A Memory from This Day in History by Pat Hurley Laird


It’s been a year since she posted this on the first full day of Spring, 2018. Robert’s Attempt to Get Banned from Book Publishing in Two Different Centuries. It’s pricey but worth it for the Renaissance artwork and the Turing Test flowcharts alone.

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A Facebook friend sent me a comment today wondering why I was spending so much of my time lampooning a conservative news site he never looks at. I spend time on a lot of things, like ALL the news outlets, but in the grand scheme of things it only amounts to my spare time. For anyone else who’s concerned, here’s a look at the bigger news picture… The New Yorker: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2026/04/ai-fun-with-dick-and-jane.html The New York Times: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2024/12/gray-lady-down.html The Instapunk Times, 2019: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/p/the-instapunk-times-morgue.html Brightbelt News, 2021: https://brightbelt.blogspot.com/ Brightbelt Perspectives, 2022: https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/p/brightbelt-perspectives-on-2022-midterms.html The Instapunk Times, 2025/26: https://instapunktimes.blogspot.com/ And before that, there was The XOFF News Network :
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Things Fall Apart

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Take a minute to look at the opener here. We all know this is pretty much how things are nowadays. Everything chaotic, backwards and upside down, as if some law of nature had been violated. Which it has.  Early in this this century, wishful thinkers believed in a mirage called Hope and Change that turned out to be shallow, insincere, and small-minded. We survived that, sort of, but the ones who felt most betrayed, about 30 percent of the nation, believed they deserved more than the eight years of delusion which had been their sacrifice given in exchange for the real prize. In compensation, they wanted to elect a very bad woman to the Presidency of the United States. They were denied that wrongheaded but deeply felt desire. Since that bitter disappointment they have become obsessed with becoming as mean and hateful and ruthless as it took to wreak their revenge on the man who defeated them and the people who helped him do it. The bad woman led the legions of those smashing everythin...
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CHYOS Club — The Oxford Connection

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Promise you, I’ll be fiddling with this one for a while. It’s too big for one go. Bear with me. CHYOS Club I’m going to show you a thundering herd of links. In a very deep sense, Oxford University is the compleat brain of the United Kingdom. If you’re to understand this post, you’re going to have to read, to look at long lists and deep piles of evidence. Their impact is simply too big to summarize in a neat way. Oxford is the intellectual culture of Britain, and its impact on the United States is not calculable so much as huge and inevitable. Oxford 1920, as depicted by Chariots of Fire. England 2020. 100  years later. How to  get  from there to here. So very simple. Oxford U. Evelyn Waugh, the greatest Brit writer of the 20th century, explained it all to the rest from his own Oxford throne;  https://affirmationsmodern.com/articles/71/ : FTA: <<In 1946 the English novelist Evelyn Waugh infamously proclaimed that he did not write satire. Satire, Waugh wrote, “pr...
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Bad Max as a challenging lesson

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  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...
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TEMU Mary’s in MAGA clothing

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Who’s in charge of building the American ‘woman’ of the future? Everyone knows what TEMU is, right? Even I know what TEMU is, and I don’t have anything to do with TikTok. How can that be? I don’t even associate with the CCP-friendly mass media. But I do know and I’ll explain why. For those a little bit farther behind the curve, this is TEMU: Companies like TEMU are the reason why Trump is taking a harder line against China than every other treacherous trading partner of the United States. The Wall Street media crowd is actively hoping for a recession to cool Trump’s jets on the tariff thing. They can’t afford to lose the enormous subsidy their publications receive from Chinese advertisers. Anything is preferable to losing those big big bucks in a period when the suckers are no longer willing to read libels against themselves by paying to see behind a pay wall. The crisis of the Trump tariff policy (that’s “Trade War” in NYTspeak) is hitting TEMU too.. Oh. Right. The crisis is higher pr...
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Why did it have to be snakes?

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I think I might be a Grimm

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  A good catch by my wife is what started all this. As is our usual habit, we were watching something on TV older than the foul-mouthed, stunt-casted contemporary dreck when it rolled over into another older show called Grimm . I had heard of the series, maybe even seen some of it when it ran originally, and so we gave it a go. In the opening sequence our protagonist sees a young blonde on the sidewalk and as he watches her pretty face changes momentarily into a twisted monster version of her. Then it disappears and she goes to her car and drives away. That’s the premise of a show that ran for six years starting in 2011. The man who sees the transformation is, unbeknownst to him, a descendant of the famous Brothers Grimm who hunted down the monsters found in fairy tales. Here’s the scene I was able to capture later: Clumsy screen grab. Sorry. Don’t tell anybody. When the blonde woman did her quick change and vanishing act, my wife laughed and said, “Who knew that Pam Bondi started ...
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A Big Missing Piece

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Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
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