I really think it looks natural. I’m a Republican congressman you know.

All right. It’s bad enough that none of the New Media conservatives has a copy editor or even a secretary who knows how to spell. I get it that it’s one of our virtues that Republican congressmen and senators are mostly used car dealers. But do so many of them have to look like it?

If the Koch Brothers are so sinister and Machiavellian, can’t they organize a SuperPAC for the purpose of making these 80 IQ glunks at least look presentable?

Stacy and Clinton are out of a job now. I bet they could be purchased to do makeovers of the dumbest looking politicians outside of Trenton, NJ. Don’t laugh. I bet they could.

No. I guess that won’t happen. The difference between conservatives and Republican politicians. Conservatives are too smart to run for office. Republicans are too dumb not to. No doubt, something they learned at the Bobby Joe Law School and Hair Supply Company, Inc.

Talk to the paw.

Told you he finally ate breakfast then grumped a bit. Then he slept like Rip van Winkle for several hours.

The modem went down, so I had to go mess with it. When I got back, Raebert was gone. I found him on his bed in the bedroom. He never goes there till 8:30 at night, his preferred bedtime for everyone.

I tried to jolly him out of his mopery, but Elliott complicated everything. Actually, Elliott’s as upset as Raebert about the weekend. He’s been knocking everything off every flat surface he can find. (Who said boys are easy?) When I was talking to Raebert, Elliott thought he should, you know, spark Raebert up a bit with his paw. Raebert’s paw is bigger. He swept Elliott (his friend) completely away with one sweep of his front left leg. End of conversation.

The pic above dates from a few minutes ago when Raebert plodded from the bedroom back to the couch with Elliott in dour attendance.

But as I was writing the update, Elliott moved on to the bathroom to knock my razor off the counter, and Raebert returned to the bedroom and flung himself down there with a majestically self-pitying groan.

My wife said it best. They’re making us pay. And doing a damn good job of it too.

UPDATE: He came back from the bedroom, got on the couch, grumbled when I petted him, removed himself to his own personal love seat (deerhounds have those), and then returned to the bedroom, where he’s sulking now.

UPDATE 2: Yeah. More back and forth. But we had a talk. After which he licked my hand. Elliott teased him and he was okay with that. The clouds might be lifting. Except that Mommy is late. Because she broke her arm in Maryland. I know. Life is a total bitch, isn’t it? Why I’ll be abandoning him yet again this evening, at a time he’s not used to, to rescue Mommy from the train. Context. Who cares about Raebert’s snit? He’d better be thinking, as I am, about how to help Mommy get some sleep tonight. So there.

They left me all alone forever.

So we went away for the weekend, to a family wedding in the Poconos. Which meant Eloise, Molly, and Raebert had to spend three nights in a kennel. (I told you about the Bordatella shots.) Everybody reacts differently, of course. Eloise was the only one who knew immediately what was up when we got there. She refused to greet the nice lady in the lobby and hid quivering behind my leg, then planted her little tush on the doormat and refused to budge. Fortunately, she only weighs 17 pounds, so resistance was futile.

Molly may have suspected, but she wasn’t sure till they led her away.

Raebert had no idea. He was still a yearling the only other time he’d been boarded, and that place wasn’t this place. The new people were making a fuss over him, which he’s used to and finds reassuring. He trotted off with them as if he was about to get his nails clipped. No problem.

Coming home was a different matter altogether. Eloise was ecstatic. Molly was relieved but had made friends (“she’s the sweetest thing ever…”). Raebert was bathed, brushed, handsome in his complimentary bandanna, and clearly stunned by the experience. They said he didn’t eat much. The groomer raved about his coat and, mostly, his calm. Only had to put the muzzle on him during the roughest part of the combing. Not because he was aggressive but because he turned his head back a couple times, and those are really big teeth he has if he wanted to use them.

Back home, Eloise and Molly immediately fell back into their routines. Crisis over.

