He says I got to get up and fight. I say, rest, Boss. We got to rest.

Raebert’s been the slowest to adjust to the new schedule, what with the missus going back to work and all. He wants to get up ON us, all stretched out and, well, protective. Very careful not to ding the bad arm but very sure about crushing me with his massive weight.

He worries about me most particularly. We’ve been thinking he’s not eating. Just realized he stops eating when I don’t eat. Which I haven’t been doing. I’m so very tired.

Time to get back in harness. I know it. Insist if you must. What Raebert’s doing in his own way.

Yes. I worry.

Wait for the wind. Live for it.

What I keep trying to tell him. He can still run.

Groomed is not gay.

Dogs we are. We don’t object to the word. But you’re loose with the word in a way we’re not loose with anything. You use “dog” as an insult mostly, though you say we’re best friends. People you dislike are “dumb as a dog,” “dirty dogs,” “bitches,” etc.

A reminder. We chose you, not the other way around. We were both great predators. We didn’t need you. But we foresaw, yes we FORESAW, great benefits from partnership. We have always understood your language better than you understand ours. There’s no way you could have ventured from the campfire and enlisted us to your side with yips and whines and barks. You don’t understand what they mean to this day. It was we who listened to you and saw promise in your dog-like eyes.

We never intended to love you. Why would we? We wanted easy pickings and a campfire. It just happened. You started loving us and we started loving you. You loved us because we were simple and pure and permanent. We started loving you because you were arbitrary, unpredictable, entertaining, and so in need of the belonging we could offer that you didn’t have. And you were smart. Not intelligent but smart.

We know everything about life. We just don’t get that much of it. We die while you live on, and how are you to know if we don’t help?

Through all the years, we’ve been the dumb dogs. Years in which we always knew more of your words than you knew of ours. Years in which we have loved you even when you didn’t love us back, or at least claimed our souls were lesser than yours.

This isn’t an indictment or ultimatum. Just a reminder. We’re conscious. We have memories. We have a font of love in our hearts. Yes, you’re smarter, whatever that means. We don’t know what that means at all. Does that make us dumb? I’m guessing not.

Remember, I know what happens to your heartbeat when I curl up with you at a moment of anxiety. You subside. You need me. You are as in love with me as I am with you.

Not a painting. An event still unfolding.

Some pugilistic tactics are so extreme that nobody sees them for what they are until long after the fact. A case in point, Ali-Foreman. All that time on the ropes. Suicidal in historical context. Guarantee of victory on the day.

Much the same with Obama. Had this at the back of my mind for months. No need to bring it out till he denounced the distraction of “phony scandals.” And Geraldo Rivera’s PR interpretation of just how successfully that term might play.

Genius, really. How do you bypass scandals when your whole purpose is to undermine and hijack the legitimate government? Easy. Just have so many scandals that nobody can keep up with them all.

Yes, I was an English major, but I was also a student of chaos theory. Which is eloquent about how, the point at which, order turns to chaos and what happens next.

That moment is called a phase transition. Things don’t move gradually from order to chaos. Take the instance of an employee juggling an increasing number of responsibilities. He can handle it, he can handle it, yes, even she can handle it until there’s one variable too many. Which results in sudden total collapse.

What happens next is called turbulence. The moment the clear stream from the tap suddenly starts spitting and splashing. Normal human response. Start closing the tap. Fewer inputs, less turbulence.

The Obama administration has actually done Saul Alinsky one better. The way to seize control is not just to set one constituency against another. It’s to violate conventions and laws so consistently and outrageously, so nakedly, that nobody can keep up with it.

Call me Sebastian.

When everything’s a scandal, nothing is. Welcome to the end of the United States. The best and the brightest in the MSM, academia, and the government are dumber than rocks. Their country is being stolen even from THEIR weird dreams.

I see it all. But how long can you keep me alive?

It’s really time you stopped talking and started listening.

When we get together, we can be fatal.

Many years ago, my insomniac recourse was an all-night radio show called Coast to Coast hosted by Art Bell. His stomping ground was the unlikely, the improbable, and even the impossible, all of which got a fair hearing from him. The Face on Mars. Remote Viewing of cataclysmic events like “killshots” from the sun. Backwards recordings that revealed the truth behind the forward lies of politicians and experts. Alien abductions. Underground alien bases. Recordings of hell. Ghosts, chupacabras, Hopi Indian prophecies, and conspiracies galore.

