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Instapunk Wasn’t Born Yesterday

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  Yes, it became an annual Nightline Ceremony Now that the first battlefield casualties of ‘Trump’s Iran War’ have been recorded (6 as of 3/2/26), Ivan hear the bells tolling on the soundtrack of the Alphabet News networks lamenting the names of dead military personnel they don’t care about in any other respect. Soldier deaths are one more cudgel that can be used to beat the America First crowd with.  We’ve been here before. The article reproduced below is one I wrote for the original Instapunk blog almost exactly 20 years ago. The occasion was a forthcoming — and much promoted — edition of Nightline dedicated to intoning all the names, one by one, of American military personnel killed in Iraq. A not so subtle undermining of ‘Bush’s Iraq War,’ by a TV program that began as a nightly update on the American hostages taken by Iran in November 1979 after Jimmy Carter handed that nation over to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The ironies abound. Nightline was outraged by the plight of the ...
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The Sneaky Cowardice of So-Called Conservatives

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Here’s the story that’s running at the righty news outlet called National Pulse. Here’s what they think we need to know: Sufficient for us to know he’s a “Biden Judge.” What if the lead graphic of their post had looked like this instead? See, they kind of left out the most sinister background of this story, which goes far beyond a medical issue, however grave it is to those involved. National Pulse fails to see that our real concern should be the supine role played by Congressional Republicans in enabling this man to be seated on a federal bench. For once, it is truly important to read the entire Wikipedia entry about this man, which is alarming even in the prose of the far-left leaning site that published it: <<Mustafa Taher Kasubhai  (born 1970) is an American lawyer who has served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon since 2024. He previously served as a United States magistrate judge...
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Party Time

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  No, I’m not going 100 percent Youtube on you. Truth is, the post I did the other day about the Progs  getting nutso when elections don’t go their way was an accident. I was really searching for the songs I’ll be posting here, and those political clips kept showing up in the sidebar. So I grabbed a few of them just to remind you that they really are out of their minds out there.  Right now, of course, a lot of MAGA people are also out of their minds, with very little power or insight about what’s going on behind the media tantrums. That’s why i started collecting this little musical refuge. When is it the right time to party? By which I don’t mean drug yourself into a coma but find a sound and a best that will make you dance or at least reach a philosophical state of equilibrium. It’s always time for that. Because not all party songs are happy things. Some of them are quiet reflective moods when the dancing and singing are winding down. Not a bad place to be when you thi...
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Legacy is a 6-letter word…

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  One of these gentlemen was named Hugh Walpole. F-a-a-a-mous Writer. Some other famous writer once wrote that “the good is oft interrèd with their bones.” It’s no secret that the reputation of Stephen King has taken a bit of a hit of late. Too much with the tongue-lashing of Donald Trump for some of his more down-home fans. Should this extremely rich and prolifically prolific author be fretting about his legacy in the annals of literature?  Hard to say. Have you heard of the prominent writer and “Commander of the British Empire (CBE) Hugh Walpole? No, not Horace. He was the one who wrote so swimmingly about fishing. This was Hugh, who has quite a lengthy write up at Wikipedia. Here are the most salient excerpts: WIKI: <<Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole , CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were ...
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The Wild West of News Media

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  DISCLAIMER: If you’re anything like me (attentive to the things I’m attentive to), you’re behind the curve in this whole podcasting phenomenon. I’d seen short clips of podcasts at ‘X’-Twitter, heard about the land office business Tucker Carlson was doing right after he left Fox, and didn’t pay that much attention to people like Joe Rogan until Barron Trump suddenly got credit for stealing the media narrative from the alphabet media (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, NYT, WAPO) during the election campaign. Honestly, I’d regarded solo “pundits” filming themselves being smarter than everyone else as an opportunity for satire rather than serious analysis. Why this disclaimer. I have put my own oar in the podcasting water. Several times. Trying to figure out how normal people could produce a regular series of programs on their own hook. So I took a crack at it on the down low. I wake up early, long before dawn, so I experimented with filming myself on the iPad. Without a printer I coul...
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A Near-Perfect Microcosm of “The Swamp”

