Deniability

Posted by Bob on October 30, 2005 at 11:16 pm  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 4 Comments »

I can’t find it, but I wrote a piece which discussed a country where I was chasing down terrorists.

I pointed out that the terrorists I was chasing took over, and a small comedy ensued. They offered me a commission by mail, then when I didn’t reply they informed me I was now listed as a terrorist in their country.

Then, since I was on their mailing list, they sent me a couple of tourist brochures. All this happened over a period of decades.

One commenter asked me if I would say what country that was. I’m glad he did, because it gives a chance to repeat some very important points about this blog.

The first is that I do not want the person who wrote that to get all upset. When I explain it will sound like I am accusing him of not reading or understanding what I said before.

Peter was saying he had said too much. No, Peter, the point of my blog is for you to say what you are thinking. If other people don’t comment as much as you do, that’s their problem, not yours.

By the same token, if someone asks me something I can’t answer for a reason, I am perfectly capable of explaining again.

Do not apologize, gang, just say it.

And don’t sweat the grammar or the spelling. I am interested in what you have to say, not in Webster’s Dictionary.

If you were drunk and you want me to remove it, I’ll remove it and your request. But sometimes drunk is good and you say what you’ve been holding back.

Now to point two: this commenter asked what country it was I referred to.

When I announced the blog, I said, “Don’t hold me to anything I say in the blog.”

What is a matter of debate to others is a matter of survival to me. “Is there a leftist bias?” is a point of debate to respectable conservatives. For me dealing with the absolute vengefulness of the left is a matter of survival.

Tom DeLay upset the liberals and now he is facing prison. The Feds spent tens of millions of dollars to send David Duke to one of the worse prisons in America on a three thousand dollar tax charge.

I have been reminded of this fact on two continents in long and almost identical speeches by two different lawyers on two different continents. Apparently these were not new speeches, because I was fascinated by how identical they were.

When the leftists finally chase you down, you have two humiliating alternatives:

1) You can say everything you claimed was a lie and — I am NOT kidding about this — that you were abused in childhood and you are a pathological liar or

2) You used to believe those things but since then you have found Jehovah/Religion/Jesus and renounce all your hate-filled thoughts.

I am leaving alternative 2) wide open.

This is because I am specifically ignoring the legal advice I got in this blog. They told me that when I got old it would be hard to avoid talking about things I had done.

It is.

My Federal files have been very carefully cleaned. I was in the direct line for clearance of ALL Federal employees and that gave me a certain amount of access to all files, including mine.

Everything is deniable.

Including the second paragraph above.

But specificity can destroy deniability. So when David Duke was pressing me in Moscow on his radio show about where I was over a period of years, I was bit frustrated that he wouldn’t understand that “I was in in various kinds of intelligence work” should have been enough to make him back off.

I have enormous gaps in my resume.

They will stay empty.

Smurfs

Posted by Bob on October 30, 2005 at 10:39 pm  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 8 Comments »

Smurfette, who says she loves me dearly, has a web site devoted to the Smurfs:

http://www.smurf.com/homepage.html

I am happy to advertise the web site of somebody who reads mine. We are the alternative media and we need to back each other up.

Smurfette’s web page talks about the 25 languages the Smurfs are published in. This is pretty relevant to me, since I was reading Smurfs in German long before they appeared in the US. In German, the word “smurf” is used as a verb the same way it is in English.

I would like to know if Smurfette is a fan of Asterix too.

Asterix is interesting because it is the only adult comic book I have ever seen.

By this I mean that Asterix is aimed at adults.

There is not a dirty word in it. I do not think there is anything particularly adult about publications that use the kind of words we used to scratch on the walls of the Boy’s Room when we were in grammar school.

Asterix can best be understood by an adult mind.

For instance, Asterix says exactly how Europeans look at each other.

To someone who is interested in languages, Asterix is a gold mine. It is published in three different versions of Dutch. Besides which, I have a couple of Asterixes that are in Afrikaans.

I also had an Asterix that was in LATIN!

The one thing that worries me about the Smurfs is that they have have a grand total of one female, who is unmarried.

She has blond hair and blue skin.

Latino “Brothers”

Posted by Bob on October 26, 2005 at 8:21 pm  
Filed Under How Things Work | 4 Comments »

Before the World Series game, ther was a salute to Latino Legends in Baseball.

It began with a speech about Latin Americans who play baseball “and their brothers in the United States.”

I wonder what would happen if a white baseball player referred to “my brothers in Europe?”

A Favor for Elizabeth

Posted by Bob on October 26, 2005 at 4:00 pm  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 7 Comments »

As I said below, though she vehemently denies it, Elizabeth is Catholic because the Pope is a bachelor. I therefore took the initiative and wrote the Pope about this.

I said that I would like to set Elizabeth up for a date with His Holiness, but he if he is busy maybe he could fix her up with one of Cardinals.

The response to my letter from the Vatican Curia was something I can only describe as unfriendly.

Further, it was badly written. I found their use of the word “excommunication” tiresomely repetitious.

Don’t worry about it, Elizabeth. I hear that Russian Orthodoxy is a great alternative.

This should not make other readers of Bob’s Blog jealous.

I stand ready to do the same sort of thing for the rest of you.

Papa Smurfs are Serious

Posted by Bob on October 24, 2005 at 4:29 pm  
Filed Under How Things Work | 6 Comments »

Al Franken, Alam Colmes and Ed Asner, fanatically anti-white leftists, are all Reformed Jews from Reformed Jewish families.

There are three segments in Jewish religion, Reformed, Conservative and Orthodox.

The Hassidim make Orthodox Jews look Super Reformed. The Orthodox are supposed to strictly observe the Law Old Testament “Christians” worship, but compared to Hassidim, they are yawners.

But something that is not generally known is that, while Reformed Jews are hard left, the Hassidim are the solidest conservative voting bloc in America.

And, not coincidentally, the Hassidim are the only Jews who are not dying out.

I was watching President Bush addressing a group of Hassidic Jews. Every Hassidic Jew there was male and at least middle age. Every one of them was dressed in identical black suit and black hat. All of them had the same beard.

They looked exactly like a group of Papa Smurfs dressed up for the occasion.

But one thing was not funny. For some reason Bush asked how many of them had ONE HUNDRED grandchildren.

Several of them raised their hands with a proud smile.

The Hassidim are very white, many of them blond and blue-eyed.

Other Jews are facing a birth deficit that is even worse than Europe’s. And I think it is a direct result of pure hatred.

If you raise your children to hate, they begin to hate themselves. That’s what happened to New England. New England had a high birth rate at first. But by the nineteeth century they couldn’t even populate that cold, rocky little corner of America they inhabited and the Irish and other groups took over.

