Available on Netflix. It’s a Must Watch movie. It helped me see.

I know I get tiresome repeating my term Serendicity, which is a combination of serendipity and Carl Jung’s synchronicity. But I harp on it because it’s such a standard part of my experience. When I ask myself a question I cannot answer, the universe gives me a hint from an unexpected direction. Not that I always know how to interpret the hint.

Where we are today. I’ve been ping ponging for weeks between two discrepant concepts. There’s the Egyptian concept of ‘Maat,’ which underlay their whole civilization, the idea that all things must be held together in a whole that keeps the world from flying apart. The symbolic purpose of the pyramids was to be a physical demonstration of Maat. Why the Egyptians tried very hard for thousands of years to do things the same way. Every man, no matter how humble, was part of the base of the pyramid that made the world continue to exist. Lately, though, I feel — with my weird sense of interconnections among all manner of things — that it’s all coming unglued. I start to see daylight, and scary other light, where there should be solid joins. Imagine a pyramid starting to separate, block from block and layer from layer. Through the expanding gaps you see, uh, what kind of light?

The other concept is Nietzche’s theory that everything repeats EXACTLY, in a kind of vicious whirlpool, or even tornado, of experience. And, lately, it feels like repetitions are occurring in my lifetime that I would have thought required centuries to circle back on and around the past. As the circle tightens it throws off sparks, a different kind of scary light, so many sparks that the whole begins to shimmer and distort, as if you cannot believe what your eyes are telling you. Maybe these are small circles of similarity nested inside Nietzche’s grander theory, a kind of proof. No actual logic explains this kind of insanity. I shake my head.

Together, the two concepts seem like a philosophical paradox, a superposition of the immovable object and the irresistible force that have somehow merged to ensure our destruction.

I have a physical sense of this, a simultaneous feeling that it is all flying apart AND imploding, like a collapse into a black hole, both at the same time.

As a born motorhead, I know something about speed. But I cannot wrap my head around the astonishing acceleration of this phenomenon. I cannot catch my breath. I cannot find a powerful enough metaphor. Therefore, I cannot write intelligently about it. Why, I suppose, I have so many apocalyptic dreams, however prosaic.

The sky is falling, almost literally, and yet everything goes on as before. The contradictions mount, the absurdities climb to new and unbelievable heights, and hardly anyone seems to notice the widening gap between reality and rhetoric.

It was less than a quarter century ago that the most massive attempt to organize society in accordance with Marx fell completely apart. Yet today, the hottest ticket in so-called progressive circles is a French Marxist named Piketty. Collectivist, centrally managed economies don’t work. But people who are presumed to be smart are panting to do it all over again.

Science has been transmuted to a religion, and unproven theories are promulgated like a gospel that seeks Inquisition-like punishments for those who dare not to believe. Those who are skeptical of ‘climate change’ are called deniers, recalling the language once used to describe people who pretended there was never a Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. Scientists — yes, scientists — argue seriously that people who do not accept their proclamations about climate change should be silenced or even imprisoned.

While, at the same time, people who use these same words and arguments have no problem comparing the historical victims of that factual holocaust to the Nazis who committed it.

Pig on the wing, by Roger ‘Himmler’ Waters.

And they see no reason to silence — despite their silencing mood — people who would compound the sins of the past by engaging in real holocaust denial.

In Philly. Mayor Nutter is irate about climate change deniers. Holocaust deniers not so much.

This is at least marginally okay for some reason. Okay to make the Jew cry. Why? Because we’re used to seeing Jews cry? We like to see Jews cry? A little more than half a century is enough time to pretend that we don’t all basically hate the Jews?

Or is it a convenient mechanism for preparing ourselves against the day when Iran nukes Israel? They had it coming. How do you feel? I’m on record.

What goes on in our little heads? Why I posted the movie trailer above. Scots and Jews are both Chosen People. As small as their populations are, they embody the best and worst of all of us. Why I have no problem using the Jews to ask questions about how we think or don’t think, how we act or don’t act, in the face of truly terrifying circumstances.

The movie is about Hannah Arendt, a brilliant Jewish philosopher who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial for the New Yorker. Eichmann was the chief operations officer for the organization that transported Jews from all over Europe to the death camps. The Israelis captured him in 1961 and put him on trial without what you would call legal jurisdiction.

Hannah Arendt was herself a survivor of a French internment camp, as well as the former lover of Martin Heidegger, an eminent German philosopher who disgraced himself by joining the Nazi Party. Both facts are more or less irrelevant to Arendt’s controversial appraisal of what she witnessed in the Eichmann trial. Which was that Eichmann was not the arch-villain the press and his prosecutors made him out to be. He was merely a bureaucrat, a mediocrity, who had no moral basis for guilt because he did not, could not, think.

