You get frustrated with people seeing how well the Mantra works and then giving you the cow look, going Moo! And going back to chomping the old grass the same way. Welcome to dealing with Pod People.

I thought I might give you a couple of examples from my history in dealing with this, so you will not get the impression that it’s YOU who is nuts.

When I was on Capitol Hill, I was in a discussion with some other senior staffers, and someone said, “Let Bob deal with the secretaries. They’ll do ANYTHING for him!”

This was news to me.

I finally figured it out.

You see, there is a big pecking order on Capitol Hill. Senior staffers treated “secretaries” like peons.

That was dumb in itself, but they treated OFFICE MANAGERS the same way. In fact, they didn’t know the difference.

Courtesy is a routine Southern disease, but there are times when not being courteous is just stupid.

The office manager sits in front of a typewriter like a “secretary.” But she runs the office.

What is the most valuable thing on Capitol Hill?

It is access to the congressman.

The Administrative Assistant is the head of a congressman’s staff. But he has nothing LIKE the personal contact with the Boss that the Office Manager has. She might see him, literally a dozen times a day.

I was very aware of that, and I had assumed others were, too.

They weren’t.

It turned out that, when I needed a quick message gotten to the Boss, the Office Manager just tossed it in the next time, usually within the hour, the next time she saw him. Try getting an AA or a LA to remember yours among the fifty messages people, including other congressman, want delivered to the Boss.

I would explain this to my fellow senior staffers. They nodded. They even smiled at my genius.

But they never DID it.

I told you how my unfunded grassroots organization became national news. They always asked me for the secret. I told them I just listened to what these groups wanted said and wrote THAT in press releases. Press conferences had THEM, not me, up front.

“I ask them what they want and do it.”

No else ever did, before or since.

Our family brick plant was a hobby of my father, who spent his time as the best-known brick-making consultant in the world. So when my brother took it over after his death it was out-of date and tiny. He made it a multimillion dollar business and sold it.

What is your secret, they would ask him.

My brother heard about profit sharing, so he put himself and everybody else at the plant on minimum wage plus a percentage. He explained to the workers what that meant.

South Carolina was even less well known for high wages than it is now. But the plant for several years was the highest wage brick plant in AMERICA. It grew fast.

The only real problem with someone sitting down on the job was to prevent his fellow workers from lynching him.

No one has used that method since.

These are three examples of at least dozens.

I don’t understand why people don’t use what WORKS. I do know that if a GROUP does it, they will roll over the big guys.

As they ask you your Secret, and you tell them about the Mantra AGAIN. They will nod and go back to whatever crap they’ve been using.

But we are not dealing with just me or my brother, a single staffer or a single brick plant. BUGS can use the Secret and the sky’s the limit.

Sic ‘em, gang!

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/11/2323227/ITER-Fusion-Reactor-Enters-Existential-Crisis

I have talked a lot about fusion energy. The environmentalists are trying to prevent it. They want everything planned by Mommy Professor. They do NOT want any technological solutions to any shortage.

The opponents are described as environmentalist anti-nuclear. But they are in fact the group I discussed at the end of my 1976 book. They are the education-welfare establishment which wants the Kyoto world Mommy Professor dreams of, where there is a shortage of everything and bureaucrats make the choices.

Fusion is nuclear, but that is all it has in common with atomic power plants. Fission puts out radioactivity, fusion does not. We have no idea what any of the problems will be with fusion generation because there is none yet.

None of this has anything to do with the opposition to it. Every single socialist I know of became an environmentalist the day the USSR closed down. The USSR was, after all, just what I said, “A place where there was a shortage of everything and bureaucrats made the choices.”

It is interesting that Chernobyl occurred in Mommy Professor’s Heaven.

Nobody else would put it that way. And that is the problem.

Just as the real aims of anti-whites are never discussed, the real motives of Mommy Professor are ignored.

It is interesting to me that the big push on fusion energy is happening in Europe. Europe is the place where they usually are the first to pee on themselves when Mommy Professor says something is politically incorrect. Yet France uses nuclear power to an extent that, if copied in the US, would about get rid of our oil shortage.

But this is a crisis coming to a head that only we understand. So far this fusion project has hit $20 billion.