After the Civil War, at the height of its power, New England depopulated itself the way Jews are doing today.

New England was dedicated to the destruction of the South. The South lost and populated the West. New England died on its rocks.

Hate, real hate, is poison.

I have an observation that is in no way scientific. The right-wing Jews I know look very Jewish. You certainly couldn’t tell that Al Franken, Ed Asner or Alan Colmes were Jews if they didn’t make such a point of it.

Ben Stein looks like the Jew’s Jew. But when someone on his show on the Comedy Channel said Thomas Jefferson had a mulatto child, he actually hit back hard and said the child was probably fathered by Jefferson’s uncle.

During one of my super-top-clearance clearances my adjudicator was a Jew. Right behind him was a table piled high with reports on me from every conceivable agency. I mean there were literally a hundred thousand pages on me there, everything about me.

He asked me if I was anti-Semitic. If I had said No he could have argued that I lied to him.

I said Yes and proceeded to explain.

I said, “Every time somebody says to me ‘I am Jewish and…’ the next thing he says is either anti-white or anti-Southern or both.”

I said, “I am sick of being insutled by people who think they have the right to insult me because they’re Jewish.”

I told David Duke that and he said I must have been crazy.

Well, I got the clearance, which was the point of the exercise.

I do not like Jews in general, because they, ON THE RECORD, consistently fight to destroy my race.

You can get away with a lot if you are consistent and you know how to tell the truth.

By the same token I appreciate it when a ben Stein breaks with Jewish opinion and is a Southerner — his father was a professor at the University of Virginia and Stein has never been anything but a conservative, even when the neos were still liberal.

Bernard Baruch’s father was Deputy Surgeon General of the Confederate Army and around 1900 in New York when the orchestra at high-class New York functions played “Dicie” he would embarrass Bernard and the other kids by jumping up and screaming the Rebel Yell.

During Reconstruction Bernard’s father was a member in good standing of the Kershaw County, South Carolina Ku Klux Klan.

You expect ME to hate a Jew like THAT?

I am the enemy of my declared enemies. Those “Christians” who are getting people in the Appalachians, where liberals can’t racially mix them, to adopt third world babies, are my enemies.

Jews who are deadly serious about being Jews, and who do not begrudge my race the right to survive, are not my enemies.

From the definition of “Christian” I hear today, I am anti-Christian, too.

Rebellious Youth

Posted by Bob on October 24, 2005 at 12:24 pm  
Filed Under History, How Things Work | 5 Comments »

I was a college professor in the 1960s. That was when the Love Generation was making calls to the parents of guys in Vietnam saying they were the Department of Defense and falsely informing them that their son had been killed in action.

Al Capp was a New York liberal Jew who did the Lil Abner cartoons. That is, as he said, he was a standard liberal Jew until he made fun of the Love Generation.

Capp made fun of the John Birch Society, the Klan, Big Business, all the standard things. He said he got some hate mail for it.

But then he made fun of the anti-Vietnam protestors, the Love Generation.

He made it clear that he was not joking when he said that he didn’t know what hate was until he got it from the Love Generation.

Hate mail from the Love Generation poured in. Capp said he got more attack mail in one week than he had gotten in his whole career before. He said each letter made the Klan look like pussycats. Capp said that the language in those letters would embarrass a Harlem pimp.

Capp abruptly became a conservative.

So we all know that the Love Generation was not about love.

There was another claim the Love Generation made besides, “We’re all about Love.”

They also said they were Rebellious Youth.

They weren’t that young, but we’ll that for another article.

Right now let’s concentrate on the claim that 1960s “campus radicals” were “Rebellious.”

Remember, I was younger than many of the students I taught. If you don’t think I was rebellious, my FBI file would contradict you.

During the 1960s I would like to have yelled at the stlf-styled radicals:

REBELLIOUS!? You’re the most obedient bunch of spoiled brats I’ve ever seen!

Here was their “radical” program:

1) All money should be taken away from the military and given to professors to spend on social programs;

2) Taxes should be vastly increased to give to social science professors more money to spend on their pet social programs;

2) All policy on so-called criminals, who are actually victims of society, should be turned over to criminologists, like our sociology professors told us;

3) The economy should run entirely by professors who will plan the whole thing;

4) Any money or power left over should go into reparations to minority groups, which will be distributed the way our liberal professors tell us it should.

That was the college student radicals idea of rebellion.

Listen, gang, the ancient Pharoahs wished that Egyptians would worship every word they said the way those so-called radicals worshipped what their professors told them.

Elizabeth is in Denial

Posted by Bob on October 20, 2005 at 10:54 pm  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 8 Comments »

I recently stated that Elizabeth and all Catholic females are Catholic because the Pope is a bachelor.

Elizabeth denies this.

We professionals in social science deal with this problem all the time.

Anyone who drinks is an alcoholic, but many keep denying this fact.

Anyone who criticizes homosexuality is a latent homosexual.

How can they deny it? By definition, “latent” means you don’t know it. So how can anybody deny they are latent?

But they keep doing it.

No, Elizabeth, if you refuse to accept the fact that you lust after the College of Cardinals you deny the validity of today’s social sciences.

And you wouldn’t want to do that.

In Bob’s Blog, Comments are Riches

Posted by Bob on October 20, 2005 at 10:31 pm  
Filed Under Comment Responses | No Comments »

In Bob’s Blog, we have to take it for granted that Bob knows what he is doing.

So when Joe talks about justices and the law, I can tell he has been thinking about what I said.

But I will not approve it if someone decides to dump his sermon in this blog.

And I’m pretty good at knowing the difference.

This is much more professional than the average person can easily understand. The point here is to
stimulate thought on YOUR part.

“But,” someone could say, “How can you presume to judge whether a person’s independent statements are the thoughts you want to stimulate? Isn’t that totalitarianism?”

I think “someone” is an idiot.

And, before anyone gets paranoid, I made up someone to have a straw man.

Bob can tell better than other people whether someone is giving me a thought I helped stimulate or making a speech he would have made if I had never been born.

Bob can also appreciate the people who jump in here and say what I make them think of.

You who do that are my pay. Who else can make good minds move?

OK, enough of reading all this treacle.

Get off your asses and MOVE!

And don’t be nervous about it.

Just remember that if you don’t do it right I’ll GET you!

The Righteous, the Hypocrites, and Me

Posted by Bob on October 20, 2005 at 8:23 pm  
Filed Under Bob | 3 Comments »

In alcohol and drug recovery, each convention is filled with vast amounts of literature. People in the Twelve Step Recovery program write books about how how, following The Program, they learned the way to make money, the way to be successful in life, the way to be happy, the way to have good “relationships” with the opposite sex.

