Archive for January, 2009

Bob Yoda and his Jedi

When commenters talk about VDare, what interests me is that you KNOW what it is all about.  To me, what is important is that YOU are IN THERE.

Shari says I will say her take on Christianity and whites is off the subject.

It is ON the subject because it is a statement in favor of white survival in the areas in which SHE is WORKING.
There is simply no area in which the disappearance of the white race is anything but a disaster.   THAT is our common message, no matter whether we are interested in economics, religion, science or anything else.

It is up to YOU to take this message and run with it in each area. 
 
This is a good example by what I mean when I say I am a teacher, not a leader.   A leader would dictate and control your message.  I just teach you how to hone your own.

I have warned Shari about The Dark Side, turning Christianity into Wordism.  If she avoids that, Bob Yoda’s job is done.    I just want to make sure you are out there fighting.
 
I TEACH the Jedi, but they have to do their own knight errantry.

4 Comments

Shari

As usual, Shari puts it simply and to the point in a way that cannot cannot be improved upon:

“On vdare, I think that they know! Just keep repeating.”

1 Comment

This “Freedom” Nonsense

Anti-whites are always spouting about how massive immigration and assimilation demanded of ALL white countries and ONLY white countries is just Freedom.

I am really ticked off at my comrades for NEVER telling the truth about this.

The same anti-white who spouts this libertarian nonsense knows very well that free speech does not apply to US, but I am STILL waiting for us to SAY so every time this crap appears.

They keep saying we can live in our own bunkers if we want to. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, it is forbidden for us to do so.

But no one points this out.

As O’Reilly said, “There should be no all-white ANYTHING in America.”

At least O’Reilly SAYS it. That’s more than my comrades on SF do.

For all their “diversity” talk, the fact is that all-white areas are forbidden because people will MOVE there. If we had freedom of choice integration would be doomed in the long term.

That is the justification for our entire set of laws, the ones O’Reilly is all for and states so clearly. Why do my comrades let the anti-whites get away with this “Freedom” crap?

10 Comments

The Trolls are Coming! The Trolls are Coming!

A Stormfronter started what is now a LONG thread about how there are more and more SUBTLE trolls signing up on SF.

This was my observation:


Let me look at this from the point of view of an old practicing politico.

1) Stormfront is being taken more and more seriously.

2) It is therefore inevitable that professional anti-anti-semites and the like will try to penetrate and influence us.

3) We need vigilant people like J.S. Bach to notice this and warn us about it.

4) As the racial issue becomes central and the fake opposition conservative crap is shoved into the background, our REAL opposition to political correctness comes to the front

5) This was bound to happen as the racial divide became more obvious

6) It is a very very GOOD sign.

4 Comments

The Buckley Syndrome

I am helping to take care of a person in the first stages of Alzheimer’s.   The care-taker I am helping out is very grateful, because she is being driven crazy by constantly reminding him of everything.

I have no problem at all with it, and I am NOT joking when I tell you the reason for this.

I have been doing this all my life.  On Stormfront anti-whites bring up the same thing over and over and over and over.  They bring up “mixing THE races” and I have had to explain to them literally HUNDREDS of times that all this assimilation (intermarriage) and mass immigration are demanded ONLY in white countries and in ALL white countries.   It is straight genocide.

But it is not only the anti-whites who have Alzheimer’s.   Anti-whites give long arguments about how race mixing is a personal choice.  I just point out that all crime is a matter of personal choice.  It works, but it will be a long cold day in The Pit before other SFers pick it up.

And then there is “anti.”  Anyone who gets out there and fights sees how effective that is in driving them on the defensive.  Like the argument about “mixing THE races” they simply cannot deal with it because it is simple, short, and TRUE.   I drove them back with it.  I got POINTS for it.

But NOBODY USED it until I finally others to do so.

Until I started caretaking this Alzheimer’s patient, I honestly did not realize how his symptoms were part of my life on Stormfront and BUGS.

Some nice person who sent me points for one of my arguments said it was “simple BUT effective.”   In other words, were dealing with deeply intellectual opponents whose arguments can usually only be dealt with by long, complicated rejoinders.

I call this the Buckley Syndrome.  Respectable conservatives kept the old, silly liberalism alive by treating it with respect.  There is nothing complex about some idiot saying we should deal with CRIMINAL violence by taking guns away from HONEST people.  I worked in a prison and I have yet to find a single career criminal who doesn’t laugh out loud at that crap.

