Best of Instapunk.com (2004 to 2014)

 


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Questions about ‘The Paper Symphony’

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I’ve been at sixes and sevens about this post since I knew I had to do it. Even had a hard time picking the leadoff graphic. This one does convey the idea of questioning the decision by a great man of senior years. But this one introduces the notion that Philip Glass’s principled stand is one that has been sponsored by indolent dilettantes who didn’t give a fig about the Kennedy Center during the decades in which it has been literally falling down. Falling down. Along with all the forms of high art the Kennedy’s were trying to inspire with a facility for culturally significant performances by the nation’s most gifted artists. Interesting and ironic that they choose the 87 years Philip Glass to deliver their most stinging blow against the unspeakable privately financed renovation of the crumbling building and its wayward preoccupation with niche artistes. Am I getting ahead of myself here? Did you miss the story when it broke? Lawrence O’Donnell, the left’s fantasy Dean of Jeffersonian ...
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The Obvious Comparison Dems Refuse to Make

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  HINT: It’s more than flashy hair. President John F. Kennedy now resides in a curious limbo. He was briefly the face of the Democrat Party as it wanted to see itself in the post-WWII era. In hindsight he was an anomaly in the party’s history. Before JFK, the most prominent Democrat Presidential contenders teetered between the crude (Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Harry Truman, Al Smith) and the unashamedly elite (Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Adlai Stevenson). JFK was an interesting hybrid of both. Like Al Smith, he was a Roman Catholic, like FDR a graduate of Harvard College. His lineage also had its disreputable side, with a family fortune reputedly acquired by bootlegging during the Great Depression. Backed by that fortune, he became famous and successful at an early age but was criticized as callow and rumored to be a philanderer in his first years in the Senate. When he became a presidential candidate, he was a clear brea...
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The Graying of a Boy

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The Mark Hamill thing. A matter of puzzlement to many people. I have an idea about what’s going on with him, which I’ll explain because I’m thinking most people are just chalking it up to projected career disappointments. Which is part of it but not all of it. I know that the language issues surrounding the topics I’ll be touching on are prohibitive, since words no longer mean what they used to, but I’m just laying it out here and everyone is free to take it or leave it as they choose. There’s an easy answer and a deeper answer. The easy answer is just scratching the surface but should show the value of common sense in a long-distance analysis like this. Easy? For Hamill, Trump is a stand-in for Harrison Ford. Looked them up. Ford is 6’1”. Hamill’s bio claims 5’9” or 5’10” though  the claim is challenged by those who say he’s more like 5’7” give or take. It’s not political, the Trump hatred. Not really. The TDS mania that pervades Hollywood was an attractive nuisance just waiting f...
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Seventh Heaven for Hamilton

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  Lewis Hamilton wins Seventh World Championship at Formula 1 Grand Prix in Turkey: A stunning drive from Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton in the Turkish Grand Prix gave him his 10th victory of the season – and, more crucially, saw him claim the seventh drivers’ title of his career, to equal the record of Michael Schumacher, as Racing Point’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel completed the podium after a thrilling race in Istanbul. Hamilton had started the race in sixth, risen to third midway through the first lap and then dropped back to sixth by the end of Lap 1 after an error at Turn 9. But a decision to change his intermediate tyres just once saw Hamilton drive a masterful race to claim victory by over 25 seconds from Perez. The win alone was enough to claim championship #7, but it was even more assured after a disastrous race for Valtteri Bottas - the only man who could have stopped Hamilton winning the title today - who spun six times en route to a P14 finish.
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I volunteer to stand before the Reich Commission

