Tag Archives: CNN

So, Hillary thinks that if the election was held today, she might win. She’s wrong.

News, Politics, , , , , ,

It was reported today on CNN‘s site that Hillary Clinton believes that if the presidential election was held today, she might win. I have bad news for her. She’s wrong.

And it’s not because I don’t like Hillary Clinton, which is usually where these kinds of stories and posts go. It’s because of something much deeper that for reasons that make complete sense, NO ONE IN THE MEDIA UNDERSTANDS.

You see, there’s this strange belief in the mainstream media that everybody hates Donald Trump because the mainstream media keeps reporting bad things about Donald Trump. And they keep repeating this information over and over. Then they conduct polls among the people who consume their news and wonder why the results keep telling them everything they keep reporting. YET, this was exactly what they did with their polls and reports during the election, and they were completely blindsided by the results.

What’s going on is something that the media just doesn’t want to face, or is just too lazy to admit might be happening: They’re reporting on only one segment of the population, and that population isn’t the majority.

You can start to see this when you read through message boards that aren’t one-sided or pay attention to the comment sections of stories on pretty much every other web site out there. There is an entire segment of the population that seems pretty angry and is just not being heard. And whenever they ARE heard, they’re treated as outliers, or crazy people, and then ignored. Yet, I suspect they’re a major part of the reason why Trump was elected in the first place. And they’re a major part of the reason why he’ll be re-elected, even though I still keep reading stories about how he can only be a one-term president because of how so many people hate him.

The sad thing is: I mentioned this during the election when people kept telling me how Donald Trump was a joke and how he had zero chance of winning the election. Whenever I mentioned that I thought the media was missing a large segment of the population, people just laughed at me and told me I had no idea what I was talking about. I suspect they’ll do the same again now. Oh well.

Why the BBC is so much of a better news source than CNN

News, Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

Why the BBC is so much of a better news source than CNN

The recent Charlottesville riot (get together/protest) is a really good example of why the BBC is so much more superior to crappy CNN. When watching the feed on the BBC story, it has absolutely no voice over and shows the actual protest going on. When you watch CNN’s coverage, it’s a voice over, explaining the situation, and then immediately after two talking heads starts bantering back and forth.

http://www.cnn.com/…/charlottesville-white-natio…/index.html

And I don’t think people ever even realize how significantly different the coverage is over one particular story. The alt-right will often equate BBC with CNN, calling both “liberal journalism” or, my favorite, “fake media.” What has basically happened is that the whole talking heads phenomenon that CNN projects into its coverage is bringing down other news agencies that are actually pretty damn good at being completely a reported story rather than a participant observer to a story (like CNN).

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40909547

I really wish more people would see this and that news agencies would try to be BBC rather than CNN because nothing is more frustrating than having a news agency dictate the news to you rather than report it to you.

(Unfortunately, Facebook sucks for embedding stories, as it only wants to show the first one, and not the second one, if you’re trying to make a comparison. Follow the links rather than rely on Facebook, which gets no kudos for being a lousy service for reporting the news)

Happy New Year and Things the Media still needs to learn

News, , , , , , ,

wall2The New Year is here, and all that jazz, so I just think I’ll say happy new year and move on from there. Hope everyone is doing well. If not, hope the new year gets better for you.

One of my usual places to find up to date news is Google News. I’ve found it to be quite informative, and I tend to read first the technology section, then the entertainment section, then business and then US News. Maybe I might read some of the other categories, but those are the main ones that interest me. However, it wasn’t until today that I started to notice something that’s been secretly bothering me for a long time. And that’s what gets included in Entertainment News.