William Buckley used French phrases and his phony Judge Whitey accent to be part of a Sophisticated Debate with morons.   It is NOT an example we need follow.

5 Comments

The Obama News Period

Stormfront gets tied down in “news and Jews.” So I might wait a bit before putting the “Coach, not Leader,” there. It maybe a waste of time right now to try to get anything listened to during the Obama News Period.

To some extent my lack of brilliance is made up for by my lack of bullshit, so I admit that seeing a black face in the Oval Office depresses me, though by my own logic it shouldn’t. Logically a white man who has declared his enmity to his own race is a far worse creature.

My Stormfront signature still ends with “Anybody but McCain.” But it takes a while for my heart to catch up with my brain.

Certainly the United States which has established the religion of political correctness is like a US which has been occupied by any other alien. Loyalty to such a system is treason to our real country.

All that is logical, but it is still depressing. So Stormfront people have the right to a period to vent their anger.

14 Comments

Coach or Teacher, Not Leader

This is for Stormfront, but I want to check it with you first.

Coach or Teacher, Not Leader

In my signature I say that MY AIM IS TO BE a coach.  One person said I am not his coach because GOD is his coach.  I would gladly step down for God.  But what I said was that my AIM is to be coach.

Others aim to be leaders.

The name of my blog, “Bob’s Underground Graduate Seminar,” shows that I think of myself as an advanced teacher rather than as a “leader.”

http://www.whitakeronline.org/blog/

We have some excellent leaders.  In BUGS I am trying to train some more coach-professors.   BUGS is steadily evolving.  I used to do a blog where I set out my ideas, but I* kept demanding comments.

BUGS is a SEMINAR.  I praise comments, I criticize comments.  I have had at least a dozen articles entitled, “READ THE COMMENTS!”   It is paying off.

A lot of our participants used Comments to go off on their own subjects.  So I started a new segment called “General Comments,” maybe not the best title, but it is a place where Seminar Members can bring up subjects without trying to fit them in as comments on whatever I was talking about.    We have now filled up General Comments I and are on General Comments II.

But a funny thing happened on the way to General Comments II.

I felt guilty about not having looked at GC I for a while.  I thought my Seminar participants would be offended.   But when I read it over, I discovered that they did not even MISS me.   BUGSers wrote general comments, and other BUGSers commented on them.

For an Indispensable Leader, this would be a defeat.  For me, it was an enormous victory.

The statements and comments in General Comments are what one would expect of real graduate students.  Unfortunately there are no real graduate students in today’s universities.  There are no REAL seminars in today’s universities.

Which is why my definition of graduate is a bit different from the one used by the education bureaucracy:

“Bob’s Underground Graduate Seminar is for people who have outgrown their college education, whether they have had one or not.”

As a former professor I make it very clear in my last book, “Why Johnny Can’t Think” what I think of what passes for education today.

My triumph in reading General Comments was not that seminar members just talked to each other.  Thank God we have Stormfront for that.   Their discussion, without my input, was DISCIPLINED.

They did not use General Comments to wander odd into whatever they wanted to write down somewhere.  We have SF for that.

Like any real seminar we have a specific program to develop in BUGS.  It is not easy to explain or one would not need a seminar format to deal with it.   If you reused to someone giving a lecture course you need to be part of the seminar for a while to understand what our DISCIPLINE is.

As I say in today’s universities real seminars no longer exist.  In today’s universities you just listen to what the professor says and regurgitate it in the exam, exactly as you did in the first grade.   To today’s professor my feeling of triumph would be hard to explain.

To me, the whole point of Seminar is PARTICIPATION, not cramming for the final.

Cramming is for high school.

In a real seminar, a long-dead art,    If a professor spends many hours in a seminar with future professors and he cannot tell who is getting it and who is not, he should go back to teaching high school where he belongs.

I feel justified in my claim to be coach, teacher, professor, whatever.  After all my work, BUGS participants are able to bring up new topics and STICK TO THE SUBJECT.

Leaders are har to replace.  But my goal is that, when I step down, due to my efforts, there will people ready to take my Chair in the numerous Seminars that will develop from BUGS.

4 Comments

Tim is WORKING on STRATEGY

Bob,

I do two things all the time. I got them both on BUGS from you. They are supposedly the most effective tools in my arsenal.

