InstaPunk Returns

Illustration of Robert Burns’s Auld Lang Syne A word in defense of New Years celebrations that long antedate woke globalization and childish fixations on cultural appropriation*. According to current tribalism orthodoxy, nobody but Scots should have any right to this song. This should be the only approved version: But what are the lyrics and what might they mean? Thing is, they’re written in a marginalized dialect suppressed by British colonialism called  Êcottics  by the French, who have never understood a single word spoken by Scots. (Like me.) Here’s the only translational guide you can expect… Permitting you to translate the original verses by the colonialized Scotter named Robert Burns:    Auld Lang Syne Robert Burns - 1759-1796 Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne!       Chorus:       For auld lang syne, my dear,      For auld lang syne....

Sir Lewis Hamilton So there’s been controversy. Here … Here … Here … …and elsewhere too. To top it off, Max was his usual gracious self . Sadly, Max will always carry an asterisk next to his first world championship in F1. It will hang over his head for his whole career, however long it lasts. He knows it, and we do too. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t feel sorry for Lewis either. Yes, he got robbed, but he’s won 103 Grand Prix races and 7 world championships, achievements Max Verstappen will never equal. Max might win three or four, but he’s an asshole, and he’s not driving for Ferrari, where you can get away with his kind of shit. Max is a bully, a destroyer of tires and cars and other drivers, and that will catch up to him in the long run. The drivers who have been knighted in the UK weren’t blessed by their wins as much as their character. All three before Lewis — Jackie Stewart, Stirling Moss, and Jack Brabham — didn’t have as many wins in total as Lewis Hamilton. They were, like ...

Promise you, I’ll be fiddling with this one for a while. It’s too big for one go. Bear with me. CHYOS Club I’m going to show you a thundering herd of links. In a very deep sense, Oxford University is the compleat brain of the United Kingdom. If you’re to understand this post, you’re going to have to read, to look at long lists and deep piles of evidence. Their impact is simply too big to summarize in a neat way. Oxford is the intellectual culture of Britain, and its impact on the United States is not calculable so much as huge and inevitable. Oxford 1920, as depicted by Chariots of Fire. England 2020. 100  years later. How to  get  from there to here. So very simple. Oxford U. Evelyn Waugh, the greatest writer of the 20th century, explained it all to the rest from his own Oxford throne;  https://affirmationsmodern.com/articles/71/ In 1946 the English novelist Evelyn Waugh infamously proclaimed that he did not write satire. Satire, Waugh wrote, “presupposes homogeneou...

  Now listen for the refrain… Can you blame them? Masks, no school, no classroom banter, no locker gossip, no parties, no dancing, no sports, no fun, just continuing promises of an end that turn out to be lies while the masks keep landing on our ever younger (5yo?) brothers and sisters. Right. All faceless forever… abcdefu .

As Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story. I’ve been obsessing about the Death of America , boring everybody, especially my wife, to tears. I’m right about how bad it is, but that doesn’t matter, does it? “Don’t be a Debbie Downer” is the real American Way. I get it. Well, I’ve got it now. A young lady I got to watch grow from teenage angst to mature married beauty sent me photographs of the costume she wore at her office Christmas party this year. She gave me credit for introducing her to Veronica Lake. Okay. I’m pleased and proud. And hopeful, even if only for a moment. Imagination, glamor, wit, and humor never go out of style. They might even save us in the end.

  The Great New Partee! “ Want to party all the time …” Yes, they’re all dressed up in the fancy new gowns  and uniforms of the Equity Movement, Critical Race Theory, Antifa/BLM, LGBTQ Liberation, the Green New Deal, Pandemic Control, and, you know, Social Justice generally. But the fact of it is, there are no new clothes, just as there are no new alphabetic characters or new ideas on offer. What appear to be clothes on this page are what all the new new new progressive initiatives are — body paint and very little more. Except for the mask and veil, not a stitch on for the new Queen, Alexandra. It’s all still what it has always been on the American New Left in my lifetime. Naked Protesting . Yes, you CAN watch it. Just click on the underscored  ‘Watch’ sentence.  The only real pros at getting away  with being starkers in  public are babies.  Sad when  they get to be older. Worse when they’re pushing 80. Except that now we’re involved in an elabor...

I got blackballed from the society after unfortunate exchanges with your desk manager and Harlan Buzby. I was told “The name of Laird will never be mentioned again at the Salem County Historical Society.” Harold Smick, Sr., was convinced by your account secondhand and never spoke to me again. Problem is, you leave a huge hole in your own history by amputating my family’s contribution. I’m asking you to restore my family to SCHS history even if you leave me out of it forever. What my family contributed over 50 years: My grandfather, Leon W. Miesse, authored one of the most significant military diaries of World War I as an infantry captain in the illustrious Rainbow Division under Douglas MacArthur during the offensive that won the war. Published under his and my name in 2018, the 100th anniversary of Allied victory. I was summarily refused an opportunity to place a few copies in the front desk to let Salem people buy them.  I lost my temper, broke nothing, but was unpleasant, ...

The CHYOS Club  (Pronounced kīos, abbreviated ‘kos, meaning MR ) American Illuminati? We’ve all heard the legends of secret societies. The Renaissance story of the ‘Illuminati’ who rule the world as gray eminences behind the scenes is a legend unsupported by facts or, at any rate, evidence. We also know of outright hoaxes widely believed in, like the Priory of Sion made famous by admittedly fictitious Dan Brown novels and movies. But we also know that there are secret societies at every level of elite life. Who hasn’t heard dark whispers of Yale’s Skull & Bones, numbering the Bushes and John Kerry as members? At the international level, the Freemasons are a proven fact, even if their Illuminati-like influence is only widely believed in the UK, with its historical paranoia about Scotland, where freemasonry re-emerges as a follow-on to the Knights Templar. Great fun, mostly. Who doesn’t thrill to news about Bill schmoozing in the dark at the Bilderberger Group? Conspiracy? All t...