Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Happy New Year!
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Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot...
Guy Lombardo. The once and future Czar of New Year’s Eve.
Welcome to the past, which is the blurry black-and-white future the revolutionary Democrats-in-charge have in mind for you. 1957 is not ideal, not the final outcome envisioned by a party whose platform is essentially a mimeograph of the Bernie Sanders campaign platform. They couldn’t nominate him because he’s Jewish and a lifelong advocate of Cuban and Soviet “socialism,” which is to say he is a Communist in everything but name. So they stole all his policy prescriptions instead. Why HIS Life Matters. In 1957, Bernie was in high school. No doubt, one of the stories that attracted his attention to the USSR, which was its demonstration of superior technology via the first satellite in space, Sputnik.
Leading the way, even if the dog dies. For the greater good.
By the time he went to Brooklyn College in 1959, Castro was just coming to power and Bernie became a loud advocate for him and all things Marxist. By then, of course, most of the world was well aware that the Marxist experiment in the Soviet Union had become a one-party totalitarian state under Josef Stalin. Which Bernie never seemed to mind. More from 1957:
The Hitlerian monster Stalin was four years dead by then, but the USSR remained every inch what he had made it. (Antifa take note of the following. You can DO this.)
In WWII, btw, FDR affectionatelynicknamed him “Uncle Joe.”
Bernie Sanders continues to insist he’s not a totalitarian Communist but a Democratic-Socialist, meaning he’s only interested in helping the oppressed workers by confiscating business from the private sector and redistributing income so that everybody has the same (almost) living wage and the exact same crappy healthcare, except for the brainy leaders who have five houses and pay no taxes. It’s completely different, right?
Chances are, the Sanders vision is more consistent with that of Venezuela’s Maduro, who praised Bernie as a revolutionary ally in the war against capitalism. So maybe this is what we all have to look forward to in the Luddite paradise being planned for us by the newly emboldened Uni-Party, which they hope to make permanent by conferring statehood on D.C. and Puerto Rico (4 new Dem senators), packing the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, and adding millions of government-dependent Dem-voting illegal aliens. The economy will take care of itself, especially when all those pesky fossil fuels have been eliminated.
“The western city of Maracaibo used to be Venezuela's affluent oil capital. But today, it's a place of hardship and hunger. Facing hyperinflation, corruption, penniless public services, crime and chronic shortages, the city has become a symbol of the country's wider economic collapse. Eating has become a luxury. Due to a lack of medical care, the lives of children, the elderly and those with chronic diseases are slowly slipping away. In this 26-minute documentary, our reporter Roméo Langlois bring us a heart-wrenching account of the depths of human suffering.”
Well, we can all hope for the best, can’t we? I do wish you all a Happy New Year. Now it’s time for me to go get ready for all those locked down bowl games we’ve been enjoying so much in our COVID gulag.
Exhibit 1. The Myth of Scientific Omniscience Where to start. There are so many places to start, all with consistently alarming intimations of one deep problem. The inference is seditious of rationality as we have deified it in science. I’m going to show you some of the more accessibly evocative starting points, not to drag you into the weeds of higher mathematics, but to stress some elements of simplicity that overthrow the fallacy called Artificial Intelligence. Bear with me. Just look for now. I’ll make connections as we proceed after viewing the items below. Exhibit 2. Turing Test Fallacy Exhibit 3. The Proof of Digital Inferiority (It works. Click where indicated on screen.) Exhibit 4. The Implementation Overreach Exhibit 5. The Implicatuons of “Sensitive Dependence” Exhibit 6. The Measurement Problem Exhibit 7. The Illusion of Control Exhibit 8. The Hammer/Nail Delusion Exhibit 9. The Impossibility of Artificial Intelligence Exhibit 10. The Oversimplification Problem Exhibit 11. ...
[ Before we begin, a word about hyperlinks in this and any Instapunk post. They’re there to help you, not create a series of distracting digressions. Good rule of thumb: note that the link is there, take it if you can’t resist, but try to finish reading the post and then go back to any hyperlinks that still intrigue you. Videos are reader’s now/later choice every time Absolute linearity is the obsession of the obsolete typewriter crowd.] The Preface to this post is here . Göbekli Tepe. 12,500 years old. Belief in the existence of the divine lasted for 12,340 yrs. This is very long. I had to write down what I was thinking in some detail. I’m glad I did, but you don’t have to read it at one sitting. If you like, you can skip all the way down to the Section titled “The Secular Dead End” and get the tone and gist of my perspective, leaving the substance till later or never. Understood? Let’s get down to it. What’s the Big Thing that matters most, more than anything? Answer? The ...
