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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Year End Thoughts for 2025 — The Big Picture Stuff

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 [ 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...
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The Cryptkeeper

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  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...
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Epstein Files Release Delayed Again, EXCEPT…

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 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)
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That Moment Before the Roller-Coaster Rockets Down the First Chute

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 You Bought Your Ticket…  Now Here’s Your Ride! Over at Facebook, I posted a glib and unserious reel about the Swearing In of Zoltan Mandamme in an abandoned subway station.  Talk about your hopeful venues…! I really should take it seriously, but I find it almost impossible because I know some well-to-do Manhattanites who have been on board with all the TDS seizures in NYC over the last 10 years. I think of them and immediately wonder just how many cartoon graphics Google has for the search phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Answer? A lot. Best of all I imagine that Big Moment, you know the one, when the roller-coaster reaches the tippy-top of the first hill and pauses… just before it plunges in into clackety-clack abyss. That pause moment is the pinnacle of the roller-coaster ride. You, yourself, and thou alone with your excitement and trepidation. Everything after that is just hanging on and screaming until the ride just seems too long and you want out a...
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A Shaft of Light in the Darkness — An EOY ‘25 Postscript

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  The Blue Pill speaks. I did something unconscionable on the last day of 2025. I posted End of Year Thoughts for 2025 at the conclusion of the first turbulent Year of Trump 2.0 and barely mentioned Trump. The post was over 12,000 words long and linked four directly related posts by name that totaled another 12,000 words. I must have rocks in my head. As I expected, it hasn’t drawn much traffic yet. I even took the unusual step for me of posting a promotional reel for my own post, which is also off to a modest start. 23 views, as compared to my most popular reel this  month, which got 30,000 hits making fun of Tim Walz.  I’m not even disappointed. It’s the holiday season and social network traffic is down across the board. As I said when I posted it on the 31st, I wrote it because I had to. Nobody has to read it because I want them to. I’d have left it there to find its own way in its own good time, except that as I have experienced far more frequently than the laws of co...
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My World and Welcome to It

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     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...
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The Friday Follies — One-Way Tickets to Galoopaville

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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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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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The “W” File from Moon Books

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  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 ...
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The Marx Committee Prizes for 2026

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 The Inaugural Rufus T. Firefly Prize So there are going to be all these prizes handed out by the eminent because invisible Marx Committee. The Committee stands on a handful of glorious principles, including in no particular order, Wars must be either lost or unending, ‘Democracy’ belongs exclusively to those who say the word the most times, the Only Guideline for global governance is ‘America Last,’ and the One and Only Great Commandment of Democratic leaders is “LOOK AT ME!” That’s why the first of many Marx Prizes will not be awarded to an American but to exemplary Furriners, meaning people we can all learn a lot from. The first of them will be the Rufus T. Firefly Prize, given to furriners who are the most eloquent about how to deal with the One Great Evil that trumps all other evils. And here they are… Subsequent prizes will be awarded as they are earned, regardless of month or year or the number of seconds showing to Zero Hour on the One True Atomic Clock, which is held in t...
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