Raebert, on the other hand, has mostly slept, occasionally making noises like the horse in the previous post‘s video. He’s been so crashed that you have to look to see he’s still breathing. The first night he didn’t want dinner. He wanted to be upstairs with us, where he didn’t even want treats but took one to make his mother happy. He’ll be all right tomorrow, she cheerfully predicted.

Now it’s Wednesday, and he’s still exhausted. He didn’t get up for breakfast and when he did get up he just got on the couch next to me for another hour and sighed. We’re thinking he didn’t sleep at all when he was away.

But he’s had breakfast finally, and now he’s sort of awake, making grumbling noises.

I wouldn’t say he’s mad. Disappointed would be a better word. Which is pretty mature, given that he’s three.

Not a big fan of Redford. But I liked this movie. Girl loves horse. Girl and horse experience terrible trauma. Girl loses leg, horse goes loco. Girl hates horse and life in general. Enter Horse Whisperer. One learning point. Horse also loved girl. In the accident that cost her leg, he was trying to protect her. He failed.

In one way or another we all fail. Death and loss hold most of the cards. But dogs hold better cards, all the royal ones. We burn slowly for a long long time. They burn bright briefly to light our way. They were never going to be there the whole way through our lives. So why are they there and why are we here? Why do we put up with each other? Why do we love each other so devotedly?

Their mission is to remind us of the continuum. They make us little gods in training. What God sees. The generations roll over, and every one of them is lovely, some more, some less, like a mountain range. We behold their journey from youth to old age, their wisdom at the end, their acceptance of the transition to what next.

You lose them, you mourn them, and then you renew them with the ones you welcome after them and love thereafter.

Life is not one horse to ride but many.

I really really loved him.

Jodi Arias. She’s crazy.

I have no idea what happened, except that I didn’t do anything.

Amanda Knox. She’s dumb as a box of rocks.

I thought I, uh, was thinking. My mistake. Actually, I was blotto.

Ojay. Heeey, everybody. I’m still here. I did it. Not that. But something.

Thought it was time to do some real reporting for a change. It’s my duty and privilege to serve my readers. I know I’m not Nancy Grace, but I’ll show you what she won’t: her wardrobe malfunction. Now who’s your go to tabloid court reporter? Exactly.

An outstanding example of a fraudulent statistical graph. I’ll explain below.

I’ll apologize up front for what will be a long post. The subject is a microcosm of the kind of flim-flam we experience in a lot of so-called social issues. I’ve been reluctant to get into it because it’s about smoking, I am a smoker, and I don’t like to court bad luck. So in some ways this post is tempting fate even more than my review of the Koran.

Sometimes I listen to talk radio in Philadelphia. There’s a conservative host named Dom Giordano who goes after big topics and small, often in the same show. This week he’s spent parts of the show on multiple days discussing a new ordinance in a South Jersey Burlington County township banning all smoking in public parks. The mayor, very pleased with himself, crafted the legislation after receiving a letter from (supposedly) a fourth grade girl who found the sight of adults smoking so disgusting that she wanted it banned. The fines are very substantial.

Yeah, put your feet up. This is going to take a while. Dom, to his credit, thought this was a step too far. One of the expressed intentions was to “denormalize” smoking, as if that hasn’t already been accomplished by decades of increasing restrictions, villainization, and even trampling on the freedoms of private enterprises like restaurants and bars. Apparently, for example, Camden County, one of the most violently dangerous places in America, now treats tobacco in public like alcohol — open cartons or packs of cigarettes are regarded the same as open containers of alcohol, subject to immediate arrest and fine. We haven’t gone THAT far yet, said the mayor. Yet?

Pressed by Dom on the advisability of allowing fourth graders to set public policy based on infantile emotions, the mayor perorated on the dangers of secondhand smoke, even in the outdoors, at distances of hundreds of feet. Although he kept returning to his main point that children shouldn’t have to witness such offensive behavior.

Of course, Dom is also a nonsmoker, and he was at pains to point out that it’s a vile and unattractive habit (just so we’re clear here), but he hung his whole argument on the question, “Since when did we start letting kids be decision makers on matters of public policy?”

