“UN says 6 million North Koreans are in urgent need of international food assistance”

 

This is an impossible situation. It is a feature of Communist regimes with brainwashed populations that the people will not revolt (at least not on a large scale/successfully) even if they are starving, even if people start dying en masse -- they didn't during the Holodomor, they didn't during the Great Leap Forward, and they didn't during the 1995-8 North Korean famine. We have no choice but to feed them; not doing so will not cause the regime to fall, it will cause millions to die. At the same time, however, we should have extricated ourselves from this situation long ago by invading the country. Probably would have been a better place to go into than Iraq/Afghanistan.

Free Will Does Not Exist

In a defense of free will that falls flat, William Egginton says the following:

 

“The point to stress, however, is that this catalog [of our past events] is not even legible in theory, for to be known it assumes a kind of knower unconstrained by time and space, a knower who could be present from every possible perspective at every possible deciding moment in an agent’s history and prehistory. Such a knower, of course, could only be something along the lines of what the monotheistic traditions call God.”

                                                                            

Egginton assumes that all past events that have ever occurred are factored into the decisions we make, and thus, absent a God, we have no way of determining what a person will do at any given moment. The first part of this statement is certainly true, but we don’t need to have a “God” to uncover and untangle the relationships between past events that determine our present mental states, we just need a machine capable of examining the brain at a sufficiently deep level, for every neuron is in its current position because of past events. There is no reason such a technology could not be built. Free will does not exist.

 

The Prosperous Time: China 2013

The Prosperous Time: China 2013

 

Part 1

The Near Future

 

The First Long-Lost Friend

A month is gone. I mean, a whole month is gone, it’s just vanished. Usually January is followed by February, which precedes March, which comes before April, and so on, but now it’s different, now March comes after January, now February is April, it’s skipped a month.

         I said to Fang Caodi, forget it, don’t go looking for it, it’s not worth it, life is short and bitter, just live it well.

          A man of greater ability would not have been able to convince him. But to tell you the truth, if you really wanted to find that lost month, Fang Caodi would be the man for the job. Throughout his life, he has had many months disappear, or perhaps have their existence be reduced to non-existence – his experiences resemble a strand of fragments, unable to be organized into stories. He appears at odd times in odd places, or, many years after having seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, he returns triumphantly from the brink of eternity at some unexpected hour. Such a person might be likely to do things that are behind the times, such as going to find a missing month.

          I hadn’t noticed its disappearance at first, and despite other people saying it had indeed vanished, I am of a skeptical sort. Every day, I read the papers, go on news websites, and watch China Central Television and Phoenix Satellite Television, and so I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable person when it comes to these kinds of things. Could such a major event so easily slip under my nose? I trust myself, my understanding, my intelligence, and my ability to make independent judgments.

          On the afternoon of February 17, I had left home and, as part of my daily routine, was walking towards the Pacific Century Place Starbucks when someone suddenly ran in front of me and shouted with a gasp, “Teacher Chen, Teacher Chen! A month is gone! It’s been two years!”

          He was wearing an unassuming baseball cap; I couldn’t make him out.

          “Fang Caodi, Fang Caodi.” He said his name twice and took off his hat, revealing a bald head and a ponytail tied with a rubber band.

          “You’ve started calling me ‘teacher’ now too?”

          With an air of importance, he added, “A month is gone! Teacher Chen, Teacher Chen, what do we do? What do we do?”

          “It’s not just a month that’s gone now, is it?”

“No, no. Teacher Chen, Teacher Chen, a month is missing, you know too! What do we do?”

Speaking with this man is tiring indeed. “When did you get back to Beijing?”

He sneezed. I gave him a business card: “Don’t get sick. It’s colder now, don’t go running around like this anymore. Let’s meet up later – my phone number and e-mail address are on the front.”

He put his cap back on and took the card. “We work well together; we’ll find it.”

          It was only as I watched him run off in the direction of the foreign embassies that I realized he wasn’t exercising.

He was running somewhere.

 

 

Pay me $5,000 and I’ll translate the rest of it. Only half-joking.

 

Want to read the 诗经 (Book of Songs/Classic of Poetry) in Latin?

Head right here, my friend.

Genetics, culture, and success

Barbados is a country that's 80% black but that has one of the highest literacy rates in the world and one of its lowest crime rates (on par with Japan). Not coincidentally, the smartest black people by far I met in Beijing were Barbadian*. Yet these blacks are the descendents of African slaves brought over en masse from Ghana and Nigeria. This suggests to me that culture is far more important than genetics in determining success of countries and populations.

