Why Life is Like It Is

 


See? I did four new websites last night. And here’s all I have to show for it.

Waddya think?

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Instapunk on the News

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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 :
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CHYOS Club — The Oxford Connection

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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...
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Bad Max as a challenging lesson

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  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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Things Fall Apart

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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 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 everythin...
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Don’t like Trump? Get over it.

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Another has-been life ruined beyond repair. Trump Curse writ large. Rosie O’Donnell still can’t get over the fact that Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by blowing off Megyn Kelly’s gotcha question about his mean tweets to women, using her as the completely understandable punchline.   Millions of men, and even some women, said to themselves, “I would do that too.” She’s a sad case. But this latest outburst got me to thinking. Maybe I’ve been unfair to The Donald myself over the years. With my wife and others, I’ve taken the position that I admire Trump as a President and would-be savior of the Republic. I’ve also said I wouldn’t have him in my house for dinner. Or, less pompously, that I have never had any desire to meet him in person. I have fought strenuously for his political life and fortunes. No one can deny that. But I also fought for George W and Mitt Romney (as I had done for McCain, whom I genuinely despised) when they were running. Didn’t want to meet them...
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Gray Lady Down

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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...
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A Big Missing Piece

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Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
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The New NIMH

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  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...
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TEMU Mary’s in MAGA clothing

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Who’s in charge of building the American ‘woman’ of the future? Everyone knows what TEMU is, right? Even I know what TEMU is, and I don’t have anything to do with TikTok. How can that be? I don’t even associate with the CCP-friendly mass media. But I do know and I’ll explain why. For those a little bit farther behind the curve, this is TEMU: Companies like TEMU are the reason why Trump is taking a harder line against China than every other treacherous trading partner of the United States. The Wall Street media crowd is actively hoping for a recession to cool Trump’s jets on the tariff thing. They can’t afford to lose the enormous subsidy their publications receive from Chinese advertisers. Anything is preferable to losing those big big bucks in a period when the suckers are no longer willing to read libels against themselves by paying to see behind a pay wall. The crisis of the Trump tariff policy (that’s “Trade War” in NYTspeak) is hitting TEMU too.. Oh. Right. The crisis is higher pr...
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History in Hindsight

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This post is a pick-up from an entry at another website of mine from Good Friday, a couple days ago. Originally, I didn’t see it as having an audience here because I don’t want to overdo the archaeology of my own work and past personal experience. But looking back is part of the process of using insights past in new ways that illuminate the present and the challenges of the future. So I rethought the placement and offer it here without apologies. The one day a year devoted entirely to death. Got to wondering, what’s the single deadest thing in our culture right now? Deader even than journalism, the fine arts, literature, music in every genre, and the scientific method. My own answer is history. I’ve read and studied a lot of history, both in school and as an avocation. As an elementary school kid, I saved a Sunday supplement that put color pics of all 35 Presidents on one sheet of newsprint and I memorized the order. Before college I got AP credit in both American and European history....
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