There are gay recovery groups and I am sure they have books on how to have good relations with the same sex, though I’ve never seen one.

Meanwhile my whole picture of The Program is embodied in times when I had to knock a guy out cold on the way to the emergency room, when I had to take a gun away from a woman who was threatening to shoot herself or anybody else, when a guy was naked and jabbing himself with a needle in his genitals in a bathroom filled with blood screaming, “I can’t find a vein, I can’t find a vein!” , and a number of times when I had to clean the vomit out of my car after taking somebody to detox.

Back to books on “How the Program Made me Healthy, Wealthy and Wise.”

When the average person reads advice of the kind I give he generally expects three subjects: 1) how to healthy, wealthy and wise, 2) how to be moral, and 3) how to think straight.

My advice is only on 3) because 3) is all I really know about.

So let me repeat why my writings are not the sort of thing great columns or best-selling advice books are made of.

A successful advice columnist tells his audience three things:

1) How to be successful;

2) How he should conduct himself personally;

And

3) How to think straight.

You may find some advice on 1) and 2) SOMEWHERE in the archives of Whitakeronline, Bob’s Blog, my articles or the books I have written.

But you shouldn’t. If I ever told you how you should act personally to be moral paragon, those were the silly writings all us mere humans stoop to.

But I don’t think you will find a word of this preaching about personal behavior in all I have said.

My advice is on how to THINK straight.

Sainthood I leave to saints. I have not achieved sainthood and I never will.

This is not like The Confessions of Saint Augustine where he is talking about the sins he committed BEFORE he saw the light: He kept praying, “Lord make me chaste, but not yet.”

Even when I discuss stupid thinking, I am not talking about things I have overcome. I am talking about things I am still doing.

Some of the people writing the books about that show up on the stands at AA conventions, the ones about to be happy and successful and how to do sex right, are probably also carrying unconscious overdosers into the emergency room.

God bless them if they are. They combine perfect theory with perfect behavior.

But I never checked to see if they practice what they preached. I had my own work to do.

And even if such a perfect peson existed, he couldnot perform one role a sinner like me was perfect for.

Very few people in a Twelve Step Program want to do their fifth step with a saint.

I wrote about the fifth step before. It is where you tell one human being ALL about yourself, I mean ALL, including the sexual stuff, and learn that that person can like you despite the things you are most ashamed of.

The huge number of people who asked to their Fifth Step with me came to me precisely because I am NOT a moral paragon and never claimed to be. If I have one proof that I nonjudgmental it is the number of people who decided, or were even urged by their sponsors, to do their fifth step with me.

You do NOT go to a judgmental person for that one.

BUT, there is always a BUT, I am not good because I am nonjudgmental.

There is a lot to be said for judgement.

All those big name rock stars who tell how they overcame drugs sound great. But they give people, and not just young people, the idea that drugs are OK because you can do them and become a success and then overcome them.

No way. Look at the list of rock stars who died using drugs.

St. Augustine and the Emperor Constantine delayed their baptism because baptism was believed to wash away all sins. So Augustine got baptised after he had done his sinning.

This may be good theology, but it is an AWFUL example.

I have led an AWFUL life. I am now a lonely old man. Nietzsche said that one leads the same life over and over. That is my worse nightmare.

I have a lot to offer. I can tell you how to argue, how to get things done.

Which is all I talk about.

But very often people assume that because what I say is good, I am good.

I have left a trail of very disappointed people behind me all my life. And I’m sick of it, because I don’t deserve that extra burden.

I am one of those who give warnings I do not heed.

I am the one who cleans the vomit out of his car. I am the one people come to to spill their guts out in the fifth step. I am the one who was out there on six continents fighting the fight no one else wanted to dirty their hands with.

I stood up to the enemies of my race while all the people who beat their chests about how Moral they were deserted me the moment the word “racist” was mentioned.

I am sure there were moral paragons in there side-by-side with me the whole time.

I just didn’t see them.

Maybe I was drunk.

Chess and Dice

Posted by Bob on October 20, 2005 at 2:08 am  
Filed Under History | No Comments »

The Romans were absolutely nuts about playing dice.

We wonder why on earth somebody could be so fascinated with a game which involved no skill at all, but was just a matter of random chance?

The answer is that the Romans had no idea that dice was a matter of random chance. The Romans didn’t know there was such a thing as random probability and a bell curve. The took it for granted that dice was a game of SKILL.

The key to understanding history is realizing that other people in other societies and in other times lived in different WORLD from ours. If you follow the Politically Correct dictum that “all people are basically the same,” you cannot begin to understand different peoples.

In Roman times, one only sailed on auspicious dates. A bird crossing overhead was an omen, as were endless numbers of other things. Astrology was a SCIENCE. The oracles were SCIENCE.

Like our modern social siences, the one thing other societies, past and present, never studied was RESULTS.

If you never check the results, astrology is science. If you never check the results, liberal intellectuals are intellectuals.

In Roman times, a person who talked to the dice was literally talking to the dice.

As with every other pagan god, JHWH dwelt on every word a person said. If you will read the context of the Lord’s Prayer, you will see Jesus considered all this absurd: “Let your answer be ‘yes” or “no,” “those who would attain salvation by much saying.”

Every other people lived on a world which was “the firmament” and where the stars were spread above us.

Look at Genesis.

That is not the world we live in.

In ancient times women were born with one less tooth than men because Aistotle said so.

In ancient times dice was a game of skill. They didn’t know there WAS such a thing as random chance.

Now tell me you are not blind in history if you believe that all people think more or less the same.

“Power is All About About Money!”

Posted by Bob on October 19, 2005 at 11:21 am  
Filed Under Bob, How Things Work | 3 Comments »

A man has the instincts of a billy goat. He wants to plant the seed and get the hell out.

I get very, very tired of people getting that True Wisdom look on their faces they always get when they’re about to say something really stupid and say, “Power is all about MONEY.”

Actually the billionaires who spend many millions promoting the leftist agenda have very little power. All they are doing is pushing the agenda some professor taught them in college. The guy with the power was the professor who screwed them in the first place.

Reply to Peter

Posted by Bob on October 19, 2005 at 11:13 am  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 3 Comments »

I thought I just approved a comment by Peter but I can’t find it.

Peter said, “I agree with Joe. I guess I should lick your hand now.”

No, Peter, you can’t lick my hand but can kiss my ….

Oops, I keep forgetting this is a family publication.

Reply to Joe

Posted by Bob on October 19, 2005 at 10:01 am  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 5 Comments »

Joe, you have a very exacting sense of humor.

Each of the three comedians you mentioned took a huge chance.

Jim Kerry is a physical comedian, and that is as old as the hills. But he is just incredibly good at it.

