In the fourteenth century a really wealthy College at Oxford might have twenty books, each of them chained to the wall, and a full-time Librarian to watch over them. If you wanted a book, you had to get permission to copy it by hand.

In that age, someone who had READ books was in a class by himself. A surgeon who had learned his trade on a battle field was a common laborer. He was scum compared to a University Doctor who could quote Galen from having read that Roman book HIMSELF.

We all know that the introduction of movable type caused several revolutions. Movable type had been invented in China, but no one can find the slightest effect it had there.

The reason that printing had such a great effect here was because an astonishingly large percentage of Europeans could read. The class that could read was a class by itself but it was a class consisting of several percent of the population. Never before, in Egypt or Mesopotamia or China, was it common to find a village that had a single person who could read and write.

In any village, the reeve and others had to read and write. Many village priests could.

The usual response I get when I point out how printing revolutionized the West but didn’t cause a whisper in China is that the Chinese script was so complex it didn’t lend itself to printing. That’s what Mommy Professor told them, and they never think beyond it.

But WHY were Chinese and hieroglyphics so complex? Wasn’t it probably BECAUSE only professional scribes used it?

Writing was a bit like BUGS. We boil things down here because in our society, new concepts are possible.

All you have ever heard Mommy Professor talk about was how FEW people could read in Medieval Europe. But compared to the percentage who could read in the “highest civilizations” outside the West, that percentage was astronomical.

Graffiti on the Pyramids has been written for thousands of years. Always it was a scribe, “he of the clever fingers,” who wrote the graffiti until the Romans and Greeks got there.

We find actual graffiti on the walls in Pompeii, written by people who were able to write but were definitely not pros. That is what historians are comparing Medieval Europe to.

There were professional FEMALE novelists in Europe long before there was printing. One famous painting shows a female novelist giving a copy of her book to a queen.

Which indicates the queen read, not for money, but for pleasure. Unless her job as queen didn’t pay enough and she had a job on the side as a scribe, a piece of history that would REALLY be worth knowing.

If Medieval society had been as illiterate as any society outside the West, which includes Rome and Greece, printing would have been invented and forgotten the way it was in China.

I go on Skype regularly only with BoardAd.

I like to think this is an honor for BoardAd. You see, I am embarrassed by the things I simply CAN’T do. BoardAd has learned how to deal with this without any thought as to why I SHOULD be able to do a simple thing when I am so good at complicated things.

BoardAd LISTENS.

BoardAd is an excellent editor. Others COULD do these things, I guess, but BoardAd is the one who DID it.

From time to time we go into a joint discussion with others on Skype.

I just told BoardAd that it irritates me when he always says “Bob already did that …” instead, of something like “WE already said that.”

On Capitol Hill, when the congressman described something I initiated, did, and left him a speech that was the first he ever heard of it, the congressman always said “I did this.”

But if we were in conference and he referred to something he had done, he would say “We” did that.

This was not courtesy, it was fact. Whatever he did, WE were responsible for. That, children, is what he HIRED me for. When the whole staff went with him to China, he made sure I would be in the office, because I could substitute for him. That’s what SENIOR staff MEANS.

In other words, I was responsible for everything “we” had done.

That is literally why they paid me the big bucks.

That is why I am not impressed when a congressman or senator says he is “giving back” some of his staff money. The average dumbass voter thinks this is glorious.

Actually, what said congressman is saying is, “You get all the representation you deserve just from me. You don’t need me to get some extra staff.”

If you can’t use all your staff money to oversee a trillion dollar budget, you should give up your seat in the House and take a janitorial position.

I once brought twenty to forty THOUSAND working people to DC for a JOINT march against busing AND protesting against dirty textbooks. They were the first real grassroots march united against the Education Establishment.

This was not a march by Mommy Professor’s rich college kids and professional activists and unemployed blacks. It was working people who had to find time off and who chartered their own buses.

THOUSANDS of them.

Senator Helms was all for it but he could not even spare a staff member to represent him at the speeches in the back of the Capitol. He couldn’t spare anybody because he was “giving back” staff money and his staff was already worked to death.

I was NOT impressed. He owed these people at least a token showing that other congressmen gave them.

That’s the sort of thing he was sent to Washington to DO.