Whereupon I sent him the following email:

When did we start making kids decision makers? When we decided that it was okay for pubescent girls to get birth control pills, abortions and morning after pills without parental consent. Which they know about because we start teaching them how to have sex in what public school grade? We have an epidemic of STDs among young people, which can be far more catastrophic than smoking. The anti smoking demonization is just a bandaid that enables the morally empty to feel superior. Probably taught by the same teachers that instruct them in the how to’s of sex acts. Amazing hypocrisy.

I could have gone on. If the new measure is what offends our eyes and instilled prejudices, there are plenty of things I don’t like to look at. Things I wouldn’t want any child or grandchild of mine exposed to in public. I am disgusted by the fact that I can’t attend a sporting event or a public gathering of any kind without hearing a constant flow of obscenities and scatologies. I don’t enjoy seeing the grossly obese, who are suddenly everywhere around us. I’m repelled by the way most people dress in public, sweats, pajama bottoms, boxer shorts hanging off the ass, thongs pointing at half exposed asses, the blizzard of tattoos, the violence of facial body piercings, and the slovenly mommies who parade everywhere inside the armor of their ill-mannered mommitude and the brats in their wake. I’ve seen children destroy retail store displays while their mothers blithely lead them away from the wreckage, which is somebody else’s job to clean up. I’ve seen kids barely above toddler age cuss out their parents like drunken sailors. The sheer loutishness of people who occupy the whole path, the whole aisle, loafing along as if there really is nobody on earth but them. People who don’t say thank you or even look at you when you hold the door open for them. Should I insist that all these be made crimes too? Maybe I should. But I’m a smoker. The only lower rung on today’s PC ladder is racist. I must deserve what I get.

But we’re all used to, even comfortable with, this state of affairs, right? In a world with no standards of any kind, smokers are a convenient and even necessary evil to be used as excuses for indignation and humiliation. They violate the last remaining vestige of a moral code, namely, that their open vice is something we can all recognize and collectively condemn. Coke, meth, and heroin users hide in corners. Even drinkers indulge their vice in bars or other private realms. Smokers light up right in front of us. The nerve. The absolutely golden opportunity to tell them to their faces how virtuous people feel…

Call after call. “Well, I’m a nonsmoker, and I can’t stand…” Fill in the blanks as you wish.

I’m sure a lot of you feel the same way. But that leads me to the climax of my argument. Most of the opprobrium aimed at smokers is based on exaggeration, disinformation, or outright falsehood. More than a little bit like Global Warming and other politically correct causes.

I’ve got real scientific evidence, but I’ll begin anecdotally. Which is certainly both permitted and prized in today’s relativist universe. My dad died of lung cancer. Good reason for me to stop being such a fool, right? He quit smoking when he was 40, cold turkey, but the dread disease hit him in his late seventies. My mother never quit. She regarded it as weight control. After childbirth, her mother ballooned to 180 pounds and stayed there, eventually incapacitated by the weight. (She was 5’1″.) My mother lived to be 82 and in all that time her weight remained between 100 and 110 pounds. That was a trade she was willing to make. She died of old age.

No, I’m not suggesting that this is a medical argument. Rather that it is consistent with other trends that can be and in fact have been documented. I have three points on these matters. [I’d like to have quoted from the sources I’ll link below, and I mulled doing this at the other site on that account, but I trust you, here, to read.]

We’ve traded smokers for a population of the obese. Who are subject in rapidly increasing numbers to the perils of Diabetes, a disease that frequently ends in blindness, amputations, and premature death. And you look much worse throughout.

Obesity Accounts for 21 Percent of US Healthcare Costs.

National Diabetes Statistics. (The numbers are staggering. Just look through this…)

Blaming lung cancer almost exclusively on smoking is a near criminal act. Why the discrepant experiences of my mom and dad caused me to do some weird research a long time ago. I searched out an almanac dated 1948 for the purpose of finding the incidence of death by diseases of the lung. Back then, almost everyone smoked. You could look it up. It was way down on the list. Lung cancer wasn’t even broken out separately. You see, I’d always suspected my dad’s cancer might have had something to do with inhaling rich mixtures of aircraft fuel in WWII.

