Now that I think about the farce of the laughable “classical” buildings that litter the tourist’s path in DC, I wonder how anyone can take the “historical” view on anything seriously.

One of the most absolute givens among historians is that people used to think the world was flat. I wonder if it’s true?

Our ancestors in general didn’t travel much, but I am sure that people who had time to study and name the stars probably noticed the horizon, too. If earth were flat it would look different to anyone who had an eye left.

The Bible does not say the earth is flat. It does refer to the heavens and the firmament being created, and if you want to, you can picture that as saying that the land is flat.

In fact, people who want to show how benighted everybody was never think of it any other way.

Egyptians calculated the circumference of the earth, but it is assumed that is because they were Negroid geniuses.

All the talk about sailors being afraid of falling off the edge of the world comes from writers making fun of them. I do not know if any sailor, even a retarded one, ever actually thought the world had an edge.

I would like to think I have not only outgrown a lot of that crap, but LEARNED something from outgrowing it. I remember they used to say that Columbus proved the world was round.

Actually the argument Columbus had with the thinkers of his day was one in which he was wrong. He had calculated the distance it would take to get to Asia going westward, and he calculated it as much closer than it was. No sane person argued that he would reach the end of the world.

Another total misconception I cannot even get people to NOTICE is about the wheel.

I point out that the wheel was not an early invention. In the comic strip B.C. they make jokes about it. Everyone understands the joke because “all the way back to the invention of the wheel” is supposed to be a term for all the way back before anything else was invented.

But when I mention this to people, they frown and say they never heard such a thing.

People not only do not learn from their most basic assumptions, they don’t even recognize them when they are mentioned.

Profiling is a large part of what the police do. You are looking for someone who fits a pattern.

Everybody knows that an illegal alien in Arizona is as likely to have a Spanish accent as it is that the guy driving at 100 MPH in a black 2010 Mustang is the same one who just robbed a bank and sped off a mile away in a 2010 black Mustang.

The chances are that the person with black skin is ten times more likely to have committed SOME crime than a person with white skin.

In short, there is no longer even a myth that racial discussions are subject to facts.

This is one of those basic truths, one of those outright admissions from the establishments, that everybody agrees to ignore. It is like the Mantra.

Mantra Thinking is the only way one would strip this kind of public secret naked.

The court which overturned most of the Arizona immigration law read this perfectly. First of all, they ignored the fact that the Federal government was not enforcing the immigration law.

It was a standard present-day decision. First of all, nobody refers to it as “an immigration law,” thought that term is understood perfectly. Secondly, the explanation of it has nothing to do with the reality of what is being discussed.

I haven’t read it and it may refer to the Fourteenth Amendment and racial profiling or to the right of a state to limit its population to people legally in the Untied States.

Those who make a living debating this stuff will find an argument that takes up the necessary number of words.

And professional commentators will debate whatever the professional word-makes choose to put in.

The only thing that really matters is that you are not one of the morons who takes this “debate” seriously.

There is no room for policy based on doing anything about crime or illegal immigration. All the professionals are busy “doing something,” and there is no one who demands that the real problem be at least discussed.

Excuse me now. I have to go take my shoes and belt off and get on a plane.

If I take a shampoo bottle it will be confiscated. No drinks with umbrellas are allowed because the umbrellas could be used to hijack the plane.

The people who formulated this crap make their livings as experts.

The ones who enforce them are officers of the law.

Those who live in the political world never write about its realities. They don’t REALIZE its realities.

It is like the Mantra. You explain it and explain it and slowly the obvious reality sinks in.

So the same respectable conservative who makes his living fighting liberal causes knows that someone whose credentials are the same as his, but on the left. But he never THINKS about it.

When the Soviet Empire collapsed, so did the major industry built around Soviet-American Friendship. This was the same industry that had been in the unilateral disarmament industry in Carter’s time and which staged the greatest last-ditch emergency political effort in history in the Nuclear Freeze Movement.

