160 years. What a whole education might do for you. Think about looking the same for the last 140 years. Witnessing everything, forgetting nothing, and having to listen to the fads and fantasies of all the intellectual heavyweights of the day.

Longevity is a curse. Why? Because all the arguments that purport to be new and salient are old and yellow. I heard MacClellan argue for peace with honor, Woodrow Wilson proclaim a new age of international responsibility and the inevitability of improvement in the basic human condition. I heard FDR orate about the end of inequality. I watched Stalin use the principle of equality to grind everyone into dust.

Throughout, I was just an ageless pretty face. I was Dorothy Parker’s boy toy at the Algonquin round table. Had something to say but couldn’t get a word in edgewise. New York intellectuals are unquestionably the stupidest creatures on the face of the earth. Only a spectacularly successful and free society can produce and tolerate such utter nonsense. I learned to hold them and the Three Stooges in the same light. Repetitive routines that are supposed to be brilliant but aren’t unless you’re the moron audience for which they’re intended. What can you do?

So I waited. Never cared for Rita Hayworth or Grace Kelly. Always knew they’d die before their time. You get a feel for these things. Thought maybe Katharine Hepburn was the ticket, but she became a parody of herself, weighed down by that accent and all those Oscars. Talked to Greta Garbo once. Learned she wanted to be alone because she had nothing to say.

Have I mentioned the artists? Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Leroy Neiman Marcus, all of them. Drunks and whoremasters and queers and poseurs. They never cared to put art back together again. They were like kids who shredded the works of alarm clocks and left them lying on the floor for daddy to deal with. Only daddy had left long ago.

Yeah. Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The first a small man with a big talent. The second a big man with a big talent and a death wish. But neither with a big brain to accompany the talent. And then came Thomas Wolfe, a tall man with a big talent and nothing to say, Faulkner a drunk man with a big talent and said it all the first time, and then all the pretenders like Mailer and Roth and Styron. Somewhere in there were some originals, but originals always burn out early. Why there’s less than a hundred thousand words of Nathanael West, and Malcolm Lowry actually used his one novel to finish drinking himself to death.

It gets lonely. When all you are is a pretty face in proximity. “Hey, Dorian,” they say. “Get me another drink.” Evelyn Waugh actually spoke to me once. He said, “I’d ask you for another drink, but I can see you wouldn’t get it for me. Congratulations.”

And I’ve been to the wars. Which is partly how I can parse the artists and writers. Just old enough to have seen the final chess match of Grant taking Richmond. Chess measured in how few thousands of dead each pawn capture entails. Why HE drank. And I saw part of Sherman’s March too. Why I’ve affected his beard since then. The only general I’ve known who hated every minute, every death, of his victories.

And World War I. And World War II. Pretense aside, I was alongside my putative grandfather and my putative father as they suffered and feared and nerved themselves up for impossible challenges. Longevity. If you asked them today, they might have some memory of an infant, a little boy, an adolescent… But it would be a fuzzy recollection. What they do remember in detail is the grown up pretty boy who resisted their notions of how you’re supposed to be.

Because I’ve been here for many ages. And the truest thing about it all is that I have the imagination most people lack. Because I’ve been there. Pretty boy and all.

A couple years ago, Comcast On Demand started listing movies attributed to ‘Phase IV.’ Things you never heard of. Figured it was the bottom of the straight to cable barrel. Didn’t watch.

But Netflix has been flexing its muscles of late, and I found a movie given four stars under the Phase IV rubric. It was called The Abduction of Eden.

The always too brief description said it was about international sex trafficking. Which struck a chord with me, given the Nigerian atrocity of schoolgirls abducted by an Al Qaida affiliate called Boko Aram. Today’s news: Hillary Clinton, champion of women’s and girl’s rights, refused repeated, insistent requests by the CIA, FBI, and DOJ to classify Boko Haram as a terrorist organization on the official watch list. Cause, you know, it would have conflicted with the administration’s meme of Al Qaeda ‘On the Run.’

Such a sweet idea, no? But look at the video. Horrific images and saccharine lyrics. Is that the genius of the Paul who is not THE Paul? Thinking so. At least Lennon got mad twice.

So I watched the low budget, straight to video production called Abduction of Eden.

Lo and behold. The single best treatment of the horrors of sex trafficking I’ve ever seen. Let me count the ways. No exploitative sex scenes or nudity, no federal agents crashing around in putative rescue attempts, no pious declarations by bureaucrats to get to the bottom of this hideous nightmare in human lives. No unalloyed happy endings punctuated by automatic gunfire and shamed, helpless girls cringing in cargo containers.

In place of all this, a good movie that drives home every noxious and humiliating aspect of this obscenity against the most basic human contract, that we will protect our girl children against predation.

Watch the movie. Dark but not without moments of light. Humanity is still brighter than evil.

P.S. RR suggests, somewhat ingenuously, that I should be a light bringer. As opposed to what? If the light that shines on the scene is a terrible light, that’s the light that has to be brung. Where we are right now.

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.

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.

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.

Except that the painting in my closet looks like this.

Yuck. Believe me, I deserve it. Probably did too much ether way back when. Probably fell in love too often too. Sigh.

(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.

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.

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.

A year and a half out from the official horse race. Presidential handicapping.

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!

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.

Raebert subsequently claimed abuse. A boot in his face.

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.