I have been apartment hunting lately, just looking to fill an empty room in someone else’s apartment rather than either rent one myself or put together a group of friends and find a place together. It has always been my experience that roommates work better when your lives are separate. In any case, Craigslist rooms are at a premium here in Manhattan, and so I quickly realized how important it is to sell yourself properly when you go to “look at the apartment.” Of course, the first thing that came to mind was pickup.

In the process of apartment hunting, I found it important to lead with my deal-breakers first, so that I don’t waste my time.  I have a few of these: I need to be able to smoke weed, at least in my room; I need to be able to cook at least a few times a week; I need to be able to bring girls back to my room without consideration of other roommates; I need to be able to fit a queen size bed in the room; I need to be in a certain location to make pulling easiest. This is an important lesson for dating too, particularly as it relates to online dating, though it’s talked about in the community pretty extensively. Don’t try to be everything to everyone, figure out what you want, and work toward designing your game to attract that type of person.

In talking with the people, since the competition is so high, you really have to sell the lifestyle that you are looking for, or at least that you think they are looking for. Job stability is an important element in this, as is savings level. Also, how will having you in their life improve their life? These are the questions you need to answer, ideally before they come up. The reason that I bring this up with regards to dating is because it occurs to me that in the past, I have not done a very good job of painting a picture of what a life with me would be like. Part of this is intentional, I generally like to choose interesting things to do on dates so that we have “fun.” Of course, any way you slice it, this is coming from the wrong place. Something that I’ve started doing lately, at least with my 2nd and 3rd dates, is trying to strike a balance between being “awesome guy” and being “chill guy.” More than that, I have been intentionally designing my dates to work with each other as a means to paint a picture of what life with me would be like. Part of that is going super meta and talking about how masculinity and femininity define each other, but part of this is also toning it way down and just strolling around the park bullshitting about nothing in particular. Maybe picking up some food along the way.

To say this another way, don’t oversell yourself. The more normal you seem, at least from a lifestyle perspective, the more she will be into it. Once you have her attracted, once you have her into you, it’s all about selling the lifestyle that you two would have together, at least if you’re looking for a girlfriend. She’s not looking for a party animal for a boyfriend. She’s not looking for a guy who can pick three awesome dates that are super fun and involved. One or two of these thrown in there occasionally are good, because women do want to have “special” nights from time to time, but in general, err on the side of being normal. Always ask yourself, “what would Don Draper do?” Yesterday I basically just walked around the park all day with a girl for a second date. It went pretty long, and ended up turning into grabbing food and watching a movie, but this is just because we were having fun. In planning the date, I had planned on doing some wine drinking with some miracle fruit, which would be fun, but is also a little ridiculous and unnecessary. Along the way, I just decided that it was unnecessary and that coming prepared with a blanket to lie on would be sufficient. Miracle fruit tastings are decidedly not what Draper would do.

Another point along the lines of not overselling yourself, at least on second and later dates, is that silence is okay. In a lot of ways, the more silence you can get away with without it getting boring, the better. If you guys are going to be dating, you will be spending a lot of time together, and she needs to feel comfortable with that silence.

It started with a conversation with some chick who I’d met online but had no interest in ever meeting. I said something about how if a woman agrees to go out with me on a weekend night, I expect sex, and if she isn’t ready for sex, I expect her to be “busy” when I invite her out on a Saturday. At some point she admitted to me that she had banged a guy she’d met online after the 3rd date, but that she regretted it when he didn’t call her again. She said that she regretted “giving herself to him” when it didn’t work out.

Sex is an inherently selfish act. When you first state this to people, they consider it to be either totally obvious or totally nonsensical. Those who call it nonsense tend to say things like “sex is more fun when it’s unselfish” or “not if you do it right” or some other totally illogical insult. Let’s make something clear, when I describe sex as “selfish,” that is not to say that getting a nut is the only thing that matters. Pleasing a partner is part of the enjoyment of the experience, as is any number of other “compromises” that people try to use as loopholes in this discussion. When I have sex, I am being equally selfish when I finish in a girl’s ass as I am when I stimulate her deep spot until she’s in a multi-orgasmic state. It’s no wonder why Lance and I both value a woman’s multi-orgasmic ability as one of the most important characteristics of “good sex.”

Now that we’ve stiff armed the haters, let’s talk. Why is this idea of sex as a selfish act an epiphany? How does internalizing this singular concept mean everything?

