What would Paul or Peter have advised us to do if they were alive today?

Once again, the Mantra is short and all-inclusive: If any of the disciples or Paul had found that we EXIST, they would have abandoned their faith.

Oddly enough, one of the things that makes me respect most of the New Testament is that its writers considered the words of Jesus so precious that they faithfully recorded his words when he was dead wrong.

Nobody knows better than BUGSERS that if Saint Martin Luther the King did or said something bad it would disappear from the record without trace.

But when Jesus declared “The end of the world is at hand!” it was as faithfully recorded as anything else the writers could recover of his actual words.

If Saint Martin Luther the King said something like “The Judgment will come while some of you who are listening to me still live”, you wouldn’t even be able to Google it. But Jesus said that, and it came out to be wrong.

But it was not removed from the record.

ALL of first century Christianity was “Adventist,” which mean that a fundamental part of the faith was that the world would end very soon.

Our Seventh Day Adventists have been around for a long, long time, and I am willing to bet that church investments include long-term stocks.

Not only does the Christian faith have no genetic morality, the faith itself was formulated on a bedrock notion that there would BE no future generations.

If Paul and the Apostles were brought back into the world today and saw US, some or all of them would have abandoned their faith.

BUGSERS get the point without quibbling, but the term “tailgating” refers to a traffic violation and the cause of many accidents in the two-lane highway days.

Today it usually means picnicking by dropping the back door of a station wagon.

My meaning was obvious to myself, BBG and HD, who are in our Advanced Youth, but you Age Challenged folks had no problem with it.

There was a whole set of customs that went out with the two-lanes, just as a whole centuries-long set of customs went out when men stopped wearing hats. Can you imagine some 30-year-old guy who is wearing a backwards baseball cap to act twelve taking off the cap for a lady in an elevator?

You always had to tailgate when you wanted to pass on a two-lane. You had to get a stretch of road on the other lane where nobody was coming. You flicked your lights.

But then there were the people who insisted at following you at sixty miles an hour with a bare car length between you. That was really irritating. They didn’t want to go faster or pass, but they just had that lack of feeling about distance, and it irritated the crap out of you.

Only one time did a patrolman pull over a guy who was tailgating me. It is such a fine feeling when a cop EVER arrests somebody for doing something that really threatens or irritates YOU.

Almost the only response you ever get from a cop was, “Well, if he DOES anything to you, call me from the hospital.”

There is another word that makes me want to giggle in a childish way totally ridiculous for a man of my Advanced Youth.

This is the term “swipe.”

All through my young days, the word “swipe” had one meaning and one meaning ONLY.

To swipe something was to STEAL it. That meaning was really ingrained in my mind.

Now I stand in line for a cash register or even in a bank, and I can see the credit card machines inviting me, in large, friendly letters, to “swipe!”

“Please swipe!”

That may be hard for you to really understand. You are, after all, Age Challenged.

We are samizdat.
The first rule of samizdat is that saying things that are banned is courage, and repeating the Party Line is cowardice.
Many in the samizdat were socialists or even Communists, but they would rather die – literally! – than repeat many of the socialist slogans they would have bravely shouted out in a free society.
Sincere advocates of free speech who would have called our words Hate before will not touch that word now that it is the weapon of censorship: “I do disagree with what you say, but I will fight g.TO THE DEATH for your right to say it.”
So when bullies shout The Party Line, you do not join the chorus unless you are one of their toadies.
A toady is also a bully. He’s just the bully’s helper who doesn’t have to do the actual fighting, like a member of the Knockout Team from the Knockout Game who does not do the actual Knockout.
Hate is the Bullies’ Motto.
So anyone who uses the Bullies’ Motto is a part of the Bully Gang.

“I should have said …” can be very, very productive if it aimed at doing a similar job better in the future. It is the essence of BUGS’ experience.

A LESSON is one thing. REGRET is the absolute opposite.

Like all real BUGS lessons, this one, once stated, is simple, obvious, and almost impossible to discipline oneself to use in practice.

Regrets are very much like Wordism. There are a billion Only True Faiths and there are a billion Might Have Beens.

In our arguments, I know very well how it feels to have missed a line which might have made a big difference. You think, “Yes, not regretting it is a good theory, but who can just shove it aside and concentrate on the lesson and not the regret.”

I want to remind you, AGAIN, that the BASIS of BUGS is DISCIPLINE.

Discipline MEANS that you train yourself to do things automatically which, to say the least, do not come naturally.

I spent my best years wasting most of my mental energy on regret.

Regret is insane.

Here on Planet Earth you can no more change what you did thirty seconds ago than you can change the fate of the Ottoman Empire.

For your brain, learning to recognize and dismiss Regret is not only a tall order, it is higher than the Tower of Babel would have been.

On the other hand, your whole approach to debate has changed so completely becoming a BUGSER that you wouldn’t have imagined it a few years ago.

I was a drug recovery sponsor and, as SPLC pointed out, a drug abuser myself.

If you think “Learn, Don’t Regret” sounds trite to YOU, try to imagine how hard it was drumming this discipline into people who did what alkies and junkies had done!

Cripple half a family but stay clean and sober and learn to drive carefully.

It sounds inane but it is the ONLY key to sanity. The discipline you will need is huge, but it is quite doable. Take that from one who has dealt with so much worse.

Regret, from the word Go, is insane. Learning the lesson is what life is all about.

These are meanderings where I put things that may be of little use to our cause but that fascinate me.

It has been over half a century since I instructed Political Science classes — yes, I started when I was 19 — so my case law is not up to date.

But back then it was perfectly legal for a man to have two legally wedded wives, and vice versa, both marriages officially recognized by the United States Government. A Supreme Court in the 1940s declared that North Carolina was under no obligation to recognize the quick and easy Nevada divorces, so a person who was legally divorced in Nevada and in all the states that recognized Nevada divorces was still legally married in states that sided with North Carolina divorcees.

In the east some of the states that took a North Carolina view were actually right in between states that recognized Nevada divorces. Only a handful of lawyers would knew which way their particular state law went.

The result was some pretty interesting legal and detective work, as well as adventure trying to catch a divorcee down in the right state at the right time to get the spouse’s rights.

As I say, this situation lasted for decades and may have been cleared up now that the Bible Belt is not quite so rigid on divorce.

South Carolina was the last state to allow divorce under ANY circumstances. SC’s first divorce law was passed in 1948.

Stuff like this fascinates me, so I ought to have a place to write it down even if it bores you.