Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Joe has more important things to see to.
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
Important. Interesting word. How do we measure important? Particularly when it comes to human fatalities. The mass media like blood. “If it bleeds it leads,” they used to say. It’s still the way they act. Why they let Biden get away with the repulsive excuse he gave for not paying more attention to the crisis at the southern border. Yes, there’s talk of millions of illegals flooding across the border in states where the only unaffected people are the elected politicians who I’ve in gated communities surrounded by heavily armed guards. Even the word ‘millions’ has lost its meaning of late. Quick — how many millions in a billion? A thousand. How many millions in a trillion? A million. That’s right. This government has put our nation in debt by (conservatives, in just one year of Congessional spending) by more than 3 million million dollars. Which you have to pay for. But it’s not important enough to you to vote these catastrophe merchants out of office. On the whole, Americans have more important things to do than take action against the utter destruction of their children’s and grandchildren’s future. Got it. That Trump fella’s Tweets. Intolerable. Ripping away women’s right to get an abortion if she wants one. Darn near evil. Along with his racism and sexism, three millions of millions of dollars thrown down a rat hole are a small price to pay. Right? Who’s got time to keep up with big numbers when gas prices over $3 a gallon actually hurt where it counts?
Who hasn’t heard that people are dying from Fentanyl. Last year it was oxycodone. The year before that it was methamphetamine. Who gives a damn. Drug addicts have been killing themselves forever, or at least in, you know big numbers since the 1960s. That’s not our problem. Our kids wouldn’t do that shit.
But they are doing that shit. In addition to the pot, the coke, the meth, the Ecstasy, the oxy, and now the Fentanyl. If you don’t know of any kid who’s died from these poisons in your neighborhood it can only be because you don’t want to know about it, hear about it, or see it laughing in your face. Like Joe the Potato.
If you knew or remembered how to add, you’d know these numbers add up. Even to the oh-so-organized, Fentanyl has become a major crisis, growing ferociously fast with no end in sight.
No, the 300 number can’t be proved yet. It takes a while to add up a year’s worth of dead when you only start your adding next year. Local reports from states and municipalities are consistent with the higher number, however. You can look these up for yourselves if you care. But do you? What do 300 deaths a day mean to you, especially if they’re occurring among the lame and the halt, and, yeah, true, the too young to know better?
Some canny reporter put it this way the other day. “It’s like a major commercial airline crash every single day.” Would that get headlines do you think, if it started to happen? The airline example isn’t the only one that drives the problem home. There are others, which we’ll get to, but flaming, dismembered passengers are a vivid image to start with.
The following dry facts and figures come from Wikipedia.
The people whose job it is to keep a major crash a day from happening have been doing an excellent job for many decades. The bracketed list includes just 13 airliner crashes that have ever killed 270 or more souls in every nation on earth since commercial aviation began a hundred years ago. It would take just 13 days for Fentanyl fatalities to exceed that total. If we were losing 100,000 people a year to airline crashes, heads would roll. Drugs? Meh. Wanna pass me that dooby, hon?
Is the number starting to seem more important yet? Drug overdoses are not natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and viral epidemics. They are a function of greed, money, official negligence, and popular indifference. Your indifference is also a cog in the killing machine.
300 a day is a higher death rate than American troops suffered during World War II. That number was about 270 a day for 1,612 days. Yeah. I’ve done the math on that too. (Why I drew the plane crash line at 270, the total being like 13 days of World War II spread over a century; plane crashes are scary, and wars not so much somehow. The ‘somebody else’ factor no doubt.)
We’re all aware, I know, of the costly national losses that are still commemorated with wreath laying sand reading of names and 21-gun salutes for decades after the fact. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 come to mind, both accounting for about 3,000 fatalities in a single day. How long do you calculate for a Fentanyl to rack up a number like that? Simple arithmetic. About 10 days. But there won’t be any wreaths or 21-gun salutes for those dead ones. Just the occasional 😲😟🙄 newspaper account of a vaguely described bust somewhere down south with completely hypothetical numbers in the millions just to keep people reading to the, yawn, end of the story.
