Mensa, which is the Yiddish word for the German Menschen, is an organization you have to have a high IQ to enter. You may be familiar with the Nazi word Untermenschen, subhumans.

If a German organization called itself Menschen and limited its membership to high IQs the ADL would go berserk.

One thing that is noted by reporters covering Mensa meetings is that there is a fair sampling of blue collars and non-college grads there. Each of that fair sampling represents a far higher share of the high-IQ population, since very few workers or dropouts KNOW their IQ.

These are people intelligent enough to get through school and who hold responsible jobs, like repairing the subways all those college grads go to work in.

So if they are smart and if they are good workers, why couldn’t they make it in school?

I have told you here repeatedly that, if the University of South Carolina had not been the only institution of higher learning in America that let anybody in who made in the top quarter of the scores on the National College Entrance Exam — the old SAT — I would have been a high school drop out.

My grades were awful in high school. They also had a national test to compare students in high schools around the country as to how much they knew of the subjects they were taking or had taken. I ALWAYS got in the top five percent and often in the top one.

In fact, one teacher said I was quite a help in keeping Columbia High School high in the subject knowledge tests. In the course, she gave me a D.

It was general knowledge in the school that I was at the top of subject knowledge tests.

It never OCCURRED to anybody to be concerned as to why, if I knew the subject, I was making Cs and Ds.

I am not saying that no one could figure it out. I am saying that no one ASKED it.

I think we should label this a Mantra Problem. It goes in with not just understanding, but taking it for granted that no one in the education establishment is at all concerned as to why, if IQ scores were generally known, Mensa might have a majority of members who hold responsible jobs but lost out in the present school system.

A Mantra Problem is one which everybody knows about, everybody takes for granted, everybody may even take a moment to be amused at an example of it, but nobody THINKS about.

I like to say I always wanted to be a real wit and I’m halfway there already.

The country is run by two sets of half-wits. Both sides say “Follow the money” but each follows half the money. Liberals are always talking about Big Business and Military expenditures but they never wonder about the titanic industries that taught them their own ideology.

Conservatives believe they are wiser about “the money.” They talk about land, labor, capital and management, but they never think of the biggest economic factor of all.

The minute you cross into Mexico you are in a place where the per capita income is, and always has been, a fraction of that of the United States. Is this land or labor or capital or management?

None of the above. It is the one thing a conservative cannot say and be respectable. I put it in a book in 1982.

Mexico is poor because its population is made up of MEXICANS.

If I were to give you a choice of places to invest, and I said “The only factor you have to go on is the color of the skin of most of the population,” where would you put your money?

And for all their exceptions and loud protestations that everybody is alike except for the Book they get their economic philosophy from, it will be an icy day in Hell before Forbes or any other conservative puts his money where his mouth is.

One of the basics that makes our society so irrational is that both sides are frustrated that they cannot get the other half to see the half that is obvious to them.

I was on the Education and Labor Committee staff on Capitol Hill. Conservatives told stories about the absurdity of OSHA, the agency that regulates safety at work sites. They got their complaints from employers. Democrats in general got their complaints from union officials and ideologues who declared their sympathy for The Working Class.

All I knew about work sites was the places I had worked and the working people I had talked to. On OSHA, I followed a course as simple as the Mantra and damned near as heretical. I wrote an amendment for John that required a cost-benefit, real accidents report on a work site before a regulation was passed.

Workers were stunned by this naiveté, but the only other choice was having no OSHA at all.

I worked on plants before the rules were made, and I was about the only conservative who didn’t oppose OSHA on principle. But OSHA was also the product of the other set of halfwits.

Follow the money. OSHA was part of those programs Mommy Professor naturally advocates as a way for Intellectuals and Idealists like themselves to run industry for the benefit of The Working Class. It was staffed accordingly, with budding intellectuals, not with the poor, simple-minded working class that they tell their students about.

There were some Democrats who actually had seen real live working people. We made changes, but the whole subject is so complicated and the results so partial that, believe me, you don’t want to hear about it and I am too tired to remember most of it.

But halfwits only see Capital, represented by corporation executives who come up through bureaucracy, and Labor, a bunch of people who must be protected, not least from themselves. Look at all those Wallace votes!

Millions of working people voted for Wallace, and no Democrat will ever admit that what he said should be listened to.

