InstaPunk Returns

From May 2019 to May 2020, I haven’t been here. Realized I was just a Buccaneer. More accurately, an old privateer, not working for anybody but me. What we at Blogger call a Missing Year. I didn’t like anything. Couldn’t believe anything. Thought I was done. Tried multiple workarounds. After Punk . History Channel did two Tesla docs While I did one. The Laird Notebooks . Started writing about reading. How to Have Fun During the National Shutdown . Good stuff for everyone. Even a sad little stripped down site at simplesite.com . I binge-watched like everyone else. I even lied. About Seven of Nine. It was always T’Pol. And all the streaming services, until I had to give up on those too. I liked the idea of a Vulcan woman, whose womanitude was slowly emerging with the Captain. Then they got desperate for ratings, and she started stripping down. Ticked me off. I was half in love with T’Pol. Especially when she had her guilt episode and, gasp, what might have been tears...

America’s Punk Writer at 66. The Internet experts say you have to put it all on one page. So here goes. R. F. Laird describes himself as America’s only Punk Writer. By this he means that his entire writing life has been about breaking the rules and getting in people’s faces. He thinks it’s as important to be funny as to be serious, and vice versa. He thinks most writers write one kind of writing and keep writing the same book over and over again. That’s why he’s done the exact opposite. His works include fiction, most outrageously a complete literary movement, and innovative forms of satire, including Bibles, a fiendishly hard video game, spoofs of famous authors, cartoon stories, and approximately 150 short comedic videos and audio narratives. He’s written half a dozen blogs covering the events of his times and both serious and comic essays about every subject under the sun, including cars, dogs, movies and TV, the sexes, religion, politics, science, sports, and multiple genr...

UPDATED MARCH 15, 2025, with the addition of Volume II below. Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama  figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on. Here’s another relevant book . I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t rea...

Not that there's nothing to say. Just no one left to tell.

Today’s Hot Headlines National Enquirer: Jackie O Was a Spy for the CIA! Weekly World News: Global Cooling Threatens Earth! The People’s Cube: Biden Unveils 2020 Slogan—‘Make Depression Great Again!’

Today’s Hot Headlines Reuters: Attorney General Barr Taps Connecticut Prosecutor to Investigate Origins of Mueller Probe MSNBC: Democrats React to Attorney General’s New Inquiry Business Insider: Dow Jones Industrial Average Washington Post: Three People Were Shot Dead with Crossbows. Then Police Found Wills. The Atlantic:   Doris Day Remembered—‘The People’s Actor’ New York Post:   Tiger Woods Burns John Daly with Surprising Cart Complaint U.S. News: Drugs the Top Killer of Pregnant Women, New Moms in Utah Philly.com: With Soda Tax, Beverage Sales Fell 51 Percent in Philly, Study Finds Cleveland Plain Dealer People.com: Tim Conway, Star of Carol Burnett Show, Dies at 85 Hollywood Reporter: Cannes Diary—Time to Roll Out the Red Carpet, But Does Anyone Still Care?

The Finn named Bottas had yet another factory-made pole position. So Hamilton gunned him down at the start. Because Mr. InstaPunk is too pissed off about Europe generally and the UK specifically. Instapunk is sick to death of the snide and snarky treatment shown to the reigning Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton. What the hell is happening with Mercedes and the Brits? The first video for Sunday should have been Lewis Hamilton's amazing hat trick at the Spanish Grand Prix. But MB has shown their Germanic side even though they say they’re a British Team. MB moved one of Lewis’ engineers to the Finn driver, who is and will always be a number 2. MB have feigned struggling to get his car performing right. And God forbid a black man should ever equal the Babe Ruth of Grand Prix racing, Michael Schumacher. Hamilton’s fellow countrymen, the Brits, don't even show up at the races. The British announcers for the race telecasts act like he isn't even there or that what he...

Ronin. Samurai without a master. Typically pagan notion. The Japanese thought they thought it up. Like most things. In the Middle Ages sometime. Which is Ancient History when you’re a Johnny-come-lately to civilization in the first place. This is only a placeholder, a link in a chain. Sunday Video News coming up. When the mood strikes. UPDATE: The mood didn’t strike. Try this instead.

Today’s Hot Headlines The Daily Caller: House Democrats Issue Subpoena for Trump’s Tax Records Daily Signal: Trump Tax Return Case Hinges on IRS Statute, Supreme Court Precedent PJ Media: IG Horowitz concludes Final Three FISA Extensions Were Illegally Obtained, Says diGenova Wall Street Journal: U.S. Steel to Invest $1.2 Billion at Pennsylvania Mills GM Media: General Motors Announces New Manufacturing Jobs Coming to Ohio American Spectator: Brian McNicoll —Why Does Congress Keep Getting Global Warming Wrong? Christian Science Monitor: How First Burkini in SI Swimsuit Issue Is Shaping Gender Debate Breitbart Hollywood: Rob Reiner Warns 24 Dem Canidates Not to Attack One Another in 2020 Primaries Babylon Bee: Brave Pro-Abortion Legislator Challenges Group of Nuns to Fistfight Power Line:  Twilight of the FBI _______________ Ed. Note: If you are a new or occasional visitor here, you might find this link rewarding.

