Alternative Election Indicators

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...

I’m changing my Spirit Animal

July 13, 2025

In recent years, I’ve been making it a practice to snap a photo of myself on my birthday as I ascend into the heady realm of old age. I turned 72 on July 10, which is supposed to be the new 40 or something if you’re up to date on the newest dietary supplements and anti-prostapocalypse Kegel exercises that keep you youngalike for decades longer than your dad. 70 is not the new 40 though. By coincidence, if there is such a thing, a young lady I’ve regarded as a daughter since I met her sent me a photo she found just last week. I was 44 then. The Boomer Bible was 7 years behind me. She wasn’t trying to be unkind, just reminding me how long we’ve known each other. The years take their toll now, just as they always have. I don’t deny playing with the photos after I take them. My motives aren’t even pure. I’m trying to stage-manage the future, at least in part, because when they show us portraits of a long dead writer they tend to want us to see what they looked like toward the end, wh...

Trump the Fascist Dictator

June 21, 2025

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 ...

Responding to a post by Michael Smith

July 07, 2025

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...

Mass Disorientation

February 03, 2024

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...

Homework that’s fun

February 09, 2023

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...

Has it been 72 hours yet?

June 26, 2025

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...

An Open Letter to Trump Haters

July 09, 2025

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...

Sometimes they drag me back in

July 06, 2025

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 ...

Full Circles Do Occur in Nature

July 15, 2025

Remember this guy? Don’t worry. I’ll remember him for you. Where this starts… This morning I checked Citizen Free Press the way I always do, to make sure the President is still alive and nukes aren’t raining down on Ukraine, and I found this: The blue teasers are all about the same guy. I took the link to the NYT feature, which was uncharacteristically out from behind the pay wall, meaning they want us to see it, even us irredeemables. CFP was right to spotlight the first seven paragraphs. Here they are: FTA: <<Not too long ago, I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife’s younger brother. I met Matt Kappler in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician’s license. My early memories of Matt are hazy — I was mostly trying to impress his parents. Still we g...

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