 

*One of them, having studied Chinese for a mere two years, was getting an engineering degree from a Chinese university. His curriculum was entirely in Chinese. This is, needless to say, extremely impressive.

Genetics/practice in developing high-level skill

Interesting post here. Comments are good too; check this one out:

 

This is also seen in the shows about various elite military units. The "selection" process isn't really about training. It's about whittling down 125 men to the 13 genetic and psychological freaks that possess the required skills.

THEN the training begins.

This was hammered home in a different TV special that demonstrated the ability of various special forces members to control core body temperature in extreme environments. They soaked one in ice water for an hour, and baked another under heat lamps. Environments that would cripple a normal person in 10 minutes had no detectable impact on performance after an hour of exposure.

And, different specialists were selected for different abilities. The pilot couldn't endure the apoxia, the ranger couldn't handle the disorientation of spinning maneuvers.

In other words, the people who make the news, in either sport or combat, are not like you. No amount of training will ever get you there.

Beijing Subway

Spent some time studying the subway today. Two observations:

                                                                   

*The conductor does nothing but push a lever to make the train go forward. He also gets out of the train at every stop to make sure no one is crushed in the doors. Everything else is done automatically.

*The doors open for exactly 20 seconds at every stop, an amount of time longer than it feels.

 

The Beijing Subway is more technologically advanced and much cleaner than the New York City Subway, but it lacks its character. In particular, no one plays music, sings, or performs, with the exception of some singing beggars you’ll come across every so often. (They’re not very good, though.)

Languages By GDP

Came across a very interesting chart over here:

 

 

“This short article provides one picture of the economic significance of different languages, with a breakdown of the percentages of world GDP by language. Not only does it show the current breakdown, but it also provides data for the years 1975 to 2002 to show modern trends. The most notable feature is the steady rise of Chinese and slow relative decline of Japanese and most European languages. Korean and Indic languages also show growth over that period, though slower than Chinese.”

 

Now here’s the same chart over the period 2003-2010 (projected from 2003):

 

 

More current data can be found here:

 

Total GDP per language area in 2008 in billion US dollars at market exchange rates (as a % of world GDP in parenthesis) >> population in 2008 (UN figures for the countries and territories making up each language area, not the actual number of speakers) :

 

1- English: 19,837+ (32.6%+) >> 481.7 million+

2- Chinese: 5,210 (8.6%) >> 1,358.1 million

3- Japanese: 4,924 (8.1%) >> 127.2 million

4- German: 4,504 (7.4%) >> 96.4 million

5- Spanish: 4,364 (7.2%) >> 416.8 million

6- French: 4,097 (6.7%) >> 426.7 million

7- Italian: 2,332 (3.8%) >> 60.3 million

8- Russian: 1,959 (3.2%) >> 189.0 million

9- Arabic: 1,914 (3.1%) >> 342.1 million

10- Portuguese: 1,913 (3.1%) >> 249.2 million

11- Dutch: 1,267 (2.1%) >> 24.6 million

12- Korean: 973 (1.6%) >> 72.2 million

13- Malay-Indonesian: 931 (1.5%) >> 263.7 million

14- Turkish: 729 (1.2%) >> 71.5 million

15- Hindi-Urdu: 570 (0.9%) >> 720.8 million

 

And perhaps the most interesting of all, GDP by number of speakers:

 

GDP per capita per language area (at market exchange rates):

Dutch: 51,466 US dollars

German: 46,703

Japanese: 38,722

Italian: 38,699

Korean: 13,472

Spanish: 10,471

Russian: 10,365

Turkish: 10,200

French: 9,602

Portuguese: 7,676

Arabic: 5,596

Chinese: 3,836

Malay-Indonesian: 3,530

Hindi-Urdu: 791

 

I’ve been saying all along that the Netherlands was awesome. Sort of surprised to see Italian so high up, though.

China's First Internet Gaming Law / 中国第一部网游专项法规实施

中国第一部网游专项法 规实施 各方详解四大看点

Saw this on CCTV this morning, the caption, of course, being "保护未成年人是核心" (protecting the children is the core [of the law]). What will the law do? A lot of good stuff:

1. People are going to be required to provide their real names (backed up by ID) when gaming.
2. Forced player killing is now banned, due to fears that killing other players in video games will lead to killing other people in real life. ()
3. New restrictions on online markets.
4. You have to have at least 10,000,000 yuan in registered capital to be a gaming company. The point here is to reduce the number of online games. If there are only big companies, the games are easier to control.