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Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. There’s an intensely contemporary reason for taking a close look at Scientology. The Swamp is so huge it seems like the Borg. But what are the stripped down essentials of the Borg? Here’s a look at a laboratory example, a microcosm if you will. In the interests of full disclosure, I did encounter Scientology back in the weird year of 1968. I was in Boston, got scooped in to a “Dianetics” exercise, and got speedily thrown out for having too much “charge” to participate. The one in charge was blond, bland to the point of creepy, and I almost (but not quite) succeeded in making him lose his temper. In further interests of disclosure, I spent years on Facebook, debating Trump-haters. They did lose their tempers. But they also exhibited the exact same repetition of Talking Points the lefties (and Scientologists) employ. Exact. Same. Words. How I made the cult connection. Overview Like it says. Troublemaker. Destroy Utterly  Horror Show Squared More ... ...
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The World of One Hit Wonders & Guilty Pleasures

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  Welcome to the world of One Hit Wonders. A club I belong to because I only ever had one book published by the American book publishing industry. Written about that elsewhere, so I won’t labor the point here. It’s the easiest way to dispense with my writing and my life. I get that.  A lot of people, including MeTwo, think I’m a failure. I probably am. On the other hand, I think it’s time to look at other One Hit Wonders (OHW), who have become to my own mind Guilty Pleasures. I’d be happy to be in their company. As a note to remember, I looked for Lowry’s book at the Internet Archive site. Not there. I’m there three times at least. Maybe I didn’t die right away… First one. To my wife, who according to MeTwo and her own confirmation, no longer likes me, always returns to this OHW from the Golden Age of  MTV: Me? She may not like me, but I still like her. Told her so yesterday. The only woman I can still talk to. She spars, she punches (verbally), and I have never called he...
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Soul Music for 2024

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A soul needs exercise, especially when confronting turbulent times in life. It needs to stretch wide, dig deep, unify the mind by way of the many senses we are born with. Music is the perfect soul exercise. Here’s a collection, without explanation, in no particular order, which means you’re free to pick your own. Hang on to this link. Come back at intervals. Don’t be afraid to stretch or dig. Being afraid is the very worst state of being. Time to overcome it and breathe again. Maria Callas, Un Bel Di: Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue: Tom Waits, Hold On: Chopin, Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2: Duke Ellington, Mood Indigo: Ry Cooder, Crossroads: Rachmaninov, Sym 2, Adagio: Copland, Appalachian Spring: Nina Simone, Sinnerman:[Good lifelong Democrat. All the klansmen… Democrats. Still love her] Celtic Woman, Coast of Galicia: Mozart, Clarinet Concerto in A Major: Gorecki, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs: Rolling Stones, Heaven: Johnny Cash, Redemption Day: Maria Callas, La Bohème: Miles Davis/John Coltrane,...
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F1 Forever… and Clark… and Hamilton… Forever…

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  He died he did in ‘68.. So sorry. So sorry. How the best, most tragic story of F1 ever, unfolded. Jimmy Clark. Just possibly the real GOAT of Formula 1. Grosjean. Made podium one year into Indy racing. Last weekend at Indycar’s Laguna Seca, Romain Grosjean put on an F1 Show not seen since Jimmy Clark won the Indy 500 in 1965. Grosjean waged a war. Americans might not know that Grosjean’s F1 career went up in smoke a year or so earlier in a fiery crash that should have ended his competitive driving forever. His hands were badly burned. People didn’t think he’d drive again. Said similar things about Niki Lauda. F1 is where the superheroes live. Presently, three F1 drivers competing in Indy stuff. Ericsson, Sato, and Grosjean. All fast, no hurt and rebuild on the fly, and forget the ad-heavy car costumery… Yet… Burned his hands, bad. So he came to America. In 100+ F1 starts, Grosjean had scored, well, this: In that same approximate period of time, Lewis Hamilton registered 99 wins, ...
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Filling a hole in my ‘End of Year Thoughts’ Series

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Facebook Jail — Repeat Offende r I’ve made it a practice to offer my thoughts about the state of the nation every year for the last decade save one. Links to all of them are listed below. The missing year is 2019. For a long time I thought I had simply misplaced it. Not so. Last week I decided to do a search at Facebook for December of that year and see what I was writing about. Here’s what I found: a battle royal against the censors of Facebook that kept me too busy to do as I had done in years previous. Viewed in aggregate, however, the posts from that time do amount to ‘End of Year Thoughts.’ I had been taking time off off from Instapunk Returns since May in order to focus on the swirling issues of the 2020 re-election campaign. Most of my writing time was spent on Facebook, whee I was running into constant censorship issues, including nonsensical penalties imposed by FB fact-checkers. They were almost always clearly wrong, demonstrably from the actual,posts they were objecting to. ...
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