InstaPunk Rules

A few years back.

My wife isn’t a big fan of the Brit motorhead show Top Gear. Mostly for good reasons. The three co-hosts share the arrested development of many many men, seemingly stuck at age nine, despite gray hairs and creeping paunches. Also, the car thing doesn’t fascinate her, which is acceptably common among women. I know her eyes glaze over when I start talking about internal combustion engines, etc.

But we had an exception last night. A standard Top Gear segment is “Star in an Average Priced Car,” which is exactly what it sounds like. TV and movie stars show up, receive some training from the show’s resident racing driver (“The Stig”), and then try to turn in the fastest lap they are capable of on the show’s tricky home track. The car is the constant. Everyone drives the same vehicle.

The results of their efforts are revealed to them in the Top Gear studio, where they and the most acerbic of the TG co-hosts, Jeremy Clarkson, are perched on car seats surrounded by an active studio audience. There is a permanent running record of the times recorded by all the stars, and there are a lot of stars. Whether you know it or not, this test is a rite of passage for a very large number of both British and American actors. Where action stars in particular have to prove their mettle in real life.

So. On the episode we saw last night, Jeremy Clarkson, notoriously anti-American except when he has American stars in the studio, was clearly star struck by having both Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz on hand. They were obviously promoting their movie Knight and Day, which Clarkson may have shown a clip of. Mostly, though, he was interested in Cameron Diaz, Cameron Diaz, and the Hollywood glow of the two of them together.

The man who continually asks Brit stars why they live in New York or Los Angeles when they could live in the one true kingdom went so far as to declare that Cameron and Tom looked like the genetic future of the human race, when all the defects had been eradicated from the species.

He asked Cruise about the reporting that he does most of his own stunts. True. He asked if that was hard and if it ever hurt. Cruise said yes, it often hurts; he’d broken his nose twice, most of his fingers and toes, a leg, and multiple ribs. Oh. How about Cameron? Well, not because of stunts but she’d broken her nose four times, beginning at age eleven. “Shit just has a way of finding my nose,” she said.

Talk about personal cars. Cruise rides motorcycles mostly these days. He has a 1934 Indian once owned by Steve McQueen. Cameron has a Prius. Clarkson made a face. She gave him a nasty grin.

Then to the laps they both did. There’s in car video of these laps. Cameron was obviously taking the competition seriously. While Jeremy was asking how anyone could actually look that good in a helmet, she was setting a TG record for most uses of the F-word in a Top Gear lap. Which is not easy to do. The stars are very colorful in their language while driving. She also mentioned in passing the real handicap American stars are under in the competition. Right hand drive means you do all your shifting with the left hand, not how Americans have learned to shift. “Damn English gears,” she said.

After they’d shown the video, Cameron wanted to know her time. Clarkson gave his Cheshire Cat grin and said it was time to see Tom Cruise’s video. He was also clearly committed, so much so that his line was at times on the verge of loss of control. On the final curve, he actually managed to come so close to rolling that both left hand wheels visibly left the ground. He was shaking his head at his own performance when the video ended.

Clarkson’s big moment in this segment always. He has the times and he tortures the stars, asking them how they think they did, who they’d like to beat on the long board of star times. Cameron didn’t know. She just didn’t want to be humiliatingly bad.

With painful slowness, Clarkson revealed her time. She had beaten everyone on the long board. The top star time.

Cruise immediately embraced her, laughing and cheering her accomplishment.

Clarkson fixed him with a beady stare and said, “That’s a nice show, but you’ve got to be crapping yourself right now.” Cruise smiled and leaned forward, waiting, which all the stars do, no matter how big and famous.

Cruise’s time was doled out even more slowly than Diaz’s. But the end result was worth it. Cruise bettered her by a full second. Cameron squealed, they embraced again and then both stood up and received a standing ovation from the studio audience.

“You Americans,” said Jeremy Clarkson. “You Americans.”

In case any of you needed a bright moment today.

CORRECTION: I overstated my wife’s lack of interest in cars. Lately, she was the reason we watched the Monaco Grand Prix and the Canadian Grand Prix. She was riveted. And she’s waiting for the next one. I think a fan has been born. If that’s not a rush to judgment.

The compleat argumentation of the progressive perspective.

I did the most accurate post about who the left is and what it wants you’ve ever read.

No comments. Do you wonder at my scorn and escalating uninterest in anything but private hells?

What we call background. In case you start feeling superior to your friendly neighborhood Instapunk. Don’t ever do that.

She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; 50
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries—
So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries,
She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf, 55
Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.
Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar:
Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete: 60
And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?
As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air.
Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake
Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love’s sake, 65
And thus; while Hermes on his pinions lay,
Like a stoop’d falcon ere he takes his prey.

Left to herself, the serpent now began
To change; her elfin blood in madness ran,
Her mouth foam’d, and the grass, therewith besprent,
Wither’d at dew so sweet and virulent;
Her eyes in torture fix’d, and anguish drear, 150
Hot, glaz’d, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
Flash’d phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.
The colours all inflam’d throughout her train,
She writh’d about, convuls’d with scarlet pain:
A deep volcanian yellow took the place 155
Of all her milder-mooned body’s grace;
And, as the lava ravishes the mead,
Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede;
Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars,
Eclips’d her crescents, and lick’d up her stars: 160
So that, in moments few, she was undrest
Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst,
And rubious-argent: of all these bereft,
Nothing but pain and ugliness were left.