This post was last updated at 11 PM, Wednesday, December 31. Latest entries are “Year End Thoughts on 2025,” “The ‘W’ File from Moon Books,” and “The Cryptkeeper.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses! XMAS STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated December 24. 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 made...
WW2 Flying Tigers P-40 showing Ace-level kills at “Threads” based on notifications of 50 to 100 Likes for various replies I’ve made to TDS ranters. I’ve been in a down mood as we approach the end of 2025 and the completion of Trump’s first year in office since 2020. My annual End of Year post will describe my big picture view, but this post will fill in a significant part of that picture and can be used as a basis for endorsement or dismissal of my personal perspective. The social network app called Threads has been reference here previously, after my first exploratory encounters with what I’ve termed the “submerged 10 percent of Trump haters” the real percentage is probably much higher than a tenth, but these are the noncelebrity Rosie O’Donnells and Robert De Niros who are so obsessed with Trump that they have to type it out loud at the top of their keyboard lungs on a daily basis. After my first few brushes with them, I began to think that there’s something important goi...
We have one, secretly transmitted to us via the DarkNet… If you’re not allowed to play with DarkNet stuff, go no further. Fair warning. Don’t show this to anybody else. It could damage reputations… Who’s that smirking at Bill from behind the lavender incense cloud? (Don’t click on the pic; we can’t be responsible for what you find)
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...
Our own Queen Iris Stairway to Heaven A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum) You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore) All I Knead (The Hollies) Take on Me (Aha!) Grand Prize Winner: Bohemian Catsody Got your mind right, yet? Good. Happy Hump Day .
Good ol’ W has put himself back in the news recently, bemoaning the plight of Afghans whose escape route to America via the Biden EZ-Pass might come unglued. A man’s got to have his priorities. Anyhow, I was reminded by his return to the public eye that I had an orphan piece about his 43ness floating around somewhere in the electronic ether I live in. There was a place called Shuteye Town 1999 , in which there was a mall store called Moon Books, in which there was a book for sale titled ‘Loving Ameria 2’ by George Hubert Walker Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush IV. You had to use your video game savvy to get inside Moon Books w/o getting arrested thiugh… * The Bore Backgrounder exists too. Still needs formatting… For more than 50 of the books sold at Moon, you could click on titles and see the front and back covers. For a lot of those, there was also a representative text sample and background on the writers. Unfortunately, Internet life has been complicated for ST99, and at ...
Michael Smith He has about 10,000 more FB friends than I do. Just posted this on his Facebook page: You posted recently about the problem of what we can really do as individuals to deal with problems you describe capably and suggested a two-part format for addressing this hole in the communication challenge. I replied with this: “There’s an alternate universe to be built out there. For all of us who care about the ones who will come later, the ones who are kids now and the ones who may only be a gleam in your children’s eyes. A deliberate linkage of all that we consider best and inspirational, both intellectually and creatively, including pure entertainments. We have all been taught (programmed?) to regard ourselves as vectors, pushed by economic (egononomic?) needs, working alone with friends, acquaintances, acolytes as support for our labors. But we are limiting ourselves by an engrained habit of clinging to customary means of attracting notice to ourselves. I know there are pr...
Same idea. Turned into a galoop by misplaced trust in wrong’ uns. Christmas was especially generous to the Gateway Pundit yesterday, offering up a bonanza of Punch-and-Judy type slapstick comedy. The stars included both knowns and unknowns in the lefty art of making fools of themselves as they act out some of the dumber parts of the aging Panderer Playbook. Rather than string them together at Facebook as if they were breaking news that mattered, Instapunk decided to string them together here as an entry in his old regular feature, The Friday Follies. No more setup needed. Just sit back and laugh. Dressing up for the Holidays FTA: <<Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan appeared in a video wearing a hijab while addressing members of the Somali community, gushing about how they’re woven into the “fabric” of the state. Flanagan, of course, is not Muslim. This comes amid growing backlash against Somali-linked fraud scandals in her state, which drained billions in taxpayer dollars. Flan...
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