Archive for February, 2008
backbaygrouch on Buckley
Buckley’s greatest issue, probably its most famous cover, solved a problem for me. The cover read, Mater, Si, Magister, No. It caused some scandal. The article(s) made clear that the clergy have their role and that it does not extend to the role of Caesar. The reason is simple. If you take the clergy out of the School of Theology they are usually perfect fools. In politics and economics their role in life leads them to idiotic prescriptions in other areas. It gave me a healthy disdain for bishops and academic priests.–backbaygrouch
This is an important observation and it certainly does not apply only to Catholics.
In the case of Catholics, this is where the boy molestation disaster came from. Bishops admitted that they handled perverted priests the way the Latest Thing demanded before 1980. All the “experts” agreed that child molesters should be treated not condemned.
But the Church did not learn a THING from this. They do not generalize to a Mantra world-view. They deal only with the symptoms. As you say, they REMAIN suckers. In their desperation to be respectable in the eyes of Fashionable Opinion clergy, Religious Right Protestants included, twist Jesus’ statements about forgiveness into making him a mealy mouthed wimp whom the Boston Globe would approve.
Mantra Thinking requires that one not just admit a single error, but uses that error as a window on one’s whole way of looking at things. An egregious error usually teaches a wise person much more than that he made a slip in one place.
Clergy tell each other that they were just being too forgiving and continue to blunder on. That is exactly the kind of self-justification the road to Hell is paved with.
Dave on Buckley
Emotions and moods play a tremendous role in life. What happened Buckley, because he did do some very good intellectual work in his life when he was young, is that he lost sight of what was serious and not serious after he became a celebrity.
You deal with raw human nature a lot when you are a celebrity. You must train yourself not to emotionally react to being rudely treated.
I saw Buckley in person on more than one occasion where he was treated to rude personal assaults by politicized left wing clowns. He treated their assaults with good humor.
But this is precisely where Buckley went wrong. You become plastic at the moment you license yourself not to react genuinely. You lose your internal navigation as to what is serious and to what is not serious.
This is precisely what separates real leaders from the fakes. And the vast majority of our “leaders” are fakes.
I visited the Dallas Book Depository once that has now weirdly become a shrine. I was taken there unwillingly. I never would have gone there willingly.
It was a bizarre experience. The “highlight” of the tour was to shown the window where Oswald was located with his rifle. The Depository is full of pictures of the extended Kennedy family in their “royals” modality. Juxtaposed next to these pictures are the film clips and pictures of John Kennedy’s murder that we are all familiar with.
I realized something then: What was fake at the Depository was any genuine respect for the Kennedy’s. What was real was an enduring and deep hatred and resentment of them. Why celebrate anybody’s murder in such a fashion? You can’t lay something like that off to “media culture” alone. It almost made think that Marxist class hatred theory might be right. I left there thinking I’d had my face rubbed in raw political reality.
Rivers run deep in human life. Once you loose sight of that you become plastic. You lose sight of what is real.
That is what happened to Buckley.
William Buckley
William Buckley belonged to that almost extinct species, people I could get mad at.
It always puzzles me when people get personally mad at Bush or some other contemporary figure. It is like kicking a washing machine. These are totally plastic people, and we know where every utterance of every public figure today comes from.
Buckley INVENTED respectable conservatism. Almost everything he said since 1970 was pure plastic. Every non-liberal spokesman today is a pure plastic Buckley.
I am incapable of getting really mad at a non-liberal public figure in exactly the same way I am incapable of getting personally involved with a sewing machine. I could have gotten mad at Singer, but if I got upset at the sins of sewing machine, I’d turn myself in for treatment.
Unlike Buckley, today’s plastic conservative deals with all disagreement the way his liberal masters do, he screams for a lynching. I upset Buckley terribly. I insulted him in my first books so much that his close friend William Rusher had to except himself from what I said in his Foreword to that book.
But the point is that Buckley was Rusher’s employer. He did not get mad at him for doing that Foreword. He published a review of that book in National review, his wholly owned publication, called “Read This One!” Then he published a front page article attacking me in National Review, cartooning me and making Pat Buchanan look like a minor figure behind the Ultimate Villain Whitaker.
Liberals are nice about allowing respectable conservatives to attack them, but conservatives earn that by leading the lynch mob against people like me.
That never occurred to Buckley.
With his death, I am left with no living on whom to vent my fury. A man can get mad at the puppeteer, but nothing is quite as unsatisfying as yelling at the puppets.
Social Messages
In an age when information POURS in, a PRACTICAL Achilles’ heel of Wordism is that it is BORING. History, the story of the entire experience of our species, is just a recitation of dates and names. Instead of being at his computer, a freshman must spend his time in the basic course in History of Civilization memorizing whether Asurbanipal was a Babylonian or an Assyrian, and WHEN.