The typical “AFC” mentality is that sex is selfish for men and unselfish for women. When a man has sex with a woman, he is taking sex from her and she is giving sex to him. In the same conversation with the above girl, she said, “the problem is that girls pretend to be prude but the reality is we are just as horny as guys but guys loose respect for girls after sex.” This is the typical mentality that we see in the dating world. This is not just semantics, this is what people actually go through life believing, in many cases from birth until death.

Imagine for a second that you let go of this belief, and imagine instead that sex is a mutually selfish act. Men love sex, women love sex, and when they have sex together, they are doing it because they both want to. They’re both horny. Does this sound like anything we’ve ever seen in the PUA community before? Does it maybe sound like the “sexual frames?” I was taught that the 5 most important sexual frames are non-judgmental, good at keeping secrets, independent, responsible, and sexually aggressive. I believe that all of these frames are derivatives of this idea of “sex as a selfish act,” which would make selfish sex THE frame. The only one that matters. I am willing to bet that if you come in with this frame and get her to accept it, everything else is just logistics.

So how do you use this do your advantage in game? If you really wanted to, you could probably just use it as an opener into a compliance loop Steve style. In a night time scenario, this would be a quick way to screen for same night lay potential, as any woman who refuses to accept the premise even if you lay it out completely is probably not going to be down with the SNL.

I prefer to use this to get deep a couple drinks into a date. “I find femininity attractive, I find a woman who embraces her sexuality attractive. I find it unattractive when a woman considers sex to be her primary/only bargaining chip in the dating marketplace. This idea that sex is a selfless gift from a woman to a man needs to go. Sex is mutually selfish in the most beautiful way possible. It is mutually selfish in the way that a relationship between an employer and employee is selfish. It is mutually selfish in the way that the relationship between a mother and a child is mutually selfish.”

Remember the MTV show Next? It was definitely one of my favorite reality/dating tv shows of all time. Remember watching that show and thinking to yourself how you would handle yourself if you were in that situation? How you would try to game the girl if you came off the bus? How you would qualify the girls if they were the ones on the bus? I think that for a lot of women, particularly those that online date, I’ve always kind of believed their life is kind of like an episode of Next. Lately, mine certainly has been.

My online game is super dialed in. There is this ridiculous synergy right now between my profile, my pictures, and my email templates. I’m getting a ton of responses these days, and basically have more numbers than I know what to do with. I’m even getting responses from women telling me explicitly that they do not think we are a match, and giving a reason why like that I’m too high energy or overwhelming or whatever. The implication is that they recognize that I am a high value man that many women will like, but I just happen to not be their type. Very interesting stuff.

I’ve been consistently going on 4 dates a week, at least two of which have been consistently new, and one or two of which have been second or later dates. I haven’t sent out new emails in over two weeks now, and can still fill up my schedule at will. When I say fill at will, I mean literally, Monday through Sunday, working around girls schedules. Now obviously I don’t do that, I would drive myself into an early grave with that degree of sleep deprivation, but I’ve done Monday through Friday, and I’ve done Sunday through Tuesday with other plans on Wednesday and Thursday and Friday as well. Needless to say, I’ve basically stopped going out on the weekends. The two or three times I have gone out on the weekend in the last two months, I’ve consistently gotten numbers that turned into dates and/or pulled too, so it’s not even a matter of using online dating as a crutch, I just prefer it.

The reason for my delinquency, other than the obvious “I can” factor, is that I am pretty much determined at this point to get a really awesome girlfriend, at least for the summer. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve had a girlfriend, and I’m sort of ready for that again. I did have a quasi summer girlfriend last year, but she was really not up to par so it never got more serious than her being my primary in a multiple relationships scenario. I haven’t had condom free sex since though, and I miss that.

