InstaPunk Returns

Facebook Jail — Repeat Offende r I’ve made it a practice to offer my thoughts about the state of the nation every year for the last decade save one. Links to all of them are listed below. The missing year is 2019. For a long time I thought I had simply misplaced it. Not so. Last week I decided to do a search at Facebook for December of that year and see what I was writing about. Here’s what I found: a battle royal against the censors of Facebook that kept me too busy to do as I had done in years previous. Viewed in aggregate, however, the posts from that time do amount to ‘End of Year Thoughts.’ I had been taking time off off from Instapunk Returns since May in order to focus on the swirling issues of the 2020 re-election campaign. Most of my writing time was spent on Facebook, whee I was running into constant censorship issues, including nonsensical penalties imposed by FB fact-checkers. They were almost always clearly wrong, demonstrably from the actual,posts they were objecting to. ...

  The Balow Star, the reigning tabloid of Shuteye Nation 2000 Along with Shuteye Town 1999 , Shuteye Nation is the most imperiled of the major works of R. F. Laird, the guy behind this and other Instapunk blogs. It’s trapped inside a Wordpress site whose vendor can no longer be reached to correct its own software glitches, although the monthly fees are still being paid like clockwork. Why we periodically offer you an opportunity to visit these amazingly predictive works about what the 21st Century would be like in our own era, a quarter century later. This post focuses on two timeless American traditions, St. Patrick’s Day and the annual Oscar telecast. (There’s also a bonus topic we’ll explain later…)  In the year 2000, some things were different and some surprisingly the same. Brawny, brawling big city columnists may be fewer in number now, but today is the day when some of the survivors will be writing about the sacred Irish version of Mardi Gras, still celebrated in ...

  Yes, it became an annual Nightline Ceremony Now that the first battlefield casualties of ‘Trump’s Iran War’ have been recorded (6 as of 3/2/26), Ivan hear the bells tolling on the soundtrack of the Alphabet News networks lamenting the names of dead military personnel they don’t care about in any other respect. Soldier deaths are one more cudgel that can be used to beat the America First crowd with.  We’ve been here before. The article reproduced below is one I wrote for the original Instapunk blog almost exactly 20 years ago. The occasion was a forthcoming — and much promoted — edition of Nightline dedicated to intoning all the names, one by one, of American military personnel killed in Iraq. A not so subtle undermining of ‘Bush’s Iraq War,’ by a TV program that began as a nightly update on the American hostages taken by Iran in November 1979 after Jimmy Carter handed that nation over to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The ironies abound. Nightline was outraged by the plight of the ...

  One of these gentlemen was named Hugh Walpole. F-a-a-a-mous Writer. Some other famous writer once wrote that “the good is oft interrèd with their bones.” It’s no secret that the reputation of Stephen King has taken a bit of a hit of late. Too much with the tongue-lashing of Donald Trump for some of his more down-home fans. Should this extremely rich and prolifically prolific author be fretting about his legacy in the annals of literature?  Hard to say. Have you heard of the prominent writer and “Commander of the British Empire (CBE) Hugh Walpole? No, not Horace. He was the one who wrote so swimmingly about fishing. This was Hugh, who has quite a lengthy write up at Wikipedia. Here are the most salient excerpts: WIKI: <<Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole , CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were ...

With all the ruckus about U.S. athletes showing off their jock insight about politics and patriotism this year (“me, me, effing ICE killers, and uh, me”), I haven’t paid much attention to the competitions in Milan, a city in which I had some fine evenings decades ago. Why spoil those memories with graceless images of Ugly Americans embarrassing themselves and us?  What has seeped through my indifference is four American performances on, ironically, ice. Two were disasters, gold medal candidates in figure skating who failed dismally under the Olympic spotlight, and two sterling American gold medal victories by a charismatic young legal immigrant from China and a Women’s Ice Hockey Team that beat Canada thrillingly in Overtime. Any karma involved here and there? Could be. Regardless, I’m not going to replay any of these turns on ice here. Let the dead past bury its dead self and let the long lasting glow of triumph reveal itself again at intervals as occasions warrant. Why such a hig...

  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 ...