Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Happy New Year!
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Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot...
Guy Lombardo. The once and future Czar of New Year’s Eve.
Welcome to the past, which is the blurry black-and-white future the revolutionary Democrats-in-charge have in mind for you. 1957 is not ideal, not the final outcome envisioned by a party whose platform is essentially a mimeograph of the Bernie Sanders campaign platform. They couldn’t nominate him because he’s Jewish and a lifelong advocate of Cuban and Soviet “socialism,” which is to say he is a Communist in everything but name. So they stole all his policy prescriptions instead. Why HIS Life Matters. In 1957, Bernie was in high school. No doubt, one of the stories that attracted his attention to the USSR, which was its demonstration of superior technology via the first satellite in space, Sputnik.
Leading the way, even if the dog dies. For the greater good.
By the time he went to Brooklyn College in 1959, Castro was just coming to power and Bernie became a loud advocate for him and all things Marxist. By then, of course, most of the world was well aware that the Marxist experiment in the Soviet Union had become a one-party totalitarian state under Josef Stalin. Which Bernie never seemed to mind. More from 1957:
The Hitlerian monster Stalin was four years dead by then, but the USSR remained every inch what he had made it. (Antifa take note of the following. You can DO this.)
In WWII, btw, FDR affectionatelynicknamed him “Uncle Joe.”
Bernie Sanders continues to insist he’s not a totalitarian Communist but a Democratic-Socialist, meaning he’s only interested in helping the oppressed workers by confiscating business from the private sector and redistributing income so that everybody has the same (almost) living wage and the exact same crappy healthcare, except for the brainy leaders who have five houses and pay no taxes. It’s completely different, right?
Chances are, the Sanders vision is more consistent with that of Venezuela’s Maduro, who praised Bernie as a revolutionary ally in the war against capitalism. So maybe this is what we all have to look forward to in the Luddite paradise being planned for us by the newly emboldened Uni-Party, which they hope to make permanent by conferring statehood on D.C. and Puerto Rico (4 new Dem senators), packing the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, and adding millions of government-dependent Dem-voting illegal aliens. The economy will take care of itself, especially when all those pesky fossil fuels have been eliminated.
“The western city of Maracaibo used to be Venezuela's affluent oil capital. But today, it's a place of hardship and hunger. Facing hyperinflation, corruption, penniless public services, crime and chronic shortages, the city has become a symbol of the country's wider economic collapse. Eating has become a luxury. Due to a lack of medical care, the lives of children, the elderly and those with chronic diseases are slowly slipping away. In this 26-minute documentary, our reporter Roméo Langlois bring us a heart-wrenching account of the depths of human suffering.”
Well, we can all hope for the best, can’t we? I do wish you all a Happy New Year. Now it’s time for me to go get ready for all those locked down bowl games we’ve been enjoying so much in our COVID gulag.
This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a topic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the culture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
Invocation of Nemesis by the Summoners Click on Rosie. Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the sad PR plight afflicting the unfortunate middle child of the three worst First Ladies in American history. . What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts. Because I’m going to admit at the outset what most of the MAGA faithful won’t. You are right that Donald Trump is responsible for much of the imminent danger we are facing as a nation. Without his arrival on the political scene 11 years ...
If you’ve never seen an Asylum production of their “Saving the World from Imminent Destruction” series, you’re excused from this post. The rest of us already know the basics. A once prominent, now disgraced scientist (often Sam Baldwin, but not always) is minding his own business making a living income and trying to mend his struggling family life when he notices that something is seriously amiss in the cosmos. Gravity isn’t working quite right. Or all the birds seem to be migrating at the same time. Or some local pond suddenly ejaculates a pillar of lava. You know. The warning knell of an extinction-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, where are the kids? They were supposed to be home by now. He calls his ex-wife. She doesn’t know where they are. He calls an old colleague at the agency in DC where nobody else will take his calls anymore. In a whisper, the colleague tells him the experts in charge haven’t noticed anything to worry about cosmologically speaking. This far in, we already know wh...
Happy Independence Day No. 250! I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial. In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
The last group photo I’m a part of that’s still in my possession. My sister’s wedding in the late1990’s, with me and my mother in attendance, here in Salem. I don’t get out much anymore. Haven’t for a long time. If I didn’t take pictures of myself, nobody would, or could, anymore. I don’t give them the chance. Why in recent years I’ve made a point of doing an official birthday selfie, to keep track of the wear and tear of the years and see if the falling apart process is gaining speed. This year was not a good year for hair. That much I’ll tell you. But here’s the Official 74th Birthday Selfie I took on Friday. Not as young as I used to be. I hadn’t really shown this pic to anyone, but imagine my surprise when I received a gift yesterday by parcel delivery from a young lady I helped raise who will always be close to my heart. She and I hadn’t spoken about the Rolling Stones in years, but somehow she must have divined I’d been thinking of them, because here’s what she ordered sent ...
Marc Antony: “ Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men– Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.” [Worth noting, Gaius Julius Caesar was not an emperor; the successors who fought for absolute power and took his name as a title were emperors and brought about the death of the several hundred years of Roman Republic.] The American Republic is now at an end. We had a good run. He will be forced to concede, because Trump will not declare martial law....
Yeah. Click on the blue headlines. There are two precursor posts to this, both still in-process. I’ll finish and link them later. One is about the death of the historical novel, which mirrors a lot of other deaths in our culture. The other is about divorce, an absolutely transformative and deadly factor in what has become of us as a nation. What does that leave us with? The end result of our progressive devolution, largely invisible to all, because it is a function of the variable we tend to think of as a constant, human consciousness. Which it isn’t. I’ve written quite a lot about the consciousness problem over the years, and Instapunk Returns, as well as a couple other of my blogs, contain 5+++ years worth of thoughts on the topic. I’ll be sending you to those posts here, providing you with an excerpt, usually the lede, a sample graphic or two, and a link. The order is roughly chronological. I’m not going to give you any particular setup from piece to piece. The relevance to the main...
The Valley of the Jerseyikes When you’ve decided to your own satisfaction that life doesn’t end with physical death, what have you got to worry about? That probably depends on where you come down on the age-old questions about ghosts. Do they exist? Are they a possible fate of troubled souls after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil or been yanked out of it too suddenly? What if you expire peacefully and find yourself waking up in the attic of your own house, somehow tethered to it with no watch you can trust to keep track of time? I know I’ve stopped wearing a watch at all, like almost all of you out there. Are we taking some kind of risk that we’ll miss the departure signal for the trip to the other side? One side effect of getting old and not liking most of what’s on teevee is that you wind up watching too many paranormal shows, which have the virtue of no politics, no gratuitous sex scenes, and extended stretches of restful watching with almost nothing happening on screen. ...
Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
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