Look. It’s not easy to look.

So. Tonight CNN is revisiting sixties television when everything was tolerant, lovely, and great. The Smothers Brothers. Star Trek, meaning the first interracial kiss. The Twilight Zone, which was continuously worried about the varied ways humankind would destroy itself. And, of course, TV’s role in educating all of us that Bill Cosby and Robert Culp got along just fine, given that those of us who made ‘I Spy’ a hit were all terrible racists.

Guess the CNN show isn’t having the effect it should. It reminds me of PBS. Years old BBC series recycled late and sold on DVD during pledge drives for five times their value. Always the same shows: the blind tenor, the three now dead sighted tenors, the E-channel guy who sings in the Grand Canyon, well, you know the drill. The rest of the time, we’re expected to put up with idiotic political documentaries — oh yeah, starring fossils like Bill Moyers and Dick Cavett — hating the U.S and promoting Global Warming in fruity tones with that infuriating finality PBS has always had because the next show is going to feature Oxbridge pretenders who live in great estates that can’t possibly be as ugly as they obviously are. (One plaintive bleat from my younger self — watched Inspector Morse because I’m supposed to, and I can report that compared to Harvard, Oxford is Lena Dunham. The former is lovely and inspiring. The latter looks like a slattern and a pile of ugly g(r)ay fortresses designed to keep her out.)

We men shouldn’t be attracted to women. They’re too good for us. The gospel of the left.

Dreary, sorry, awful, ancient, and did I say awful. Oxford. Like America, Harvard is lovely.

Beyond Oxford.

‘Cause, you know, Harvard is lovely. Why John Harvard sits there in the spring. Nobody else can be so relaxed.

Oxford don’t got The Yard in springtime.

Sigh. PBS. Sigh. Which leads us to Great Performances.

Have you figured out that I’m pissed and tired and probably deader than PBS? All the public stations in our area keep rerunning the same shows. Everything the party of America’s progressive future does with its public broadcast dollars is a celebration of a very mundane, even antique, past. Barbara Streisand a decade or two ago. Communist Pete Seeger celebrating his ninetieth birthday and three quarters of a century of loving every enemy of America. Bob Dylan caterwauling on some stage somewhere sometime from a decade no one remembers. I could go on.

But I won’t. If I started, I would never stop. Anyone want to hear what I’d ask of all of you if life as we know it were on the line? No. Of course not. I’m the lance for a painful boil. That’s all. Life goes on. You live life. Life is for the living, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You know. Same old male white privilege problem.

But sometimes the dying know something too.

Unfair, you Oxbridge types? The equalizer. Google. You tell me which is more beautiful. Oxford or Harvard.

P.S. Harvard. Rub my tummy. I’m the killer you’ll never know.

It’s gotten bad. (That’s his face…!)

Everything I wrote before about important posts and cover posts is just so much misdirection. I’m worried about the important stuff. Raebert is getting a haircut tomorrow. I have to deliver him between 7:30 and 9:00 to a ‘professional.’ Who’s a professional when it comes to deerhounds? No one I’ve ever met.

I wouldn’t do it. But he’s a mess. A complete and utter mess.

Seems like just a few weeks ago that I had it sort of under control. Brushings and like that. Then it all just went nuts.

Ever seen a coat like that? Thicker than all the thistles in Scotland.

Lying down, at a distance like that and stuff, he looks even worse.

What happened to my beamish boy? He’s becoming a sinister Harry Potter forest.

But I have faith. In him if nothing else.

Because I know who he is underneath the everything.

My Boy.

Before we knew him, he knew us. He was waiting for us. Don’t talk to us about scary.

Hmmm. Who?

Someone sent me the pic and the explanation:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old rancher whose hand was caught in the squeeze gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man.

Eventually the topic got around to Obama and his role as our president.

The old rancher said, ‘Well, ya know, Obama is a ‘Post Turtle”.

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him, what a ‘post turtle’ was.

