InstaPunk Returns

  Here’s the “official” story as it has stood for a quarter century. This will be an unusual post. It contains my longest ever direct quote of another source, which happens to be the longest ever post I have seen at the Gateway Pundit website. Ordinarily this is a kind of topic I would have handled fairly briefly at Facebook, but the relevant text by Gateway and by me is too substantial for that. I tried doing it that way before choosing this site instead. Here’s the graphic I prepared for the FB post: After I’d  prepared the graphic, things started to get complicated. There was just too much relevant content for a Facebook post. I have a personal connection to the Oklahoma City bombing story you probably have to be 50 to share. I remember exactly where I was when it broke into the regular cable programming one April morning in 1995 with a Special Announcement of an unfolding catastrophe in the state where my sister lived. My TV, large screen for the time and equipped with sur...

A great poet and a great role model, both iconic. This post will be widely condemned, I know. My purpose is not to propose a prescription consisting of problem-solving steps but to offer a different perspective on a subject that is being deliberately distorted on all sides. The LGBTQ liberation movement betrays all the ills of everything we begin as a Social Justice project. A few brave individuals speak up for a persecuted minority, achieve some success, become organized, and ultimately transmogrify into a political constituency bearing little in common with the intentions of its pioneers. I the past century, we’ve seen this phenomenon with Civil Rights, Feminism, and Gay Liberation. In all three cases, there has been a point of overreach that passes invisibly in the blur of sensational headlines, outrageous acts of protest and resistance, and then a counterintuitive drift toward resegregation and deliberately offputting demands on the commonweal. While LGBTQ obviously has elements in...

The IMDb List A month or so ago I heard an episode of the Cluck and Buck Radio Show (i.e., Clay Travis/Buck Sexton) discussing the lists of best 21st Century movies that have been popping up now that we’ve got a quarter of the new century under our belts. They weren’t happy with the names they were hearing. After a lot of what passes for manly banter between them they settled on The Dark Knight Rises as their pick for Number 1. It’s a better choice, I agree, than most of the titles on the list above, but the whole process of selection here seems sad. Even pitiful. I’ve seen exactly eight of the 21 movies shown here, and the only one I’d consider a candidate for the top spot is Lord of the Rings . I liked Lost in Translation’ s   inclusion   on the list as well. That’s about it. Most of it seems like pretentious junk, overhyped sequels, and predictably dark excursions into some director’s disappointments with the universe. Not what I watch movies for.  I very much do...

  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. ...