I Was Young Once. When I was 19.


Harvard degree, cum laude, and all that shite. So what happened? Hear that? It’s my wife, laughing. I decided to become a great writer. Best of all time. Did that. But then what…?




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Year End Thoughts for 2025 — The Big Picture Stuff

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 [ Before we begin, a word about hyperlinks in this and any Instapunk post. They’re there to help you, not create a series of distracting digressions. Good rule of thumb: note that the link is there, take it if you can’t resist, but try to finish reading the post and then go back to any hyperlinks that still intrigue you. Videos are reader’s now/later choice every time. Absolute linearity is the obsession of the obsolete typewriter crowd.] The Preface to this post is  here . Göbekli Tepe. 12,500 years old. Belief in the existence of the divine lasted for 12,340 yrs. This is very long. I had to write down what I was thinking in some detail. I’m glad I did, but you don’t have to read it at one sitting. If you like, you can skip all the way down to the Section titled “The Secular Dead End” and get the tone and gist of my perspective, leaving the substance till later or never. Understood? Let’s get down to it. What’s the Big Thing that matters most, more than anything? Answer? The...
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Storm Warning

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  You are being told at this very moment that these things are ‘snowflakes.’ Since Trump became President for the first time in 2017, climate seer Al Gore has not been seen much in public. Ruthless MAGA censorship made him something of a nonperson until his sudden reappearance at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland a few days ago. His public message there was grievously misreported as follows: Had the truth not been vigorously repressed by White House minions, we would have learned of Gore’s real purpose, to broadcast a warning about the most sinister conspiracy yet perpetrated by the autocratic Trump regime. To understand the real and imminent danger confronting us, we must revisit the history most of us already know in general terms. Back in 2006, the  former Presidential candidate from whom an election really was stolen issued a warning to the world. He had, in fact, put the science together and metaphorically traveled in time to a future in which climate change would i...
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That Moment Before the Roller-Coaster Rockets Down the First Chute

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 You Bought Your Ticket…  Now Here’s Your Ride! Over at Facebook, I posted a glib and unserious reel about the Swearing In of Zoltan Mandamme in an abandoned subway station.  Talk about your hopeful venues…! I really should take it seriously, but I find it almost impossible because I know some well-to-do Manhattanites who have been on board with all the TDS seizures in NYC over the last 10 years. I think of them and immediately wonder just how many cartoon graphics Google has for the search phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Answer? A lot. Best of all I imagine that Big Moment, you know the one, when the roller-coaster reaches the tippy-top of the first hill and pauses… just before it plunges in into clackety-clack abyss. That pause moment is the pinnacle of the roller-coaster ride. You, yourself, and thou alone with your excitement and trepidation. Everything after that is just hanging on and screaming until the ride just seems too long and you want out a...
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The Friday (Not So)Follies

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Edward Hopper, severified by me . If I can surprise myself on a Friday morning otherwise filled with nervous chatter, maybe I can help someone else achieve a more reflective mood as we approach the weekend. Here are a few tidbits that popped up when I checked what visitors had viewed in the last 24 hours. Not here for the funny this time. More fractal than that… sometimes it feels like they’re looking for me , in bits and pieces. I’ve corrected some link problems with these. The Internet is growing old and forgetful faster than I am… I am Cassandra Ru-u-u-sh Awaaay… [All] Things Fall Apart The Creepy Line (The trailer will do for now. Come back later if you’re intrigued.) Every Once in a While I Remember My Roots They’re not (necessarily) very long, except for the last one. And this one… It’s Called a Rhombi…hedron
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A Colony Called Canada, Part 1

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  This is only the first of two, possibly three posts on the most overlooked problem area in the Western Hemisphere. This is the part where I do what most commentators rarely do, come clean about the existing biases on the subject in my own past, which are on record and not repudiated. A keyword search here at IPR will show you two recent posts about the recent convulsions in U,S.-Canada relations, but this one might have remained hidden if I hadn’t dug it out from the Internet Archive to show you. That’s where I’ll leave it for now while work continues on researching the present mess. Tuesday, July 05, 2005  Canada Day! One of Canada's remote provinces launches its two fireworks. REGRET . Yeah, it's a bit late.  Canada Day  is really celebrated on July 1, but it's impossible to pay attention to it until after the July 4th festivities are over. Even now, I feel kind of guilty discussing Canada Day without having done more to reemphasize the profound significance ...
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A Shaft of Light in the Darkness — An EOY ‘25 Postscript