One, I never say anti-racism and just leave it alone. I always say “anti-racism is a code word for anti-white”. I then stay on anti-white. It rarely goes further anymore, because I have slaughtered people with one of my shortened mantras so many times.

Another thing stolen from you is MY RACE. I never ever say “the white race”. Always my race, my race, my race. I have had white folks tell me after that they had never heard anyone talk about our race and personalize so much. I have had Asians say that they had never heard a white person say MY RACE. Very difficult to attack. Once in a while you will get a smart arsed anti-white SHWA ask me what my race is. I always say White Folks and then I call them dumb asses.

When you say ‘the white race’. You will get endless dumb questions about WHAT is the WHITE RACE etc. No one has ever asked me all these side issue questions by me saying MY RACE. When they do. I can immediately make fun of them and call them names.

Bob, has anyone ever asked you what color you are? No, not likely. My race is your best underrated and understated BUGS tool. I catch people all the time on BUGS saying ‘the white race’. I let it slide. But I shouldn’t because it is THAT effective. Make “My Race” a habit and watch people.

3 Comments

General Comments 2

Nothing new was coming into General Comments so I ignored it for a while.   Needless to say, that is when the comments came in. 

backbaygrouch says we need a new one because the old one is now too long.  So, techs, I suggest we start this one and link it up in place of the old one.  Or however you decide to handle it. 

Meanwhile I will look at the General Comments I that I overlooked.

223 Comments

Anti-WHITE, I Need Some HELP Here!

This is a war of words.   The use of WORDS is what matters.

I seem to be fighting a LONE battle against the use of the word “anti.”   Anybody who works in OV sees how desperately they object when one says anti-WHITE, but I can’t get people to USE it.

In short, I am the same position with anti-WHITE as I am with the Mantra.

I am very glad to have Lord Nelson back.   

I now have some real practitioners like him on the Mantra.  It took YEARS to get them and I can’t spare one.

I find it hard to understand how people who claim to be serious simply cannot assimilate the importance of words that WORK.

“Anti-white” is more important and effective than five tomes on Jews.

Please get in there and correct our comrades on this and similar points.

And never, never, NEVER let them off the hook by saying “anti.”

13 Comments

The New Idea Chain

 About 1900 the British Admiralty refused to develop submarines with an ironic comment:

“The British Navy is not in the business of developing ships that sink.”

Cute.

And COSTLY.

France got smashed by Germany in 1870, 1914 and 1940, each time in the exact same way.  Today it is hard to believe how dumb the French were in each case.  In each case the Germans invented a new way to move so fast they reached Paris before the French Army could.

In each case France was fighting the last war.

One of history’s cruelest jokes was what happened when the French built the Ultimate, Updated World War One Trench and called it the Maginot Line.

Dave explains the new technology of the fight brought on by the Internet.  Tim sums it up brilliantly:  “BUGS has no currency in the past.”

For decades I worked with the old idea chain.  I could trace the Latest Thing from New England campuses to the Boston Globe to the New York Times to the Atlanta Journal.  Then Europeans would pick up the Latest Thing and then the colonies, the English language press in Australia and South Africa, would pick it up.

 It ran like a Mussolini train schedule, perfectly predictable and right on time.  This was useful to me, because I knew what “new” ideas people would come up with out where I was ahead of time.  But I did not realize until now how exactly like a train it was.  It depended on enormous initial investment in an established track made up of iron rails.

As Dave points out, the old idea train was the ONLY means of transporting ideas.  If you had toldwomonein1908 that autos and trucks and suchlike playthings would reduce the importance of railroads, you would be laughed at.

But at NBC and CBS. they are not laughing.

We can worry about their Maginot Line or we can concentrate on developing our Blitzkrieg.

2 Comments

Dave and Tim

Here is an important point and it has to do with the way the Internet is shaping life.

The Internet is turning an enormous amount of what used to be esoteric knowledge into a low cost commodity. The white race has bestowed upon the world an incredible legacy of intellectual property and real capital, a legacy freely available to all nonwhites. With the Internet, huge stores of knowhow are now easily available worldwide, courtesy of our race, much of it embedded in software.

This is of great benefit to the world economy. But it raises the value of the kinds of knowledge that can only be acquired through risk taking and doing, and other kinds of knowledge that cannot or will not be transmitted over the Internet.

Not only that, it makes more salient the kinds of knowledge that is only accessible through racial traits, particularly the kinds of knowledge that has it source in traits involving distinct motives and obsessions.