From this experience, I’ve gleaned some new insight into online dating, and women in general, insight that I will share with you now:

1. Women don’t give a shit if you live with your parents as long as you own it. I suppose it’s possible that I might have even better success if I had my own place, but I have yet to detect any noticeable impact of telling a girl I live with my mom and sister on the progress of that seduction. I think that there is definitely value in having your own place from a self esteem perspective, particularly for new guys, but this is just further evidence that if it doesn’t bother you, it won’t bother her. Period.
2. Dating sites stack the deck in favor of successful men, making them even more successful. I have for a long time theorized that a small percentage of men on dating sites were doing on the vast majority of the dates, even more so than in real life. What never occurred to me, however, is that the online dating sites facilitate this. Sure, I knew that updating your profile or pictures gave you a little bit of an edge, they would preferentially display people with new info in their profiles over people with older info. But it’s definitely more than that. Since I’ve started getting this ridiculous level of success though, I’ve been getting way more winks, interests and unsolicited emails from women. One of the reasons I haven’t sent out new emails in a few weeks, in fact, is because I’ve had enough women initiating contact with me throughout the week that it would just be ridiculous to collect even more numbers. And we’re not just talking about one site. Match.com, OkCupid.com and PlentyofFish.com all seem to be preferentially displaying my profile to women; I suspect that it’s because I am getting more responses than other guys. On some level this makes sense. Hot women are the bottleneck for an online dating site, and the more hot women there are on a site, the more men there will be to date them. Presumably, if more women are responding to you, then you are a higher value man, and so more women will want to hear from you.
3. Most women don’t actually go on a lot of online dates. Unless they were just lying to me, which I have no reason to believe is the case, for a high proportion of the women that I am going out with I am their first or second online date. Mind you, I am often going out with these girls two weeks after I’m getting their numbers, so they’ve had plenty of time to go out with other guys. They just haven’t for whatever reason. I think that in our society that stigma still exists to some extent around it, which is why it’s so important that if you’re online dating you just act totally comfortable with it.
4. Most girls have really shitty game. They really don’t know how to get all of the body language right to really make a guy swoon for them. Since I’ve started this rampage, I have encountered 1, count them, 1 girl with good girl game. Even in her case though, she really fucked it up with me by refusing to kiss on the first date, despite sending all of the signals that she wanted it. I’m about 80% confident that she was a synthetic like me, not because there was anything she did that obviously suggested that to be the case, but because she was really just doing EVERYTHING right body language wise. That combined with her stunt at the end refusing to kiss because she doesn’t “do that on first dates” just screams game playing. I’m definitely going to see her again, but the probability of her getting past fuck buddy status is slim to none. Had she gone the opposite route and invited me back to her place rather than rejecting the kiss, she would have been on the fast track to girlfriendhood, potentially displacing the other 15 prospects I have within a matter of weeks.

America reclaimed a little bit of its strength yesterday with the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Hopefully we will look back on that act as a turning point in our “war on terrorism.” At home though, we are still losing our own internal war on the Pussification of America (Credit my boys Covino and Rich from SiriusXM).

Last week, my buddy Lance from Honey and Lance sent me a link to this post which he knew I would find interesting and would want to comment on. Reading my comments on the post, I think you’ll get a pretty good sense of my take, so that’s not what I’m going to touch on here. What I instead want to write about is some more meta-ethical points that relate directly back into this post as well as many themes of the blog on which it lives.

The blog post was written by a chick named Rachel Rabbit White, a self proclaimed married bisexual feminist. I should mention that I have a lot more respect for her now than I did when I wrote my first comment, which was an intentionally douchy response to an intentionally douchy article. Despite my tone, she handled herself in a very mature, open minded way that I have a lot of respect for. It doesn’t excuse her blog based on morally bankrupt concepts, but I want to make it clear that the goal of this post is not to be an ad hominem attack, but rather a critical review of some of these concepts.

Yesterday I was walking around central park with a girl and she brought up a tangential topic, namely, morality in dating, and more specifically, what drives human dating behavior in men and women. My response was pretty long, but at the start of the response, I noted that the prevailing scientific theory in biology at the moment is that of evolution by natural selection, and as such, any discussion of human drives, and by extension human ethics, must have its theoretical foundation in evolution to even be on my radar. I don’t want to get into too much debate about what makes something good or bad, but suffice it to say that any model worth considering is going to be rooted in evolution, and as such is going to agree with the rest of this post.

