Never heard of it.

Time, I think, for a new Secretary of State. He has a longer face than John Kerry. He’s better at escaping difficult situations than Hillary, who always seems to be left sourly holding the bag.

Even better, he seems never even to have heard of Syria, which would, what’s the term, “inform” his decision about whether we should intervene between one of gang of killers and a second gang of killers in the name of social justice.

To tell the truth, Raebert doesn’t really care about social justice. What he cares about is jobs for the hardworking people of America.

No. He doesn’t care about jobs either. Sorry. Forgive me.

Raebert cares about me and the missus. But he gives great speeches.

No. He doesn’t give great speeches. But he’s tall, dark, and handsome. He understands English as well as most Yalies, and he even knows when to lie down (er, when you ask him if he needs to go out and pee). What more can you ask of an American Secretary of State in the age of Obama?

I can pee any time. Right now, I prefer to sit here and glisten.

Pretty perfect if you ask me.

We get to look past the foreground. At least in my back yard.

The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

The 80-20 rule is important to us today for two reasons.

First, the current leftist domination and corruption of our nation are the product of just 20 percent of our population. These are the leftists who have subsumed our political class, our mass media, our mass entertainment industry, and our educational and legal institutions. Don’t let their recent vote totals hide their minority status. The leadership of the left stands in relationship to their supposed beneficiaries — minorities, women, illegal immigrants, environmentalists, etc — as a pimp does to his working girls. I’m not being roughly metaphorical. I’m being precise. The pimp cozies up to the lost or naive and sweet talks them into serving his own selfish purposes, which are always money and power. He uses them ruthlessly, then discards them carelessly whenever they become inconvenient. Their personal welfare is never his concern. He prefers them to be ignorant, dependent, helpless except for his largesse, and disposable as toilet paper. His first and absolute commandment is that his working girls prostitute themselves on his behalf and feel a kind of gratitude to him, or failing that, demonstrate unshakeable obedience and loyalty to his interests, regardless of any abuse he may feel required to mete out along the way.

Well, that’s the story of the left that has hijacked our country and our form of government. Another application of the 80-20 rule. 80 percent working girls of all four sexes and 20 percent ruthless totalitarians. Why lefties identify so consistently with murderous dictators around the globe. Why feminists were brought to heel in defending Clinton’s sexual assaults. Why civil rights “leaders” have consented in, no, conspired in, promulgating policies that have systematically destroyed black families, black educational and employment opportunities, and duped their own people into deconstructing cities into a series of urban infernos that ensure the incarceration of close to a majority of black males. Get the men out of the way and the helpless single mothers are yours. Pimps. 20 percent subjugating the 80 percent who trusted and relied on them.

Why there’s a spirit of hopelessness among so many who remember when government was supposed to serve and not rule us. The most viciously ambitious and narcissistic among us have captured all the institutions of power. What can we do? The whole country is imploding. And the working girls keep sashaying up to their pimps with more cash stashed in their panties, gratefully handed over to a contemptuous overlord in a $100,000 limousine.

Worse, the pimp is so delusional, so sociopathic, so deranged that he’s convinced himself his farcical sweet talk is truth, because after all, truth in the post modern street is whatever you pretend it is. There’s no such thing as hypocrisy because just look at those strung out working girls. Where would they be without your protection?

So why would I call this post Life Goes On? Because there’s another 20 percent in play that can’t be dismissed or entirely subjugated. This is the 20 percent that made America work in the first place. The ones who are relentlessly hardworking, creative, focused, and goal-oriented. These are the ones who came here to make a better life for their descendants. They didn’t expect to be rewarded in this life. For them the profit motive of capitalism wasn’t about greed but financing their family’s future. They’re the ones who produced all the great engines of industry and ideas that generated the miracle of American exceptionalism, which is as real as the nose on your face.

And you know what? Regardless of food stamp fraud, ersatz disability claims, and an ever rising tide of government dependency, that 20 percent is still there, in its same old constant relationship to the drones. They work, they aspire, they make huge demands on themselves, they balance family duties against the desire to make a personal, individual mark on the universe, or at least to be the best and bravest they can be, and they are alive in a way successful professional bureaucrats, government or corporate, can never be.