Steve Martin is the pitiful comedian. That is also as old as the hills and it takes exacting skill to make the exact balance he makes, the one everybody tries and nobody can do as well as he does.

Chris Farley was the shouting comedian. His was the humor that every Jewish comedian tries and fails at. It has to be JUST right, and the Jews just make it obnoxious.

So, like the cat in the commercial, Joe’s tastes in humor are very simple. He wants the best there is.

My comedic specialty is, like that of the three above, as old as Cro-Magnon man.

It is called, “Injecting humor into serious subjects.”

If you don’t think a new twist on THAT is as hard as Farley’s making loud humor funny, ask any speech-writer.

But I do it GOOD.

In most speeches, you can tell when the “time to add a light touch” has been reached.

My humor is aimed at catching you off guard.

For my readers, reading what I say is like hearing somebody talk about something you had already been working out in your mind, but I have thought about it a lot and express it in a way you wish you had.

So there are you are, sharing my outrage and my disgust, getting right down to the guts of the matter. At that exact point I have the chance to inject the very essence of humor:

Surprise.

No joke is funny if you see the punch line coming.

But when someone is exposing the very thing that disgusts or offends you most, suddenly running into a punch line is like stepping on a land mine. I simply cannot resist an opportunity like that.

There is another element. There is a reason why professional speechwriters cannot take advantage of this opportunity the way I do here is because, for most people, humor on a serious subject is next door to heresy.

So you HAVE to signal your punch. You have to say, in effect, “Now this is a very serious subject, and I recognize that, but at this point I am going to lighten things up by making a joke so don’t take it as making light of this very serious issue that means so much to you.”

After an intro like that it’s a little hard to catch the crowd by surprise.

I need readers who trust me. That split second of surprise is precious. If you throw it away by asking yourself, “Should I laugh at this or is it heresy?” you lose it.

My humor is for people who can ride with the tide.

“I can’t believe it. Very few people can make me laugh. Jim Carrey, Steve Martin and Chris Farley. Now you. What are the chances? A guy that knows all the stuff that you know also turns out to be able to make me laugh. I think it’s the way you put things sometimes. I read you for a serious purpose. I never look to be entertained. And here it is. I can’t believe it. I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of friends. You should have. No, this is not sychophancy. Just plain straight talk.”

Comment by joe rorke — 10/18/2005 @

Indulging a Luxury

Posted by Bob on October 18, 2005 at 11:41 am  
Filed Under Musings about Life | 1 Comment »

One of my definitions of luxury is, “the ability to take trivia seriously.”

Partly from teaching international law and also my lifelong ingterest in geography, I have developed a fascination with the political status of what I refer to technically as “tee tiny little countries.”

Does anybody else know anything about a country which exists called San Marino?

It sits there landlocked inside Italy. San Marino consists of about 12,000 acres.

It is not like one of the recent pieces of a colonial empire that gets a seat in the United Nations. San Marino has been an independent state since the fourth century.

VERY independent.

For years it had the only popularly elected Communist government on earth. When Mousolini’s ally Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June of 1941 San Marino declared war on Germany.

This left Il Duce in a bit of a quandary. He couldn’t just stomp on San Marino and San Marino hadn’t declared war on HIM. So he gave Germany the right to send troops across its territory and until the Americans got there they occupied the place, way the out inthe middle of Italy.

I wish I could find out more about that very strange occupation.

San Marino has turned its foreign relations over to Italy, so it has no UN seat.

But SMOM DOES a UN seat, and I’ll bet Elizabeth has information on that huge country.

The Sovereign and Military Order of Malta, though the origins of SMOM are disputed, is a worldwide Catholic organization that once ruled Malta, as the name indicates. Its size was reduced somewhat
after Rhodes was taken away from them.

SMOM now occupies no ground at all. It is located in an upper story of a bulding in Rome.

BUT…

SMOM has a seat inthe United Nations and has independent relations with 70 countries. It exchanges ambassadots with them!

Elizabeth, wherfe in the HELL do those ambassadors LIVE? Somehow I can’t picture seventy legations in the upper stories of an Italian office building.

Compared to SMOM Vatican City is a giant. It has 106 acres of actual ground.

I don’t understand why Vatican City is constantly referred to as the second smallest indepandent country on earth, next to Monaco, since the Vatican recognizes SMOM.

Compared to the three independent countries inside Italy, Leichtenstein is a sprawling giant. It is about the size of Washington, DC which is 40,000 acres, but Leichtenstein has long since turned all of its foreign relations over to Switzerland.

I have heard too much about Monaco to care about it. I have heard plenty about the Vatican, but precisely because it is so important religiously its political existence has been largely ignored.

Like SMOM what is now Vatican City once occupied a lot more territory. The Papal States covered some forty thousand square miles of central Italy for many centuries. Like SMOM, the Pope’s empire contracted a bit when its original area was conquered.

The smallest REAL country in Europe is Luxembourg. I say REAL because it did ALL the things a sovereign country does. It printed its own money, though Belgian currency was also an official currency there until the Euro. I believe that is the only example on earth of a country OFFICIALLY accepting another country’s money as official and yet printing its own at the same time.

Luxembourg actually had its own army and used it as a member of NATO, to which it contributed on regiment. Luxembourg was exactly 999 square miles in size, which always made me want them to take another square mile when I was nine years old and studying my little red ge0graphy book all the time.

I believe Andorra is the only country on earth whose main industry, officially, was smuggling.

Throughout the 1950s Andorra’s official, appropriated military budget was exactly twenty four dollars and sixty five cents per annum.

The Channel Islands Britain had their own sovereignty. They were the only English-speaking areas occupied by Germany during World War II.

When I said that Luxembourg was eh only country that OFFICIALLY recognized a foreign currency and yet printed its own, I forgot that Scotland printed its own currency and may still do so but mainly uses the British pound.

I think that Vatican City is the only tee tiny country that does not have the same official language as its bigger neighbor(s). The official language of that country is still Latin.

Oddly enough, all this seeming trivia can be very useful in an international law lecture, but I was fascinated by it long before I taught that.

Reply to Peter

Posted by Bob on October 18, 2005 at 10:38 am  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 2 Comments »

Dammit, Peter, I am NOT TOUCHY!!

I get so sick of people calling me touchy!

Excuse me a second while I get my paper bag.

Whew, that’s better!

Something else I am getting tired of is people whispering behind my back about how paranoid I am.

And that cat stomping around next door is getting on my nerves.

Reply to Trager

Posted by Bob on October 17, 2005 at 4:35 pm  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 2 Comments »

Traeger is about the only person on earth I could still consider a friend.

Maybe.

We have known each other forever, so he gots no mercy here and expects none.