So let’s talk about “fat positive” for a second, because it came up numerous times when I was exploring Rachel’s blog, and it also came up indirectly in a couple of comments below the post, specifically those by Scarlett. For those of you who don’t know what it is, “fat positive” is a movement with the goal of an acceptance of fatness as normal, healthy and attractive. Now, I understand where Rachel is coming from, as she has a history of anorexia, so it’s understandable that she feels like judgment of female beauty contributes to body image issues, and that this is a problem for the world. But here’s the thing: attraction is not a choice, and is largely rooted in biology, much moreso than people are willing to acknowledge in this day and age. Body fat in healthy individuals is tightly regulated in the hypothalamus. Both the urge to overeat and to undereat fall into this category of “tightly regulated,” and the psychological story that our mind tells itself is reverse engineered from the biochemistry of the brain. As such, if someone is overweight, it means that they are unhealthy, in the sense that this regulatory signaling is getting disrupted, so the body chooses to retain excess fat mass because it thinks that this level of fat mass is a much lower, actually healthy level.

From a evolutionary standpoint, it makes a world of sense that an unhealthy physique would be unattractive. It also makes sense that physique would be vastly more important to men than it would be to women. Biologically, a man is capable of impregnating a woman, leaving, and still having his genetics passed onto the next generation, assuming that the woman is physically capable of giving birth and raising the child without dying. So the minimum investment required from a man is about two minutes or less, and evolution will select for men to be attracted to fit women who will be able to raise their child to self-sufficiency. By comparison, the minimum level of investment required of a woman to have her genetics passed on to the next generation is a bare minimum 9 months and more commonly on the order of 13+ years. Since our incentives are so misaligned, it’s no surprise that our mechanisms of attraction would be so different.

These differences are reality, and to judge individuals on these differences is to ignore reality, to fly in the face of it. As such, it is immoral to judge a man for liking hot women, just as it is immoral to judge a woman for liking power, money, word creativity or anything else that women are attracted to. That is why the “fat positive” movement is total bullshit. Being fat is not normal, it’s not healthy, and it’s definitely not attractive. To deny these facts is to deny reality. To criticize someone for choosing to accept reality is immoral. For this reason, the “fat positive” movement is a morally bankrupt movement.

Still with me so far? Great, so let’s go one step deeper. Now, for the most part, I do not blame fat people for being fat, it is not their fault. They were born into a perfect storm of obesity creation, namely a world in which grains are the base of the food pyramid and are subsidized by the government, and dietary animal fats are demonized and replaced by frankenoils created from the subsidized grains. Still, just because it’s not your fault that you’re not fat, doesn’t mean that you should except that you are fat. Accepting mediocrity is to refuse to strive for greatness, which brings me full circle to the Pussification of America.

Earlier in this piece I mentioned that I am going to do my best to keep things agnostic of your beliefs about morality as long as whatever system you believe in has a basis in evolution. Still, I want to make it clear that my belief is that human achievement is good, and to accept mediocrity for yourself is bad. Regardless of whether you agree with this worldview, it is undeniable that the United States of America was founded on this conception of morality. So anything that serves to make America accept mediocrity rather than strive for greatness is something that results in the pussification of our nation. Look, if you want to accept mediocrity for yourself and have that be sanctioned by the government, there are plenty of other countries in the world. America is supposed to be the one safe haven for ambition. At some point, I may write a blog post on this (hint, government needs to get out of the way on most things, the exceptions being public goods, a bare minimum standard of living social safety net, healthcare because it is not a market good, and education because it is the vehicle by which one learns the basic tools required in order to move from poverty into prosperity), but for now, I’ll try to stay on topic.

The Pussification of America needs to be stopped. It needs to be resisted at every turn. This includes derailing the “fat positive” movement. For all of you fatties who protest, check out Robb Wolf’s site or Mark Sisson’s site, a lot of great free information on both, and both have hugely popular books available in all major bookstores. Now you have access to the right information, and losing weight will be stupid easy for you should you choose to do it. If you don’t choose to do it, well, now that you have good information, you are choosing mediocrity for yourself, and I no longer give a shit if I offend you.

I went out with a couple of non-pickup friends on Friday night, one of whom was talking to this below average twenty-six year old all night (he’s 23). When I asked him how things ended up with her, it became clear to me he was making some rookie mistakes.

Guys, if it isn’t obvious by now, the phone is dead. If you meet girls out and try to call instead of texting, you are shooting yourself in the testicle. The other day I was talking to a friend of mine out in Colorado who is working on some daygame, and he told me that he just had this revelation. It was a shocker to me, because I’d assumed everyone knew this by now, but then when it came up again today I figured someone needed to say it. I was going to qualify the statement by saying that this only goes for women under 30, but in talking with Lance it seems like we’re probably safe generalizing this to a much wider age range.