When I read Entertainment, I’m interested in movie announcements, revelations of new music and the ocassional ridiculous scandal that tends to make me laugh. However, I”ve started to notice other pieces of news that are being included in this feed, and it’s just wrong. I’ll give you an example: James Holmes, the nutcase that shot up  the midnight showing of the latest Batman movie, is having his hearing and the news wants to know what his defense will be. Why does this bother me? This is not entertainment news at all. I don’t care that he did his crime during a Batman screening. I don’t care that the media is excited and hyped about the case. THIS IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT NEWS. It is national news, or serious news. To put it under the entertainment umbrella is sending a signal out to every nutcase out there that if he wants his 15 minutes of entertainment fame, do something ridiculous, like kill a whole bunch of people during a movie screening.

Entertainment news needs to be held to actual entertainment stuff, not this kind of thing. The message the news is sending by this sort of thing is that we’re going to be entertained by whack jobs killing people in real life. This is why “news” people like Nancy Grace exist, and I so wish that they didn’t get a single moment of air time. We don’t need media celebrities trying to make a name for themselves by going crazy on the news and trying to gain attention, which is one reason why I refuse to watch anything Nancy Grace related. She’s exactly the kind of reason why we have this sort of thing turning in on an entertainment feed instead of simple news.

And that’s the problem today. News has become entertainment, which just fuels that old problem of watching the evening news and seeing that the lead story is a fire that affects less than 0.001 of the population. Fires are exciting, and you can watch things burn, which is why you rarely see a fire story in the newspaper (unless it burns half the city). It’s only exciting on television with pictures and footage.

This is why we’re now seeing Holmes as an entertainment story. Instead of CNN, Fox and the major networks covering this story and its impact on America, we’re now going to have E!, People, and the Celebrity Gossip talking about what clothes the killer was wearing, and why the prosecutor so shouldn’t have been wearing those shoes.

On another note, chances are pretty good this web site is going to be closed soon. I’ve discovered very few people are actually interacting with me and that most of my views appear to be from spammers trying to sell shit to people who do read my blog.

Reality Disclosure: The Victoria Secret Fashion Show is Really Just a Televised Episode of Nearly Naked Women Trying to Sell Us Underwear

Business, Social Networking, Technology, Television, , , , , , , , ,
Attractive woman selling you stuff
Attractive woman selling you stuff

I read a lot of news. So, it came to me as a bit of a surprise that CNN has been doing nothing but trying to explain how “important” their story about the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is.  After “reading” through their article and numerous other articles that have attempted to “write” about this story, almost always with a HUGE picture of very attractive supermodels, I get the picture. There was a fashion show put out by Victoria’s Secret, a store that sells ladies lingerie to women who want to look attractive to their partners after things have already moved to the point where they really don’t have to do anything to make the mood get to the next point. I mean, honestly, if I’m in a situation where a woman is now in her underwear, chances are pretty good she doesn’t have to convince me that I should be moving to, well, for lack of better terms, the next “base”. If I read things wrong at that time, then something’s seriously wrong with me, with her, or with the human species and academic mating rituals.

But let’s break down what’s really going on with this “fashion” show. It’s a bunch of very attractive women, walking around in their under garments, trying to get people to think this would be a really good purchase in the future. That’s really it. They’re not developing a better solar panel to collect energy. They’re not helping us figure out which presidential candidate is going to lie to us more than the other. They’re not even helping us find a potential mate. They’re walking around in their underwear being gawked at by guys across the country.

Cause let’s face it. This show might be watched by women thinking, “that outfit looks nice and maybe if I buy it, I might look like that multimillion dollar an hour supermodel” but it’s mostly being watched by guys who are thinking, “man, I really should have majored in something other than sociology in college cause a girl like that is never going to talk to me and my sorry ass bank account.” And, of course, there’s a huge segment of guys who are probably watching that show alone, in the dark. If you’re one of those guys, you might have even set up your own drive in cinema screen hire to make it a more immersive experience.

But great television it’s not. It’s like watching the Miss America Pageant and saying you watch it because you support programs that provide college scholarships to enterprising young women. No one buys that. No one even buys it when the pageant tries to pretend that’s why the pageant exists. It’s a vehicle to sell stuff in the way we always sell it. With sex.