I now quote what he says and my replies are marked by ***********

TRAGER SAYS:

Something much more basic is going on:

Computers make for more refined accounting.

More refined accounting means a better ability to find out which parts of a business are making or losing money.

Computers also mean that engineers can incorporate costs into their design and not have to send designs to top management, which will then get cost from accounting, buyer preferences from marketing, and so on. Top management alone has the information. (Engineers design cars that make them happy, but they cost too much and the public won’t buy them.) All this means that middle-management ranks, those who pass informatation from bottom to top and back down again, are getting delayered.

****** While I am the senile one, you seem to have forgotten that all this was the explanation of why, in the Carter years, everybody thought that business cycles were a thing of the past.

***** Nobody noticed that Europe had computers and one long cycle: Down

*********I do love the irony that Yuppie middle management, back in the 90s where you seem to be stuck, said automation was OK and the low-life working class would have to face losing jobs.

****** Those are the guys who are now asking, “Would you like fries with that?”

Computers also mean that it has become easier to buy outside the firm than make it yourself.

Transactions costs are lowered. Did you ever hear of Ronald Coase and a paper he wrote in 1937, “The Economics of the Firm”? Of course *you* have.

****** You know Ronald Coase was a professor of mine.

All this means more and more creative destruction, shorter product cycles, more jobs in design and marketing, fewer semi-skilled and unskilled jobs (code for IQ, mostly), smaller sized plants and firms both.

*********** What is this “unskilled” nonsense? Anybody who can paint a house can get a job. A super specialist in computers can’t.

*************** Where have you been the last couple of decades?

This means a general increase in the tempo of change. Who now plans ten years ahead?

********** I can’t believe you are parroting this “Inevitable incread in the tempo of change” bit.

********** In political strategy, and I mean REAL politics, you plant ideas. I deal in decades routinely.

It means a greater premium on raw IQ. You’re OLD Bob and not as smart as you used to be and are living on you accumulated wisdom. There’s not much of a demand for “experience.” Peak earning years will go down.

******** Lord, man you are really stuck in the nineties!

******** I can’t get it straight whether you are somehow competing with me or making a point.

******** I am very unhappy that I have to keep saying things that are obvious and neitehr young nor old people can see. You yourself said my big contribution was, and I quote:

******** “Things jump out at you that other people don’t even notice.” It is a very uncomfortable talent, because I keep wondering why the obvious never occurs to anybody lese.

********* In fact, it is very much like the old movie about the pod people, where nobody seemed to notice that people with human brains and emotions were being replaced by pods.

************ I want to be frozen and wake in a world where I will be given lotes of extra frontal lobe and taught by people who have already thought of what I agonizingly try to teach people now.

********** I do NOT like being the only sane one around.

Not as much as it should, since our Stone Age brains tell us that with age comes wisdom. It did, when the oldsters were all of thirty.
It all adds up to no more careers, just jobs in the old sense that you get a very specific task.
Tell me, Bob, what are the last three bits of wisdom you’ve acquired.

********** You seem obsessed with me.

******** If you read the blog, you would know that I am Odinistic. The word “Wisdom” is for charlatans.

********* You know I never let anybody get away with the sort of crap you just asked me. What is this “Wisdom” fertilizer?

********** There are things that work and things that don’t work. There are thoughts one comes up with and insights one finds or learns.

********** But “Wisdom?” In all seriousness, what in the HELL is that?

Martyr, Second Class

Posted by Bob on October 17, 2005 at 3:17 pm  
Filed Under Bob | No Comments »

After my second nervous breakdown the friends I still had in Washington were all Catholics.

Hard-core Catholics.

Conservative Catholics? That is one hell of an understatement.

I have no use for anybody who believes in an omnipotent God of Heaven and Hell and then tries to make this concept reasonable and acceptable to Modern Thought. He is speaking a language that means nothing to me.

If there is no Heaven or Hell religion is silly.

And believe me, at that point in my life I could believe in Hell. You think I am joking?

DEFINITELY no joke.

In my state “Creo in Deo Crudel,” “I believe in a cruel God,” made perfect sense to me. I gave it a one percent chance of being true.

Being true FOREVER.

At that time I was also very interested in the Shroud of Turin. It was inexplicable, and I was ready to be convinced.

One never wholly sheds the faith he was raised in.

So I went to the only religious friends I had. Calvinists required a faith I could not mustger.

Myy friends were so Catholic they weren’t Catholics any more. All of them had decided that, since Vatican II, the pope wasn’t really Catholic any more.

You think I’m joking, don’t you?

Paul Weyrich and the others had gone to the Eastern Rite. They would have gone to the Orthodox Church if the theologians had not stood in the door blocking their way.

So I joined Paul’s church, in which he later became a deacon. That is the order just below priest.

Jesus forgave the repentent thief, so the idea that he had passed on the power to forgive sins made sense to me.

Politics is everything.

By my connections, I got a benefit. To become a member of this sort of church normally requires a year as a catechumen. It took me three months, which was the amount of time I had in DC during that particular assignment.

I spent a lot of my time worrying about the “tonsure.” In order to join you had to have a new baptism and a “tonsure.”

I kept thinking about going around with a monkish haircut, the whole top of my head bald, until the hair grew back.

It turn out this was a fortunate. In fact, the “tonsure” was just cutting a tiny bit of hair off. I still have the hair along with my baptismal certificate. But worrying about weeks with a bald head kept me from minding the baptism too much.

And the baptism was something else.

The Orthodox baptism makes you Baptists look like a bunch of amateurs. I was staying with my ex-wife, and on the day of my baptism I put on a bathing suit. I had to explain to her that I was being baptised.

Being a good Odinist, she had a little trouble understanding why you had to wear a bathing suit when being baptized.

Oh well, you know how ignorant these heathens are.

In the Orthodox Church and the Melkite Church you are not just immersed in water the way the Baptists do it. You are taken to the huge font which is filled with oil and water — you can certainly feel the oil, Lord knows how much they put in — and you are shoved under three times.

Which is just the start.

Over your bathing suit you are given a thin white robe to wear. You are soaking wet and your hair is oily.

There is more ceremony, then you have to stand in front of an icon during the entire church service with a wooden cross in one hand and a burning candle in the other.

Did I mention you are soaking wet and you don’t comb your hair?

Have you ever stood motionless for a solid hour with candle in one hand while you are soaking wet?

Probably not.

For one thing, the candle drips. Having wax on a hand is like having a nose itch. But you have a cross in your other hand.

Have you ever stood for a solid hour, soaking wet, while your nose itches and both hands are full and you have to think nothing but Elevated Thoughts because you have just been baptized and you really want to be good and earn the trust the priest and Paul Weyrich have placed in you by giving you a short catechumen?

