Because of these and other limitations of cell phones and other handheld devices, and the fact that I like the power of a real computer, I’ve avoided them to the extent I could up to now. However, the evolution of WiMax technology has brought some advantages in terms of price and convenience that have given me cause to reconsider my distaste for handhelds.

I have been a big fan of wireless for some time now, having had an intense dislike of unnecessary cables for quite a while. I’ve set up my home office with Clearwire broadband and a VOIP phone, which has finally started to work about as well as a normal land line and has the added benefit of incredibly cheap long distance (I can call China and Europe for two cents per minute from my home phone, and all of North America is free). If I travel to any city with a Clearwire connection, I can bring my modem and phone box along and plug them into any normal telephone and make and receive calls as though I were at home, and I also get the same broadband internet connection on my laptop. This is quite convenient, and requires no more than a power outlet, but the equipment is too bulky to take to a cafe, meeting or park — it isn’t worth dragging around unless you have a place to stay for a few days where you can set up a little desk.

However, Samsung has just come out with a little machine called the “Mondi” that promises to offer WiMax connections (3G and 4G) and is eventually supposed to be enhanced to serve as a miniature Wi-Fi hotspot. The reviews for the Mondi haven’t been glowing, but I see some serious potential in these kinds of devices. With a $40/month plan, I could use one of these devices as a mobile VOIP phone, broadband router and PDA all in one neat little package as well as cut $10/month off my current phone/internet bill and rid my house of even more cables (yay!).

If someone brings out something like the Mondi that does not use Microsoft software, it would be hard to pass it up.

Finally, I see a day when I can dispense with cumbersome modems, cables and telephones, have access to 4G speed on my laptop, and receive all my calls at one phone number — all with one little device I can keep in my pocket and one reasonable monthly bill. Simplicity is elegant.

Go to a nursing home sometime, and you will see women working for low wages in an undesirable occupation. At the grocery store, girls are bagging groceries. Hospital orderlies who clean up the messes and push wheelchairs are largely female, and even being a doctor – female or not – is far from the glamorous lifestyle portrayed on so many TV shows. In fact, going into the medical profession is something like signing up for indentured servitude.

Most working women have jobs I woudn’t want. Neither would most of my readers, I imagine. Most of their jobs are support for the broader economy, and are drone work. Sure, we’re seeing more and more female managers, but most of them are managing drones in strictly confined institutions. Then there are the waitresses and bookkeepers who work at small businesses, and the government employees at the courthouse, DMV, etc. Most independent, female-owned businesses seem to be preschools or day care, boutique bakeries and small clothing stores. It is all part of a dreary service economy that has grown like so much vegetation around the core engines of economic progress.

Of course, there are women involved in high-powered, important jobs. Most of these, however, are in social rather than creative fields. For example, one can find plenty of women with power in politics, education and even law, but in engineering, building and entertainment they are rare indeed.

What this says to me is that there is still room for men in our economy (if it can regain its health), but somehow we have shifted from creative jobs that produce wealth and economic progress to jobs that sustain the status quo. How did this happen? I suspect it has something to do with government spending, which has thrown us into the deepest debt we’ve faced in generations. Perhaps the recent emphasis on tricky finance rather than productive endeavors played a role as well. Either way, I doubt that this new female-centric economy is actually sustainable. The math simply doesn’t work out, for one thing — how can we rescue the economy by spending more money on the non-productive service sector while the true creators of wealth are failing or moving overseas?

While conducting some online research, I happened across an article discovered by fellow-traveler Chuck Ross that he incorporated into one of his blog posts. Chuck has uncovered a very rich seam here (read the article online with free registration), as I will presently explain.

The article quotes Jung in its title, in which Jung says: “America [is] facing its most tragic moment. It will either master its mighty forces or be mastered by them.”

Jung expounds upon the theme of mastery, covering the struggle between different races, the elements, and finally the struggle between the sexes. It is the last to which he most conclusively attaches the epithet “tragedy.”