*************

Short version: Keats is very long winded. In this case by design. Long ago, Instapunk was nearly killed by a beautiful mythical monster. Instapunk is still alive because nothing can kill him. Whatever comfort you can take, take from that.

Easy to say it’s all show business. But it’s worse than that. Nowadays, it’s the politicians who are paid actors with remarkably little script approval. After all, their jets are waiting. It’s the media who are desperate hangers-on, hoping for an invitation to the correspondents dinner.

Nothing that transpires in national politics is real. Everybody false, everybody a polished performer. Turn on the cameras, make it happen, dude, and tell the women and horses to stay out of the way. If you don’t know who I am, you better learn quick.

Except that it’s all horsecrap. None of these guys knows anything. Everytime John Kerry speaks as Secretary of State I want to throw up. That bad. The Cabinet, agency heads, and other federal bosses are a row of idiots. A complete gallery of malicious morons. I don’t even know if Obama thinks he can play chess, and I know only the moves of the pieces, but I can still kick his ass. Contrary to seven years of effusive PR, I can state with confidence he’s not all that smart. There’s no intellect or learning of any kind in the O realm.

Governing in this administration is only about whose ass you should be kissing. Nobody knows anything, nobody reads anything, nobody ever thinks about anything. Nobody is ever accountable for anything.

But the pundits and the new media keep pretending that John Kerry knows how to change a tire. He doesn’t. His wife doesn’t care. She has a filipino houseboy to do that for her. Why rich people are so happy. Why incredibly stupid rich people do incredibly stupid things in public. Like being Secretary of State when you have no idea what just happened in the world, why, or how it could possibly be your responsibility. All of this on the off chance some chick might sleep with you before your cock falls off. Which the reporters from NYT and WAPO have been just dying to do. There’s nothing they find sexier than an old, wooden, botox-deadened face in a corpse-like body which is almost certain to give women as much pleasure as a splintered oak firelog. Not to mention a firelog’s exquisite powers of conversation. From France, of course. Sad, pitiful, stupid old man. Even sadder, some of them will offer a nest to his ancient dwindling twig.

After they do, of course, he will simply add another mark to the competitive wall he set up with Teddy Kennedy. For real men, such competitions don’t end because a rival kicks the bucket. They end when you have nailed everyone on the political reporting staff of the major newspapers and the major news networks.

Was it good for you sweetheart?

It was great for me. We call it acting. The only thing we fucking do. Can you get me a latte?

All right. You progressives hate America. Enough of this death by a million cuts. Just go ahead and do it. Kill America dead. The most effective policies aren’t hard to figure out, even for us righty troglodytes.

Every major agency of the federal government, and increasingly every municipal police department, has its own SWAT team. Turn them loose to carry out your fondest wishes.

Find and burn every copy of the U.S. Constitution in the land. You know you’ve always wanted to. Forget rewriting it. The idea of a law you can’t remake in accord with your newest post-modern whim has never been your long suit, has it? Enjoy the bonfire. Bring marshmallows. Vegan marshmallows, mind.

Round up all white heterosexual males registered Republican or Independent under the age of 60. Put them in a reeducation camp. Castrate them. End the Conservative War on Women (and such) once and for all. Enough with the speech codes, the micro-aggressions, the talk of triggers, the endless blather about marriage, the bullshit contraception controversies, the end of any more need for angry homosexual and transgender exhibitionism and the resultant hysterical tantrums. Just cut their balls off. All done. Then women and such will be free to be women and such. uh, mostly.

Round up all the pro-life Christians and put them in a reeducation camp. Import thousands of Jihadists to behead or crucify them all. No need to instruct them on how to handle the nazi Palestinian-holocausting zionists. Just point.

Bronze the Congressional Black Caucus. That way you’ll always have them the way they are now, photogenic and compliant, and as perpetual as a gerrymandered district in congress.

Will that accomplish all your goals? By no means. You’ve got this sense of mission about reducing the carbon footprint. You don’t just hate America. You hate humanity. So. Do it. Make abortion compulsory for all white women. Or just tie their tubes. Margaret Sanger knew everything you need to know about sterilizing the undesirables. Don’t stop there, though. Round up all the scientists who are climate change deniers, put them in a reeducation camp, and lobotomize them all. Then castrate them too.

Use ObamaCare to perform compulsory euthanasia on all white people 60 and older. That’ll make a dent, eh?

Who have we got left? Your treasured, persecuted minorities. They can do what they like, given the confines of the 100 percent tax rate, which ensures a continuation of the fine living enjoyed by your legions of government bureaucrats who nominally serve dependents by ignoring their needs utterly and devastating the urban areas where the majority of them presently live. Important exception though. Remember your fiery convictions about gun control? Anyone caught owning a firearm must be executed immediately by firing squad. Including all members of the evil U.S. Military.

Now we’re starting to get somewhere. It’s called thinning the herd. The carbon footprint will be cut by two thirds. All inconvenient dissent will be silenced. There can be no possible future for the racist patriarchy of this ill begotten nation because there will be no children, at least none that long survive. The great Mother Earth will be far better off.