Whether this law can be enforced effectively/will have an effect is questionable, but it reveals the government's increasing eagerness to control the internet. "Protecting the children" my ass.

More Bible Fun

Anyone read Judges 19:1-30 lately? I mean, reading the Old Testament every Saturday kinda steels you to some of the more "inappropriate" stories, but I was nevertheless surprised to stumble upon this, which I had somehow missed. Basically, here's what happens:

A Levite (a member of a certain Jewish tribe) goes and gets married to this woman in Bethlehem. She ditches him (they don't say why) and goes back to her dad's house, with the guy in hot pursuit. He stays at the dad's house for a while, eating and drinking, and then starts off on the journey to bring her back to his place. They stop off at a town along the way, where a nice old man lets them stay at his house. Then, in a scene strongly reminiscent of the attempt at gay gang rape in Genesis 19, a mob surrounds the house and demands the man come out (so that they can anally rape him). Instead, the old man, like Lot, offers his virgin daughter and the Levite's wife up to be raped. The Levite then gets fed up and gives the relentless mob his wife (I assume she consented), whom they proceed to rape all night long. She dies on his doorstep the next morning. He takes the body back to his house, where he dismembers it and sends a piece to each tribe of Israel, as a reminder of how terrible things have gotten in the country.

This is almost as fun as the time where Moses kills all men and women in the city and gets the Israelites to take the little girls as virgins "for themselves" (yeah, I wonder what that means...). Oh, and then they sacrifice some of them to God. Sweet.

How To Keep A New Year's Resolution, And Also Informational Content

I've figured it out -- life. How stuff works. How you can use a program like this not only to do well in school and master Chinese, but also to run your life and brainwash yourself. Here's how:

Have you ever read a really good, moving book, movie, or motivational speech? You felt really good about yourself for a few days afterward, resolved to change your ways, but inevitably failed -- am I right, or am I right? (Right. In fact, I'm always right -- get used to it.) Why? Because the enthusiasm faded away. But if you've got an SRS program to remind you of why you felt motivated in the first place, then everything's chill, right? Theoretically, you can maintain a consistent level of motivation all the time, making permanent change inevitable. SRS the quotes, mister! You can SRS quotes! SRS images, moving content, audio! Whatever the hell you want! It's your life -- do what the shit you want with it. Just like you do with Chinese -- remind yourself not of words but of ideas. Like advertising. But for good things.

And the cooler thing is, you can do the same thing with arguments or facts. Want to become a debate master? Just memorize your arguments and your facts -- most debates are just repetitions of old debates anyway. The winner is simply he who's memorized the most steps. (The same with chess; the best players are those who've studied the most old games.) You forget stuff, but you don't have to -- not with your brain in a file on your desktop, you don't! And interestingly, this way, you won't be as easily able to brainwash, because when you caught up in a whole new set of facts or theories or a certain school of thought, you'll always have the other ideas in your SRS to serve as a buffer, keeping you safely away from radicalism and firmly anchored to reality. You'll become a composite of ideas, rather than a parrot of one. I mean, you'll have all the facts at your disposal! You can make your own ideas with them even after you've long forgetten the original arguments! Isn't that cool?!

Sorry, got a bit sidetracked there -- the important point is that we humans only have a limited time here on earth, so we've got to take in as much shit as possible. This is not a trade-off situation here: this is fucking zero-sum, my friend. You waste time watching no-content cartoons, you simply loose time. Boom. Gone. Never gone get it back. It is striking how much time we waste when we could be absorbing information -- while walking (put some informational content on your MP3 player to absorb), while watching TV (watch something fun and at least somewhat informative -- military channel's my pick), and even SRSing (maximize your time -- you're doing Chinese sentences, so make those sentences facts about 70s pop stars; learn about them and Chinese at the same time!).

Maximize. Beat the boss. Win the game.

Regarding That Chinese Stuff Back There

I do want to start writing in Chinese, but Blogger, blocked in China, is not the suitable platform, especially as I will be writing in simplified Chinese. So expect to see more posts from here:

http://arieh.blog.sohu.com/

I will continue to post here in English.