The old rancher said, ‘When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a ‘post turtle’.

The old rancher saw the puzzled look on the doctor’s face so he continued to explain. “You know he didn’t get up there by himself, he doesn’t belong up there, he doesn’t know what to do while he’s up there, he’s elevated beyond his ability to function, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put him up there to begin with.”

See? What I usually do. An easy post sitting on top of a complex post. This is the one you feel comfortable responding to.

And the one I’m most likely to be hauled away for. What with being a post turtle myself in the age of new media.

Unless I’m really just a Yertle Turtle…

King of the Mud.

Tradeoffs. Comments, Ho! Because I’d really like to hear something from y’all.

Even the ones who stand so tall. Busy is the new virtue.

Sadly, it still leads inexorably to mud.

I used to have a vision of the pond myself. Now the pond is a dot in the landscape of my nightmares. Take my advice. Talk to the Yertle.

I haven’t been staying away because I was mad at you. I’ve been mad at everyone else, who offers so little reason to hope. Conservative icons are down in the dumps, simultaneously playing to their grim faced audiences and yet trying to play the Q-Rating media game. Charles Krauthammer blistered the Obama West Point address in the harshest possible terms, only — when pointedly asked for a letter grade — to give it a C-minus. For once he was embarrassed when Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard said, “What do you mean? It’s an F.” Driving the grade home by quoting Charles to himself. Meanwhile Kevin Williamson, luminary of National Review, finds it important to respond to a fancied feud between himself and Rush Limbaugh. Gaaah.

Others are taken in by the massive leftist diversion attempt to make everything about some historically unacceptable identity based inequality — from a new argument for African American reparations to a white male, gun-obsessed misogynist interpretation of the latest mass shooting (and stabbing and car crashing btw) to the idiotic new gambit against the Washington Redskins in which 50 Democratic senators participated, to frenzied and ludicrous new arguments by supposedly rational representatives of our government that we should be more concerned about global warming than we are by Islamic slaughters of Christians, honor killings of women, and the genital mutilation of pubescent girls.

Each of these has drawn some kind of answering essay, as if any of it were worthy of response. Nonsense is nonsense, and evil is evil. Tiffs are a waste of time. The volume of such responses is as huge as Kim Kardashian’s grossly implant-mutilated ass. Which National Review and other new media sites felt compelled to weigh in on, in light of the low ratings her latest wedding received on the internet.

If it occurs naturally, it’s a pathology called steatopygia. How did we get here?

So where do you go in search of hope? I can offer two interesting avenues today.

Everyone knows that video games are somehow complicit in school shootings. Everybody’s heard of Grand Theft Auto. But what if thug games aren’t the only choice video youngsters have? What if GTA is simply a natural selection for the constant population of the world’s thugs? What if the most successful games represent some kind of odd reaching out to a world in which virtue, duty, honor, bravery, and sacrifice are the ideals:

Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is a live-action film and miniseries set in the Halo universe. Although shot as a feature-length film, Forward Unto Dawn was originally released as a webseries consisting of five roughly 15-minute episodes, the first of which was released on October 5, 2012, with the last episode released on November 2, 2012. The series’ plot, occurring in the early days of the Human-Covenant War circa 2526, revolves around Thomas Lasky, a young cadet at Corbulo Academy of Military Science, and how John-117 inspired him to eventually become a leader. Lasky is also a prominent character in Halo 4 as a commander on the UNSC Infinity. The name of the series, aside from being a reference to the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn, is given new significance in the series as part a running motif based around a poem. The series was known as Sleeper during pre-production.

Actually, I can show you the whole Halo 4 movie. It’s as far as you can get from Grand Theft Auto.

Don’t need to watch much here. Only enough to see the kid is not an incitement to California school shooters. The rest is at Netflix.

The protagonist is not a sociopathic killer. He’s a young man in doubt. His journey is from a sense of loss and ambivalence to the necessity of placing his unit’s lives above his own. How traditional can you get? There’s no sex, no nudity, no scriptwriter editorializing. One of the best pure futurist sci fi movies I’ve seen.

