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.
RAV’s Frank Gaffney discussing existential crisis of AI with statecraft guru Sam Faddish. What could go wrong? This, for one thing: He has his own gaggle of Chicken Little AI experts. And, inevitably, this: Me, when I’m not hiding my true self behind a photograph They’re all worried about AI. Terrified in fact. For different reasons. Bannon has some apocalyptic seer who’s worried about meta-humans replacing Homo sapiens. Gaffney and Faddis are fixated on the latest AI hot topic, “The Singularity,” that magic moment when a supercomputer becomes self aware and decides to exterminate mankind. How did we get here? The usual way. The movies. First, there was HAL: Then, just a quarter century later, after a decades-long detour through a dead-end time paradox called The Terminator , there came the monstrous harpy HAL, a transgendered terminator in a box, like we’d been brought up to believe in, including Gaffney and Faddis: Worried yet? Here’s her resumé and mission statement. C...
How did we get here from here ? Don’t forget the question. We’ll be answering it by the end of the post, in our usual roundabout way. Today is the last day of May, finally, and therefore the Last Day of May Madness. I don’t pretend to know what June will bring and what epithet it will earn, but this second part of yesterday’s ramble is about showing you that madness takes different people differently, and mine is not so much random infantilism as obsessive curiosity derived from my relationship with the universe. The universe speaks to me in ways both overt and intimational, which is my own word and also the tacit permission I give you to interpret my references to the universe as free-association play with my particular universe, of which I have documented abundant bits and pieces and bigger parts too. I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t think there was some value to it. Yesterday we started with RINOs in the news and the funny curse they seem to have brought upon themselves, and we ended...
Are we being distracted from the real problem? This is a fairly typical posting from the right-leaning media… FTA: <<Liberal celebrities and entertainers love to get preachy with the public. It’s almost like it’s coded in their DNA. They just can’t resist it. One public relations expert recently said that the public is sick and tired of it. People want to be entertained, not lectured to. He used two specific examples. Bruce Springsteen and the Black Crowes. Springsteen’s concerts have become more like liberal talk radio and the Black Crowes actually had audience members walk out on them for trashing the USA. Doug Eldridge, the founder of Achilles PR, says people have had it with this. “At this point, it’s fatigue,” Eldridge said. “Much like compounding interest, it’s not a linear calculation; it’s accumulation,” he continued. “For the last decade, fans (read: average Americans) have been lectured, lied to, gaslit, and shamed, if they didn’t confo...
They don’t let me out much anymore. I feel like Uncle Fred . Back on the first of April I rechristened the next 30 days April Fools Month. Turns out I was right to do that, as the Democrat downward spiral into an unhinged opposite of what it once prided itself for became more laughable by the day. Now we are on the 30th day of what I am hopefully about to bury as “May Madness,” a cringe-inducing period of violent Dem fantasies and true-life violence they deplore without seeming able to connect their own rhetoric with mass shootings and assassination attempts. They’re actually proud of themselves. A lot like their Republican counterpart, the RINOs, whose only sign of backbone in many years has been their willingness to defy Trump and conspire openly against the legislative priorities he was elected to implement. And, like the Dems, they're proud of themselves. It’s not a small group. Let me count the stiff-necked feeders at the Wall St/Pharma/Amnesty/Pork/Antisemite trough who have ...
How this post got started… No secret that my sleep habits are a lot like That Man’s, the one so many Americans love to hate. I’ve been losing my optimism about 2.0 for a long time now, not because I don’t trust his resolve or motives but because the pessimism is a powerful force I’ve struggled against all my adult life. Which began too soon, as I’ve described elsewhere. Like him, I’m running out of time in the natural human sense of it. More still to do than likely years to do it in. My sleep comes only in chunks, punctuated by dream-induced wake-up calls that send me to the keyboard and the net and the pile of work sitting there in the in-basket. I sympathize with the champions of MAGA who are sounding so tetchy and miserable at the moment. They’re convinced they must keep trying to impress on the low-attention-span voters in their audience just how important it is to understand the depth and depravity and dastardly deeds of the Deep State. But I don’t need to be reminded. What I...
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 dur...
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.
…and a weird dose of nostalgia, as for something half remembered. What did you do for your Memorial Day remembrances? We watched the laying off the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns and the President’s speech. The audience was large, and the people there looked amazingly normal. Attentive and respectful. The way our parents taught us to be at solemn events. We heard the fireworks begin after dark and out the Thundershirt on our terrier Tommy, who isn’t entirely sure that fireworks aren’t an approaching thunderstorm. All we needed of that timeless ritual, since we’ve both been to May such occasions, including the field a mile away where the Salem even is always held. It was only at bedtime that I tried something new. In my constant search for background sounds that facilitate the hours of sleep I get before the inevitable wee hours summons to the keyboard, I try different things, usually intended to be monotonous and therefore soporific. British crime documentary series are ...
A snip of what’s up at Reels. I wouldn’t normally use this site to promote a single joke at Facebook’s Reels investment in ACHD social network communications. This is a special case in a couple ways. The graphic basis comes from a post at Breitbart by John Nolte, whom we admire for his courage and his encyclopedic knowledge of (yeah, I’ll use the highfalutin’ word…) Cinema . It’s long been a conviction of mine that the most indispensable credential for opinionating is knowing at least one subject extremely well. Nolte’s love and expertise about all things connected to Hollywood and its extraordinary cultural contribution for over a hundred and fifty years now qualifies as just such a credential. He was with Breitbart from the beginning and has survived all the ups and downs there because he never stops doing what he does best, which is write about all the phenomena that have affected and changed the world since this breakthrough project was produced in 1872: Edward Muybridge. Ever hear...
The post referenced in the title is about an IPR National Insurrection analysis that is presently underway. Putting it together is a real slog, and I don’t like slogs, which is why I’m putting pressure on myself by publishing this in advance. It’s really just data, but it’s data that show you just how deceptive the presentation and supposed analysis of data can be. Part of the Insurrection post is examining differentials between various troubled regions of the United States. For many kinds of behavioral variables, there are nicely produced maps compiled by this and that federal or public interest organization. Examples I’ve collected so far in researching my post. [Note: Per 100,000 numbers are less messy for the social scientists to soil their hands with than collectively shocking totals.] Of course, it’s very difficult to amass data that won’t be disputed about deaths per 100,000 sexually active females of fertile age. None of the data collectors really like using total deaths as a s...
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