I was pleased to see that, as I proposed in my recent post on the “American Dilemma,” Jung also explains the American character as a result of its religious heritage:

They chose the greatest abstraction of all, the idea of God, and they sacrificed everything to that idea. Countries went down before it, families were broken up by it, armies were slaughtered in the attempt to learn to think of God, and your puritans, the Huguenots, and all those to whom the idea of God was greater than anything else, learned to think so well that they left their own homes, and you are the descendants of those people. An abstract thought is always ruthless. It is the most dangerous one to think, and the most marvellous.

Having established the character of the American people, he sets about diagnosing the ailment:

I study the individual to understand the race, and the race to understand the individual. I ask myself, What influence has the building of America had upon the American man and the American woman of today? I find that it is a good subject for the student of pschoanalysis.

There is only so much vital energy in any human being. We call that in our work the Libido. And I would say that the Libido of the American man is focused almost entirely upon his business, so that as a husband he is glad to have no responsibilities. He gives the complete direction of his family life over to his wife. This is what you call giving independence to the American woman. It is what I call the laziness of the American man. That is why he is so kind and polite in his home, and why he can fight so hard in his business. His real life is where his fight is. The lazy part of his life is where his family is.

The diagnosis is clear: America is the land of the Beta provider.

If Jung appears to be merging with Roissy here, just wait, it gets even better:

I made many observations on shipboard. I noticed that whenever the American husband spoke to his wife there was always a little melancholy note in his voice, as though he were not quite free: as though he were a boy talking to an older woman. he was always very polite and very kind, and paid her every respect. You could see that in her eyes he was not at all dangerous, and that she was not afraid of being mastered by him. But when anyone told him there was betting going on he would leave her, and his face became eager and full of desire, and his eyes would get very bright and his voice would get strong, and hard, and brutal.

Because this was written in 1912, the modern equivalent to the betting parlor would be the TV screen and a football game, where even docile, beta husbands will yell like barbarians.

The final passage of the article, which offers analysis and the cure, is startlingly prescient, predicting decades in advance the wholesale collapse of the American family. In fact, this final passage is so illuminating that I’ll transcribe the entire thing on my blog, so that readers who don’t have time to register with the NY Times Magazine can read it right here:

American Marriages Tragic

You believe, for instance, that American marriages are the happiest in the world. I say that they are the most tragic. I know this not only from my study of the people as a whole, but from my study of individuals who come to me. I find that the men and women are giving their vital energy to everything but the relation between themselves. In that relation all is confusion. The women are the mothers of their husbands as well as of their children, yet at the same time there is in them the old, old primitive desire to be possessed, to yield, to surrender. And there is nothing in the man for her to surrender to except his kindness, his courtesy, his generosity, his chivalry. His competitor, his rival in business must yield, but she need not.

There is no country in the world where women have to work so hard to attract men’s attention. There is in your Metropolitan Museum a bas-relief which shows the girls of Crete in one of their religious dances about their god in the form of a bull. These girls of 2,000 BC wear their hair in chignons; they have puffed sleeves; their corseted waists are very slender; they are dressed to show every line of their figures just as your women are dressing today.

At that time the reasons which made it necessary to attract men to themselves in this way had to do with the morals of their country. The women were desperate just as they are today, without knowing it. In Athens four or five hundred years before Christ there was even an epidemic of suicide among young girls, which was only brought to an end by the decision of the Areopagus that the next girl who did away with herself would be exhibited nude upon the streets of Athens. There were no more suicides. The judges of Athens understood sex psychology.