For example, I have never met a nonwhite who has any idea of the compulsive obsession white men tend to have with weapons. I think if they knew the truth they would be horrified. Nonwhites are simply clueless of the depth of our concern and obsession with weapons development. They have no idea HOW MUCH WE CARE and how thoroughly we are devoted to acquiring new and better weapons.

This shared consciousness among white men is non-accessible to nonwhites. And a very large domain of know-how and understanding surrounding this shared consciousness will not ever be published on the Internet.

This gives us some clues about where things are really headed in the racial struggle. There is a lot of baked-in-the cake exclusivity that cannot be penetrated.

I believe the racial bonds are there and in truth they are very compulsive. So the harder Political Correctness shoves, the greater the push back in separation. The “push back” is unseen and unnoticed. So much the better.

There cannot and there will never be “a common humanity”.

– Dave

Dave,

Great post. No White Nationalist on Stormfront has ever published anything concerning our tribes ACTUAL survival tendencies. I published a post under “White Survival” pointing to a one simple fact. Our survival has never been birth dependent. 80% of our survival is defense and that is why the USA and Russia have the largest weapons development on earth. Hardly anyone responded. They want fear and fantasy concerning “all hope is lost” type of nonsense.

“For example, I have never met a nonwhite who has any idea of the compulsive obsession white men tend to have with weapons. I think if they knew the truth they would be horrified. Nonwhites are simply clueless of the depth of our concern and obsession with weapons development. They have no idea HOW MUCH WE CARE and how thoroughly we are devoted to acquiring new and better weapons.

This shared consciousness among white men is non-accessible to nonwhites. And a very large domain of know how and understanding surrounding this shared consciousness will not ever be published on the Internet.

This gives us some clues about where things are really headed in the racial struggle. There is a lot of baked-in-the cake exclusivity that cannot be penetrated.”

That is why BUGS is the best. We are the only ones dealing in REALTY. And me and you can only imagine what Putin’s Russia and our Pentagon really have in terms of Weapons capabilities. We know how we think. Therefore we know how Aryans think. All the White Nationalists and even some smart Racists only deal in what is KNOWN. What is known is based on the PAST. BUGS has no currency in the past.

– Tim
 

No Comments

Dave, Mentality and Means

 
As whites, we don’t need a “mass movement” or any kind of that sort of regalia.

The important thing is to leave behind yesterday’s political methods. They are a legacy from circumstances that have disappeared from life. This latter is the most important point of all.

–Dave

The “living in space” thing that sounded so inevitable in 1977 is no longer a big deal, like living in Virtual Reality.  It seems out of date, but it’s not.  It’s on hold.

Once again in order to understand what happens to “inevitables” you have to THINK ABOUT basic no one else ever analyzes.  Anybody who remembers the clunkers computers were back then sees why the Virtual Reality craze went out.  Computers were then and are now far too slow for it.

Likewise living in space.  That was considered inevitable when the Moon Mission was all the rage.  Manned space MISSIONS are gone.  So that, like VR, is considered out of date.

But computers are forging ahead and it is becoming routine to launch one more satellite, SEMI-PRIVATELY.

You never know what opportunities will present themselves.  The way we saved our race will be something we don’t even consider right now.

But, as Dave says, the point is not to obsess on white nationalism, Jews, or any other METHOD.  Once we get the Mantra MENTALITY, we will be ready for the WAY to racial survival.

As Tim indicates, when we do, it will come as an awful shock to the non-whites we leave behind.

But Hitler could not have predicted the Depression and Marx did not foresee World War I.  We are after the MENTALITY of white survival.  The MEANS will come on the Tide of History.

4 Comments

Tim and Ghetto Earth

 
Can you imagine the hysterics of the PC elite about the prospects of Earth Aryans going to an all white planet? That would make for a great sci-fi comedy flick.

– Tim

        
This is why I was in a position to save the Hubble Telescope.  

It was one of those dramas you hear about.   The subcommittee had cut Hubble and the Jupiter Orbital Probe out of the 1977 NASA budget.  The Appropriations subcommittee is usually the final word.

They knew there would a rebellion against this castration of the Space Program, so the Leadership sprung the vote immediately, on the Thursday when the break began.   The pro-space congressmen were generally younger and more Western, without the Floor-fighting expertise that old hands like John and me had.

