Posted by Bob on June 24, 2006 at 1:01 pm

We have all heard the term “a ship of the line” from the days when Britain was in absolute command of the seas. The man who invented the “line ahead” formation that was so instrumental in giving Britannia true control over the waves has one especially interesting attribute. Not only did he never leave Britain, but he was never on a ship in his entire life, even in port.

The famous British redcoats got their uniform from Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Cromwell was in his middle age when he developed the New Model Army, training his troops in the methods Gustavus Adolphus had been using in the Thirty Years’ War before he was killed at, I believe, Lützen. The New Model Army, from its first day in battle, swept every opponent from the field. Cromwell always beat everybody.

Cromwell’s New Model was the basis of all British ground combat for about two centuries.

As I said, Cromwell was a middle-aged man before he led his New Model Army to its first victory. Before that, he had never been in the army, he had never been in a battle, he had never even HEARD a hostile shot fired.

One thing you are NOT going to see emphasized in a military history is that, when the British Empire was at its height and Britannia rules the waves, it might not have ruled anything without the techniques developed by complete military amateurs.

So let’s ask a question. Please note that this is 1) a question with so obvious an answer one feels silly asking it, and 2) a question absolutely no one ever considers when they look at history or anything else that doesn’t have the word “Advertisement” written all over it. That question is, “Why wouldn’t a military academy textbook emphasize that the developer of the line ahead formation and the New Model Army were both amateurs?

The obvious answer, so obvious it seems silly to state it, is that those who buy books for military academies want to emphasize how PROFESSIONAL military men are the only ones who know how to run an army or a navy.

This is rather obvious, but no one seems to take it into account. For example, when I was young I always heard that absolutely everything was created in the Cradle of Civilization, the Middle East. Even as a teenager, when this belief was absolute, it struck me as unlikely. The Middle East was made up of absolute, top to-bottom, rigid tyrannies. All intellectual life was owned by the priests. How could such a rigid tyranny invent NEW things?

It took me a while to realize WHY this doctrine ruled. It was taught in schools where the ability to read and write and do arithmetic were also taught. So history said that the societies that read and wrote and followed rules were the places where everything began and the only means by which truth triumphed over a mankind that was not better than the apes.

This was not a conscious choice. But that was the history schools at the time would obviously want so that was the history they got.

Isaac Asimov wrote his whole Foundation Trilogy in the early 1950s based on the idea that only an Empire could produce original ideas. After the Fall of Egypt or the Fall of Rome, history said, everything became stagnant and brutal and filthy until a new Empire based on scribes and bureaucracy came again. That is the absolute basis of the Foundation Trilogy, and it is exactly what everybody took to be true history in 1950.

The idea was that only a totally centralized bureaucratic state could INVENT things. New ideas only came from a rigid, bureaucratized state. It was assumed that the only argument against Communism, with everybody reporting Soviet leaps and bounds in production with every Five-Year Plan, was that it took away too much freedom.

No one doubted Communism was as successful as it claimed to be. It was just too mean about it.

Of course, everybody was wrong on every single point.

But how could you PREDICT they were wrong, when every statistic and historical instance and Future Inevitability they all the professionals announced said they were right? The way to do it would be to analyze each and every piece of information, each Theory of History, each Future Inevitably by ONE criterion:

Does anybody have a reason to WANT this to be true?

Professional scholars wanted it to be true that only a society which had a huge army of bureaucrats and scribes could accomplish anything. Asimov took this to a laughable extreme, but only laughable TODAY. At the time it was a sober analysis.

Intellectual life is an infomercial.

Treat it accordingly.

Posted by Bob on June 19, 2006 at 11:22 am

1) At the Council of Conservative Citizens, one speaker did a truly brilliant piece on how today’s system is run by sociopaths.

A sociopath is a person who is incapable of true feelings of guilt. He has no loyalties.

Later this speaker told me he had read about that somewhere and it had gotten him to thinking on this point.

I remember that he was reading whitakeronline almost from the day I started it in 1998.

If you will look at Whitakeronline, I talked about this at enormous length starting about 1999, and every year I spoke about it at length in different contexts.

But the speech he made, the thinking he had done about this, taught me an enormous amount. He gave an example about an employer he knew whose business was going through a hard time. But that employee is NOT a sociopath. He says that he simply cannot fire his friends, workers who have made the business what it is over the years.

This employer, like so many before him, will eventually be destroyed by his conscience. A sociopath will out compete him by simply throwing out all his old employees and giving his company to Mexico or bringing the Mexicans here.

He made a number of excellent observations and deductions about sociopathy which I will be telling you about later.

2) But let me proceed to the points that will be of use to you in this sequence.

Another person there is having his first experience in being a staffer. That is, the ideas be had been talking about to his chief went straight into his chief’s speeches. When you are new to that, you have an experience which is so normal, and happened to me so long ago, that it was quite an experience to hear it about to fresh from a person who has just had it.

By nature, staffing is an invisible business and unromantic. You will hear endless talk from The Greatest Generation about their first combat experience or from people about their first love affair, but everybody I talk to who is staff has been a professional staffer for a long time, so I believe this is the first time I ever heard anyone who made me nostalgic about staff work.

He said that when his boss hit on HIS points, he was very happy,but he wanted to jump up and say, “That’s MY point!”

Now back to point 1), this truly brilliant speech on the fact that racial treason is part and partial of the whole disease of a sociopathic society. Was I upset that the speaker got started with my ideas, which I had repeated and analyzed so many times so long ago?

The fact is that if I worried about people “stealing” my ideas I would have been sitting and drooling in a rubber room before many of you were born.