The years it took to get Republicans to get the Wallace vote, now known as Reagan Democrats, show that they had the same view of working people that their fellow country club members who were limousine liberals had.

A good example of the results of this kind of thing was OSHA. Either no OSHA or Mommy Professor’s OSHA.

The point is that the people in charge ARE half wits. But it is high time we stopped grieving over it and looked at WHY this is the case.

Some ex-hippies have told me in no uncertain terms that my impression that hippies were anti-white was wrong. I find that very easy to believe.

In the faraway 60s I was driving across the South with a young English girl. We were watching a live TV show where young people were asked if they thought long hair on males was bad. She guessed almost all of them would say no.

She was barely older than the youngsters who answered, but it was, as I had predicted to her, about ninety percent yes. She had nothing to guide her but the American media and American commentators.

The Wallace Youth was huge, but I never saw a single picture of them until Wallace was shot and his stalker’s picture was among those wearing Wallace Youth hats. I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of even one Nixon Youth.

But Leftist Youth was on television nightly.

All Youth, then as now, was radical left. That is the reason the information about “youth” was produced.

At Kent State, the average age of the rock-throwers was higher than the average age of National Guard units who fired on them. By the way, the entire national media absolutely declared that no rocks were thrown. Now that it doesn’t matter, they admit it freely.

As Al Capp said, “It doesn’t take a college education to know that the easiest way to get yourself killed is to throw rocks at armed men.”

When the TV news interviewed students about the integration of the University of South Carolina, which had been delayed until me and my group left the school, one guy yelled, advocated violence, the whole bit.

Everybody knew that in this random sampling of student opinion, he would be left out. He was a student and he gave no doubt he had an opinion, but everyone assumed that it would be edited out. I like to go into that with people, precisely because they took it for granted.

When someone edits out offensive language, the decision is looked at closely. But we have become so accustomed to neatly trimmed news that we never THINK about the implications.

As one BUGS commenter put it, censorship is more about what is left out than about what is left in.
If that guy had been a LEFTIST radical screaming for violence, CBS would have featured him as “youthful dissent.” But I had to stick that under people’s noses to get them to NOTICE what they took for granted.

But this sort of unnoticed truth is what makes the world what it is. Not Conspiracies, not Big Money, but simply what the media are comfortable with.

It is important for me to repeat that right after the 1980 election, the media didn’t KNOW any of the people in the new Administration below Secretary level. They even put ME on the front page of the New York Times because my quotes were too good to leave out!

It took them a year to find out who was nice and who wasn’t. Can you imagine any other media in the developed world that wouldn’t even have a passing acquaintance with people who just took over in a landslide?

Compared to what is coming, Reagan was very, very mild.

The media won’t mention us until we are at their throats.

National Review had a lead article about how weak Republicans were in the aftermath of Watergate, and how liberals were prevented from imposing a socialist program during that period.

During that period I was on Capitol Hill, I was working with National Review publisher Bill Rusher, and I wrote two major political books. My boss John Ashbrook led a tiny group that stopped congress in its tracks repeatedly.

I have only mentioned that I saved the space telescope because that was only me doing it and that issue is more easily explained, though it involves a knowledge of Appropriations Committee membership, the primacy of the Subcommittees, and other things that most congressional staff is not really familiar with.

And, incidentally, I was also writing a few articles for National Review.

The reason I scanned the article was to see if there was a single incident or person in the article that I recognized.

There wasn’t.

This is routine, it is as I expected, but if you haven’t spent your whole life in the guts of this business you might start thinking some of Conspiracy to Hide History was under way.

National Review was doing what every magazine does when it deals with history or any other subject. The writer wasn’t going into history to find out what happened. The article wasn’t featured because of some sudden interest in the political history of the late seventies.

As every writer who wants to eat regularly learns, the piece was aimed at making a point about NOW. It was written for a respectable conservative magazine to show that respectable conservatism worked then and is the only true faith now.

There wasn’t a lot of room in today’s NR for the fact that unrespectables were taking over and going for the “Wallace” vote, that a few congressmen, in the teeth of respectable opposition, were using hard ball to stop the congress in its tracks and keeping congress sitting extra days to force items off that the huge Democratic majority in both houses and the White House put in.

