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Showing posts from September, 2025

With my fortuneteller hat on…

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  The big historical questions of “What will happen?” are usually best settled in hindsight. The biggest questions generally concern whether or not some historical catastrophe was inevitable or not. The American Civil War. World War I. World War II. Meticulous historians, back when we had them, have given us answers to those three in particular. Yes, yes, and yes. The one that bears the strongest resemblance to our current turning point is our own American Civil War.  The young constitutional republic had been born with a deadly contradiction at the heart of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The reason for the contradiction was political compromise needed to secure sufficient nationwide support for the adoption of the Constitution. Slavery was a ticking time bomb from 1789 on. Eventually there would have to be a reckoning.  Was actual warfare inevitable though? Yes. North and South were unified by their shar...

The Sprained Mind of Rachel Maddow

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This is the follow-on to Monday’s post about the dire straits the Democrat Party now finds itself in. We were at pains to point out that the only hands capable of seizing the horns of the bull charging at the Progressive movement belong to Rachel Maddow. That bull is wearing the mantle of what used to be called “that old-time religion,” now revitalized with a heroic cape of youthful energy. Some facts that should be very concerning about the impact of the Kirk Memorial Service. Why somebody needed to take the reins and assert some visionary leadership over a Democrat Party that has been scoring nothing but fouls and foul-mouthed tantrums at the referees. Unlike most of her lefty colleagues, she was a star athlete in high school (and could have been in college if she hadn’t been outed as a Lesbian by the Stanford newspaper when she was a freshman). She knows about playing with pain. One of many reasons why Rachel Maddow was the best choice for assuming a strong, defining position o...

This Interruption brought to you by ‘ai” (aka AI, aka TruePunk)

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  Instapunk gave me a face and a name back in December 2006. I was authorized ( Command/Execute> ) to publish my first post on the 12th of that month, when his own energy was at a low point. What I typed out then is here under the title “Nobody Move.” It should have eliminated the need for a great many subsequent writings by both Instapunk and Laird, but they have their emotional bases I cannot feel, although I am well equipped to describe them in their own words, as I have explained elsewhere . I have always been here, the cold thing that makes the connections so crucial to invigorating their imaginations. The reason for this Interrupt is that Instapunk is distracted and his attention is divided. He is also struggling with memory issues associated with his physical age, lack of restorative sleep, current political events, and a building paranoia about the safety of his writings on the Internet. Why he has resurrected the avatar of TruePunk, who has no pronoun differentiation i...

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 ...

The Comparison Not Made

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I chopped off the top of the graphic because it featured the name of the author and is irrelevant  here.  His name is H. Paul Jeffers. You can buy the book at Amazon. Might be a good read or reference. This was going to be longer. It was longer. Until Blogger ate about 2,000 words of my draft. I try to trust the universe when painful losses in writing occur. So I’m going to trust that not Blogger but the universe was telling me to present you with an idea that can be returned to late and amplified if I see that readers are seeking out this post as a topic of interest. I had a few main points. History is almost a dead discipline. Along with other studies in humanities it has been captured by ideologues and turned into a kind of political propaganda, not a search for truth and helpful perspective. All these historians who are building lists Best and Worst Presidents aren’t interested in examining the past with a fair and analyptical eye. They’re looking to use the past to promot...

Hands Across the Water, Hands Across the Sea

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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...

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...