On Fifth Avenue I am constantly reminded of that bas-relief. All the women, by their dress, by the eagerness of their faces, by their walk, are trying to attract the tired men of their country. What they will do when they fail I can’t tell. It may be that then they will face themselves instead of running away from themselves, as they do now. Usually, men are more honest with themselves than women. But in this country your women have more leisure than men. Ideas run easily among them, are discussed in clubs, and so here it may be that they will be the first ones to ask if you are a happy country or unhappy. [Here Jung is clearly warning Americans that pent up sexual frustration will cause American women to effect potentially disastrous changes through activism]

It may be that you are going to produce a race which are human beings first, and men and women secondarily. It may be that you are going to create the real independent woman who knows she is independent, who feels the responsibility of her independence and, in time, will come to see that she must give up spontaneously those things which up to now she only allows to be taken from her when she pretends to be passive. Today the American woman is still confused. She wants independence, she wants to be free to do everything, to think everything, to say everything, to have all the opportunities which men have, and, at the same time, she wants to be mastered by man and to be possessed in the archaic way of Europe. [Today, since much of Europe has gone down the same beta American spiral, we find women turning to romance novels in which they are spirited away by sheikhs to some desert oasis]

You think your young girls marry European husbands because they are ambitious for titles. I say it is because, after all, they are not different from the European girls; they like the way European men make love, and they like to feel we are a little dangerous. They are not happy with their American husbands because they are not afraid of them. It is natural, even though it is archaic, for women to want to be afraid when they love [here's where Roissy's "shady character game" comes into play]. If they don’t want to be afraid then perhaps they are becoming truly independent, and you may be producing the real ‘new woman.’ But up to this time your American man isn’t ready for real independence in woman. He only wants to be the obedient son of his mother-wife. There is a great obligation laid upon the American people – that it shall face itself – that it shall admit its moment of tragedy in the present — admit that it has a great future only if it has courage to face itself.

The medicine Jung offers as a cure is as obvious as the diagnosis was: American men need to learn gender realism and game.

I have to admit that this article blew me away. I could hardly believe that I’d find a psychologist, ninety-seven years ago, offering the same advice we’re getting from the more lucid segments of the PUA community.

Carl Jung was something of an alpha male himself. He was married for over fifty years, and allegedly had a number of lovers on the side. I don’t doubt it. He also sends feminists into paroxysmal rages, which force them to write long, incoherent treatises on why and how Jung is wrong or should be “revised,” even as he attracts throngs of female admirers. I will certainly read more of Jung, but from what I have seen here, I believe it would be fair to call him the founding father of the theory of game.

Only one of the captured Uyghurs is alleged to be an Al-Qaeda member, and the rest were largely unfortunate men who had fled China or were trying to resist the PRC in one way or the other. None had any real argument with the United States, and they all appear to have been largely ignorant concerning the jihad against the US. In fact, prior to their capture, most thought of the US as an ally in their struggle against the PRC. To sum it up, they were mainly hapless political dissidents rather than hardcore jihadis.

Now what I’d really like to know, given the recent unrest in Xinjiang, is exactly what kind of intelligence they provided interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. Given that at least a few of them probably were sincere about resisting China in Xinjiang, and were allegedly plugged into the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” (which may not actually exist), it would seem that these Uyghurs could be of great value to the US in harassing China.

The significance of Palau as a potential refuge for the Uyghurs has to do with its location, a recent defense deal, and historical operations carried out in the region. Although few people are aware that during the 1950s and 60s the US supported a guerrilla war against China through Tibetan activists, this was in fact an important CIA operation that yielded significant intelligence for the US on the then-isolated PRC. Tibetan dissidents were flown to the US for training, but the center of the operation was in Saipan, a US territory in the Pacific located relatively close to Palau.

Palau gained independence from the US in 1994, but the countries have continued to maintain a close relationship. Recently, Palau was offered $200 million as an incentive to continue to work with United States “sharing mutual burdens,” which according to William Cleary in a Pacific Daily News article, “[...] is a bargain in which the U.S. arguably will get its money’s worth by keeping the military forces of China and other rival powers out of Palau.”

Now, of course, the Chinese are stridently demanding the return of each and every Uyghur. China is using every bit of diplomatic leverage it can to have them returned, and most countries have shied away from offering them asylum. Ultimately, this may be in the interests of the US (which, I am starting to think, wants the Uyghurs working for our intelligence services) because they will be forced to stay on US territory or in satellite states such as Palau.

