Need some Help: US Criminal Background Check?

I recently received a hint that a moderately well-known PUA has a rather long pre-PUA criminal record. I was given that PUAs name of birth as well, and was also told that in the USA someone's criminal record is public information.

I did try to look up said PUA's crime record, but unfortunately Google returns pages upon pages full of commercial providers, who all seem to tap into the same pool of government information. But how do I access this information directly, without going through a middle man?

Some of those commercial websites give you a "preview", and if they are true, then said PUA (no, not Gunwitch) does indeed have attempted and/or committed some serious crimes. I would like to access those files, and I would of course share anything I find with all of you.

Any help is much appreciated! Feel free to comment below, or send me an email via this contact form.

Thank you very much!

Minimal Game Reviews: Chase Amante and Tao of Dirt

I've been incredibly busy these days, which is why it took me some time to tell you about two excellent reviews of Minimal Game in the blogosphere. The first is by Chase Amante, whom you might now as "Regal" on mASF, and the other by a blogger who goes by the name of Dirt Man. His site is called Tao of Dirt, and worth a visit.

What I find interesting about these reviews is that Dirt Man thinks the book is great for a beginner:

Overall I think this is a solid book, especially for guys getting into the game of meeting and seducing women. As the title suggests, the focus is on principles and attitude, rather than specific routines and what not. In that sense it may seem a bit esoteric to some, but I think in general guys will get it. If you’re advanced, you probably don’t even think about things so much, trust your instincts, and do very little in terms of meeting women. But if you’re not there yet, this is a great place to start.

On the other hand, Chase views it as more suited for people who have gained some experience already:

Much of Minimal Game is aimed at fixing your worldview: how do you see things? Sleazy works at correcting your view of attire, age, looks, women's sexuality, the role women play in a seduction, roadblocks you'll encounter, and a variety of other topics.

While Sleazy does at times give more specific examples, including some openers he uses and some tips on eye contact, this is not a manual for the pure beginner who is at a loss about what to do or what to say. Rather, this is a book suited to the man who has some experience meeting women and is around an intermediate or higher degree of skill and is looking for some higher level direction to apply and refine the mechanics he's already gotten down.

Of course, I believe that Minimal Game is great for you, no matter at which level you are, since it covers the timeless principles of seduction. Therefore, it should be all you'll ever need. Check it out if you haven't already!

A Note on Confidence and Being Cool

I was just going through some recent comments, and came across an excellent one of Skeptic. In response to my Paleo, Freedom Porn, and Tim Ferriss piece, he wrote:

Aaron, I am with you. I can't stand these human exploiters like Timothy Ferriss, Neil Strauss, Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson, PUA community, crapaleo/crossfit community, Fight Club quoting, pseudo-rebel, pseudo-intellectual idiots. A bunch of blind morons who desperately want to belong to some "modern man's man" cult. It's weak and pathetic and I'm tired of it. 

It's also ironic that being "cool" and "charismatic" usually means exactly the opposite of what most people are already doing when they are looking for answers on forums or reading too many self-help books. To be cool/charismatic (which are both kind of stupid concepts anyway when you understand the deeper meaning they point towards) means not really giving a fuck whether you are defined cool or charismatic. Not even giving a fuck whether you give a fuck or not. It also means not needing to be either a leader or a follower of any kind. It's a huge thing to grasp. And to let go of all the bullshit and go one's own path alone seems to be an impenetrable obstacle for most men. 

It's probably always been this way. And always will be. Maybe not. Maybe we could have a society of geniuses one day given the right environment. 

Nevertheless, it seems that most great artists, scientists, philosphers we're iconoclasts. At least in their given field. They were also beyond movements or dogmas. Most of them died unknown and mad. The legends and icons became only after death e.g. Einstein pins.

The part in bold is something everyone who looks towards other people for advice and guidance should think about for a moment or two. No matter what you do, if you only follow someone else, the upside is fairly limited. Sure, it is a fairly risk-free strategy in pretty much any area of life, but it is also one that is limiting.

Speaking of "being cool", I find it ironic that the fashion and advertising industry presents us over and over with new images we should aspire too. However, if we are all "cool", then no one is. This is because then there'll be too many similar people around. Instead, find your own style, figure out your own taste, and don't try to please other people. It's worse enough if you have to do so during work, but in your spare time, you should listen to yourself instead.

In my opinion, the wish to conform often just results from a need to get approval. Of course, if you look like everything else, act like everybody else, listen to the same music as everyone else, and buy what everyone else does, you know that you'll fit in. You'll at least fit in until the next iPhone is released, or the fashion industry tells you that it's now time buy jeans again. It's a never-ending circle. But what if you had developed enough confidence to do what you like?