Probably not.

At the end of the hour, the service ends with the taking of the bread and wine. The priest had told me that the catechumen was served FIRST, even if a bishop was present.

I wanted to have my Holy Supper soonest for purely spiritual reasons. But the physical part of me was anxious too. It wanted to stop standing there with the nose itch and both hands full as soon as it could.

The priest totally forgot I was there. So I stood there while everybody else went up front and took the bread and wine. Finally I just put down my burden and got to the back of the line.

I never reminded the priest he had forgotten me.

I also never demanded what I should have gotten for this ordeal:

A medal that declared me a Martyr, Second Class.

Some Hints on Finding Things Out

Posted by Bob on October 17, 2005 at 2:06 pm  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 5 Comments »

Peter is still ragging me about finding a book.

This could be useful.

The problem is that most of the time when I tell people first steps in finding things they think I am making fun of them, because what I do is so simple.

That’s not true. Finding an obscure fact in zoology is fairly easy. You just call a zoology department.

But finding something that “everybody knows” can be very tricky.

I was known for finding things when I got to the Reagan Admininistration, so, like all my bosses, my new boss decided to try me out. He wanted to know a quote from Shakespeare.

I called three or four local library reference services, told them who I was, and they went to work hard. They did not find the quote. What they found out was something MUCH harder:

There was no such quote.

Here’s the kicker: Nobody else would have been able to find that out without days of work. My boss was, as they all were, very impressed. It also reenforced my practical Ben Franklin image.

BUT remember that I DID this myself. If someone had come to me and asked me how to do it and I had told a major appointee of the Reagan Administration he should call the local library, he would have been grossly insulted.

In the internet age, our problem is telling the damned machine that we want something very simple. We do NOT want to buy pimple removers.

The advantage of having an institutional memory like me around is that I spent decades finding HUMANS with information.

Peter wants to know if a book exists. He needs to call several bookstores and ask if they have a book search.

You do NOT have to promise to buy a book to get a full search done. Most of these searches are for out-of-print and hard-to-find books.

Your library will also do it for you

It takes a while.

Most book searches also have a list of actual books, books that exist or existed, on hand. When you are dealing with a fake book this is very useful.

Peter’s question touches on an interesting sidelight: Almost everything under the sun, and a lot that the sun never saw, is discussed somewhere in the Congressional Record. Finding it is an art in itself. If your local library doesn’t have the CR, your local college will. But the library can find out where one is.

Never forget the interlibrary loan service. Your library can get you almost any book that still exists. Even if it doesn’t exist, the microfilm archives, world-wide, to which your library can get access, are awesome.

Be very pleasant and as unbending as a California redwood.

Elizabeth, do you have any more hints?

It is funny people think my hints are insulting because they are so “simple.”

I remember one of the top political fundraisers of all time whom I knew well, Richard Viguerie, addressed a group explaining the basics of direct mail. Richard was a poor Texas cajun who came up in the world, so when he discovered how “simple” direct mail was, he honestly didn’t think it took a genius to do what he did.

He said he had more business than he could handle, so he would just tell his conservative audience how to do it.

I know he meant it, because I think the same way. But I have learned that simple is not simple.

So Viguerie went on for about an hour with short hints he had learned by statistical analysis of responses to direct mail:

Long letters with short sentences.

How YOU can help.

Specify how much money you are trying to raise.

How to get a list of uninvolved sponsors with big names.

And on and on and on for a full hour.

Willis Carto could give you days of this.

He thinks it’s simple, too.

Then Viguerie finished with, “So as you see it’s not some kind of science. It’s all very simple.”

When he came down from the podium I said, “Richard, you don’t know it but what you just told people was, ‘Look, it’s very simple. Here’s Volume One.’”

Everything that works is based on something that seems simple once you grasp it.

But with nanotechnology, if we could grasp molecules, making ANYTHING would be simple.

“Once you grasp it” is a hell of a modifier.

It is the charlatan and the priesthood that seeks complication and arcane theories. As I cannot point out too often:

“If you babble in English you are a fool. If you babble in Latin you are a scholar.”

Why the Greatest Generation was so Small

Posted by Bob on October 14, 2005 at 12:45 pm  
Filed Under History | 4 Comments »

They called themselves “dog faces.”

The reason they were called “dog faces” was because they were put through the Basic Training of World War II. Basic Training made them obey their masters like dogs.

The British Army had a slogan for recruiting:

“It’s a MAN’S Life.”

If Basic Training made a man of you, it was a failure. The purpose of Basic was to make you perfectly obedient.

It takes generations of breeding and training besides to make a dog perfectly obedient.

The Army had eight weeks.

Four years of Obedience Training. That was World War Two in America. You had to unlearn everything our ancestors came here for.

But it got WORSE.

There was the GI Bill of Rights.

Over fifty percent of those who proudly called themselves GIs, “Government Issues,” took advantage of the right to go to college free.

After four years of Obedience Training, their professors taught them that only professors knew how to rule the world. They called it Progressive Thinking, they called it Liberalism.

I have lived a lifetime hearing people call slavishness heroism and hearing people call hatred humanity. So I am not the least surprised that the group that called itself The Greatest Generation called abject, groveling obedience “Being Realistic” and “Being Tough.”

They thought they were mature. They thought they knew what the world was all about.

So when I said they should fight back, they laughed and said I did know the world the way they did. They had learned that the sergeant was meaner than they were. They had learned that you have to “go through channels.”

Above all, hey learned that “You can’t beat Town Hall.”

In the American Revolution, everyone of them would have been a Tory.

That was just from Basic Training. Everybody who got Basic Training in World War II would have been a Tory in the Revolution. They were obedient dog faces and proud of it.

But Basic Training was followed by Politically Correct Training.

After Obedience Training the Dog Face went to college for the “education” they had earned. At the universities they were dog faces again:

At the universities the dog faces learned there that there were Authorities in the world. The Authorities knew what was best.

If you didn’t believe it, the Authorities would flunk you.

Once again, if you didn’t obey, the Authorities would squash you like a bug.

That generation, the people who called themselves dog faces, were convinced that believing professors made them Real Men.

Real Men knew the Real World.

They were Real Men.

They knew how to Obey.

You are now living in the world the Greatest Generation made for you.

Mondo cane, the world of dogs. You are living in the world the dogs made for you.