Evidently only one Uyghur has so far agreed to relocate to Palau, but eventually the number may rise, because 17 remain in Gitmo, and Chinese pressure guarantees that their options will be limited. I can imagine a new guerrilla operation intended to harass and pressure China through Xinjiang being run, at least partially, out of Palau. Because we now have a number of real, live ethnic Uyghur dissidents in US hands, the US has the tools to stir up trouble in China’s backyard, and I assume they will be put to use.

When living in the PRC, although very young, I had a strong feeling that there was a fundamental imbalance in the global economy. I had left the US at a time when fortunes were just starting to soar with the dotcom boom, development was ramping up and people were living at an unparalleled level of affluence. High school kids were driving giant SUVs, hip new shopping malls were sprouting in previously barren lots, and the mega stores like Costco and WalMart were beginning to establish themselves as the models for American consumption. It was an odd phenomenon to watch overfed Americans hefting pallets of goods into cavernous vehicles even before I saw how the other half of humanity lived.

So when I arrived in China and saw how little most people had, I began to wonder what exactly it was that sustained American consumption, and soon the answer became apparent. China was booming at the time, and still is. Millions of people were working on construction projects and in manufacturing, and what they were producing was very tangible. Buildings were going up all over the place, and stores were bursting with cheap manufactured products. The North Face jackets one would pay hundreds of dollars to buy in an American department store could be bought for a a mere $50 in markets like Hongqiao, which was my favorite place to buy pearls.

Because China was awash in goods, many of which were of limited value to the Chinese, who had little space in their meager apartments and still hadn’t adopted a consumer culture, practically any American with the proper resources could purchase containers and ship these products to America, selling them for a steep profit. The Chinese were certainly making money off of these manufactured goods, but it was the American middlemen who were really cleaning up. In retrospect, I can see that it was this model that came to dominate the American economy over the last fifteen years or so.

In order to sustain growth in a post-industrial United States, we had to figure out a way to make money off of other countries’ labor, and China became the most important provider of that labor. However, as the growth in consumption of goods manufactured in China began to taper off this decade, we needed to find another product of Chinese labor to sell, and so, increasingly, we began to sell their savings. The US real estate boom was financed with the cash Chinese workers were putting in their banks.

Because Chinese save so much of their money, their interest rate is very low. For the most part, Chinese operate on the basis of cash, credit being a risky proposition. However, their banks were willing to extend credit to the United States in return for federally guaranteed treasuries. So, through the Federal Reserve, our banks took this cash and pumped it into the real estate market, inflating it to ridiculous proportions. As long as the boom held up, people were happily reaping profits on both sides of the Pacific.

However, nothing lasts forever – especially not speculative bubbles – and now we are left with an incredible debt and little to no profit to pay it off. This time, there’s nothing credible to replace the real estate scam. Some have mentioned carbon credits, but there’s no way the Chinese, who are now the world’s largest producers of CO2, will ever buy into that scheme. But we do have assets…

Here’s where Goldman Sachs and friends come into the equation. Through their dominance of the Federal Reserve, they will have the money and the power to purchase valuable, but financially struggling assets, which they will turn around and sell for a cut. Who will they sell these assets to? Why, whoever can pay for them, and that happens to be the Chinese. The Chinese will demand a good deal, because we do, of course, owe them a whole lot of money, and how else can we make good on those federal guarantees?

So my prediction is that American assets will start to be sold to foreigners, Chinese in particular, and the oligarchs at Goldman Sachs will make a killing off these deals. What assets will these be? Probably a number of natural resource extraction companies, some factories, technology, aerospace, etc. I can imagine some pharmaceutical companies being sold off as well. Americans might assume the government will protect our vital economic assets, but I don’t think so. Those in government understand that their job, just like a postal worker’s, requires a paycheck. Government is expensive, and those who work in it do not want to become unemployed. Therefore, if the price they have to pay for continuing to do business is selling out the American people, they will quietly do so. And anyway, American business isn’t laying many golden eggs these days. From a Chinese perspective, it might simply be a better idea to throw the goose in a pot and cook it.