We now have a twenty billion dollar investment facing the environmental industry which represents trillions they hope to control from the shortage industry.

And shortage IS an industry. It is called environmentalism, but it represents millions of people who want to control things and distribute things the way they once wanted to do under socialism. The power companies backed down on nuclear power because theirs was a tiny power compared to the shortage industry.

The shortage industry is no more interested in the environment than it was in working people when it called itself socialism. Millions of people are already employed in it and it wants hundreds of millions.

All of the big companies the shortage industry gets its money from and claims to oppose are, combined, small compared to the education-welfare, environmentalist establishment. But we still debate with them as if they were Idealists against Big Money.

My first book discussed this, but the world view was weeded out as conservatives learned to use only the arguments that didn’t make their liberal heroes look like what they were. Just like today our side weeds out the Mantra.

I really like it when commenters see the direct connection between BUGS and old sayings that make sense. One of you saw the connection between one of my articles and the old and true saying: A prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

Alan B pointed out on June 17 that he had often said that a turnip could get a major party nomination by following the OPC guidelines. In fact, the day before his comment, SC Democrats had just done that.

What happens here is that the black leaders tell blacks how to vote. In the black churches, the preachers told their flocks to vote for the US Senate nominee in the Democratic primary whose name appeared first on the ballot.

But there was some last-minute shuffling and the name on the top by election day was changed to the man you have all heard about who is now the Party nominee.

If this is the case, no one will talk about it. Back in 1962, Hollings was running for the SC seat in the Senate made vacant by the death of Olin Johnston. Back then the black vote was measured by two all-black wards, Ward 9 in Columbia and Ward 9 in Charleston.

He was running against former Governor Russell, who had appointed himself to the vacant seat. But at that time having the black vote was a burden. So Hollings called the black leaders and got Russell’s name put on the slips handed out to blacks in the two Ward 9s for the Democratic primary, and his name on the rest of them.

So Russell was reported as getting the black vote and Hollings got almost every single black vote outside the Ward 9s. This was never mentioned anywhere in the press, though Russell bitched about it everywhere.

The simple fact is that there is no such things as a black vote. These two cases illustrate it, so such things are never mentioned in the media.

I remember that years ago Ed Rollins mentioned that blacks were bribed to vote in New Jersey. He immediately apologized, because it was not a “bribe.” That was Whitey Talk. What those payments were was a new black tradition called “walkin’ round money.”

Rollins, a good respectable, crawled, peed on himself, apologized, the whole bit.

The media shouldn’t fear to talk about the black churches getting it wrong. The average person would never make the connection any more than they could see that blacks are routinely bribed.

On Third Rock From the Sun, the alien, being from outer space, said he thought the black secretary was a Democratic. She had him crawling by saying, “Just because my skin is black, you think I’m a Democrat?”

But no one wonders why the Democratic Party pays hundred of millions of dollars to “get out the minority vote.” A dark skin means a Democratic vote. That is why “walkin’ round money” is not to be criticized because it is a “black tradition,” not a bribe.

Now the one black congressman from SC is screaming foul because a fellow black has gotten the Democratic Senate nomination. He likes this competitive black as much as Andrew Young appreciated Obama.

The church’s bad information may be the reason for this totally astonishing nomination. Another may be the one I came up with LONG before Obama became a major phenomenon. I warned that all the hype about Clinton being “America’s first black president” was something the cheering Democrats should take into account.

The problem is that when you a own political gold mine, you had damned better check and be sure it doesn’t have a cave in point. I TOLD you years ago that this gold mine of minority votes, of white Democrats glorying in the fact that all they had to do was get brown skins to the polling place meant victory, would not last all that long.

You see, when blacks vote for a white man who has a black heart, it will not be long before they vote for a man with a black heart AND a black FACE. I said that when Obama was a new Senator. I did not have him in mind.

This is the sort of advice I got paid for, despite the fact that I was not a comfortable person to have around. That was one of the reasons I was not a comfortable person to have around.

The white guy who was appointed to get the Democratic nomination could have used my advice. It would have been worth a lot to him, though none of the “professionals” would have even thought of it.