I am a damned good team player and I am a great delegator of authority. The whole concept of BUGS is to give US a consistent message that WORKS. William Pierce is a hero of our movement. But his one great failure was that, as he died, he could not say “We.”

So what I am saying here is that WE should learn from that.

Stormfront is having a discussion of the Genius Conspiracy that caused Pearl Harbor. When those folks consider the Conspiracy, they are looking at CIA agents who make James Bond look like a typist.

My picture of the Geniuses is a little different. In fact, what always comes to my mind is the incident of the Burn Bags.

OPM, where I was a Reagan appointee, had to deal with the employment of all civilian employees that were on budget. The CIA itself is off budget. But the Defense Intelligence Agency and the like are on budget.

Theoretically we dealt with a lot of highly classified stuff. Actually, we farmed it out to the agency. But we had to handle our documents the way any agency that might be in on intelligence work had to do it.

We also had to CLEAR all civilian personnel.

We were, in short, among the Geniuses.

When something came across our desks in the Director’s Office that was what they call Top Secret, it went into the Burn Bag after we looked at it.

One day Reagan’s appointee as General Counsel in this agency handling highly classified material came to the our regular meeting with the Director with a request:

“Would you please order them to BURN the damned Burn Bags?”

Someone from his office had been in the furnace room and had actually stumbled over one of the high pile of Burn Bags they hadn’t gotten around to.

I was very uncomfortable, and the Director looked over and me without a word. I was in his line on staffing and security, the last person to see the stuff before it went to his office. I should have checked that sort of thing.

This was an evening meeting, when the “politicals” met after the regular folks had long since gone home. So I went and burned them myself. So I remember it well.

We were sloppy, but the CIA itself was sloppier.

When I hear people talking about The Beast, the Geniuses, about a dozen incidents like this come before me.

When Reagan needed some real manipulating done, he called in Ollie North, a new Lt. Colonel, to do it. When the congressman who got us into saving the Afghans in their rebellion against the USSR  ended up going to the front himself, the CIA opposed him the way any bureaucracy would.

I have been in the Mouth of the Beast.

It strikes me as toothless.

If you look at the comments on “”Confessions of a Recovering Economist,” they lead in an interesting direction. They came to the conclusion that the most interesting thing I have said about economics is that it is racial.

The way you tell how a country is doing is not by its capital investment or any of the indicators economists write books about. You tell how well a country is doing by the color of its skin.

As with the Holocaust, establishment strategy is to prevent any DISCUSSION of this obvious fact.

But lately a few commentators have actually cottoned onto an interesting fact.

You remember how I pointed out that anyone who knows Marxist theory knows that the term “political correctness” is purely and solely Marxist?

I have lately heard a few RESPECTABLE CONSERVATIVES, the dregs of the intellectual barrel, actually point out that trying to explain everything in terms of money is Marxist.

I am not being sarcastic when I say that I am always a bit shocked when a respectable conservative sees a fundamental reality. They are selected because they are people who DON’T see reality.

Marxists see economics as a religion. All of Marxist history is a “class struggle.” But to put that more accurately, Marxists do not recognize ANY history that cannot be traced back to who gets the money.

Libertarians also see economics as a religion. Marxists are comfortable with libertarians because both of these groups are of the same faith, like Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

To a Marxist, a libertarian is a schismatic, not a heretic. They worship the same god, but in a different way. That is fine with Political Correctness. As I have said, Holocaust denial laws are not to prevent DENIAL of Holocaust, they are aimed to prevent DISCUSSION of the Holocaust.

Political Correctness chooses opponents who do not DISCUSS their fundamental weak points. The basics of Marxism are, like the Holocaust, simply outdated. Marxism is based on the Rousseauvian idea that man is the only social animal. Like Rousseau, Marxists base everything on the idea that man would be perfect if he would return to a state of nature.

Like Rousseau, Marx saw a state of nature as classless and without violence.

Like Holocaust myths, this house of cards would collapse instantly if anyone ever disputed them because the simple movement of behavioral science has made the Rousseauvian/Marxist world view laughable.

You have noticed their growing desperation, but most people don’t see where it comes from. Like the Holocaust Industry with their soap from Jews and their lampshades, it is exposure of their fundamental world view is threatened, not by exposures from Conspiracy Theories, but by someone saying their basic ideas in plain English.

Someone must take up the job of arguing that they are mistaken, not idiotic. That is what libertarians and neoconservatives are for.