3) one of our Blog commenters was talking about my discussion of the drawback our present system of selecting political “commentators.”

The search for professional political commenters makes sure none of them are interesting. We have a professional political discussion community which is made up of liberals talking to each other and only allowing in conservatives who are “respectable.”

In other words, one cannot get PUBLIC exposure unless his every word can be predicted beforehand. They have no ideas, none at all. That is how you become a liberal or a respectable conservative.

But they have to find SOMETHING to say. So they have to “exploit” ideas from those of us outside the circle.

Which, with people like me around, can be made to destroy the whole PURPOSE for which this tight little circle was created in the first place.

I realized point 3) before 1960. But whereas the usual reaction to this is to bemoan it, I was not analyzing reality in order to complain about it.

In my teens I already had plenty of foreknowledge of how bad things would be.

I needed no new moaning material.

So I looked at this reality and decided to USE it. So I became an expert at reducing ideas down to the level where even conservatives could use them. My ideas had to be “stolen” to be used and made mainstream.

In other words I was a political staffer before I ever saw a professional staffer.

What I found was not the road to fame. This is the road to POWER.

Almost by definition, a political commentator has no power at all. If he isn’t saying the predictable there is a line waiting around the block to say it. He is famous because he has no power.

By the same token, the president has lots of fame but almost no power. If that particular man does not get his political position right to win office, someone else will. But the position has long since been mapped out.

By people like me.

People are always using political positioning as Moaning Material.

But where does this “positioning” come from? There is one “position” and another “position,” both too extreme for him to take. So he navigates in the exact right place between these “positions” before somebody else does.

That is the key to election. But there is no POWER in it at all.

Obviously no famous politician or political writer ever MAKES the political positions he is navigating between.

The Professional Moaners act as if this “positioning” was done between “positions” that came from nowhere. Like everything else, these positions were created.

By people like me.

If I become traceable I become famous.

AND powerless.

Posted by Bob on August 17, 2006 at 3:29 pm

I bragged that, if I had been on staff, I, alone, would have stopped the “assault rifles” ban.

Remember I just said John hired me as a man who would have ideas and carry them out. I would have brought in the film I was talking about, written out the testimony about the REAL Swiss assault weapons, and handed it all to him.

I do not know of anohter staffer who was given as much absolute free reign as I was. I would have laid, at blog length, the purpose of all this and asked John to handle it from there on. John would find a way to get it in front of the committee and he would have enjoyed every minute of it. He would find other congressment o get in on it.

John had his own little coterie of trouble-makers, including Bob Dornan. They all loved raising hell.

They were NOT love by the go-along-get-along conservatives.

We would have crushed that crap before it ever got out of committee.

I did that for a long list of stinkers.

That is what John Ashbrook HIRED me to do.

So there was no Secret Plot by Staffers to rule the congressman.

Never tell anybody this in a barroom or in a stump speech. They’ll go to sleep on you.

Posted by Bob on August 17, 2006 at 3:22 pm

William Rusher recommended me to John Ashbrook as a have-an-idea-and-do-it man.

When John hired me, he said, “Bob, I spend a hundred hours a week dealing with my constituent’s troubles, working out deals, answering roll calls, sitting in committee, all the things you know about. I don’t have time to THINK enough.”

“What I want you to do is get out there and think and give me the information and go for it.”

Now at this point the “POWER COMES FROM THE BARREL OF A GUN!” types are going to stop listening and say, “You SEE, I TOLD you congressmen were just puppets of their staff!”

I get so TIRED of crap like that. It’s great for a barroom, but not if you’re dealing in real POWER. What it is impossible to explain to people, the same electorate that MADE the mess in Washington, is that we are talking about the big leagues.

There is a substantial difference between the big leagues and a barroom. The mess in Washington is a result of people listening to the barroom because it’s more fun.

I chose to work for John Ashbrook, and on Capitol Hill there is no substitute for loyalty. You would be ASTONISHED how many staff members simply will not go along with something and resign rather than do it.
I know, I know, only the screaming old drunk in the barroom has any real principles, and all the drunks and voters agree with that.

Meanwhile, back on earth, a man who has been elected and reelected to congress can SMELL disloyalty. I did what I did by reading over what John had written to the point where I did his writing for him. But never once did I EVER try to manipulate him.

Once, when the bill to outlaw in vitro, which LATER resulted in over 20,000 healthy births to families who desperately wanted children, I told John face-to-face that if he, a committed prolifer, required me to work in favor of abolishing in vitro, I would have to resign. He told he was not ABOUT to.

John pointed out to me that, as usual, we thought just alike: we were PRO-LIFE, not just anti-abortion.

So maybe now you can understand why I never believe a WORD that the anti-abortion movement says about embryonic stem cells. You may not agree but you can see why I assume that they lie and that they are NOT pro-life. I assume that they are just theocratic nutcases.

All of this would bore a barroom crowd or a bunch of voters to death. But the big leagues operate on loyalty and, as I have said before, on KEEPING PROMISES.

No, I don’t mean keeping promises to VOTERS. You can do anything you want and a year later, unless the media really hate you, it will all be forgotten by the voters or drunks.

Let me repeat, this is the big leagues. You don’t keep promises to some clown who will forget everything he is shouting about tonight a week from now.

But even a repeatedly reelected congressman can be frozen out and lose everything if he is repeatedly dishonest with the other PROS. They REMEMBER. Their staff REMEMBERS.

You can lie to the kiddies, you SHOULD lie to the kiddies.

But NEVER lie to the grown-ups.

Power comes from HONESTY with those who expect it and will back it up.