She coined the term “The Banality of Evil.” She also proposed that Jewish leaders of the time were complicit in the holocaust by not doing enough, not resisting enough. For which she was savagely attacked by Jews and others. She received death threats. Lifelong friends turned their backs on her.

Both of the causes of the vituperation against Arendt are still in play today. For example, days before I saw this movie I saw a modern incarnation of Eichmann in the button-eyed pup who uttered the “Dude, it was like two years ago” riposte to Bret Baier. Different cause perhaps. Not obedience but pure dumb-ass narcissism. Same result. No thinking going on. Not really human. Anyone who’s seen Lois Lerner sitting blank faced in a congressional hearing has seen Eichmann. Probably, you have Eichmanns where you work. The result doesn’t have to be death. It’s just that in the right (wrong) organization, death can be the result; it would all be the same to them.

And Jews are still complicit in the gathering peril of Israelis. Intellectual Jews who fund and support and write vehemently on Obama’s behalf despite his evident anti-semitism, to which they are willfully and idiotically blind. Which is, despite all the intellectual and educational credentials in the world, another manifestation of Eichmann syndrome. They think they are thinking, they’re sure they’re some of the best thinkers in the world, but what they regard as thinking is to real thinking what masturbation is to loving conjugal sex. And there’s no part of them that can ever learn the difference.

Where are you in this picture? Do you feel the pyramid flying apart? Do you feel yourself inside the accelerating maelstrom, the circle? Can you hear the echoes from our impending future? Or do you just not think about it? Think about this if you can. And this. And feel this (Not for children, VERY graphic).

Meager soundtrack with that. Here’s a better one. Thinking and feeling are more closely related than most smart people imagine.

P.S. This just in: Holocaust a hoax, according to California schoolteachers? How far from the yellow star? That rumble you hear is the fundament crumbling in fear.

Hadrian’s Wall. Meant to keep the Scots OUT of Roman Britain. The Romans were afraid of just how easily highlanders could kill, well, anyone. And they enjoyed it as much as if they were Romans.

A post that’s not politically correct. I’m getting ready to talk about Jews, which is always controversial, but they will understand that I am doing so from the standpoint of the one tribe that is as old as they are, as accomplished, and as continuously distinct.

They’ll also understand my claim that we are better. They won’t agree. But they’ll have to consult their notes.

You won’t find two older tribes. The Jews invented morality with their Ten Commandments. We invented capitalism. And the steam engine and television. Anyone want to take a vote? I kid.

But the Jews also invented surviving by running away, having a “diaspora,” and sulking a lot. We just kept getting in the other guy’s face, never leaving home, and constituting a constant threat to the stability of the greatest military on earth from one century to the next, permanently outnumbered and never giving a shit.

We had some dopey clerics. They had some dopey experimentalists who called themselves psychologists, philosophers, and geniuses while we were building the industrial revolution. And our lawyers are every bit as nasty and ruthless as theirs.

Scots were some of the first robber barons and philanthropists. Jews were the first Hollywood moguls. Want to compare?

There’s no category in which we don’t win till you get to physics. The Uncertainty Principle has not and never will be understood by any Scot. Except that we’ve always known it’s impossible to know who’s playing the bagpipe without knowing that the bagpipe is also playing the piper. Which is called Scottish Quantum Physics.

Jews have been hounded through the ages. Scots have too. Both are the targets of conspiracy theorists. Ireland and Britain continue to be terrified by whatever might be going on at Roslyn Chapel. The Jews, unfortunately, lost track of their primary temple some time ago.

Not that we’re competing. Except that as the two most ancient surviving tribes, they’re bound to compete. And have some of the same attributes. You think Jews are tight? You never saw my mother computing the tip to the third decimal point.

Thing is, Scots are superior. No matter what’s happening now. For more than a thousand years the Jews tried to assimilate, to run, to hide. That whole time, the Scots were trying to beat the holy shit out of England. Which somebody had to do, and the Irish weren’t up for it because nobody had invented pipe bombs and remote controlled car explosives yet.

Am I being impolite? Not sorry. Sick of political correctness. I come from the oldest, smartest, strongest tribe that owns billions of pounds in assets on earth. Jews have oranges and camo. I congratulate them. But there’s much more to be done.

Stay tuned.

Courtesy of Oscar Wilde, of course. Dorian Gray had a painting of himself he didn’t want to look at. Me too. The idea was that whatever he did it wouldn’t show on his face. Everyone in Hollywood would pay millions for that benefit. But the painting would pay.

I did all that awful depraved stuff and now I’m only 160 and I already have a beard and specs. It sucks. Oscar and I have to have a talk. Not Google glasses btw. Just my hologram chip. I see 3-D through all your clothes. But only with my right eye.

