I have a certain philosophy that I have not yet shared with you folks, but I am going to do so now because, as you will learn, it will be worth millions.

I have come to the conclusion that much of the thing known as Progress must answer to two concepts. First off, nothing ever really changes that much. Secondly, everything reverses itself. While these two ideas seem mutually exclusive at first, and in fact seem to present a catchall policy akin to "things will either change or stay the same," it is nothing of the sort. I am here to tell you that both are present in Progress, one merely needs to see how everything can stay the same while things reverse. That doesn’t make any sense, you say? It actually makes perfect sense and, in order to explain it, I give you the grease monkey.

Cars were, once upon a time, the province of mechanical whizzes. One did not buy a car unless one knew, or at least could figure out, how to fix it. There were no tow trucks, no service stations and few gas stations. If something broke on your car, you fixed it yourself or it stayed broken. If you wanted to take a trip in a car, you brought plenty of gasoline along because you never knew when you would come across a store that sold the stuff. Of course, eventually there came to be service stations, tow trucks, rural mechanics, gas stations and the like, so the ability to work on cars was not necessary, but it was a very handy skill to have because is saved a lot of money.

Thus, we come to the grease monkey. Everybody, I’m sure, has come across a guy like that. This was the guy who wanted to fix his car, tune it, mess with the timing, rebuild the engine and other such things that most of us happily pay someone else to do. However, their acknowledged reason for doing all this work was to make their car perform better, a vague idea usually pared down to the answer to the question, "What’ll she do?" (And therein creating an entirely separate essay upon the essential similarity between the way a man views his car and the way he views his girlfriend). It could be argued that the actual reason car guys worked on their machines is that they wanted to work on them, period, but we are not going to mire ourselves in such a conversational death-spiral because, after all, that’s not going to make us big piles of dough. Anyway, these guys were happy to play with their cars, reseating spark plugs, retightening their alternator belts and painting flames on the fenders. Eventually, they started adding spoilers and wheelie bars and blowers and such and everything seemed to be going fine for America’s love affair with the automobile.

However, things fell apart. Do you know why? The Japanese. They had the gall to think that, instead of needing a nation of part-time mechanics, they could just put computers into the engine and have it make adjustments that would make everything run better, faster and more reliably because the computer could analyze what the car was doing while it was doing it. Thus, as more computers were put into the cars, the less that non-professionals could do to their cars because that would risk damaging the small chips of silicon that made the whole thing work. So, now, the only customization a "car guy" can do to his automobile/truck is to add stickers featuring Calvin urinating on something.

However, the grease monkey is not dead. No, he merely got the grime out from under his fingernails. And what is the grease monkey doing now? He is working on his computer.

He is finding the latest drivers for his video card, he is swapping out modems, he is installing new memory, replacing his motherboard’s chipset, building a LAN for his house, etc. And all the time, he is trying to get more performance out of his computer and that is usually explained by the answer to the question, "How fast will she download porn?"

As you see, the two conditions for progress I have listed above are qualified: Nothing really changed, guys still have hunks of metal to try to play with. It’s still all about speed. They still like their women naked. But things have reversed themselves around the "hunks of metal" axis. Hunks of metal, that originally rendered men effectively incapable of mucking about with hunks of metal, became the very hunks of metal they are now playing with. Also, notice that this is generally considered Progress.

Now that we have provided you with an example of my philosophy in action, I am one step closer to our wads of cash. And our next step is something our friend Randy said sometime during the weekend of Tim’s wedding.

Randy was telling us that he and Shar have a, as I shall term it, child plan. They had a girl (In fact they still have her, and her name is Mackenzie). They would also like to have a boy. But they are stopping at either the first boy or the third girl. Besides the obvious reasons for not wanting to risk having more than three girls in the house at any given time, as well as wanting to avoid the difficulty known as "labor", another reason for them wanting to quit at three is that, apparently, as women get older, they are more likely to have female children. I, personally, have no statistics to support this, but that was the information that I was given at the time. Should you demand proof of this, I welcome you to look them up if you think it’s so important. I, however, am not going to let mere facts get in the way of my money.

Our next step takes us to China and their one child per family policy. This, in case you had not heard, is causing problems throughout China because there is a cultural stigma there for families to have sons, so they tend to keep having children until they have sons. Thus, the horror stories about families leaving their female offspring to be raised by wolves. This is generally considered to be bad, because the indigenous wolf population is forced to raise foster children without government subsidy checks. This, however, is okay, because the resulting glut of males in China means big checks for us.

Now then, here is where the money starts rolling in:

Women in the US are getting married and having children later in life. Which means more female children in the US. Which means a shortage of potential mates for these women. Which means we need to find a source of males somewhere. Which means:

Asian Mail-Order Husbands.

Get in on the ground floor now, because this is going places!

Notice, nothing really changes. White Americans are still allowed to purchase members of other races. Asians are still available at bargain prices ("How do we do it? Volume!"). Amtrak is expanding, which means more of the same for Chinese immigrants. And also notice that everything reversed itself because now people are treating their husbands like objects instead of their wives. And that, folks, is Progress!