You see, for them it’s not about the money or the power or the prestige. It’s about seeking out the challenges and besting them, come hell or high water. The common bond between “Deadliest Catch” and “Faceoff,” between “Axmen” and “Masterchef,” and even between “Duck Dynasty” and “Heroes of Cosplay.”

No, they don’t all believe in the same things. I’m sure you could collect plenty of lunatic political opinions from participants in most of these shows. What they share that’s more important is a set of values. You work hard. You compete hard. But you also help when help is needed. Seen often, for example, on “Faceoff” and “Masterchef,” ALWAYS on “Deadliest Catch,” and almost never on Gordon Ramsay’s raspberry to American reality show narcissism, “Hell’s Kitchen.”

I’ve lived in both the fatcat bureaucratic corporate world and the entrepreneurial, presumably more dog-eat-dog world of small businesses. Where would you expect to see more toleration of error, more willingness to risk personal loss for the sake of just helping another? I can assure you it’s a slam dunk in favor of the little guy shops. Who they are still matters more than how much they profit personally.

The good news is that that the 20 percent of capitalist idealists (whether they’d accept my label or not) are still out there. They’re the vital ones, the living ones, and their drive is far more powerful than that of the power-besotted, utterly self-satisfied and selfish ones who are sitting astride this beleaguered nation trying to throttle it to death.

The best news is that the lefty 20 percent is, whenever anyone cares to look, an exhausted, idea-less joke. Nothing they’ve done in the last 50 years, excepting the Clean Air Act, has produced anything but hideously negative unintended consequences. They’re the victim of their own conspiracy to dumb the rest of us down. They may have succeeded in creating a horrifying generation of “low information voters,” but they’ve become something worse — “low information intellectuals.” The professors who set about creating a proletariat of parrots did it to their own as well.

When you stop teaching history, facts, writing, and analytical skills to schoolchildren, you have nobbled your own heirs too. Today’s mighty Ivy liberals know nothing of their own history or of western civilization’s. They know how to attack someone else’s argument with monolithic cant and vile abuse, but they can’t construct an argument of their own to save their lives. They have absorbed an impression of history their didact tutors insisted on, but they have no power left to critique any idea, let alone the ideology they embody without appreciating that belief is a thing to be first understood and, second, defended with the power of reason and fact.

They are destitute. Credentialed retards in charge of the body politic. Lawyers who don’t believe in the rule of law, only the destruction of statute via semantic dithering. Political philosophers who don’t believe in any principle beyond their their own entitlement to make the process enforce their own whims about an impossible fantasy of social and planetary justice. Destitute, in short, of all ideas that might justify and legitimize their own lives, let alone their assumed right to tell the rest of us how to live. Resting atop an unbroken record of making things ever and always worse by collecting more power into their own arrogant hands.

Would I bet on this moribund 20 percent against the 20 percent who have some idea why they’re alive and bright-eyed in pursuit of careers and family objectives that have nothing to do with remaking the earth as a satellite around their diseased egos? Not a chance I would.

Did you like the fountains of grass I can see through my bay window, past the busy fingers of the trees that want to hide them from my view?

Life goes on. It will. The American spirit is not something easily stamped out of existence.

Who’s which, girl or boy? Beats the hell out of me.

Read the previous post first. Excellent minds befuddled by current events.

Now for a common mind unbefuddled. Ya know, everybody knows that everybody knows the depths. The unique arrogance of the elite — you know, Ivy, powerful, beautiful, rich, famous, etc — is that they’re too damn dumb to know this elementary fact. Worse, the elite think the depths can be overcome by force of IQ, money, and position.

Nothing overcomes the depths but life itself.

In this respect there are no alphas, betas, and gammas. Why I was struck by Mika Brzezinski’s condemnation of Miley Cyrus. Why was she so offended? Have to say I think because she’s an Evelyn Waugh heroine (early novels only). Different rules for the quality versus the hoi polloi. Her friends can have fuck buddies, abortions, and shallow parasitic relationships, because that’s the way of life at the top of the celebrity sphere. But girls from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio just shouldn’t. Civilization would fail.