It kinda looks like weed, doesn’t it? We been here before. We all know how to keep this kind of reporting from getting to us, don’t we? Why I’ll close here, with some pictures worth a few thousand words at,least, when the weed-looking stuff starts to look like recreational pills and even candy. Might be a good idea to check the Halloween loot your kids bring home from trick or treating next year.
And I never even mentioned the name ‘China,’ the President’s good buddy on the other side of the world.
It’s a long story that’s been through many vicissitudes, and only recently has reached a crisis point in the nation’s emotional stability. In the early days of the mass media age, women’s quest for respect from men led them to pursue intellectual accomplishment with lots of reading and whatnot. This led, understandably, to more women who needed glasses to be competitive at work and general mixed company. Sadly, one of the longest lived memes (before people knew they were memes) of that era was the Dorothy Parker quip above. As women invaded television news in the media explosion of the late Twentieth Century, the invention of contact lenses made it possible for the biggest female stars of journalism to appear elegantly finished without attraction-diminishing spectacles. Nancy Dickerson, Barbara Walters, and Diane Sawyer managed to look both smart and glamorous. All eyes were upon them, even to the point of siring the term ‘nipslip.’ Why the incidence of women wearing eyegla...
Yes, I know that Hump Day's about camels, not elephants. But symbols of any kind are always a puzzle. What do they mean and how do they help us understand anything? Why I decided to swipe the famous elephant painting done by the Chinese and rework it with a camel as the subject of blind men’s groping investigations. Not that any of this is particularly important, but Hump Day is first and foremost having an entertaining distraction in the middle of the work week, something to cheer us up until the blessed moment when we are more than halfway to the weekend. The point of my plagiarized artwork is to demonstrate that camel anatomy is just as disjointed (pun intended) as the elephant’s. Every part is its own mysterious combination of shapes, movements, and textures. Beginning with the glorious camel nose, which has its own place in the metaphor lexicon. I mean, Look at it. That’s a honker, you got to admit. Not hard to see why it’s a striking image for something unbidden poking its...
They make fun of Trump’s ability in racket sports. What he’s been playing in the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars in his second term. We explain. There’s a mass of loud keyboardists outside the beltway who develop and fanatically promote their own memes about the President of the United States. The recent news that Trump had had his second physical at Walter Reed fueled an immediate leap to the conclusion that he was at death’s door. People who had trouble spelling ( congenitive heart defect) were busy diagnosing presidential health with the expertise they’d already demonstrated by refusing to believe that there was anything physically or mentally impaired about the 80+ year old Biden. According to a flurry of breathlessly repeated inferences from brief mass media summaries of the Reed checkup and flu/COVID boosters, Trump was suffering from the results of a stroke, a serious blood disorder that was causing red blotches on his hands, and the penalty of a long lif...
I’ll be quoting directly in chunks here, so there can be no claim that I am cherry-picking facts, situations, narratives, or contexts. It’s an old subject for me, as you’ll see, but I’m writing now because my wife gave me a hard time about surfacing the racial issues surrounding the mass shooting at Lincoln University, which I raised because she told me the report she’s read did not include the fact that Lincoln is one of the surviving Historically Black Colleges. This is important because the mass media are fastidious about concealing pertinent information about the identities of both shooters and victims these days. She suggested I was dragging race into a sad crime story. Then she left the room. As I expect many of you would too. We’ve been well trained not to see this particular elephant in the room. Or at least not to discuss it. Here’s the NBC account: One person is dead and at least six others were wounded in a shooting amid homecoming festivities Saturday night at Lincoln Unive...
This post was last updated at 2:30 PM., Sunday, October 26. Latest entries are “A Thing We Meticulously Don’t Talk About,” “What’s Going to Happen on ‘No Kings’ Day?”and “A Skirmish in the Gender/Family Wars.” The Instapunk Times is on the newsstand [STRIKE ISSUE!] Undernet Black was updated October 24. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algo...
