Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Hands Across the Water, Hands Across the Sea
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People say the left has no heart. This is very far from the truth. They are full of love and empathy for everybody but the evil ones among us, and they are very Old Testament in their conceptions of Justice. They believe absolutely in the Death Penalty and Hell forever after, except for the ones who get oppressed by the evil ones for their color, ethnicity, gender choices, sexual promiscuity and perversity, body odors, excretory preferences, criminal propensities and other mental illnesses, and every form of weakness except being too small to live anywhere but inside a woman’s body, to which they have no right at all. With the exceptions noted, they love absolutely everybody equally, especially people who work for the government and famous rich people who agree with them about all of the above.
Everybody acts like this is so hard to understand. It isn’t. It’s simple. You just have to have an eye for it. Know how to look for their heart and when they’re wearing it prominently on their sleeve.
A tableau that should, and will, bring tears to your eyes before the end of this post.
See? That’s why we at the Instapunk Times have taken the extraordinary step of expanding our reach to include a news division capable of covering and understanding the aspects of the non-MAGA population only a specialized kind of discernment can appreciate properly. To this end, we have recently acquired the struggling multimedia outlet called Brightbelt News.
A brave voice in the wilderness with a touching story all its own, covered Below the Fold.
Yes, you can learn more about Brightbelt later, but for now all you need to get you started is their maiden post at IPR. Which is in their capable hands, from here to the end.
The Politics of Martyrdom and Verse Vīsa
The Charlie Kirk Hoax, as it will one day be known, is the most cynical ploy yet by a Trump oligarchy intent on imposing fascism on the United States and the rest of the world too. Who could imagine they’d be willing to sacrifice one of their own to deal a deadly blow to the forces of wisdom and light who oppose them? Imagination doesn’t matter when you have a rifle in an open carry state. In the state of Utah something violent happened last week, and depending on your political human values, what happened was either a cold-blooded assassination of a hero or a harsh but overdue levying of Social Justice on a dangerous fascist.
Regardless of how you see it and express yourself about it personally, the result was creation of a martyr for the cause of autocratic oppression of the ordinary people across the country. The parades and speeches in support of the new martyr began immediately, but then eerily parallel act of political violence occurred, receiving huge coverage of its own.
The power of MAGA was applied to the crisis of a dissenting and irreverent voice. The response was a death blow not to a lone human body but to a whole American institution.
This one of those cases where the perilous spark ignites a fa larger fire than anyone could have thought possible. The Senior Senator from New York took a stand of mythic scale against the totalitarian oppression of free speech to an American who wasn’t even in the country without papers. Here’s how it went:
He meant every word. The way he always does.
Then, as happens in American life, all hell broke loose. The victim of the indecent assault on his freedom chose to fight back.
SCOOP: Multiple news outlets are reporting that ABC has pulled the Jimmy Kimmel late night show from its broadcast lineup indefinitely, beginning tonight. What no other source has reported is Kimmel’s response to the allegation that he knowingly lied about the motive of the Sept 10 assassination.
“No one has even talked to me about this,” he said. “The fact is that this has nothing to do with what I said on TV last night. I say shit. We all do. but I get singled out. This is the most glaring example of the Trump administration’s installational racism, which I have long been a victim of going back to when I was a pioneer as a biracial entertainer before no one else was. You know what I’m saying?”
“It’s stone hardcore racism is what it is,” he said. The angry host continued his rant, calling out the involvement of surly white supremacist health clubs located near the ABC studio, as well the devious machinations of failed (and envious) biracial entertainer Vanilla Ice, who was on the show once and stole one of Jimmy’s basketball trophies.
“I’m going to get me that lawyer, you know the one, where the glove don’t fit. I know exactly what we’ll tell that jury. If the Frame don’t fit, you must, uh, quit trying to convict me. My man Jussie says it’ll be a cinch to get off with the right reporters on the case.”
When Kimmel took time out to catch his breath, a personal assistant volunteered that the talk show star was already booked to appear on The View with “that Sunny Hostin, Whoopi, and that old Jewish lady.”
From across the room, Kimmel shouted, “I’ll knock their socks off. You’ll see. You got that?”
Yes, we got it and now you got it too. Can’t wait for the Kimmel-Hostin hookup. He looks eager…
Now the game is afoot for real. Overnight, infusions of cash and ready volunteers put in place the first step,of a step of state funeral for the Jimmy Kimmel Show. A casket filled with the precious videotaped episodes of the show were put on display in a flag-draped casket and hundreds verging on a thousand mourners passed through the Capitol Rotunda to,pay their respects for the Death of Democracy.