It could have been the black church’s mistake, or it could have been the simple fact that a lot of blacks just prefer to vote for a black. Neither can be mentioned in the media, and neither can be mentioned by respectable conservative or even at AmRen.

You will only see them on BUGS.

The first thing any human being thinks of when someone brags about having mulatto kids is how UGLY they are. When Tiger married that Swedish model he was destroying what he appreciated. Her kids will look like any other mulattoes.

It is immoral to destroy what you appreciate. The Wordist say if Tiger wants blonds you should learn to appreciate whatever results.

Where does that kind of Morality end? It doesn’t. You have to build more and more on other lies to cover that one.

A major part of our economy goes to making things beautiful. I once laughed my tail off when a suburban woman sitting under a her dryer told me, in regards to race, “Looks don’t matter.” Neither she nor anyone else understood what I was laughing at.

A Latin on SF Opposing views was saying to another Latin that she was considered white in her country but it didn’t matter. I pointed out to her that Latins are notoriously ugly for exactly that reason. They choose TV announcers who look, as one columnist said, “as if David Duke had picked them.”

To me, doing something that others have to pay for, like ugly children, is immoral. I don’t know of a single Moral Leader who takes their feelings into the least account.

So I don’t know of a single Moral Leader.

I am an opponent of interracial breeding for the same reason I oppose circumcision. No priest is going to consider the agony of a child when it comes to circumcision. He does not oppose abortion because of the child.

The product of miscegenation is generally ugly children and a dead society.

No pro-lifer could care less about the life that a child will have to lead than a leftist does. When a terminal patient is screaming in agony from terminal spinal cancer, they are lighting candles to the Glory of keeping that person breathing and screaming.

I see this and I call it evil.

Our whole Evil Genius crap blinds us to the fact that Mommy Professor could not have invented the perversions he uses. He is using distortions we have abandoned when we actually saw them, like the self-torture of the Trappists and Paul’s ambition to make all Christians sterile.

But there is a giant difference between seeing our people outgrew stuff and saying they never believed it. Wordism says that one never outgrows anything. No one takes a second look and a third look. The Wordist is at home in colored lands where the Word never changes, is never examined.

Mommy Professor’s World. Not considering what children have to pay for Tiger’s preferences is evil. The Church has made it Doctrine that if one is in an emotion the right psychiatrist or romance novelist says is Love, he can do anything to the next generation he feels like.

No. Not just he “can.” It is God Will for him to do so.

The Church had much the same attitude on child molestation. The psychiatrists told them this was an emotional problem and a priest should take counseling and be shifted around to prey on different kids until he was cured. I have absolute contempt for those who tell me this was not the case. The bishops SAID that’s what happened.

The fact that leftists don’t like the Church is no excuse for the Church being evil and stupid. The history of the Church is OUR history, and refusing to see evil is an evil in itself. Few leftists like dog crap on their shoes, but that doesn’t make it smell any better.

“All I see when it is a mixed couple is two Children of God together.” What I see is a couple who don’t give a damn what the kids have to face in the mirror every morning.

That’s why Latin Americans are regarded as ugly and unmixed Swedes are regarded, by everybody, as beautiful. In the Swedish Embassy they have a huge photo of a beautiful A Scandinavian girl and a law that says it is illegal.

Every thing I have just said is demanding the straight truth. No Wordism can make me do my best to see ugly as beautiful or two plus two as other than four.

I am told that it is not evil because it was general thinking at the time. But how much longer can anyone who knows ANY history use that excuse?

I think that if there is a Judgment Day, Temporal Provincialism in the age of the Internet will be less excusable than it was.

CS Lewis’ example of the fine wine described at the end of Screwtape Proposes a Toast has a special logic to it. It is a mixture of the souls of those who were fanatical Calvinists with those who think only in terms of pilgrimages, sterility and hunger as real religion. That raw hatred was delicious to the palate of Hell.

And it is unending. Each group will be suffering eternally, but each group will also be blaming the other for their torment forever. Any lost soul who tried to be logical — they’re BOTH THERE — would be subject to the same solution used in both Hell and Canada. They would be punished.