Details. Shut down the Internet completely. (Yes, you progressive luminaries can keep your cellphones, as long as they keep working.) Shut down all newspapers but the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the L.A. Times. Shut down all broadcast and cable television except for The Glorious Presidential Golf Channel. Something the newly green laborers in the agricultural fields — er, everyone who doesn’t work for the government once the cities collapse — can enjoy after a long day of growing organic vegetables fertilized by human excrement. Once a week they can see an informative message movie starring Matt Damon or George Clooney. As long as they hose off the human fertilizer first. Oh. Forgot. No more domestic animals either. Time to end the patriarchy’s tyranny of animals too.

The Hispanics who survive the gun executions can mow your lawns and take care of the president’s golf courses. Also, maybe, if they have the time, manicure the campuses of the elite prep schools and universities where you send YOUR children to do drugs, hookups, and no critical thinking or learning of any kind. Good progressive kids are those with hostile porridge for brains. Otherwise they might figure out how much you despise them too. The Eloi only you are willing to protect from us morlocks. The Betas you sired at great expense and inconvenient time out from your Alpha careers. You must be so proud. Here they are. And for only fifty grand a year through eight years of Groton and Princeton, they emerge like butterflies, only half as dim-witted as you have always been. No threat. Because no future. You will see to that, which is your infallible way.

Sound like heaven? Of course it does. Everyone will finally be equal, except for you ones who are more equal than the rest. The last generation of the astonishingly gifted who have the right to rule the rest of us. Granted, it doesn’t solve all the problems in the rest of the world, but they’ll take care of themselves pretty handily. Everyone knows America has always been the source of all their problems. They’ll do fine from here on in. Most everyone knows they’ve been in love with death a lot longer than Americans, and they’re just dying to follow your lead. And you’ll be the ones who get to watch it all happen.

Unless you forget to kill the imported jihadist killing squads. But you wouldn’t make a mistake like that, would you? Of course not. You’re the smartest people who ever lived.

Who is she, really? You know who she is.

She’s been dipping in the personal popularity polls lately. A few unguarded remarks about what it’s like to have momentary cash flow problems while you’re in debt to lawyers defending your husband’s impeachment crisis and the losing effort to keep him from being disbarred in Arkansas. Plus a curious inability to articulate any single actual accomplishment she’s had in her high profile career as a carpetbagging U.S. Senator from New York and a do-nothing, go everywhere Secretary of State for the worst foreign policy president in our history. You know. Little stuff like that. Nits and picks.

Apparently it’s not supposed to matter. An article yesterday at Real Clear Politics is typical:

Not “If” Hillary Runs for President, But When — and How

Yes, let’s get that out of the way: Hillary Rodham Clinton is not deciding whether to run for president; she’s already running for president. If she doesn’t make it to the starting gate for the 2016 Democratic primaries, she will have quit running. When has a Clinton ever quit anything?…

The feigned indecision is part of the 2016 Clinton campaign rollout, as is the new autobiography, “Hard Choices,” and its accompanying book tour. Legendary literary editor Michael Pakenham referred to such volumes as “unbooks.” Like all Washington memoirs, its unofficial subtitle should be “If They Had Only Listened to Me.” Their purpose isn’t to entertain, educate, or enlighten. It’s to keep the author’s name in the news, make some money, and pave the way for the next gig. “Hard Choices” does all three, which is nice work if you can get it, considering the project is a ghost-written campaign manifesto…

This week, she lashed out at liberal interviewer Terry Gross for having the temerity to ask if the Clintons had changed their minds about gay marriage or if they had changed their public position when it became expedient. It’s an interesting question, actually, and one I’ve wondered about since the night during Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign when he signed the Orwellian-named Defense of Marriage Act into law. Hillary also fudged on the date in the Gross interview, citing the year 1993, a reminder that another trait she shares with Bill is a willingness to bend the truth…

So she has flaws, yes, but tremendous strengths as a candidate, too. I’ll go into them next Sunday when I explain why HRC is almost certain to be the next president of the United States.

Let me repeat that phrase “tremendous strengths as a candidate.” Let’s see. She’s a do nothing phony who has a record of lying, vengeful personal attacks, and represents a mirror of her husband’s say anything corruption without his political skills. Yeah. What would the strengths be?

She’s a woman. She has name recognition. The Democrats have nothing like a credible candidate to be president of the United States. And she’s a woman.

That’s it. The Dems are planning to parlay their fraudulent War on Women meme to another presidential election based on the idea that it’s this minority’s turn to occupy the Oval Office.

It’s just possible that eight years of Obama will have convinced people that demographics aren’t sufficient reason to hand the keys of power to an incompetent of the politically correct victim class.

More than that, Hillary’s qualifications as a gender warrior in the War on Women battle for equality and respect, etc, are even thinner than Obama’s claim to be an African-American.

Exhibit I in the campaign to come. A new revelation about Hillary’s early legal career. In 1975, she agreed to defend a 41 year old man who was almost certainly guilty of having raped a 12 year old girl. She chatted jocularly about the details of the case with a reporter, on audiotape, and laughed about both her friendly relations with the judge and the technicality on which she managed to acquit her client. At no point did she express the slightest concern for the victim.

You can read the whole story here. Please do.

The victim of that assault is not inclined to forgive:

Now 52, the victim resides in the same town where she was born.

Divorced and living alone, she blames her troubled life on the attack. She was in prison for check forgery to pay for her prior addiction to methamphetamines when Newsday interviewed her in 2008. The story says she harbored no ill will toward Clinton.

According to her, that is not the case.