One cynically conceived Republican martyr had just been outshine by a far bigger martyr worth many hundreds of millions of dollars for decades to come.
Sooner or later, they all came to honor the fallen standard of a nation. Pelosi, Schumer,
a bunch of the others too, whether they’d been able to don their dashikis or not.
Incredibly moving and newsworthy for all the alphabet cameramen in the audience.
What happens next is, as the old adage goes, in the lap of the DNC.
This is a DEVELOPING STORY…
Below the Fold…
As promised some background information on the Brightbelt News Divison. It was launched yewrs ago by an incredibly talented video editor named Pamela Key, who found herself oppressed and abused, both personally and professionally by the ruling patriarchy of the Breitbarf Website and Import-Export Company.
As working conditions grew worse, Key ceased to be permitted to write any copy on her own but identifying pronouns of speakers. She was required to record interviews from streaming broadcasts and then employ company technology to transcribe the words into Breitbarf Internet posts, intended Key believed, to be read by no one ever. Her pay was reduced repeatedly until she was actually forced to live in a storage area behind the editorial offices.
This is a photographic memento of that sorry period in her life.
Then she managed to make a physical escape by signing a contract with a major GOP donor who was so infatuated with her feral social behaviors that he underwrote her own journalistic endeavor called Brightbelt News.
She continued to work at Breitbarf to maintain her access to wire copy and Rolodexes of like-minded dissident journalists. All came crashing to a halt some months into the project when her sponsor ran off to Borneo with a lycanthropic boy from Brentwood.
Now it’s time to turn the page again. Here is our once and future Brightbelt editor.
The great news is that many of her former correspondents are still available to work with her. One day at a time. We’ll have to see how it all goes. Just like the oh-so promising martyrdom of Jimmy Kimmel. Perhaps Brightbelt can even be a bridge between the starkly divisive media world of the past and the ‘both sides now’ approach of reshaping the truth in ways pleasing to everybody…
You remember this guy ? His name was John Wilkes Booth. He killed President Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday it is today. He was a Confederate sympathizer who believed Lincoln and the federal government that enforced United States laws were evil. Pretty much like — no, exactly like — today’s Democrat know-it-alls who encourage violence against federal laws removing the technical non-voters they think they own like the crooked judges who make their fortunes. John Wilkes Booth was considered insignificant before he killed the President. He was an actor, related to a more famous actor and living pretty much on his name only anymore. Sound like any bios you’ve heard lately? I’m just asking you to remember that the following people may seem like insignificant entertainers with all their violent threats agains Trump, but in their kind of work they all learn how to load and cocks guns. And pull the trigger while aiming at the red laser dot. Yeah, these people. What do they all claim...
Yes, it became an annual Nightline Ceremony Now that the first battlefield casualties of ‘Trump’s Iran War’ have been recorded (6 as of 3/2/26), Ivan hear the bells tolling on the soundtrack of the Alphabet News networks lamenting the names of dead military personnel they don’t care about in any other respect. Soldier deaths are one more cudgel that can be used to beat the America First crowd with. We’ve been here before. The article reproduced below is one I wrote for the original Instapunk blog almost exactly 20 years ago. The occasion was a forthcoming — and much promoted — edition of Nightline dedicated to intoning all the names, one by one, of American military personnel killed in Iraq. A not so subtle undermining of ‘Bush’s Iraq War,’ by a TV program that began as a nightly update on the American hostages taken by Iran in November 1979 after Jimmy Carter handed that nation over to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The ironies abound. Nightline was outraged by the plight of the ...
This is one in a series of posts I’ve written for a friend explaining ways in which my life has seemed orchestrated rather than the strict result of my own decisions. Even my biggest seeming mistakes have produced enormous benefits in terms of furthering my education and the scope of my writing. This is the latest of those posts, shared here because there’s no one living who can be hurt by its content becoming generally available. It’s more personal than IPR posts usually are. But I’m in a Shane mood at the moment and I don’t care. It’s a mood that recurs now and again. It passes and I go back to work. But that’s why this post is being shared here, today. One point to remember. The audio narratives here were not scripted. They were extemporaneous recordings made on my iPad over a number of years, not expressly for this post. C’est L’amour That’s the Piaf I fixated on when I was forming my first thoughts on romantic love. I knew of her before we were ever went to France, because my...