Thing is, the most impressive feature of Halo 4 is the music. Purists will deride it as derivative, but that’s too easy. It’s clearly rooted in Orff’s Carmina Burana, but it also does somehow convey a time beyond ours. Here’s the whole soundtrack. Call it Neo-Neo-Romanticism. Gregorian Chant and other liturgical forms seem to be hard-wired in us. There’s salacious and violent rap rebelliousness (mysteriously not here) and then there’s the need for transcendently deep, harmonic and rhythmically guilt-ridden meaning underneath our dreams and nightmares. The dark and the divine, intertwined. Why you can hear Rachmaninoff in the opening strains. Sweetened by electronic futurism that beats the human heart back to life. What it is to be human. That impossible long arc between our worst and our best. Why we all still need God, whether we know it or not.

Which is my introduction to the most interesting essay I’ve found in over a week, a philosophical formulation of precisely this kind of straddling. Which might be our last, best hope.

Post-Modern Conservative

To be postmodern and conservative is to deconstruct other uses of “postmodern” by beginning with the obvious. To be postmodern means to be about conserving what’s true and good about the modern world, as well sustaining or restoring what’s true and good about various premodern forms of thought and life. It is also, as Solzhenitsyn explained, about criticizing the modern world for its excessive materialism and its replacement of God and virtue with legalism, and the medieval world for its excessively single-minded focus on spiritual life or the soul at the expense of the body.

One of our conservative criticisms of purely modern thought is its prejudice in favor of endless innovation, which can be seen, for example, in its overly technological view of science. Maybe the purest sources of modern thought these days is the hyper-libertarianism of some economists and Silicon Valley technologists, which points in the direct of transhumanism. The false hope is that through techno-innovation we can become better or freer than human, a hope that depends on ungratefully misunderstanding how stuck and how blessed we are to be beings born to know, love, and die. That’s not to say that we believe, as do those existentialists, that death is the final word about who each of us is.

So to be postmodern and conservative is to take our stand somewhere between the traditionalists and the libertarians. The traditionalists focus is on who each of us is as a relational being with duties and loyalties to particular persons and places. The libertarians — or, to be more clear, the individualists — focus on who each of us is as an irreducibly free person with inalienable rights, a person who can’t be reduced to a part of some whole greater than himself or herself. A postmodern conservative is about showing how a free person with rights is also a relational person with duties. The truth is that each of us is a unique and irreplaceable free and relational person.

If you’re not suffering from ADD, you might be able to read and think about the whole thing.

She sailed far and wide in this dream boat.

The exact opposite of a 1960 Coupe de Ville.

Probably not a good thing to be married to a motorhead. Now she knows more. Frighteningly, she likes the Italians.

Yeah. She’s learned that before Ferrari there was Alfa.

And the French.

Life is not fair. The grandest car ever built is one Lady Laird would like to own. Bugatti Royale.

And, God bless us, the antediluvian Americans.

The most stylish monster equipped with headers before NASCAR was even a glimmer in some moonshiner’s eye.

And, shockingly, the aristocratic English, namely Jaguars.

Yeah, beauty interrupts life. Sorry.

We’re still working on the small English, which includes the car that if it actually worked would replace that Coupe de Ville in a second.

MY dream car. If it would only start. And not show instant electrical problems. Why I have an MR2 instead.

But it doesn’t, never did, work.

I could write 10,000 words about this movie. I could link dozens of recent Internet posts about the war on women, the new hyper-aggression of feminists, the snarky protests of disappointed metrosexual males, the inevitability of a woman president named Hillary because “it’s time.”

Maybe I will soon. But not today. I’m getting ready to visit the Devon horse show Saturday and a granddaughter’s wildly excessive Barbie birthday on Sunday.

