I was talking with a young lady pharmacist about the old needles they used to give shots and take blood with. Those were used thick and were used over and over, being sterilized in hot water. They were, compared to present needles, very thick. It was like having a dull pencil jammed into your vein.

Like almost everybody else in the medical profession I deal with, she didn’t even remember those old needles. She hadn’t even seen them in a medical museum. I then said, “Oh, well, like all old men, I just wanted to impress you with How Tough I Had It. So we started joking about the old walking twenty miles in the snow bit.

She is a mother, so we started talking about how hard it was being YOUNG today: Diversity, choices to make. The ultimate contrast I always thought of was my grandfather, who was a railroad telegrapher. He had the exact same job for forty years, then retired. Today you don’t have the same job five years from now, even if you stay in the same place.

But my grandfather, who DID walk to his limited schooling in the snow, was of the generation that that talked about The Good Old Days. They didn’t drool and cry over their Suffering.

Then it occurred to me that the young lady and I represented two oif three generations after my grandfather’s time. A third one was absent.

AT LAST!

There was no one there from the self-styled Greatest Generation to tell us how easy kids have it today — the theme of my youth — and how nobody knew what SUFFERING was except those who went through the Depression and the War. Only they and the Jews Knew What Suffering Was!

The TV ads demanding yet more money for ANOTHER memorial to the crowd that calls itself The Greatest Generation moans that thousands of them die off every day.

They say “What a Loss!”

I say, “Blessed silence!”

Trager Smith asks, in a nice short piece — you had me worried because your last one was so long it would have embarrassed AFKAN at his worst — whether anyone would bring up McCain’s place of birth if he is elected.

I think of McCain as the new Bob Dole so it’s unlikely to come up. But the fact is that if Schwarzenegger were elected president the Court would simply declare that, according to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, anyone who believes in the proposition that all men are created equal is a natural born citizen.

No, I am not overstating this. Since Virginia vs. Loving, which abolished all anti-miscegenation laws, the Court can declare absolutely anything it chooses, and it will. There is no possibility whatsoever that in McCain’s case this matter will be taken seriously.

If it were Schwarzenegger I would recommend a phrase in a treaty with Austria allowing someone born in Austria to be classed as a “natural born citizen” in terms of qualifying for the presidency. Treaties are above the Constitution, hence the old Bricker Amendment.

The point is that this is just an excuse for whatever the powers that be want the Constitution to say.

What is the first amendment had said, “A well informed public being essential to the national welfare, there shall be no abridgement of the right of free speech or freedom of the press.” as the second Amendment refers to well regulated militia before the right to bear arms?

The court could have said that racism does not contribute to a well-informed public, just as the second amendment has been effectively repealed subject to the “well-regulated” part.

In the real world, the wording would not have made a practical difference. The bottom line here is that the media matters while three million paid-up NRA members do not represent “we the People of the United States. The Court represents “We the people.” One of the main functions of that “We the people” is to kick the people into line when they vote wrong.

Only a Mantra thinker would bring this up.

Like assimilation and immigration into EVERY white coutnry and ONLY white countries, this is so basic that no respectable cosnervative would ever think of it much less question it. Man-
tra thinking can have a huge and UNIQUE impact by stating reality inplain English and stiucking with it.

You ain’t going to do any of that by being the 100,000th rooter for Ron Paul. It’s not as much fun doing the real job alone. But no one else can do it.

Back to constitutionality: Even a respectable conservative once had balls enough to correct an ACLU spokesman who said that that organization protests the Bill of Right. This one conservative said, once, “except the Second Amendment.”

Decades ago when Bob Jones defended its right to keep its tax deductible status while banning interracial dating, all the mainline churches were on its side in court. By the same token it is the American media, not the first amendment alone that makes the first amendment effective here.

While people talk about the power of the Bill of Rights, it makes little practical difference if thereis no power behind it.

While the courts can screw around with Hung Chu Pow or somebody on the details, when
it comes to the presidency there is no power in favor of the natural born citizen provision

That is all that matters.

Once the power was there, the antimiscegenation laws no state ever even considered it had the right to enforce for two centuries were simply nullified.

Article III says that congress “shall” limit the appellate jurisdiction of the federal courts. It is the only “shall” in the document that is not considered an imperative according to those same courts. In fact, most people consider any restriction on the courts to be unconstitutional.

Trager notes that I “have been around the block” on these issues. I have taught what is called Constitutional Law and I have helped restrict the courts in congress. So the above is the situation as I see it.

RE: Ain’t Compassion great?