Except that the painting in my closet looks like this.

I been really really bad over the years. But you knew that.

(Actually, I’ve been working all day on a major post I couldn’t bring home due to technical difficulties. Come back tomorrow. As soon as I can get the links sorted out you’ll have something real, not fluff, to think about.)

The new show is called Outnumbered. Exactly the same as The View. Women talking over each other, allowing no one to get a word in edgewise.

Shows how wrong I can be about a prediction. (I predicted to my wife that given the lineup it could be Fox News’s smartest show.) Women who have intellect don’t understand the responsibility it entails. It’s just one more weapon in their arsenal. Smile, tits, legs, smarts. I think that’s the right order.

Pretty much fed up with all women but my wife. And Sarah. (I exaggerate for effect. Because I’m a blogger.)

Sad to say. But they’re all beauties, dontcha know.

Our host. Harris Faulkner.

Jedediah Bila. The smartest of the lot.

Kirsten Powers. Glorious liberal.

Katie Pavlich. One of the last three investigative reporters in the country. The other two are also women.

Andrea Tantaros . The Greek. How can The View answer this?

Sandra Smith. Business network girl.

Kimberly Guilfoyle. The Irish have no shame. I’ll prove it in a second.

Yeah, today she looks like a vampire. But she’s one of those ‘former federal prosecutors’ all women are these days. Only she once looked like this.

Only Fox News can bring it like this.

So their opening show didn’t work out so well. It happens every day at noon. Maybe I’m being too hard on them. Not a big fan of female intellect. But you knew that going in. And you should know for a fact that my candidate for president is Sarah Palin.

And, rarely for me, I don’t care at all about her smile, tits, legs, et cetera. I do wish she would learn to lower her voice, That would be a huge plus. Just saying.

Yeah. The water boarding thing. Not as upsetting as progs would like it to be.

Jeb. Boring RINO with more baggage than anyone could overcome.

Huckabee. Nobody wants an evangelistic corncob.

Rand Paul. This one makes me mad. Conservatives are supposed to be judges of character. Creepy. Adolescent in his foreign policy. I’d actually vote for Hillary first. Or, more likely, stay home. (Stop it! He’s the worst wrong turn we could make!)

Rick Perry. Two dumb presidents in a row. Don’t need a third.

Mike Pence. Probably a good man. But dull. Dull doesn’t work anymore.

Bobby Jindal. Make a decent president. Can’t be elected. Looks like Mole from Wind in the Willows.

Ted Cruz. Not his cycle. Too smart for his opposition, but also probably too smart for his own good.

Chris Christie. Fuggeddaboutit..

Others. Well, there is only one:

I am declaring today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

I know a lot of you think I’m too damaged as a politician to run. I would argue I’m the best to run. The Democrats and the left have already expended all their ammunition against me. They have questioned everything about me, including whether I’m the mother of my fifth child. War on women? I am the survivor. Still here.

I know I’m supposed to be inexperienced. Hillary Clinton is supposed to be experienced. She went to Wellesley and Yale Law School. She was the First Lady of Arkansas. Cool. She was the wife of the President of the United States. Cool. She tried out an early version of ObamaCare in congress, but nobody wanted it. She ran for president and lost. To the worst president we have ever had in the history of the nation. She was the Secretary of State and cannot name a single accomplishment in that office. Other than a million frequent flyer miles.

So you want her now because after throwing the dice and having lost on purely politically correct grounds, we have another PC opportunity — this time to elect a female president. Who should, somehow, be Hillary.

Time for some confessions. I didn’t go to any Ivy League universities. I’m not one of the ordained political class which knows it has the right to rule the rest of you. None of my fathers or uncles or grandfathers are ex-Presidents, senators or heirs of Standard Oil or U.S. Steel. None of my family went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Sorry if I don’t feel at all sad about that. Actually, I’m proud. Ronald Reagan went to a place called Eureka College. He never got the memo that America was supposed to be run by the elite sons and daughters of the most expensive schools. Neither did I.

I’m just the only person in the race who has ever been on the ticket for the vice presidency of the United States. Do you imagine that’s not an experience? State to state, town to town, hearing what everybody has to say? Hillary did it as a candidate for the nomination. I did it as a candidate for the Vice Presidency. I was a governor. She was a First Lady, a do nothing senator — name one bill that has her name on it — and a do nothing Secretary of State — name one thing she accomplished more than the million miles she traveled other than the death of four Americans in Benghazi. We all know her famous ad about three in the morning. Where was she at three in the morning on that night? Where was Obama? No questions on those two points have EVER been answered.

