The R. F. Lairds — Part 3

 

Now we can see the rest. How Old Am I?

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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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Mad Max 2026

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  The Interceptor The Lord of the Rings is a great trilogy, both as books and movies, but it’s not my favorite trilogy this morning. I’m here to talk about Mad Max, the Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Both stories are allegories, LOTR in the grand universal sense, MM in the lowdown ‘fighting for our lives here, boss’ sense. Both stories apply to our current situation in America, but one is more useful as a tool of both engagement and patience. That would be the guy with the leg brace and the bad attitude. It doesn’t hurt that I identify personally more with Max than I do with Frodo Baggins or, for that matter with Aragorn, Gandalf, or Legolas. There’s an otherness about both settings, but Max’s focus on roads, vehicles, speed, and gasoline are close enough to my own youth that it’s easier for  me to be behind the wheel with him than dodging orcs on the ramparts of Gondor or in the caves of Moria. I have driven fast, a lot, and in more ways than one, very often in...
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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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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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Not to be an alarmist, but a Reminder is in order…

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You remember this guy ? His name was John Wilkes Booth. He killed President Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday it is today. He was a Confederate sympathizer who believed Lincoln and the federal government that enforced United States laws were evil. Pretty much like — no, exactly like — today’s Democrat know-it-alls who encourage violence against federal laws removing the technical non-voters they think they own like the crooked judges who make their fortunes. John Wilkes Booth was considered insignificant before he killed the President. He was an actor, related to a more famous actor and living pretty much on his name only anymore. Sound like any bios you’ve heard lately?  I’m just asking you to remember that the following people may seem like insignificant entertainers with all their violent threats agains Trump, but in their kind of work they all learn how to load and cocks guns. And pull the trigger while aiming at the red laser dot.  Yeah, these people. What do they all claim...
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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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Behind the Conman Shibboleth

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  P. T. Barnum’s Most Famous Attraction My first job at NCR Corporation was in Product Marketing, which encompasses marketing strategy, marketing communications, and sales support in the form of competition information. Yawn. But my career began with an immediate crisis. When I was taking stock of what I had to work with, I tried to find my division marketing strategy. There wasn’t one. Well, there was, but it wasn’t a strategy; it was a simple directive. Pursue major accounts. Period. So I wrote a marketing strategy document and showed it to the smartest guy I knew at NCR, the one-man band who gave Executive Briefings to targeted major account decision makers. He shook his head at me. “It’s great,” he told me. “But there’s nobody to show it to. Not your boss, not his boss, and not the Director of Marketing. He doesn’t give this kind of stuff the time of day.”  Oh. We talked. He got more enthusiastic. “What might work is sending it directly to our real boss, the Division VP. Y...
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The Canadian Sinkhole

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What’s wrong with this picture ? A rough history of the Great White Mess as a North American colony has been covered in a previous post , but what must concern us as American citizens is the role they’ll be playing in the critical years ahead. None of the options is promising. Geographically, Canada is the second largest nation on earth. In every other respect it is not even an also ran. Maybe a ‘coulda ran’ depending on how you look at it, but ‘didna ran’ is more like it. For most of their history as a quasi-semi-ex-colony of the British Empire and stepchild of the British Commonwealth, they seem to have just been just sitting there taking handouts from the adults of western civilization. When you look for greats (and I have), they are there but in small numbers and often with sad stories.  Their greatest writer was Malcolm Lowry, not Canadian by birth but by exile and adoption, who died soon after writing what has been ranked (by the people who do such rankings) as the eleventh b...
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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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The French Hurry-Up, 1963

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This is one in a series of posts I’ve written for a friend explaining ways in which my life has seemed orchestrated rather than the strict result of my own decisions. Even my biggest seeming mistakes have produced enormous benefits in terms of furthering my education and the scope of my writing. This is the latest of those posts, shared here because there’s no one living who can be hurt by its content becoming generally available. It’s more personal than IPR posts usually are. But I’m in a Shane mood at the moment and I don’t care. It’s a mood that recurs now and again. It passes and I go back to work. But that’s why this post is being shared here, today. One point to remember. The audio narratives here were not scripted. They were extemporaneous recordings made on my iPad over a number of years, not expressly for this post. C’est L’amour That’s the Piaf I fixated on when I was forming my first thoughts on romantic love. I knew of her before we were ever went to France, because my...
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