So, I’m glad the show was the number one watched show in the country, just as much as I’m glad that Twilight is the number one movie, and every top seller on the New York Times bestseller list is a young adult book because Americans have become too stupid to read books for adults.

But that doesn’t mean I’m really happy about it. So leave me alone as I turn off the lights and watch the second half of this underwear advertisement show I taped so I could watch it alone. Check back with me in about a half hour. We’ll talk about literature then.

Taxation Gurus Just Don’t Seem to Get It

Business, Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

CNN Money ran an article today from Jeanne Sahadi advocating the need to raise taxes “because the looming debt problem is just too big”. Her argument goes on to say that Republicans are misthinking the whole issue because as long as the debt remains large, the country can never go forward.

Well, my response is twofold. First, we need to stop putting taxation into a partisan framework. That never solves anything but makes the issues so tied to other agendas that there’s no way to have a rational conversation about the issue in the first place. By making it partisan, any response of negativity to Sahadi immediately gets lumped into a “he’s a Republican, and therefore he is only limited to Republican talking points.” Whenever the conversation moves to the next level of analysis, the responder can immediately throw it, “oh yeah, but Republicans also believe (fill in the blank, and you realize why no rational debate is then possible).”

Second, and this is really my more important point, at what point did government become so important that it became the elephant we SEE in the room rather than the one hiding in the background? In other words, why is government always the most important factor for the debate? Why isn’t the individual considered more important?

Think about it this way. If we go back to the original foundation theories of government and agree that people came together in a Hobbesian fashion to escape from our evil surroundings, we understand that we then gave up a little bit of our freedom to achieve security. Now, no matter whether you buy Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau, at no point did we ever really give up the original reason for getting together, meaning that we got together because it was mutually beneficial to us, NOT because we were all desiring to create a government. At no point did the foundation of government ever supercede our reason for creating government. In other words, those who create a government are always more important than the government itself, not the other way around. Yet, in every one of these arguments, especially the one put forth by Sahadi, government is the reason we do the things we do, so that we are required to sacrifice at the altar of government, instead of the other way around.

I pay taxes. I’m not rich, but because I am low middle class, I pay money into taxes that really makes an impact on my daily life. The majority of people who pay taxes are like me, lower middle class people who don’t make a lot of money. Any increase in taxes to us hurts big time, yet we’re rarely ever represented in these conversations about taxation and government. Instead, the Republicans represent the interests of the very rich, and the Democrats represent government attempting to fund more money for governmental programs. In a fair world, we’d have another party that actually represented a social class of common people, but we don’t have that in this country. Oh, both sides claim to be that representative, but they never are. They represent their own interests and those interests are never ours.

What it comes down to for the majority of us is a question of how much we value government. I, personally, don’t value government all that much. I see it as a mechanism to keep gangs and drug dealers from killing me on a daily basis. And to be honest, government doesn’t even do that very well. Serious amounts of money are spent on a drug war that fuels this continuous battle between mean streets and the common person, and the common person is rarely seen as the one to which government answers. An example: A few years ago, I was beaten and robbed by gang members who targeted me because of my color. Instead of a serious response to the victim, which you would expect in a case like this, or at least might see on television played by actors who don’t represent real police officers, I ended up in a bizarre situation where two police agencies argued IN FRONT OF ME over which one was responsible for taking the report. Neither one of them wanted the responsibility. Of course, after all was said and done, the culprits were never caught, and I suspect they were never even pursued. Over the next few weeks, before I finally moved across the country to get away from the cesspool that is Hayward, California, I read the blotter reports in the newspapers about how the same individuals were continuing to target citizens in the EXACT SAME AREA EVERY DAY, and even escalating to public buses, convenient stores and train stations. In other words, government didn’t care one bit whatsoever.

Yet, when it comes to taxation, Sahadi believes that if government is starting to fail financially, it is within our requirements to respond immediately and fix it. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Right now, we spend so much money on things that have very little to do with the average American who does pay taxes. Let’s go over a bit of that list.

Wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq: Who benefits from this? Me? I don’t think so. Did I care about freedom in Iraq to begin with? No, not really. I’ve never had contact with anyone from Iraq before. Nor have I had contact with anyone from Afghanistan or Libya. Sure, I buy gas, and some of that comes from some of those places, but if we weren’t fighting a war in these places, we’d still be buying gas from these places regardless. I don’t even suspect it would cost that much more because prices are controlled by OPEC, not tin foil hat dictators.

That pretty much translates to our entire military budget. Yes, it is responsible for protecting America from foreign enemies, but honestly, we’re not actually doing that with our military. We are located in countries that are not ours, fighting for issues that have nothing to do with freedom in the United States. And in order to conduct these wars, we have had presidents (the last two specifically) advocating to suppress our freedoms, which means we’re fighting to lessen our freedoms, which is ironic in its own cynical way. If we were defending America specifically, I’d be happy, but we’re not. We’re pushing agendas of people who are not the lower middle class. And we’re backing up those issues by sending young lower middle class soldiers into wars to support people who rarely serve in the military themselves.

Most governmental agencies that the common person desires are usually handled by the states. My education is handled by the states. The federal government does nothing but institute standards that no one ever achieves. Our federal government has no idea how to educate the youth of America, yet they feel worthy of forcing their standards on the states regardless. I don’t see the value in this. Sure, I can see the value of making sure we don’t teach creationism in school, but nowadays, federal government isn’t even doing that; it’s doing the exact opposite and then fighting with itself over those specific, political standards. Not necessary and not helpful.

Heath care seems like it’s important, but when you threw it into politics, it starts to get useless. Tylor Cowen, in his excellent article, The Great Stagnation, points out that even though the United States spends more money than most countries on health care, we have some of the lowest levels of life-expectancy and our health success rates are dismal at best in comparison to nations that actually spend less of their GDP of health care. Like most governmental issues, we do horrible with our money because we keep believing in American exceptionalism, when we don’t realize that exceptionalism doesn’t always mean better. Part of our problem is that we have a lot of money already in the mix that should be spent better, not a need for more money to be spent on doing the wrong things more often. That last sentence is probably the most significant of this essay but will echo with no one.

In the end, it will come down to partisan drivel politics again where we have people who have a stake in winning an argument over issues that should never be decided by partisan politics. But we don’t seem to care because we’ve gone way beyond caring about what’s important and care more about winning arguments that don’t benefit us even when we do.

As a taxpayer who pays what he believes to be enough taxes, I don’t subscribe to the theory that more money is necessary to fix the problems of bad spending. Unfortunately, the people we have in government are not the best people when it comes to spending wisely; they never have been. Instead, we have the people who are best at convincing people to vote for them because they’re good at making people feel better about themselves, especially when we live in a country of people who should be a lot more critical of their own shortcomings. We’re educating ourselves horribly, we’re grossly overweight, and we let ourselves be ruled by foolish passions over issues that require serious contemplation. But this will fall on deaf ears because we’re a nation of people who likes to hear that we’re great, and when that person comes along who strokes our ego, we’ll vote for him, and we’ll wonder why no one ever does anything about fixing our country. We certainly won’t get the answers from anyone who is paid to tell us what we already keep hearing, but then we’d stop paying them if they didn’t. We’re pretty good at creating vicious circles in this country. Another thing we’re good at, eh?

What it All Comes Down to

Computer Games, Economics, Memoirs, Movies, Politics, Social Networking, Television, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.

The media still doesn’t understand “nice guys”

Uncategorized, ,

One of my pet peeves is how the media still has no grasp on the concept of “nice guys”. A few weeks back, I read a reprint of an article on CNN, which was all about how some girl was upset that she can’t seem to find a nice guy. Then it went on to ridicule every guy in the world because SHE keeps picking “bad boys” when she really wants a “nice guy”. I wrote a response that got a lot of “likes” on CNN, where I essentially stated that the reason she is never going to find a nice guy is because she looks for bad guys and then blames nice guys for not being easier to find. You don’t find what you’re not looking for.