“Is this about that rape of me?” she asked when a Free Beacon reporter knocked on her door and requested an interview.

Declining an interview, she nevertheless expressed deep and abiding hostility toward the Newsday reporter who spoke to her in 2008—and toward her assailant’s defender, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Being pro-abortion might have been enough cover for her husband’s shoddy if not criminal behavior toward women. I’m inclined to think, though, that women will not be as willing to overlook the indulgence of child rape by Bill’s wife.

What do you think? Inevitable? Maybe a comeuppance for a life of unscrupulous and convenient decisions, accompanied by a uniquely voracious thirst for power. Obama ain’t the only one, and maybe Americans won’t fall for it yet again.

One can only hope.

It’s wonderful.

If you’re me, everything is arranged for you. In advance.

Have you ever watched the show “Numbers”? A math prodigy named Charlie has a big brother who’s an FBI dude who needs him to chase down crooks. I’m Charlie. Everybody, especially big brother, feels an urge to protect the vulnerable prodigy. Because he had it so rough as a kid.

My youth was difficult. Dad thought I was just a kid for a while. My sister knew I wasn’t, just a kid I mean, which created some problems.

Afterwards, things changed. An informal protective network followed me for the rest of my life. It was loose and nearly undetectable early on. It has become tight and nearly foolproof in recent years. Nobody has ever called me on my inability to play chess, for example.

Think about it. If you’re this great brilliant genius, shouldn’t you be forced at some point to play chess?

Sorry. I’m just playing with you now. I have an iPad that weighs about four ounces and my wife figured out how to fix it for me. It’s like a feather in my hands. Checkmate. A term I learned from my grandfather, the smartest person on earth I ever knew, who knew no more about chess than the rules on the box. That may have been our greatest wink-wink with each other. Chess is not a smartness contest. It’s a dumb game played by mostly dumb people. Smart people have more interesting things to do.

I’m still just talking. What it’s like to be me. You wake up every day like Stephen Hawking, only not quadriplegic in a wheel chair. Are you grateful? Absolutely. Can’t stress this part enough. Everybody has protected me through the years, but no one more than my beloved Boudica.

You wake up every day. You look at the state of the world. You remember there’s a trench knife in the drawer. Then you start on the daily calculus. If I die, she’ll be alone. It would be far worse if she dies first. I’d be alone, which has always been the great unthinkable. And since her, I can’t even imagine life as life without her beside me. Why I can’t think about leaving without her.

But I hurt. In every possible way. Talk all you want about the wages of sin. Think of them in the context of needing to stay around for the best person you know. Years of smoking and drinking have taken their toll. I know I should apologize. Won’t. John Updike said he looked into the ashtray and realized there was a cigarette butt for every paragraph. So he stopped. It didn’t help his writing. He also went on record calling out John Cheever for being too drunk to recognize him. “I know John Cheever’s in there somewhere,” he said. Truth. A much better writer than Updike was in there somewhere.

So I am feeble these days. My mind is not going. It’s changed. It was always waiting for the Internet. I now follow so many of everything you wouldn’t believe it. Athletes, movie stars, composers, philosophers, musicians, and, unfortunately, pundits. I know what Charles Krauthammer had for breakfast and it isn’t pretty.

I wake up every day and try to think what to write. My beautiful wife props up my fragile ego and tells me I will think of something. Usually she’s right, because I am me after all, but sometimes she’s wrong. Which is when she forgives me without a word and brings home whatever we decide on for dinner.

Lake is presently mad at me because he doesn’t understand his role in the protective network that surrounds spoiled geniuses. Spoiled geniuses like me.

I can be contrite all day long. The graphic has it right, though. A unicorn is a once in a lifetime thing. You think unicorns don’t know they’re unique?

We do.

I still am who I am.

The rules have changed. But I have my own rules.

Don’t use race as a weapon.

Don’t use sex as a weapon.

Don’t use class as a weapon.

Don’t use wealth as a weapon.

Don’t use the earth as a weapon.

And don’t forget the Prime Directive.

Except that everybody forgets everything all the time. Why I act so mad so much of the time. Everybody has a window of right now consciousness. Yours is the size of an iPhone screen. Mine is the size of an IMAX screen times ten.

You have no idea how much I can hold in the forefront of consciousness at the same time. It’s killing me. Pretty quickly.

So pay attention while I’m still here.

And remember the Prime Directive. The Smithsonian Channel just did a bio of Isaac Newton. Asperger’s sufferer. Like Einstein and Darwin. Genius is a disease. Newton was focused on three separate obsessions. Math, alchemy, and theology. I have three obsessions too. The Rolling Stones, the life of the United States, and women’s bodies.

Greatest music video ever. (Surpassing this one.) A woman telling the truth.

Do we understand one another now?

More rules will follow.

Journalism used to be about looking up skirts and enjoying it.
Now it’s about looking up skirts and lying about what you saw.

Follow-on to the previous post.

Despite The Five’s Andrea Tantaros and Kimberly whatever her last name is these days, I know that Fox News thinks blondes should rule the world. Megyn Kelly is their boldest thrust in that direction, and to the extent that it sends Bill O’Reilly into retirement, I’m on board.

On. The. Other. Hand. Blondes should not rule the world. Why? Blonde is more often than not a state of mind. The carpet rarely matches the drapes. And the brain is rarely there.

