THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

MARK, THE ALAMO, THERMOPYLAE, AND ME | 2006-12-26

NOT SPAM

NOT SPAM

Bob, this is all good and well and Peter's sharpshooter-like remarks are on target and Painfully insightful and jammed pack with forethought and good honest white intent as usual; but who the hell has been posting the Mantra lately? Anyone? Or have we given up the assault and taken to the trenches with cards and brandy and dreams of scantily clad women? I mean, just who the hell is manning the fort anyway?

Comment by Mark

ME:

Mark, you and I are fighting the more usual version of the Alamo and Thermopylae and Valley Forge. It was easy to be in World War II when everybody was being called, but how did the few at the Alamo manage to hold out to the death when they knew that their fellow Texans were not helping them because THEY "had lives."

These are the times that try men's souls. Every week I read one or two SF Sustaining Member posts that say, "I am a brave warrior, but somebody was mean to me so I'm taking my marbles and going home." So if anybody wants to be offended, let me give them the chance.

One of the few posts I have rejected was old guy complaining about being asked to account for his blog entries. It went on about how tough a life he had led. He could have posted the Mantra twenty times with less effort.

I am sure that Shari and Elizabeth and others routinely drop money into the collection plate at their respective churches which is a tiny percentage of the amount that church spends fighting capital punishments or demanding race-mixing in diversity programs or backing Israel. But if one asked them to give our cause as much in a year as they drop into the collection plate in a week they would be appalled.

Someone says he is always putting the Mantra in. I doubt it, because if he were he would be getting some feedback that he couldn't resist repeating here.

I may be wrong about all of this. But I was a professor and I used to tell my students, "Forget the excuses. I not only know them all, I've USED them all."

So what can I do about it? The rational thing for lone warriors to do is to go home. I asked people to double up with you and no one did.

But I am looking for intellectual heirs, and I am finding and making some here. I need to get ideas out. So I concentrate on that. I use what I've got and it took me YEARS to get THIS group.

I would prefer that people made our battle at least on of their top ten priorities, but they won't. This is Bob and Mark's problem, the one the World War II Generation never had to face, the problem keeping up one's MORAL courage. During WWII there were draft dodgers but they were universally despised or in prison for opposing the war.

As opposed to this rally-round-the-flag WWII stuff, which is relatively easy, a REAL fight, the fight in which you make history, is the one where you have to be there alone, and keep on fighting as if your people were not just lying there like broken dolls.

That is the way most important fights are REALLY won. It is NEVER the people who want to wait for a torchlight victory parade who win the REAL fights. The Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, was made a brigadier general, but at one point his entire army consisted of eight men getting eaten alive by mosquitoes in the swamp. I am sure their family was telling them, as mine told me, decade after decade, that I was a damned fool to keep doing this.

Going out and fighting for your people when they refuse to fight for themselves, or join the other side, is irrational and shows that one isn't Truly Shrewd.

The Truly Shrewd person has a life. He never joins in until people like us have made the movement.

But Mark, those of us who do this despite everything are the ONLY people who make history. We are the ONLY people who have power.

Those who learn here will eventually teach. One has to settle for what one has, and this is the best I have ever been part of. Keep hitting them, Sarge, some may actually DO something sooner rather than later.

But they should not think they are fooling me, and you should not think I don't know what I'm doing.

MANTRA THINKING: SCREW THE DETAILS, GET THE CONCEPT RIGHT | 2011-07-19

About my age Benjamin Franklin began writing his autobiography.

It was, among other things, a farewell. Franklin was about seventy and he had done more different things than any other man we know of from his time.

Franklin had negotiated with the King and with Indians, supplied armies, made his fortune, and he was the only the third American to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. Almost every American knew quotes from him,,

James Watt and Adam Smith were personal buddies of his.

Just his incredible contributions to the science of electricity would have been enough for one man. "Positive" and "negative" and "battery" and a whole list of basic words we use today were his.

So by 1774 Ole Ben was feeling a bit used up. He was looking back on his life.

He never finished the book.

Some events caught up with him of which you may have heard. In fact, most people are not familiar with what he did BEFORE he started saying goodbye.

He had no idea what was about to happen in the troubles with Britain, but he had another historical blind spot.

