InstaPunk Returns

  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...

  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...

  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...

  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 ...