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  The Blue Pill speaks. I did something unconscionable on the last day of 2025. I posted End of Year Thoughts for 2025 at the conclusion of the first turbulent Year of Trump 2.0 and barely mentioned Trump. The post was over 12,000 words long and linked four directly related posts by name that totaled another 12,000 words. I must have rocks in my head. As I expected, it hasn’t drawn much traffic yet. I even took the unusual step for me of posting a promotional reel for my own post, which is also off to a modest start. 23 views, as compared to my most popular reel this  month, which got 30,000 hits making fun of Tim Walz.  I’m not even disappointed. It’s the holiday season and social network traffic is down across the board. As I said when I posted it on the 31st, I wrote it because I had to. Nobody has to read it because I want them to. I’d have left it there to find its own way in its own good time, except that as I have experienced far more frequently than the laws of co...
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The Marx Committee Prizes for 2026

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 The Inaugural Rufus T. Firefly Prize So there are going to be all these prizes handed out by the eminent because invisible Marx Committee. The Committee stands on a handful of glorious principles, including in no particular order, Wars must be either lost or unending, ‘Democracy’ belongs exclusively to those who say the word the most times, the Only Guideline for global governance is ‘America Last,’ and the One and Only Great Commandment of Democratic leaders is “LOOK AT ME!” That’s why the first of many Marx Prizes will not be awarded to an American but to exemplary Furriners, meaning people we can all learn a lot from. The first of them will be the Rufus T. Firefly Prize, given to furriners who are the most eloquent about how to deal with the One Great Evil that trumps all other evils. And here they are… Subsequent prizes will be awarded as they are earned, regardless of month or year or the number of seconds showing to Zero Hour on the One True Atomic Clock, which is held in t...
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A Hump Day Top 20

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  This pic makes sense at Hump Day HQ . A lot of wannabe news out there, without many headlines that go beyond the threat level. Why Hump Day can be an opportunity to back off a bit, regroup, and get our minds right for finishing the week with a flourish. The idea for this post came to me when I was checking visitor stats, which usually are set to seven days. A little under 500 had visited in the last day, but no one had visited the newest post. That’s highly unusual. What were they all looking at? I changed the timeframe to 24 hours, and here’s what I got: A couple are here because I may have mentioned them online elsewhere, but most are here for reasons unknown. Not a lot to any of them, and these hardly add up anywhere close to 500, so they must be the result of curiosity, of keyword searches by visitors taking a look around. In other words, this list might qualify as a representative sample of the Instapunk site as a whole and what piques the interest of its audience.  So ...
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The Game is Afoot

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  Do not pass go, do not collect £200 Sterling. I don’t usually do this. Put up a post at Facebook that felt like it also belonged here. So here it is, based on a Breitbarf story: Prime Ministers Starney, Cramer, and Dundese This is one of those “As If” stories. Written and posted as if it were news, which it isn’t. Writing down what the kids say in the Playroom when no adults are presumed present is just something to occupy the time when nobody really knows what’s happening in the big story topics. Iran. Who knows? Ukraine. Who knows? Minnesota’s H.S. version of Fort Sumter. Who  knows? The SCOTUS ruling on tariffs. Who knows? The U.S. District Court Insurgency. Who knows? Greenland. WTF knows? Aaaaah. The parliamentary democracies of the British Commonwealth are doing a Parker-Bros Monopoly version of “The Empire Strikes Back”!  How touching. How quaint.   My own theory is that the mass media, left and right both, have been so exhausted by the hectic pace of the ...
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Year End Thoughts for 2025 — A Personal Preface

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  Alone in the wee hours. When I think. This is my Sage photo. Taken at 3 in the morning on my iPad, unretouched, just a still from a 30 second video with just incidental lighting. Just me. I hold no office, have no title, have no books on sale in any brick and mortar bookstores, and have acquired no material fortune on which to build my own memorial.  Why should anyone listen to what I have to say?  Until age slowed me down physically, drastically reduced my mobility, I considered myself a member of the thinking community, applying my education and diverse work experience to the challenges of life and cultural expression like a great many other of my peers. The passage of years changes that perspective. You (meaning I, I suppose) start to realize there are fewer and fewer people like you, including friends and family, with whom you can have productive, wide ranging interactions and discussions. This is a point at which one can start to feel alone, as if time has passed y...
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