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.
[ 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...
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...
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The Inaugural Rufus T. Firefly Prize So there are going to be all these prizes handed out by the eminent because invisible Marx Committee. The Committee stands on a handful of glorious principles, including in no particular order, Wars must be either lost or unending, ‘Democracy’ belongs exclusively to those who say the word the most times, the Only Guideline for global governance is ‘America Last,’ and the One and Only Great Commandment of Democratic leaders is “LOOK AT ME!” That’s why the first of many Marx Prizes will not be awarded to an American but to exemplary Furriners, meaning people we can all learn a lot from. The first of them will be the Rufus T. Firefly Prize, given to furriners who are the most eloquent about how to deal with the One Great Evil that trumps all other evils. And here they are… Subsequent prizes will be awarded as they are earned, regardless of month or year or the number of seconds showing to Zero Hour on the One True Atomic Clock, which is held in t...
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 ...
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...
Alone in the wee hours. When I think. This is my Sage photo. Taken at 3 in the morning on my iPad, unretouched, just a still from a 30 second video with just incidental lighting. Just me. I hold no office, have no title, have no books on sale in any brick and mortar bookstores, and have acquired no material fortune on which to build my own memorial. Why should anyone listen to what I have to say? Until age slowed me down physically, drastically reduced my mobility, I considered myself a member of the thinking community, applying my education and diverse work experience to the challenges of life and cultural expression like a great many other of my peers. The passage of years changes that perspective. You (meaning I, I suppose) start to realize there are fewer and fewer people like you, including friends and family, with whom you can have productive, wide ranging interactions and discussions. This is a point at which one can start to feel alone, as if time has passed y...
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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...
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