Smoking down, lung cancer up. (Hmmm. Are smokers being blamed for a bigger problem they help make invisible? You decide.)

Finally. Secondhand smoke. This is the real nanny state postulate. MY smoking gives YOU cancer. If you can even smell it, it’s killing you. Which gives you the right to tell me how to live my life.

Science and Secondhand Smoke.

Dubious. If not completely idiotic.

Oh. Almost forgot the graph up top. (Sorry it’s blurry. Best I could do. I’ll get better…) The anatomy of a social engineering propaganda campaign. Scientific malpractice. Two of the variables, male and female smokers, are keyed to the left hand legend, percent of population (UK). The two other variables, lung cancer deaths by sex, are keyed to the right hand legend, deaths per 100,000. The visual message of the graph is that men and women who smoked died of lung cancer because the curves track so closely on the graph. Not so. In 1976, the first year of the lung cancer tracking, the percentage of male smokers who died of lung cancer was 0.0011 per year. Hell. Multiply it by 50. That’s 5.5 percent. But now look at the female curves. As female smoking is declining, their death by lung cancer rates are escalating. Strong correlation between smoking and lung cancer? You tell me.

And what does this tell you about the risks of secondhand smoke? Not that many smokers actually die of lung cancer. Why would nonsmokers be at any statistically significant risk whatever? Because they don’t like the smell.

I don’t like the smell of tarty perfumes, jock colognes, or deodorant tampons (not kidding — I always know and I much prefer nature). But I don’t believe they’re giving me cancer.

And need I point out the mortality statistics of male homosexuals in the 1980s? Or the ominous statistics of STDs that are newly and perhaps invulnerably resistant to antibiotics? There’s a new race on. We need to discover a brand new high tech antibiotic to prevent gonorrhea from becoming a fatal disease in a matter of days. Did conservative Dom know or make any of these points? No. He accepts the immense weight of the propaganda almost without question.

Smokers are the pariahs. Even our defenders can’t think of any arguments beyond our pathetic ghettoization, which doesn’t seem quite right, no matter why. Not even the absurdity of demonizing smokers while the public schools who teach kids to spit at them are happy to teach fellatio via banana exercises and promote gay marriage as if it were the threshold of humanistic paradise.

I’ll stick with this stark reminder of the evils of smoking, thank you.

No love. No mercy. Nothing but my loud and sickeningly ugly and monstrous whims.

I call it pinhead atheism. If there’s a God, he’s a cruel idiot because we know better what he should be doing. God as asshole.

The Muslims have the market cornered on this kind of divinity. Why, I think, the secularists and atheists are so protective of Islam. Allah is the poster child for god haters. As long as Muslims are stoning rape victims, erasing the identities of their wives and daughters, murdering gays, and blowing up everyone who disagrees with a permanent state of theocratic tyranny, they are the best possible argument against religion of any kind. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. No other major religion on earth has such a vicious, vindictive, violent, and vengeful god or pantheon. No other religion is starting or trying to provoke religious wars. But the American left, led by Obama, can’t find enough excuses for Islam’s unending list of contemporary crimes. How convenient. How clever. How seditious. How erudite and elite of them.

What they like most of all is that Allah is simply a different incarnation of the God of the Old Testament. They tell the same stories. Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac fathered the Jews, Ishmael the Arabs. Same family tree, right? If the one is completely fucked, the other must be, too. The same way all three brothers in the Rahm Emmanuel family are evil, foul-mouthed pricks. Nobody as perfect as the mythical Jesus could have emerged from THAT gene pool.

What gets left out, of course, is that God may still be playing to the low information voters none of the smart people care about. It’s not like low information voters have ever folded their tents and slunk away. In the case of the U.S., certain of the low-information crowd have actually managed to gain control of the dialogue.