They were despairing, and I said, “Hell, all you need to mobilize is a one-day delay.  I’ll GET you a one-day delay.”  I walked into John’s office and said, “Do you know about the Jupiter Probe and the Space Telescope?”
John said, “No.” and I said, “Well, we need a one-day delay for it.”
John said, “Is it good for America?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get you the day.”

No more was said.  That what he hired his senior staffers for.

Over the weekend the space lobby got in 400,000 telegrams demanding reversal before the vote took place on Monday.  America’s top scientists were in the galleries when the House voted FOUR TO ONE to reverse the subcommittee.  UNPRECEDENTED!

John got enormous praise from new supporters and was invited to speak before the AAAS.   Edward Teller came in to congratulate him personally.

How did it happen that an old Middle America campaigner was in the middle of the space program all of a sudden?

His senior staffer was interested in living in space as a place for whites.

1 Comment

Anti-WHITE, Dammit!

People write me about “using my influence.”

I don’t have any.

I was delighted when Lord Nelson and Prometheus started pushing the Mantra after I had spent YEARS knocking anti-WHITES down with it and getting rep points for doing so.

But nobody who gave me rep points USED it.  It took YEARS and endless effort to finally get a few people who understood the Mantra and USED it.

So now when people on SF say “anti,” I am the ONLY one who slams at them with “anti-WHITE.”

I have no INFLUENCE.  No one puts my BUGS pieces even into SF, much less any place else.  The only times I am accused of having INFLUENCE is when someone wants me to use it or when someone wants to say that an example I gave is an Evil Influence, like the porno bit in the Maxim article below.

You all know the simple arithmetic we always hear: “If I tell four people and THEY tell four people and they tell four people…”

It doesn’t work.  No matter how many people in BUGS discover the Mantra, on any other initiative I am entirely on my own.

Which pisses me off.   I could USE some following.

But then I look at the other races.

Nothing is easier than getting ten million Chinese waving Mao’s Red Book.   We got a couple of thousand pro-Confederate flaggers in a march.  On the other side, a snap of the finger brought out so many blacks out in a counter march that they could hardly breathe in the open air around the State Capitol.

Whites piss me off, but I prefer you.

4 Comments

Dave

Dave says:

“And noticing what is compulsory is Mantra thinking.”

Thanks, Dave.

Yes! Noticing where they are coming from is how one wins with Mantra Thinking.

I had just written a piece on the same subject, or what to MY mind is the same subject. I decided that no one would understand my point.

Well, courtesy of Dave, I’ll try it:

Bullshitters and Tape Recorders

Anti-WHITES are divided into two groups:

1) The ones who just recite Mommy Professor, and

2) The ones who are reciting bullshit and they know it’s bullshit.

You will note that when I go after an anti-WHITE in OV he is obviously outclassed.

Forty-five years ago when I was a grad student at the University of Virginia, it was a standing joke at parties when a student or professor would hear that I was a racist and would come over to me to straighten me out. People would watch them come over to me and watch me cut them down.

They enjoyed watching it because I had cut most of THEM down the same way. It became fascinating to them. As one prof said, “What is interesting is to watch how the time it takes you goes down. It took you five or ten minutes when you got here, now they start backing away in two or three minutes.”

My secret, then as now, was simply knowing that anti-WHITES come in two groups:

1) The ones who just recite Mommy Professor and

2) The ones who are reciting bullshit and they know it’s bullshit.

So I made Group feel like the Mommy Professor Tape Recorders they are, and I cut through the BS in Group 2.

It ALWAYS worked. It always WORKS.

No Comments

Maxim

There is a magazine called Maxim.  On the cover of each issue is a mixed-blood woman.   I got it in the mail for two separate one-year subscriptions, neither of which I ordered.

I must begin by disillusioning you. Kind folks may respond by saying to themselves, “OF COURSE a good Bible Belter like Bob would not order PORN.”  As usual, just when somebody thinks I’m a good boy, I have to disavow it. 

“BROTHERS,” you may expect me to say with tears in my eyes, “I have SINNED!”

Sorry.

After my divorce twenty-five years ago, the Playboy Channel cost twelve dollars a month, and I subscribed to it.  I LIKE looking at good-looking mostly blonde women.  If this is sinful I can only say that The Lord forgot to neuter me.

No one EVER sent me a FREE subscription to Playboy.   You would play hell trying to get a 24-hour Playboy Channel at an affordable price today.  IN SHORT I doubt seriously that Maxim, which is now the Media’s official benchmark of ”ideal women,” pays its own way.