Every network had Nuclear Freezers as its heroes even down to its sitcoms. A giant movie special about nuclear war was made for TV, but it was so obviously propaganda that it flopped.

Comedians pushed the Nuclear Freeze. It was to stop the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was the last nail in the Soviet coffin.

The Soviet empire fell. It has been mentioned repeatedly that conservatives were left without Moscow as their national enemy. But what was never hinted was that there was also a PRO-Soviet industry.

Every former Soviet working at their Embassy said plainly after the fall that all of his time had been spent “recruiting.” Nobody questioned that. But, as usual, nobody THOUGHT about that.

Sixty years of full time recruiting and, if you were not a McCarthyite, you had to believe no one got recruited.

Even more so you had to accept that, while the right had huge anti-Communist organizations, there were no pro-Soviet ones on the left.

But no one can give a true history of the rise of environmentalist activism without pointing to the thousands who went straight from working in one part of the left to another.

When people talk about environmentalism, I can’t have much to say, because nobody is interested in the big reason for its explosive growth.

I have seen endless numbers of movements formed and I have formed a couple.

I explained about direct mailing in another piece. All those “spokesmen” you see on TV in Washington or New York draw a salary. Very few of them could live on a congressman’s salary, which is as high as government workers get.

They do this the good old American way, by entrepreneurship. But today they don’t found small businesses. They found groups to support a cause.

Competition is fierce. You have to think of a cause which can raise money but which no one has already taken over yet.

Many an organization to save the Peruvian Ringworm has been tried and failed. Many an organization has tried to set up another version of a proven money-maker like Ban Guns but found the field already over crowded.

In the real world, they pick causes the way Americans used to pick a location for a restaurant or a hardware store.

This is one of the most fundamental facts of American politics.

And you won’t read about it anywhere but in BUGS.

People love to recite Wise Sayings. But they seldom apply them to the real world.

“Follow the money” is pretty obvious, and when someone wants to impress you he can trace imaginary money through Swiss banks to financing Evil. He is fully convinced that a vice president who already has several hundred million dollars has no interest in power for its own sake, but just wants to make more for the oil company he partially owns.

They will Follow the Money around the world but never across the street. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people have never made a dime anywhere but in supporting causes. Our president is one of them.

But the flow of money in this case never gets a word.

You can see it everywhere. You can see National Review replacing the World Communist threat with a World Arab Threat. You can see all the tens of thousands of people who made their livings as Friends of Peace, i.e., of the Communists, instantly transformed into Environmentalists.

But no one mentions it. They want to discuss the “frame of mind” that makes a person go from one cause to another.

In the real world, the people in the Save the Whales, if they had a job before, generally had a job saving something or, as Obama’s resume only says, “social activist.”

The Left doesn’t denounce common sense statements like this. It ignores them.

If you want to make a living as a respectable conservative, you follow the guidelines set down by the establishment media. As the first publisher of National Review for over thirty years, William Rusher said, “The staff of National Review doesn’t believe anything until it is published in the New York Times.”

So there are no articles about how people who are now middle aged and have never made a living outside of activism make a living.

But this is pure Follow the Money. If you read the articles, it is as if these people existed on air.

Which makes so much absolutely clear, in fact obvious, to me that which seems so strange for people who are looking for the Latest Conspiracy or the Big Excitement.

In 1994, the House of Representatives went Republicans for the first time in forty years, during which its leadership kept wisely saying, “The votes are in the middle of the road.”

In fact, the House had been controlled by the Democrats for all but four years since 1931.

Its Republicans leadership gave regular lectures on How to Win Elections by Being Moderate.

There were about fifteen thousand Democratic House employees, in Washington and in the District. About ten thousand lost their jobs.

Where did they go? Damned few went where the computer specialists went when that industry collapsed, to MacDonald’s or Wendy’s. They retired or got jobs in the same industry in the same city.