Yours,
Me

你好！

对不起，更多的是我发现，汉语成了我的友语，我的爱语，本来只是某一种语言，只是课的内容，但是怎么可能还算是这样呢？我的生活是汉语，我的媒体是汉语，我的初恋是汉语，我就是汉语。我用汉语来写下来我最深的感觉！我想不到一个不会说不会写中文的我。我如何能忘记她，我的爱？怎么会忘记我写过的情书呢？想不到，我想不到啊。。。

bye

I've been doing some thinking lately. A lot of thinking. About how we don't get choose the language we were born with. about how we are so willing to let ourselves be its slaves. About how this is unacceptable, and about how this is not freedom. if i want to be free, really Free, i have to choose the language i speak and write. my choice.my goddamn choice.

not to say i dont like english i like it. but it was forced on me.i had no say.i might have picked english anyway but i might have not

so im going to write in chinese now,.
why mostly for this reason
everything i do is already chinese
mightaswellstartwritingmybloginchinese
canigomorethanthis
isitpossible
yes
好

---

好玩贺卡等你发，邮箱贺卡全新上线！

Your New Favourite Band(s): In Chinese! (Awesome Chinese Music! Keep Reading!)

No good Chinese music, right? It's all stupid love ballads, right? Nothing to listen to while you're studying nearly 17/7 and are unwilling to listen to English music, right? Wrong. Trust me, dude, you're wrong. Well, not about the stupid love ballads: there are a lot of those, and I've actually found that if you force yourself to listen to them, they start to grow on you*. But see, you don't have to force yourself to listen to crap, because there is awesome Chinese music out there: awesome, creative, weird, inspiring, original, sublime, etc: you simply haven't found it yet. You're not looking, and what's worse, you're just making excuses to listen to your sweet, sweet, Backstreet Boys. So where is it, you ask? Hey! Don't talk to me like that! Be patient and it'll come to you!

Haha, I'm kidding. (Couldn't you tell?) Here are some fantastic bands, followed by some neat tracks to get you started:

二手玫瑰 (Secondhand Rose): My favorite of all on the list. Their music is a combination of traditional Chinese crosstalk-like banter and modern rock tunes, with a whole bunch of weird sound effects (and occasionally throat singing – I've heard kids and choirs singing a few times too) and offbeat instrumental flairs thrown in. Rather unusual, but the singer's voice rocks those tones like you wouldn't believe – from one note to the next with such sharpness it's breathtaking. (At least to me. I dunno if you guys get turned on by stuff like this.) It's like he's singing Beijing opera with a backing band. What's more, a lot of the lyrics are actually pretty funny and very, very sharp. And tremendously original: there are very few bands as original/crazy as these guys. (Well, good crazy: there are plenty of bands that are crazy but just suck. Like this one.)

What should you start with? Well, basically all of their songs are worth a listen. (And I really do mean that; there are no filler tracks.) But first, a word of caution: a lot of them start off kind of slow or silly, but then get really deep and plain freaking nuts towards the end. (坚持就是胜利!) And most change so quickly from one melody/genre to the next that's it's often hard to find continuity.
Take 公益歌曲; it's a lighthearted, summer beat at first, but they throw in these Nirvana-like riffs every 30 seconds or so, and it's got this killer, epic finish.
娱乐江湖 is in the same vein, but it's even better. Probably my favorite song of theirs, actually. If you're impatient, skip to 3:20 for the good stuff.
野史 is a little too weird, but it gets nice at the end, almost like System of a Down.
因为所以 is nice; they do this cool bagpipe thing.
允许部分艺术家先富起来 is badass. Listen to it.
春天的故事 is nice, real slow, and beautiful.
命运 is just real cool.
A song that I’m not particularly fond of is 伎俩, but it's got the lead singer's voice at its best.
起飞 is kooky.

扭曲的机器 (Twisted Machine) is a heavy metal band. It's not exactly my cup of tea, but there aren't many Chinese bands like these guys, so they're worth a mention. Scratch that; these guys are great.
别惹我 is sick. Badass-action-movie-soundtrack sick.
存在的意义 is pretty cool, and not quite as heavy as 别惹我.
镜子 is similar, real smooth. Can't really put in the same genre as 别惹我.
理想的背后 is another sick, sick song. I would enjoy it more if its lyrics were vehemently anti-American. (I'm actually serious about that; for some reason, some songs just sound better as anti-government pieces.)
我快不会照你们说的去做 actually is an anti-establishment song. It's not really so good, but I'm putting it on the list because it's really interesting to hear songs like this from a *PRC* band. (Nothing explicitly anti-China, though.)
TV秀 is another song with lyrics that I'm sure try the patience of the Chinese government. It is, however, actually a pretty sweet song.