Here is compassion, as practiced by fools, in action.
Find 10 starving African Aborigines.
Feed them so they can produce 100 African Aborigines.
Find 100 starving African Aborigines.
Feed them so they can produce 1000 African Aborigines.
Repeat until the pyramid scheme collapses, at which time you can rail against “world hunger.”

Ain’t bleeding hearts brilliant?

Anyone can tell you a great deal about how the world fifty years ago was different from today, but it is not possible to accurately describe the world fifty years from now.

A newspaper from fifty years ago is a curiosity. A newspaper from fifty years in the future would be worth billions if not trillions of dollars.

To “progress” has a specific meaning. It is the movement from where you have been to where you are going, from Point A to Point B. When you say you are “progressing” it means you know exactly where you are headed. If political “progressives” knew that they would own the stock market.

Octogenarian Le Pen just got sent to prison for three months for saying that the Nazi Occupation, which he lived through, wasn’t all that bad. I just pointed out that children in occupied countries didn’t starve under the Nazi Occupation the way they did after it. Maurice Chevalier chose to stay in France after the Nazis took over. Elie Wiesel could have left the Nazis when the Soviet Liberators showed up, but he chose to go west with the Germans.

But I am sure William Buckley is ecstatic, just as he was over David Irving’s six-year sentence for researching the subject and concluding that hundreds of thousands rather than millions of Jews died under the Nazis. Buckley would like an established Catholic Church in America, but he will settle for that of Political Correctness.

And that, of course, is why no one laughs out loud at the idea that there are people who can perfectly predict the future. Which is exactly what the term “progressive” means.

Under an established religion, the future will be what the priests WANT it to be. No matter how often they are wrong, this proposition still holds for anyone who wants to stay out of jail.

In the piece below, I explained how my being reared in rural SC in the 40s and 50s gave me experience with the Old South.

When I took a semester in grad school in 1992 one professor was an Afrikaner. When I walked up and addressed him in die Taal, it took him a minute to recognize his native tongue, since he did not expect it HERE.

I was talking to a woman finishing her PhD in Political Science and mentioned that one of apartheid’s least-mentioned problems was illegal BLACK immigration from the Glorious Free Countries to her north. There were other students sitting around.

She replied, “Well, they were just coming there so they could EAT.”

I replied, “Well, when you’re starving, just getting something to eat can be pretty important.”

Everybody laughed — at her.

What she said was condescension of the cruelest sort, but NOBODY else would have called her on it.

Mantra Thinking.

Everybody agrees that slavery was awful while the Secret Six, who financed John Brown, were Liberators. The Secret Six got their money from New England industry, as did the VERY well paid New England abolitionist ministers. They got their money from working children fourteen hours a day.

But the really big difference between industrial slavery of whites and chattel slavery of blacks was much like the difference between me and the Modern, Caring Libservative on Homelessness. As I said, their conscience, such as it is, is OK as long as they sit in a warm house and demand that we become more Third World and at the same time that the homeless get regulation housing from somewhere.

Many, many children got crippled in those factories which paid the monstrous salaries of fashionable New England ministers. What did the factory owners do for them?

Those kids, or the older workers, actually did STARVE. The ministers preaching within a mile of them did not mention that at all. They were busy with Southern slavery, which was what they got paid for.

That sounds a LOT like the Christian Right today.

The girl who thought black starvation in southern Africa was nothing compared to having black faces in government there would have LOVED abolitionist New England. Tens of thousands of whites were crippled and starving there, but that was unimportant.

It’s a good thing that nobody who was important to those preachers ever said anything about the mote in someone else’s eye and the beam in your own.

Ain’t Compassion great?

– Poverty

We have spent (so far) sixty something years listening to the self-styled Greatest Generation whining, “I got SHOT at, you ain’t got no real EXPERIENCE unless you got SHOT at in the Big War!”

“Gimme money!”

So let me talk about experience.

It is important that I was raised a century and a half ago. I mean this literally in a sense. The South Carolina I was raised in really did resemble a hundred and fifty years ago. We had “our” blacks in houses we gave them and they were on the walk from my house to the plantation, or brick plant.

Thanks to Our Glorious Union and discriminatory rail rates, the South was still in the state of subjugation and poverty it had been since The Glorious Union had been saved by another group that would have called itself the Greatest Generation if they had had a Tom Brokaw around.

But in a way I kept up this century and a half old experience. I was all over the third world, centuries back. I actually saw people STARVING, and smelled them. That word “starvation” has a meaning way beyond malnutrition or the maid bringing in the Mocha half an hour late, which is what Jane Fonda means by it when she says children in South Carolina are starving.

