A Man Called Ove




Laughs, tears, and a smart blow against the Swedish Nanny State. Showing on Amazon Prime. Peas in a pod.

Compare with this Swedish TV Masterpiece from InstaPunk Rules.


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The Blobfish Boomlet

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  Click the graphic above to watch the Rumble video Why this post? The last 48 hours or so have defined the beginning of a new phase in the adventure of Trump 2.0. Phase 1 was fixing the border, addressing the hot wars in foreign climes, and launching a new trade strategy based on tariffs. Phase 2 was not a restart but a new layer, the beginning of calling the criminals of Trump 1.0 to account, ramping up the deportation campaign in Sanctuary locations, and fighting back against the locally based judicial insurrection against the 2024 election of Trump and his Americans First policies. Phase 3 is another new layer, the immediate aftermath of the death of the Democrat Party in last night’s election results.  I’m calling it the Blobfish Boomlet, because the outstanding feature of the Blobfish is that it is ugly and shapeless, flaccid inertness disguising itself with inflated media presence. Pundits insist we are looking at an ideological divide, a collision between two diametric...
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Our Idiot Judiciary

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Yeah, I did that. Am I fair? I’m principally a thinker and writer, which often but not always go together. As a thinker I use writing as a tool for thinking, because writing forces you to deal with matters of order, precision, logic, and moral context in testing your thinking. If you can’t write a thought down and agree with what you’ve written, you haven’t thought it through. I tend to be, try to be, fair in that process. But being a writer also offers the opportunity to go the next step beyond documentation. Because much of what I think is not popular, generally accepted in its positions, or understood by undisciplined minds, I also tend to create a kind of commentary called satire. Satire is inherently UN fair, in that it is meant to provoke readers to do their own thinking when they are angered or offended by a satirical provocation. For those who are inclined to agree with the unfairness, there is the collateral benefit of laughter. Funny requires no justification. It  just is...
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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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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 12:30 PM, Wednesday, November 19.  Latest entries are “Profile in Courage on the Epstein Fiasco,” “Sick of Fascist-Commie Circular Firing Squad,” and “Our Idiot Judiciary.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses! [ NOV 19 STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated November 19. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in th...
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Taking the Masks Off for Once on Halloween

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It’s Halloween! The funnest day of all for a certain sort of dreadly person. The music is just to set the mood. Feel free to come back to it in between the videos below. We’re all about masks today, and looking underneath them to see what’s going on with the elite saviors we’re depending on. Take a look and have some fun yourselves. Predicted this predatory new strategy back in February 2021 The Trump comeback victory in 2024 flattened the exhausted patriarchy of the Democrat leadership. Young eunuchs seeking to replace the Bidens and Schumers and Durbins are out of luck, whether they know it or not. Schiff, Buttigieg, Jeffries, Walz, Booker, and the fashion mannequin Newsom are doing nothing but give the male sex an even worse image than it already had.  He’s slim and lithe enough. Just not us enough. Who’s left? What’s left of the old matriarchy reluctantly giving way to the new blood, which is raising the pitch of the public debate to ear-shattering levels. Sad to see pioneers ...
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Sick of the Fascist<>Commie Circular Firing Squad

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The only objective of the current Deep State Democrat Party is just a hellish fetish. It was probably rude of me to interrupt the umpty-umpteenth nitpicking of the fascist/commie definitional argle-bargle that’s gripped American political partisans since the McCarthy era. (Explained here for all the trouble it’s caused). Not my concern anymore. There’s a bigger problem this kind of empty back and forth helps conceal. So I described the real problem in a comment I thought I’d share here with people who might actually read it: The UniParty State No Longer Has Any Ideology Historical antecedents are useful, but they can also be counterproductive diversions. Parsing the differences and similarities between communism and fascism/Nazism is no longer useful because we are looking at a new paradigm. Both fascism and communism had an ideological base on which activist organizations and ultimately states were built. But once they had shown the power and elitist protections of the state there wa...
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Is there a curse on New York City?

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  The island of Manhattan once belonged to the Lenape people, like a lot of NY and NJ. Just asking the question. Because there is historical background, evidence, And repeated rumblings from our Jungian subconscious that’s afflicted with uncannily relevant visions. Writers used to be solemnly warned that “to be universal, you must first be local.” Why my explanation of a possible curse on the Big Apple will actually begin a two-hour bus ride to the south of the Holland Tunnel. Which is not mentioned by accident. The fingerprints of the Dutch are all over the origins of this story.  The place down south of NYC is Salem County, New Jersey, which had a very special relationship with the Lenape people: The Salem Oak Tree was the real center of the county seat of Salem, where I grew up. It was so old and huge that its massive trunk had lower limbs that were the size of mighty oak trees themselves. The tree was already a landmark in 1675 when the treaty was signed under it. The Quak...
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A Thing We Meticulously Don’t Talk About

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I’ll be quoting directly in chunks here, so there can be no claim that I am cherry-picking facts, situations, narratives, or contexts. It’s an old subject for me, as you’ll see, but I’m writing now because my wife gave me a hard time about surfacing the racial issues surrounding the mass shooting at Lincoln University, which I raised because she told me the report she’s read did not include the fact that Lincoln is one of the surviving Historically Black Colleges. This is important because the mass media are fastidious about concealing pertinent information about the identities of both shooters and victims these days. She suggested I was dragging race into a sad crime story. Then she left the room. As I expect many of you would too. We’ve been well trained not to see this particular elephant in the room. Or at least not to discuss it. Here’s the NBC account: One person is dead and at least six others were wounded in a shooting amid homecoming festivities Saturday night at Lincoln Unive...
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Profile in Courage on the Epstein Fiasco

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  Representative Clay Higgins (R, LA) Is everyone ready for this? Getting what you wanted? There’s an old saying, “Be careful what you wish for… you might get it.” We’re about to have the most highly publicized rape trial media coverage in history for a rape trial that will never result in any convictions. A more tactless way of putting it is to say we are about to have the public pissing contest to end all public pissing contests. Trump called for this bill to pass. Democrats are smacking their lips. Republicans are afraid that MAGA constituencies obsessed with a sense of injustice about the victims are melting away in Christian-sounding dudgeon. Now it’s going to happen. Sometime today probably. Passage of the bill, I mean. Actual distribution of the documents will still be a burdensome process because everyone agrees redactions will be needed to protect the innocent. But, but, but… we will get to see the Democrat Party’s idea of “Democracy” in action. No wonder every member of t...
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  Redeeming the “Eccentric” Burnouts of the Left An interesting story still in the making. There’s a new streaming service just getting off the ground now with a groundbreaking movie project aimed at the award heights of SAG and the Golden Globes. Netflux Communications (still fighting off a trademark infringement suit from a troubled older streaming service) has chosen to share some pre-production details about their upcoming feature film ‘Being Keith Olbermann.” The project represents a collaboration among multiple partners in the enterprise, including Netflux, onetime newsman Keith Oldermann, and Stephen Col’bier, the onetime late night star who replaced that host from Indiana of all places, David, who is himself one of the project’s sponsors. The good news for us is that one Netflix’s innovative marketing strategies is to release more than the usual materials available from a production still in development, including some video clips and multiple storyboards of scenes yet to b...
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