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.

I’ve been mulling the collapse of the CNN brand, only partly in the wake of the ratings fact that more people turned to Fox for the Zimmerman verdict than turned to CNN. There’s also the departure of CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, that drab man-hating crab who suddenly signed with Al Jazeera, which is, you know, the station that had Muslim resignations this week over the pro-Islamist tilt of the network in the latest Egyptian shenanigans. But not Soledad. (She ducked her meeting with former network news colleague Lara Logan, because she has people to see and things to do in her new global career.) How much disgust are we supposed to swallow without dying of stomach cancer? What legitimate news organization would ever have hired her in the first place?

You see, there was a time when people of all stripes did turn to CNN. Especially Headline News. Which just told you, ta da, the headlines.

It made me think of Lynne Russell, the first solo female anchor of a prime time news show. She was on for 18 years and I have no idea what her politics were. She knew, astoundingly, that she was a newsreader, not a guiding political philosopher of the age.

Loved her. She was in a groove. Her outfits and hairdos changed from night to night, she got so practiced she seemed to be gliding into the anchor a chair a moment before the TelePrompTer began running, and often, quite often in fact, her readings had the arch, humorous quality of a woman with a real life who was as amused by the copy she was reading as she expected us to be hearing it.

She wasn’t trying to be above us. She was mirroring us. Only much better dressed and better looking.

Jersey girl, of course. Like many things that have gone away, I miss her. When life was not as grim as a Stalinist reeducation program.

If you youngsters don’t know what you’ve already lost, you have absolutely no chance to get it back. Be thankful for same-sex marriage. Because you’re yoked to Rachel Maddow regardless of your tilt.

I’m just wondering how anybody is going to reach old age without a sense of humor and the knowing smile of a wise woman. Things that are gone, gone, gone.

Somebody has to kill the killers.

Lake was commenting today (via text) on my darkness of late. He used the term “downward spiral.” Which I reminded him applies more directly to our nation and culture. I also reminded him of this Kipling story, about a born killer who has to follow his enemy down the hole no matter how dark it gets.

Rikki-tikki knew that he must catch her, or all the trouble would begin again. She headed straight for the long grass by the thorn-bush, and as he was running Rikki-tikki heard Darzee still singing his foolish little song of triumph. But Darzee’s wife was wiser. She flew off her nest as Nagaina came along, and flapped her wings about Nagaina’s head. If Darzee had helped they might have turned her; but Nagaina only lowered her hood and went on. Still, the instant’s delay brough Rikki-tikki up to her, and as she plunged into the rat-hole where she and Nag used to live, his little white teeth were clenched on her tail, and he went down with her — and very few mongooses, however wise and old they may be, care to follow a cobra into its hole. It was dark in the hole; and Rikki-tikki never knew when it might open out and give Nagaina room to turn and strike at him. He held on savagely, and struck out his feet to act as brakes on the dark slope of the hot, moist earth.

Then the grass by the mouth of the hole stopped waving, and Darzee said: “It is all over with Rikki-tikki! We must sing his death song. Valiant Rikki-tikki is dead! For Nagaina will surely kill him underground.”

So he sang a very mournful song that he made up on the spur of the minute, and just as he got to the most touching part the grass quivered again, and Rikki-tikki, covered with dirt, dragged himself out of the hole leg by leg, licking his whiskers. Darzee stopped with a little shout. Rikki-tikki shook some of the dust out of his fur and sneezed. “It is all over,” he said. “The widow will never come out again.” And the red ants that live between the grass stems heard him, and began to troop down one after another to see if he had spoken the truth.

I’ve been thinking about a post on this topic for a while now. I am no victim of my times. I was raised and trained expressly to do what I do. My father reared me as a cultural warrior. It’s not his fault that building a human mongoose has unintended consequences.

I hunt and kill cobras. What I do. I’m not nice or cute or useful for anything else. I don’t even change the net population of cobras.

But people who live in fear of cobras can take heart in knowing there’s such a thing as a mongoose.

My teeth are sunk in the tail of a poisonous culture that can kill our nation. I won’t let go.

I’ve spent years feeling guilty because I thought I’d disappointed my father. I’m finally realizing that I didn’t, couldn’t. He doesn’t approve all the choices I’ve made, but he knows that I never ever let go. Even more than he. And he knows the price that exacts.

Why I’m feeling as if it’s possible, conceivable, to imagine a state of peace. I was built to play this particular part in the end game of America. I’m pretty sure he’ll forgive the sins that helped turn me into the resistance weapon I’ve become.

Booooring. You don’t have to be a rodent to kill snakes. Hell, I’m damn near as quick as The Boss. They call me Rikki Tikki Izzi.

uh, Izzie has never scratched me. She leads a four-cat household in mouse kills. This absolutely crazed, wild-ass Bengal has never scratched me. I’m a mongoose. I was raised for this. Watch Hitman. I have a barcode on my head.

Hoodies are cool. Unless they get you killed. So maybe don’t wear one if you don’t want to get killed. An idea I had. But what do I know?

What a mess. No celebrating here. One life snuffed out. One life turned into a hell to its last breath. Two dumb young’uns who made a series of dumb decisions that resulted in death. Sad all round. Can’t stand the hyped up post-mortem coverage of the verdict any more than I could stand the mountains of media and political whoring that led to this night.

The participants are congratulating themselves on the victory of the legal system. Fine. But the legal system is powerless against the real villains in this case. The race hustlers who made a sad, sorry local fatality into a national obsession that amounts to incitement to riot. Who will prosecute NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, or the president of the United States for inflaming racial relations in a completely cynical and unnecessary way — just to promote a race narrative that was obsolete before the current administration made it the be-all defense of every screw-up, failure, and corrupt act by the federal government?

Disgust. And sorrow. That’s all I’m feeling right now. How about you?