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.