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.
Exhibit 1. The Myth of Scientific Omniscience Where to start. There are so many places to start, all with consistently alarming intimations of one deep problem. The inference is seditious of rationality as we have deified it in science. I’m going to show you some of the more accessibly evocative starting points, not to drag you into the weeds of higher mathematics, but to stress some elements of simplicity that overthrow the fallacy called Artificial Intelligence. Bear with me. Just look for now. I’ll make connections as we proceed after viewing the items below. Exhibit 2. Turing Test Fallacy Exhibit 3. The Proof of Digital Inferiority (It works. Click where indicated on screen.) Exhibit 4. The Implementation Overreach Exhibit 5. The Implicatuons of “Sensitive Dependence” Exhibit 6. The Measurement Problem Exhibit 7. The Illusion of Control Exhibit 8. The Hammer/Nail Delusion Exhibit 9. The Impossibility of Artificial Intelligence Exhibit 10. The Oversimplification Problem Exhibit 11. ...
Our own Queen Iris Stairway to Heaven A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum) You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore) All I Knead (The Hollies) Take on Me (Aha!) Grand Prize Winner: Bohemian Catsody Got your mind right, yet? Good. Happy Hump Day .
WW2 Flying Tigers P-40 showing Ace-level kills at “Threads” based on notifications of 50 to 100 Likes for various replies I’ve made to TDS ranters. I’ve been in a down mood as we approach the end of 2025 and the completion of Trump’s first year in office since 2020. My annual End of Year post will describe my big picture view, but this post will fill in a significant part of that picture and can be used as a basis for endorsement or dismissal of my personal perspective. The social network app called Threads has been reference here previously, after my first exploratory encounters with what I’ve termed the “submerged 10 percent of Trump haters” the real percentage is probably much higher than a tenth, but these are the noncelebrity Rosie O’Donnells and Robert De Niros who are so obsessed with Trump that they have to type it out loud at the top of their keyboard lungs on a daily basis. After my first few brushes with them, I began to think that there’s something important goi...
This post was last updated at 12:01 AM, Wednesday, December 25. Latest entries are “Year End Thoughts on 2025,” “The ‘W’ File from Moon Books,” and “The Cryptkeeper.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses! XMAS STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated December 24. 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 1930s, and I m...
This was going to be a Facebook joke, playing on the contrast between the haughty New Yorker grand dame and the plainspoken Trump 2.0 disdain for reflexive mass media TDS. When I looked Jane Mayer up in Wikipedia I discovered the need to write this post. The woman is an archetype of the particular kind of box highly influential lefties in the nation’s press come from. They are by no means representative of the nation they purport to understand and cover objectively in their reporting and opinionating. Back in April of this year, I wrote a post called “ TDS is a coalition not a monolith .” It described criteria that define various ways in which Trump haters are limited in their knowledge of American life despite levels of education, power, and prosperity that might seem guaranteed to give them broad insight into their countrymen as a whole. Limiting factors include the isolating effects of being among the overpaid and over-indulged, the vertical siloing effects of geography...
We have one, secretly transmitted to us via the DarkNet… If you’re not allowed to play with DarkNet stuff, go no further. Fair warning. Don’t show this to anybody else. It could damage reputations… Who’s that smirking at Bill from behind the lavender incense cloud? (Don’t click on the pic; we can’t be responsible for what you find)
Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex. But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she ha...
Good ol’ W has put himself back in the news recently, bemoaning the plight of Afghans whose escape route to America via the Biden EZ-Pass might come unglued. A man’s got to have his priorities. Anyhow, I was reminded by his return to the public eye that I had an orphan piece about his 43ness floating around somewhere in the electronic ether I live in. There was a place called Shuteye Town 1999 , in which there was a mall store called Moon Books, in which there was a book for sale titled ‘Loving Ameria 2’ by George Hubert Walker Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush IV. You had to use your video game savvy to get inside Moon Books w/o getting arrested thiugh… * The Bore Backgrounder exists too. Still needs formatting… For more than 50 of the books sold at Moon, you could click on titles and see the front and back covers. For a lot of those, there was also a representative text sample and background on the writers. Unfortunately, Internet life has been complicated for ST99, and at ...
Michael Smith He has about 10,000 more FB friends than I do. Just posted this on his Facebook page: You posted recently about the problem of what we can really do as individuals to deal with problems you describe capably and suggested a two-part format for addressing this hole in the communication challenge. I replied with this: “There’s an alternate universe to be built out there. For all of us who care about the ones who will come later, the ones who are kids now and the ones who may only be a gleam in your children’s eyes. A deliberate linkage of all that we consider best and inspirational, both intellectually and creatively, including pure entertainments. We have all been taught (programmed?) to regard ourselves as vectors, pushed by economic (egononomic?) needs, working alone with friends, acquaintances, acolytes as support for our labors. But we are limiting ourselves by an engrained habit of clinging to customary means of attracting notice to ourselves. I know there are pr...
A long time ago I decided to build a little time capsule depicting the world as we were experiencing it at the very end of the 20th Century. It was called Shuteye Town 1999 and is still hanging on for dear life here . Like the rest of 1999 it had a lot of public transportation, a lot of entertainment media, and a big mall with the usual stores, including one that sold the books of the day. The way it worked, you could use your mouse or touch screen to go where you wanted and get what you wanted with your handy-dandy credit card. The bookstore had been the scene of a recent shooting, but you could get past the crime scene tape and shop for all kinds of publications, even the intellectual crap from the Shuteye Times bestseller list. One of the books in the intellectual category was Norm Chompski’s Global Politics . He was one of about 50 authors whose book was featured not just with a front and back cover display, but also a selection of the text. I’m telling you all this be...
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