"Maybe Game made me Weird?" — Johnny's Story

A frequent commenter on my blog, Johnny, recently wrote down his experience with pickup in a number of blog posts. He goes into detail about his background and motivation, describes various encounters with "professional" PUAs, the post bootcamp high, and his eventual disillusionment. Some nay-sayers (aka. shills) will now say that Johnny should have kept approaching, and pony up more cash for some more bootcamps, but as it turned out, he figured out how to picking up girls like normal people do it.

It is not a virgin-to-heaven of pussy story, but a blatantly honest description of a guy who found great success in school and at work, but lacked social skills. (No, "pickup" does not provide you with them.) He ends up in New York, finds the community, and thinks this is the key to success. In a series of posts he details the time he spent trying to learn pick up.

The Telegraph on the "Community"

A member of my forum pointed out an excellent article on The Telegraph: Pick-up artists, online seduction and dating tips. For my followers, none of it will be news, but the content is presented in a somewhat mocking tone. Yet, it does point towards some deeper truths which are obvious to critical people, as well as outsiders. Only guys caught up in the community will disagree.

Here are some excerpts:

The dubious ethics
If you didn't think deliberately targeting women with low self-esteem was bad enough, a lot of PUAs base their techniques on something called “neuro-linguistic programming” or NLP. It's purportedly a form of hypnosis, similar to what Paul McKenna might use on you if you wanted to think yourself thin. In other words, if this actually worked, PUAs would be hypnotising women into sex. How this would be ethically distinguishable from drugging them is not obvious. Luckily for everyone, research into NLP suggests that it is nonsense anyway; see below.

The pseudoscience
NLP seems to be claptrap (one psychiatrist, Dr Roderique Davis, describes it as “cargo-cult psychology”, meaning that it was designed to look like science without doing any of the work). But a misunderstanding of complex ideas seems to be at the heart of a lot of pick-up artistry. One PUA, a fat man called Gem, once told The Times that Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene taught him “everything I know about pick-up”. One of the figureheads of the movement, David DeAngelo (or “Eben Pagan”) claims to be an aficionado of Ayn Rand. There is a lot of talk of “alpha males” and “beta males” and “psychological anchoring”. It is not clear that any of the people involved know what they are talking about. Dr Petra Boynton, the sex educator and blogger, says that there is “no evidence of effectiveness” for any of the PUA claims.

The men
People who have had dealings with PUAs often use the same term to describe them: “trainspotters”. Like trainspotters, they are obsessed with collecting numbers and statistics; many keep detailed records of every “Close”. The terminology often has a militaristic fantasy feel: even aside from the endless US Army-style acronyms, messages in chatrooms detailing pick-up attempts are called “field reports”, and PUAs discuss “field testing” new techniques, as though they were howitzers rather than glorified chat-up lines. Dr Boynton describes users as “the most vulnerable of men”, and says that the PUA industry is a means of making money from vulnerable people.

Paleo, Freedom Porn, and Tim Ferriss

After my review of Frost's Freedom Twenty-Five, I got some rather interesting responses. Some people even questioned my integrity for promoting this book, but they had missed that while I did praise some parts, I was much more critical towards other sections. But because you can get a few interesting hints here and there, I did recommend it. However, as has been pointed out by a few people recently, Frost's book wasn't particularly original.

One of my friends wrote:

Frost has just taken whatever wisdom is in vogue right now (paleo diet; new male relationship philosophies; passive income) and put them in one book. Ferriss did the same. So it was "heard it all before" for me. Are you still following the paleo diet, by the way? I've done it several times before but always ended up going back to bread, for that "full" feeling after eating. Plus paleo is expensive. I didn't think you ate much meat, so was quite surprised you had moved to a meat-based diet.

I had actually missed this, but this is due to me simply not really following the media. I carefully select what I read, and I quickly dismiss anything I find suspicious. Had I known about diet fads beforehand, I would have warned you about the paleo diet. I'm doing this now, though. Well, maybe I  should make an addendum to my original review. So let me just be blunt: Paleo is a fad and unsustainable. It lead to a change in my nutrition, though. Before, I hardly ate meat. This has now changed, and I follow a rather balanced diet. Paleo itself, though, is questionable.

I was under the impression that I had more "energy", but this was merely because I wasn't getting enough proteins before. Later on, I figured out that a carb-free diet is unsustainable, and not just because it is very expensive. Of course, Frost recommends just going home to a girl and ravage her fridge, but this was probably a joke I didn't get since girls don't tend to have stacked fridges, or meat at home. Besides, who pays for their meat? It's not as if they are all awash with cash.