Unless you are specifically planning to try to pull some David Shade-esque sexual hypnosis over the phone (and you better be advanced as shit before you even attempt that), you should almost never be talking with women you haven’t nailed yet on the phone. And you should be texting girls at the latest the next day (many will text same night and try to get the SNL). If it’s Monday morning and you haven’t talked to a girl you met on Friday night yet, regardless of whether or not Sunday is Easter, 10:1 you’re dealing with a dead lead.

Girls love their dogs, and if you have your profile set up properly, anything that you would normally try to convey via an email is probably already being conveyed through your profile. This is why Rule #1 of online dating is this: If she has a dog, ask her about it. Seems simple, right? Occam’s Razor at its finest.

Honestly, to me it runs almost totally counter to every single “rule” in pickup that I’ve ever heard about projecting value through your first email, but I have had a substantially higher percentage success rate with these types of emails than with any other. Of course, not every girl has a dog, so this doesn’t totally scale perfectly, but lately I’ve been testing new ways to incorporate this type of logic into my online dating game. Will report back as I draw conclusions.

Update – Here are a couple of examples from the last week of what I’m talking about (both really hot and both got positive responses):

Subject: Dog Adventures

Body: <Dog’s Name> is quite the world traveler! What breed is she? – Hammer

Subject: Puppy Love

Body: <Dog Breed> are so adorable! I always wanted a dog growing up, but my mom and sister were allergic. How old is she?

Text message snippet from a conversation I had with an OkCupid girl I met last week:

Hammer: Little aj = pain in the butt

AJ: What??

Hammer: All this being sick… Very inconvenient

AJ: I know im sorry

Hammer: So selfish of you to put your health ahead of me. Tisk tisk

AJ: O really? Wow! haha

Hammer: Well make sure you get a good night’s sleep tonight, need you healthy for the weekend

AJ: Dude you leave bruises and marks on me!

Hammer: Badges of honor

AJ: To some extent!

For close to a year and a half now, the majority of my reading has shifted away from game and toward health and poker. Not to say that I’m not interested in game and won’t continue writing about it, but I wanted to put together my thoughts on health as they currently stand (they’ve evolved a lot since I first started forming opinions on the subject).

High level Understanding:

Health, as I define it, is the absence of disease. The implication here is that we are all born with perfect health, and if we live within our evolutionary experience, we will stay that way. Our health is relatively robust, so acute deviations from our evolutionary experience are generally well tolerated, but for the vast majority of people, chronic deviations from this template cause problems, and the longer they chronically deviate without correcting and letting things heal, the more likely they are to develop problems.

With very few exceptions, nearly all health problems are caused by a poor diet. Our resistance to a poor diet can be improved by improving our sleep length and quality, getting adequate direct sunlight, and exercising, but with a perfect diet these areas are substantially less important for maintaining perfect health.

There’s No Such Thing as a Macronutrient

Dr. Kurt Harris was the first one I saw state this in his posts here and here, and man how true it is. We need to stop thinking about fats, and start thinking about healthy, natural fats as compared to hydrogenated seed oils. We need to stop thinking about carbohydrates, and start thinking about glucose and fructose, and what baddies the whole food source you’re getting them from come with, i.e. grain lectins, phytoestrogens, etc.

Drilling Down: Cancer

During any cell replication, there is a non-zero probability that a genetic mutation will occur, and a subset of these genetic mutations will be cancerous.

In a healthy person, there is a normal amount of cell turnover, and thus a moderate amount of genetic mutation, but for each of these mutations there is a near 1 probability that apoptosis will cause any mutated cells to self destruct preventing any cancerous ones from spreading.

In an unhealthy person, the elevated level of inflammation causes an increase in cell turnover and thus cell replication, increasing the total number of mutations and thus cancerous mutations in the body. An increased number of mutations increases the likelihood of that .00000001 chance that one slips through the cracks. It also has the effect of potentially taking apoptosis offline to some degree, particularly in the case of hyperinsulinemia (one mechanism by which this may occur is through suppression of retinoic acid production). So an inflamed person is both producing more cancerous cells and inhibiting his ability to deal with those cancerous cells, thus massively increasing the likelihood of cancer occuring.