But Art Bell retired, I returned to a daytime schedule, and I hadn’t listened to Coast to Coast for years until last night when I simply could not sleep and lay dozing while Art Bell’s less charismatic replacement spent two hours talking with a blogger about the NSA and the Amash amendment, which failed in the house last night in its attempt to get the NSA out of our private lives.

Two choices. Coast to Coast is still as crazy as it used to be. Or it isn’t. Is paranoia about the NSA as paranoid and delusional as the infamous Doctor Doom of the old days or the now discredited three-name glunk who spent his life playing all speeches backwards and plucking from them sinister phrases you couldn’t quite hear?

I pondered it over coffee without much conviction, and then I encountered two things. A waiting comment from Helk. And a Hotair post by Mary Katharine Ham.

Helk said:

There was a time when I thought I knew something about the nature of reality. I gave that up. Reality is a moving target and as such you can never really know it for what it is instead you can only know it for the blur that it appears to be.

Numbers, on the other hand, do not change and remain inalterable throughout time. We orbit them and attempt to make sense of the apparent order that always seems just beyond description. I am of course speaking of the prime number distribution…

Mary Katharine Ham made this curious equivocation about the Amash Amendment:

As a limited-government conservative, I find it heartening to see this many House members questioning this policy. Though conventional wisdom suggests selling security at any price is the safer side of this issue with the American people, the closeness of the vote suggests that’s not necessarily still the case. Voters making cost-benefit analyses about any federal program is enough to make my heart sing… [emphasis added]

No, I’m not denouncing MKH. She did express calculated support for the amendment which failed to pass Congress. What I’m doing is remembering Helk’s comments on the nature of reality and NUMBERS, even if they’re not primes but lowly arithmetic.

Security at any price. The simplest numbers make a laughingstock of that position, objectively, indisputably, and even ludicrously.

I’m not going to do all the math for you. I’ll just share a few stats you can verify for yourselves. Maybe 35,000 deaths a year in U.S. auto accidents (lots more than gun deaths btw). 245 million passenger vehicles. Meaning you, in your car, have about a 1/100th of one percent chance of dying in a car crash every year.

Not so bad, right? We’d like it to be better, but people do stupid things, don’t they? And cars are a lot safer than they used to be.

Yet consider. If commercial air travel in the United States were only as safe as the daily auto commute and soccer-mom minivanning, we would lose 82,500 dead a year, about one large airliner every day, all 365 days a year. All by terrorist bombs? No worse than teenage sexters in their hormone-soaked Volvos. We could absorb that hit as a nation, even if not the 24/7 cable news glurge that would be now times ten. Would turning off the TV be worth the price of turning off the NSA and its omniscience of YOUR private lives? Guess that’s up to you.

But compare this with the actual record of commercial airliners in the United States. 153 deaths in 10 years. Who wants to do the math on that?

Now for terrorist deaths in the land of John Wayne and the home of the brave. 3087 in the years from 1985 to 2013. (Let’s see: 3,000 out of 300,000,000-plus. Casualties divided by, uh, 28 years. Christ. It’s long division with remainders and tons of decimal places! Can anybody count that low?) Feeling screechy and scared, are we? Speaking personally, we’ve lost people we love and will always remember. Speaking statistically, we are utterly unscathed.

Except, oh yeah. Security trumps freedom every time, doesn’t it? Let the NSA erase the Bill of Rights. Because we’ll be safer. From an increasingly monstrous political class that’s willing to use our life data to destroy us whenever we might pose a threat. From state and local bureaucracies who know how to tie in to the new databases and wipe out your credit, your medical privacy, your reputations and basic human dignity if you resist them or attract their baleful attention in any way.

Give up worrying about the chip implantation those silly Christians fretted about as the Mark of the Beast. You’re already carrying GPS-beaming cellphones everywhere you go, your cars can be tracked to within a block, and as everyone should have learned in the past few months, the IRS not only has access to your private lives, it is exercising uncorrected, perhaps unstoppable malice in making sure you’re the club-footed, ill-smelling ones in the great American Dream competition.

But good and loyal Republicans don’t see a danger. Not to you. Or should I say to them?

The Asham vote was a TRUE litmus test. The power of the political class against the timid ignorance of the ones who haven’t been paying attention.

Get out your little arithmetic blackboard. Do the sums. We don’t need a Soviet state to safeguard us. We can put up with a lot more casualties before it’s time to think about trading our freedom away.

Where’s Art Bell now that we need a mild maniac to instill credence in the unthinkable?

