to get oil and natural gas from sources other than the Middle East, it’s important in world markets whether we’re buying from them or not. Our dependence on foreign oil began back in the 1930s when the British were in Iran and Iraq and Franklin Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud during WWII. You have to deal with the hand you’re dealt, and it would be a much easier hand to play if we could get oil and natural gas here. If we had more oil and natural gas, countries such as Japan would prefer to buy from us. China would rather buy from Canada than an unstable Middle East. Reducing our dependence might even contribute to more stability in the Middle East. I think it has less to do with American military forces than the fact that we’re so dependent on them; it gives them all this extra leverage.

The war is about oil. It’s that simple?
I don’t mind saying America has a vital national interest in a large, growing, ever more prosperous economy, and to have that you need energy sources. So you can buy it from the Middle East or you can buy it from us. The problem with the Obama strategy and the way they’ve approached the Keystone Pipeline and fracking and the whole EPA war on coal, etc., is it makes us more dependent on foreign energy. That’s bad economics and it’s bad security policy.

It sounds like we’re about to strike a deal here. If I get the pipeline through and lift fracking bans and encourage coal, you’ll agree to bring the troops home.
Not quite. We would be better off using our own resources. No doubt about it. But an America that turns away from the world is less able to provide stability and security, which means one of two things: Either the world becomes more anarchic and financial interchange decreases (this lowers our standard of living and hurts our way of life), or other powers enter the vacuum. It’s likely these other powers will not have a view of the world that is benign toward us. A strong America helps preserve a strong economy. A strong international position helps preserve a strong domestic way of life.

Gavin McInnes

The backlash for my “Tackling Asian Privilege” was so intense, it made me feel like a Maxell tape ad. I got a handful of texts (how’d they get my number?), dozens of Tweets, hundreds of comments, and thousands of Facebook links telling me I’m “ignorant” and “useless” and should get my ass kicked. They told me it was a “dishonest call to include Asian-Americans in discussions on race” and suggested I check myself before I wreck myself.

So I checked myself. I quit drinking for a day and spent a lot of time staring in the mirror. I gotta be honest: What I saw there made me sick. When I looked inside myself, I felt even more disgusted. It only takes a second to realize I’m doing better than others because of privilege. Doye. However, to apply this logic to others is insane. Asians face all kinds of racism and have no privileges. The fact that they’re doing better than every other group means they’re simply better. White people suck. 

I would like to take a moment to deeply apologize to all our Asian readers and also to all our racially aware readers. In particular, I’d like to thank the student at Berkeley who pointed out how similar my essay was to Peggy McIntosh’s “Invisible Knapsack.” That one was a wake-up call.

In fact, after going over my “Tackling Asian Privilege” essay, I realized the whole thing ceased to be offensive when I subbed out the word “Asian” for “white.”

Check it out…

“Nobody clutches their purse to their side when a white person walks into the elevator. If a white person applies for a job at a bank or on the police force, he or she is often welcomed with open arms (assuming both places have met their diversity quotas). When a white person commits a crime, some people are shocked (assuming he’s rich and educated). When a certain type of white man is appointed to the head of the Department of Energy, everyone knowingly nods his or her head. White privilege pervades every part of our day-to-day life and it’s time they joined the conversation about race.

“Though they comprise 75% of the American population, they make up 47% of all doctors. Only 2.3% of doctors are African American, yet they’re 13% of the population. Thirty percent of African American men will go to jail. Right now we have 1 in 11 African Americans in prison, but our nation can only say the same about 1 in 45 whites. Nobody sees the problem with that?

“Quebec’s McGill University is one of the most elite schools in North America, and to walk through their campus is to see way more Caucasians than African Canadians. This is true of all Ivy League schools. American whites have the second-highest education level of any racial demographic and they’re also the second-wealthiest. While African American households earned an average of $30,939 in 2005, whites walked away with only $10,000 less than twice that.

“The reason for this is simple: PRIVILEGE.”