Why an amazingly primitive metaphor might still work. The God of the Old AND New Testaments is the Harlem Globetrotters. Allah is the Washington Generals.

Perfect, isn’t it? The post-modern egalitarian relativists think the Washington Generals are equally entitled to, well, everything. Just because they always lose doesn’t mean they’re disposable.

Except that they are. Disposable, I mean. Of course they are. The Washington Generals exist only as a silly opposing force to the Harlem Globetrotters. Islam? It’s only a silly if incredibly violent, murderous, and oppressive opposing force to Christianity. The Isaac-Ishmael connection is key. By choosing Ishmael, Muslims have turned the meaning and intentions of God on their head.

The Jewish tradition led to law, morality, civilization, and ultimately to a compassionate culture which demarked a difference between faith and state. The Muslim tradition led to conquest, genocide, and religion AS state AND law. Sharia. With innumerable death penalties and unspeakable non-lethal cruelties besides. The Muslim tradition may have had a few brief moments of brilliance in the past, but there is no Muslim Shakespeare, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Bach, Pasteur, Mozart, Voltaire, Locke, Jefferson, Lincoln, Mark Twain, Einstein, or Gershwin.

Islam is not the hoped for example of the evils of religion. It is a vivid and shockingly obvious example of religion faked by an aggressive, malicious tyrant.

I’m a writer. All I am, really. The one thing I can tell you for sure: the Koran is phony scripture, copied from the Bible by people of lesser talent. Its structure sucks, its imagery is imitative where it’s not nonexistent. It’s more like a badly executed writing assignment foisted on an untalented staff of political toadies than a work of, uh, divine revelation.

Find me anything in the Koran that reaches the poetic heights of Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, Mark, or John. Nothing. It’s all pedestrian, mediocre drivel elevated only by its pretensions.

And the God that is Allah is, uh, a God upside down, cast in darkness from above and lit only from underneath, by the adoration of death minded followers.

I can only wonder why nobody else has ever stated these obvious facts.

Upside down or upside up? You tell me. But which of us is lit from above? Actually, there’s a right answer to this one. It hangs on the wall at the end of my upstairs hall. The light from above is a chandelier. THIS is right side up.

Can’t bear to open my eyes to the extent of the perfidy. The me of this site. At 60 I desperately want to believe in goodness.

I wanted so much to get away from politics. Shades of Godfather 3. I keep getting drawn back in. I’m working on a big new post at the other site. Could take me a couple of days because it’s SO big.

Maybe I’m just kidding myself. Ultimately, there’s a reason why some are deerhounds, seeming dumb but somehow dangerous. You know. The concept of the elemental, ancient, and savage.

My plan had been a post here about azaleas. Now I’m back to Raebert at his most unpredictable, meaning, of course, at his most predictable. I don’t want to be. But I’m still that guy. Forgive me.

Problem is, I know exactly what’s going on, what’s wrong, and how wrong it is.

At one level it’s idiotically simple. But people never believe simple. They want subtle, complex, and sophisticated. The people who understand the wisdom of idiotically simple will know ahead of time what I’m working on. The people who need sophisticated, clever, and slick will have to wait. That takes time. Even for idiot deerhounds.

I hate it when he gets like this.

But I still have to be the other guy. Somebody has to.

Somebody tweaked me, not wholly unfairly: Don’t Close Your Eyes. Out of context but not out of the ballpark. Well, not altogether anyway. I’m a fan of Keith Whitley. Elemental, savage, and doomed. Affinity is destiny. In some respects. Then again, there’s always hope. The more things stay the same, the more we triumph. Not everyone gets saved, but life has always been a fatal proposition. And, you know, if you can’t believe in God, how can you possibly believe in breasts?

Sorry. I guess that would be one more vulgar Scottish philosophical observation. Not Kantian at all. The Germans and the Russians have done so much to advance philosophy. Marxism. Nazism. Objectivism. I prefer to believe in breasts. Which I try to keep in check by believing first and foremost in Christianity. Although a hand on a female breast is the closest any of us males ever get to God.

Why my eyes remain closed.