Smoking causes cancer by the same above mechanism. It damages cells in the body, particularly the lungs and throat, increasing cell turnover. However, since it doesn’t do anything on the back end that would inhibit apoptosis, if you eat a healthy diet and smoke it is very unlikely that you will get cancer. This is why a traditional culture like the Kitavans don’t get cancer despite smoking like chimneys.

Many if not most modern cancers can be treated effectively with a ketogenic diet. While some cancers are able to convert glutamine into glutamate and use it for energy by running it through the TCA cycle, most modern cancers require glucose. Starving them of glucose will cause them to stop spreading and start dying. It will also help bring apoptosis in the body back online, accelerating this process.

Drilling Down: Autoimmunity, Psychiatric Problems and Allergies

Autoimmune disease and allergies start with a leaky gut and psych problems start with a leaky brain. If the gut is healthy, large plant proteins (see: toxins evolved by the plants to prevent their seeds from being eaten) are not making it through the intestinal barrier without first being broken up into their free amino acids. Same goes for the blood-brain barrier.

A leaky gut/brain is caused by a disregulation of the protein zonulin. Zonulin is responsible for regulating the tight junctions between cells in the intestinal barrier and the blood-brain barrier, and when zonulin is overproduced, these tight junctions let large particles in. I don’t know the mechanism by which this occurs, but it is pretty clear that grain lectins in particular cause this disregulation of zonulin and thus permeable barriers.

Once in the bloodstream, many of these plant proteins get attacked by the immune system as foreign invaders. However, some of them have very similar amino acid profiles to proteins in our body, and so in many cases as a result of producing antibodies to the plant proteins our own tissues will get attacked. For example, WGA (wheat germ agglutinin) looks very similar to pancreatic beta cells, and in someone with Type I Diabetes, if it is caught early enough and the appropriate dietary intervention is implemented, the disease process can be reversed and pancreatic function can be restored.

The proper dietary intervention for autoimmunity, allergies and psych problems is a strict removal of all grains, legumes, dairy (mostly casein containing dairy, milk fats are fine) and nightshades for a certain period of time. This time period will vary from person to person, and can be as short as a few weeks or as long as a couple of years before the gut is healed and the disease process is reversed. Once the disease is reversed, most tissues will go back to normal, but some may be permanently damaged.

Drilling Down: Obesity

Fat tissue in the body is very tightly regulated. This regulation occurs primarily in the hypothalamus, not in the fat tissue as Gary Taubes has suggested. We can call this regulating mechanism the adipostat, similar to a thermostat except for adipose tissue instead of temperature. Insulin resistance does not cause obesity, leptin resistance does. In the cases where insulin resistance occurs, it occurs downstream of leptin resistance. However, there are some cases in which a person can be overweight but not insulin resistant. Further, injecting leptin into the brain of an overweight or obese person would almost assuredly cause them to seemingly spontaneously lose weight (has only been tested in animal models) despite insulin resistance.

For a given leptin sensitivity, there is a tight range that the body will keep fat and thus weight in. It’s like a house that has a heater and an air conditioner, and regardless of what the conditions are outside the temperature inside will stay within a tight range of the temperature set on the thermostat. This is why people who are lean will stay lean in trials where they are forced to overeat to a disgusting degree. This is also why overweight individuals can maintain basically the same weight under short term overfeeding conditions as well, despite already having leptin sensitivity issues.

The adipostat breaks when leptin resistance occurs. I don’t totally understand the biochemical mechanism by which leptin resistance occurs, but it probably starts with inflammation, and likely particularly inflammation in the liver. It is most closely associated with fructose, hydrogenated seed oils and grain lectins. Leptin is secreted by the fat mass, and when a person is leptin resistant, they have a very high level of blood leptin but very little of it is getting into the hypothalamus.

The most effective way to lose weight will vary from person to person, but it will invariably involve a resetting of this adipostat. In someone who is insulin resistant, they probably are going to have the best results on ketogenic diet. For someone who is not insulin resistant, they will probably lose weight equally as fast independent of macronutrient ratios and calories as long as they are getting all of their calories from safe foods that do not cause and perpetuate leptin resistance. “Safe” carb sources can include root vegetables and tubers, and for many people white rice.

Drilling Down: Heart Disease

Not too much to explain on this one, since heart disease is so closely associated with obesity. Heart disease is caused by systemic inflammation, and in particular vascular inflammation. Dietary causes are the same as those for obesity, which is why they are so closely linked.

