InstaPunk Returns

  It   strikes   me now and again. Can’t help it. Just try to control it… I’ve only done one thing: That’s all. I swear. Okay. Couldn’t help it. But’s that’s all. Really. I was working on my long postponed post about the best movies in the first 25 years of the 21st Century when this overpowering sense of ennui overcame me, and dissing the movies suddenly struck me as more important than debunking the big lies mass media tells about itself. Working my way through it… P.S. An old friend just checked in with an enhancement of my comic cover that blows mine out of the water. Couldn’t resist sharing it with you all. ________________________ Below the Fold What I had of the new/old post I was trying to finish:  Keeping My Promise about the Best 21st Century Movies It’s that time of the year when movies are back in the news more than usual. The recent Oscars broadcast was chiefly notable for its record-low viewership, inane political rhetoric from the podium, and a crop of...

I first heard of Meidas Touch shortly after I joined ‘X’ in the wake of Musk’s takeover of the poisonous lefty site called Twitter. The lefties continue to be a dominating presence there, and even when freeloader Citizen Free Press links a decent post there, the first one or two replies at least are screeds by the kind of crayon-armed haters who want all Republicans assassinated. CFP loves to indicate that outrageous lefty posts are ‘buried’ or ‘destroyed’ by MAGA derision, but this is usually an overstatement. Why I was occasionally moved to reply to the worst of them. The Meidas Touch editor Filipkowski was one of the first to tempt me to. After a quick review of the MT site, I told him it was the most egregious pile of vile libel made up completely out of whole cloth I had ever seen. (A permanent sidebar there declared that there are over 20,000 pending lawsuits against Trump for a variety of sex crimes.) I told him he was a disgusting cancer on the corpse of journalism that was sti...

Here’s the story that’s running at the righty news outlet called National Pulse. Here’s what they think we need to know: Sufficient for us to know he’s a “Biden Judge.” What if the lead graphic of their post had looked like this instead? See, they kind of left out the most sinister background of this story, which goes far beyond a medical issue, however grave it is to those involved. National Pulse fails to see that our real concern should be the supine role played by Congressional Republicans in enabling this man to be seated on a federal bench. For once, it is truly important to read the entire Wikipedia entry about this man, which is alarming even in the prose of the far-left leaning site that published it: <<Mustafa Taher Kasubhai  (born 1970) is an American lawyer who has served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon since 2024. He previously served as a United States magistrate judge...

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 ...