Archive for November 24th, 2007
Saving BUGS History
A fine man who worked with SysOps and me made a penetrating observation.
We were trying to get my book published, and he noted that at every convention there is a PILE of books published by the movement, but we never pool our resources. His brilliant summary was, “We have GOT to stop having to reinvent the wheel every time.”
We haven’t, of course.
In Whitaker Online, Bob’s Blog, and Bob’s Underground Graduate Seminar, since 1998, laid out unchanged in half a million to a million words of postings and comments, we have the COMPLETE DEVELOPMENT of THIS wheel. We are also careful to make sure that, if we lose our web page or anything else happens, the whole shebang is in several people’s hands who have experience and permission to use it.
Of all our basics, delegation, pooling and openness is not the least of the lessons we have to teach.
Anyone who cannot use SOMETHING we have done is lacking something basic.
“TECH Work” and Credit
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, General on 11/24/2007
Any time I start to feel guilty about not giving credit to SysOps Brain or Dave or the people I entirely miss giving credit to, I remind myself that I should either forget that crap or force myself to watch the Toni Awards or read the “Acknowledgments” section of any book I happen to pick up.
I told you how sick a senior staffer on the Hill gets of congressman kissing each other on the ass in public. Torturing everybody with personal thanks here would be boring, not least, very soon, for the people getting the kisses. But this also gives me a chance to hit on another of our BASICS:
What I call “tech work” here is a LOT more than a genius at tech. Our “techs” lay out the entire presentation of what goes on here, like a movie director. This means they must stay on top of things and know EXACTLY what the message IS.
Alfred Hitchcock found the making of his movies tedious, because he had already worked out every scene and every shot in his head, so he was just going through the motions.
So no one could find careful “crediting” less interesting than our techs, because no one is more in sync with our BASICS than they.
Including THIS basic:
We are not in this for praise.
We are not in this for money.
We are not in this for fame.
We are not in this for high-sounding titles.
Our goal is much more modest:
All we ask is to change the course of world history.
I do not keep repeating these things ENTIRELY out of senility.
Mommy Professor History is a History of Historians
“The Renaissance Disaster” below goes back to another of our BASICS:
Information, like every other human product, is produced for a REASON. Anything someone says should be looked at from this point of view as well as just finding an answer. This is where “Mommy Professor” came from. One minute the anti is an intellectual, the next he is a kid repeating what Mommy Professor said.
I regularly stop before answering any argument and think back over the BASICS. So I give antis hell when they say they are white by pointing out that they are like Communists bragging they are Americans. That is WHY they say that. They think that self-sacrifice is a virtue, so treason against their own kind is virtue. And I say this is insane.
I’ve tried it. No one has a comeback because it’s obviously true. They produced the information to look good and I made it look like the treason it is.
Don’t spit out the standard replies. Use OURS.
So WHY do we have Street Lamp History?
The results are barely beginning to filter down, but archeology and carbon dating and other science is ripping received history, The History of Mankind, to pieces. It will get worse yearly for standard historians, for Mommy Professor’s orthodoxy.
After all, what IS a standard historian? He is someone who deals exclusively in WRITINGS. He has to mention scientific breakthroughs, but he doesn’t understand them and he hates them.
At first historians handled science by concentrating on anything they could twist into political correctness. The Egyptians had pyramids? Well, the Incas had pyramids, too, so the white history is not so hot.
The “Out of Africa” stuff. But, as so many times before in history, our established religion is finding that science is getting out of hand. And while Mommy Professor has not changed “World History” one iota, everybody on the Internet is getting regular updates.
Historians are limited to quoting WRITERS. More important than the Library of Alexandria but never mentioned is the entire Persian literature was burned, the only hint of history and folk memory we may have had back to Mount Ararat on the Black Sea, the Flood.
This is easy to ignore because it doesn’t exist in the quotations historians rely on.
WHY is this information produced?
BASICS, gang!
Historians love the Renaissance because it praises writers like them. The real development of Calculus is ignored by saying we stood on the shoulders of Euclid, who would not have had the slightest inkling of the what or even the why of advanced math. He produced a sophomore course of little serious value.
But he is a Giant to historians, because he can be CITED. Pages on which real Medieval mathematicians developed the Calculus were scratched out so that scarce lamb skins could be used for more copies of Euclid the Giant on whose shoulders we mere Western barbarians stood.
In other words, Mommy Professor rubbed out the complicated stuff and got more copies of what he could understand and quote. But the real development of Calculus is still there, though historians have carefully ignored it.
Mommy Professor can UNDERSTAND Euclid. To him Calculus is some kind of Babylonian god.
Mommy Professor’s “history” is a series of surviving quotations twisted to suit the agenda. It is Established Religion crap that makes a Moslem fundamentalist look literate and sane by comparison.
All this from BASICS.
Back Bay Grouch
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses, Religion on 11/24/2007
That depends entirely on which kind of Catholic you mean. I am rereading Lawrence Brown’s Might of the West for about the fiftieth time, and he makes a critical distinction.
My own observation: Erasmus supported Luther at the outset, but turned against him as he began to attack the Western unity represented by the Medieval Church. But at his death, he refused all rites, something a modern Catholic would NEVER do. This puzzles the hell out of Mommy Professor.
But Brown points out, and C.S. Lewis, who was an Anglican, indicated, that both the Reformation and the reaction to it, the Catholic Church hardened at Trent, were totally different from the united church in its Medieval form. Nobody raised on the Renaissance crap has the slightest idea what I am talking about.
The Medieval Church, as I said, regarded Renaissance witches as demented old women. They did not let Wordism blind them to reality. The Medieval Church would have had no problem with Galileo.
My interpretation of Brown and Lewis is that the Reformation got the entire church, both Tridentate and Reformation, tangled in the exact WORDS of the Bible and Tradition. Tradition is a living thing, not the locked-in wordism of post-Reformation Catholicism.
In short, Tradition is Western. Neither the Reformation nor the Trent Catholics nor Mommy Professor has a hint of what that means.
Erasmus was a part of the West, part of the Medieval Church, so he did not feel he needed the hocus-pocus.
These are thought-points, not doctrine.
2 Comments