I watch the old Dan Rather types sit around and gripe about the Good Old Days when news was the province of Professionals like them. They make a few hidden references to Good Old Soviet television where Professionals like them would limit television to ballets and other Uplifting stuff.
In short, the masses are entirely out of hand. Someone should give them what they OUGHT to watch and nothing else. The code term for this is “being obsessed with ratings.”
In our seminar, the first thing we should think of when this sort of phrase is used is “watching the ratings COMPARED TO WHAT?”
Compared to the Wordists’ dictation of what everybody should have.
All this fits into the unquestioned Sixties mantra of Social Messages which the Greatest generation never questioned. So they were grateful when someone said, “Pollution is bad” and followed it up with the standard bureaucratic solution. That was considered to be a FAVOR.
This whole concept of Social Messages fit into an old saying, “A lot of what he says is new. A lot of what he says is true. But nothing he says that is new is true.” This is a perfect description of 60s Social Messages
The fact that pollution was bad was not new. The standard prescription for it was not true. But the good old Obedience Trained Greatest generation never thought of that. And no one in the controlled media was allowed to say it if they did.
For the lost monopoly called “professional journalism” those were indeed the Good Old Days.
Dave: Practical History
We are innudated with color in our lives owing to electricity and advanced chemistry, two fields white men excel in. That is why we find pastels, grays, and the off whites so tasteful. We have no starvation for color.
Not so in Claudius’ time. Coming up with color in clothing, buildings, all the man made stuff was a far bigger deal to them than it is to us at present.
They needed color and strived for it the way white people usually strive for things.
History is always a conceit of the present, a consensus on a story book version of the past.
We imagine a gray past because in our time man made color is no big deal. But we still want HDTV.
The important point here is that white people do not emphasize their heritage, nor acknowledge themselves as creators of worlds. Accordingly, we feel no need for our own version of “Black History Month”.
That’s because we actually are creators of worlds, in distinction to nonwhites who always follow behind us.
It’s just illegal to mention this in a multiracial society, a tyranny where the reality of genetic racial inequality must not be acknowledged.
— Dave
backbaygrouch May Like This Story
Louisiana has always had a huge white Catholic vote. David Duke’s legislative district was 75% Catholic.
As a result Huey Long used to tell this story in his early runs for statwide office:
“When I was a boy, I used to hitch up the mule at dawn and drive my Catholic grandparents to early Mass. About ten on Sunday morning I would hitch up the mule again to drive my Protestant grandparents to eleven o’clock church services.”
Later he was asked if that story was true.
“Hell,” Long replied, “We didn’t even have a mule!”
Practical History: Domestic Slavery
Who the hell would WANT slaves today? The only slaves you hear about today are the illegal aliens hired by rich people who become candidates for public office. In recent history this was a common campaign scandal.
But this kind of slavery is for the super rich and the very, VERY rich.
I know a number of merely very rich people. None of them has a regular daily maid.
From what I see the difference is that the merely very rich live in very rich COMMUNITIES. They have huge expensive houses that are next to other huge expansive houses. Their neighbors know exactly who lives there, and the community is very touchy about add-ons where strangers can be allowed to stay for long periods of time.
The very, VERY rich live in COMPOUNDS like OJ Simpson’s’. He could let anybody live with him in a little add-on. He could have had a live-in illegal without comment from his neighbors. A live-in domestic slave is a natural result of this sort of arrangement.
Hence domestic slavery was a phenomenon of limousine liberalism.
Limousine liberals who want to run for public office are now very careful about his now, so it is not as common a SCANDAL today. But I wonder if the very, VERY rich in general have cut down on domestic slavery.
Practical History
In one piece on history below, I did not go into the bias and ignorance of historians, I think you consider me pretty solid on that point, but to a PRACTICAL problem with academic history. History is changing at a maddening pace today, and the bureaucracy that has grown up around history simply cannot keep up.
By the time any book has gone through the printing process, a year or so, and the education bureaucracy, the latest news is years old. That is like trying to keep up with physics using stone tablets.
So they don’t even TRY. History books today could have been, and in some cases were, used in the 1950s. Even in the 1960s when I was in graduate economics, we had almost no textbooks. We had lists of articles to read.
Another practical problem comes up in the fact that, contrary to popular belief, smaller businesses tend to PREFER racial and sex quotas. Big businesses, with huge legal staffs on hand, find it easy to negotiate these things with government agencies. But the small business man does not have lawyers on hand. They would prefer just to be given a hard and fast rule, a straight, quota, to meet rather than having to hire a lawyer.
Government regulations help nig business, which is why big business lobbies tend to favor liberals. Government regulation puts rising small businesses out of business. Big business and big government get along just fine.
Small business come out of nowhere and bust up monopolies, as Vonage is doing to the phone companies. Vonage now has its own legal staff, but big business needs to bust up such companies when hey are small and vulnerable, and one of their major allies is regulation.