Today’s Hot Headlines NBC News: U.S. Seizes North Korean Ship Suspected of Violating U.N. Sanctions New York Post: Inside the Online Posts of Colorado Shooting Suspect Maya McKinney American Greatness: Only Five Democrats Have a Serious Shot at the Nomination National Review: Victor Davis Hanson—Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape Leon Wolf/Twitter: To Snopes—“I See You Have ‘Fact-Checked’ Another Obvious Satire at the Babylon Bee…” .  [ bkgd ] The College Fix: TRENDING—Colleges Nationwide Removing Historical Artwork Deemed Offensive .  [ bkgd ] Townhall.com: Trump White House Moves Ahead with Reining in Lower Court Judges Hot Air: Gallup Poll—Less Than Half in U.S. Would Vote for a Socialist for President Reason Magazine: Will Decriminalizing Psilocybin Hasten the End Of the War on Drugs? NBC News: Legalized Marijuana Linked to a Sharp Rise in Car Crashes RealityChek: Were Pre-Trump Trade Policies Really ‘America Last’ Policies? ...

Today’s Hot Headlines The Federalist: Robert Mueller’s 10 Most Egregious Missteps During Anti-Trump Collusion Investigation PJ Media: Clowns Vote to Hold Barr in Contempt Zero Hedge: Trump Winning? China Trade Gap Tumbles to 5-Year Low Business Insider: Dow Jones Industrial Average Rasmussen Reports: Same Old Same Old New York Post: Why Jerry Nadler’s ‘Constitutional Crisis’ Talk Is Pure Bull American Thinker: Do NASA’s Latest Figures Confirm Global Warming? American Spectator: Will Suppression Truthers Depress 2020 Democrat Turnout? Power Line: Not Just Another Google Mistake Breitbart: Parody Clooney PSA Rips Trump and ‘Dumbf*ck Idiots’ Over Climate Change U.K. Telegraph: David Attenborough—‘Humans Are a Plague on Earth’    [ bkgd ]

It’s not a long list. That’s the point. Hardly anyone gets to be on it. Nobody’s on it who isn’t a superhuman human. Actual gods don’t count. Only two of those, deliberately excluded. Shakespeare and Mozart.  End of that list. You want to fight? Tell me why your guy should be on the List. I’ll tell you why he isn’t. First Guy St. John the Divine Italian Guy Dante English Guys Milton Newton Blake Orwell French Guys Voltaire Pascal German Guys Bach Nietzche Jung Spanish Guy Picasso American Guys Poe Bierce

Today’s Hot Headlines Town & Country: Queen Elizabeth Will Meet with New Baby Today The Onion:   Royal Baby Born Business Insider: Dow Jones Industrial Average  [post-baby] New York Post:   Trump Asserts Executive Privilege to Block Release of Mueller Report Babylon Bee: Sanders Campaign to Reach Out to Younger Americans Via Telegraph FrontPageMagazine: Anti-Semitism Is Thriving Among Activists, Not Americans Philly.com: I’m a Mediocre WhiteMan, So I’m Thinking About Joining the 2020 Dem Presidential Field American Thinker: The Democrats and Mass Hysteria American Greatness: Dennis Prager—Why the Left Mocks the Bible Intellectual Takeout: Why Are So Many Female Teachers Sleeping With Students? _______________ Ed. Note: if you are a new or occasional visitor here, you might find this link amusing.

The guy on the left is a maybe. Meaning he’s smarter than the other one. Who’s running? When you get to be an old guy, you start thinking about hair. The facts are pretty daunting. Percentages matter. Age in Years = Percent Chance You are Bald or Balding. For a long time I thought I might be immune. Had that Dorian Gray thing going for me. Until I got to be 60 and saw it was going to be a delusion eclipsed by the laws of probability. My dad had the nickname “Baldy” in college because he had what looked like a receding hairline even back in his salad days. When he died at the age of 77, he still had a full head of hair, much to the chagrin I’m sure of old friends who had parted company with their own locks many years before. Thought I had that particular statistical game beat since I had the same hairline he did. Wrong. It’s all about genes. You get them from mom and dad both. My dad genes said hair to the bitter end. My mom genes said her dad’s hair was equally important. Never ...