Here’s what I’ve learned. The War on Women isn’t by Republicans. It’s by Democrats. I use contraception. I buy it for a few dollars a month. Since more attention has been focused on my female functions than any national candidate ever in history, permit me to tell you, I have never intended to be impregnated by every single instance of relations with my husband. I have five children. I am more invested in the future than Hillary will ever be.

Killing babies is what career politicians can stomach. Not what I can.

I know a lot of you have been taught I’m simple minded. Uneducated. Ignorant. A loose cannon. What we need now are professionals, right? Professionals. You elected Barack Obama president, who never governed anything and has spent six years proving he will never be able to govern anything. Professional?

Now many of you want Hillary, who has also never governed anything, and in the few positions she has held can claim no accomplishments. Professional? No.

I have been a governor. As well as a mayor. I sometimes value the latter more than the former. You hear what’s bothering people. It focuses you a lot.

I’m not running for president because it was always my destiny, my birthright. I’m running because I love my country. Because I love all of you. Because our nation is in dire peril. And I can do something about it.

I have queued up three titles: the Ascendancy of Women I, II, and III.

Short circuiting all that. Part I was supposed to be the sickly performance of Laura Ingraham on her talk radio show. Creature of the inside the beltway crowd. She dissed Charles Krauthammer by telling him he was flat-out wrong for disputing her theory that Jeb Bush would be the 2016 Republican nominee. Odd. You could actually hear him adjusting downward his appraisal of her intelligence.

Then (Part II) I was going to highlight Ingraham’s love-love interview with David Gregory’s wife, Clare Shipman (compound conflict of interest never mentioned), wherein Shipman asseverated that women lack confidence because they crayon inside the lines and never learn that taking risks is part of the success game. The worry wart of their brains is also bigger. Aw. Except that, contradictorily, as a woman you also have to learn to defy your kinder, better instincts and accept risk, because that’s what testosterone does for men. Like some drug that distorts appropriate perception. Especially in white men. Life would be better if women were in charge.

Why, no doubt, Ingraham said, “Does this mean we women are better?” Answer: “Yes. We have better values.”

The female advantage? Caution. Empathy. And, uh, rumination.

Excuse me. Rumination? Shipman said men in her studies show men don’t ruminate as much. Like Kant, Freud, Jung, Einstein, Buddha, and Jesus? Yeah we don’t talk as much. Some — not all of us — are thinking. Which women show few signs of doing except when men are watching.

Here’s the sad thing. Legal education is almost completely about crayons not being inside the lines. Why all truly great attorneys are on the defense, and all women are ‘former federal prosecutors.’ The many many women who now have law degrees can never understand male minds. Which are not about worrying, nurturing, or any of the other female virtues but piercing through to the infinite. Which has never interested women. Why women, who congratulate themselves endlessly on being superior, have no idea.

Why we’re not still in caves living hand to mouth. Why Stonehenge got built. Why the pyramids got built. According to Clare Shipman and Laura Ingraham, superior female nurturing would have resulted in more empathy, fewer wars, and the traditionally virtuous 30 year life span. Which would beat menopause, n’est-ce pas? And all those hot flashes.

If only men were better behaved…

Let my wife tell you about the superiority of women. She’ll set you straight. Women are the dude, man!

The ongoing battle to hear.

Rush Limbaugh has been off the air for a week. Today he’s back. He got a second cochlear implant, this time in the other ear. He’s sunny and jovial as usual, but it’s a grim battle he’s been fighting for more than a dozen years, and there’s no guarantee he will win it.

He filled us in during his opening monologue. His deafness was caused by an immune disorder. His brain identified the cilia on which hearing depends as a disease to be exterminated. Thirteen years ago he went stone deaf and yet continued his show for months without being able to hear his own voice. Doctors assured him that eventually his speech would become that of a person born deaf, a detectable slur that would end his career. The profession saving answer was a cochlear implant in his left ear, which involves drilling into the skull, removing all the organs of hearing, and replacing them with a prosthetic that operates in a much more limited frequency than a natural ear can process. They left the right ear alone because an implant is irreversible, and maybe there would be a cure someday.

Two things. There will be no cure in his lifetime. And the first implant has been gradually deteriorating. So he had the remaining hearing organs in his brain drilled out and replaced. He’s in the studio today, swaddled in bandages like, as he says, “Claude Rains in The Invisible Man,” and the second implant hasn’t been turned on yet.

There’s a chance it won’t work at all. His right brain has been asleep with respect to processing sounds for 13 years. It might not wake up. No one knows whether it will or not.

I know his enemies will gloat and hope loudly and scatologically for the worst. I’m sure the prospect of a stentorian conservative broadcaster silenced in the end by the ironic sentence of deafness will be risible to the evil ones who consider themselves the arbiters of all things good. But everyone could learn from what Rush shared about the experience of becoming wholly deaf.