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Jesse Jackson (1942-2026) Honestly tried to find an appropriately hagiographic portrait of Mr. Jackson on the occasion of his death, but I came up pretty empty. Mostly photos of him with other famous people, usually Democrats and Civil Rights bigwigs. I really did make an effort to turn an old photo of him into something more. His was a career full of activity and effort but little glamor. He ran for President twice in two of the weakest candidate pools the Dems Hadhad before the current slagpile. In 1984 he lost the nomination to Mondale, who went on to lose 49 of 50 states. In 1988 he polled worse than Al Gore and Michael Dukakis, who also lost bigly in the general. What little attention I paid him then and subsequently is probably due to his participation in the phenomenon of Reagan Derangement Syndrome, that new streak of personal hatred which entered National Democrat politicking after Watergate. Then he gradually dropped away into the background. Honestly, I probably would l...
Two people daring to approach one another against the odds I like this pic. A surreal take on Valentine’s Day. My wife and I love each other, just not this particular commercial permutation of romance. She doesn’t want a card and I don’t either. But it doesn’t mean I want to be a Scrooge about the whole thing. More than one way to stir a heart though. Loving a musical talent of the opposite sex is not what I’d call cheating, or else I’m in very big trouble. Just shared my lifelong romance with Edith Piaf, which will live as long as I do. But she’s not the only one I have flirtations, infatuations, even relationships with. Enough of them that this could be a series, though I promise I’ll keep that to a minimum. Still, this is a good time to acknowledge such affinities. Women have been misbehaving quite a lot on public stages of Iate and I have not been shy about calling them out. Appropriate that I give a moment to my more tender feelings. Yes, even I have feelings. And female sin...
With all the ruckus about U.S. athletes showing off their jock insight about politics and patriotism this year (“me, me, effing ICE killers, and uh, me”), I haven’t paid much attention to the competitions in Milan, a city in which I had some fine evenings decades ago. Why spoil those memories with graceless images of Ugly Americans embarrassing themselves and us? What has seeped through my indifference is four American performances on, ironically, ice. Two were disasters, gold medal candidates in figure skating who failed dismally under the Olympic spotlight, and two sterling American gold medal victories by a charismatic young legal immigrant from China and a Women’s Ice Hockey Team that beat Canada thrillingly in Overtime. Any karma involved here and there? Could be. Regardless, I’m not going to replay any of these turns on ice here. Let the dead past bury its dead self and let the long lasting glow of triumph reveal itself again at intervals as occasions warrant. Why such a hig...
DISCLAIMER: If you’re anything like me (attentive to the things I’m attentive to), you’re behind the curve in this whole podcasting phenomenon. I’d seen short clips of podcasts at ‘X’-Twitter, heard about the land office business Tucker Carlson was doing right after he left Fox, and didn’t pay that much attention to people like Joe Rogan until Barron Trump suddenly got credit for stealing the media narrative from the alphabet media (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, NYT, WAPO) during the election campaign. Honestly, I’d regarded solo “pundits” filming themselves being smarter than everyone else as an opportunity for satire rather than serious analysis. Why this disclaimer. I have put my own oar in the podcasting water. Several times. Trying to figure out how normal people could produce a regular series of programs on their own hook. So I took a crack at it on the down low. I wake up early, long before dawn, so I experimented with filming myself on the iPad. Without a printer I coul...
One of these gentlemen was named Hugh Walpole. F-a-a-a-mous Writer. Some other famous writer once wrote that “the good is oft interrèd with their bones.” It’s no secret that the reputation of Stephen King has taken a bit of a hit of late. Too much with the tongue-lashing of Donald Trump for some of his more down-home fans. Should this extremely rich and prolifically prolific author be fretting about his legacy in the annals of literature? Hard to say. Have you heard of the prominent writer and “Commander of the British Empire (CBE) Hugh Walpole? No, not Horace. He was the one who wrote so swimmingly about fishing. This was Hugh, who has quite a lengthy write up at Wikipedia. Here are the most salient excerpts: WIKI: <<Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole , CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were ...
Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. There’s an intensely contemporary reason for taking a close look at Scientology. The Swamp is so huge it seems like the Borg. But what are the stripped down essentials of the Borg? Here’s a look at a laboratory example, a microcosm if you will. In the interests of full disclosure, I did encounter Scientology back in the weird year of 1968. I was in Boston, got scooped in to a “Dianetics” exercise, and got speedily thrown out for having too much “charge” to participate. The one in charge was blond, bland to the point of creepy, and I almost (but not quite) succeeded in making him lose his temper. In further interests of disclosure, I spent years on Facebook, debating Trump-haters. They did lose their tempers. But they also exhibited the exact same repetition of Talking Points the lefties (and Scientologists) employ. Exact. Same. Words. How I made the cult connection. Overview Like it says. Troublemaker. Destroy Utterly Horror Show Squared More ... ...
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