It could go a bunch of different ways. It could be signs and quiet crowds like the big Tea Party rallies It could be dominated by the womyns. On Instagram and X they seem the maddest. It could be clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers. Scuffles but non-lethal. It could be full-boat Antifa with violent intent. It could be hellfire, like the George Floyd riots. It could be Robert de Niro and a few of his very cross elderly friends and admirers. What do YOU think? Which is also important in and of itself. Investigating your own predictive imagination in this might be a helpful exercise in determining just how big a threat we are facing from the Deep State. I don’t know what’s going to happen. All I can do is share with you the factors I regard as the most telling. How they all shake out or come together is a mystery that can only be answered in the unfolding of events. But here’s what I think... The mass media want a giant national day of angry protest against the Tr...
Not quite true… Not quite true that I don’t care about you. Don’t care about whatever judgments you lay on me, but that’s different. Also not quite true that the big piece I’m referring to in the title is missing. It’s all there, more or less intact, but it’s missing to me. Why Facebook wants to sell it to me for just under $3,000. I’m not bitching about that. It’s the contract we accept when we join the network. Frustrated? Yeah. That’s the right word. Here at IPR, I refer to Facebook as something else I do in addition to this and my other website projects. Since 2019 (with one petulant year off), I have added posts here pretty steadily. They now add up to just under 700 posts in total. At an average of 1,500 words, that amounts to more than a million words of text and who knows how many graphics. At 400 words per printed page, excluding graphics, that’s about 2,800 pages. That’s a lot. I’ve never been able to guesstimate much hard data about Facebook. A little over 10 years of postin...
It’s Halloween! The funnest day of all for a certain sort of dreadly person. The music is just to set the mood. Feel free to come back to it in between the videos below. We’re all about masks today, and looking underneath them to see what’s going on with the elite saviors we’re depending on. Take a look and have some fun yourselves. Predicted this predatory new strategy back in February 2021 The Trump comeback victory in 2024 flattened the exhausted patriarchy of the Democrat leadership. Young eunuchs seeking to replace the Bidens and Schumers and Durbins are out of luck, whether they know it or not. Schiff, Buttigieg, Jeffries, Walz, Booker, and the fashion mannequin Newsom are doing nothing but give the male sex an even worse image than it already had. He’s slim and lithe enough. Just not us enough. Who’s left? What’s left of the old matriarchy reluctantly giving way to the new blood, which is raising the pitch of the public debate to ear-shattering levels. Sad to see pioneers ...
Her name is Rachel Gilman. I’m sure she’s a pleasant lady in person. Before we get into the nitty gritty, please take a closer look at the graphic in the lower right hand corner of the image above. This could be the most gruesome desecration of the American flag I’ve seen. It demonstrates the scare tactic of the coat-hanger abortion to a fare-thee-well. 300 deaths a year may be a sad statistic, but it is not a civilizational catastrophe. We stopped counting abortions many years ago. The numbers you see quoted are all guesstimates, riddled with acknowledged gaps smoothed over by minimizing assumptions to conceal the enormity of legalized deaths that occurred under Roe v. Wade. Numbers in our biggest cities are terrifying when considered by racial breakdown. In NYC, nearly half of all black pregnancies end in abortion. That’s eugenics-level population control. Why Planned Parenthood is so embarrassed about admitting the eugenic philosophy of their patron Saint, Ma...
The island of Manhattan once belonged to the Lenape people, like a lot of NY and NJ. Just asking the question. Because there is historical background, evidence, And repeated rumblings from our Jungian subconscious that’s afflicted with uncannily relevant visions. Writers used to be solemnly warned that “to be universal, you must first be local.” Why my explanation of a possible curse on the Big Apple will actually begin a two-hour bus ride to the south of the Holland Tunnel. Which is not mentioned by accident. The fingerprints of the Dutch are all over the origins of this story. The place down south of NYC is Salem County, New Jersey, which had a very special relationship with the Lenape people: The Salem Oak Tree was the real center of the county seat of Salem, where I grew up. It was so old and huge that its massive trunk had lower limbs that were the size of mighty oak trees themselves. The tree was already a landmark in 1675 when the treaty was signed under it. The Quak...
Comments