Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Newsmax “Conservative website” my ass.
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Anything in here about gas prices? Got gas three weeks ago at $2.65.9 per gallon. Got gas today at $2.93.9 per gallon. The Biden Administration cares about average Americans? Can you find gas prices on today’s Newsmax headlines? No.
Actually, their idea of news hopeful and helpful to conservatives is boasting how much better they are doing in traffic than other so-called conservative websites, none of which has been conservative for a long long time. The great news is, they’re a winner since inauguration (unlike the rest of us), along with the lame deadsoft Parler and WhoMe (WhyMe?) or whatever that usufruct of FB skirmishers calls itself.
Fox News and National Review have plunged in popularity (24-46 percent). Do tell. Newsmax actually thinks National Review became anti-Trump after the election. (Huh?) They don’t mention Breitbart. Rivals, you know. But I can assure them Breitbart is now spelling and punctuating better than a 5th grader, or some of them anyway, and they’re as objectively professional as, well, Newsmax.
Sadly, most of you are getting your news from the Neo-RINOs — namely Newsmax and Breitbart — featuring an obsolete ideal of ‘objective journalism’ articulated by tired columnists as old as the Democrat leadership, while the MSM Left is nakedly propping up a president who has delegated his biggest responsibilities to a second-rate California roundheels politico who is to executive experience what an HR VP is to corporate management, an officious regulatory ballbuster defending the overhead bottom line by intimidating the people who do the real work. Queen Kamala has never run anything. Now she’s assigned by our Swiss-cheese-brained president to fix a COVID situation the press asks nothing about and a border crisis the president won’t even admit exists. Does anybody inquire into this? Research her executive experience in depth? Nooooo. Arch innuendo will suffice, if it’s mentioned at all.
I mean, what does it take to defeat the cancerous Uni-Party Borg that’s devouring the Constitution and American lives at a terrifying clip? We just have to keep responding with reasonableness to vicious, unreasoning despots. Right? Of course. What it means to be right, right?
At a minimum, do any of the conservative brainiacs think just because they live in Jellystone Park, no one in flyover country will notice a 40 percent increase in gas prices since the Doddering Delaware Destroyer moved into the White House?
Far be it from them to take a cue from the original Delaware Destroyer, the non-zombie one, and fight back with some actual hard hits.
I’ve some “max” news for all of you. I’ve been bad to the bone all my adult life. Played and won this exact 8-ball game with exactly the same guys from Cape May to Millville to Salem to Philly to Bear, Delaware. Usually won. I’ve Mad-Max-crossed the Delaware twin bridges and the Ben Franklin on Harleys and Nortons at 75 mph. I was in the crowd of 120,000 at JFK stadium when Journey, with the country’s chart topping hit Don’t Stop Believin’ opened for the Stones in 1981 to yawns and the last act before the main event was George Thorogood. The place erupted, topped later on only by Mick and Keith, ants on a faraway stage with no Jumbotron. We know our own. Journey was nothing to Philly. George and the Stones were something. You and Newsmax and Breitbart aren’t it. Why I parted company with Facebook long months ago.
Why am I coming back for a few late posts? I’m struggling on the best way to complete my biggest MS in a decade or three: Death of the Republic. You’re all implicated in that. Just say, I needed a few more pale “Likes” to refocus my resolve. Every comment as blank and uncommunicative as “Like” hardens my resolve to complete my oft-stated task of leaving a record for those who will come later. After you. After your kids and grandkids. When some punks somewhere will have to start fitting the broken pieces back together.
But I do acknowledge that all us Facebook Friends are family. Hello, my family:
People thought Satanic Majesties was copying Sergeant Pepper.
Nope. Stones were pushing the boundaries. The Metamorphosis
LP was Stones spoofing pompous Beatles again. (Lady Jane?)
Everyone’s gone wrong on culture issues. Except, that is, for me.
All you hippies and Gaians and Wiccans and greenies and all-around-do-gooders and passive aggressive politically correct liberals and resignedly tolerant RINOs who thought the last half of the 20th century was about the Beatles and the new age of Aquarius were wrong. It was always about 1984. The Death Card of the Tarot. The bleak wall Pink Floyd described and succumbed to without understanding it for a moment. The 20th century was always about The Rolling Stones. A ticket you needed not to ride but to survive.
Before you had your Rainbow, we had ours. The 6th Rolling Stone.
