End of Year Thoughts, 2018


On the eve of the traumatic year 2019, I took a thoughtful look at the factors in play. It’s in three parts. They are self explanatory.

Part 1 — The Overton Window

Part 2 — Mental Models, Old and New

Part 3 — The Trump Enigma Explained


Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

Instapunk on the News

Image
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 :
Read more

I’ve thought about all this more than you have

Image
Graphic by Joshua Lake I’m changing my career mode today. If I were a senescent rock and roll band, which isn’t far off the mark, I’d be starting a series of farewell tours to give the youngsters a chance to see me before I take my final curtain call in the sky. I’ve already written enough to stop putting out albums, but it’s a habit that’s hard to break.  Truth is, I am now resigned to the inevitability of an American Dark Age, which may come on slowly or rapidly depending, but the issue in the intermediate term is not in doubt. We have become an uneducated, secular, self-involved nation of barely conscious people taking up space in institutions that were corrupted past saving many years ago.  What’s the point of me writing more? I’m writing what I do for the unborn ones who will come later and have to start picking up the pieces when being morally conscious and educated about the riches of human history becomes an aspiration again. Until then, I’m going to provide this préci...
Read more

CHYOS Club — The Oxford Connection

Image
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...
Read more

A Time Capsule that’s just been sitting there waiting

Image
  (1957-1966) You’re going to think this is as bad as being directed to the Hallmark Channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, or reruns of Fantasy Island. It isn’t. Yes, we found it because we’re old and remember when we watched it with grandparents or at home on Blaxk and white TVs. But this is one of those rare cases where the experience of seeing it again is better than the clichéed memory. There’s a lot more to watch than the one true plot of Perry identifying the murderer on the stand against all odds and confounding D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg yet again.  You realize almost immediately that you’re visiting a skillfully produced presentation of a completely different, bygone world that makes every episode fun to watch. The first two or three years will do. Unbelievably, they made 30 a year from 1957 to 1960. Each episode is 52 minutes long, which means advertising was confined to about 7+ minutes, compared to the 12-14 minutes per hour of ads on network shows no...
Read more

UPDATE: Things Fall Apart

Image
  Prepare for the Californication of the United States. Am I surprised? No. There will be much to discuss in future about just how ugly and violent things will get and how quickly, but those who thought they were voting for some return to pre-Trump normalcy are going to be shocked and dismayed about how much they will come to rue this day. Right now, I am simply marking the moment by reposting my current pinned post at FB as an indicator that I have long had a deep awareness of just how much trouble we are in for the shirt and intermediate terms. It may still be possible to head off a true Dark Age in western civilization, but the odds have shifted materially against that chance with the election results tonight. Here’s what I wrote back on September 19th. I stand by every word of it today. ********************* 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 h...
Read more

Gray Lady Down

Image
Lights on, nobody home. Strangest thing happened yesterday. I don’t usually get much help from other nosey people in finding material to write about. Usually, I just make it up for myself. But UPS made a surprise delivery here yesterday with a fat envelope containing a bunch of photographs and a small breast pocket notepad containing hand-scrawled sentence fragments keyed to the photos. So I’m sharing what I have, although there’s not much I can confirm in the way you’re supposed to do it. My source seems to be claiming that the New York Times as we have known it is gone, purchased by a third party, repurposed, and moved from its current location to another headquarters building. Still in New York City but no longer in the high-rent district. Until a few weeks ago, the derelict brownstone had been vacant for years. The  new owners have done a high-speed rehab just sufficient to resume publishing. I can hear all the questions now. Who bought them? Why does the NYT give every appeara...
Read more

PsychoPatriarchy My Ass

Image
Here’s the gist of what she has to say: FTA: <<For those of us who have spent our lives trying to dismantle this endlessly destructive paradigm of patriarchy, it has become increasingly clear in recent months that something more terrifying is afoot. The wheels are off the cart. We are in the midst of a chaotic, demented acceleration of the most violent and cruel aspects of this system which has evolved into what I am calling Psychopatriarchy . Psychopatriarchy is a reaction, a backlash against the progress we have made on all fronts: women’s rights, civil rights, immigrant rights, workers rights, trans rights etc. It has birthed an authoritarian fascist reality, poisoning our social and psychological environment with terrorizing violence, cruelty and precarity. It has consolidated the billionaire class who are driven by the mindset summed up in the slogan “move fast and break things.” Or, one might say, grab things, rape things. Psychopatriarchy is found in the 12 people  wh...
Read more

Things Fall Apart

Image
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 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 everything in ...
Read more

The New NIMH

Image
  Available at TUBI and Pluto streaming services. PREAMBLE This will turn out to be relevant. I promise. There is a 1982 movie called “The Secret of NIMH,” which is an animated story for children about quite dramatic and dangerous events in a world most of us pay little attention to. In fact the movie itself has been characterized as one of the greatest and yet most forgotten masterpieces of its film genre. NIMH won a prestigious ‘Saturn’ Award but achieved only modest initial success at the box office, though it became quietly popular with home purchases over the 40+ years since. Here’s a quickie plot overview, courtesy of Google: “Mrs. Brisby, a widowed mouse (Elizabeth Hartman), must move her children out of their home in a field before the local farmer starts plowing. Unable to leave because her son is ill, Mrs. Brisby seeks the help of nearby rats, who have heightened intelligence after being the subjects of scientific experiments. She receives an unexpected gift from the elde...
Read more