Rush explained what very few could. Nothing prepares you for absolute silence. You can imagine blindness by closing your eyes. You cannot imagine deafness. He relates, humorously, that old friends still whisper to him on the golf course, in the wrong ear, even though he cannot detect whispering in his prosthetic ear either. People, he laughs, simply cannot comprehend this kind of disability.

Almost clinically, he describes the nature of the hearing he has enjoyed for the past decade. Only memory makes it work at all. The sound that gets through to him is like a low-Watt AM radio station skipping from Idaho to your transistor set in the small hours of night, staticky, dim, and flat. He cannot recognize a melody without knowing the song first. His memory fills in the blanks in that case. Which means there can be no such thing as new music. Ever.

He cannot identify the location or origin of any sound. Unless he can relate the movement of a mouth with what his implant relays to him, he has no way of knowing who is speaking. And there is no conscious screening, dampening or heightening function. Have you ever heard a tape recording of a conference room meeting you attended? If so, you’d know better what it’s like. It’s incomprehensible, totally alien from your recollection of the event. Suddenly you hear chairs scraping, voices overlapping like a wall of background chatter, the clatter of coffee cups, the continuous ruffle of paper things, and individual voices sound like they come from the bottom of a well. The difference between the recording and your memory is your brain, which subtly turns down the volume on background noise and turns up the volume on the targets of your attention.

The prosthetic is the tape recorder. Unless Rush remembers the voice of the person he’s talking to, everyone “sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

I won’t feel sorry for him. Because he refuses to feel sorry for himself. And if worse comes to worst, he will find some way to prevail.

But I do admire his candor, resolve, and extraordinary good humor in the face of this adversity. And what can only be described as bravery.

If you have online radio on your Internet device, look up this broadcast. At the least it’s educational. At best it’s inspirational.

The very best of luck to you, Rush Limbaugh. I hope you can all join me in that sentiment.

Two injured men. A grief that should be universal. Is it? No. Because universality itself has been hijacked by the pussy know-it-alls in charge.

Where were we? I’ve been putting this off because the right order is elusive. When everything is wrong, upside down, tragically ill, where do you start?

Arbitrarily, I suppose. How about with the idea mongers. They don’t think and they hate thought.

Harvard student Sandra Y.L. Korn recently proposed in The Harvard Crimson that academics should be stopped if their research is deemed oppressive. Arguing that “academic justice” should replace “academic freedom,” she writes: “If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom’?”

In other words, Korn would have the university cease to be a forum for open debate and free inquiry in the name of justice, as defined by mainstream liberal academia.

Unfortunately, this is already a reality in most universities across America, where academics and university administrators alike are trying, often successfully, to discredit and prohibit certain ideas and ways of thinking. Particularly in the humanities, many ideas are no longer considered legitimate, and debate over them is de facto non-existent. In order to delegitimize researchers who are out of line, academics brand them with one of several terms that have emerged from social science theory.

How can this be? Their morality is such that they don’t care. Victor Davis Hanson explains.

Why do our well-meaning elites so often worry about humanity in the abstract rather than the real effects of their cosmic ideologies on the majority? The dream of universal health coverage trumped the nightmare of millions of lives disrupted by the implementation of it. Noble lies, with emphatics like “Period!” were necessary to sell something that would hurt precisely those who were told that this was going to be good for them. A myriad of green mandates has led to California’s having the highest-priced gasoline and electricity in the continental United States, a fact that delights utopians in San Francisco and in the long run might help the rest of us, but right now ensures that the poor of the state’s vast, hot interior can scarcely afford to cool their homes or drive to work. Fresno on August 1, after all, is a bit warmer than Berkeley or Menlo Park.

In a word, liberal ideology so often proves more important than people. Noble theories about saving humanity offer exemption from worry about the immediate consequences for individual humans. In a personal sense, those who embrace progressive ideas expect to be excused from the ramifications of their schemes. For the elite who send their kids to prep schools and private academies, public charter schools for the poor are bad, given that they undermine the dream of progressive, union-run education that has turned into a nightmare for those forced to enroll in it.

Recently, pundit Margaret Carlson wrote an op-ed lamenting the fall of Lois Lerner, as if her decline were due to a McCarthyesque hit. But Lerner staged her own dishonest disclosure of impropriety. She set up a phony, preplanned question that might offer her a platform to contextualize her unethical behavior. Despite her protestations that the IRS’s violations all emanated from a rogue office in Ohio, Lerner or her colleagues were in contact with Democratic enablers at the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Justice to find ways to thwart conservative tax-exempt organizations before the 2012 election.