So I’ll leave you with this Netflix available movie to watch on your own. It’s mostly for all you men who have young sons. I won’t even reference the philosophical implications of Plato’s cave, or the significance of one of my all time favorite poems, Kublai Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I, too, know the opening lines by heart and many more after that.

Make of it what you will.

Huge Hat Tip to Hotair. I can’t improve on the juxtaposition of an ancient multimillionaire parasite descendant of real producers condescending in the rawest bumper sticker terms to his political opposition — countered by a living human being who has actually felt the slings and arrows of life’s bare bodkin. Here:

Rockefeller should have felt shame. Did he? No. Progressives never feel shame. They’re all too damn stupid to comprehend simple logic, too infatuated with themselves to experience empathy, too lofty to see that virtue is not a function of their own godhood. They’re the quality. The rest of us are stinking, evil peasants.

Makes me nostalgic for Britain’s (when there still was a Britain, alas) sly understanding of what aristocrats were really good for.

I know. This happened more than a couple years ago, Dude.

But isn’t it interesting that the so-called party of the common man is now dominated by rich insiders who have no idea what kind of lives most common men lead between the incestuous power corridors of Washington and the gay bars of San Francisco?

I’m sure Hotair’s Allahpundit was most moved by Ron Johnson’s impassioned response to Rockefeller. I was most moved by Rockefeller’s subsequent response to Johnson. He’s not a sociopath. He’s a moral moron.

As all progressives in this nightmare era of American decline have become. Why I don’t keep up much with current events. When I don’t mention current affairs, it’s because they’re too ridiculously insane to be worthy of rational comment and too absurd to be possible of satire.

All I’d wish on Rockefeller is a good taxidermist. Except that I suspect he — and every other accomplice in this vandal regime — has already been stuffed with confetti made of shredded copies of the New York Times and posed in the museum of progressive paleontology like extinct creatures from an age no one should ever want back.

As I said. O in a nutshell. Emphasis on the ‘hell.’

How much sound and fury and high dudgeon has been expended on a mere name by those who profess to honor Native Americans?

You’ve heard tons of enlightened progressives wage a war against the Washington Redskins. Chances are, though, you’ve heard almost nothing about the war Washington, DC, is waging against the Native Americans they loudly claim to love. Here’s a brief intro.

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, the United States has already tried its hand at a pseudo-single-payer system. The VA is one example. Another, albeit less highly publicized, is the Indian Health Service. (via WhiteCoat)

Based on an agreement in 1787, the government is responsible to provide free health care to Native Indians on reservations. And, as you can see from this scathing story from the Associated Press, that promise has not been kept.

The numbers don’t lie:

American Indians have an infant death rate that is 40 percent higher than the rate for whites. They are twice as likely to die from diabetes, 60 percent more likely to have a stroke, 30 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease.American Indians have disproportionately high death rates from unintentional injuries and suicide, and a high prevalence of risk factors for obesity, substance abuse, sudden infant death syndrome, teenage pregnancy, liver disease and hepatitis.

And, after Haiti, where in the Western hemisphere do men have the lowest life expectancy? It’s on Indian reservations in South Dakota.

I should tell you most of the (amazingly scant) reportage of the IHS crisis dates back to 2009, including this:

Recent accounts suggest the federal health service for American Indians on reservations is in crisis. Will President Obama’s stimulus plan and health care reform plans help?

A “Broken” Health Care System for Native Americans

On paper, the situation sounds good: Based on a 1787 agreement between tribes and the United States government, the U.S. has an obligation to provide American Indians with free health care on reservations.

But that’s not how it works, reports the Associated Press. Roughly one-third more is spent per capita on health care for felons in federal prison, according to 2005 data referenced by the AP. The system’s ineffectiveness has yielded a common refrain on reservations of “don’t get sick after June,” because that‘s when federal funds run out.

Does the age of the coverage mean that the beneficent Obama administration has solved the IHS problems it failed to solve in the VA? Uh, no. Typically, the O administration has made things worse.