American middlemen will continue to grow fat off of international deals, but this time it won’t be Chinese trinkets in WalMart that provide the basis of their profits, but rather what remains of America’s national assets.

However, where Iceland is an encouraging example of a country in which men live past 80 on average, the situation for men in Russia appears abysmal. With an average lifespan of 59, Russian men are outlived by Russian women by almost 13 years. In fact, men in Haiti, one of the poorest countries on earth, outlive Russian men.

Much has been written about the causes of excessive mortality among Russian men. Some shocking findings, such as the fact that Russian men at the age of 16 had a better chance of living to 60 in the late 19th century than they do today, have come to light.

Alcohol has been singled out as a major factor in the spiking death rate for Russian men, but this must be a symptom rather than a cause, because French men have been drinking more for much longer than Russian men. The French outdrink almost everyone in the world, yet their men still outlive even American men by a couple of years. The same goes for the Irish.

There’s obviously something far more toxic than mere ethanol that is causing Russian men to destroy themselves. If one looks at male suicide rates by country, one thing that stands out is that the top five countries are all former members of the Soviet Union. Russia is in second place behind Lithuania.

In addition to a very high rate of suicide, the Russian homicide rate is also very high – nearly four times the American rate – and the Russian accidental death rate is astronomical; at 130.8 per 100,000 (as of late 90s) it is the highest in the world.

When these factors are taken together, it becomes apparent that Russian men have very little regard for their lives. Because these trends tend to cluster around the northern Former Soviet Union states, it is obvious that the most important factor here is culture — both material and spiritual. What is it about this particular region that destroys men?

I would argue that it is due to their crippling loss. During the Communist era, men were defined according to their position as a worker, and denied any place in the world beyond the role of servant of the Communist system. As we all know, systems sometimes break down, and the USSR notably disintegrated almost twenty years ago. The concepts of family, God and property had all been largely destroyed in favor of the all-encompassing state, and it took only the blink of an eye for the state to collapse, leaving men with nothing to live for.

Take, for example, the biblical story of Job. Imagine Russian men collectively as Job, but without faith. When men lose everything material in this world, only faith and hope can sustain them. Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, both of whom lived through that particularly Russian phenomenon of total loss, gained a deep understanding of this truth.

Here in America, it is becoming more and more common for the state to dispossess men of their families and the means to support themselves. Prison has become a standard solution to the problem of lost men, and the stability of the state, which will sooner or later face insolvency, is not necessarily as secure as one might think.

So when loss on an epic scale sweeps over America, and it will someday, we can only hope that men still have faith, because without it many men will die.

However, this simply isn’t Christian. Above all, I prefer that people are honest about what they are doing, and the Episcopalian Church is indulging in a grievous falsehood by suggesting that Christian marriage is anything but the union of one man and one woman. So how can the Episcopalians continue to call themselves “Christian?” Frankly, I don’t think they can. They should make like the Unitarians or Bahai and declare themselves separate from the mainstream religions. To do otherwise is to perpetuate a lie, and exposes the Episcopalian Church for the sham that it is.

However, there is a hint about what is really at stake here. The Episcopalian Church has inherited a very substantial amount of property, and naturally “spiritual leaders” like Jefferts-Schori would like to keep their hands on this property. Therefore, the spiritual struggle has turned into a sordid battle over temples.

One wonders whether this can result in anything but a pyrrhic victory, because the death of the Episcopalian Church in America is obviously at hand. Despite being a Catholic by baptism, my mother’s family was Episcopalian, and I can’t say I’ll be entirely pleased to see the tradition die out. There were some redeeming things about the British expression of the Christian faith, and I had a taste of them as a child. It will be one of those poignant, bitter moments when I realize that no more children will ever sing the hymns I remember from my brief exposure to the Episcopalian church as a child in the latter years of its existence.