Lerner has sought to obfuscate her improper role at the IRS, pled the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination, and done a great deal of damage to the American notion that government agencies, especially in election years, must remain impartial. It is hard to think of anything that she has testified about that has proved accurate. In addition, Lerner caused hundreds of legitimate members of tax-exempt organizations misery by violating the rules of her own agency. In short, there is no scandal victim less sympathetic than the now-well-retired Lois Lerner, even if the damage she did to innocent others does not register on the liberal scale of sympathy. Apparently, since her politics of wishing to shut down right-wing groups is correct, her morality need not be. Had Carlson been the director of a liberal green group, and had it been denied tax-exempt status by a high-ranking conservative IRS bureaucrat right before the reelection of George W. Bush, and had that functionary been exposed as an ideologue who harmed the reputation of the IRS and took the Fifth Amendment, I doubt that Carlson would now be writing to express worry over his mounting legal fees.

These are profoundly stupid, callous, insulated and ignorant people. Inveterate lefty journalist Al Hunt (whom I despise at a visceral level whenever I see his smug face on TV) drove home the point in a recent column called Why Isn’t Obama’s Good News Getting across?

Here’s a bit of good news for nervous Democrats: President Barack Obama’s health-care law isn’t going to be the albatross many feared it would be in this year’s congressional elections. Enrollment has soared, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the program will cost less than initially projected and that premiums will rise only slightly this year.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid aren’t popping the Champagne, however. The economy could clobber Democrats in November. And the president continues to alternate between telling Americans how much better things are and deploring how many are being left behind.

Both statements are true, but that makes for a message that’s muddled, incoherent and too negative.

The Senate leadership and White House staff have started to meet each week to develop a coordinated economic message for the fall. They have a ways to go.

Politicians see the same poll numbers the news media does. In a recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, the sentiment about the economy showed no positive movement. A Bloomberg national survey last month indicated more pessimism than a year before about the economy, job growth and housing. A majority said they thought health-care costs were getting worse and gave Obama negative marks on health care and the economy.

Congressional Democrats find it especially frustrating that the president doesn’t make a strong and more compelling case for the improvements on his watch. On health care, it isn’t just that 8 million people have signed up for coverage under the law; health-care costs have been growing at the slowest pace in decades.

The Federal Reserve has forecast the economy will grow at a clip of about 3 percent this year, after five years of average growth of less than 2 percent after the financial crisis. Housing has climbed out of its slump, the energy industry is booming, the financial sector has recovered along with lending, and manufacturing is at least crawling, with a vibrant automobile industry.

Compared with the rest of the world, this is a great American comeback story. Europe is struggling; there are increasing worries about China. And Russia, despite its swagger, is an economic basket case, with a gross domestic product smaller than that of Brazil and about the same size as Italy’s.

Cool, Al. Everything’s great where you live. You’re blind but unfortunately not deaf and dumb. Too bad. MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry hasn’t your talent for swallowing your tongue when making ludicrous statements. We get all neck-swaying Oprah telling folks to get used to paying more for their ‘crappy plans.’ A rare moment of honesty.

Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. Which brings us to Global Warming. Progressives are convinced the cause is being submarined by nefarious enterprises.

John Kerry says climate change is the most important issue facing the Secretary of State. Yesterday or so was Earth day. It certainly got left wing Salon Magazine excited.

In the run-up to Earth Day this year, two major reports were released by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the largest such body in the world. On March 31, Working Group II released its report, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, and on April 13, Working Group III released its report, Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Both reports cited substantially more evidence of substantially more global warming and related impacts than past reports have, and they did so more lucidly than in past iterations.

As climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe told Salon, “This time around, to its credit, the IPCC has gotten a lot more serious about improving its ability to communicate the report’s message, through graphics and other ancillary products.” There was also a greater sophistication in how to conceptualize, measure and compare things, even where substantial uncertainties are involved. And there was a substantial list of more than 90 major impacts already recorded on every part of the planet.

Yet, one of the most disturbing stories to emerge around the reports was the New York Times report that language about the need for $100 billion in crisis funds to aid poor nations was removed from the Working Group III executive summary for policymakers during the final round of editing. The action neatly encapsulated the yawning gap between the growing danger of climate change — and growing maturity of climate scientists — on the one hand, and the utter lack of political will on the other.

Arrogance. Humanities majors stomping on scientists who don’t share their political views. Oh? How about an alternative political view or two of Earth Day?