This is important.  But since most people will obsess on porno itself, my point will be missed.   Which is exactly what anti-WHITES depend on.  I am not big on conspiracies, but I do know that the superrich are generally anti-WHITE.  For a few million dollars, the girly magazine of record can be made into a monthly ad for Affirmative Action Beauty.

I have seen news commentaries showing Maxim covers as Ideal Women.

I saw the Microsoft ads with Politically Correct people bragging they were “PC,” With Bill Gates grinning on screen.

This is how smart people fight for power.  But if I try to alert our people to it, there will be SFers telling me I am praising Hugh Hefner.

Dave said that I pick the wrong examples.  That happens, but the simple fact is that there ARE no examples our people will NOT obsess on.  It is like being tripped up constantly.  I write a piece on Maxim and get response that tell me Hugh Hefner is bad.  I write about how to fight, and got responses saying commenters are Good Christians or are in a macho mood or are feeling depressed.

1 Comment

Expansion of the Universe

Since I did the last piece and everybody decided to go off on their own subject, I can use BUGS as just the place of record for my meanderings.

OUR universe — there is no reason to call it THE universe – is supposed to be expanding at an increasing rate.  If it is to maintain a certain rate of increase in three dimensions, it would have to expand at an expanding rate.   The equal and opposite reaction to that might be gravity.

As far as I know, all this is still based on the red shift.  Like the strong force in the atom, a force can exist which doesn’t obey the distance squared law.  It may be that the red shift is different at a distance or there are curves in space we don’t know about yet which produce the apparent red shift.

This is a comment on your comments.  My mind can wander, too.

4 Comments

Temporal Provincialism – Again

Everything here relates. I have written before about how everyone is shocked if I know some detail of the latest news everybody is talking about, but they are equally shocked if I remember the same detail a month later. By then, they’ve forgotten all about THAT Big News Story.

The same is true of history. It is grudgingly admitted that the coded language in Revelations might have something to do with Nero. Which is exactly like saying that a Christian document written in a world ruled by Stalin might have some reference to Uncle Joe.

But I have had people tell me in earnest in the 1960s that John was actually talking not about Nero, but about the Cuban Missile Crisis, while in 2001 he was referring to the Twin Towers.

In all but intent, this is the Big Lie technique. The big difference is that these people are lying to THEMSELVES. As I said before, most people can’t remember what news they were obsessed with six months ago. You can tell about what year a history book was written, which means is not a good history. A historian can either get published or discuss real history.

It is the same with past, present, and future. I keep repeating that it matters not [at] all whether a futurologist predicts correctly. He is getting published NOW. He is an official futurologist because he is getting grants NOW. The more provincially NOW he is the better.

Which is why [some] of the most entertaining humor you will ever read consist[s] of the confident predictions of Experts. Historians are the same about yesterday. News commentators forget everything before they comment. They have to have something for TONIGHT, and everything in history and all in future has to be related to NOW.

You cannot understand history or the future if you do not keep Temporal Provincialism firmly in mind at all times. If you do, it gives you a huge understanding denied the “professionals.”

Almost everybody who has known me for a while considers my predictions correct to the point of being creepy, even ones I had forgotten until they mentioned them. But the secret is simple: Look at history as if you were in THAT time. Look at the future not in terms of what might seem plausible now, but beyond the welter of Latest News.

9 Comments

Bruce

Bob,
I took your advice and picked up a few W.E. Woodward books. You’re right, they are good. If you ever think of any more good books, I’d be interested.
Happy New Year!
Bruce

Woodward is a special, but in general history written in the 30s is always a good bet. That was when history books were best-sellers aimed at a general audience of literate Americans.  Now history books are all written for Harvard.

1 Comment

Dave and USING Criticism

Dave wrote two long and thoughtful pieces.   My reply to the last of them was, “So you are saying that if you risk your life in uniform you can do Mantra thinking?”

In any regular classroom, if the professor said that it would be a CONDEMNATION, not a CRITICISM.  The professor is there to teach you the True Faith and to head off any deviations from it.

What I said was a criticism, which is the opposite end of the world from a condemnation.

On the football field my coach would say, all too often, “Feel around you, Whitaker, maybe you’re still in bed.”   That was a CRITICISM.   On the football field you had better pay attention or you’ll get carried away.