Here's a video for starters (found on Alek Novy's website):

References for the video can be found here, in case and pseudo-critical "hater" wants to jump at me in the comment thread.

Merely attacking the paleo diet does miss the bigger picture, though. As "Red Pill" in his excellent blog writes, there is a "paleo-game cult" going on. I have already debunked "game", and the paleo-diet has been debunked by many others as just another fad diet. Another big part of this "cult" is what I am inclined to call freedom porn.

Freedom porn is a religion mostly built by Tim Ferriss. You may have read his book "Four Hour Workweek", which promises you to give you the tools to build an automated source of income. There is no need to slave away in a 9-to-5 job. Just find a way to exploit your fellow man and do whatever you want in your spare time. If this sounds too good to be true, then it's because it is. Ferriss later on even came out telling people that it "never was about just working four hours a week". What a joker!

So, the book is not about working just four hours a week, but instead about building your own business. The examples he gives are downright ludicrous, like importing shirts from France and selling them with a big margin. Yeah, right! What Ferriss doesn't take into account is that Google AdSense is rather expensive, and given abysmally low conversion rates, you'd probably end up spending several hundred dollars on online ads before selling one item that brings in only a fraction of the cost of selling it. This is hardly a sustainable business.

But the bigger problem is that he is giving people false hope. As a result, you have then guys like Frost moving to Thailand, confessing in a book that they have no real idea how to make money, but just writing a book, in the hope that this will then generate enough money to live off. It doesn't seem to work out for him, but even if it did: How many people would be able to move to a Third World country, write about the experience, and live off it, until the story got old and nobody would buy it anymore?

Tim Ferriss tries to make you believe he's a regular shmuck like you and me. In fact, he is all but, and there are strong reasons to believe that he only got the foot in the door due to his wealthy family. Let's just recount the facts: Ferriss grew up in East Hampton. If you look it up, you'll learn that "Demographics in East Hampton are skewed by the fact that more than half the houses are owned as second homes (often from some of the wealthiest people in the country)." This sounds a lot as if Ferriss belongs to the "1%". Then he went to a school with a student/teacher ratio of 5 to 1. That's hardly like inner city Detroit. In case you are interested, St Paul's School charges about $50,000 a year.

In corporate owned media, this would be the point for someone to chime in and say that I am "envious" or "jealous", and if you've been brainwashed by right-wing ideology, you'd now say that I am a "hater." However, I only want to illustrate the background of "self-made man" Tim Ferriss. That he later on went to Princeton to get a degree in "East Asian Studies". How fitting! I don't know how familiar you are with higher education, but the general rule is that the more bullshitty a subject is, the more it merely serves as an excuse for the children of the rich to get a place there. It's not as if you can really measure performance in those fields objectively, after all.

Now you may say, "Yeah, Sleazy, I get what you are aiming at, but why do you bother?" Let me tell you something: I have attended an elite institution myself, the London School of Economics, and I have encountered the kind of guy Tim Ferriss is far too many times: Those people have an absurd sense of entitlement, and if they don't get their way the normal way, they have no qualms of cheating. They think the rules just don't apply to them. (Just look at the "elites" in banking, business, and politics! It's exactly the same mentality.) I was thus not surprised that Ferriss admitted in his book that he was, after getting a bad grade on a university paper, pestering the lecturer for hours, with the intended consequence that this guy would think really hard before giving him a bad grade ever again. How do you call this kind of behavior? Yes, it's cheating, and not "finding a loop hole."

Further legendary tales of Ferriss include him detailing how he cheated on a national championship, I think it was Chinese kickboxing. He claimed to have simply dehydrated himself thoroughly, and then he went on to just push the guys out of the ring. Tim was proud of that "loop hole". If this isn't utterly dishonest, then I wouldn't know what is. This is only the beginning, though, because Tim's first company sold snake oil: pills that were supposed to boost your brain power. I read some stories about him selling questionable supplements to bodybuilders, too. But let's not bother with the products, because there are much worse things going on behind the scenes.

In fact, when I read his "success story," it just sounded fishy. I guess I have just met too many stupid, arrogant assholes in my life who would be complete failures if they didn't have a wealthy family to chip in a few $10k here and there. My hunch was that Ferriss' claim to have raked in a ton of money with his company "BrainQuicken" doesn't quite add up. Sure, he can now tell the world that he sold the company (for an undisclosed amount) and since then invests in other companies. But isn't it far more plausible that his family sits on a few hundred million dollars if not more, and he's simply investing that money?