We get so tied up in outright bias that we can easily miss these practical considerations.
Another big problem that was big in the Reagan days and was supposed to be unique in American history was homelessness. I dealt personally with this a lot in alcohol and drug recovery. I sponsored a number of people who were homeless.
During the Depression, Shanty Towns sprang up all over the country. I have not met a single homeless person in the program who would not have LOVED to live in a Shanty Town rather than on the street. Homelessness is indeed an American problem unique in our history, but not for the reasons given.
The solution to homelessness today is for paid activists to lobby for legislation in Reagan’s day was to get government money to build housing that meet bureaucratic specifications.
Housing in Depression days was different in two ways. First, almost any American could BUILD a shanty. Secondly people had a PLACE to build a shanty.
There are no more “woods” where you can put up a shanty town. Government doesn’t allow you to build them. That is what is unique.
Minorities move into Projects. White folks move into mobile homes. Mobile homes are also regulated out of most cities. My sponsees could have built their own shanties. It never occurs to most minorities.
In the real world, public housing for “the poor” is a battle zone. Once again, that is government regulation. Shanty towns were safe and white.
People make communities, not books.
Sane whites prefer the streets to public housing.
All this is a RESULT of activism. Housing regulations and racial requirements in public housing are the result of activism. So if you are white or one for the few blacks who can build his own place, you have to have a pretty substantial income to afford to live in regulated housing that is decent and safe.
Hence homelessness.
The Non-Fall of Rome
We talk about the Fall of Rome because, though the Emperor Constantine had no idea Rome had Fallen when he moved the capitol, to us it looks like it had. Remember that Gibbon was writing back when it was assumed that Classical Sculpture consisted of the gray, bare stone they were digging up.
About Gibbons’ time they also began to erect “Classical” buildings that were bare and gray like the ones that were left in Rime and Greece. People who talk about how “sophisticated” they are always good for a belly laugh. So the BBC has “I, Claudius” with a statue in his garden that is bare gay stone. This is Sophisticated Authenticity.
It is exactly as sophisticated as the Cargo Cult. In fact, it is exactly LIKE the Cargo Cult.
So our Cargo Cult history says that when Constantine moved from Rome, Rome fell. From OUR point of view, during the following period Rome DID fall, that is, it “fell” in OUR areas of Western Europe. But the Classical World had developed and lived for a millennium before it ever set foot north of the Alps. So it didn’t Fall because it lost that territory.
The World View sophisticates have now is that the Mediterranean world Fell when it lost territory north of the Alps.
The truth is that the Mediterranean world barely noticed. Our Cargo Cult history is built on this Fall of Rome crap.
You cannot begin to understand how ridiculous our history, Chronicles of Culture History, Marxist history and all the rest are until you get used to this Cargo Cult belly Laugh.
Real thinking is not in the same WORLD with these morons.
Faith and Hard Cash
Dave’s discussion below shows, among other things, that he is dealing in a reality he hasn’t quite grasped yet. It is important that he not let common popular ideas get him off track. He must stick with Mantra logic.
Let’s get specific. In common parlance, faith and hard cash are two ends of a spectrum. “Show me the MONEY” is supposed to be hard reality whereas faith is supposed to be wimpish. But, as Dave makes clear, it is faith in Germans that made the Deutschmark the hardest of currencies.
“Show me the money” sounds realistic, but it hasn’t been that long since the Hard Currency, pieces of official paper, was considered wimpish. “Show me the METAL,” Show me the GOLD” was the essence of Practicality until Roosevelt outlawed the possession of gold and the 20s gold bonds were called in.
So is Real Money gold or paper?
Real Money is what you can SPEND. How do you KNOW your paper or your gold will be accepted? Chances are your gold won’t. You can’t use gold coins as a medium of exchange.
You CAN use paper as a medium of exchange.
In fact, you can’t USE your gold coins as a medium exchange unless you have a piece of paper from a goldsmith saying they’re the Real McCoy. In the real world, you take your Hard Currency to the gold dealer and get pieces of paper, real money, for it.
Lots of people have gold for exchange when The Catastrophe hits. They do that because society will be in a state of collapse. They do that because all the stores will be closed.
So how in the HELL, in the midst of a catastrophe like that, are they going to get anyone to testify that it is REAL gold? We’ve all seen real gold, but how many touchstones have we seen?
So what IS money?
Money is what you accept because you have FAITH that anyone will accept it from you.
Money is faith.
In the 1960s survivalists talked about how only GOLD would work in The Great Collapse. I thought that was laugh then, but I couldn’t explain it to them.
Libertarians insist on their Magic Money, based on Hard and Objective Metal and the Magic Border Lines. But, as Dave points out, the Magic Border Line that makes wages higher is based entirely on faith in the PEOPLE north of that Line as opposed to PEOPLE south of that line.