“Though many whites come here with little or no money and live in rough neighborhoods, some are lifted out of this disadvantage within a generation and are soon living an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Millions of the poor are still white, but so what? Generally speaking, in America, whites live a disproportionately advantaged life where things are simply handed to them. Whites turn on the TV and they see Captain Kirk driving a spaceship. When they’re told he’s a fictional character, they jump to real-life astronaut Neil Armstrong. Whites are unfairly overrepresented in science, medicine, law, finance, education, and virtually everything that generates wealth. They are probably drastically overrepresented in Nobel Prizes, especially the men. These arrogant crackers may not publicly flaunt a racist moniker such as “model majority,” but who knows how they speak in the privacy of their own homes? As a people, white people need to recognize they got where they are not by the virtue of hard work but by stepping on the backs of others. Many of us think paying reparations is an impossible task, but we should at least be willing to join the conversation and admit, as Obama put it, “You didn’t build that.” We need to recognize that our position is innately unfair. We need to acknowledge we are lucky. And most importantly, we need to stop it right now.

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“White privilege is, if you will, an invisible knapsack of unearned perks and benefits that a white person is able to unpack wherever we go. White privilege is very, very real and yet nobody’s talking about it. Whites can purchase real estate in virtually every neighborhood they want. Nobody worries about property values when a white person moves in the neighborhood. When asking for a loan or writing a check, a white person never has to be concerned with how he or she will be perceived. Whites can say swear words or wear secondhand clothes without anyone assuming it’s due to poverty or illiteracy. When driving a nice vehicle in a bad part of town, a white person rarely has to worry about being pulled over. Even when he does get pulled over, he never wonders if it’s because of his race (unless he’s in a nice car in a bad part of town). If a rich white person gets into a good school, other students don’t assume it’s because of affirmative action. A wealthy, well-dressed white person with no tattoos can listen to rap music very loudly on a boom box while riding the New York subway without anyone wondering if they’re going to get stabbed.

“When one opens the discourse to this taboo, we learn many terms that had previously been ignored. ‘Earned strength’ is very different from ‘unearned power.’ Whites are ‘overprivileged’ and enjoy this ‘unacknowledged power’ in a totally ‘incognizant’ way. Privilege can look like power when it is in fact permission to escape or dominate. You don’t need round eyes to see that simply by the virtue of their success, whites are seriously and systematically oppressing people of color, and not only the yellow ones. To be overrepresented in a field is to dominate those who are not proportionately represented. Whether whites know it or not, simply existing can be tantamount to a hate crime. The white farmers in Rhodesia found this out the hard way, as so they should.

“So what do we do? How do we change the latent inequality that white people exploit? Should we be penalized? Yes. The first thing we have to do is get some more communication going. Using your voice is the first step to raising awareness, not just parochially but in a transnational sense. We need to redesign social systems where whites are not 75% of everything in this country. We need to ignore the majority and uplift the masses. By staying cloaked in the myth of meritocracy we are denying the latent power of the underprivileged.

“Look at Dresden, Germany today and look at Detroit. While white cities are constantly flooded with opportunities to rebuild, cities of color are left to rot. I’ve never heard whites discuss ‘White Power’ in public, but you know they’re constantly thinking it. How can they not? This false notion of pride is rammed down their throats everywhere they go. Sportscasters may not say they are filled with joy and pride when they see an athlete they like, but you can tell that’s what they’re thinking. Sure, using the phrase “chink in the armor” will get you fired, but that’s because whites have dominated sports until very, very recently. I mean, come on. White people invented Nazis. 

“Let’s work together to break the silence. A drop in the bucket seems small until you see all the ripples it makes. To tackle white privilege and bring them down to the subpar level of success (almost) every other group faces, we need systemic change on a global level. Our government needs to get involved. Tax dollars have to be used and you can be sure jobs will be created. White success has been stolen, not earned, and it’s up to these same privileged masses to give back the power and eradicate this unfair system of advantage. We need to transform society to the point where whites’ problems don’t pale in comparison to those of the less privileged.”

There…doesn’t everything make more sense when this logic is only applied to whites? Asians face the same disadvantages all nonwhites face, especially when it comes to humor.

The questions are complicated, but the answers are simple. If whites accomplish too much, they probably cheated. If anyone else succeeds, it’s due to hard work. Conversely, if anyone’s doing badly, it’s most likely a white person’s fault and not that particular person’s. Now that we know these truths to be self-evident, it’s time to do everything we can, including the immediate massive expansion of government programs, to force this truth to become a reality no matter the cost.