Mika’s a phony. Thinking she maybe wishes she hadn’t slept her way to wherever she imagines she is.

I wasn’t that pleased with Victor Hanson either. Stated my objections once or twice to his lack of understanding of pop culture. But he does enjoy descending like Gibbon with a classicist’s arm bar to wipe us all out.

Truth. Mylie Cyrus wore a bikini called “nude” that was nothing of the sort. She was just a girl wanting attention. Any man on the scene would have sent her back home with a message to grow up. She did nothing like Madonna’s Sex Book, her near X-rated movie, or her disgusting practice of cruising New York in limos looking for sex partners. Outrage? Really. If anything, she’s the reductio ad absurdem of stupid girls who don’t quite know what lascivious means.

No, I don’t dislike or misunderstand nostalgia. It’s just that we are where we are. Having a super-class of amoral plutocrats isn’t quite working for the, uh, common man and common woman.

We prefer, down in our lowly dens of poor iniquity, to experience sin AS sin, and ask forgiveness accordingly. We’re not fond of the trumpet as the voice of confession. You know. Maybe the whisper is better.

Or country singers. Maybe the ones who don’t rip off their tops or show off their crotches to everyone who wants to see.

Probably just me. An old man dreaming.

Fellini’s Satyricon Gaga

When I read this masterful essay by Victor Davis Hanson, I thought I would have nothing additional to say about it. Comparing the cultural corruption of our contemporary elites to the declining days of Rome is a natural. But maybe too natural. He says, at one point, in service to his Roman Satyricon analogy:

In good Petronian fashion, the narcissist Anthony Weiner sent pictures of his own genitalia to near-strangers, under the Latinate pseudonym “Carlos Danger.” Was Eliot Spitzer any better? As the governor of New York, he preferred anonymous numbers — “Client #9” — to false names, real to virtual sex, very young to mature women, and buying rather than romancing his partners. Is there some Petronian prerequisite in our age that our ascendant politicians must be perverts?

Transvestitism and sexual ambiguity are likewise Petronian themes; in our day, the controversy rages over whether convicted felon Bradley Manning is now a woman because he says he is. The politically correct term “transgendered” trumps biology; and if you doubt that, you are a homophobe or worse. As in the Roman Satyricon, our popular culture also displays a sick fascination with images of teen sex. So how does one trump the now-boring sexual shamelessness of Lady Gaga — still squirming about in a skimpy thong — at an MTV awards ceremony? Bring out former Disney teenage star Miley Cyrus in a vinyl bikini, wearing some sort of huge foam finger on her hand to simulate lewd sex acts.

The orgies at Trimalchio’s cool Pompeii estate (think Malibu) suggest that in imperial-Roman society Kardashian-style displays of wealth and Clintonian influence-peddling were matter-of-fact rather than shocking. Note that in our real version of the novel’s theme, Mayor Filner was not bothered by his exposure, and finally had to be nearly dragged out of office. Carlos Danger would have been mayor of New York, but the liberal press finally became worried over its embarrassment: Apparently two or three sexting episodes were tolerable, but another four or five, replete with more lies, risked parody.

As usual, Hanson makes many excellent points, particularly on the sorry state of education among our self-proclaimed best and brightest. But I can’t help feeling that at base he’s yearning for a past that can’t come back. His essay reminded me, for example, of this emotional outpouring by Juan Williams:

Fifty years after the March on Washington, mystical memories of that seminal moment in the civil-rights era are less likely to focus on movement politics than on the great poetry and great music.

The emotional uplift of the monumental march is a universe of time away from today’s degrading rap music—filled with the n-word, bitches and “hoes”—that confuses and depresses race relations in America now…

King sailed past… sad realities to invoke his soaring vision of the nation at racial peace. When he finished speaking, the crowd spontaneously broke into singing “We Shall Overcome,” holding hands and swaying as if in communal prayer.

