The Final Score


"The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away: not one single American was charged, indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election - not even a low-level volunteer. The number is zero." Glenn Greenwald.

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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 11:25 AM, Tuesday, July 8.  Latest entries are “Responding to a Post by Michael Smith,”  “Sometimes They Drag Me Back in,” and “An AI video Hoax to be wary of.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses... NEW: Undernet Black was updated recently. 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 the Algonquin Hotel in the 193...
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Trump the Fascist Dictator

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  Il Douche as the lefties like to call him On the first day of Summer, 2025, it’s time to take stock on what is and is not going on in these United States of America. The desperate remnant of what used to be the official Democrat Party is still trying to depict Donald Trump as an anti-Democratic authoritarian fully engaged in the process of destroying our Constitutional protections against a single executive ruling by decree and the tactics of terror. We’re five months in now to the second term of this president, and it’s appropriate to demonstrate what could have happened in that time and did not. The pic up top is of Mussolini only because there’s a superficial physical resemblance between Il Duce and The Donald . The more accurate comparison for our purposes is with the favorite avatar of the left, Adolf Hitler and His Nazi Party. People with Internet access, even Democrats, can confirm to themselves that Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933  by means of an electoral ...
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Is Newsom Real or is he AI?

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There’s a serious article in the works on the current state of AI technology, but this post is mostly a fun way of showing how a sheaf of new apps are playing with its capabilities. It’s probably closer to Whwt most people imagine AI to be than the experts who are alternately promoting and fearing its life-changing potential. Not a bad way to prepare the soil for the planting of some new ideas later on. Saw the article posted above and was immediately reminded of a cartoon app I had used on the Fovernor of California about a year ago. I was happy enough with the result because it did resemble the Governor, but that didn’t stop me from using his name to open the post and make sure readers would recognize him on the steps of the Capitol. I made a number of cartoons for future reference, some of which I subsequently used when a given subject’s behavior was cartoonish enough. Why I have something like 65,000 image files It’s called exploring the technology. I do it all the time. I use what...
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Homework that’s fun

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Click the graphic to go right to The Glossary I know there are those out there in the Facebook Universe who do come to look at the longer thought pieces I generally reserve for IPR and other of my websites. The traffic here, by the way, is not chiefly driven by Facebook, which accounts for only 17 percent of the IPR audience. This post, though, is primarily for you FB friends who may want to see one of the taproots of views I regularly express about the UniParty, the decline of the rule of law, the nexus of media and left-leaning government institutions, the assault on Judeo-Christian principles, the abortion debate, and the ongoing war between and among victim classes in the United States of 2023. Now that may sound like a dose of medicine, but it isn’t. The Glossary at Shuteye Nation was a satirical work of a little more than 10,000 words, presented dictionary-style, words and terms in alphabetical order with their definitions. It was written in the year 2000. With the possible excep...
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Responding to a post by Michael Smith

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  The Facebook version of me read a post this morning by a smart man named Michael Smith. He was talking about third parties. I read his ‘Essay Part 1’ and was disposed to make a comment, which got thrown out for being too long. So here it is. Smith’s post is first. Robert Laird’s response is second. MICHAEL SMITH.    Essay 1: The Case Against a Third Party My granddaddy, Baker T. Goodwin, when faced with something with which he disagreed, used to say, “I’m agin’ it,” and when it comes to this “America Party” nonsense floating around - like Ross Perot’s old Reform Party - I’m mostly still “agin’ it.” But I’ll toss in one caveat: if we’re talking a third party, it better be a complete replacement party for the GOP and whatever scraps of the Democrat Party still respect the Constitution - if any exist – but if there are any left, they’re hidden better than a moonshine still in the Ozarks. Conservatives need to learn to play the long game, or we’re doomed to a future of Demo...
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Has it been 72 hours yet?

