Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
The Daily Media Routine (Whether you’ve noticed or not)
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In sunnier days, this would probably have been a Friday Follies post. But we’re talking a wilder take on recent antics being fed us through the mass media. More like Friday FAFO Fun. Just how batshit crazy we should feel about the hallucinogenic diet we’re on depends more than somewhat on what side of the aisle we’re viewing it from. For example, if you’re MAGA, as many of my readers are, you probably feel compelled to check in on the War Room on a fairly regular basis. Where the hunt seems to be on for that one more fatal trap the cunning Dementocrats will be using to steal yet another election.
I’m not taking questions here. This is just how the daily drear if RAV is striking me. Note that the part of “Hang On” Steve is being played here by Jon Voight, and wait for the relief of seeing Julie “the Smart One” Kelly being played by Sigourney Weaver. You and I should consider ourselves Stanley.
Is that better or worse than being one of wet behind the ears voyeurs of the left on Threads, TikTok, Instagram, and Substack? Waiting with bated breath for the news that Epstein has finally reached of the grave to grab hold of the most evil man who ever lived?
Thing is, war Room and the sex addicts are in the same boat. All the media are full of breathless stories about impending events, revelations, resolutions, and retributions, but they don’t happen.
Like all those juicy hints we get from Pam Blondi at the DOJ about who’s next in line for a perp walk on either the Epstein Library or the 2020 Election Tote Board. Big headlines sitting on top of flashbang content.
And right after we’ve had another legal disappointment, we get another ‘wutwuzzat?” update on the missing mom of the celelebrity anchorperson for that show we never watch. Lot’s of press conferences and running around, but what the hell happened if it did happen?
Meanwhile we keep waiting for more bloodshed in the fat woke women protecting rapists from ICE agents saga, and even that’s become kind of a Daily Dud.
But they want us to keep watching somehow, anyhow. Even when not much is really happening and the smart money is waiting for a very big shoe to drop soon. In the interim, desperate news outlets like Brightbart have published no less than half a dozen stories about one late night talk show host in just two days. WTF.
Like we care?
The one who really does care is the guy trying to avoid the celebrity scrap heap of a podcast buried in leftist driftwood.
Yawn.
What is it, then, that everyone on the ball has been waiting for while the FAFO funnies have been distracting/annoying us? This…
Waiting for the real boss of the U.S. Rule of Lawfare, Judge Boasberg, to get SCOTUS in line on tariffs:
Which, by the way, he just did.
Now for the OTHER big Boasberg ruling to come. Soon. The decertification of the 2024 Presidential Election by a District Court Judge in favor of the first DEI airhead to raise her hand.
This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a topic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the culture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
Invocation of Nemesis by the Summoners Click on Rosie. Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the sad PR plight afflicting the unfortunate middle child of the three worst First Ladies in American history. . What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts. Because I’m going to admit at the outset what most of the MAGA faithful won’t. You are right that Donald Trump is responsible for much of the imminent danger we are facing as a nation. Without his arrival on the political scene 11 years ...
Happy Independence Day No. 250! I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial. In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
Yeah. Click on the blue headlines. There are two precursor posts to this, both still in-process. I’ll finish and link them later. One is about the death of the historical novel, which mirrors a lot of other deaths in our culture. The other is about divorce, an absolutely transformative and deadly factor in what has become of us as a nation. What does that leave us with? The end result of our progressive devolution, largely invisible to all, because it is a function of the variable we tend to think of as a constant, human consciousness. Which it isn’t. I’ve written quite a lot about the consciousness problem over the years, and Instapunk Returns, as well as a couple other of my blogs, contain 5+++ years worth of thoughts on the topic. I’ll be sending you to those posts here, providing you with an excerpt, usually the lede, a sample graphic or two, and a link. The order is roughly chronological. I’m not going to give you any particular setup from piece to piece. The relevance to the main...
Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
The last group photo I’m a part of that’s still in my possession. My sister’s wedding in the late1990’s, with me and my mother in attendance, here in Salem. I don’t get out much anymore. Haven’t for a long time. If I didn’t take pictures of myself, nobody would, or could, anymore. I don’t give them the chance. Why in recent years I’ve made a point of doing an official birthday selfie, to keep track of the wear and tear of the years and see if the falling apart process is gaining speed. This year was not a good year for hair. That much I’ll tell you. But here’s the Official 74th Birthday Selfie I took on Friday. Not as young as I used to be. I hadn’t really shown this pic to anyone, but imagine my surprise when I received a gift yesterday by parcel delivery from a young lady I helped raise who will always be close to my heart. She and I hadn’t spoken about the Rolling Stones in years, but somehow she must have divined I’d been thinking of them, because here’s what she ordered sent ...
If you’ve never seen an Asylum production of their “Saving the World from Imminent Destruction” series, you’re excused from this post. The rest of us already know the basics. A once prominent, now disgraced scientist (often Sam Baldwin, but not always) is minding his own business making a living income and trying to mend his struggling family life when he notices that something is seriously amiss in the cosmos. Gravity isn’t working quite right. Or all the birds seem to be migrating at the same time. Or some local pond suddenly ejaculates a pillar of lava. You know. The warning knell of an extinction-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, where are the kids? They were supposed to be home by now. He calls his ex-wife. She doesn’t know where they are. He calls an old colleague at the agency in DC where nobody else will take his calls anymore. In a whisper, the colleague tells him the experts in charge haven’t noticed anything to worry about cosmologically speaking. This far in, we already know wh...
The Valley of the Jerseyikes When you’ve decided to your own satisfaction that life doesn’t end with physical death, what have you got to worry about? That probably depends on where you come down on the age-old questions about ghosts. Do they exist? Are they a possible fate of troubled souls after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil or been yanked out of it too suddenly? What if you expire peacefully and find yourself waking up in the attic of your own house, somehow tethered to it with no watch you can trust to keep track of time? I know I’ve stopped wearing a watch at all, like almost all of you out there. Are we taking some kind of risk that we’ll miss the departure signal for the trip to the other side? One side effect of getting old and not liking most of what’s on teevee is that you wind up watching too many paranormal shows, which have the virtue of no politics, no gratuitous sex scenes, and extended stretches of restful watching with almost nothing happening on screen. ...
Marc Antony: “ Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men– Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.” [Worth noting, Gaius Julius Caesar was not an emperor; the successors who fought for absolute power and took his name as a title were emperors and brought about the death of the several hundred years of Roman Republic.] The American Republic is now at an end. We had a good run. He will be forced to concede, because Trump will not declare martial law....
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