“Life After Man” hints that man disappears from the earth because of a catastrophe. I wrote an article about the end of the SST (Supersonic Transport) but I forgot to explain WHY I wrote it. This relates to the likelihood of man disappearing from the earth, not with a bang, but without any noise at all.

It also relates to primitive islanders who believe that dreams are just as real as waking life. Social anthropologists and psychologists for a while thought this was a Great Insight.

One major reason dreams are not the same as waking life is that you can dream of destroying the world and it won’t make any difference when you wake up. Cut to the nub, this means that dreams are real to YOU, but they are not real to me. In other words, the big difference between reality and dreams is actually a matter of COMMUNICATION.

Historically, reality has been moving faster, among other things. Since the beginning of flight daredevils and test planes would break a speed barrier, and in a decade or two that new speed would be routine.

Until the SST. The SST took passengers across the Atlantic at a maximum speed of 2.2 times the speed of sound, a good three times as fast as jet aircraft did routinely. But instead of becoming routine, as speed records has been before, transoceanic aircraft went back to the 500 mph speed they had had for decades and there is no sign anyone is looking for anything faster.

The reason for this goes back to the fact that reality is primarily a means of communication. The reason ocean liners were replaced by planes was because people needed to get across the ocean in less than a week or two. But there was not adequate need for human beings to get across in a few less hours.

If you need to communicate with somebody that fast, you use light speed communications.

All those cities that “Life After Man” showed collapsing exist simply because people NEEDED to be near each other. Note the past tense. A century ago the central city was the place of the future because the inevitable future of industrial society required people to live close together.

Actually one phase of Life After Man was here over a generation ago. Harlem, which was a very upper class area when the New York Metro was build often looks like what is depicted a century after Man disappeared in the documentary. The area around the University of Chicago turned into the same kind of ruin from being totally upper crust in the same period.

In fact the main reason we have any trace left of worrying about where anybody is because computer speeds are so low.

Let’s take a concrete example. It used to be that a detective wanted to be on the scene.” Now being “on the scene” means very little compared to getting photos and samples for the lab. Eye witnesses used to be everything. Now photos are essential and far more valuable.

In fact, the trouble with Big Foot is that we have eyewitnesses but no photos, and all the eye witnesses on earth are no substitute for one photo. Photos don’t take psychedelic drugs like shamans. Photos don’t get schizophrenic and have voices talking to them

Above all, photos have no imagination at all. They are pure communication, at least as compared to what we used to think of as pure communication. If someone takes the SST to Europe to talk to somebody, you can bet he will insist on recording what is said.

Spending a fortune to talk face to face is not much use if the results will not be believed unless they are recorded. It is easier to record light speed communications.

In the 1950’s the epitome of Modern Man, “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,” lived in Connecticut. Every morning He got up at the break of dawn, put on his coat and tie, drove some miles to the train station, took the train to Grand Central Station, then took the subway many miles to his place of work.

Every day he walked from his office to the subway, took the subway to the train station, and spent an hour or two going back to Connecticut, walked to his car and drove it back home. He got home in time to hit the sack.

Dawn to late night, every day. Very few people do that today, though I am sure many still do. When “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” was written, this was considered the Way of The Future.

When computer speeds get to a certain level, you will be able to see, smell and taste at long distance, with the sort of advantages a photo has over a memory. Where would “we” BE then?

I cannot predict where our physical bodies will be then. They probably won’t be in any tall buildings.

This is a continuing theme of this blog. “Progressivism” depends absolutely on a PREDICTABLE Future. And the LAST thing the future ever is is predictable.

Actually that is not strictly true. History shows that the future of a BROWN civilization is as predictable as the life span of an ant colony. Every time you look at the ruins of a civilization that went down and stayed down the people there have brown skins, black hair, and brown eyes, which is what we call Diversity. There are no such places in the white world.

If the progressives have the future they demand, it WILL be predictable.

I got some comments on “Me and the Irish” that made me want to make some points that people today are not exposed to. Pretty random, but interesting at least to me.

It is true that the “Scots-Irish” are not Irish, but Scot Protestants who lived in Ireland for generations and then moved to America. That does not mean, though, that they are not Celtic. Gaelic, aka, “Irish” us spoken in large parts of Scotland because of a combination of words you don’t hear much: Irish Imperialism.

Back in the first millennium, the Picts controlled a huge part of Scotland. They spoke a language just as Celtic as Gaelic, in the same way that Italian is just as Latin as Spanish, but Pictish was a different language, just as Italian is different from Spanish. The Irish conquered that area and today its Gaelic is the same as Irish Gaelic. By the time of Cromwell a lot of the Pictish blood was in the Scots who went to Ireland as enemies.

Another thing that is forgotten today is that in New England the inferiority of Southern blood was explained by the heavy admixture of Celtic in it. You can still see some of that in Mencken.

The Buckleys always correct people and insist they are “ANGLO-Irish.” In the Southern Partisan in the 1980’s, Bill Buckley’s brother wrote a vicious column about Irish blood that offended my friend Doctor Shanty deeply.

