Backwards and Upside Down, July 4th Style

RI State Senator Tiara Mack



Another reminder of the Compleat State of the Union.
 

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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 8:30 AM., Saturday, August 30. Latest entries are “A Time Capsule that’s just been sitting there waiting,” “The New Dem Strategy,” and “Poetry Across Scales.” The Instapunk Times is on the racks.. Undernet Black was updated August 30. 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 my own pi...
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Poetry across scales

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  Minimalism has been a periodic ideal of modern and post-modern esthetics. Purely arbitrary, of course, though not without possibilities and even infinities of its own. For example, there are those who regard Haiku as a sort of supreme test of the poet, since poetry is commonly defined as the best words in the best order. This leaves the door open for imagining that there is an absolute minimum definable for capturing profound truth in the fewest of the best words in the least of the best order. In Haiku there must be 17 syllables, some reference to a season (ensuring universality I guess), and a prohibition against rhyme to prevent cheating (another guess). What if this definition of the minimum is wrong? What if there’s some way to reach great truths in less than 17 syllables? In less than a single word even? And, gasp, in less than a single letter on the page? Impossible? Well, why the hell not? I propose that the graphic above is a poem, subject to meaningful exploration, inte...
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The World According to Instapunk

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  It’s time for me to do something I really dislike having to do. I need to write a book that will be printed on paper and will also consist as entirely of words as I can manage. It has been many years since I have regarded that as my preferred medium of expression. I find it confining, technologically and artistically retrograde, and I would avoid doing it if I could. Not that I can’t do it. I have done a huge chunk of work that way. But that aspect of my writing was supposed to be over nearly 30 years ago. The author of every creative project is a unique persona. He is the state of his consciousness during the period of producing it. What medium or genre he is working in. What his original intention was. What in personal life and in the world around him was drawing his attention at the time. And what was changing in him as he moved from intention to completed work. Instapunk is a persona, an artificially created one who started as a performative voice and became an alternative mo...
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The New Dem Strategy

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Just got my usual wake-up notification from the standard Instagram donkey expressing disbelief that Trump’s latest press conference didn’t land him in the loony bin. He was particularly outraged that “there is no more national media” to protect us from the President’s insanity. Which is to say that Trump met his objective for the press conference: goading the moribund Democrat Party to keep sawing at the limb of the tree they’re sitting on.  I went looking for an animated cartoon that illustrates my point. Unable to find it even with the help of Google’s AI know-it-all, I cobbled one together on my own. Simple and brief as it is, my little animation shows what the lefties are hoping against hope for, that blessed moment when the saw severs the link to the poisoned tree for good and saves them from it. There follows that brief stretched out moment when the limb remains suspended alone in midair while the tree falls. Then the illusion ends and the limb crashes to the ground as the la...
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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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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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Into the 9th Month of Trump 2.0…

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  The normal term of gestation is almost done. Apologies to Kubrick. What have we got to go on so far? What kind of President is 2.0 going to be? The 1.0 version was naïve about the extent of corruption and poison in Washington, DC. He got stabbed in the back a lot. Like most of us, he was not nearly suspicious enough of the massive healthcare/pharmaceutical complex and learned the hard way that their “science” is just as fraudulent and mercenary as the Climate Change Mafia. He got a lot done in the first term, but they were successful in removing him from power. What can we expect now. How different is 2.0? Here’s an assessment of who Trump has been since January 20. He is boldly but carefully revolutionary. I say carefully because he is playing the long game and when he drops a big rock in the water he lets the system absorb the shock and respond. People stung by his second term tweets overlook the fact that tweets these days are a frequent substitute for ignoring the law and for...
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Homework that’s fun

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IMPORTANT NOTE 8/4/25 : The ‘Shuteye Nation’ files of which The Glossary is  a  component are stored under the Wordpress application. Wordpress itself is in corporate limbo, unreachable even by fully paid up customers. I can no longer sign in even though I still own the site. Why there is a block against reaching the files the first time you try. It’s simple to bypass. When you click on one of the frames below, you will see a screen saying it is a private file. Click the option offering More Information. The next screen will give you the option of seeing the files anyway. Click on that. THEN refresh your screen and the file will appear. This is the only time in the current session when you will have to do this. It’s an annoyance. That is all. Click the graphic to go right to The Glossary I know there are those out there in the Facebook Universe who do come to look at the longer thought pieces I generally reserve for IPR and other of my websites. The traffic here, by the way, i...
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A Time Capsule that’s just been sitting there waiting

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  (1957-1966) You’re going to think this is as bad as being directed to the Hallmark Channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, or reruns of Fantasy Island. It isn’t. Yes, we found it because we’re old and remember when we watched it with grandparents or at home on Blaxk and white TVs. But this is one of those rare cases where the experience of seeing it again is better than the clichéed memory. There’s a lot more to watch than the one true plot of Perry identifying the murderer on the stand against all odds and confounding D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg yet again.  You realize almost immediately that you’re visiting a skillfully produced presentation of a completely different, bygone world that makes every episode fun to watch. The first two or three years will do. Unbelievably, they made 30 a year from 1957 to 1960. Each episode is 52 minutes long, which means advertising was confined to about 7+ minutes, compared to the 12-14 minutes per hour of ads on network shows no...
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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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