Sometimes you have to tell people things

From a long way back…

Memories of references to Harry, who was always me after all…



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What the TDS’ers Got Right

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Invocation of Nemesis by the Summoners   Click on Rosie. Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the sad PR plight afflicting the unfortunate middle child of the three worst First Ladies in American history. .  What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts. Because I’m going to admit at the outset what most of the MAGA faithful won’t. You are right that Donald Trump is responsible for much of the imminent danger we are facing as a nation. Without his arrival on the political scene 11 years ...
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The Real Sword of Damocles Hanging Over Western Civilization

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This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a topic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the culture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
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There Aren’t Enough of Us

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Yeah. Click on the blue headlines. There are two precursor posts to this, both still in-process. I’ll finish and link them later. One is about the death of the historical novel, which mirrors a lot of other deaths in our culture. The other is about divorce, an absolutely transformative and deadly factor in what has become of us as a nation. What does that leave us with? The end result of our progressive devolution, largely invisible to all, because it is a function of the variable we tend to think of as a constant, human consciousness. Which it isn’t. I’ve written quite a lot about the consciousness problem over the years, and Instapunk Returns, as well as a couple other of my blogs, contain 5+++ years worth of thoughts on the topic. I’ll be sending you to those posts here, providing you with an excerpt, usually the lede, a sample graphic or two, and a link. The order is roughly chronological. I’m not going to give you any particular setup from piece to piece. The relevance to the main...
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Bad Max as a challenging lesson

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  Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of  Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
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Saving the Democrats a lot of time

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  Conflicted identity and media image woes By now we know if you’re a Democrat, getting elected isn’t about who you are, what you’ve done or haven’t done. It’s about how people see you. The factors that can do in a candidate are often more subtle than the pundits of the professional wrestling circuit called the mainstream media. Why we think it’s time to help the world’s most uninformed voters about who to elect as their next nominee for President. We’re not going to get all racist and sexist about it. The decision points we’ve discovered are all based on the individuals involved, not the immaterial fluff like experience or political philosophies. We’ll start right at the top and give you one simple thing to bear in mind before you try to pick a winner for 2028. Kamala Harris Not about the word salads or the escort thing. Too Desperate. Gavin Newsom Too Lyle Waggoner. Times change. Bernie Sanders Too ‘Little Big Man’ AOC Too prematurely passé  Gretchen Whitmer Too Lily-White J...
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Concerning the 250th Anniversary of Our Nation

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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...
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Death of the Republic

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Marc Antony:  “ Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men– Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.”     [Worth noting, Gaius Julius Caesar was not an emperor; the successors who fought for absolute power and took his name as a title were emperors and brought about the death of the several hundred years of Roman Republic.]      The American Republic is now at an end. We had a good run. He will be forced to concede, because Trump will not declare martial law....
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Lady Gaga-cum-Barbie-cum-AI/T&A/Autotune-cum-softporn-cum-girlieboys…

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 …and a weird dose of nostalgia, as for something half remembered. What did you do for your Memorial Day remembrances?  We watched the laying of the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns and the President’s speech. The audience was large, and the people there looked amazingly normal. Attentive and respectful. The way our parents taught us to be at solemn events. We heard the fireworks begin after dark and put the Thundershirt on our terrier Tommy, who isn’t entirely sure that fireworks aren’t an approaching thunderstorm. All we needed of that timeless ritual, since we’ve both been to many such occasions, including the field a mile away where the Salem event is always held. It was only at bedtime that I tried something new. In my constant search for background sounds that facilitate the hours of sleep I get before the inevitable wee hours summons to the keyboard, I try different things, usually intended to be monotonous and therefore soporific. British crime documentary series are...
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Trump 2.0 — A Movie We’ve Seen Before

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If you’ve never seen an Asylum production of their “Saving the World from Imminent Destruction” series, you’re excused from this post. The rest of us already know the basics. A once prominent, now disgraced scientist (often Sam Baldwin, but not always) is minding his own business making a living income and trying to mend his struggling family life when he notices that something is seriously amiss in the cosmos. Gravity isn’t working quite right. Or all the birds seem to be migrating at the same time. Or some local pond suddenly ejaculates a pillar of lava. You know. The warning knell of an extinction-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, where are the kids? They were supposed to be home by now. He calls his ex-wife. She doesn’t know where they are. He calls an old colleague at the agency in DC where nobody else will take his calls anymore. In a whisper, the colleague tells him the experts in charge haven’t noticed anything to worry about cosmologically speaking. This far in, we already know wh...
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