Most people wouldn’t understand these complications today. The Scots Irish were not Irish, but they were heavily Celtic. Those Scots Irish were sent in to crush the wild Irish and then they went to America. The poor Indians didn’t stand a dog’s chance against the product of all that.

Both Calhoun and Jackson were prototypical Scots-Irishmen. In fact, they looked so much alike that in Europe their portraits would get mixed up. If I were an Indian, I wouldn’t want to run into either one of them in a dark forest.

“…but only if he’s a fool to start with.”

The fact that people are dumbed down so much today becomes serious when you make your LIVING explaining things to people. I often had to talk to some important constituent — on thing “senior” congressional staff is for — and it really got scary.

The reason it is scary is that senior staff if not asked to talk someone unless it is a person who is especially important to the congressman. He is therefore somebody your boss talks with often. There are “case workers” for more routine work.

Actually when it comes to a pro doing work for a constituent, I would take a case worker over a senior staffer any time The jobs are totally different. But if an important person can‘t talk to the boss, he has to be handed over to a senior staffer.

If you want to be important, you go to the Ambassador. If you’re serious about needing a visa, you go the staff.

The problem is that when your boss is away in China, for example, as happened to me, you have a bunch of Very Important Strangers who know you are subbing for the congressman.

So you are dealing with people your congressman has known closely for years. If you were a case worker you would have the person’s letter and know what he wants. Senior staff has neither.

What I want to emphasize that in this situation I faced the same problem you face all the time. Exactly what level to approach this person on? The difference is that when you are doing anything professionally, it becomes deadly serious. The problem is familiar, the pressure is higher.

As you know, these days you honestly do not know what level to approach somebody on.

As you know, if you don’t explain something anybody with a room temperature IQ should know you get one of two reactions:

1) the person is insulted that you explain something so simple; or

2) the person eventually is upset that you didn‘t explain that in the first place.

Either way you lose, and if an important constituent is upset with you, you lose big time.

Here is a person who has never had the slightest inkling that “the race problem” has absolutely nothing to do with THE races. Mass immigration and assimilation — intermarriage — are matters ENTIRELY for ALL white countries and ONLY white countries. Nobody even considers this stuff in the case of an Asian or African country.

Lately each insurance company has quoted how much money the average person saved who switched. To their insurance has saved from their last insurance company. “Confused?” says the spokesman, “Don’t be.”

This gambit must work because they are all putting it in expensive advertising. So the companies are betting most people are fools.

But I honestly don’t know how many people see the obvious here. Anyone who switches from one company to another for the same set of benefits does so because, in that particular case, it will save them money. There is no way of knowing how large the sample is. But anyone who changes from Company A to Company B is saving money doing so.

This should be obvious to anyone who is not actually in a retarded home and to some who are. But anyone who thinks immigration and assimilation is matter of “THE races” is a practicing moron. But every commenter I read makes that mistake. So his readers don’t notice he is being stupid. What else do they not think of?

This can be a VERY serious matter if you are in the business of explaining things.

When I was with the Reagan Administration, one of my fellow appointees with whom I got along best was a PhD Philadelphia Irishman. We thought much alike, because he despised “intellectuals” as much as I did and, like me, his roots were solidly ethnic: he despised “intellectuals who despised the Irish, and I despise the “intellectuals” who looked down on Southerners.

I once told a Catholic joke. The Catholic in the joke came out on top. His objection to the joke was unique in our society: He said, “Why is it that when a Protestant tells a Catholic joke to a Catholic, the Catholic always comes out on top?”

Let me translate. These words, from a proud Shanty Irishman to an Unreconstructed Rebel meant,

What do you think we are, a bunch of niggers?”

Blacks and Jews ALWAYS have to come out on top. Blacks can never be guilty of the murder they are accused of. Jews an never hat hate anybody else. By now the few intelligent people we have left know what it means when one is uncritical of the group you belong to.

The Partisan Dictionary for the Southern Partisan was an extension of my fellow Southerner’s The Devil’s Dictionary. So I defined “Catholics” as “A group of people who say some of their best friends are priests but they wouldn’t want their daughter to marry one.” The editor and owner, an Irish Catholic like Scarlett O’Hara, thought it was hilarious.

I wish I could claim originality to the idea that Southerners and Irish Catholics are natural allies against the necrophilia Yankees***, but Margaret Mitchell beat me to it.

But I got one letter that made me sick. It was from a poor little Catholic boy, probably seventy or so, who was devastated by my vicious attack on his Faith. He sounded like a Jew at his most self-pitying.

The reason the Republican Party is still winning elections in our minority-soaked electorate is because its two historic bases of power, the Solid South and the Northern Irish, pulled out from under it. It is the Yankee Republicans who bumbled everything when we could have won a lot more.

I knew I was in the right place when I did the press relations for the anti-busing group ROAR in Boston and the folks there kept saying how they hated “Yankees.” Me and Doctor Shanty got along famously.

*** Edgar Allen Poe’s term