Until Shane returns tomorrow or the next day. At the other site.

Orteil du Chameille. French. Cool. Translate.

Not trying to shock anybody. I thought the Gosnell trial would end today as a kind of Mother’s Day message. It didn’t. From what the jury has asked of the judge, it looks as if they haven’t even gotten to the Gosnell charges yet. Still dealing with the flunkies, factotums, and stooges who propped up this charnel house.

There’s been other relevant news. Cher’s mom shared that she was sitting in a chair in an abortion waiting room when she decided she couldn’t go through with it. That’s the micro. At the macro level, we have word of a virulent new strain of gonorrhea, completely resistant to antibiotics, that can kill people dead in days. While we continue to make it easier and easier for girls to get morning after pills with no parental knowledge or consent. The important thing above all being that they simply must be free to fuck to their heart’s content. Which serves who exactly?

Libertarian, right? Progressive. Post-Christian modernism, right? Right?

We’re all just supposed to accept that our precious daughters, whom we’d do absolutely anything to protect unless the government disapproves, are being taught to have sex as soon and often as possible. Institutionally approved sex education is about how, not if, or, perish the thought, how not.

So don’t take the link I’m offering. It’s not about any four letter word. And it’s filtered by Google’s “strict” setting. Meaning it’s not explicit or even moderately offensive. It’s harmless, well in line with acceptable cultural norms, whatever they are. But guess what. It gives us a portrait of our daughters. Not all, but way too many. And even your virtuous daughters are friendly with these girls, texting them and learning from them. Ignore me if you prefer. But this is what the millennial generation of young women has become. Staggering percentages of them have sexually transmitted diseases. So much so that antibiotics are simply ceasing to work. Many of them are going to die before they even get to an abortion mill.

The Link.

The so-called smart people want you to turn a blind eye. No man can. Every man knows how provocative this is. When will you stand up and say no? Ever?

Or do we just love NASCAR?

We dig racing. Deeply.

I did nothing. Noth-ing.

We went to the vet today. Bordatella shots for all the dogs because we’ll be going away at some point in the next few weeks. The hardest thing for my wife to understand about deerhounds is that they aren’t just bigger, hairier greyhounds. So we had Raebert, Molly, and Eloise in the office all at once, transported in two cars no less. Everything was cool. A vet tech leaned over the gate and said mirthfully, “And a partridge in a pear tree.”

Then a cranky old male golden lab came in and looked crosswise at Raebert. Who said something back. Something Scottish. My wife was horrified. We shushed him. He subsided. He’s twice everybody’s size, you see. No hint of aggression can be tolerated. But he knows that because he’s a smart boy. Why he got A’s in obedience school, even if he forgets his manners now and again.

Then they’d had their shots and I took the sighthounds out to the car while my wife did the business part with Eloise in tow. But no sooner had we reached the top of the steps than we saw, at the bottom of the steps, a gorgeous young Swiss Mountain dog. He took one look at Raebert and did that aggressive male bark we’ve all learned to recognize and dread. “Who. And. What. The. Hell. Are. You?”

Oh God, I’m thinking. You really really don’t want to know. We had an escape route. A ramp, a 40 ft detour to avoid the steps. I led Raebert and Molly down the slick first half, and the slicker second half in the opposite direction. Raebert was absolutely cool. Molly was only a little frantic, the way she always is at the vet’s.

I didn’t tell my wife right away that the ramp caused the leashes to get fouled and when I went to put them in the car Molly got out of her collar because Raebert had his leash wrapped around him to the point no one but Molly could move. “Molly, stay,” I commanded. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Why I was able to slip the collar back on her while I belatedly stood on Raebert’s loose leash. Everything under control except my heart…

“What a gorgeous Swissie!” my wife told me when she returned with Eloise.

I’m just reporting here. Raebert didn’t go all Braveheart on anyone and Molly didn’t bolt like a deer into the trafficky suburbs. Total victory. And Eloise was a little angel for the whole ride up and back.

Why my weekend is already a complete triumph.