SHORT ONE SHORT ONE SHORT ONE | 2012-03-04
A Mantra Rule: Doubt someone who says he has a high IQ if he can't spell it.
DAVE | 2006-08-24
Dave says,
"NOT SPAM
NOT SPAM
There are very few truly talented people in the world. Because of this, they are tremendously influential. Bob Whitaker is one these people.
His books are few and thin, a great sign in an intellectual. "
ME:
Good Lord, what a brilliant observation!
Eric Hoffer once mused,
"So many people write short books that are ful of brilliance. When those are successful, they then write bigger books going into the subject more, and those books are boring and useless."
I made my best money writing long books for others. But you catch me flatfooted when you observe that my four books in my OWN name were short. In fact, I had to put in extra stuff at the insistence of the publishers.
Mark Twain's first very successful book was "Innocents Abroad." Back then a book had to sell for the high price of one dollar, so it had to be THICK. Twain kept on adding to it to get it to the required length.
So in the end, when someone asked him what "Innocents Abroad" consisted of, he replie,
"It's kind of like the Planet Earth. There are a few good parts and a lot of desert, but most of it is water."
It like this blog better.
It consists of some good, solid ground and something good land needs:
Plenty of manure.
THE WINDMILL OF TOMORROW | 2010-12-30
It is HILARIOUS that our established religion's idea of futuristic power sources is WINDMILLS! But no one is allowed to laugh in church.
The only major advance in social science in half a century has been the study of animal behavior. Instead of seeing herd animals as mindless brutes who clump together ONLY for fear of predators, we have discovered that they have class systems and dictatorships more rigid and cruel than the greatest tyrannies Rousseau and Marx faced.
Today's social science chugs along on the assumption that all inequality is the result of economic disadvantage. All inequality is UNNATURAL, not like the innocent beasts of the field. That crap is as out of date as the 4500 year old earth.
Boone Pickens made himself a saint of our established religion when he tried to make WINDMILLS the Way of the Future. He lost two billion.
If you watch old movies, you know how to identify Men from the Year 2000. They wore a uniform , tight, solid color, with little gold epaulets on the shoulders.
All of them. Men and women, children and adults. It saved the B movie makers a MINT. I am sure that the same 2000 AD uniforms used in Things to Come in 1937 were used on TV's Buck Rogers two decades later.
But no one took it seriously that we today would be WEARING a solid color uniform. If that uniform were adopted today as The Inevitable Future, every Mommy Professor would line up to get studies financed that proved that that is the direction fashion is going, and every documentary on clothes would end with a Sermon on how, with all the apparent contradictions, clothing has been moving in that direction since Egypt.
Our ancestors would have laughed out loud if they saw The Sermon on our documentaries today. The Technology of the Future, they say, a blaring of trumpets and then --- WINDMILLS!
Oh, yes, Futuristic Windmills with the funny pointed shapes, but always the same ones, every bit as predictable today as the uniform of the Man From the Year 2000 was in the B movies.
It must save the documentary makers a mint.
TWO VOLUNTEERS! | 2007-04-07
I can't FIND it, but Pain sent me a list of the places he posted the Mantra yesterday and called it a slow day. A couple more people and a "slow days" like that can win us this war in the long run.
TWO commenters have already answered my request in "Second Step," one by phone, and the other is already moving. This is not million-strong Nuremberg rally or a giant torchlight parade, but it thrills me, and I'll tell you why:
ALL governments are oligarchies.
The trouble with giant rallies is the same as that with the moderate Republicans' precious "minority vote."
When Bush won his landslide victory for governor of Texas, he got a huge segment of the minority vote. He never got over it. Through all the years when Republicans were telling conservative white Democrats to go to hell and predicting they would get the 'Negro vote" the next time around, they always pointed to the fact that in the landslide of 1952 Eisenhower got over forty percent of the Negro vote.
I was the ONLY person who pointed out, over and over and over, as usual, that Republicans got the minority ONLY when they didn't NEED it. They NEVER got over ten percent of it when it made a DIFFERENCE in the OUTCOME. In every close election, Democrats got over ninety percent of that vote.
The same is true of giant rallies. In the pro-Confederate flag rally thousands showed up, but when the anti-flag rally took place, the city was choked with all the blacks and a few white toadies.
When this was pointed out to me, I said, "And how many SWING votes were in each rally?"
As usual, only I asked that.
Governor Beasley not only lost his bid for re-election, his political career was completely destroyed just as BOTH South Carolina senators were getting ready to retire. Not only that, but for once everyone admitted it was his switch on the Flag that ruined him.
The Nazi Party got 200,000 votes in 1928. After the war, a substantial proportion of those who marched in the 1933 victory parade and came to the Nuremberg rallies cheered as those same Party leaders were legally lynched.
ALL governments are oligarchies. "Victory has many fathers, defeat none."