That sense of unity, promise and purpose was also evident in the music of the march. It’s music that still stirs emotions to this day.

Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” written in 1962, hit No. 2 on the Billboard charts just before the crowd gathered in Washington. When the folk-music trio Peter, Paul and Mary sang the song for the 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial that day, it became an interracial anthem for change. The song itself drew inspiration from two others: The lyrics brought to mind Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory,” which included an allegory about newspapers blowing down city streets, and its melody came from a slave protest song called “No More Auction Block.”

And so they sang in Washington: “Yes, how many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free? Yes, how many times can a man turn his head, pretending that he just doesn’t see? The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

Sam Cooke, the black gospel and rhythm-and-blues singer began performing the Dylan song immediately after the march. He had been working on a song about the hurt he felt as a black man living with racism yet also with hope for better times. In December 1963, Cooke recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The song became a hit on black radio, another anthem of yearning for a nation without racial rancor.

Nostalgia, pure and simple. But you can’t ever go back. All the intervening time has happened, whether we wish it did or not. Maybe because some people got stuck in time. Krauthammer:

The Civil Rights movement is “intellectually bankrupt,” Charles Krauthammer charged Monday night.

During his regular appearance on the panel segment of Special Report, Krauthammer argued that the movement is subsisting on the nostalgia from fifty years ago when it battles voter ID laws.

“Is the biggest issue in African-American life today the voter ID law? Is that going to alter the course of society in black America, the inner cities? The terrible standard in the schools? The breakdown of the family and all that?” Krauthammer asked.

“It’s nostalgia of a movement that’s intellectually bankrupt,” he said, and predicted that the voter ID laws the movement is challenging will stand up in court.

P.S. This is less than half the post. I’m done with either WordPress or the U.S. government. Restored my account at Facebook Sunday. Today I can’t post here in three tries. When does a paranoid really have enemies? You figure it out.

P.P.S. it didn’t start with the waif Miley Cyrus.

Harpy, anyone?

Write a Dear John letter in 1916 and see what happens.

It’s pitched as a horror movie. It isn’t. So watch it with all your might.

Death has big hands.

The hands of the past can seem like ghosts. Ask me about it sometime.

Spiral fracture. Hang on for more info.

Yeah. The lowdown.

We went to the doctor again Friday. He turned her loose. She wasn’t supposed to be as healed as she was. But she, uh, was.

She said she would be. But now she’s mad at me. I chafed at her becoming too fond of video games during her confinement. She compared it to my addiction to posting.

Deerhound Diary and InstaPunk are all the same to her. Just me, playing a game, sparking and dancing.

Hell. Maybe she’s right. Probably was. I used to be addicted to the Evander Holyfield boxing game. I tried to explain that it got old. After 80-some championships and consequent declines. She told me no one could get addicted to that unless they were a fool. Right, I guess.

But she’s healthy again. Thank God.

I see the future.

I don’t do trances. Can’t cure your bunions or Atlantean fantasies. I do long nights of sleeping, not sleeping, sleeping, etc. Every night. All night long. I spend days exploring the universe between the chimes of my wife’s snooze alarm. Sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell. But usually in an odd neither, which might be our future.

This is time spent in a realm between waking and sleeping. Of course I’m a prophet. Always have been. But you don’t want to see what I see now in that place where I spend so much of my other-conscious time.

I’m not crazy. I’m not a doomsday prepper. I’m more like a Christian stoic. It’s NOT going to be okay. It’s just going to be. We’ll survive it or we won’t. Pretty simple.

The Nicene Creed

I BELIEVE in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God; Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father; By whom all things were made: Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man: And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried: And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures: And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father: And he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; Whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spake by the Prophets: And I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church: I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins: And I look for the Resurrection of the dead: And the Life of the world to come. Amen.

What I see. Anger, ruin, pain, loss, and regress. Which is not all a bad thing. Unless you’ve never learned to read, live, or love. Then it’s just running away down countless corridors, hoping nobody sees.

She was buried today. Age 98. Catholic ceremony, viewing, mass, and interment. Followed by a Jersey diner dinner in a private room. And now they’re drinking. Who knows when my Irish wife will get home?