In all those years, the goddess Tina never did Gimme Shelter. Why?
Couldn’t. Merry Clayton could. Tina never could. Wanna talk Yoko?
Oh. The female part. That would be Merry Clayton.
The history changing part? That would be not Beatles but Stones.
You weren’t there. Life was. When the 50 Year War
began. I never ever stopped. Saw how bad it’s got.
See. I was there for all of it. Lennon, not Jagger, was the one accused of molesting a minor female child. You all think you know. I was there. You weren’t.
The Beatles were an Ed Sullivan Show phenomenon. The Stones were our life unfolding. Yesterday, Philly radio host Don Giordano, who’s pretty damn sure he knows everything, did his usual Question of the Day, Who’s your favorite band? Only rule? No Beatles, no Stones. I almost parked the car.
Giordano. Knows everything, knows nothing. He still, religiously, watches the Jerry Seinfeld Show. Repeatedly. What he has instead of religious faith. Why the Republic is dead. Gimme Shelter.
Truthfully, you can’t be a fan of both Beatles and Stones.
Proof. The Beatles lasted 5 years as a top band. The Rolling Stones lasted 50+. You do the math.
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 ...
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 tooic 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 cukture 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...
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...
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. ...
The CHYOS Club (Pronounced kīos, abbreviated ‘kos, meaning MR ) American Illuminati? We’ve all heard the legends of secret societies. The Renaissance story of the ‘Illuminati’ who rule the world as gray eminences behind the scenes is a legend unsupported by facts or, at any rate, evidence. We also know of outright hoaxes widely believed in, like the Priory of Sion made famous by admittedly fictitious Dan Brown novels and movies. But we also know that there are secret societies at every level of elite life. Who hasn’t heard dark whispers of Yale’s Skull & Bones, numbering the Bushes and John Kerry as members? At the international level, the Freemasons are a proven fact, even if their Illuminati-like influence is only widely believed in the UK, with its historical paranoia about Scotland, where freemasonry re-emerges as a follow-on to the Knights Templar. Great fun, mostly. Who doesn’t thrill to news about Bill schmoozing in the dark at the Bilderberger Group? Conspiracy? All t...
Lewis Hamilton wins Seventh World Championship at Formula 1 Grand Prix in Turkey: A stunning drive from Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton in the Turkish Grand Prix gave him his 10th victory of the season – and, more crucially, saw him claim the seventh drivers’ title of his career, to equal the record of Michael Schumacher, as Racing Point’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel completed the podium after a thrilling race in Istanbul. Hamilton had started the race in sixth, risen to third midway through the first lap and then dropped back to sixth by the end of Lap 1 after an error at Turn 9. But a decision to change his intermediate tyres just once saw Hamilton drive a masterful race to claim victory by over 25 seconds from Perez. The win alone was enough to claim championship #7, but it was even more assured after a disastrous race for Valtteri Bottas - the only man who could have stopped Hamilton winning the title today - who spun six times en route to a P14 finish.
The big historical questions of “What will happen?” are usually best settled in hindsight. The biggest questions generally concern whether or not some historical catastrophe was inevitable or not. The American Civil War. World War I. World War II. Meticulous historians, back when we had them, have given us answers to those three in particular. Yes, yes, and yes. The one that bears the strongest resemblance to our current turning point is our own American Civil War. The young constitutional republic had been born with a deadly contradiction at the heart of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The reason for the contradiction was political compromise needed to secure sufficient nationwide support for the adoption of the Constitution. Slavery was a ticking time bomb from 1789 on. Eventually there would have to be a reckoning. Was actual warfare inevitable though? Yes. North and South were unified by their shar...
Minimalism has been a periodic ideal of modern and post-modern esthetics. Purely arbitrary, of course, though not without possibilities and even infinities of its own. For example, there are those who regard Haiku as a sort of supreme test of the poet, since poetry is commonly defined as the best words in the best order. This leaves the door open for imagining that there is an absolute minimum definable for capturing profound truth in the fewest of the best words in the least of the best order. In Haiku there must be 17 syllables, some reference to a season (ensuring universality I guess), and a prohibition against rhyme to prevent cheating (another guess). What if this definition of the minimum is wrong? What if there’s some way to reach great truths in less than 17 syllables? In less than a single word even? And, gasp, in less than a single letter on the page? Impossible? Well, why the hell not? I propose that the graphic above is a poem, subject to meaningful exploration, inte...
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