Ben Franklin was fascinated by knowledge for its own sake. But, as a very, very practical man who had made his own fortune, he knew that electricity was fascinating but totally impractical. He would have laughed out loud at someone who theorized that there might someday be a PRACTICAL use for this barely theoretical force.

Yes, he proved lightening was electricity, but he no more thought of that as a practical discovery than he would of the idea that man is largely made of carbon, and therefore scientists could create a man.

I use to know the details of Franklin's electricity. But that was back when I was a ham radio operator, and I was using a state of the art Morse Code key.

I remember that a "battery" was named for the way the glass jars looked like a column of men. It took a lot of glass jars being chemicalized and rubbed to put out a spark you could see.

I forgot the details, but since I am a Mantra Thinker, the CONCEPT stayed with me. It caused me to save a lot of science projects that Senator Proxmire was loved by mindless conservatives for attacking.

Proxmire just read the titles of the projects, which the average person would not understand, and denounce the $50,000 or whatever the grantee was spending.

Analog Magazine once made a list of some of the stunning advances these very basic research programs caused.

That was one of the two times I risked my job on principle. John Ashbrook had the NSF Grant list sent to me and asked me to find some projects to make fun of for publicity. I was the only person on his or the Committee's staff who could understand what the titles meant, so I was the only one who could do it.

I did what a staffer NEVER does: I told him No. I told my boss this stuff was unworthy of him, and I would have no part of it.

No, I don't remember the details of Ben Franklin and electricity.

But I got the POINT.

A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE | 2005-05-07

How stupid does one have to be to take the USA Today seriously? Look at the list of offenses that have the Pentagon up in arms.

They include "proselytizing by Christians, use of Bible quotes in official e-mail and an ad promoting Jesus in the base newspaper, signed by 200 academy leaders."

Also, the Leftist watchdogs for Separation of Church and State allege that "non-Christian cadets were harassed by seniors and that Christians were allowed to display crosses in the dorms while cadets were barred from hanging non-religious items."

By the way, did the Pentagon ever figure out why they were unable to stop three hijacked airliners from hitting the WTC and their own building on September 11th, 2001? Or has this issue got a higher priority level?

Perhaps this is so important because, as the article states, it grew out of a survey of students and staff following a "2003 scandal in which nearly 150 female cadets alleged that they had been sexually assaulted by fellow cadets in the previous decade."

Are we supposed to consider these two events related? Are we to believe that increasing Christian evangelism correlates to increasing numbers of sexual assaults? That emailing Bible quotes and hanging crosses in dorm rooms produces the same result as integrating neighborhoods?

A HUNDRED NEW STATES | 2012-11-18

A treaty signed by the President and approved by two-thirds of the Senate does not fall under the limits of the United States Constitution. If my understanding is still correct, a treaty signed by any country could bring states into the Union.

Say maybe exactly a hundred of them.

Then if my distant memories of lecturing in constitutional and international law are accurate, and if those senators voted the right way, which is just about guaranteed, the President and a foreign country he picked would exercise a dictatorship in the US.

And there is ample precedent for this in the congresses that adopted the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

The Nazis took over Germany constitutionally. They evoked the emergency provisions which were already in the Weimar Constitution. Hitler bragged that his referenda were the last elections Germany would have for a thousand years. But the Weimar Emergency Clauses set no time limit.

The Bricker Amendment was proposed to force treaties to conform to the Constitution. This was stopped by the left, just as it was the left which set the precedents for a congress changing fundamental law by a minority of the real vote.

I even found that law students were often unaware of the extra constitutional power of treaties.

I wonder how many law students today could tell you the one provision of the United States Constitution which cannot be amended?

Superstition has it that when we begin to seize anti-white assets they will simply go abroad. In Rhodesia during sanctions, one the main sports was moving money around. I remember it well.

The main problem with hiding money is its definition. Money is defined as an instrument which is identified as money. Not identifiable, IDENTIFIED. You are trying to secretly move something which everybody knows is money.

Even with cooperation of the banking systems of South Africa and Portugal it was very hard to move Rhodesian money into the international monetary system. And we're talking thousands of dollars.

Paper constitutions do not make countries. Paper provisions do not make basic systems.

When a country changes fundamentally, the paperwork necessary to suit the new country is no problem.