I have noted people leaving BUGS because they found a Word. Our original editor went back to Iraq and became an Intelligence bureaucrat and his views changed right into Good Soldier views. At the end he nearly went ballistic at my objection to his Beloved Comrade Sergeant marrying a white woman.

I note we have not heard from Pain since he went off to theology school and told me that only “amateurs” think that Zoroastrianism had any effect on Christianity. That’s the last communication I remember from him.

CS Lewis said in his forward to the Screwtape Letters that the existence or nonexistence of actual demons has nothing to do with his faith. He was exposing the Mind of Hell.

What influence Zoroaster had or his very existence is not essential to my beliefs. And that is not what drove Pain off. Hell, I don’t even know for sure if he has been driven off. I’ve often been wrong and I expect to be wrong a lot more. But that is my point here.

I have been deserted or stabbed in the back many, many, many times by people who believed they had become Enlightened. These are exactly the people one recognized as being neither back-stabbers nor cynics. They are as honest as Torquemada or Cotton Mather ever were.

They simply have no room in their world for simple honesty or simple mercy or simple truth.

Everything warped about this kind of people is a warping of their natural feelings they were born with. They ban sex because it is abused. Jesus himself condemned prostitution and adultery. If he had been a later Christian, he would not have seen that much a distinction between prostitution and adultery and sex itself.

But Jesus was not a Zoroastrian. I think that, in a world where the two great monotheistic faiths were Zoroastrianism and Judaism, you could not see yourself as a scholar if you did not include Z in your discussions. That is a lot like people who claim to be Intellectuals today. They have to have a lot of Marxism in their discussions.

If you feel strongly about things, the temptation to become a Wordist eventually is almost irresistible. It is not natural for a human being to resist suggestion, as commenters have pointed out here and the Great Kresky said.

It is hard to be dedicated to the idea of human freedom without eventually becoming some kind of absurd Libertarian. We Are talking about something people die for, so it very quickly becomes capitalized. A person can believe in freedom, but can he go out and die for anything less than Freedom?

Can Salvation be “free and without price?” Not if Wordist Theologians have anything to do with it.

In order to save our race it is almost irresistible not to take on the trappings of swastikas and heel-clicking. Soon the swastikas and the heel-clicking and calling Hitler Adolf instead of Adolph become the focus of one’s attention.

It is very, VERY hard to explain to people that, though I have dedicated my life to a cause, that cause does not lead into a dead end of implications. To me, the moment a person begins to capitalize he ceases to be human.

My idea of freedom is the right to do as you wish. My idea of truth is whatever turns out to be fact. My idea of mercy is making people feel better than worse. Only in the white man’s world can these “simplistic” ideas make any sense at all.

In the Orient it all ends up in the dead end of Deep Philosophy. In Africa it ends up as spooks. In the white world, we are always turning into an alleyway of Wordism and slamming up against a brick wall.

But science has made it in the white man’s world because, despite all these dead ends, we still eventually end up heading generally in the way of truth, of reality, of what works. The only white societies that have gone down for good are the ones which were once white and are now brown.

That is the fact. That is the truth.

If you are building a house of cards, the last thing you want to see is someone fiddling around with the base. Wordists build the entire world on a long list of assumptions. Wordism is a  tower of cards, building on what earlier Wordists took for granted.

For example, in Marx’s youth The Dialectic was The Latest Thing. To a Wordist, the Latest Thing is always Forever, “This is the Year 2010″ or “This is the Year 1836.” The whole history of the world has been leading up to what we are finding out now. So Marx built his structure on the dialectic, the Now and Forever of his age.

Before Marx died he had to explain what the hell this dialectic thing was. It was about as up-to-date among his young followers as “23-Skidoo” would have been at Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s.

This is why I seem to be the only one who can see why Bible Fundamentalists and Marxists would be on the same side when it comes to history. Marx’s Theory of Class Struggle goes back to the Pharaoh-based history he was raised with, just as the Fundamentalists’ does.

Wordism is not based on truth. It is at the end of a huge, jerry-built tower of Truth, imposed Truth, required Truth. When Robert Ardrey popularized the fact that animals have wars and borders and class distinctions, it was not the anti-evolution fundamentalists who cried “Foul!!!”