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R. F. Laird of Yardarm University “University of California-Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich proposed the radical idea for a post-election commission to censor speech and name and shame every public figure who supported President Donald Trump’s rise to power. He wrote on Twitter over the weekend that “when this nightmare” — or Trump’s presidency — “is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.” In response to the tweet, several Twitter followers agreed and even raised the stakes of his proposal. “I am thinking more of using the postwar Nuremberg Trials as a template,” one Twitter user wrote, speculating that criminal trials should be in order. “Felonies were committed as were treasonous behaviors. The guilty should be arrested, tried, convicted and f...
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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 off 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 out 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 May such occasions, including the field a mile away where the Salem even 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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More things nobody wants to talk about

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Judge Tiffany Baker-Carper Why would I lead off a story about a controversial judge with a picture of her all dolled up for a social occasion? To get it out of the way. Yes, she’s a good-looking, shapely young woman. That’s not the issue, which is not personal but systemic on the face of it. If she made a grave misjudgment because the situation was over her head, the first appropriate question is not what kind of terrible person is she, but rather why was she on the bench in the first place?  Here’s the story as reported yesterday by the Gateway Pundit: FTA: <<The pedophile, Daniel Spencer, was convicted in April 2025 of traveling to meet a minor for sex following an undercover sting operation. Despite the State Attorney’s Office recommending he be held without bond pending sentencing, Judge Baker-Carper allowed Spencer to remain free, citing his lack of violent criminal history and prior compliance while on bond. Weeks later, on May 19, 2025, Spencer and his wife, Chloe Spen...
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Freaky Friday 3 — The Most Unkindest Cut of All…

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Stupid stupid stupid girl…   She doesn’t know anything but what’s on the teleprompter. We were talking about history in a previous post today. Here’s an irony so total that the ones who built this moral trap for themselves probably still won’t understand it. Today’s definition of being Progressive, I mean truly Progressive not with exceptions, are fully in favor of gender affirmation surgeries as early as late prepubescence. They are so certain of the righteousness of their position in the absolute sanctity of individual choice regarding gender decisions that they argue their opponents’ position is un-Christian.  Where history has them by the short and curlies, so to speak. In actual as opposed to made-up history the decision to remove reproductive organs at prepubescence was born not of woke social engineering but of a Christian religious ideal in the 16th Century. Singers called Castrati were created surgically and became famous performers for Christian audiences. Yes, the ...
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Freaky Friday 2 — Speaking of Stupid Girls…

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  Sunny Hostin, our favorite blonde-ish Black Pantheress, is wrong on a couple counts here. First, like the rest of The View panel, she fails to realize that most of us ‘right-wingers’ aren’t at all outraged by Christopher Nolan’s casting in his Odyssey movie. Talented as he may be, he’s also a Brit, and they’re a nation that has gone so far down the Woke hole that actuaries are predicting a majority Muslim population in the U.K. by 2030. Nolan will also have been intensely aware that the Brit film industry has crippled itself by insisting on 30 percent nonwhite casting in BBC productions, regardless of the bizarre casting anomalies that such a rule makes inevitable. In remaking Greek mythology he knows he has license to curry critical favor while boosting the free PR of a project that is, in the cold light of day, an old and cinematically familiar story not likely to sound like a must-see pic to most. His cheerful acceptance of this and his calm defense of an absurd unconfirmed po...
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What begins with a ‘C’ and should usually be spelled with an asterisk in the middle?

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Father Gaffigan Call this one more thing nobody wants to talk about on either side of the Great Divide in our culture. The question crops up in vague reporting of unexplained disconnects between what people say and what they mean. We had a good example last week, as Stephen Coldert [sic] was celebrating the last show of his record breaking destruction of a once profitable and popular television franchise. He asked for his personally beatified acolytes that night to ask him interview questions from his own hostly throne on the show’s set while he expatiated from the guest lectern. Jim Gaffigan took the bait. As a Cath*lic in good standing himself, he wanted his Archbishop of Politics to share his religious beliefs with the teevee congregation. (Un)surprisingly, Coldert’s answer became something of a story.  That’s not just a claim about life after death. It’s a much more sweeping position than that, particularly in the way it was phrased. Interestingly, the quoted “X’ post was trun...
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