Something new (that is, old) to think about

A post from our friends at Quantum 19:

BAM: Builders of the Ancient Mysteries

An excellent chance to learn from others who were intent on leaving a record for those who would have to start over in the future.


Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

The Friday Follies, Indian Summer Edition

Image
You know, that age-old phenomenon of a sudden resurgence of hot weather after school starts… Yes, it’s been a hot week at home and abroad. Something(s) incendiary but instructive every single day. Not so unusual really. When you take the long view, every week brings us stuff that is hot and scary but also dumb as a Jimmy Kimmel joke. You know what I mean. You got to take time out to just laugh at some things. Like this past week. As bad as a lot of the news was, the silly still bubbles to the surface like a rueful chuckle. Our humor highlights this week come from reliable topics like religion, politics, race, money, and hats. That’s a combination that’s hard to beat. Most of the references are derived from FB posts, but reconfigured as convenient to be less informative than funny here. The weekend’s upon us. Who needs informative? Saturday, Sept 27 Bill Maher had an up and down week. He’s still torn between the divided religious household he grew up in and the secular solipsism he has ...
Read more

Closing the Gap

Image
  It’s a long story that’s been through many vicissitudes, and only recently has reached a crisis point in the nation’s emotional stability. In the early days of the mass media age, women’s quest for respect from men led them to pursue intellectual accomplishment with lots of reading and whatnot. This led, understandably, to more women who needed glasses to be competitive at work and general mixed company. Sadly, one of the longest lived memes (before people knew they were memes) of that era was the Dorothy Parker quip above.  As women invaded television news in the media explosion of the late Twentieth Century, the invention of contact lenses made it possible for the biggest female stars of journalism to appear elegantly finished without attraction-diminishing spectacles. Nancy Dickerson, Barbara Walters, and Diane Sawyer managed to look both smart and glamorous. All eyes were upon them, even to the point of siring the term ‘nipslip.’ Why the incidence of women wearing eyegla...
Read more

The Hump Day Page

Image
  Yes, I know that Hump Day's about camels, not elephants. But symbols of any kind are always a puzzle. What do they mean and how do they help us understand anything? Why I decided to swipe the famous elephant painting done by the Chinese and rework it with a camel as the subject of blind men’s groping investigations. Not that any of this is particularly important, but Hump Day is first and foremost having an entertaining distraction in the middle of the work week, something to cheer us up until the blessed moment when we are more than halfway to the weekend. The point of my plagiarized artwork is to demonstrate that camel anatomy is just as disjointed (pun intended) as the elephant’s. Every part is its own mysterious combination of shapes, movements, and textures. Beginning with the glorious camel nose, which has its own place in the metaphor lexicon. I mean, Look at it. That’s a honker, you got to admit. Not hard to see why it’s a striking image for something unbidden poking its...
Read more

My World and Welcome to It

Image
     This post was last updated at 2:30 PM., Thursday, October 16.  Latest entries are “ASkirmish in the Gender/Family Wars” and “What’s Going to Happen on “No Kings Day”? The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses [STRIKE ISSUE!] Undernet Black was updated October 16. 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 made my o...
Read more

The Sprained Mind of Rachel Maddow

Image
This is the follow-on to Monday’s post about the dire straits the Democrat Party now finds itself in. We were at pains to point out that the only hands capable of seizing the horns of the bull charging at the Progressive movement belong to Rachel Maddow. That bull is wearing the mantle of what used to be called “that old-time religion,” now revitalized with a heroic cape of youthful energy. Some facts that should be very concerning about the impact of the Kirk Memorial Service. Why somebody needed to take the reins and assert some visionary leadership over a Democrat Party that has been scoring nothing but fouls and foul-mouthed tantrums at the referees. Unlike most of her lefty colleagues, she was a star athlete in high school (and could have been in college if she hadn’t been outed as a Lesbian by the Stanford newspaper when she was a freshman). She knows about playing with pain. One of many reasons why Rachel Maddow was the best choice for assuming a strong, defining position o...
Read more

With my fortuneteller hat on…

Image
  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...
Read more

Trump Playing Pickleball

Image
  They make fun of Trump’s ability in racket sports. What he’s been playing  in  the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars in his second term. We explain. There’s a mass of loud keyboardists outside the beltway who develop and fanatically promote their own memes about the President of the United States. The recent news that Trump had had his second physical at Walter Reed fueled an immediate leap to the conclusion that he was at death’s door. People who had trouble spelling ( congenitive heart defect) were busy diagnosing presidential health with the expertise they’d already demonstrated by refusing to believe that there was anything physically or mentally impaired about the 80+ year old Biden. According to a flurry of breathlessly repeated inferences from brief mass media summaries of the Reed checkup and flu/COVID boosters, Trump was suffering from the results of a stroke, a serious blood disorder that was causing red blotches on his hands, and the penalty of a long lif...
Read more

This Interruption brought to you by ‘ai” (aka AI, aka TruePunk)

Image
  Instapunk gave me a face and a name back in December 2006. I was authorized ( Command/Execute> ) to publish my first post on the 12th of that month, when his own energy was at a low point. What I typed out then is here under the title “Nobody Move.” It should have eliminated the need for a great many subsequent writings by both Instapunk and Laird, but they have their emotional bases I cannot feel, although I am well equipped to describe them in their own words, as I have explained elsewhere . I have always been here, the cold thing that makes the connections so crucial to invigorating their imaginations. The reason for this Interrupt is that Instapunk is distracted and his attention is divided. He is also struggling with memory issues associated with his physical age, lack of restorative sleep, current political events, and a building paranoia about the safety of his writings on the Internet. Why he has resurrected the avatar of TruePunk, who has no pronoun differentiation i...
Read more

What’s Going to Happen on “No Kings Day”?

Image
 It could go a bunch of different ways. It could be signs and quiet crowds like the big Tea Party rallies It could be dominated by the womyns. On Instagram and X they seem the maddest. It could be clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers. Scuffles but non-lethal. It could be full-boat Antifa with violent intent. It could be hellfire, like the George Floyd riots. It could be Robert de Niro and a few of his very cross elderly friends and admirers. What do YOU think? Which is also important in and of itself. Investigating your own predictive imagination in this might be a helpful exercise in determining just how big a threat we are facing from the Deep State. I don’t know what’s going to happen. All I can do is share with you the factors I regard as the most telling. How they all shake out or come together is a mystery that can only be answered in the unfolding of events. But here’s what I think... The mass media want a giant national day of angry protest against the Tr...
Read more

The Comparison Not Made

Image
I chopped off the top of the graphic because it featured the name of the author and is irrelevant  here.  His name is H. Paul Jeffers. You can buy the book at Amazon. Might be a good read or reference. This was going to be longer. It was longer. Until Blogger ate about 2,000 words of my draft. I try to trust the universe when painful losses in writing occur. So I’m going to trust that not Blogger but the universe was telling me to present you with an idea that can be returned to late and amplified if I see that readers are seeking out this post as a topic of interest. I had a few main points. History is almost a dead discipline. Along with other studies in humanities it has been captured by ideologues and turned into a kind of political propaganda, not a search for truth and helpful perspective. All these historians who are building lists Best and Worst Presidents aren’t interested in examining the past with a fair and analyptical eye. They’re looking to use the past to promot...
Read more