Japan has less natural resources by far than Mexico has. But if you took all the Mexicans and moved them to Japan and took all the Japanese and moved them to Mexico, Mexicans would be worse off than they are now. I wrote that in the New Right Papers in 1982 after presenting it to before Nobel Laureates at an economics convention. No one EVER disagreed. But no one repeated it, either.
You can’t SAY that and have a career in academia, as Nobel Laureate Dr. Watson’s firing has just demonstrated.
AGAIN.
All the careerists in every field are OPENLY rejecting serious analysis that leads in politically incorrect directions. Which means that it is in precisely those directions that unexplored truth is piling up. It is a failure to move in those directions that is leading to the ever more impossible bottlenecks we are faced with in public policy.
Dave, BUGS participants, we have reality all to ourselves.
Dave
The most severe crises is in Europe precisely because a bunch a bureaucrats in Brussels decided to replace Germany’s organic currency with a Soviet model fake called the Euro, thus removing from the sovereign state of Germany, one of the world’s greatest industrial powers, any ability to competently manage the market in its own sovereign bonds (the bonds of the German state).
Political correctness requires us to ignore how important Germany is to the world and how dire the mismanagement of Germany’s finances is to the future of Europe.
The combat occurring in Central Asia is light action combat only. It is no big deal, stuff for mercenaries. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are not going to be problems going forward. Young men for several generations and still today in Central Asia have no other means to earn a living except through being a fighter in somebody’s ad hoc cobbled together battalion. Nothing has changed. It is the same ‘ol same ‘ol in Central Asia. The only difference is that America now has significant bases there.
It is hugely ironic that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America decided to move its European presence eastward into Central Asia.
Clinton actually felt it necessary, in connection with his Serbian aggression, to flip the Russians the bird by bullying Turkey to let American surface naval vessels through the Bosporus Straits for an unseemly victory lap in the Black Sea.
So the big move into Central Asia has been a big friggin success, just at the time Europe is going to hell in a hand basket. The MSM fails to report that France is currently facing an exodus of white people. These whites are early adopters of the coming “get the hell out of Dodge” mentality that is sweeping Europe’s white middle classes.
The American government has plenty of room to continue to water its sovereign bond float in this environment. Global finance has nowhere else to go except into gold and the smart money sure in the hell is not doing that. Instead, it is selling into the big gold rally that has been going on now for over 5 years the loot it stole in its mortgage bond pool operations. They are flipping the loot into short-term American sovereigns in anticipation of an inevitable crash in the commodity markets. Unlike consumer goods prices, commodity prices always come home.
Today, the Fed actually has to sell American sovereigns from its very own portfolio to keep short-term interest rates from going too low. This is because the demand for short-term American sovereigns from the global pool operators. This is truly history making stuff, as it is truly rare that the Fed sells bonds to drain the monetary base.
There is no way in hell the Fed is going to water American currency by buying bonds. It has no need to, and won’t for the foreseeable future. You have to remember, the Fed has no choice but to be responsible in today’s environment. It is a captive agency of the US Department of the Treasury and has global terms of trade commitments that must be met. Also, the value of American bonds must be upheld because those bonds are required to fund the American Navy’s victory laps in the Black Sea. (Don’t tell a Libertarian this. It will upset his religious conceits.)
Meanwhile, the whole nonwhite world is piling onto the backs of white Americans through T-Bill purchases. And meanwhile, the MSM continually tells us America has been defeated in Central Asia.
No way. That is not what is going on at all. Europe has been defeated. But the MSM will not notice this until Europe is in utter ruins.
And you know how it is. It is the MSM that determines what is real, not reality itself.
The National Debt
That was Perot’s big issue in 1992 and it is dead now. Bush used 9/11 to write himself a permanent free ride on debt, since wars are routinely financed by debt and this war will be forever. The end of the debt issue means the end of issues about what Shari calls the consolidated state.
There are no longer any issues for elections to decide. All the money is committed. However much we talk about things government should do or not do; it is simply a cash cow now. The national debt is free money and entitlements take up about all of the rest.
Especially if you include all the REAL entitlements. Almost all black degrees are in areas which are part of government entitlements, Human Relations and Education and all the rest which are simply the result of government regulations or pressure.
The Trial Lawyers Association represents an entitlement. Three million lawyers make their livings off of games played that are totally useless.
What we say here interrelates. So when I pointed out that there is no evidence whatsoever that more legal due process produces the slightest increase in actual justice, it meant that lawyers live on a government entitlement as surely as Social Security recipients do. “Civil rights” is now a cash cow, as is the Holocaust Industry.
The PRACTICAL result here is that minorities will be bought off, one way or another. The Great Torchlight Parade will be replaced by dealing. Not with a bang but with a whimper.
