When you dig through all the agony of George Orwell’s novel 1984, you get to the point where the inquisitor is forcing the main character to agree, under torture, that two plus is whatever he wants it to be. The poor tortured protagantists is screaming, “Please, just tell me what it SHOULD be!”

The essence of freedom, says Orwell, is to say that two plus two equals four.

I have repeatedly pointed out the fact that the Wall Street Journal regularly talks about scientifically conducted tests between champanzees and market experts.

The chimpanzees toss darts at a list of hte Fortune 500 and the that is taken as a prediction of what a profit-seeking investor, a rich person in a coat and tie, should buy. Against the chimps’ dart tosses are place the costly analyses by by market experts.

No one is surprised that the results are dead even.

So does this cause one single person to value the market experts’ analysis as worth one penny less?

No way.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is cash on the barrelhead.

This is as real as reality gets.

You will not find one single person who invests real money inthe real stock market who wil deny this for an instant.

You will not find one single person who invests moneyinthe real stockmarket who would pay a stock market analyst a penny less.

No, this is NOT a matter of the analyst being right or wrong. In fact those hiring the analyst are being perfectly rational. Who cares if the professional is right or wrong? He IS the professional.

That is all that matters.

Professional futurologists are ALWAYS wrong about the future.

Who cares?

Every futurologist who wrotes a book today will be an even more professional, better paid futurologist tomorrow.

No stock market analyst ever lost a dime by being wrong.

Welcome to the real world.

Let’s take a market expert called Suburban Blitzer. Suburban Blitzer, like all analysts, predicts the market with the exactly the same precision as a pair of dice.

So?

If a suburbanite loses money by following Suburban Blitzer’s advice, he is seen as unfortunate. He has lots of company.

But what if a suburbanite loses money betting on the dart-throwing of a bunch of chimps?

You know, thought you act like you don’t, that that would be considered nuts.

So it is perfectly RATIONAL for a suburbanite to pay Suburban Blitzer lots of money, not because he is right, but because his name is Suburban Blitzer or Ronald W. Gross and Sons or Standard and Poor.

He is not right, but he is worth money.

Got it yet?

So who wants to be right?

Let me explain this another way:

It is far more important to be correct than to be right. Being correct is worth money.

So if you quote Suburabn Blitzer correctly, nobody denies that you were correct. If you lost money, all your neighbors lost money, too. Being wrong with Suburban Blitzer is correct. Losing money with Suburban Blitzer is excusable.

Losing money with a chimp makes you a laughing stock.

Do you really think the difference here is not worth money? Suburban Blitzer earns every penny you pay him.

I hear more and more young white people who are outraged at the fact that their careers have been ended before they started by racial preferences.

The world was taken away from you, and a few of you have actually noticed.

In the past those complaints from white young people have always been accompanied by declarations of how the same young person worships The Greatest Generation, about how he is proud to be a sacrifice to the Holy Cause of Diversity.

But now you young people seem to be, at long, long last, just plain pi.., I mean off, I mean upset.

God knows it’s about time.

One of my problems is that, inside my mind, I do not possess The Proper Respect.

My problem is that, again and again and agan, I have discovered that all the things I was supposed to repsect were NOTHING.

I don’t mean good. I don’t mean bad.

I mean NOTHING.

Psychiatry, I discovered, did NOTHING about mental illness. Every test showed that talk therapy had no effect whatsoever on the patient.

Not good. Not a Giant Conspiracy.

NOTHING.

I discovered that the Greatest Good my teacher-parents had assure me of, Education, meant NOTHING.

You need a degree to be accepted by the establishment, but nobody in the establishment could find out whether anybody had this EDUCATION except by the records.

The “education” itself means NOTHING.

Religions always say that their payoff is after death.

You can’t argue with that. In fact, I respect that more than religions like Communism that insist that they pay off in THIS world.

I was always very tiresome in pointing monomaniaclly to the fact that every Communist state had to kill people who tried to escape from it.

The folks who got paid for it kept writing about how Communism was theologically or ideologically off base. I kept pointing to the machine guns they needed to keep people in.

Communism collapsed the minute the tanks stopped rolling. But the people who said it was ideologically or theocratically incorrect are the ones who are still getting paid.

I am told that if one wears a costume that says “Police” he should have a gun.

As soon as that was tested, with gun permits, it collapsed.

People who went through the clearance procedure to have their gun permitgs did far, far better with guns than the guys in the costumes.

As always, nobody noticed.

Protestant today insist that one have a theology degree.

But despite my official identity as a Catholic, aka, Eastern Rite, convert, I remain a real, out-of-date, old-fashioned Protestant.

I try to be respectful.

But somewhere in me, when I see grown man in a costume, whether he calls it a uniform or a casuble or a Pope’s tiara, I see somebody who is being silly.]

Let me now explain that I wrote this in a comatose state, when I wasn’t thinking right.

Grovel, grovel.