Murkowski “Incredulous” at Indian Health Service’s Failure to Fully Fund Native Health Clinic Contracts

“I Feel Like I Am Fighting the Administration” to Abide by Supreme Court Ruling

WASHINGTON, DC — Senator Lisa Murkowski today had a candid exchange with the Director of the Indian Health Service over the Obama administration’s continuing refusal to fully fund the contract support costs for tribal health care providers nationwide, saying she is “incredulous that we are still living through this” fight. Contract support costs are the operational costs of tribes to manage tribal health programs –including personal management systems, liability insurance, and facility support costs. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in the case Ramah vs Salazar that tribes should be fully compensated to for the operation of self-governance contracts in delivering the promises of the Federal trust responsibility.

Murkowski also rebuffed President Obama’s recent comments at the White House Tribal Nations Summit acknowledging his administration is shortchanging native tribes but seeking answers. “I went to the summit to focus on what the President would say about Contract Support Costs. The President said ‘I hear you loud and clear and we need to find answers,’” recalled Murkowski in her introduction. (clip below) “We don’t need to find answers; I think the Supreme Court laid it out very clearly – full reimbursement must be provided.” [Any of this sound familiar?]

The tribes had to go to the Great White Father to beg reimbursement for contracted IHS services.

Yet the current Wiki article on IHS seems, laughably, to blame the continuing fustercluck on, well, guess…

A 2010 report by Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Chairman Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., found that the Aberdeen Area of the Indian Health Service(IHS) is in a “chronic state of crisis.”[8] “Serious management problems and a lack of oversight of this region have adversely affected the access and quality of health care provided to Native Americans in the Aberdeen Area, which serves 18 tribes in the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa,” according to the report.

In 2013 the Indian Health Service was hit hard by sequestration funding cuts of $800 million, representing a substantial percentage of its budget.

News flash. The problems didn’t begin with the sequester. Again from 2009. They’re written in the history of another failed federal promise.

They’re written in the chronic under funding of IHS, and in its regulation heavy bureaucracy both of which give rise to the sobering fact that at 1,642 per 100,000 people, the death rate for Native Americans in South Dakota is the highest of any race or ethnic group in the U.S., according to 2007 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers.

Here and across America, tribal people know they must be dying or about to lose a limb to get serious care. Otherwise, their stories are of rushed providers failing to test them for potentially fatal dis eases despite obvious symptoms, long waits in clinics without ever being seen, and credit ratings ruined when IHS makes referrals to specialists but then doesn’t pay for the care.

“To me,” said Tommy Thompson, emergency manager for the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, “it seems like they’re hell bent to provide the cheapest possible health care at the expense of our people.”

Maybe one day the president will read about the real Native American crisis in the newspapers.

Or, maybe, passionate progressives can take care of everything by renaming the Indian Health Service? Aren’t words really the only things that matter?

P.S. Just found this. What I’d call perfect timing. 50 senators send letter to Roger Goodell asking Washington Redskins to change their name. Youse gots to have youse priorities. Does they’s care about them Injuns or what?

Patrick.

My mother died ten years ago. But she lived long enough to take back a slander that influenced my dog decisions for thirty years.

As I was growing up, the only breed she totally dismissed was the greyhound. I’m paraphrasing but her position was essentially that greyhounds are too stupid to be worthy of the name of dog. She had one as a small child. His name was Skeeter (?). He didn’t fit in somehow.

Over her long long life she had Irish Setters, multiple terriers, German Shepherds, and Boston terriers (then called Boston Bulls). She was devoted to them all, a fine mom to her many charges, one of whom may have saved her life after a car accident — one of those notoriously stupid Irish Setters, no less.

In her final, failing days, she still had Mandy, but Mandy was also growing very old. I took up residence with her, and Lady Laird kindly lent me her greyhound Patrick for company because my mother was in and out of herself by then.

