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.”
You are being told at this very moment that these things are ‘snowflakes.’ Since Trump became President for the first time in 2017, climate seer Al Gore has not been seen much in public. Ruthless MAGA censorship made him something of a nonperson until his sudden reappearance at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland a few days ago. His public message there was grievously misreported as follows: Had the truth not been vigorously repressed by White House minions, we would have learned of Gore’s real purpose, to broadcast a warning about the most sinister conspiracy yet perpetrated by the autocratic Trump regime. To understand the real and imminent danger confronting us, we must revisit the history most of us already know in general terms. Back in 2006, the former Presidential candidate from whom an election really was stolen issued a warning to the world. He had, in fact, put the science together and metaphorically traveled in time to a future in which climate change would i...
The Interceptor The Lord of the Rings is a great trilogy, both as books and movies, but it’s not my favorite trilogy this morning. I’m here to talk about Mad Max, the Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Both stories are allegories, LOTR in the grand universal sense, MM in the lowdown ‘fighting for our lives here, boss’ sense. Both stories apply to our current situation in America, but one is more useful as a tool of both engagement and patience. That would be the guy with the leg brace and the bad attitude. It doesn’t hurt that I identify personally more with Max than I do with Frodo Baggins or, for that matter with Aragorn, Gandalf, or Legolas. There’s an otherness about both settings, but Max’s focus on roads, vehicles, speed, and gasoline are close enough to my own youth that it’s easier for me to be behind the wheel with him than dodging orcs on the ramparts of Gondor or in the caves of Moria. I have driven fast, a lot, and in more ways than one, very often in...
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 ...
Edward Hopper, severified by me . If I can surprise myself on a Friday morning otherwise filled with nervous chatter, maybe I can help someone else achieve a more reflective mood as we approach the weekend. Here are a few tidbits that popped up when I checked what visitors had viewed in the last 24 hours. Not here for the funny this time. More fractal than that… sometimes it feels like they’re looking for me , in bits and pieces. I’ve corrected some link problems with these. The Internet is growing old and forgetful faster than I am… I am Cassandra Ru-u-u-sh Awaaay… [All] Things Fall Apart The Creepy Line (The trailer will do for now. Come back later if you’re intrigued.) Every Once in a While I Remember My Roots They’re not (necessarily) very long, except for the last one. And this one… It’s Called a Rhombi…hedron
Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
P. T. Barnum’s Most Famous Attraction My first job at NCR Corporation was in Product Marketing, which encompasses marketing strategy, marketing communications, and sales support in the form of competition information. Yawn. But my career began with an immediate crisis. When I was taking stock of what I had to work with, I tried to find my division marketing strategy. There wasn’t one. Well, there was, but it wasn’t a strategy; it was a simple directive. Pursue major accounts. Period. So I wrote a marketing strategy document and showed it to the smartest guy I knew at NCR, the one-man band who gave Executive Briefings to targeted major account decision makers. He shook his head at me. “It’s great,” he told me. “But there’s nobody to show it to. Not your boss, not his boss, and not the Director of Marketing. He doesn’t give this kind of stuff the time of day.” Oh. We talked. He got more enthusiastic. “What might work is sending it directly to our real boss, the Division VP. Y...
[ 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...
What’s wrong with this picture ? A rough history of the Great White Mess as a North American colony has been covered in a previous post , but what must concern us as American citizens is the role they’ll be playing in the critical years ahead. None of the options is promising. Geographically, Canada is the second largest nation on earth. In every other respect it is not even an also ran. Maybe a ‘coulda ran’ depending on how you look at it, but ‘didna ran’ is more like it. For most of their history as a quasi-semi-ex-colony of the British Empire and stepchild of the British Commonwealth, they seem to have just been just sitting there taking handouts from the adults of western civilization. When you look for greats (and I have), they are there but in small numbers and often with sad stories. Their greatest writer was Malcolm Lowry, not Canadian by birth but by exile and adoption, who died soon after writing what has been ranked (by the people who do such rankings) as the eleventh b...
This pic makes sense at Hump Day HQ . A lot of wannabe news out there, without many headlines that go beyond the threat level. Why Hump Day can be an opportunity to back off a bit, regroup, and get our minds right for finishing the week with a flourish. The idea for this post came to me when I was checking visitor stats, which usually are set to seven days. A little under 500 had visited in the last day, but no one had visited the newest post. That’s highly unusual. What were they all looking at? I changed the timeframe to 24 hours, and here’s what I got: A couple are here because I may have mentioned them online elsewhere, but most are here for reasons unknown. Not a lot to any of them, and these hardly add up anywhere close to 500, so they must be the result of curiosity, of keyword searches by visitors taking a look around. In other words, this list might qualify as a representative sample of the Instapunk site as a whole and what piques the interest of its audience. So ...
Ellis Henican You may have seen him on TV. He’s been on a lot of the cable news networks as a pundit-slash-analyst. He’s a reliable, crafty voice for the left on short notice, on almost any subject. He makes his point like most lawyers do, by attacking your argument with the intent of taking it down to components easily smashed with dismissal and ridicule. Most times, your own argument doesn’t have to be made at all, however threadbare the talking points are. That’s how Anthony Weiner built his whole political career while it lasted. Ellis Henican isn’t a lawyer though. He’s not really a politician either. He’s a professional Jack-of-all-trades in the news/media establishment centered principally in New York, though excursions and field trips elsewhere are permitted, of course. His box bio at Wiki describes him as a “ Columnist, author, talk radio, entertainer, voice actor, television, political analyst.” Under Notable Works he lists one book, titled “Home Team,” (a ghosted autobiograp...
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