So a writer ignores the reality. He also avoids the John Ashbrooks. He avoids the influence of George Wallace. It is obvious that this puts him in Never-Never Land, but the reason the article appears is to serve the purposes of a publication trying to survive in 2010.

I am simply not naïve enough to expect any such an article to overlap with reality a generation ago. I am not only aware that information is produced for a reason, I assume it.

You would think that a man who was in the middle of things in a major historical battle would find any discussion of it at least worth reading. But if you have long since learned that information is produced for a reason, you know that the article is a repetition of what the magazine says in all the things it chooses to publish.

Any source of information survives by putting out what helps it survive. A lot of people are constantly enraged at this. I take it for granted because the simple, basic rule, “Why is this information produced?” makes this, not a conspiracy, but a matter of course.

When people talk about big happenings, they want big causes. When Kennedy was shot, no one wanted to attribute that to one lone nut job, especially a Communist nut job.
That is a major reason conspiracy theories flourished.

That is what makes BUGS so hard to sell. No one wants to hear that the historical catastrophes we have seen were the result of simple causes. No one wants to hear that all that complicated talk about race relations just comes down the Final Solution to the White Problem.

I just wrote a piece here about how television was monomaniacally New York-centered from the history of granting licenses. The average person who hobbies in politics would say that is a cute observation and go on to Big Stuff.

In big historical events, people associate realism with Big Stuff. Reality is not made of Big Stuff. Reality has a lot of Big Stuff, medium stuff, and tiny stuff. The catch is that when you talk about the little stuff, like TV programming, very few people want to hear about it.

Which means their picture of the world is completely unreal. If a plane goes down, it may be the result of a terrorist plot or it may be a tiny piece of defective equipment like the one that knocked out all power in the entire Northeastern United States for hours in the 1960s.

If that happened today a dozen books would come out showing it was Arabs.

The article about early New York provincialism in TV programming was written to DEMONSTRATE the truth that no one is as provincial as a rube who thinks he’s sophisticated.

The rule here is that you don’t reach reality by searching for excitement. You could have talked yourself blue about Arab Terrorist Plots or some other Great Conspiracy causing that Blackout, but the fact is that the blackout would have continued until you replaced that one little switch.

Our movement can get lots of membership with News and Jews. But it will get nowhere until it gets to the basics.

I have spent over a decade trying to get them to change that one switch. I will probably literally die trying.

There was a period in the history of TV when it was not only a monopoly of New York City, it was when no one understood you if you said “New York provincial.” At that time “barbarian” and “sophisticated” had exactly the meaning a college graduate is trained in.

To say a New Yorker was not sophisticated was exactly like saying the Pope is not Catholic.

EXACTLY.

Only big cities had TV stations. Then the FCC gave out no more for years. The TV licenses were, of course, “free,” meaning the public got no money for these enormously valuable pieces of public property.

Nobody in South Carolina could get TV without an enormous antenna tower aimed at Charlotte. Tiny, broken-down houses would have a sixty-foot piece of metal sprouting out of their roofs. This was so familiar to most of the country that Saturday Evening Post had a cartoon of an outhouse with a huge tower on it.

There was no caption. There didn’t need to be.

Finally the moratorium on licenses was lifted. Columbia got three stations almost simultaneously.

There was an immediate catastrophe in popular programming. Molly Goldberg went under. Milton Berle went under. A guy Murray’s program, sponsored by Manischewitz wine, went under. The whole program list went under.

But the network programmers, responsible for billions of 1950s dollars, learned not a thing from this. Almost every show was placed in New York.

These are the Geniuses Who Control Everything and Never Make A Mistake. The Learned Elders must have been on acid during that period.

TV Guide, almost the country’s only politically conservative magazine, pointed this out in a cover article about 1964, which I remember well. It was a breakthrough. It pointed out that New Yorkers still referred to the territory between New York and Los Angeles as “flyover country.”

That article talked about the giant money losses networks were sustaining by their Big City fixation. By “losses” I mean the media monopoly made less money than it could have.

We are not talking chickenfeed here. These were some of the country’s top executives, and not entirely by cheating.

Being provincial is routine. But for top executives to lose billions of dollars by being provincial demonstrates that there is no one as provincial as a rube who thinks he’s sophisticated.

A large part of our age is explained by rubes who thought they were becoming city slickers by adopting the Little New Yorker mentality.