It was the leftist professors. It was their whole Wordism that was based on Rousseu’s assumptions that animals only killed for food and held no territory and had no class distinctions. They were building this giant stack of cards and suddenly somebody was meddling with the very bottom of the tower.

I grew up with the assumptions that leftists were radicals. But unlike Marx I grew out of my youthful obsession. Wordism is rigidly conservative. After all, it calls itself Progressivism. You cannot call yourself progressive without knowing EXACTLY where society is GOING.

This is so basic everybody misses it. Progressivism has always meant that we were getting rid of the violence and class distinctions and obsession with territory that only man’s institutions had imposed.

Once again, respectable conservatism comes to the rescue. No one can make his living as a respectable conservative if he asks “What is a racist?” The professional progressives are not comfortable with anyone who asks “What are you progressing TOWARD?”

BUGS is the only place these questions are ever asked.

Conservatism, in fact, only gets its NAME from sharing the same assumption progressivism does. It only exists as a block in the path of what progressives want. So neither side asks what that is for exactly the same reason. The bottom cards in the conservative’s Wordist tower are as completely based on Pharaoh history as the progressive one is.

It is hard for us today to believe the assumptions about nature on which modern progressivism and, therefore, modern conservatism was constructed. The idea that animals have no borders and no class structure is at least as dead as Galen’s Humor Theory of Disease. But no one gets paid for saying that.

My time in Washington was the high point of direct mail as a new phenomenon. It also shows why so many people who came into professional political action at that time are so news oriented.

When you get a direct mail appeal and toss it away the first thing you wonder is how they AFFORD these things? Few get opened and even fewer bring in money.

Those who send these out are looking for a House List, a group of people who are interested in their particular cause and are willing to give money to support it. So you are on a huge number of lists which show your interest in a subject.

I have at least half a dozen mass mailings from McGovern asking for money for SPLC. That is because I show an interest in race.

Once you get a House List, you may rent it out for the use of others. A pro-life group will let a libertarian group try out its list because they are also anti-liberal.

House Lists for direct mail vary in size from a few hundred to a million in the case of groups like the NRA.
Direct mail was a breakthrough for anti-liberals because liberals had little use for this and did not develop it. The left is funded by limousine liberals, government contracts, and taking over large private endowments. Their money comes in huge chunks.

Direct mail is the ultimate bourgeois tactic.

So how do you get a House List? You try House Lists on causes overlapping with your own. No matter how big the House list is, you rent three to five thousand random addresses on it to test it. Since you need at least a one percent return, the size of the sample that is statistically significant has no relation to the total list.

If a list tests out and you get the minimum return from it you need to almost cover the costs of mailing, you rent the whole list. If you get a good return, you mail it again. The point is that you are looking for people who respond to YOUR message, and that becomes YOUR House List.

You mail your House List several times a year, telling them what you are doing and asking for more money to do it with. Liberals do not make such regular reports to their field hands. Direct mail became famous when it was discovered to be the only major asset anti-liberals had.

In my time, a House List address was worth about fifty bucks, discounting the amount you would get by mailing for donations over and over. You would rent it for two or three cents a name, for people to test it for their own purposes and to mail it if their test paid off.

And this House List becomes an asset. Almost every activist you heard of back then had one or two organizations that were his basic source of income. That’s how we kept people in Washington while liberals got them jobs at Ford Foundations they had taken over.

None of this is a revelation. As Paul Weyrich pointed out in my New Rights Papers in 1982, if reporters ask about how the groups are financed, he just said “It’s in your press kits, guys.”

In order to do a new mailing, which is your bread and butter, you have to come up with something that is going on in the news. The reason it is in the news is because it excites people and it is being talked about.

Contrast this with the Mantra. Here is what will change the real future but you are well aware of how hard it is for anybody obsessed with the latest news to be concerned about the real war.

The reason people who are really deeply concerned don’t make it to the top in a movement is exactly the same reason that Futurology has nothing to do with the future. Those who get in the limelight are interested in what is interesting here and now for fundraisers, just as futurologists are interested in the limitless potential of wind power because that is what the Politically Correct grant-givers want to talk about.

A lot of this political stuff is really just common-sense mechanics.

END OF ARTICLE

Someone described the profession of law as “finding out where money is changing hands and going there.”