I wouldn’t bring this up as a rule because I’m usually a tactful fellow. But it looks more and more as if Hillary is planning to be anointed president. You know. A vintage blonde is still a blonde, and we all want a blonde telling us what to do. Unless we don’t.

I don’t.

Women don’t belong in politics. Not because they’re dumb or treacherous or corrupt or generally awful, which they all are, like most men. They don’t belong in politics because it’s so much harder to see who they are.

Megyn Kelly seems like a natural heir to Bill O’Reilly’s throne. He’s a goof and a buffoon and a pretentious Long Island wannabe who got where he is by never taking no for an answer. A filter we can use when he mounts his digital throne and tells the rest of us what to think.

Megyn Kelly is a lot scarier. Makeup does not conceal shark eyes. She insists she has children. Then go be with the children. Don’t queen yourself over the rest of us with almost nothing to back it up. SUNY Albany Law School. Seriously?

O’Reilly’s on-set chair is designed to put him at a level with the people he bullies. He’s 6’5″. Megyn’s chair is an elevated crystal throne, designed to reinforce her dominion over everyone who might come under her scrutiny. O’Reilly we can trust ourselves to see through, a fatuous old jerk. Who knows anything about Megyn?

Me. Hate to break it to you, ladies. After 50 years of feminism, the results are in. Women are still second rate. They excel at having fantastic legs and sometimes glorious breasts, but intellectually they are also-rans.

The war on boys is nothing new. Feminists have been on that patrol for a good three decades. Men are increasingly not allowed into the best colleges, etc. Thing is, they’re still in charge of almost everything. Why is that? The horrific conspiratorial patriarchy? Or the simple way of things?

Women compete by being more sexually alluring. If you believe in Evolution, you hyper-rational babies who can’t figure out that life begins at conception when it so obviously does, you must also accept that women were not evolved for their brainpower. Tits. Legs. Childbearing hips. And, thankfully for all us men, lust.

But not brains. Those are always an anomaly. Men won’t tell you this, girls. They don’t listen to you. You think it’s their fault. They don’t listen to you because you have nothing to say. Never have had. Since the beginning of civilization.

There are very (very) few exceptions. Got one here. Good luck to the rest of you.

As for Fox, I congratulate them for letting Gretchen Carlson be a size 14. Isn’t that nice?

“Lifeless eyes, like a doll’s eyes…”.

I know. Last night was huge. Eric Kantor got defeated in a primary. Never in history has a sitting House Majority Leader been evicted in a primary. It’s bound to reenergize all the grass roots resistance to Washington DC the professional pundits have been determined to write off.

If you want the politics of it, go to Laura Ingraham’s website or radio show. There was an interesting tableau, though, on Megyn Kelly’s FNC show last night. Four old white guys pooh-poohing the loss in order to defend the Republican establishment. But Megyn had arranged call-ins from Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham.

The two of them trounced the dismissive conventional wisdom just spouted by the old white guys. Ann and Laura were both impassioned and smart. Contrary to the Fox News line, the entire Republican Party had just been up-ended, out of the blue, so to speak.

So, being the astute politically obsessed observer I always am, I turned to my wife and said, “I have two questions about Megyn Kelly.”

She said, in her usual verbose way, “Shoot.”

“Is it considered a good fit if a thirtyish woman has a kind of pleat going on in the top between her breasts?”

“No. It isn’t.”

“And don’t Megyn Kelly’s eyes look as dead as shark’s eyes?”

“Yes. They do.”

I dunno. Just saying. I don’t think of Fox News as an ally in the grand fight to save the nation. I think of them as Switzerland, a boring neutral with a bunch of money in the bank.

When I think of their journalism (sorry, imagine me putting air quotes over that word), I have an immediate image of Peter Doocy, son of the channel’s resident weatherman and arch morning bore. Peter has nice hair. No doubt why he’s the Fox News Channel’s chief White House correspondent, foreign correspondent, and investigative reporter.

Peter seems a nice boy. But… Sorry.

I have a whole other post to do on this subject. Give me a few hours. Please? The data gods are not being kind today.

She’s too friendly with the beltway libs who pretend to be journalists. Other than that I mostly like her. She’s good, no, excellent at demolishing immigration idiots.

Laura Ingraham made a claim on her radio show today that I found not credible. She’s famous for her love of pop music from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Her knowledge, according to informed sources (mostly her), is encyclopedic. She also loves country music, for which I credit her. But she went a step too far in my opinion this morning claiming that George Strait’s farewell concert the other night “smashed the attendance records set by the Rolling Stones.” She cited a figure of 105,000, which aroused my suspicions immediately. I attended the Stones concert in 1981 at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, which had a nominal football capacity of 100,000, and on that day the stands were filled and the entire football playing field was too. All of us paying customers. Nothing I could prove.

90,000? Really? I was all the way at the back. Jagger looked like an ant. Journey had the No. 1 album in the country. Nobody paid them any attention. The venue was too gigantic. The Stones ripped the joint apart.

So I looked up the attendance figures for the notorious Hyde Park concerts in London. Guess what I found.

AEG Live is the promoter of the Rolling Stones’ 2013 tour, which is named “50 and Counting” in honor of the band’s 50th anniversary. Mick Taylor, who was the Rolling Stones’ lead guitarist from 1969 to 1974, is a guest on all of the tour dates.