Since other people wanted my position, the coach could have said, “Get off the field, Whitaker, and let somebody play who can concentrate.”  THAT is a CONDEMNATION.

Like my old coach, I am not very subtle.  But if I am worthy of being a coach — and coaches DO get fired regularly – what I say is a demand for you to address something.

As you would expect from any guy in his dotage, I am about to regale you with a tale of the Good Old Days.   Thirty years ago the editor of Analog – not Bova, the real one – said that he READ every submission.

That was when on writer gave this advice to wannabe writers: “READ you rejection letter.”  Most writers just saw rejection and tossed it.  BAD mistake.  Back then you had a chance to read a CRITICISM from the horses’ mouth, from the person who decided your fate.

No more.   Now you get a Screw You letter that says they only consider articles submitted by Qualified Agents.

I READ my rejection slips.  I do not know what an acceptance from Analog looks like, but this did a lot of good as a writer.  Now you can’t even get a useful rejection.

Now science fiction is just another bureaucracy.  It is vetted for accuracy by a “qualified” agent.   Like 30s history, scifi was wildly popular in the 70s.  We couldn’t save the space telescope NOW because that whole scifi base of support is gone.  Like history, scifi is now aimed not to offend Opinion.

My comment was aimed at getting Dave away from what I CONSIDER to be a sort of World War II Generation concept of Suffering as the key to Wisdom.

6 Comments

Reply to Pain: How Mantra Thinking Makes You a Highlander

I added up the years in Bob’s bio, and despite his physical appearance, he is actually 98 years old. Bob, are you the Highlander?

–Pain

I sure as hell FEEL 98. I just wish I looked as good as Connery does.

People will say they are older than I am but THEY still have energy for this and that.

My reply is, “It ain’t the YEARS, it’s the MILEAGE.”

But this is the sort of count up that could make trouble for me on Wiki. The list of things I did, if they had been consecutively, sound unbelievable. But in real life, the more unrelated things you do, the more you get into.

I was on any assignment I volunteered for. To me, fighting Shining Path stuff in South America or African Liberation Movements was part of the same movement where I met with George Wallace or knocked out a cop in Louisville.

Pain’s comment reminds me that I have always been a Mantra Thinker. Who else but a Mantra Thinker would connect the “small time” politics of Governor Wallace with the fight going on so far abroad?

I studied Soviet economics under the man who broke the CIA nonsense about how well Centrally Planned Economies did. I SAW the collapsing economies when PC was bragging on their efficiency.

But it was as lonely thing, because nobody in one of my worlds could see what I was doing in another. Try explaining to someone who is risking his life helping the Contras that that coalition I was promoting was part of the same fight.

Col. North would understands that perfectly NOW, post-Reagan. But can you imagine trying to explain it to him in the early 70s, when he was engaged in a “REAL WAR?”

I was essential because I was on SO MANY fronts. I saw the whole fight, as I do today.

Mantra Thinking.

In fact, more of my life has been spent learning to explain what I was doing than doing it. Being in South America and Africa did not take that much time if you are not making a career of it. Saving the space telescope and preventing the IRS from imposing racial quotas required that I know a lot about space technology AND that I knew the grassroots movement at the anti-busing and private school levels.

I also knew the Soviet economy was a fake. It was all part of the same fight. Reagan’s SDI Star Wars broke them because it EXPOSED all this. I knew espionage and I knew that the whole Soviet Science bit was fake. They stole everything they had.

Soviet Science (The Sputnik Syndrome, AFKAN can explain that history) and Soviet economics were their weaknesses.

The USSR never got to the moon. The USSR never came NEAR the moon. Suddenly they were faced with project of that size which only the American economy and American science could handle.

I was part of ALL of that, and it took a lifetime for most people to be a part of any phase of it. No one who helped mobilize 400,000 telegrams had any idea why my Wallace side was a part of what they were doing.

If you are not a Mantra Thinker you naturally think I spent a lifetime in each of these different roles. But I saw espionage, grassroots marches, living in space movements, Capitol Hill politics, Soviet economics and all the rest as part of ONE battle I could not explain to anyone else.

And now that the Soviet Empire is gone, everybody knew it all the time. The BASICS I tried to explain in my different roles to people who thought THEY were the real fight while they stared at me like moo-cows are now what everybody knew all along.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, nobody but your Ole Prof Bob could teach Mantra Thinking then and no one else can do it now.

5 Comments

Switch to our mobile site