Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Twelve Pipers Piping
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Roddy Piper in ‘They Live’ (1988)
Back in 2018, I celebrated the Christmas season with a satirical treatment of the Twelve Days of Christmas. The last day of Christmas is January 5th. It was on that day that I published this post at my website Instapunk Rules and on Facebook as well.
Take a minute to view the entire original post here.
Today is January 5th, as it was in that post. As it was exactly two years later in 2021, when the next day would make January 6th a date heard round the world. Which makes the coincidence of the 2019 post, if it is that, seem comically prophetic. People who have seen the movie know that Roddy Piper does finally storm the headquarters of the invading aliens to “chew bubblegum and kick ass.” And he loses, dying in the process.
End of story? Not quite. Yesterday it was Facebook’s Memories algorithm that added a further touch of irony. I was notified by FB of my 2019 post on January 4th about “Eleven Drummers Drumming.” The notification included a working link to the Instapunk Rules url where it was to be found. Hmmm, I thought, and tried to take them up on the offer to share it. Here’s a snapshot of how that went.
My original post did not black out the working url FB had
used. I added the blackout later so I could show the exchange.
Here are the offending Drummers by the way:
Pretty unacceptable, eh?
Clearly, posting the next day’s more content-sensitive post about the last day of Christmas was out of the question.
Which highlights an interesting other fact on the timeline of recent years. My website Instapunk Rules (IR) had obviously been banned sometime after January of 2019. So had its predecessor and companion site Deerhound Diary (DD). Those two sites contain over a thousand posts between them and include many political posts FB could have banned individually as well as posts about all manner of other things. The choice of the FB censors? Ban them both totally and punish even the effort to link them as a crime against Community Standards. Which must have occurred sometime in 2019, when the nation’s liberty was going to hell as I chronicled at both IR and DD. My reference point was the year 1969, exactly 50 years prior to 2019, and I pulled no punches but made no threats, violent or otherwise. My four-part post-mortem of 1969 as a prophetic antecedent is here, but I had laid extensive groundwork for this discussion back in 2018.
I wrote in December 2018 “2019 will be a momentous year.”
Which it proved to be. Two independent proofs:
It’s been downhill for all of us since these two 2019 disasters.
Which may or may not be closer to the truth as omens than Roddy Piper’s climactic confrontation. You decide. Whatever you think, no one can doubt that FB’s left hand doesn’t know what its other left hand is doing.
Exhibit 1. The Myth of Scientific Omniscience Where to start. There are so many places to start, all with consistently alarming intimations of one deep problem. The inference is seditious of rationality as we have deified it in science. I’m going to show you some of the more accessibly evocative starting points, not to drag you into the weeds of higher mathematics, but to stress some elements of simplicity that overthrow the fallacy called Artificial Intelligence. Bear with me. Just look for now. I’ll make connections as we proceed after viewing the items below. Exhibit 2. Turing Test Fallacy Exhibit 3. The Proof of Digital Inferiority (It works. Click where indicated on screen.) Exhibit 4. The Implementation Overreach Exhibit 5. The Implicatuons of “Sensitive Dependence” Exhibit 6. The Measurement Problem Exhibit 7. The Illusion of Control Exhibit 8. The Hammer/Nail Delusion Exhibit 9. The Impossibility of Artificial Intelligence Exhibit 10. The Oversimplification Problem Exhibit 11. ...
[ 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 ...
WW2 Flying Tigers P-40 showing Ace-level kills at “Threads” based on notifications of 50 to 100 Likes for various replies I’ve made to TDS ranters. I’ve been in a down mood as we approach the end of 2025 and the completion of Trump’s first year in office since 2020. My annual End of Year post will describe my big picture view, but this post will fill in a significant part of that picture and can be used as a basis for endorsement or dismissal of my personal perspective. The social network app called Threads has been reference here previously, after my first exploratory encounters with what I’ve termed the “submerged 10 percent of Trump haters” the real percentage is probably much higher than a tenth, but these are the noncelebrity Rosie O’Donnells and Robert De Niros who are so obsessed with Trump that they have to type it out loud at the top of their keyboard lungs on a daily basis. After my first few brushes with them, I began to think that there’s something important goi...
This post was last updated at 11 PM, Wednesday, December 31. Latest entries are “Year End Thoughts on 2025,” “The ‘W’ File from Moon Books,” and “The Cryptkeeper.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses! XMAS STRIKE ISSUE! ] Undernet Black was updated December 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 Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I made...
We have one, secretly transmitted to us via the DarkNet… If you’re not allowed to play with DarkNet stuff, go no further. Fair warning. Don’t show this to anybody else. It could damage reputations… Who’s that smirking at Bill from behind the lavender incense cloud? (Don’t click on the pic; we can’t be responsible for what you find)
You Bought Your Ticket… Now Here’s Your Ride! Over at Facebook, I posted a glib and unserious reel about the Swearing In of Zoltan Mandamme in an abandoned subway station. Talk about your hopeful venues…! I really should take it seriously, but I find it almost impossible because I know some well-to-do Manhattanites who have been on board with all the TDS seizures in NYC over the last 10 years. I think of them and immediately wonder just how many cartoon graphics Google has for the search phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Answer? A lot. Best of all I imagine that Big Moment, you know the one, when the roller-coaster reaches the tippy-top of the first hill and pauses… just before it plunges in into clackety-clack abyss. That pause moment is the pinnacle of the roller-coaster ride. You, yourself, and thou alone with your excitement and trepidation. Everything after that is just hanging on and screaming until the ride just seems too long and you want out a...
Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex. But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she ha...
Our own Queen Iris Stairway to Heaven A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procol Harum) You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore) All I Knead (The Hollies) Take on Me (Aha!) Grand Prize Winner: Bohemian Catsody Got your mind right, yet? Good. Happy Hump Day .
Good ol’ W has put himself back in the news recently, bemoaning the plight of Afghans whose escape route to America via the Biden EZ-Pass might come unglued. A man’s got to have his priorities. Anyhow, I was reminded by his return to the public eye that I had an orphan piece about his 43ness floating around somewhere in the electronic ether I live in. There was a place called Shuteye Town 1999 , in which there was a mall store called Moon Books, in which there was a book for sale titled ‘Loving Ameria 2’ by George Hubert Walker Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush IV. You had to use your video game savvy to get inside Moon Books w/o getting arrested thiugh… * The Bore Backgrounder exists too. Still needs formatting… For more than 50 of the books sold at Moon, you could click on titles and see the front and back covers. For a lot of those, there was also a representative text sample and background on the writers. Unfortunately, Internet life has been complicated for ST99, and at ...
Same idea. Turned into a galoop by misplaced trust in wrong’ uns. Christmas was especially generous to the Gateway Pundit yesterday, offering up a bonanza of Punch-and-Judy type slapstick comedy. The stars included both knowns and unknowns in the lefty art of making fools of themselves as they act out some of the dumber parts of the aging Panderer Playbook. Rather than string them together at Facebook as if they were breaking news that mattered, Instapunk decided to string them together here as an entry in his old regular feature, The Friday Follies. No more setup needed. Just sit back and laugh. Dressing up for the Holidays FTA: <<Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan appeared in a video wearing a hijab while addressing members of the Somali community, gushing about how they’re woven into the “fabric” of the state. Flanagan, of course, is not Muslim. This comes amid growing backlash against Somali-linked fraud scandals in her state, which drained billions in taxpayer dollars. Flan...
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