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By my watch it’s the third day. How to explain what Trump has been up to in the Mideast? He’s been doing what he always does. Working for the deal he wants after all the rhetoric and bluster and the moves and countermoves are done.  What did he want? The safety of Israel, which is our only agent of Democracy in the Middle East. An end to the killing as soon and for as long as possible. And most of all, he wanted Americans to be as safe as possible from the deliberate and collateral damage inflicted by crazy people in the greater Islamic world. What were the obstacles he had to overcome? 1) Irrational, incredibly violent emotions on both sides, by Israel and by Iran and the organizational instruments it has used for 45 years to attack, terrorize, and otherwise intimidate Israel and its few real allies in the western world. 2) A seriously degraded U.S. intelligence capability, lacking both the political will and the human on-the-ground resources to discover What the Hell was really g...
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An Open Letter to Trump Haters

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One of these installed in at least five different cities You probably think this is going to be a screed or a lecture. It isn’t. It’s an honest question, asked out of curiosity: WHAT ARE YOU GETTING OUT OF ALL THIS? Almost no one comments here, so I’m not expecting answers. I’m asking you to think about the question for yourselves, with some specificity. To wit: Has the amount of emotion you’ve invested in hating Trump for 10 years made you happier? Is your marriage better, your sex life more satisfying, your circle of friends wider, your career more prosperous, your state of mind more equable and fulfilling? How has your perspective on life changed during the last 10 years? Are you more or less optimistic, diversified in your leisure-time pursuits, content with the personal choices you’ve been making on a day-to-day basis, balanced between the frequently opposing pulls of intellect and emotion? How has your self image (your amour-propre, as the French would say) evolved during this p...
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Sometimes they drag me back in

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Thomas Jefferson in a tracksui t   In the last couple of weeks I’ve been witness to a couple of monomaniacs holding forth from their petty thrones on Facebook. Thomas Lipscomb has been making an ass of himself with thinly veiled “anti-Zionist” screeds against the corrupt Jew leadership of Israel. Commenters aplenty have taken the bait and swarmed in to denounce his denunciations and brand him as the antisemite he is (or has, in his dotage, become). I made a comment or two trying to expose the provocation game he was playing, but it fell on deaf ears. I managed to overcome the obstacles associated with using Messenger to remind Lipscomb that as an op-ed ‘journalist,’ his obligation was to persuade, not inflame. I sent him a link to my post about Scarecrows , but he did not reply. After that I left them all to it without looking, but my wife had a morbid fascination with the ongoing ritual dance until I think I convinced her to let it drop while it continued on. That’s where I stood ...
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Through the past brightly…

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  A key video that won’t load after a brief title flash in the time capsules below Yes, the President is standing on a knife edge that stretched all the way from California to Iran and beyond. I’m keeping an eye on it, as I’m sure many of you are too. But unlike the pundits and other seers of the mass media, we the people who live in the real world know that there’s not much we can do to affect what will happen in the hours and weeks ahead. We’ve already done what we had to do, which is elect the best available candidate for the job of making the tough decisions about how best to proceed in our interests. Beyond that, our responsibility is primarily to remain calm and do the work we’re best suited to doing. In my case that means writing stuff I think it worthwhile to write about as honestly as possible. That accounts for most of my time, but being as old and uniquely situated as I am, there’s also a continual overhead I have to pay in the form of what I call Reclamation ; that is, ...
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Mass Disorientation

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  He’s gone. This never happened. Don’t tell me I’m the only who’s noticed. That would mean I’m having a psychotic break, into a state called dissociation. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. What I’m referring to is bigger than a solitary breakdown because it takes in too much to be one man’s delusion, no matter how vast his imagination. What I’m talking about is an increasing sense of unreality in the everyday experience of an entire population. No, not just a sense, an atmosphere that involves all the senses. Nothing looks, sounds, smells, feels, tastes quite right, and even time is out of joint. There are still connections, some glue that binds pieces together but the connections are twisting, torquing, breaking and reattaching in new ways. There is movement through time, but even the ticks of the clock are changing speed and pitch, mocking us all individually and collectively, so the only thing we can be sure of is that reality itself is becoming the globs in a Sixties la...
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