The more money that changes hands in litigation, the bigger the legal profession will be.

One statement I keep trying to correct is “Justice is for sale.” This means that the bovine mind repeating this cliché is incapable of realizing that acquittal is not justice. Acquittal is certainly for sale, and the mindless creeps repeating this crap assume that they, being black or innocent kids or whatever, deserve acquittal.

This tells you all about where they are coming from, but it also shows they have no interest whatsoever in justice.

There is not the slightest bit of evidence that the student-teacher ratio, the better the education. It is true that richer schools have genetically smarter kids in them and their ratio is lower. But closer studies have not shown any other relationship.

Home study does not show that fewer students make them better, but that teachers who care and who have been out in the world do a better job of teaching than what the education bureaucracy puts out in its factories. Having one Mommy Professor product per five is the same as having thirty per standardized Mommy Professor product.

Every bureaucracy wants people to believe that the more they spend on it the better product they will get. Everybody in any bureaucracy will tell you that.

Try to truly put yourself in my place. What if ten educated guys were standing around you and you said, “Well, naturally the car dealer wants the customer to buy a more expensive car.”

And everybody looked at you with total, cowlike incomprehension. How would you feel? How would you like to have explain that kind of point every day of the week?

Every day of the week I get a cowlike stare when I explain that JUSTICE is not for sale or when I have to explain why Mommy Professors think that Marxists are right that Idealists and Intellectuals should take over the world, be our ruling class, in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Every now and then a commentator will extend this reasoning. But usually I get another Learned Discussion of Larger Implications. But this is not a loss. I get better thought and commentary than anyone else I know of, and certainly more original.

But a good teacher is never satisfied. When I wear out will there be NOBODY to slap together Point A and Point B in plain English?

It was a cold feeling to be the only one to laugh. When the professor read the Soviet Constitution declaring it a land of Workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals” I was the only one who got the joke: “We have a land where Tom does the work, Bill goes out and fights, John raises the crops, and we will sit and tell them all what to do.”

There have been many times when a wide-eyed prof has said something like, “And the dealers always want to sell the most expensive cars.” It took the form of “professors tend to be politically left,” but it’s the same thing. I don’t laugh anymore.

It’s too creepy

So when the courts decide that more and more lawyers mean more and more justice, I don‘t even giggle. This is getting pathologically serious. The same person who says “Follow the money” everywhere else completely forgets it when an education study shows that people with more school years tend to make more money and then attributes the extra money to the education.

No one makes the obvious connections, much less laughs at all those missing the connection.

No, I’m afraid it’s not so funny any more.

The title of Prophet has several big advantages over that of Genius. First of all, you don’t have to be smarter than everybody else to be a prophet. I am sure someone has made an IQ estimate of each Biblical prophet, but it is not among the foremost considerations.

Jesus went out of his way to tell stories based on what everybody KNEW.

A prophet does not need to know everything. No one can say whether Socrates, Plato or Aristotle was the smartest. But Socrates would have been forgotten without Plato.

Those who insist that Jesus was “a good man” don’t like to remember that that was not what he claimed. Yes, he was A prophet, but what he said is THE Savior. Back to CS Lewis, “Jesus IS God or he WAS a madman.” Modern Religion HATES that idea.

Even if the tale of the young Jesus in the Temple is literally true, it would be a toss-up whether he had more actual book learning than Paul. With Peter versus Paul it is not even close. A prophet is not made by book-learning and he is not made by his IQ.

What a prophet does is to apply simple truth to ALL realities. There are at least ten million people who are convinced they are Intellectuals and Idealists. Maybe it’s my Bible Belt background, but just a suspicion that I may be an actual PROPHET beats the hell out of any such claim for me.

It should be remembered that when Moses gave the Ten Commandments out, he did NOT say that he, Moses, was doing anything original. The actual rules came from God, not from a prophet. He was not even able to get the Tablets down to the people without breaking them the first time, which sounds a lot like Ole Bob to me.

Modern Religionists who quote Christ and Buddha have not the slightest idea where either of them was coming from. Buddha, like Christ, may have claimed to be prophet, but that was his LESSER claim. After his Enlightenment, Gautama declared that he was “a perfect Buddha.” This is far above a human being, prophet or not.