He’s in each and every one of us. That’s the true nature of reality.

And I’m one of the very few who has seen Raebert angry. Trust me. You don’t want to.

She’s better now. Don’t bother me.

We’re not always at our best. Sometimes I have a bad hair day.

The missus still has her brace, and an appointment in a month for another X-Ray, and the prospect of physical therapy after that. However, she’s been cleared to go back to work, where she is now. She’s driving on one wing and a prayer right now. Kind of an American story, right?

I’ve been better. But I’ll get there again. Working on something now…

Smaller than we usually do.

And the big one.

Somebody’s cool.

Thanks, Tim.

But it’s time for me to get back to work. If you’ll forgive me.

When you don’t know your dog is a sighthound, you might be a silly person.

We love you, Guy. But what you have here is a sighthound with a five day’s growth of beard. Congratulations.

Look up all the greyhound friends websites and bask in their flashing, vulnerable beauty.

She’s also a reader, that Tiffany.

Thanks to commenter Joe for sharing photos of the better being in his life. I urge you all to do the same. The book Tiffany is reading is “Feast of Snakes” by Harry Crews. You can find it at Wiki and probably Amazon. Anyway… She looks like a good girl.

There’s a little deerhound in everyone.

Raebert knows I’m not God. God is.

But I know a lot. Ask Helk. He knows physics down to the level of quanta, but he also knows I feel the nature of the universe more than he does. I’m an oxymoron. I’m just a dilettante writer. But at some level I know, have always known, absolutely everything, from the smallest to the biggest. I know where everything fits and how, no matter where you point your finger. I can reorganize the whole universe from that point, see it all in an instant, and then struggle to explain it to people who can’t remember all the ripples as they expand.

Normally I don’t parade that fact. But this week I’m outraged. When everyone focuses on a pure triviality, my perspective becomes, uh, hi-def. Who’s the smartest pundit in the world? Krauthammer. To me he’s just a blister. I told my wife what he would say last night almost word for word. He was right but he was wrong too.

The United States is being slain. All the myopic pundits can’t ever quite see it. Too much personal stuff, too much belief in the power of maneuvering. Too much intimidation by the better educated libs of the NYT and WAPO. They all still think there was a course at Harvard or Yale or Columbia that just makes you smarter than everyone else.

My perspective is different. Why I’m content to some degree that educated morons will succeed in ending the American experiment. Not because there’s anything but buffoonery to sustain their world view, but because intelligence rises and falls like the tides, subject to the cycles of the moon and sun.

What I’m trying to share here is my boredom with the process. I know what is happening, I know why it is happening, I know exactly how fucking idiotic all the supposedly brilliant people are (as if I were watching from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel), and I know that we are as doomed as a sailor with feet cast in concrete and attached to an anchor chain tossed overboard.

So I’m part human and part pure mind. My mind says let it go, let it all go. It’s time. My human self says fight to the death, to the last gasp, and beyond.

I choose to fight, even as I drift farther and farther away in the dreams I experience at night. What I’m telling you is that I need all of you to keep me tethered HERE.
Please.

Don’t bother me. The Boss might know everything.

Raebert’s wrong to turn his back. I need you all.

P.S. Lake reminds me that nobody knows physics anymore but MIT and Cal-Tech nerds. He’s right.

.

Then why does Raebert know the answer to the riddle of Schroedinger’s Cat? When the box opens, what’s in there is definitely dead, unless he recognizes the face. If it’s Mickey, Izzie, Elliott, or Cassie, it’s his cat. Everyone else is Schroedinger’s and a dead man.

Something I stumbled over today:

If you are student in the Hempstead Public Schools, you may need some help in learning literacy. The Long Island, N.Y. district released a summer reading list that is replete with more than 30 errors. Some of the more egregious mistakes include:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is listed as “The Great Gypsy.”

Authors Emily Bronte and Charlotte Bronte, who wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre respectively, are listed with the last name Bonte.

Animal Farm author George Orwell is named George Ornell.

The Chosen author Chaim Potok has the last name Dotok.

Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones is listed as “The Lovely Bone.” (Fido, where are you?)

Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story have their author as listed as Norris Houghton (the publisher).

A member of the New York State Department of Education’s Board of Regents said, “Hempstead has not had a stable administration for a long time and the kids are suffering.”

Huh? What with all the turnover caused by the NEA’s relentlessly destabilizing policy of merit-based promotions?

I agree we have a new generation.

And people say dogs are dumb.