It’s funny how the Greatest Generation talks about the agony they went through in the process of dropping their weapons on Normandy Beach, but they NEVER mention the agony of children who were actually starving in Europe after “Liberation” — not under the Nazi occupation. They had their rations, but being really without food was not an EXPERIENCE, you see.

But my experience with real starvation and an entirely different thing, real poverty, makes me think a bit differently. Let’s start with something I worked with a lot in the drug recovery program, the Homeless.

I was outraged, not that there weren’t enough bureaucrats to give them all homes, but that bureaucrats kept them from building their own. During the Depression there were shanty towns that sprang up.

Not now. There is nowhere to build them. I am in South Carolina, where people are not “street smart” and helpless. Whereas street smarts in Harlem know how to threaten and bully their way into other people’s money and houses, the sobering up group I knew in SC would have been happy to build themselves a shanty town instead of wandering on the streets.

As one guy said, “Why stay in a fifty thousand dollar house when you can live under a million-dollar bridge?”

He would rather make his shanty, but the bridge has a PERMIT and he doesn’t.

There are no “woods” any more. You can’t go out into the woods and built something, just anything, to keep the rain off. But this is the sort of thing I would notice. Others would sit in their warm dry homes and say they need to bitch until somebody builds more houses or something.

It’s exactly like the people who feel their only obligation is to bitch about how “White people STOLE America from the Indians!”

I repeat, if you receive stolen property your first obligation is not to FEEL guilty about it and yell at the other thieves.

Your ONLY moral and legal obligation when you receive PART of any stolen good is to GIVE IT BACK! Buying stolen land is called “receiving stolen goods” and a prison sentence goes with it. The SECOND you REALIZE it is stolen, you become a criminal unless you GIVE IT BACK ***IMMEDIATELY***.

I am serious here. Anyone who says America was stolen has a legal and moral obligation to have reservations already confirmed to GET OUT.

This is Mantra Logic.

Those who have only dealt with homelessness today consider that the problem is a shortage of bureaucrats. The homeless must be put into certified homes ASAP. The homeless, on the other hand, would rather MAKE a shelter for themselves RIGHT NOW while they’re waiting.

They’re going to wait forever. As we import the entire third world, standards of poverty are going to keep going down, not up. We could have provided for white Americans, but there is no way we are going to give certified housing to the waves of immigrants landing here.

Our homeless problem comes from too many bureaucrats, not a shortage of them.

Try to explain that to Jane Fonda or somebody in The Greatest Generation, and lots of luck.

Please don’t be DUMB. I am NOT talking about Ross Perot here!

2008: What I Said Was …

I have been saying that the Faithful Colored Companions were going to start looking for their own instead of their white liberal Lone Rangers. As usual, Obama pops up and everybody knew it all along.

I have been saying that conservatives who make their living in public, like radio commentators, must at all costs keep that “respectable” label. I said that in any society the issues that are forcefully ignored get worse and worse until they BURST out. Which is why conservatives are shoved aside by McCain and nobody cares.

Simply put, by staying respectable to make a living, conservatives have totally marginalized themselves on real issues. If you will read over BUGS for the past years, you will see that is EXACTLY what I said would happen.

The only partial parallel to our present situation is 1992, when Bush moderated the Republicans to irrelevance and Clinton, a small-state governor, came out of nowhere. That was when Ross Perot just said he would be willing to run for President and had a PLURALITY against the other two before he showed his nut side and dropped out.

But this is more serious. If you will look carefully at McCain’s support, it has no devotion at all. It is like Dole’s 1996 backing. The media wanted Dole to be nominated, so he was. The media was announcing poll after poll showing Dole might beat Clinton UNTIL THE CONVENTION. Then the media dropped that crap like a rock. Within a month after Dole was nominated everybody was wondering what the hell the Republicans did THAT for. Dole was a JOKE by then.

You might make a play about this election right now. The title I suggest is, “Waiting for Perot.”

Obama’s White Boys

The media are reporting breathlessly that Obama is getting “white votes in the South.” He is getting DEMOCRATIC white votes in the South. Those who think of themselves as white Southerners simply do not vote in Democratic primaries in the South.

One rule of politics is that the Party faithfuls are more extreme than the elected officials. Those who are still Democrats to the extent of voting in that primary are solidly liberal. It is easy to say that people with white skins in the South are voting for Obama. These are Hillary Clinton New South liberals. Obama is the new hero, so they are voting for him.

This has nothing to do with white Southerners in general. That’s amateur thinking. The idea that this means that Hillary and Obama have won the hearts and minds of the South is childish, but the media will keep saying it. They want it, so it’s true.

If you think hard-core Democrats at the primary level represent white Southerners in any way, you have been out of the loop for decades.