Having been raised Catholic during a time of great change in the Church – the 1970s-80s – I never quite understood how consequential the changes the Church had gone through following the Vatican II Council were until I was an adult and read the history. I studied Latin in school, but heard precious little in church, and the role of the priest did not seem significantly different from the women who read from the lectern during most services. I later learned that my particular church had become a haven for lesbians, and was forced to curtail its activities following then Cardinal Ratzinger’s evaluation of the Seattle Archdiocese, which was sparked by some strange politics and practices in the early 1980s, including political support for Communist insurgencies in Latin America, gay activism and the widely ignored – and widespread – indulgence in pederasty.

These practices have changed, and the Church has taken on a more traditional demeanor, but the damage has already been done, and it seems that more and more men are fleeing religion, viewing it as an apparently hostile and inscrutable institution (this has some parallels with the male flight from higher education). So what we are seeing today is women defining Christianity from every part of the spectrum. We have women like Katherine Jefferts-Schori heading up the Episcopalian Church in the US and taking it down the path of outright, flaming heresy, and then we have a number of more conservative Christian women writing their own opinions about their particular church, coming close to preaching in their own right. Many conservative Christians celebrate the appearance of conservative female Christian writers, but they seem to forget that this upsets the entire notion of Christianity, which is that the Church shall be led, first and foremost, by men. There is really no argument about this in scripture.

What this says to me is that the decline of Christianity is by no means over. In fact, I would argue that even conservative women, if they take on authority in their particular religion, will only hasten the process. The truth is that it is demoralizing for men to have to listen to a female know-it-all preach to them about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and most young men will in all likelihood reject religion entirely, as they see it as offering no escape from the submissive role they must assume in all relationships with women in the secular world. Who could imagine that a shrill priestess could compel young men to get married, when they have been chafing under female authority from the time they first learned to walk on their own two feet?

The emergence in the mainstream of American women assuming authority in matters of religion is a clear indication of the impending collapse of the social norms that have sustained our society for centuries. It’s anyone’s guess what will replace them, but a growing number of people are suggesting Islam will ultimately prevail over a weakened, spiritually emasculated West, just as Christianity vanquished the tired paganism of the Roman Empire.

However, it remains one of the only sectors in our economy that continues to grow despite the recession. Some doctors are beginning to get a little nervous about this, and see that health care has started to grow uncontrollably and become an unsustainable monster. George Lundberg, the blogger from the previous link, writes that health care costs are staggering, and do not reflect the true value of health care in the US:

“Health Care in the USA uses (consumes) some 17% of the Domestic National Product, something like $ 2 600 000 000 000 per year. Its growth has been at 2-5 X the rate of inflation almost every year for as long as I have watched it (some 30 years).”

Health care is projected to grow not only because it subsists largely on public money, but because the numbers of elderly, who have a far greater need for it, will swell greatly over coming years. From a purely rational perspective (that is, not taking humanity into account), it would seem that spending such an enormous amount of GDP on maintaining non-productive members of society will ultimately have a draining effect on our economy. If we are using a such a huge amount of our national income and energy taking care of old folks, then just what kind of economy will we have?

Of course, one hardly wants to see old people abandoned and left to die, so nobody is suggesting cutting them off, but it strikes me as dangerous that this is seen as the primary growth area in our economy, and may turn out to cause an imbalance in society in general, whereby younger, productive Americans pay a significant amount of taxes and insurance to pay for a bloated geriatric care industry.

Furthermore, health care is dominated by females. They comprise 75% of health care workers, which has been a major factor in the gender imbalance in unemployment in the recession. This brings up the question of where the money will ultimately come from to pay for the health care industry. If it becomes a large enough part of our national expenditures, it seems that it might begin to eat everything else up until there is little left, at which point it will have no choice but to cannibalize itself.

I am extremely skeptical of the idea that we can run a country on nursing homes and hospitals, but this appears to be the best plan according to a number of investors. Unfortunately, it cannot last. Plenty of people will make a lot of money, just as they have been doing with the incessant bubbles of the last decade, but the nation as a whole will suffer for this new scheme.

As usual in North Korea, it is not clear what this means, but the current belligerence on the part of the North Korean regime may simply be so much bluster covering for the frailty of its leadership. We can only hope…