Here is what an insider of the supplement industry had to say about Ferriss' business, pointing out that even if Ferriss "made $40k" a month, which he doubts, it's still an entirely different question how much of that revenue turned into profit. Those are just excerpts of a discussion, but you can easily follow the link and check the sources yourself:

Bodybuilding.com has over 8,500 products. 1.2 million members with a 10% conversion rate (a gift there, should be about 2-3%) makes 120,000 purchases.

120,000 purchases /8,500 products = 14 sales for BQ off that site.

The hits to Tims's old site are easily conformable. This is the internet here people. Do the math yourself, and anyone can quickly see that BrainQUICKEN does not generate anywhere near that income.

[...]

Bodybuilder.com is pretty straightforward. Go to the site and pull the numbers off the top page. Simple math tells you he isn't making much there. Check the page views per month on BQ. Those numbers just don't add up to anywhere near 40k.

Ferriss didn't have to bother about a few $10k here and there because he surely got money from his family to help him out with. It doesn't stop here, though. Have you ever looked at the reviews of "Four Hour Work Week" on Amazon? Here, have a look! You may say, awesome, thousands of people recommend his work. This can't be bad? Well, if you dig a little bit deeper, you'll find that there is something fishy going on. I quote from a review on Amazon.co.uk:

Finally, to conclude what is quite possibly the longest review I have ever written, I would like to comment on the number of five star reviews this book has garnered over on Amazon's US website. If you have been so patient as to read all the way to the end of this review, you surely deserve to know that the author of this book has a hugely popular website and quite a devoted following, based in part on a previous bestseller he wrote: The 4-Hour Workweek. This may also explain the truly massive number of helpful votes the current "Most Helpful" review has achieved (at the time of posting, it has over 2,000 helpful votes).

In fact, having seen a number of other reviewers claim that this book gained a suspiciously high number of positive reviews rather too quickly, I decided to do a little detective work myself. By sorting the reviews from oldest first, I very easily verified that 110 reviews of this book were posted on the 14th of December 2010. Of these 110 reviews, all but 5 gave the book five stars. Of the 5 reviews that didn't give the book five stars, all but one gave it four stars. Obviously it's now equally easy for you in turn to verify all this for yourself; provided, that is, you don't mind counting to 110! Curiously, a disturbingly large number of reviews (again, almost all five star) also happened to appear on April 26 2011. I've no idea why April 26 2011 was the magic day, but if you do happen to know, then please leave a comment on this review letting me in on the secret. I'm quite curious myself! Again, all this applies to Amazon's US website, not the UK one.

In the end I can only say that I went into this with an open mind. I did actually buy the book, and I didn't throw away that money just so I could write a nasty review. I also took a very serious shot at the weight loss program contained in the book. And yes, just like anyone else on a weight loss program, of course I wanted it to work. However, I find that I cannot reconcile my own experiences with the countless rave reviews this book seems to attract.

Draw what conclusions you will.

Tim Ferriss promotes using "virtual assistants", so I wouldn't be surprised if he was ordering them to hype his books online.

This concludes my research on Tim Ferriss. If you want to know why this guy annoys me, I openly admit that it is due to an ingrained dislike of people like him: sons of the rich who believe the world has to bend to their rules, and if they hit a brick wall, aren't afraid to lie and deceive. Ferriss addresses your greed and laziness in his books, and he wants you to believe that his background and connections have nothing to do with his eventual financial success. "Four Hour Work Week" may indeed have been the first one. I hope this article sobered you up, or confirmed your suspicions.

NSFW: Vince Kelvin Sex Tape

"Earl Grey" made a comment on my recent Vince Kelvin thread. I'll just copy and paste it here:

I don't know if this is legit or not (judging from the haircut it has to be Vince), but on another forum there is currently a Vince Kelvin sex tape floating around. Before you ask your cat to claw out your eyes, be informed that Vince first gets a BJ from a fattie, then bangs the fattie in missionary position and all this next to a passed out person.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl88b9_unauthorized-pua-guru-vince-kelvin-sextape_creation

Do not watch this immediately after eating, otherwise you might just chunder everywhere!

Yes, the guy is Vince Kelvin. Vince, let us see another one of your fabulous lays! Maybe there's even a career in gonzo porn for you.

Be prepared to cover part of the video with your hand. I did while watching it. At the same time, I was laughing hard because Vince stayed completely in character, making his strange facial expressions. A few times, you can even see him looking at the guy who is hiding in the closet and filming.