And shares in a depreciated America will not be that big a deal by the time it comes due. We are already dealing with the fact that a dollar from White America and a dollar from our New Brazil melting pot is not the same thing.
Shari
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 2/24/2008
Shari gave us this some time ago in General Comments:
It looks like Obama running for president is revealing what Bob said about the liberals’ faithful colored companions. I’m wondering if this will result in the consolidated government breaking up? If whites, at that point, might say something like what was in that stele on the Nile. “No Nubian shall pass this point except to obtain supplies and return.” I know you don’t think that whites have to be a majority, but it seems that some definite lines have to be drawn, and blacks, unlike Mexicans don’t really have else where to go. Just thinking too far ahead.
“I’m wondering if this will result in the consolidated government breaking up?”
I don’t think that the FORM of consolidated government will break up. The absolute monopoly of the major media in the 1960s has not broken up. Those networks are still there, and their monopoly of broadcast television is largely intact. It has not been destroyed, it has been superceded.
The British Monarchy is still there, but the threat of absolutism that led to their Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is, to say the least, no longer front page news.
I get my jollies in funny ways. I get a kick out of it when old Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite types sit around and grouse to each other about the “death of REAL journalism.” On THEIR side, that is EXACTLY the same thing as Stormfronters moaning, “All is Lost!”
The Internet and cable and the whole storm of technology have KILLED “real journalism” when network rulers controlled all media information from New York City. I seem to be the only person alive who celebrates OUR victories.
But unless you read BUGS, all you see is SFers meaning all is lost and you miss the fun of watching THEM saying the same thing.
No, the consolidated government is not likely to disappear. It is going the way of the British Monarchy and network television. It ceases to MATTER.
What we say here interrelates.
What we say here interrelates.
What we say here interrelates.
So Shari brought in the second cataract inscription. Obviously that inscription did not refer to the Nubian slaves up in Egypt.
Where there are Nubians, there are Nubian slaves.
Including today.
We bought them from Nubians. We BUY them from Nubians. More than one political candidate has been humiliated by the slaves he has had.
What we say here interrelates.
The piece I wrote just before SysOps and Brian had to save us again, “History IS Bunk” is completely different from what you normally find people writing. It is not just the usual screed about how historians distort things. It is a PRACTICAL look at the future of history.
My question in that piece is, “What will we replace today’s history WITH?” Above, I talked about how consolidated government and network television aren’t going to vanish on some Great Future Day of the Great Torchlight Parade.
What we say here interrelates. The Great Rulers To Whom All is Lost like Rather’s successors are slipping and sliding in a morass of change they can’t understand or deal with, just like us mere mortals. Historians face a PRACTICAL problem. If they were REAL historians they would understand that history has to change almost every day now. But no one is less prepared for that than the “historians” whose world is set in a smooth flow from Ancient Egypt to the Modern History of Modern Humankind.
In a time of Genome projects and carbon dating and documentaries flowing in with the latest discoveries on cable, not filtered through broadcast TV, history is as much a matter of news items as anything else. So what does a modern history class have?
Books. Tens of billions of dollars worth of books rehashing how the whole world came from Pharaohs.
What we say here interrelates.
When I pointed out that the most important thing about this election is that it doesn’t matter, I doubt it meant much to most, even here.
There was a time not long ago when national elections were CRITICAL. A LOT hinged on whether Goldwater or Johnson won in 1964. Today neither side will make anything but adjustments at the edges. Our national policy is FIXED.
Network television reaches more homes today than it did in 1964. But it doesn’t DETERMINE things any more. It is a fixed quantity. Likewise, the government is a fixed quantity. When the Democrats talk endless about CHANGE is a sure sign that no change is going to come from this election.
To look to the future, you have to look at things that will make the difference, not fixed quantities. The Crown in Britain today probably has a greater REAL budget than it did in Henry VIII’s time. In modern society, the average merely sizable corporation would dwarf the Crown’s 1510 budget.
What we say here interrelates.
The future will NOT mirror the past. If you are looking in the same old places you are staring at a brick wall.
Our Time: Technological Peak, Management Sewer
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 2/23/2008
The comic strip Iggy is wildly popular among those in THE demographic: Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals. That is because Iggy is NOT satire. Crazy satire gets old fast. But Iggy describes a reality that LOOKS like satire.
Management really is that bad today. It is so bad that it LOOKS like satire.
Iggy looks like a satire with his crazy tie. But the reader has no doubt that that guy can work technical miracles of the most sophisticated kind simply because, in today’s world, a young person HAS to keep a job like that. We take that for granted.
It is the organization and management that provides the bitter humor.
I have listened to my young kinfolk describe the pain of dealing with sewer-level management.
SysOps is nodding vigorously.
The technical personnel have to PRODUCE. There has never been a time when the pressure was as great on them, and forgiveness for failure less obtainable. That produces technical heights.