The band 刺猬 (Hedgehog) got me really excited, because they play beautifully, but then I heard the lead singer sing. Ugh. At the very least, they've got some brilliant opening riffs.
春天来了's is fantastic, end-of-the-world-grade material. Real nostalgic feel.
电影 is so light and fragile, so lovely – mmm!
They have quite a few songs in English, too, so if you're into English music, give that a try.

Carsick Cars. Chill alternative stuff. They're like China's Arcade Fire. I mean, I don’t actually like Arcade Fire, but they're all low-fi and stuff; I'm probably just not cultured enough. Anyway, this isn't my favorite type of music, but I really do like 广场, one hell of an epic song.

The album 谁是崔健; no, not a band, but it's got a bunch of really awesome songs, so go out and get it.
The first 10 seconds or so of 浪子归 are incredible; the rest are decent, with the exception of this really neat electrobeat at 2:20.
一无所有 is the best song on the album by far. Yes, that good.

The Hero soundtrack – some insane instrumental pieces on that one. No lyrics, but feel free to add your own.

Random, neat tracks I've discovered: 新长征路上的摇滚 (反光镜乐队 – awesome punk feel), 不是我不明白 (挂在盒子上 – electronic riot grrl!), 狐狸 (万晓利 – simply a sick, sick song), and 机器猫 (新裤子 – again, just a really neat song).

For the first few weeks of listening exclusively to Chinese music, I put up with Jay Chou, J.J. Lin, S.H.E., 邓丽君, 胡彦斌, etc. Alright, I shouldn't say “put up”; they're all pretty good, actually. Jay Chou is magnificently talented, 邓丽君 is obviously delightful, and 胡彦斌 has...well, some awesome socialist songs. But you have to go beyond the pop surface, because there is actually a lot behind it.

Now where to get them? Well, if you're in mainland China, get yourself straight to the incredible, thank-god-for-unlimited-legal-free-downloadable-nondrm'd-music Google Music. If you're not, well, sucks to be you. Try Baidu, because you're almost certainly not going to find physical CDs in the West (or anywhere else, for that matter). Bittorrent should have them too, if you want to break the law.

P.S. I'm just covering rock/metal/alternative music here. I highly recommend instrumental classical music, which, again, you can your own lyrics to. Give 成公亮 a go.

*Who can't help liking 姑娘我爱你? Srsly.

Swordsmanship

Have you guys seen the movie Hero? You know the scene where the emperor looks at the character painted by the best fighter of them all and goes, “Where’s the swordsmanship in that?” And then later he looks at it and finally gets it? You remember that scene? It's so plain, the character. So plain. Looks like it was made by someone with no skill at all. The artist has mastered the sword, the brush, so flawlessly that he unwilling to use it. He has reached a stage of such utter perfection that he is beyond compare entirely. A state so profound that he realizes its purposelessness. Why?

You know, life is a *lot* like this. A lot. I'm not trying to be really deep or anything, I'm just pointing out that things really work like this. Think about it.

Chinese Girl Texts Me (In English): "Is 2012 The End Of The World?"

I swear I'm not making this up. I suppose I should feel honored to be asked such a deep question; to them, I am the all-knowing god, the colossus standing proudly astride their provincial little world, etc. (Sort of like this awesome dude and his non-existent Korean skills.) Anyway, without further ado:

april: Is 2012 the end of the world? [she usually asks in chinese; english means it's an Extra Important™ question]
me: 哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈 [hahaha]
april:你是笑我傻吗？我宿舍的人一直在说这个事，我本来不信，但现在觉得好恐怖啊！ [are you laughing 'cuz i'm stupid? the people in my dorm keep talking about it, i didn't believe them at first, but now i'm getting really freaked out]
me: 对不起，回答是否定的，但需要一个解释，到我们见面时再说吧 [sorry, the answer is no, but this requires an explanation, we'll talk when we meet next]
april: 那一定给我好的解释。 [then you better give me a good explanation!]
me: 别着急，这个我很有研究 [don't worry, i have a lot of experience in this area]
april: 那好啊！幸亏你有研究，我都快被我们宿舍的人弄疯了。[that's good, thankfully you know about it, i’m being driven crazy by my roommates]

Oh, and in case you don't know what she's referring to, have a look at this.

Joke I Heard On Chinese TV

There's a school, right? And there's an Egyptian student and an Indian student in the same class. They start talking about their countries' ancient civilizations. The Egyptian goes to the Indian, hey, back in my country I was at the pyramids, and I found buried in the ground phone cables! This proves that Egypt invented the telephone first.