The interesting thing was a CNN writer contacted me and wanted to interview me about my thoughts on this for an article she was going to write. She never got back to me, but interestingly enough, her “article” that she was going to write appeared on CNN today. Here it is, by Stephanie Chen. As I never got to comment before she wrote her story, I definitely have a few things to say about this particular issue and the very concept of nice guys in general, so here goes:

This article pretty much proves to me that mass media is never going to understand the concept of nice guys because it’s a lot like sending a French chef to write an article about Arabic pottery. They don’t know anything about the topic, so trying to be the archaeologist on a nature dig is never going to get the real story. It’s just going to get more and more people confused.

This article shows the problem immediately in that it goes to sources that are not nice guys to explain why nice guys need to be more like them in order to succeed. One of the interviewees wrote a book on how to “score babes”. Yeah, that’s going to really indicate to the diminishing numbers of “nice guys” how they should interact with women in order to do whatever it is they think nice guys are really intending to want to be doing with women. Just because Captain Kirk slept with a bunch of green alien girls in Star Trek doesn’t mean that every member of the Federation can only succeed by taking a “Be like James T. Kirk” seminar on interspecies dating. Okay, I’ll try to keep away from the geek references….

Part of the problem with these essays on why nice guys fail is this belief that we’re all failing because they don’t see us in clubs trying to pick up women like the rest of the bad boys who seem to get a lot of action. Maybe we’re nice guys because that’s something we don’t normally do. If our purpose was to do anything to get a little action, then I’m going to go out on a limb, but that’s probably going to remove the very nature of what makes us part of being nice guys in the first place.

If women are really interested in finding nice guys, I’m sorry but it’s really up to them to go looking for them. They’re not going to find them at clubs. Sorry, but that’s now where they hang out. Most nice guys wouldn’t last a half hour at a club because we’re the ones who feel really awkward because we’re alone, and our usual nature isn’t to become the life of the party at a party where we’re not normally invited. The sad thing is: I’ve had this conversation with a lot of women who are constantly looking for “nice guys”, and they never get it. Oh, they say they get it, and they nod appreciatively, but they always go back to their ways and end up with the guys they can’t understand how they always end up with. I’d pull out my hair in frustration, but there’s not a lot of it left these days, so I have to be careful about that.

Yet, the media keeps reporting that in order for “nice guys” to do well, they have to stop being nice guys, or do things the “other guys” do in order to not be seen by women as “nice guys”. In other words, women looking for nice guys will not go after a nice guy, so you have to pretend to be a bad guy in order for a woman to see you as the nice guy you are. Does any of this sound a bit dysfunctional?

So, what’s the solution? Well, if you’re a woman, the solution is so freaking simple but you’ll NEVER go there. I’ll go out on a limb here but MOST women have guy friends they confide in and consider really nice guys. Well, instead of asking those “nice guys” where to find a nice guy, look right at them right now. There they are. They’re right in front of you. Probably liking you but to afraid to say anything because they figure you’ll stop being their friend. But there they are. And they’ll be there until you either notice them or someone smarter than you notices them and then you start to wonder why you could never find someone like them.

For guys, well, if you’re a nice guy, do what I did. Give up. It’s not worth the hassle. It’s a lot less of a headache when you don’t put yourself out there trying to pretend to be something you’re not. I’m a nice guy, and I’m happy with what I am. I don’t really need to “score” or find anyone to achieve personal happiness. Sure, if the right person came along, or I was friends with the right person and she noticed me, that would be great. And we’d live happily ever after.

But if that doesn’t happen, I’m not going to worry about it. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’m not going to be worrying about you either. If you can’t figure out where to find a nice guy, you probably don’t deserve one in the first place.