Meanwhile management is selected by fitting people into a political maze, with the super-rich at the top. The process has no contact with reality whatsoever.
History IS Bunk
You can’t begin to understand history if you don’t get a belly laugh out of looking at the Federal Capitol Building and 49 of the 50 state ones.
Looking at them, I imagine an American showing these edifices to a person from Classical Times. He says, “You see? We build our buildings just like YOU did. This is a Classical Style Building.”
I can see the person from Ancient Rome backing away from this lunatic, “What in the Hell is this nut talking about? Is he physically dangerous?”
The “Classical” buildings and sculptures come from a time when we dug up ancient statues that had had all the coloring rubbed off of them. They were gray stone. When you see a movie made in Rome the place looks like Spanish Harlem on a bad day. All the old buildings are gray stone.
We have LONG since found the traces of marble and coloring that made ancient Rome bright with color. But we will never correct any of this.
Historians talk endlessly about the Fall of the Roman Empire. The Romans would find that a curious notion. Nothing fell. The capitol was moved. If Congress decided to move the seat of government from Washington to a more central location, we wouldn’t consider it The Fall of America. The Emperor in Rome moved to Byzantium. He would be surprised to be told that his government had fallen.
But the problems here are simply practical. Can anybody imagine congress deciding to paint the Capitol Building? That “Classical” style would be totally alien to the actual Romans, but it is absolutely essential to US.
Another practical problem. If we were burn all the books that trace everything to the Middle East, what would we replace them WITH? Our version of history is already a belly laugh and gets sillier every day. But it is OUR version of history. Tens of billions of dollars are invested in it.
Another practical problem. How would you feel if you invested your entire life in studying ancient history and then discovered it didn’t exist?
This is not just a difficulty for regular history. Marxism as developed in the mid-nineteenth century and it is as firmly grounded in this mythical version as is any conservative version. Read the Introduction to the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and you will find that it begins by saying that all class distinctions are artificial. When that was written, it was ASSUMED that only man had upper and lower classes.
Since then we have found that every other societal animal has a class system that makes Victorian England look egalitarian. Anyone talking about that in a Marxist society would have bought himself a one-way ticket to the Gulag.
As technology and findings advance, our already belly-laugh idea of history becomes sillier every day.
Confessions of a Computer Ignoramus
As I said to Shari in Comments, in my present condition I deal with the weirdest mental lapses. I used URL because I couldn’t think of “Address Bar.”
But I would not have known what the “address bar” was a few years back. The address bar is in the top right corner of my screen, where it now says:
http://whitakeronline.org/blog/wp-admin/post-new.php
This explanation could easily sound insulting. But if you don’t KNOW that, it is also essential. So is it better to be overcareful and risk somebody taking it as an insult, or just leave it hanging so that someone who doesn’t understand it would feel stupid if they were to ask?
A lot of people will say, “I hate to bore you with this long explanation, but …” That problem is so old that there is an old saying:
“It is better to bore than to mystify.”
My corollary to this is that it is better to risk insult than to mystify. I feel that our tech team is not here to patronize us, but to TEACH us.
They are trying to mediate between human beings and a MINDLESS MACHINE. The machine is totally literal, so a single word can stop us in our tracks. I want them to assume TOTAL IGNORANCE across the board, because somewhere in the explanation is a trip-up it embarrasses me to ask about.
Yes, it IS irritating, even to an old gator-skin like me, to be spoken to as if I were a child. But we have a lot of people here, and we are all important. SOMEONE is not going to know SOMETHING that is explained at the most childish level.
The fact is that it is us computer ignoramuses who probably are the most easily insulted. If I know what the address bar is, it would tend to bother me to have it explained than it would SysOps or Brain. They have nothing to prove, whereas as my level of understanding IS childish, so talking to me as if I were a child would tend to bother me more.
Tough luck, Bob!
This is too serious a matter to tippy-toe about my hang-ups. We are dealing with people who understand reality where it counts, so our knowledge of computers is a minor matter, and too critically important to be retarded by sensitivity on mechanics.
It is better to offend than to mystify.
Note From Truck Roy
Hello Bob,
Thanks for recommending Lord Nelson. His appearance on my show went very well and the show will be airing next Wednesday.
I am looking for a couple debaters for Driven Sno’s show that will be on live in a few weeks. The debate will be:
“Democracy is pointless, we should fly under the radar until the revolution V.S. We should use Democracy to win local office and spread the word.”
Perhaps you can see if any of your people would be interested in debating this topic.
-Truck Roy
Faith
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, History on 2/20/2008
Building on Shari’s statement below, I thought about the faith that drives US.
Shari said, “What is so sobering, is that it’s bribery that steals the heart, not religion.”
Ours is not a religion, but it is a faith.
All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident.
– Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher, 1788-1860
Ours is not a faith in things in things unseen, but of seeing things others do not see.
When Shari and Simmons hammer away at the Chronicles of Culture, their faith is tested in a way people do not understand.
They hammer away at the simple truth and get what history shows us all prophets face: They get ridiculed and ignored. That is the first stage of every revolution. Everyone who reads history can see this in retrospect, but no one can see it when it is happening.
All we say here interrelates. I have repeatedly pointed out that Jesus never said “Praise God.” Groups like the PTL (Praise the Lord) Club always go the way of the original Pilgrim church in Massachusetts: They end up Unitarian (or in Israel worship), because they are going back to the essentially pagan God of the Old Testament. Like JHWH, that deity needed constant attention and praise.
Christ preached a Father for whom the simple Lord’s Prayer was enough. That is a different concept entirely. You asked for what you needed from the Father and then you went out and PLANT SEEDS.
Jesus told his followers to plant the seeds and some of them will grow.
They grew.
As Shari says, the rest is just bribes.
A lot of Russian dissidents said, after the USSR fell, that they were actually happier in a society where their samizdats, their illegal publications, got them jailed instead of living in a society where their opinions are ignored in the avalanche of different ideas. Being taken seriously by those in power is a reward, a BRIBE, no matter how it may seem a punishment.
Respectable conservatives were so happy at being agreed with by liberals who Were Somebody, neoconservatives, that they threw their whole movement away to bask in neo approval.
When you get tierd of hammering away at the Mantra and say something about Obama or Ron Paul, you get hit with fury and arguments. That is a relief after the ridicule and silence.
That is a BRIBE.
But you simply cannot compare the importance of the Mantra and the thinking that goes with it to one more comment about Ron Paul or Obama.
Old Testament fanatics always demand that the world end or Creationism to be proven.
NOW.
I am sure that, two thousand eyars ago, a lot of listeners were disappointed when Christ said that they should plant the seeds and some of them would grow.
EVENTUALLY.
And when Jesus died reviled on the cross and even Peter denied him three times, they were sure that their point was proven. Those were the respectable conservatives of their day.
Shari Does a Simmons
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 2/20/2008
What is so sobering, is that it’s bribery that steals the heart, not religion.
Shari
Fleming Woke Up!
My comment “is now under moderation” at Chronicles of Culture:
(Your comment is awaiting moderation.)
Those who claim to be sophisticated here sound exactly like 1960s leftists. Every statement they make is ad hominem:
“Us With It” types don’t say unnice things like that.”
“That’s just IGNUNCE!”
Clearly the Neos have taken over their side. Back to the 60s.
Simple truth doesn’t need to hide behind a veneer of “sophistication:”
AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, ASIA FOR THE ASIANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR EVERYBODY!
“It is said that there is this RACE problem. They say this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.”
“The Netherlands and Belgium are as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them.”
“Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for EVERY white country and ONLY white countries to “assimilate,” i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites.”
“What if I said there was this RACE problem and this RACE problem would be solved only if hundreds of millions of non-blacks were brought into EVERY black country and ONLY into black countries?”
“How long would it take anyone to realize I’m not talking about a RACE problem. I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?”
“And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn’t object to this?”
“But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.”
They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.
“Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.”
http://whitakeronline.org
http://www.nationalsalvation.net/
History is Happening Under Our Noses!
The same people who talk about the Blood of the Martyrs and all of what, in retrospect, are the signs of revolution use the same signs today to declare how hopeless it all is.
The whole damned world is out to get US, and they SAY so! We have brilliant martyrs going to prison and having to leave their countries for refusing to back down. Huge resources are OPENLY being spent on Hate Police when other groups are actually blowing things up and killing people.
What in Heaven’s Name do you NEED to prove we are on the wave of history?
Now We’re COOKING!
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 2/19/2008
Brian sent me the url for sharis’ comments and I read one and added my own comment.
But the comment I made had already been made by Shari in her reply. I just added Eastern Europe to it.
Fleming doesn’t like me, so he may cut it out. I’ll check and if he lets it in, I’ll ADD THE URL.
It’s http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=410#comment-93634
My pseudonym is Bob Whitaker.
Long before me, Simmons jumped in there and backed Shari up.
This is my reward, my FUN. I told you, every morning I get up, make my coffee and go straight to your comments.
This is even BETTER. I am going to go to the urls one at a time, to ENJOY them. Shari and Simmons are doing a TERRIFIC job! This makes all my work worth while. All I needed was the URLs.
I just don’t think you realize how important this is to me.
Shari and Simmons, Help Me Out Here!
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 2/19/2008
Shari wrote about using the Mantra. I wanted to get in there and see my crowd cutting them up. I was disappointed. I wrote a long piece about urls and how I couldn’t find them. You need to know how bad I am at looking things up, so I have written about it repeatedly.
