InstaPunk Returns

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. ...

  Thought I’d posted about this back in April. Come to find out, I’d done the research, compiled the reference materials, and then failed to do the writing and posting part. It happens. The graphic above is from a post I did in Dec ‘24 called Am I the Only One Who’s Noticed This? , which concluded that the idea of Canada as a 51st state was unworkable. The biggest obstacle was Canada’s population, which approximately equals California’s, heavily concentrated in the eastern provinces. The addition of two Democrat senators might be manageable, but the damage in the House of Representatives, all those Laborite stooges with a House membership pushing 40 would be catastrophic. I concluded Trump was getting their attention before the serious trade renegotiations began. It was possible to see by the time trade talks started in earnest that the Canadian government was as backward and out of touch as the Biden administration and that not all of Canada was content to do as they as they usual...

  Saw a short but evocative post from Michael Smith on Facebook yesterday that struck an immediate chord with me:   It struck chords with a lot of people in fact. We’d already been through this once with all the guiltiest talking heads in the media interviewing all the accomplices in the political class about how the fact of Joe Biden’s serious dementia could have been covered up so thoroughly. Nauseating to watch. Now we have a similar but not quite identical phenomenon of the complicit talking heads in the huge set of hoaxes designed to destroy the Trump presidency, inviting some of of the prime perpetrators on to deny the truth of Tulsi Gabbard’s charges with a straight face. Nodding all around as more lies are piled on top of the mountain of old lies. Does no one realize they are, if possible, making matters worse for themselves when the investigators bring their charges? Reading Smith’s post and the comments appended to it made me think of a movie I had seen as a kid. It ...

More than 300,000 of you have visited here. How much have you read? I don’t know. I do know there are more than 650 posts at IPR, averaging better than 1,500 words a post when you factor in the long and longer ones. There is also contained herein an outreach to voluminous other materials in other of my sites over 20+ years time. That’s why I do an occasional Repost to highlight older material that is currently as relevant as it’s ever been in the present context. There’s a precursor to this post, also a hearkening back, that may make a good reminder of my qualifications to comment on Barack Obama. It’s called “ Only the Willfully Blind Never Saw It… ” and worth rereading in its own right. This one is full of content that can be browsed, dipped into, returned to, and used as a ready reference source as new related events transpire. I’m not insisting anyone readmit, just offering it because we have now reached the point at which a former President of the United States is almost certainly...

  “Yes, you. The rabbit at the back of the room. Stand up.” There will be a lot of talk by the experts now that the first half year is in the bank. The Honeymoon is over, so to speak. The bride has returned from her lavish world tour and is now spilling the secrets to her girlfriends. Was it all perfect? No. She won’t be discussing the great sex in detail because they were sleeping together before the wedding anyway, and now she can’t help confiding to her intimates some of the real life annoyances that always crop up when you’re sharing close quarters in foreign surroundings. Her confidence that the things about him she thought she could change or improve has been shaken. In little ways, he is still living his own life, no matter how solicitous he seems. He is always busy but he is not always with her. He stares alone out the window in the middle of the night. Sometimes he seems to be looking past her, even when they’re touching. She had particularly wanted to see a,particular mus...