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My World and Welcome to It

My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 3:53 PM, Monday, June 30. Latest entries are “A Look Back at Pioneering Protests Against the Wall,” “REPOST: The San Andreas Faultline in the Democrat Party,”  “Is it 72 hours yet?,”  and “Trump the Fascist Dictator. ” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses... NEW: Undernet Black was updated today. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of t...

A Look Back at Pioneering Protests against “The Wall”

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Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that it is the Executive Branch which enforces the laws of the land, not the Judicial Branch, the deportations the 2024 electorate voted for can proceed with fewer skirmishes between paper airplanes. The protests in individual locations will occur in their customary way, with sticks and rocks and Molotov cocktails and looting and arson. You know. In the most popular liberal way. In light of today’s events I went looking for my own coverage of the earliest liberal protests against the proposal to build a Wall along the entire southern border to prevent illegals from mounting some kind of absurd mass invasion. This was way back in 2006, when Bush was President and proposing something called Comprehensive Immigration Reform, which usually means lots of amnesties and thousands more illegals. When talk about a Wall got serious for the first time.  Naturally, the liberals immediately identified this as a quasi-Nazi insurrectionist-type movement to enf...

REPOST: The San Andreas Faultline in the Democrat Party

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I’ve only done this once or twice in the past. That is, I haven’t made an habit of running the same IPR post again at a later date because it’s become relevant again in a new context. This time obviously, the context is the 12-Day War and its aftermath, which has also surfaced some truly striking examples of antisemitism on the Democrat side. I’m dealing with the linked example elsewhere, but I was reminded that it’s time for some accountability by various constituencies within the now fractured and crumbling liberal coalition of the past. The original post was written almost two years ago and appears here unchanged. These are not new issues we’re dealing with… October 27, 2023 This is a complicated subject studded with land mines that can only exacerbate the potential for a devastating earthquake. The new and unanticipated war in Israel has exposed a weird schism in Democrat ranks nobody has ever wanted to address in print but me. There  is  a Jewish Problem. It’s not t...

Has it been 72 hours yet?

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By my watch it’s the third day. How to explain what Trump has been up to in the Mideast? He’s been doing what he always does. Working for the deal he wants after all the rhetoric and bluster and the moves and countermoves are done.  What did he want? The safety of Israel, which is our only agent of Democracy in the Middle East. An end to the killing as soon and for as long as possible. And most of all, he wanted Americans to be as safe as possible from the deliberate and collateral damage inflicted by crazy people in the greater Islamic world. What were the obstacles he had to overcome? 1) Irrational, incredibly violent emotions on both sides, by Israel and by Iran and the organizational instruments it has used for 45 years to attack, terrorize, and otherwise intimidate Israel and its few real allies in the western world. 2) A seriously degraded U.S. intelligence capability, lacking both the political will and the human on-the-ground resources to discover What the Hell was really g...

Trump the Fascist Dictator

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  Il Douche as the lefties like to call him On the first day of Summer, 2025, it’s time to take stock on what is and is not going on in these United States of America. The desperate remnant of what used to be the official Democrat Party is still trying to depict Donald Trump as an anti-Democratic authoritarian fully engaged in the process of destroying our Constitutional protections against a single executive ruling by decree and the tactics of terror. We’re five months in now to the second term of this president, and it’s appropriate to demonstrate what could have happened in that time and did not. The pic up top is of Mussolini only because there’s a superficial physical resemblance between Il Duce and The Donald . The more accurate comparison for our purposes is with the favorite avatar of the left, Adolf Hitler and His Nazi Party. People with Internet access, even Democrats, can confirm to themselves that Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933  by means of an electoral ...

Is Newsom Real or is he AI?

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There’s a serious article in the works on the current state of AI technology, but this post is mostly a fun way of showing how a sheaf of new apps are playing with its capabilities. It’s probably closer to Whwt most people imagine AI to be than the experts who are alternately promoting and fearing its life-changing potential. Not a bad way to prepare the soil for the planting of some new ideas later on. Saw the article posted above and was immediately reminded of a cartoon app I had used on the Fovernor of California about a year ago. I was happy enough with the result because it did resemble the Governor, but that didn’t stop me from using his name to open the post and make sure readers would recognize him on the steps of the Capitol. I made a number of cartoons for future reference, some of which I subsequently used when a given subject’s behavior was cartoonish enough. Why I have something like 65,000 image files It’s called exploring the technology. I do it all the time. I use what...

Through the past brightly…

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  A key video that won’t load after a brief title flash in the time capsules below Yes, the President is standing on a knife edge that stretched all the way from California to Iran and beyond. I’m keeping an eye on it, as I’m sure many of you are too. But unlike the pundits and other seers of the mass media, we the people who live in the real world know that there’s not much we can do to affect what will happen in the hours and weeks ahead. We’ve already done what we had to do, which is elect the best available candidate for the job of making the tough decisions about how best to proceed in our interests. Beyond that, our responsibility is primarily to remain calm and do the work we’re best suited to doing. In my case that means writing stuff I think it worthwhile to write about as honestly as possible. That accounts for most of my time, but being as old and uniquely situated as I am, there’s also a continual overhead I have to pay in the form of what I call Reclamation ; that is, ...

Israel Bullying its Neighbors Again

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  What’s all the fuss about? Israel is only twice the size of LA. Not worth even half the attention, right? This may look complicated, and in the mechanics and timelines and geopolitics of it all it is, but underneath all the noise it really is simple this time. Iran is committed to the destruction, the utter annihilation, of Israel. They will never change their policy about this. Iran wants a bomb. No amount of wheedling, negotiating, or compromise will end this obsessive hunger. Israel wants to take care of them alone. Why? Apart from Trump in the White House, there is no one they can trust. The opposition party and even a big chunk of the Republican Party are willing to sell out Israel with intelligence leaks, stall tactics, and and everything conceivable to make Middle East conflict profitable for their purses and careers. Netanyahu, battling appeasing insurrectionists of his own, has decided this is his best and perhaps only opportunity to cut off the head of the snake. None o...