Up at the top of the page when you are on the Internet is the address bar. I understand it is also called a URL. All you have to do is copy that and put it in your note.
So I BEGGED for the URL. Brian gave me the GENERAL URL for Chronicles of Culture. It is the same mess I am used to. In a later comment Shari mentioned comment 124. But the page I had stops at 37, and even the numbers of posts are cut off on the left.
Brian mentioned 124.
NO URL.
Simmons says he and Shari were cutting up the PhDs and I was being unfair.
But NO URL.
I am DEEPLY disappointed that I can’t see you in action, so I wrote that what I had was “Worse Than Useless.”
Hey, gang, I’m almost human! I have some feelings, too!
Shari said she was quitting because her feelings were hurt. Shari’s too good to do that. When I started feeling sorry for myself and said I might quit Simmons just told me to stop whining and for God’s sake just go ahead and quit.
I haven’t mentioned quitting since.
All you have to do is go to the address bar where your REAL fight went on and send it to us.
What you are condemning me for is being extremely disappointed that I can’t see you in action.
Help me out here, gang!
Dave on Simmons’s “Shriek and Retreat”
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 2/19/2008
The last sentence is critical:
I am so grateful to have learned through BUGS what a real graduate seminar is and how important to the future a real graduate seminar can be.
And through BUGS I have learned that certain phases carry enormous power, something I did not know before BUGS.
“The Untrained Eye”, that is a phrase that has sunk into my consciousness pretty darned deeply. The intellectual core of BW revolves around that phrase.
Accordingly, I have learned that new worlds are born with the untrained eye and that the untrained eye is where revolutions come from. This is not trivial knowledge. How can we make a revolution if we don’t know where revolutions really come from?
Law is genuinely reformed with the untrained eye. And governments are reined in and put to rights with the untrained eye. It takes the untrained eye to do that.
That is why a revolution, any kind of revolution, could never come from academia.
And art, what art really is, entertains untrained eye as completely and fully (sometimes more) as the learned eye. And evidence that requires an “education” to interpret is not evidence. And analysis that is accessible to only the learned is not analysis.
That is why I have finally got it through my head that one telescope is worth a million formulas and I have a better handle of what constitutes good science than I ever had before.
This BUGS has improved my thinking enormously. It has put me miles ahead of where I ever thought I could get.
That’s why we here at BUGS truly are the leaders. If you don’t get that, you do not understand what is really going on.




Bubble Thinking: Brutus Pulls a Shari
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 2/28/2008
READ THE COMMENTS!
Brutus began his latest comment with an apology.
Shari taught me that, when a commenter essays something dead on target, he or she often
begins by apologizing for it. In fact, apology is normal beginning when a commenter is doing what BUGS is all about!
We live in a society where the one thing a person is trained NOT to do is make accurate observations that are basic, simple, and to the point. After spending decades under this suppression, our normal response is to make the observation and then apologize for it.
We exercise an intellectual freedom here that is like coming out of a cave into the bright sunlight. Our seminar is really a return to the Anglo-Saxon Moot. After dealing with a lifetime of finding out what one is SUPPOSED to say and trying to fit an observation into it, it is not easy to just go ahead and SAY something because it may be TRUE.
While not worrying about whether or not it IS true.
This is VERY hard to get used to. This suddenly leads to perfectly understandable reactions. One s is the Bob is Playing God concept. I am lazy. I don’t make the usual, “maybe I’m wrong” statements in my writings. I make my statements the way you are used to seeing them made by Professional and Authoritative Sources. So I sound like I am being a Professional and Authoritative Source.
I’m not. In this many, many cases where commenters have demonstrated that I was dead wrong, in fact silly, my reaction is not outrage,but “Oh. OK.” That is VERY hard to get used to,but that is purpose of free speech.
My first reaction was to get mad at Shari. But my long term reaction has been a feeling of deep satisfaction. Over and over, when we go into the guts of an issue, Shari puts in a short little statement that boils it all down so well that it is hard for me to make it clear how brilliant it is.
The reason we have the only real seminar left on Planet Earth is because nothing s more condemned in a Wordist society than thinking out loud. The purpose of a Wordist society is to Learn the Truth, not to decide what truth is.
Naturally when you step out into a forum where you are left naked of the cliche’s and assumption that you are taught are the purpose of “free speech” it is not a comfortable experience.
It is hard to get an animal out of cage where it has been starved and confined. I remember seeing a documentary on a “bubble boy” who had had an operation under anesthesia which allowed it to be released for the first time into its mother’s arms.
What was the child’s reaction? It screamed in terror and agony as if it were being circumcised. Its whole world, the bubble, was being taken from it and this woman was actually physically contacting it.
Coming out of the Wordist bubble is scary and alien to us. We are coming out of the bubble which, for all its enslavement, is where we have lived our whole intellectual lives.
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