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.
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...
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.
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...
This is cross-posted from a confidential site I use to communicate with an old friend on matters more concerned with writing than this one normally is. Sometimes the two sites intersect in unexpected ways. (e.g., See The French Hurry-Up from Feb ‘26.) This does seem an appropriate follow-up to my most recent IPR post. Up to you what you make of it… Inevitably, another major commitment of my time called Instapunk Returns will occasionally stick its nose into the doings here. Working on both, I’m sometimes forced to ask myself how I got from Point A to Point XXX as I seem to have done yesterday at IPR. Specifically, how did I manage to get from here… Yes, I did ‘Shapes’ at graduation, but we all learned our ABCs too. …to here ? The concluding flourish of my latest IPR screed, Thoughts on Foul Language I put the Little Red Hen Nursery School in the same context with the song abcdefu because we all have an important personal timeline with respect to the alphabet. My...
It’s not a long list. That’s the point. Hardly anyone gets to be on it. Nobody’s on it who isn’t a superhuman human. Actual gods don’t count. Only two of those, deliberately excluded. Shakespeare and Mozart. End of that list. You want to fight? Tell me why your guy should be on the List. I’ll tell you why he isn’t. First Guy St. John the Divine Italian Guy Dante English Guys Milton Newton Blake Orwell French Guys Voltaire Pascal German Guys Bach Nietzche Jung Spanish Guy Picasso American Guys Poe Bierce
A cartoon stolen from ****ing Alarmy, who always watermark their stuff There comes a time when you realize some critical cultural variable has reached the kind of tipping point that transforms into chaos. I recently realized one of these tipping points has been reached when the streaming services, desperate for new product in the vacuum left by their failed woke productions, suddenly dumped a bunch of theatrical releases and straight to video movies from the years 2023 and 2024 on their platforms. I watch a lot of movies on streaming services, but I quickly learned not to watch anything dated ‘23 or ‘24. Too much gender confusion nonsense, too much (un)veiled lefty politicking about this and that, but most of all, way way too much foul language. I’d long had a rule that more than 10 F-bombs in 5 minutes was a signal to bail from any movie. Now I knew that this low bar couldn’t be met by the overwhelming majority of movies from the past few years. I’m not a prig. I probably hold ...
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...
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...
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...
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