Clams, Oysters, Duck Doo and Joe

Posted by Bob on October 14, 2005 at 11:47 am  
Filed Under Comment Responses | 3 Comments »

In response to my “There are no Careers Today” Joe writes,

“Are all the clamdiggers gone too? I grew up on the bay. I don’t see how that could have changed very much. Last I heard duckshit had polluted the bay and the clamdiggers had to stay off the bay. Duck farms, you know. Them ducks have a tendency to dump a load now and again. They tell me it got into the bay and polluted it. Those were the days. I have many fond memories of working out on the bay. I knew nothing about the people who have a stranglehold on our country today. Real freedom seemed to exist in those days. If the criminals in charge today have their way, our children and our grandchildren won’t ever know what that freedom was like. Who would have dreamed such a thing could have happened in our country?”

MY REPLY:

Last sentence first. As anybody who knew me will attest, I was saying these things would happen in America when I was a teenager.

When I was fifteen I would come back from my lunch to my high school and somebody would shout “Federal Troops!”

Unlike absolutely everybody else who would tell you now they knew it, I took it for granted that the Federal Government would use Federal troops to enforce integration.

Everybody thought “Federal Troops” Bob was being ridiculous.

The list of my ridiculousness back then is endless. My sister remembers when I said the old ladies walking on Green Street near the University would not dare do that in the future and she thought how extreme that sounded.

There is not a thing happening now that I was not ridiculed in the 1950s for taking for granted.

That was then.

It happened in the 1960s when I was predicting fifty years ahead, and no one believes what I say about 2010. Likewise the 70s and the 20s, and so on.

No one takes me seriously today.

I’m used to it.

I’m tired of talking about that, so let’s go on to what may strike a chord with some readers: I do not know the difference between clams and oysters. I do not know the difference between frogs and toads. I expect someone on the Blog to let me know.

I do know that oysters clean the bays.

I watched my father wade with me in the bay and look through oyster shells and find one with an oyster in it and eat the damned thing raw.

But he also pulled his nose hairs with tweezers.

And I worked on the brick plant long before I was old enough and never passed out.

I was TOUGH. And I resent the fact I had to be.

Pain is CHEAP. A decent civilization is one which does not ask people to suffer, but a society that makes people WANT to live in it.

What I realized in the 1950s is that we could have had a joyful future.

We blew it.

I don’t miss the 1950s. I don’t miss outhouses and raw oysters.

But I do miss the future we could have had if they had listened to me.

The Old Man Wants to Ramble

Posted by Bob on October 14, 2005 at 11:18 am  
Filed Under Bob | 1 Comment »

One of our favorite blacks in the brick plant, Charlie, had to spend several months on the chain gang.

He didn’t like it.

It wasn’t the work he minded. Working on the chain gang was much, much, MUCH easier than working on the brick plant.

MUCH easier.

Did I mention the word “much?”

On the brick plant there was one major qualification for getting the job. That was not “monkeying.”

“Monkeying” meant passing out. If you passed out twice on the job they let you go.

Did I mention that the chain gang was easier than that?

So Charlie didn’t mind the work. He made jokes about it.

He also didn’t mind the man with the shotgun. The man with the shotgun was a friendly old guy and you would only get shot if you ran.

RAN?

It was a CHAIN gang. They actually did have chains on.

Anybody who tried to run with chains on would not have been shot. He would have been sent to the State Hospital for mental observation.

So Charlie didn’t mind the work or the shotgun.

No, Charlie didn’t mind the work, Lord knows, and he didn’t even seem to mind the jail.

What got to him was corn bread and peas.

Every day for months he ate nothing, and I mean nothing, but corn bread and black-eyed peas.

We had very little in the sand hills, but we had FOOD. Lots of food. Lots of GOOD food.

Whenever I walked down to the plant through the places that were referred to by everybody, including the blacks, as the “niggah houses,” my mouth watered. The same was true of the rest of my family.

The “niggah house” were shabby, but they were free, and only Charlie and a couple of other black men got them. We gave them to the blacks we WANTED to live near us. They didn’t have to commute many miles to the brick plant as so many others had to.

Work was scarce in the sand hills, very scarce. You had to drive and you could not “monkey.”

Nobody EVER gave up one of the “niggah houses.”

Food and shelter, sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? My family provided that for some eighty people with those throw-away things. Most of the the people we provided them for were black.

Nobody ever gave up a “niggah house.” To live there, you had to be on personal terms with the Whitakers. We were big people in our little world.

So Charlie wasn’t upset with the lack of decor in the jail. What he talked about for months afterward was corn bread and peas.

I could see why.

When you walked by the “niggah houses” all you remembered was the smell of the stuff cooking. It was cooking all the time, and whoever wanted something to eat just took some.

I didn’t go in and eat after I was about five. When I was very small, my parents would leave me with the black folks, and me and the other “niggah” kids would eat whenever we felt like it.

The average African today would give his soul for a steady diet of corn bread and black-eyed peas.

I’ve been there. I know.

Charlie missed FOOD, and he missed it bad.

You can’t have food like that today. It was dripping with fat, it was made to taste good and it made your stomach dance.

My yuppie niece went to a black wedding in the low state a few years back and she couldn’t believe how good the food was. She ate and she ate.

It was her only chance to eat it. It would have scandalized her Yuppie friends. Every bite was verboten, Evil and full of every poison we are warned against.

She just couldn’t stop. She talked about it for months.

Many a person in Pontiac, South Carolina back then died at the age of ninety or so of cholesterol poisoning. So Modern Opinion has to be right.

But nobody out there was EVER hungry.

I don’t know where Jane Fonda found her “children starving in South Carolina.”

But it sure wasn’t in our sandhills.

There are no Careers Today

Posted by Bob on October 14, 2005 at 10:16 am  
Filed Under General, Musings about Life | 2 Comments »

My grandfather began his work for the railroad about 1900. He retired about 1946. The job changed almost not at all during that entire period. He learned telegraphy and he was a station
master.

My father was the world’s top consultant on brick making. But when he died in 1961 the brick plants were very little changed from the ones in the 1920s. Every single brick had to be moved individually by hand in each stage of the process. The clay had to be found, the clay mixed, then the brick was shaped and cut and dried and fired.

To start with the ground, find clay, then burn that clay into exactly into exactly the color you needed, all this took a lot of expertise.

But from the time he started to the time he finished, it was the SAME expertise.

NOTHING is like that now.

My other grandfather was a Methodist preacher. The Methodist Church like so many other Protestant churches had split before the Civil War into Northern and Southern branches. My grandfather began preaching in the 1870s and retired in the 1930s. During that entire time he was employed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

If you had asked my grandfather whether he was a fundamentalist, I doubt he would have understood what you meant. All Southern Methodist ministers were fundamentalists. There was no Modern Theology to learn, there was no Political Correctness to keep up with. Even the names for colored people didn’t change every couple of years.

His job was to bring people to Christ.

Not to teach them the latest progressive theories. Today it is hard to imagine a mainline Protestant minister taking “all that salvation and damnation stuff” seriously, but that was all he did.