Some lessons. You can’t go to a funeral if all you have is a light gray suit you can’t fit into anymore. So I didn’t. You probably shouldn’t go to funerals of people you met only half a dozen times or so, even if you liked each other more than anyone else ever did. (This would be an arbitrary RFL rule…) If you live long enough, make all the arrangements ahead of time. Aunt Ruth did. And everyone’s enjoying the day because she did.

Did I mention that I liked her? I did. When you get to be 98 there are people who hold grudges. But I thought she was terrific. Like a large block of driftwood. Weathered, immovable, no, immanent. They placed her in a chair at parties, and she squinted at all the guests, appraising, evaluating, seeing. All I ever did was be polite. She sparkled just a little when I visited. I offered her hors d’oeuvres and she politely declined.

That’s it. I liked her. She liked me. Maybe I should have attended her funeral. But I don’t like funerals. Never did.

There are rumors, unconfirmed, that not everybody liked her. That she could be difficult, rigid, impossible. None of my business. I remember the twinkle in her eye. How I will think of her:

You got it. The Miss Marple of the suburban family set.

Rest in peace, old gal.

I mean how totally cool and glacial is this trend?!

News for Brizoni, if he’s still out there…

Thanks to a couple of surveys, it’s being put about in certain circles that atheists [have] higher IQs than believers. That may or may not be the case, but one problem with this argument is that, if you accept “average group differences in IQ”, you get into all sorts of sinister debates which ‘bien pensant’ atheist Lefties might find less to their liking.

So let’s not go down that unhappy road. Let’s dispense with the crude metric of IQ and look at the actual lives led by atheists, and believers, and see how they measure up. In other words: let’s see who is living more intelligently.
And guess what: it’s the believers. A vast body of research, amassed over recent decades, shows that religious belief is physically and psychologically beneficial – to a remarkable degree.

In 2004, scholars at UCLA revealed that college students involved in religious activities are likely to have better mental health. In 2006, population researchers at the University of Texas discovered that the more often you go to church, the longer you live. In the same year researchers at Duke University in America discovered that religious people have stronger immune systems than the irreligious. They also established that churchgoers have lower blood pressure.

Well, you know, it goes on like this for paragraph after paragraph. Sorry, B. if you ever want to come back to the community of people who talk sensibly without forcing their religious (un)beliefs down the throat of their goddam neighbor, come here. Honestly. I miss you.

Being brave and smart when you’re terrified? The real definition of a hero.

Have you heard about Antoinette Tuff? She talked the would-be Georgia school shooter back from the cliff. And she’s a bookkeeper, for God’s sake. What did she do? She…

mustered up the courage to talk Hill into surrendering — a one-on-one negotiation captured on the [911] tape.

“Don’t feel bad, baby,” she can be heard telling the young man. “My husband just left me after 33 years. … I’ve got a son that’s multiple disabled.”

Later, she can be heard reassuring him that “it’s all going to be well.”

After about 20 minutes, she won him over.

Tuff: “OK, he said that they can come in now. He needs to go to the hospital.”

Operator: “OK, and he doesn’t have any weapons on him or anything like that?”

[DeKalb County police Det. Ray Davis says the Georgia elementary school shooting suspect had “500 rounds of ammo with him.”]

Tuff: “He’s laying on the floor. He’s got everything out of his pockets. There isn’t anything. The only thing he has is his belt. Everything is out of his pockets. Everything is sitting here on the counter, so all we need to do is they can just come in, and I’ll buzz them in.”

Only after the ordeal was over did Tuff reveal just how scared she’d been the whole time:

“I’m going to tell you something baby — I’ve never been so scared in all the days in my life,” she told the unidentified operator. Then, she started crying and exclaimed, “Oh, Jesus! Oh, God!”

Full story here.

Amazing courage and inspired personal judgment. (Contrast with previous post…) “Tuff” as she unquestionably is, I’d like to put a comforting arm around her. She saved those children. People ask what Jesus would do. She did it.

Bravo.