Homework — 4/1/2019


American Greatness: The Tables Turn in Russian Collusion Hunt

This isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a news story. It’s history, written by an historian, of outrageous events and schemes and lies that have been deliberately concealed for years by so-called purveyors of ‘news.’

If you want to know what has been going on behind the scenes since well before the 2016 presidential election, this article must be part of your information base.

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Instapunk Wasn’t Born Yesterday

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  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 ...
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The Sneaky Cowardice of So-Called Conservatives

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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...
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Party Time

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  No, I’m not going 100 percent Youtube on you. Truth is, the post I did the other day about the Progs  getting nutso when elections don’t go their way was an accident. I was really searching for the songs I’ll be posting here, and those political clips kept showing up in the sidebar. So I grabbed a few of them just to remind you that they really are out of their minds out there.  Right now, of course, a lot of MAGA people are also out of their minds, with very little power or insight about what’s going on behind the media tantrums. That’s why i started collecting this little musical refuge. When is it the right time to party? By which I don’t mean drug yourself into a coma but find a sound and a best that will make you dance or at least reach a philosophical state of equilibrium. It’s always time for that. Because not all party songs are happy things. Some of them are quiet reflective moods when the dancing and singing are winding down. Not a bad place to be when you thi...
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Legacy is a 6-letter word…

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  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 ...
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The Wild West of News Media

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Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. There’s an intensely contemporary reason for taking a close look at Scientology. The Swamp is so huge it seems like the Borg. But what are the stripped down essentials of the Borg? Here’s a look at a laboratory example, a microcosm if you will. In the interests of full disclosure, I did encounter Scientology back in the weird year of 1968. I was in Boston, got scooped in to a “Dianetics” exercise, and got speedily thrown out for having too much “charge” to participate. The one in charge was blond, bland to the point of creepy, and I almost (but not quite) succeeded in making him lose his temper. In further interests of disclosure, I spent years on Facebook, debating Trump-haters. They did lose their tempers. But they also exhibited the exact same repetition of Talking Points the lefties (and Scientologists) employ. Exact. Same. Words. How I made the cult connection. Overview Like it says. Troublemaker. Destroy Utterly  Horror Show Squared More ... ...
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