We had doctors who learned their medicine in practice.

They even came to your house. They didn’t keep up with the latest fads in medicine, which is about all medicine is these days, and they didn’t keep up with “the latest developments in their field.”

They didn’t HAVE a “field.” They were doctors.

As for the latest developments, there were very few to keep up with. There were earthshaking drugs like penicillin developed was huge progress, but they took very little time to learn about.

My father took time out in his teens to read law and pass the bar exam, apparently for a lark, because he was too young to get a license to practice law. Lawyers practiced law in front of a jury or before a judge they knew.

The question was whether a guy was guilty or innocent and what to do about it. Like a preacher saving souls, this is now an old-fashioned and irrelevant business in the modern legal profession, but back then that was what they did for a living.

There were many last-minute decisions by the courts to keep up with. The law changed very slowly back then.

Preacher, station master, brick maker, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. These were careers.

There are no careers today.

Yesbuts

Posted by Bob on October 7, 2005 at 7:32 pm  
Filed Under Coaching Session, How Things Work | 8 Comments »

A driver who is going 55 mph in the passing lane, along with another car on his right, holds up every rush-hour driver, thousands of people, for about ten to fifteen minutes.

The police, naturally, go after “aggressive drivers,” tired people who want to get home and resent spending an extra fifteen minutes on the road, a total of at least a thousand hours, so some impotent old man can prove he knows how fast everybody should go.

Thousands of people spend thousands of extra hours on the road for that one clown.

“Yesbuts” are exactly like that.

A “yesbut” is somebody who makes a promise to get back to you and doesn’t.

When you are trying to get something done, you will call people and clear it with them. Then you run into a “yesbut.” He doesn’t get back to you and everything gets jammed, like traffic behind that impotent clown in the passing lane who wants his one chance to bully the world.

One “yesbut” holds EVERYBODY up.

A “yesbut” doesn’t last long in serious business. Grownups don’t play that game.

PS: A yesbut is also known as a “flake.”

New Orleans and the Black Sea

Posted by Bob on October 5, 2005 at 3:45 pm  
Filed Under History | 6 Comments »

Twelve thousand years ago, give or take a klick, there was a huge land which was below sea level.

It was very warm and very fertile. It was protected from the sea by a solid block of land many miles across.

But over the years that land block became smaller and smaller. Today, we would blame global warming and people driving SUVs. But there weren’t many SUVs back then.

Finally the land block collapsed and a wave came larger than any seen since came in all at once. It was unimaginably large. Within months thousands, yes I said thousands, of square miles were inundated. We do no know how much of it was coverd in a matter of days by the first titanic wave.

Today that once-fertile valley, easily large enough to put a sizable country in, is called the Black Sea. The Black Sea has several hundred feet of river water on top, but the rest of the way down it is still the heavier sea water, the salt water that came across in the first giant wave.

And a Kyoto Treaty would not have stopped it.

A Little Revenge — The Sullivan Case

Posted by Bob on October 3, 2005 at 3:02 pm  
Filed Under How Things Work | No Comments »

Hollywood celebrities, almost all of them hard-line leftists, are always complaining about how they are insulted by the press and their privacy is invaded and they have no legal recourse.

To me there is a good, solid revenge in that because their problem stems mostly from the Sullivan Case. In the Sullivan Case the Supreme Court ruled that a “public figure” could only sue someone for libel or slander under extreme, almost impossible conditions.

That is what Hollywood stars are whining about now.

Before the Sullivan Case, celebrities had the same right to sue as mere mortals.

But when a leftist cries about the Sullivan Case, Ole Bob is the only person on earth who seems to REMEMBER how the Sullivan Case came about.

During the early 1960s when Saint Martin Luther the King was undergoinghis martyrdom in Alabama, one city official who opposed him was attacked by the New York Times.

The New York Times attack included and lies and terms so extreme that it was almost impossible for said official, Sullivan, not to collect huge damages from the New York Times.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren could not let the New York Times lose the case.

On the other hand, if they let the New York Times get away with this under a complete new definition of free speech, the entire libel and slander law in America would disappear.

The New York Times had met EVERY criterion of malicious slander against Sullivan.

Nonetheless the Warren Court HAD to let them get away with it.

This is why the New York Times HAD to get away with it:

In the 1960s liberals operated under the rule that, “There is no room for racism in America.”

So the national media used lies and personal attacks against segregationists as a matter of course. TIME magazine put out a book on the segregationists which quoted every white segregationist in ebonics. Every white segregationist was quoted as using “thuh” for “the,” “hawses” for horses” and “seguhgation” for segregation.”

I knew a lot of the segregationists quoted, and they didn’t use that kind of English.

Every integrationist in the book, white or black, was quoted in the King’s English.

But this was standard practice against segregationists. It was REQUIRED practice against segregationists.

As the British court said in the 1987 case of The Crown versus Joseph Pierce, “The truth is no exuse” for racism. They sent Pierce to prison for telling the truth for racist purposes.

By the same token, malicious and personal lies about anyone liberals and respectable conservatives agree to call “racists” is the highest morality today as it was inthe 1960s.

If anyone challenges the right of “anti-racistgs” to use slander conservative spokesmen, to prove their respectability, will lead the lynching party.

So in the 1960s lies and libel were routine against us segregationists and everybody knew it.

So the New York Times COULD not he allowed to lose the case against the segregationist Sullivan for doing what every liberal was SUPPOSED to do and every respectable conservative had to accept.

But here was the New York Times with its pants down. They had met every conceivable criterion of the malicious libel law that every American depended on to keep anybody with a printing press from destroying him.

If everybody were suddenly deprived of their right to sue for libel by the Supreme Court, even the slavish World War II generation would have revolted.

So how could the Supreme Court save the right to libel segreagationists for the national media and not destroy the entire libel law?

To do this, the Warren Court invented the “public figure.”

It turned out that the minor official Sullivan, down in Alabama, was a “public figure.”

So Sullivan was subject to an entirely different libel law from the one that applied to mere mortals.

In order to save the New York Times and in order to justify the liberal duty to libel segregationists, the Supreme Court had to invent a “public figure.”

And a “public figure” had tp include a minor Alabama official. In order to make Sullivan a “public figure” they had to extend this category “public figure” not just to movie stars and presidents, but to anybody who had been in the public eye at all.

Even Old Bob fell into that category when he was Young Bob.

Now leftist show people are subject to the same libel law SGREGATIONISTS were.

They don’t like it.

Now the Jane Fondas and Warren Beatteys cry and moan because they have no protection against libel. But they would have cheered the Sullivan Decision when it first came out.

In fact Hanoi Jane did just that.

What goes around comes around.

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