1. There has been no temperature trend over the last 15 years; the actual record has belied the predictions of the models. The past two years have set a record for the fewest tornadoes ever for a similar period, and there has been no trend in the frequency of strong (F3 to F5) tornadoes in the United States since 1950. The number of wildfires is in a long-term decline. It has been eight years since a Category 3 or higher hurricane landed on a U.S. coast; that long a period devoid of an intense hurricane landfall has not been observed since 1900. The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season was the least active in 40 years, with zero major hurricanes.

There has been no trend in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, and tropical cyclone energy is near its lowest level since reliable measurements began by satellite in the 1970s. There has been no change in the long-term trend in sea level. The record of changes in the size of the Arctic ice cover is far more ambiguous than often asserted, because the satellite measurements began at the outset of the warming period from roughly 1980 through 1998. The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895. Flooding in the United States over the last century has not been correlated with increases in greenhouse-gas concentrations. What systematic evidence supports the assertion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) are causing significant adverse effects?

And, finally, Egypt. Back to our title… on the Nile…

Fucked there too, eh? Congratulations, morons.

Should do better. If you can. But I use computers too, as you all know.

Don’t know who he is. Raebert howled. An image in the mirror in my wife’s closet . He wagged one stern finger at me and evaporated. I blame it on Mucinex.

Raebert subsequently claimed abuse. A boot in his face.

Only problem. He never moved. Nobody hurts Raebert without a response. Something caressed him. Something like consciousness. Catch it if you can.

Consciousness is the first thing progressives gave away. Raebert can get his back, as soon as he wakes up. The human versions, not much hope. Why I’m still Josey.

The Outlaw Josey Wales promo from Storylabs on Vimeo.

Have to admit, I’m looking a lot like Josey Wales at the moment. Beard and hair, for sure, and I have the hat, except it’s black. Feeling a lot like him, too. Pissed off.

Sometimes it’s time to get mean.

Why would a rebel keep running, keep fighting? No, I’m not a confederate. No stars and bars on my flagpole. I’m just tired of the Gatling guns of the federal government.

Actually, I’m not talking guns in particular. Not all that interested in the Bundy Ranch standoff. Been there, done that with Waco and Ruby Ridge. Militias against trained federal troops, SWAT teams and the like? That’s a game for people who are just tired of living.

I’m talking about the real Gatling guns. The ones aimed at our minds.

Not that I expect you to see it or react beyond a tut tut. I’m in a Josey Wales frame of mind, which is outside yours, way outside, not judging because you’re trying to hold it all together while the center is dissolving. The Josey thing is knowing and seeing how it all works. Bad men on the loose.

Can I take on four or five at a time? Yes. But that still won’t turn the tide. Here’s what they’ve done and are doing to you: lying so constantly you’re inured to it; accusing you of racism, sexism, etc, so constantly you half believe it’s you not them at fault; acting so superior, so dismissive of your right to disagree about nonsense like global warming that you grow too tired to say, “Oh fuck off;” driving so hard to make your religion seem a perverted, genocidal offense against native human rights and dignity that you just turn away; declaring, declaiming that your opposition to abortion is not only evil but also possibly a fatal embarrassment to the cause of Conservatives everywhere; hectoring and hammering you about life and marriage and day after pills to the point that you feel you’re in the minority, and a shrinking minority at that, when the opposite is true; insisting, strenuously, against all the evidence, that Islam is a religion of peace that poses no threat to you, when you know deep down that Islam is a sickness, all of it and all of them, a machine for creating automatons and murderous states that slaughter their own women as well as any who believe differently. Are you too busy to get as mad as Josey?

All you really have to do is say, “No!” And mean it. Everything they believe is wrong. Every ideal they hold is corrupt.

Time for a metaphor switch. Josey was never in the kind of danger you are. He’d already lost everything. He could afford to walk into ridiculous odds. You need to be finding your inner Neo. The one who can perceive the Matrix and say, “No.”

btw, for all of you tempted to jeer at Keanu Reeves, match this for incentive in a role.

Yes, I’m Josey. Know how to shoot. Far more more important to know how to stop the bullets. Doesn’t matter if they kill me. Much more vital that they lose the power to kill all of you.

Time to explain my title. It’s a joke within a joke. Yes, ‘Da Nile’ is a river. It’s a river they have worshipped, devoted themselves to, promised every necessary sacrifice to. But they, like the ancient Egyptians they so resemble in their rigidity and lack of individuality and perspicacity, got the geography wrong. Completely. Didn’t you know? The Egyptians called the Upper Nile the Lower Nile and vice versa. They had the whole world upside down. Didn’t see it. What we call denial.

I have a dozen or more articles I’ll provide links to and quotes from, tomorrow. You’ll see. Sanctimonious priests of themselves as they are, they have everything upside down, in the face of proof to the contrary. That’s me, Josey, shooting. But you’ve got to become Neo, making their bullets drop helplessly to the floor.