Mick Taylor’s first-ever live show with the Rolling Stones was a free concert at Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. The attendance at the show was an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 people. The show was filmed by Granada Television and released on home video under the title “Stones in the Park.”

I have nothing against George Strait. I just find it necessary to contend with Laura Ingraham’s occasional looseness with facts.

On a lesser matter, Rush Limbaugh returned from vacation yesterday boasting that he would make sense of a week’s worth of events nobody but he could suss out. He proceeded to do a three hour monologue recapitulating points I had already made here about the difference between incompetence and deeply malevolent intent.

He also was clamorously seeking credit for the dire prophecy embedded in his “I hope he fails” broadcast the day after the 2009 inauguration. Which I had also preceded him on here.

I’m not accusing him of stealing ideas. Pretty sure he’s never heard of me. But maybe he shouldn’t be quite so sure that he’s the only one of us flyover Americans who can figure out the dark truths of the left.

Especially now that his facade of constant jovial optimism is starting to crack like a badly boiled egg. He’s as lugubrious as I am, but on handling that turn of mind without losing the faith I have him beat by a mile.

All the king’s horses, all the king’s men…

These are just trivialities. If you want the serious, look a couple posts further down. Instapunk has finally pulled the long scriver back out of its scabbard, and it’s time to resume the old ‘debates’ of the Metalkort.

It’s called Gardermoen, which is an airport in Oslo. Whither Valhalla?

Did I say punk? If Mstislav Rostropovich and Patti Smith had a love child, who would she be? This one.

Suited my mood today. The woman behind the music is Julia Kent, a Canadian cellist. Don’t know anything else about her except that she was once a rocker and is now ranked as one of the top ten female cellists in the world.

All I need to know today.

Maybe you know how this particular 24 hours end. I don’t. That’s all for now, boys.

Tools of a cold-blooded, illegal strategy for ramming amnesty through congress. Click pic to enlarge.

Come on, everybody. Call them what they are: internment camps for children. At military bases all over the southwest. Children without their parents, many infected with measles, scabies, TB, and the MRSA virus. How many we don’t know because the resources aren’t available to care adequately for a sudden influx of thousands of illegals.

Who thinks people aren’t going to blame the federal government for the inevitable casualties?

Who’s in charge anymore? Who’s an adult capable of taking responsibility? Apparently no one. They’re probably dreaming up a slogan. Something like “Work Makes Free.”

So, can we impeach the president for setting up concentration camps on American soil? No? Why the hell not? How in the hell can we not?!

Everything I’ve said is already on record. I post the cover of the Instapunk book because it had everything right the soonest and you could send it to your friends.

There are new books. Buy these three as they become available.

The heavyweight of the bunch is attorney Andrew McCarthy’s explanation of impeachment issues.

Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

The second is by Breitbart’s new top gun, Ben Shapiro.

The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration.

The third is by John Fund and Hans Spakovsky.

Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

Be mad at me all you want. Read these books.

Nobody likes to hear it, for sure anyone born after 1950, but you gotta put in the hours. And keep track of them. With me?

Why is Instapunk back full time? A comment by a friend who said, tell me what I can do other than bullets.

I assure you he is trending toward bullets. Not that he’s amassing them, but that he has them and is waiting. For an opportunity. Or an excuse.

The easiest cop-out imaginable. I like him but he’s being an asshole.

All the rifles and handguns in the hands of all the truest patriots in America couldn’t withstand ten minutes of the firepower the American military could rain down on them if the federal government so chose. And they now have that statutory right, posse comitatus notwithstanding.

Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.”

“Federal military forces shall not be used to quell civil disturbances unless specifically authorized by the president in accordance with applicable law or permitted under emergency authority,” the directive states.

“In these circumstances, those federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions.

The conditions include military support needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.” A second use is when federal, state and local authorities “are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for federal property or federal governmental functions.”

“Federal action, including the use of federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect the federal property or functions,” the directive states.

Military assistance can include loans of arms, ammunition, vessels and aircraft. The directive states clearly that it is for engaging civilians during times of unrest.

People, veterans, even some of the militia crazies proudly declare that the American military would never fire on American citizens. Of course they would. They already have.

Your guns may make you feel like a free man, but the truth is the war we’re fighting and have to win will never be won by violence. If violence breaks out on a large scale, we lose.

So what do we do? The enemy left, probably no more than 25 percent of us, has captured the federal bureaucracy, the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, various self pitying voter constituencies, including single mothers, promiscuous unmarried females, all black people, illegal aliens, the most prestigious public intellectuals of all ethnic and gender stripes, the major universities they shill for, all other levels of academe from high school down to kindergarten, and even most of the Protestant churches, such as Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians.

So go git your gun, sonny, and die in glamorous freeze frame like Butch and Sundance from that dumb 50 year old hippie movie.

Bullshit. The only thing your guns are going to do is get you killed and probably propagandized to boot. Your bullet riddled corpse will sell obedience to the feds better than the Geico gecko sells car insurance.

Resisting the Feds sounds romantic. In reality it’s ugly. Really ugly. Ask Bonnie Parker.

Once knew a guy who never went anywhere without a loaded gun. He didn’t think it would save him from anyone but petty crooks. He understood armament. “When they come,” he said, “all the militias in Montana and South Dakota will be patriotic ashes. The American military is an unstoppable force.”

And the generals, as we’ve been learning for the last five years, are in on the totalitarian intention.

