Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
In place of News, there’s still Gutfeld…
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Since the ascendancy of Bobby Kennedy at HHS, health has become a hot-button issue on both sides of the aisle. Actual events and results are not immediate in this realm, which is why the alignments of political operatives tend to be rhetorical, polemical, and overstated in the absence of just about everything else you can put on TV. Conservatives are suddenly more publicly concerned about health and what’s hurting it than they’ve ever been, and lefties are applying their old playbook strategy of accusing MAGA of bias and bad faith while resurrecting old chestnuts intended to prove how much they’ve always cared about health. Just this week I’ve seen the same ad a half dozen times reminding us deplorables about how bad smoking is and how culpable evil capitalist companies have been in promoting it. We’re told to join the class action population of smokers now dying who have just discovered that cigarettes are to blame.
Dreary stuff. Which is the time when Greg Gutfeld usually weighs in with something funny and common-sensical to say about it all. Here’s his latest, from yesterday:
The 3-minute warmup is so-so, the next 5 minutes are great.
I have two collateral inputs for you that you may or may not regard as relevant.
My slighting reference to the warmup is acknowledgment that I am not Gutfeld’s biggest fan. The other day I posted a link to a stream of posts from Instapunk Rules. By coincidence it contained an assessment of Gutfeld’s appeal that has since been proven wrong.
I tend to boast of my accurate predictions. With good reason, I think. I predicted long before his run at it that Romney would never be President. I predicted that the Obama presidency would be a disaster the day after his election in 2008. I said he would be so bad that he’s make it impossible to elect another black president for a generation. I’ve been right about a lot of things over the years, but I was wrong about Gutfeld. He is now the Number 1 host of late night talk shows, besting (or nearly so) the collective ratings of Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon, and Meyers, who — along with lefty bedfellow Jon Stewart — have given up telling jokes that don’t end with the punchline”Donald Trump.”
A longtime reader of my posts called me on my premature obit of Gutfeld at the time. She’s a lovely woman from Hawaii, sometimes caustic but always passionate in her convictions. I responded (the Wordpress SW made me ‘Anonymous’), and she came back with a closing retort. That’s how things used to work in the good old days before Uncle Joe. And she was right. His career was far from over.
But I believe my reaction to Gutfeld at the time went a little deeper than Red Eye and grinning Greg. My suspicion was that he was more interested in getting laughs than providing the political insight his employment at Fox News would seem to imply. There are still times when it seems he’ll say anything to get a guffaw (e.g., his Gere-gerbil joke in the warmup above), although he does seem more sharply and satirically focused than he used to be. Which I admire.
All of which matters only because it explains the rationale for my closing bit of collateral evidence. Again by coincidence, the Gutfeld clip also included a Colbert-related clip in the usual YT sidebar. This is where the late-night hosts are all exposed as continual flirts with hypocrisy. They say they care about the topics they prosecute, but do they care as much about the topics as the ratings? To quote, the Fox News Channel of old, “You decide.”
Happy Independence Day No. 250! I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial. In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
The last group photo I’m a part of that’s still in my possession. My sister’s wedding in the late1990’s, with me and my mother in attendance, here in Salem. I don’t get out much anymore. Haven’t for a long time. If I didn’t take pictures of myself, nobody would, or could, anymore. I don’t give them the chance. Why in recent years I’ve made a point of doing an official birthday selfie, to keep track of the wear and tear of the years and see if the falling apart process is gaining speed. This year was not a good year for hair. That much I’ll tell you. But here’s the Official 74th Birthday Selfie I took on Friday. Not as young as I used to be. I hadn’t really shown this pic to anyone, but imagine my surprise when I received a gift yesterday by parcel delivery from a young lady I helped raise who will always be close to my heart. She and I hadn’t spoken about the Rolling Stones in years, but somehow she must have divined I’d been thinking of them, because here’s what she ordered sent ...
If you’ve never seen an Asylum production of their “Saving the World from Imminent Destruction” series, you’re excused from this post. The rest of us already know the basics. A once prominent, now disgraced scientist (often Sam Baldwin, but not always) is minding his own business making a living income and trying to mend his struggling family life when he notices that something is seriously amiss in the cosmos. Gravity isn’t working quite right. Or all the birds seem to be migrating at the same time. Or some local pond suddenly ejaculates a pillar of lava. You know. The warning knell of an extinction-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, where are the kids? They were supposed to be home by now. He calls his ex-wife. She doesn’t know where they are. He calls an old colleague at the agency in DC where nobody else will take his calls anymore. In a whisper, the colleague tells him the experts in charge haven’t noticed anything to worry about cosmologically speaking. This far in, we already know wh...
This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a tooic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the cukture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
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.
The Valley of the Jerseyikes When you’ve decided to your own satisfaction that life doesn’t end with physical death, what have you got to worry about? That probably depends on where you come down on the age-old questions about ghosts. Do they exist? Are they a possible fate of troubled souls after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil or been yanked out of it too suddenly? What if you expire peacefully and find yourself waking up in the attic of your own house, somehow tethered to it with no watch you can trust to keep track of time? I know I’ve stopped wearing a watch at all, like almost all of you out there. Are we taking some kind of risk that we’ll miss the departure signal for the trip to the other side? One side effect of getting old and not liking most of what’s on teevee is that you wind up watching too many paranormal shows, which have the virtue of no politics, no gratuitous sex scenes, and extended stretches of restful watching with almost nothing happening on screen. ...
This is cross-posted from a confidential site I use to communicate with an old friend on matters more concerned with writing than this one normally is. Sometimes the two sites intersect in unexpected ways. (e.g., See The French Hurry-Up from Feb ‘26.) This does seem an appropriate follow-up to my most recent IPR post. Up to you what you make of it… Inevitably, another major commitment of my time called Instapunk Returns will occasionally stick its nose into the doings here. Working on both, I’m sometimes forced to ask myself how I got from Point A to Point XXX as I seem to have done yesterday at IPR. Specifically, how did I manage to get from here… Yes, I did ‘Shapes’ at graduation, but we all learned our ABCs too. …to here ? The concluding flourish of my latest IPR screed, Thoughts on Foul Language I put the Little Red Hen Nursery School in the same context with the song abcdefu because we all have an important personal timeline with respect to the alphabet. My...
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...
The CHYOS Club (Pronounced kīos, abbreviated ‘kos, meaning MR ) American Illuminati? We’ve all heard the legends of secret societies. The Renaissance story of the ‘Illuminati’ who rule the world as gray eminences behind the scenes is a legend unsupported by facts or, at any rate, evidence. We also know of outright hoaxes widely believed in, like the Priory of Sion made famous by admittedly fictitious Dan Brown novels and movies. But we also know that there are secret societies at every level of elite life. Who hasn’t heard dark whispers of Yale’s Skull & Bones, numbering the Bushes and John Kerry as members? At the international level, the Freemasons are a proven fact, even if their Illuminati-like influence is only widely believed in the UK, with its historical paranoia about Scotland, where freemasonry re-emerges as a follow-on to the Knights Templar. Great fun, mostly. Who doesn’t thrill to news about Bill schmoozing in the dark at the Bilderberger Group? Conspiracy? All t...
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