Now to bed. That old Indian is trying to sneak up on me again. And you, look out for Agent Smith.

(If you click on the text, it will get bigger.)

Told you I just got my Hal 9000 iPad. One more today. I’ve written about Robert Benchley before, perhaps too dismissively. He had a self deprecating style of humor that seems oddly piercing today, when everyone pretends to know everything and nobody knows much of anything.

He belonged to the famous Algonquin Round Table, a 1920s cabal of New York writers, critics, and performers who were as talented as, and definitely more witty and scandalous than, the Rat Pack of the Sinatra generation. Names still remembered include New Yorker editor Harold Ross, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woolcott, playwrights George Kauffman, Robert Sherwood, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Marc Connolly, notorious actress Tallulah Bankhead, Harpo Marx, novelist Edna Ferber, et cetera. The first time I went to New York as an adult I walked to the Algonquin and had a drink in the bar. I wanted to feel them sparking. But it was a small sad place after all. All I could feel was them drinking. So I remembered the first one I knew of. Him I could feel. Of them all, Robert Benchley was the good guy.

The Algonquin crowd would have chewed up and spit out the pretenders who publish the New York Times today, as well as what’s left of the New Yorker and other Big Apple publications. They could outdrink everybody, outcurse everybody, outshock, outtalk, and outwrite everybody on the scene today. Mostly, now, I wouldn’t want to meet them. But I would love to see the takedowns. They would be stupendous, memorable, brutal, like Hemingway’s killing of the bull. And then I’d like to sit in the corner and talk about piffle with the nice one.

It’s said the funniest moment ever on Johnny Carson’s 1960s Tonight Show (look it up) was when diminutive comedian George Gobel appeared late, preceded by multiple superstars, and said, “Did you ever feel like everybody else was a tuxedo and you were a brown shoe?” That was Benchley.

Why I thought of the piece above. Sometimes there are simple truths that put us all in our place. Or should. Benchley’s essay “Mind’s Eye Trouble,” excerpted above, is one of those. He admits that his own imagination of great dramas, great things in general, is hostage to a handful of reliable images from his youth.

He speaks of Worcester, Massachusetts. I can speak of Greenwich, New Jersey, in whose backwoods I fought the battles of the Revolution and the Civil War, and much of the secret agent Cold War, with an air-pump popgun and later with a .38 caliber snub nose in a Mattel shoulder holster. The caps sounded convincing in the echo of a viney and tree-laden creek valley that could have been Saratoga, the Wilderness, or the Black Forest. Still, despite my subsequent travels, what I think of first.

Then there was Mercersburg. Brutus and Marc Antony spoke over the dead body of Julius Caesar on the white steps of Main Hall, just three blocks from Jack’s drugstore and the best hot ham hoagies you’ve ever had. Yes, I’ve been to Italy since and the memories overlap, but one place they never will is in the realm of distance measurement.

When I think of a hundred yards, or even a mile, to this day, as old as I am, I am immediately returned to the varsity football field of Mercersburg. I am standing in front of the home scoreboard staring at the opposite goalposts. I can see exactly what a hundred yards looks like. And because what lies beyond that goalpost is rolling open country, I can also see and feel what a mile is.

Benchley was right. We are all imaginationally catalyzed and limited in this way to some degree. Experience is supposed to break us free of what are clearly childish inventions of times and events we did not, could not have witnessed.

I think I can prove we never transcend these elementary touchstones, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves we have. I won’t take a lot of time doing this. In the past year I have had three apocalyptic dreams. One about the arrival of a gigantic spaceship, sinister and overwhelming. One about the detonation of a thermonuclear device. And one about the disintegration of the back half of a town to flakes of rust. In each of these dreams, the apocalypse occurred in the same place — the intersection of Grant and Market Streets in my home town. In each case I was stopped for the light. On the left was Jang’s Dry Cleaners. On the right was St. John’s Parish House. Then it happened.

This picture is the best I can do. It’s from the Internet and not the complete vista. I’d wanted to do a pic myself but I’m just back from a bad couple days and the Hal 9000 is insisting I go with what I have.

Twin it. Looks this way on both sides. Alley of bricks and trees and endless sky beyond.

Hal is insisting because this post is a foundation for a much more difficult and demanding one I’ll have to do tomorrow. It’s about how we have to start understanding the brilliant nitwits who want to put us in a gulag.

Maybe Robert Benchley wasn’t quite the lightweight he always pretended to be. Amazingly, the whole text of his “best” as collected by his son Nathaniel (not to be confused with his grandson Peter Benchley of Jaws fame) can be found here. He died at 56. He was a lot nicer than me. Hemingway was 62. I guess nice has nothing to do with it.

See you tomorrow.