Why I say “no bullets.”

All of this — every shocking, awful, traitorous, immoral, anti-Christian, anti-American outrage — has been engineered by 25 percent or less of our population. In accordance with a totally unscrupulous and amoral rule book written by Saul Alinsky.

Is any glimmer starting to wink in your dim minds? No?

I thought not. Why I had to leave sighthounds behind for a pure combat site (damn you). How on earth did 25 percent manage to conquer the other 75 percent?

THEY WORKED AT IT NIGHT AND DAY FOR YEARS YOU FUCKING MORONS!!’

How do you repel them? Help me out here. How many synonyms are there for “duh”? You work night and day for years.

They were at it full time. But there are a lot more of us than them. You don’t have to be full time. Tithe 10 percent of your productive time each day to restoring your nation. I’m allowed to ask this because more than 50 percent of my productive time has been spent in this pursuit since I was 20 years old.

Yeah. Keep a book of accounts. There’s time spent sleeping, earning a living, and the hygiene and eating stuff. That leaves some free time you usually spend complaining or watching disgusting sitcoms on TV.

First of all, inform yourself. Don’t be a fool. Read. History. Political science so called. The headlines and columns of the enemy. The intellects on our side. And grammar books. For God’s sake learn how to spell before you dare to put a word in print. Then get active.

Don’t care how you do that exactly. Get involved in local politics, knocking on doors and handing out fliers and such. Start your own blog to pontificate about your issues. Fire up a podcast with your friends. Start letter writing campaigns and call assaults on your congressman and senator. Go to church and face down clerics who defend abortion and support illegal immigration that makes the lives of American black people even worse. Challenge the lefty assholes in your place of work who say things you normally don’t have the energy or nerve to confront.

Whatever it is, book it in your journal. Just make sure it adds up to 10 percent of your productive time. By the way, friendly stuff with the friendlies, like raising your kids to be decent people, attending rodeos and Blue Angels performances, doesn’t count. That’s the time off everyone needs. Claiming it as some kind of virtue is like boasting that you don’t hit your wife. Of course a good man raises his kids properly and never hits his wife. Not part of the tithe.

The rest is war.

Any part of this you don’t understand? Anyone that slow I’ll meet in the comments. But don’t expect much forgiveness. I’m not in a forgiving mood.

It was a fashion event. Like Rihanna, when it comes to fashion, I’m a minimalist.

Don’t take me too seriously. Actually, I think all women should dress like this, regardless of age. Except the ones at the mall.

Consider this a test. If you can see the post, we’re officially back in business at Instapunk Rules. Not that this is a trivial rule. What was the term on Star Trek? Ah yes. The Prime Directive.

P.S. Best way to get in the mood for Instapunk Rules. Read all the posts. Only about 10 of them, including this one. I think you can handle that. If you can’t, I bet you can find yourself on Twitter.

What a waste of talent.

Stumbled across this on a cable back channel called Aspire.

“Black College Quiz Show” is a straightforward derivative of the old (really old) game show called College Bowl, which I used to watch with my grandparents.

It’s intended to spotlight the scholarly attainments of students at historically black colleges like Howard, Morehouse, Spelman, Tuskegee, Cheyney, Dillard, Fisk, Hampton, and quite a few others. When I discovered it, I thought ‘cool,’ and settled in to be impressed and pleased.

I was impressed but far from pleased. In fact, I was sickened, almost to the point of despair. Here’s the thing. All the students on the show are clearly smart, articulate, and capable of great things. Quick to the buzzer, confident of their answers.

But all the questions, and I do mean ALL the questions are about things black. Civil rights history, black pop stars and athletes, black politicians, black scientists, black writers and artists, and African geography.

It’s an intellectual ghetto, an act of self segregation that literally induces nausea. These kids are clearly smart enough to learn anything. But they are aimed, forced, jammed into a focus on things African American guaranteed to isolate them from everyone who is not African American. Ethnic pride is fine. But if the only topic I ever learned about was Scotland, I know I’d be pretty much screwed. Like all these kids most definitely are. Dead on the altar of a depraved religion called Victimization.

When did this nation go so so crazy that it dooms its young in the name of political correctness? Is there any reason why a young black woman cannot be asked a question about James Madison or Wolfgang Mozart? Apparently it’s much more important for her to be confined to a corner of anger and resentment than bloom in the glory of a western tradition she and her brothers (should) share with everyone else.

Sick. So tired of seeing sour faces and myopically pissed off eyes. It’s supposed to be a positive and upbeat show. Instead it’s a damn tragedy and a self fulfilling prophecy of the long road to bitterness and nowhere.

Three score years of rules and experience. Most rules broken, most experience wasted. But there’s a residue of conviction. (Mrs. IP didn’t like the original pic.)

I’m very far from being a priest or rabbi. Of the Ten Commandments, I have broken most of them. I cannot stomach the notion that the Holy Bible is somehow the literal truth of history in the tiny segment of time in which humans have attempted to record their deeds, their beliefs, and their truths. But do I believe the Bible is somehow true?

I am entitled to a whack at that question, because as a writer, bibles have been my business to a greater extent than most. I’ve written at least two and possibly a third in camouflage.