Dietary saturated fat does not cause heart disease. Saturated fat is in no way nefarious. Same for cholesterol. There is no reason to believe that for a healthy person, any substance that the body produces is problematic in the diet. This includes all fats that the body can produce via lipolysis, as well as glucose, among other things. Still, that is not to say that a person who is inflamed and insulin resistant is not going to have problems tolerating dietary glucose.

Aging

At this point, I have very little reason to believe that most of the disease processes associated with aging are actually caused by aging. Rather, the vast majority of them, including balding, vision loss, fattening, muscle loss, heart disease, cancer, etc. are all product of lifestyle choices catching up to you. If you keep poisoning your body, it will eventually catch up to you. For some people this happens in the womb, for others it happens in their 30s, but the causal mechanisms are the same and are not due to the aging process itself. There *may* be a point where your body’s telomeres become too short after a certain number of replications that will vary from person to person, and in these cases health will deteriorate rapidly. This is speculative because the research is still pretty fuzzy, and also it’s not something that I’ve focused in on much myself. If this is true, the best way to push that point out is to keep systemic inflammation at a minimum throughout your life. Alternatively, there may be an age beyond which if a human is still alive and in good health, the probability of death in any given year is flat. So while for most of us, after the age of 30 or so, the probability of dying increases every year, but there may be a point where it flattens out, i.e. The probability of dying within the next 365 days is the same if you’re 96,  107 or 115.

The J-Curve

When you read about nutrition, a concept you will often come across is the concept of essential nutrients. By definition, these are the nutrients that must be in your diet because your body cannot create them, but does need them for proper functioning. For example, palmitic acid, a saturated fatty acid, is not an essential nutrient despite the fact that the body needs it, because your body can make it, but omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids are essential nutrients, because the body cannot make them. Same goes for vitamin c, all minerals, and many other dietary substances.

One characteristic that all essential nutrients share, that non-essential nutrients do not, is that you can plot what is known as a J-Curve with them. In this curve, you have mortality/disease on the y-axis and the nutrient on the x-axis, and what you see is that up to a point, mortality goes down as the amount of this nutrient in the diet goes up, but after a point there are usually negative effects of that nutrient in the diet. This is why linoleic acid is an essential nutrient, without which we’d die, but excess linoleic acid causes all kinds of problems, particularly if it throws off the ratio of omega-6/omega-3 fatty acids in the diet.

Perfect Health

For someone who is healthy and has an intact gut lining, the best way to stay that way is to eat a diet that does not cause any of the above issues. I believe the templates provided by the Perfect Health Diet or the Weston A. Price Foundation are the least restrictive templates that a healthy person can use and stay that way indefinitely. An unhealthy individual may require more restrictive intervention to reverse disease processes, but these diets are a good place to start. Certain deviations from those plans can be tolerated by healthy individuals as long as they are not chronic, but if any problems do pop up in these meanderings, strict adherence for a certain amount of time is recommended to correct them.

If you are interested in eating this way, these recipe links are a good place to start:

Perfect Health Diet Recipes

Free the Animal Recipes

Mark’s Daily Apple Recipes

Anthony is a great guy. I sometimes wonder why he feels the need to come off so confrontational in his written work, as when you talk to him in person he represents a complete 180 from his online persona. Not that he doesn’t hold the same beliefs, rather that the tone of how he expresses them is much less confrontational in person as compared to on his blog. Enter this post on rape. I have a number of criticisms of this post, two of which I want to focus on here.

Before I begin though, I want to assert that Anthony is creating a false dichotomy between sexual assault and rape. These are one in the same, and to try to define rape as anything other than sexual assault is just plain wrong. According to wordnet, rape (the verb) means to “force (someone) to have sex against their will,” and (the noun) “the crime of forcing a woman to submit to sexual intercourse against her will.” I understand where he is coming from in terms of a sexual situation where a woman’s lower brain chooses to accept a man’s advances before her conscious mind catches up, forcing the conscious brain to backwards rationalize the situation and feel overtaken despite emotional consent. Still, our society does not allow you to redefine a word to suit your purpose and then attack other people for “misusing” the accepted definition. You’re better off creating your own word, or using a word with a different meaning, like “ravage.”