Patrick made more of a difference than I did. My mother sat in her living room and the ever calm Patrick curled up in the front room, content to be no problem to me. But he acquired the habit of checking on my mother about once an hour. He was never a licker. He would just come and stand near her for a bit. She put her hand on his head for a bit. Then he would go lie down again.

It occurred to her she should have something to give him. We told her about Cheezits. So she asked for a bowl of Cheezits at her chair side. Same routine as before. He came to check on her, she laid a hand on his head, but with her other hand she grabbed a Cheezit and gave it to him, which he accepted gravely before retreating again. It was their thing.

Her eyes lit up when he visited. He was so beautiful, so room-filling, so gentle, so serene. Her angel.

This is the greyhound soul. There are many sighthound breeds and varieties, but somewhere inside all of them is this combination of acceptance, quiet comprehension of human emotion, and uncritical love. They don’t learn how to fetch. You can bounce a nerf ball off their noses a hundred times and it never dawns on them to catch it. They don’t really play. But they love stuffed toys that have eyes and limbs. They like gathering them in and protecting them on their beds and couches.

And they also run like nothing you’ve ever seen, faster than every other dog breed and faster than any other mammal but the cheetah. Patrick once saw a squirrel across the street when I was walking him. He accelerated to full speed within the length of the leash. Only the adrenalin of terror at losing him enabled me to haul him in. Thought he’d dislocated my arm. Thankfully, he pulled up at the last possible second.

This is why there are sighthound variations. Speed and acceleration are useful traits for humans who want hunters, guardians, and competitive athletes. Scottish Deerhounds are the Incredible Hulk of sighthounds. Greyhound build but huge, overwhelming speed and endurance, heavy bones, and the strength to take down a deer in the open field.

Borzois, once called Russian Wolfhounds, are also built like greys but with hair long enough to thrive in Siberian winters, and the pack aggression to take down wolves.

Russians. Always strength in numbers.

Afghans. You think they’re sissies? They’ve hunted and killed in Afghanistan longer than anyone on earth but other born Afghanis. The hair? It gets cold in the mountains. The longevity of the breed? Fidelity to family.

You looking at me? I’m looking at you too. I can forgive. Can you?

There are Salukis. All the breed guidance tells you not to expect a close relationship. In them the greyhound reserve is transmuted to distance. But they have lovely feathers.

I understand. I just don’t care that much. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

And windhounds. People want smaller Borzois. Here they are. A new breeding experiment.

Pretty little things. Less muscle. More eeriness.

Two others I’ll point to today. Staghounds. A direct cross between deerhounds and greyhounds. They can run down coyotes. Not an AKC breed because they’re hybrids, not necessarily interbred to breed standards. Here’s some background.

Got coyote? Ice cream’s okay too.

And, finally, Doberman Pinschers. One of the most feared of all breeds. Fast, intelligent, beautiful, and loyal. But with teeth. Also definitely part greyhound.

Why do I mention Dobermans? Because some of our closest greyhound friends just replaced two prematurely mortal greys with this little guy:

I. See. You.

Where am I going with this? Sighthounds are distinct because they see. Us. All different kinds. That’s how we should be here. Not all the same but clear of vision. Not confused by all the myriad misdirections of our culture, politics, and media. I concede I’m part Doberman. That shouldn’t sever our familial ties. Faint hope?

Maybe. You tell me.

P.S. Apologies if any of this seems sentimental. Today is my dad’s birthday. He was born in 1922 and died in 1999. He thought the country was done way back then. Don’t you hate it when the old man was right all along? But I’m still his son. Just because the war is lost doesn’t mean you stop fighting. Fifteen years now. Sometimes I gasp for breath. Forgive me. What manner of sighthound was he?

Called the Lurcher. Not big but a relentless, tireless courser.

Happy Birthday, dad.

Boss talks a lot. I’m tired. And bored. I’m just a deerhound.

Lake seems to think this is a good idea. The “anybody out there” meme.

Me, I’m ready to decamp to Instapunk Rules. Being nice has run its course. Back to the long scrivers.