The Indian goes, well, I was chilling by the Indus river valley, and I dug a hole and found nothing.

The Egyptian retorts, ha!, you see, this proves the superiority of Egypt!

The Indian replies, no, it proves that India was the first to invent wireless!

Some More Thoughts

Why are you in China if you're gonna sit around and speak Indonesian all day?! Jesus Christ...

Why do we feel free to give kids amphetamine but not marijuana?

I got this bread thing with dates in it. Whole dates. With the large seeds still in them. I had to throw it out, because it was basically literally inedible. (It was also disgusting.) I can't imagine who came up with that brilliant idea...

How To Get Any Girl You Want

I can't keep the ladies off of me. Extraordinarily, jaw-droppingly beautiful Chinese girl, five minutes after meeting me, goes "do you have a girlfriend?" I say no, she says "let's go to karaoke. But first, we have to get drunk." What do I do in this situation? And why am I in it in the first place?

It's all in the voice. I'm incredibly good-looking, of course, but the main thing is the voice. This explains it all:

Even most girls don’t consciously realize the POWER of the male voice. They don’t say “wow, this guy has such a hot voice”, instead they say, “wow, THERE’S JUST SOMETHING ABOUT HIM that TURNS ME ON”. In fact they’ll even rationalize it with other things, just because they have to have some reason to explain how HORNY they are whenever this guy speaks, and, like I said, most people are unconscious to the power of the voice.

I’ve known guys. Who look pretty average or even below average. But when they open their mouths… BANG. One, two, three… K.O.! There’s a famous saying, “the word is more powerful than the sword”, well this is where that saying came from.

Oh, guys have some idea about the power of the word, alright. But they focus on the wrong aspect. Guys worry about saying THE RIGHT THING… there is no such thing. That’s ridiculous if you think about it for just a moment: the idea that if he just says THE RIGHT THING, a guy can seduce a girl? Like she’s a robot or something? Yeah whatever. No, there is no “right thing” and no “wrong thing”. The semantics are utterly irrelevant when boy meets girl, it’s how the words are said. It’s the VOICE. The TONALITY. The VOLUME. The AUTHORITY. As far as the words themselves are concerned, a guy with a SEXY VOICE could introduce himself by saying, “Hi I’m a paint scraper, I scrape paint for a living and live with my grandma!” WORDS DON”T MATTER!

Don’t believe me? Watch the typical guy when he first meets his girlfriend’s family. It’s almost comical. He’ll be so nervous about saying THE RIGHT THINGS that he’ll end up sounding like a malfunctioning robot. Now swap him with a guy with GREAT TONALITY and VOCAL DOMINANCE who just SPEAKS HIS MIND. Suddenly the girl and her mom are battling it out on Jerry Springer fighting over this guy!

It even transcends language. A guy with a killer voice can go to a totally alien culture. Where he and the girls can’t speak a single word in common. He can even be totally ignorant of that culture’s norms and protocols. But he just starts talking and the GIRLS ARE ALL OVER HIM. He could be reciting the phonebook for all it matters. Hell, his foreign accent will be a BIG PLUS.

There are a lot of other factors that play a role when it comes to a guy being ATTRACTIVE. Things like body language, good posture, confidence, willingness to TAKE what he DESERVES.
But guess what. These things are all directly correlated to the man’s VOICE. When the man learns how to speak better, EVERYTHING else about him NATURALLY BECOMES GOLD. It has been said that public speaking is the most common fear. So of course a man who can publically speak is the MOST CONFIDENT MAN IN THE WORLD.

The author is completely right. In fact, I have never read anything more correct in my life. It explains my tremendous success with women (when I apply myself, that is).

For this is not an isolated incident. I pick up the chicks like there's no tomorrow here. My physical attractiveness and whiteness draw them in, my astonishingly good Chinese gets them horny, and my insane sense of humor seals the deal. Oh, and dropping the "I'm Jewish" line doesn't seem to hurt either. (Chinese girls upon realizing you're Jewish: have a look.)

I have come to the conclusion that I am simply a tremendously attractive human being. And it's not out of some ulterior motive, either; I have the same luck with Japanese/Thai girls.

Oh, and in case you haven't realized by now (from the tone, the sidebar on the right, the tags), this post is extremely tongue-in-cheek. Still, I think there's something you all can learn from it -- I wasn't kidding about that voice stuff.