A Brief Hello


Yes, I’m still here. We’ll see how I do and how you do. Maybe we can be interesting together.

Today at the Slop Factory I posted a link to a scabrous graphic. Let’s see if I can link that here.

Sad disrespect for the Statue of Liberty. No need to shrug it off and move on.

We’ll try a couple of other things later. How do we like this format so far?

Heaven.

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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 10:45 AM., Sunday, September 21. Latest entries are “A Comparison Not made,“ “An American Turning Point,” “A Mission from Gahd,” and “For Those in Hell,”  The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses. .. Undernet Black was updated September 21. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I m...
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For those in Hell

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  Yes, I’m writing this because of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He was a good and brave man and I admired him. He was 31. Now he’s eternal. Since I am Christian and do believe in an afterlife, I am confident Charlie’s life has entered a new realm with new opportunities awaiting him. It is this to which I subscribe, as I believe many faithful do, not as susceptible as children to a constant heaven made of clouds and angels and long trumpets and hosannas to the One who cannot really be seen. If this makes me a blasphemer to some, I don’t care. Heaven as a gated community with a good view seems a limited and boring retirement from the excitements of life. To me anyway. Most of the problems people have with the concept of divinity are similarly small-minded and short-sighted. It’s human to keep trying to cut God and his domain down to size in ways that make him open to dealmaking or derision if that’s your preference.  Imagine that Heaven might be a roll your own kind of tr...
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An American Turning Point, Part 1

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  This is not a subject we’ll be talking about every day. That’s why this post today. It’s a marker. You can come back here later to remember where things stood before Charlie Kirk was laid to rest. Everything will be different from now on, and this moment will be part of the subtext of what happens in other arenas where it’s not mentioned or regarded as relevant. As needed there will be Parts 2, 3, etc, but we’ll go on doing what we’ve always done here, talk about whatever we feel like talking about, by turns seriously and satirically, and when this particular subtext is relevant it will be noted by hyperlink, not renewed sermonizing. Yesterday, I posted the following at Facebook: The one big question that matters now... where exactly is the faultline in American conscience? How many to the left of the crack in our national soul and how many to the right? It was never going to be the case that the assassination of a major conservative political figure would meet with universal c...
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The Roots of TDS in the Dem Rank and File

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  Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex. But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she ha...
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  People say the left has no heart. This is very far from the truth. They are full of love and empathy for everybody but the evil ones among us, and they are very Old Testament in their conceptions of Justice. They believe absolutely in the Death Penalty and Hell forever after, except for the ones who get oppressed by the evil ones for their color, ethnicity, gender choices, sexual promiscuity and perversity, body odors, excretory preferences, criminal propensities and other mental illnesses, and every form of weakness except being too small to live anywhere but inside a woman’s body, to which they have no right at all. With the exceptions noted, they love absolutely everybody equally, especially people who work for the government and famous rich people who agree with them about all of the above. Everybody acts like this is so hard to understand. It isn’t. It’s simple. You just have to have an eye for it. Know how to look for their heart and when they’re wearing it prominently on t...
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The DNC Response to the Kirk Memorial

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This is only a thought starter, because there are still a lot of balls in the air on this thing, but time’s a’wasting. The funeral is today, but the Memorial Event yesterday at Arizona U. Stadium is simply not something the out-of-power party can ignore or pretend never happened. This is what it looked like: This wasn’t a Trump campaign rally at some basketball arena. This was a double decker football stadium, every seat filled, plus an arena across the street watching the proceedings on a Jumbotron, with still others  lined up outside. Many speakers and one brand new star in the firmament, Charlie Kirk’s widow, who is no retiring house mouse. Except that she brought down the house in Phoenix and promised to keep going from here on forever. No two ways about it. She stole the show, and the thunder, from everyone, including  Donald Trump. Which makes people believe, maybe for the first time, that MAGA  won’t end  with him. That should scare Dems from here to Ireland ...
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  If you were to wake me at 3 am and ask, Who’s the star of the Blues Brothers  movie?, I’d say “It’s the Bluesmobile.” It’s 3 am in the morning now. Years ago I made up a list of the best American movies about America and ran it as a series on the original Instapunk website. I subsequently published it in 2018 as a Kindle book under an assumed name, because I didn’t want people to pass it up on the basis of their prejudices against me and my abrasive approach to things. It’s still available at Amazon. Illustrated and with a provocative concluding essay about Stephen Spielberg. It’s a good book and I recommend it. At about a hundred pages covering 35+ great movies for five bucks, it’s a cost-effective antidote for the dreck that’s being made and shown on the streaming services these days. One problem that’s been bothering me the past few days, though, is that it’s missing one very important milestone in American cinema. One that’s grown steadily in relevance as we have stumbl...
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The Sprained Mind of Rachel Maddow

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