The first point that I want to address is Anthony’s statement that he thinks that “consent ends the minute a woman purposefully and willingly isolates herself with a man she is attracted to.” There is an assumption made by this statement that totally ignores the differences between men and women. That assumption is that a woman’s truth is the same as a man’s. That she is capable of making choices for herself now that will be predicated on how she will feel ten minutes from now. From The Way of the Superior Man, Chapter 16:

“Keeping your word” is a masculine trait, in men or women. A person with a feminine essence may not keep her word, yet it is not exactly “lying.” In the feminine reality, words and facts take a second place to emotions and the shifting moods of relationship.

The result of this is that just because a woman consents to sex when she isolates herself with you, doesn’t mean that she is consenting to sex when you try to take off her panties. There are a number of reasons for this, and I suppose esteem may be one of them. She lacks esteem, and as a result she fears being judged for her choice to have sex with you. Still, it’s by no means the only one. For example, between her coming into your apartment and you trying to get her naked, you could fuck shit up.  So while she may have been attracted to you when she made the decision, she may not be attracted to you in the moment that she’s giving  you last minute resistance. Now listen, any man of esteem who is faced with this situation, including Hank Reardon and Howard Roark, would stop right there and let her leave. A man of integrity has no interest in fucking a woman who doesn’t value him. Of course, the situations that Ayn Rand wrote about in her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are not the situation I’m describing, which is why these characters went through with the “rape” rather than stopping as they would in the former situation where they fucked up and the woman is no longer attracted to them.

Yet assuming that all people are rational actors of integrity is a false assumption. In Rand’s terminology, most people are “looters.” They steal, they murder, they lie, they rape. It is hypocritical to attack government for ruling by force of the gun while allowing yourself the freedom to fuck an unwilling partner by force of muscle might.

The proper role of government is to protect the right to life, liberty and property, primarily from looters. It is a contract that we as a collective choose to enter into for this purpose. And we choose to give government the power to do this by the force of the gun. Anthony calls himself a “Declarationist,” but I think he makes some very poor judgments about what Jefferson intended in the Declaration of Independence. This is for another post, as it’s been quite a while since I’ve read my Rousseau and Locke, but I think it’s safe to assume that when a country is founded on with the chant of “No taxation without representation,” they do not mean that it is illegal for the government to enforce an income tax.

I would agree with Anthony that our government has run astray in many areas, and this probably includes rape legistlation, but that does not mean that all situations in which a woman enters into isolation with a man she is attracted to, she has consented to sex, and the government has no place using its might to punish a man for raping her. Our social contract with government is such that vigilantism is unacceptable in our society, and that’s the way I like it. If Anthony or anyone else raped my sister, I would expect the government to step in and punish him for me, creating an adequate deterrent for this looter behavior and hopefully preventing it from happening to my future daughter if when she gets herself in that situation.

The second point I wanted to make is much simpler. Anthony says of rape, “It’s proper usage should be to depict sex in its proper form, as an act of violent force.” Maybe his ideal sexual situation is one in which a woman resists until the very last second and he has to force his cock inside her, but to say that this is sex’s proper form assumes that this is everyone’s ideal, or that an ideal man should value this type of sex over all others. Well, I guess I’m not ideal then, because I much prefer when a woman lusts for my cock. I’ve said this before, but I want a woman to look at my cock like she has a disease and my cum is the antidote. I want her to beg me to fuck her. To be so overwhelmed with lust that I can’t get it inside her fast enough.

Once in isolation with a woman, any resistance is totally unattractive to me. First, it screams lack of esteem, which is inherently unattractive. Second, it represents a lack of appreciation for what I am offering her. As I said, a man of integrity would never fuck a woman who was not attracted to him. What could be a more obvious indication that you are either a) insecure or b) not attracted to me than you preventing me from removing your panties and sticking my cock inside you?

I was appalled this morning, moreso than I’ve been in years. More specifically, I haven’t been so offended since the first time I saw a hot chick wearing Uggs, squashing any chance at a slow roaster that may have been brewing.

Getting out of the Subway on the way to work, I saw a moderately hot chick wearing these crimes against humanity. I probably wouldn’t have even noticed except that she was clumpity clumping along like she was a fucking horse.

Moon Boots are atrocious. Whoever designed them should be brought up on Geneva Convention charges, then sent to the most hardcore, ass-pound-in-the-shower prison you can find.

As men, we must stand united behind the cause of stopping the spread of this eye burning abomination. Women all over the world must know that no man is desperate enough to fuck a woman who would be caught dead in these. That is all.