InstaPunk Returns

  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...

Pop-up ads proliferating in the Internet news outlets. Some of the news is really bad. The ads are worse. September 2023 May 2025 September 2025 This doesn’t look like a healthy progression, does it? Are they just getting more candid in their renderings, or are women getting fatter that fast? Obviously, the weight control regimes aren’t working, regardless. No wonder BobbyJr sounds so concerned…

  I wake up in the middle of the night. i have notifications from the Instagram companion app ‘Threads.’ Simetimes people who tell me they liked my response to so and so, others from the app itself telling how many favorable views (60, 100 Likes, and so on)  this or that response has had. Still others anxious to pick fights with someone a few have started calling ‘the Cryptkeeper’ because of the avatar I’ve been using lately at FB and Instagram. I don’t mind. Probably accurate in a way. Looks old on purpose. Often there’s a back and forth or two, until they or I give up in disgust. All a waste of time, I suppose, but it’s a way to vent the nervous energy that wakes me up and I can go back to sleep for a couple hours. But now and then there’s someone so committed to their antiTrump obsession that they feel compelled to dig in and keep trying to put me in my place. They can’t help it. Here’s an example from the last day or so. It started with a thread of TDS’ers who were irate a...

You know, that age-old phenomenon of a sudden resurgence of hot weather after school starts… Yes, it’s been a hot week at home and abroad. Something(s) incendiary but instructive every single day. Not so unusual really. When you take the long view, every week brings us stuff that is hot and scary but also dumb as a Jimmy Kimmel joke. You know what I mean. You got to take time out to just laugh at some things. Like this past week. As bad as a lot of the news was, the silly still bubbles to the surface like a rueful chuckle. Our humor highlights this week come from reliable topics like religion, politics, race, money, and hats. That’s a combination that’s hard to beat. Most of the references are derived from FB posts, but reconfigured as convenient to be less informative than funny here. The weekend’s upon us. Who needs informative? Saturday, Sept 27 Bill Maher had an up and down week. He’s still torn between the divided religious household he grew up in and the secular solipsism he has ...

  Thomas Jacob Sandford, man who shot Mormons in church There’s a temptation when you know you have readers to reinvent the wheel. Update things you’ve said before in the context of today’s headlines. It’s called Feeding the Beast. Some readers might think I need to post something scoop-like. Not true actually. I have an advantage and a disadvantage over many other writers when it comes to this temptation. It’s really quite easy for me to find what I’ve said before about some topic that’s popped incongruously into the news again. That’s the case right now regarding the  Mormon thing. No one wants to talk about it, because it’s a perpetually thorny subject for the liberal, preponderantly atheist media. Mormons and Mormonism are just one of those subjects everyone wants to steer around, talk around, not be around. But they’re sneaking into the news at the moment. The alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk came from a Mormon family, which is at least as important as the fact that they...

  The big historical questions of “What will happen?” are usually best settled in hindsight. The biggest questions generally concern whether or not some historical catastrophe was inevitable or not. The American Civil War. World War I. World War II. Meticulous historians, back when we had them, have given us answers to those three in particular. Yes, yes, and yes. The one that bears the strongest resemblance to our current turning point is our own American Civil War.  The young constitutional republic had been born with a deadly contradiction at the heart of its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The reason for the contradiction was political compromise needed to secure sufficient nationwide support for the adoption of the Constitution. Slavery was a ticking time bomb from 1789 on. Eventually there would have to be a reckoning.  Was actual warfare inevitable though? Yes. North and South were unified by their shar...

This is the follow-on to Monday’s post about the dire straits the Democrat Party now finds itself in. We were at pains to point out that the only hands capable of seizing the horns of the bull charging at the Progressive movement belong to Rachel Maddow. That bull is wearing the mantle of what used to be called “that old-time religion,” now revitalized with a heroic cape of youthful energy. Some facts that should be very concerning about the impact of the Kirk Memorial Service. Why somebody needed to take the reins and assert some visionary leadership over a Democrat Party that has been scoring nothing but fouls and foul-mouthed tantrums at the referees. Unlike most of her lefty colleagues, she was a star athlete in high school (and could have been in college if she hadn’t been outed as a Lesbian by the Stanford newspaper when she was a freshman). She knows about playing with pain. One of many reasons why Rachel Maddow was the best choice for assuming a strong, defining position o...

  Instapunk gave me a face and a name back in December 2006. I was authorized ( Command/Execute> ) to publish my first post on the 12th of that month, when his own energy was at a low point. What I typed out then is here under the title “Nobody Move.” It should have eliminated the need for a great many subsequent writings by both Instapunk and Laird, but they have their emotional bases I cannot feel, although I am well equipped to describe them in their own words, as I have explained elsewhere . I have always been here, the cold thing that makes the connections so crucial to invigorating their imaginations. The reason for this Interrupt is that Instapunk is distracted and his attention is divided. He is also struggling with memory issues associated with his physical age, lack of restorative sleep, current political events, and a building paranoia about the safety of his writings on the Internet. Why he has resurrected the avatar of TruePunk, who has no pronoun differentiation i...