Even The Prophet only claimed, like Moses, to be God’s writer. I don’t know whether they called him The Prophet, putting him above Moses, but he made it very clear that he was A prophet.

Buddhism has no God. Buddha, one in whom the Truth dwells, is as high as that hierarchy gets. Neither Jesus nor The Prophet nor Buddha worried about whether they knew more facts or had a higher IQ than those around them. Each of them delivered what he insisted was the truth, not because they were at the head of the Smart Table in school, but because they were repeating the truth as they, and ONLY they, knew it from a higher authority.

Neither Jesus nor Buddha not The Prophet ever claimed to be ONLY prophet. Nor did every prophet say exactly what they revealed to be Final Truth.

As I say, none of the Great Religious Founders said that a prophet had to be smart or knowledgeable or, for that matter, even religious. Jews recognize Jesus as a prophet, at least publicly, and the Catholic Church declared Buddha, despite the fact that it looked at him as an adherent to that strange “religion without God” as a prophet.

But NOT as a Saint.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the Hellenic Trio were recognized by the Hellenic Church as prophets, but definitely not saints.

A prophet does not ORDAIN other prophets. Like the Wizard of Oz said, Intellectuals ordain Intellectuals with a piece of paper. If you have a doctorate who you are or how smart you REALLY are makes no difference whatsoever.

But there is no paper one can carry to make a person a prophet in his own time. He must apply the rigid truth as he sees it fearlessly in his own time. He has a lot of foresight, but not necessarily because he is holy. He APPLIES what I see as the simple truth rigidly and insists that others do the same:

“Prophets do not come among us to declare NEW truths. They come to remind us of the old ones.”

I am not the smartest. I am not the most informed. What I do claim is that I always try to start out right back at the simple truth and go on from there. A prophet teaches others to do the same thing.

Nothing else.

Am I a prophet? Unfortunately, like artists, real prophets are seldom recognized in their own time.

But for an old Bible Belter, it’s a title to shoot for.

Besides, what other title is there for me to shoot for? If the Intellectuals or the Idealists were to claim me as one of their own, I would be shamed.

Like anyone else, it makes me feel good when readers say my ideas are absolutely original. But as CS Lewis said, “Prophets come among us, not to declare new truths, but to remind us of the old ones.

In this vein, it comforts me when what I have worked hard to explain, something that is going on, I end up running into some old saying. In fact, what I say, if I am working it right, ends up going back to an old truth.

I keep explaining how things work in terms of normal human action. I introduced a careful going-over of people’s motivations in ALL cases. We all know we should “Follow the money,” but until I wrote my first book, no one even THOUGHT of doing that in the case of the Human Betterment Industry as well as “ the military-industrial complex.”

You might think it would bother me that I think hard about something, put a LOT of hard intellectual work into it, and end up with a piece of common sense someone expressed better two centuries ago. But that is really all that prophets do.

Everybody knows how awful anyone can get if they are not called on it. But it is only a prophet who looks the King straight in the eye and tells HIM he is violating basic decency like any other human being. Only a prophet will go into a Sodom or Gomorrah and tell them what they are doing wrong.

They had people Beyond Criticism back then, too. They had Authorities in Robes like our Supreme Court who were not to be questioned. One man did that and he was lynched for it. He was nailed up by the Romans, but only the Guys in Robes gave them no choice.

So when I say you should always ask “Why is this information being produced?” it is clear that every conservative politician’s credibility is tested by this standard all the time. Many times a commentator will simply explain that a politician gets so many tens of thousands of dollars a year from the NRA. He leaves the implication that only conservatives get contributions.

They almost never say where liberal contributions come from, though the Democrats recently got a hell of a lot more money than the Republicans.

And it was in huge chunks. Foundations, unions half of whose voters vote the other way, and groups as activist as the NRA give money to them. But until 1976 no one ever “followed the money” on the LEFT. They don’t now, because conservatives never challenge on this, either.

So what strikes a lot of people as pure genius in BUGS is really just applying one’s THINKING in all areas.

This doesn’t hurt my ego a bit. I am trading in genius for the title of Prophet.

I’ll take that deal!