The answer is yes. The Holy Bible is truth revealed, however it was done, which remains a mystery. Its purpose is not to be a million word piece of legislation like, say, ObamaCare, that imposes answers to all questions before they are asked. It is meant as a light that shows us ourselves as we tend to be and illuminates a path toward better lives. Bibles shouldn’t be measured in terms of facts as CBS and the Washington Post define them but in terms of their candlepower.

How much brighter can we be in appraising our choices and decisions? The source of the animating candle is not as important as what we can learn from its glow. The source of that glow is everyone’s choice to make depending on what he has derived from it.

I personally don’t care how you define God or even if you believe in him. If you don’t, you do have the additional obligation of explaining where the idea of him originated, especially given that he seems to have come up with rules that are so very hard for everyone to live by, including the most powerful and talented among us. How did we evolve from the semi-animal view of the human laborer as beast of burden and disposable property to the conception that all people possess a soul and a right to a direct, transcendent connection with the almighty, however imagined?

It wasn’t rational. Economics, political power, nation state prosperity all favored the definition of ordinary people as chattels of the gifted, well born, or otherwise blessed. The Egyptian and Roman models were spectacularly successful. The precociously intellectual model of the Greeks foundered early on. Their empire was an ephemeral dream that died with the sociopathic Alexander. Why feudalism persisted well into the nineteenth century in nations as “advanced” as Italy and Germany.

A true understanding of the Bible could have prevented so much. And, yes, I’m calling shenanigans on everything evil that was supposedly done in the name of the Bible after its Old Testament publication and its subsequent New Testament update by the Council of Nicaea. People take a long time to learn anything.

Why I spoke earlier in terms of candlepower rather than Watts. Here’s where I begin. I have never once benefited personally — in terms of happiness, satisfaction, or peace of mind — from a single time I broke one of the Ten Commandments. Every single instance has brought me grief, regret, unintended consequences, and loss of self-respect. Not because I broke a commandment. But because the commandments are right. I’m 60 now. Which makes me a quick learner, I suspect.

How did a nomadic tribe of, by their own account, opportunistic invaders and killers manage to identify such vital keys to life?

Does it matter? Not until you start to perceive the anachronistic wisdom of their so-called God.

That’s how I’m suggesting we should learn to read the Bible. There are at least two astonishing things about the Old Testament. First, that morality makes such an early appearance in the story of a hard-scrabble desert tribe. Second, that there is so much literary if not strictly factual honesty in their accounts of their own history. Every conceivable kind of crime and barbarism is rendered in detail. Divine revelation or compulsive self-revelation? Murder, treachery, incest, envy, lust, treachery, persecution, stupidity, hubris, and more treachery, always with their own ill consequences, not just the judgments of the prophets and the punishments of God. (Read The Viking epic King Harald’s Saga from at least a thousand years later. Same plot. No remorse.)

It’s a portrait of a people struggling oh so fallibly toward the thing we take for granted, modern consciousness. What set them on that path? They had no algebra, no physics, no discipline of logic, no telescopes, no medicine, no science of the mind or emotions. But they divined the importance of virtue as the ideal outcome of the battle between good and evil. How did they do that?

To drive home the fact of anachronism, consider the Book of David. Maybe contemporaneous with Homer, who was more Beowulf than Shakespeare. David was Shakespeare about two millennia early. Not being glib. T-h-i-n-k about it. If you have the knowledge, context, and mental capacity to….

It is the contrast that provides the spark that should light the light. In its sequence of events, Israel is every other ancient civilization more than not. Despots and fools and builders and destroyers. Against this is the tug of an aspiration not found in their antecedents and peers. The moral glue of their aspiration enabled them to survive where every other imperiled civilization couldn’t, their absolute subjugation by a ruthless occupying empire.

Which caused them to up the ante.

It’s become fashionable to assign Jesus to a category of resurrected gods that includes Osiris and Dionysius. Malarkey. Those gods didn’t return from the dead for any altruistic purpose. They were akin to the concept of spring. Not the moral salvation of all the worshipers.

Jesus is a unique figure, fundamentally unlike Osiris or even Buddha. He was conceived as God made man. Picture the equality sign in your heads. Man made God. Ordinary man made divine. That was the revelation and the revolution. That was the breakthrough.

Jesus was not here to ask us to die in imitation of him. He was here to say that he had already died for us, which freed us to live and think and be and hold our own communion with the greater meaning of life.

He reduced the Ten Commandments to two. Not because the Ten were no longer operative, but because he was, like fathers who give away their daughters at weddings, telling us that he trusted us to make our own decisions now, that he was prepared to forgive our errors as long as we remembered where we came from and how we had been raised. All those errors were already paid for if we could just remember who we were supposed to be.

You can call it a fable if you want. Like one of Kipling’s Just So Stories. You can blame the fable for the continual failures of the brides to justify daddy’s confidence. But what you can’t do is wash away the murderous record of the human societies that have attempted to rule the daddy fable out of the story.

Their record is not only catastrophic but inhuman and monstrous. Their defense is rational philosophy.

But the first rule of Instapunk is that rationality unleavened by truth is the surest road there is to calamity.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Now we are reaching the crisis. Things are not falling apart. They are flying apart. The people who are smarter than all the ancient notions of God are in control. They have forgotten everything that enabled Mankind to emerge from the blood of Assyrian massacres. And they WILL kill us all with their rational omniscience.

P.S. For those who are the noticing kind, that was not my first selfie. This was.

Pacal. I was younger and fitter then. A punk with clout. Still had my Mohawk.