This is the only place you will hear those thousands mentioned as a political factor, because this is following the money across town rather than around the world.

My brother does emergency room work but he says he seldom deals with an emergency. He says in fact that I have dealt with more real emergencies than he has, though that maybe an exaggeration.

But there is a reason an emergency room now deals with few emergencies. In the 1950s everything that could be done for an injured person was in a reasonably well equipped hospital Today you must get the person to a high-tech center, a “trauma” center, as soon as possible.

The ambulance only takes a trauma patient to a place where the copter takes off.

My brother mentioned in passing that tens of billions of dollars were spent on several new “trauma centers,” all but one went broke.

Billions of dollars were wasted because all those geniuses did not know one simple fact.

Those who can afford medical care do not have traumas.

Most of the people who end up in trauma centers are criminals, the poor, drunks, that sort of person. The Trauma Centers went broke because they were giving most of their care away free.

Now I can understand why, here and there, a person loses his savings because he was dumb enough to set up a Pork Center in an area inhabited mostly by Orthodox Jews. But this kind of mistake really lets you know why “financial experts” today are such idiots.

The only trauma hospitals now go after are heart attacks, because we have to die of something, and if you have medical insurance or money, the chances are you will end up in the heart ward.

But not in the Trauma Ward.

In the real world even auto accidents happen mostly to the repeaters. I have seen lots and lots of real emergencies because I was in the alcohol and drug program — working free — and druggies and alkies get into most of those.

Hispanics and blacks are victims of most of the crime. More important to this case is the fact that the aim of most crime committed against those who have money is their money. The matter of fact blood letting among poor blacks and Hispanics by those who prey on them is to terrorize. It is done by human wrecks who can’t control themselves.

If you are going to invest money, it is a good idea to take a look at the world you are investing in.

What the Trauma center planners did not do was fall for the stereotypes.

What they did not do was racial profiling.

Did I mention that they lost their asses?

I was talking to one of our best European BUGSters on Skype, and he said he was honored to be in contact with one who, in a saner time, would be one of America’s leaders. Like most men, I get awkward when handed a sincere compliment, so I joked about it.

But he’s right. I WAS a leader, despite everything.

This makes me think of people like David Duke. Every time I hear about the Katrina disaster, I remember that oh-so-funny bumper sticker against him during his run for Governor: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”

Everybody knew that Dr. Duke’s Democratic opponent was a crook. But they didn’t choose to spend a lot of effort on it. It was Duke who eventually went to Federal prison.

So it was better to have somebody Politically Correct who put state money wherever others chose. Then came Katrina, and New Orleans was totally, unbelievably unprepared for it.

That bumper sticker said it all: We elect politically correct crooks here, to hell with how the budget is handled.

And Katrina made them pay for that exact mistake.

Did I say that no one mentions it?

It was so sophisticated, so FUNNY then: “Vote for the Crook, It’s Important.”

Oh, yes, I notice I DID say no one thinks it’s so funny now.

I doubt seriously there would have been all that rioting and looting under Governor Duke or his successors. When Lester Maddox became Governor of Georgia he announced that looters were to be Shot on sight. He said that if a riot broke out he would be there to personally take the badge off of any policeman who did NOT shoot a looter.

In Maddox’s four years in the tumultuous 1960s, there was one riot in Augusta. It was short. Every news story showed its single casualty, a black man shot dead looting a liquor store with bottles in his hands.

I repeat, that was the ONLY casualty. Looting stopped instantly. Rioters left the streets.

It was obvious that a Katrina was coming. In fact, I saw a National Geographic from a few months before it hit predicting exactly the Katrina scenario in astonishing detail.

Dave would have been prepared. He is interested in everything, and he would have known the Katrina scenario cold long before it reached NO.

But they voted for the crook, that is, forty percent of the white population and all the blacks voted for the crook.

They are still paying for it.