Yeah. He’s got a quadcopter and he’s headed out to Iceland tomorrow to do some science and astronomy and earth stuff. Whereas the cool people are selling insurance in Kansas City.

Do any of you youngsters ever get the point that the opportunity to do cool stuff is not about sounding off like a total asshole but putting your head down, getting really good at something, and then pushing to the limit to achieve something?

Of course you don’t. Why the constantly bored are the most boring of all. Snooze.

Lake will be back. His timing is involved with the return of Instapunk. So don’t get impatient. We have the site skeleton up already. Biggest obstacle: agreement between Boudica and me on the appropriate site graphics. You know I’m more pacifist than provocateur. She, on the other hand, wants a jugular in her hand.

We’ll work it out.

But here’s a taste.

Okay, Winston?

P.S. For those who didn’t take the link from ‘taste,’ be advised that the site “Instapunk Rules” is now online. Here. Welcoming comments are permitted.

Lest we forget…

Sick of hearing about the decline and fall of America? Hie thee to the Smithsonian Channel and the series called Aerial America. One thing corporate ronin get to experience that most don’t is repeated flights across the vast lands between the coasts. Sometimes at high altitude, sometimes in puddle jumpers on short commuter flights. It’s all beautiful.

Contrary to your road and highway experience it’s not all strip malls, McDonalds, and Exxon stations. Why the automobile and its romanticism is dying. Too often the car view is soul destroying. Not that there aren’t still thousands of miles of back country roads that are worth driving, with views that would pop your eyes and strain your noses, but we’re all being funneled somehow into a concrete tunnel that hides our own nation’s glories from us.

America is still beautiful. And amazingly still largely rural and parochial, in the best sense, meaning, where you are from in particular still matters in the grand sum of the nation.

The Smithsonian Channel, more than any other elitist cable offering, succeeds in remembering that the United States of America is not just Washington, D.C., home of its museum, but the entire expanse of experience, history, achievement, travail, architecture, and natural wonder that constitutes the home of all of us.

Aerial America is a shot in the arm. It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t preach. It remains true to its altitude. It shows beauty of all kinds, remembers sorrows and losses, but retains a lyrical tone of admiration for the home we all share. I cannot fault any individual episode. I can only fault the omissions so far — e.g., New Jersey, the most topographically diverse in the entire union — but I trust they will bring home that bacon someday soon.

If you’re feeling down and buried under images of destroyed Detroit and La Raza Los Angeles, watch this show. America has always been about the land and its healing power. This show, with very few exceptions, will make your heart beat again. It’s on Netflix if your cable provider doesn’t offer it. And, no, I’m not in anyone’s employ.

I live with the guy. I should know.

Does he spank me? What is spank? He swats my rear end. Is that spank? Oh. Guess he does. But he is my friend.

Ya know?

Maybe you don’t want him mad. Just saying. He gets a look in his eye and I go lie down. Usually after he says, “LIE DOWN!” Maybe you should all lie down when he gets that look in his eye. Just saying.

Older, nastier, better.

So. There will be two new websites. One designed to help Hotair and Breitbart and Fox News write better. And one that returns to our origins.

Instapunk Rules.

Deerhound Diary has been fun. An interlude. But the battle being waged is for our nation. I can’t stand down. And neither can the others who used to help me post at Instapunk: Country Punk, LocoPunk, TruePunk, the Glimmers, the XOFF News Channel, and all the rest. I’m also given to understand that Johnny Dodge will occasionally venture from his Last Chance Garage to post at the new site in return for my occasional postings at his. What do they call that? Win/Win.

It will take a few days to sort out the software. As I get older and wiser, I get less tech-savvy. Tell you anything about yourselves? I thought not.

I’ll never get arrested for texting while walking. I’m likely to be arrested or audited or quietly killed for thinking Obama is the worst disaster in American history. But they can come for me any time. They’re already inserting ads for my own Obama book into every website I visit. Would that scare you? It doesn’t scare me. I always knew that’s who they were. What’s important is that they not come for you, not scare you out of the fight. I’m Instapunk. Nobody intimidates me.

Why it’s time for me to go back to Instapunk Rules. No quarter given or taken. No sleight too slight to punish. No target too big to take down.

Shammadamma.

Never any makeup. Just herself.

The impossible one. She makes everyone mad. But her children are fine. How does that happen? Well, she’s incandescent. People keep firing her. Because she’s always been smarter than the people who hire her. And she’s beautiful. With no helping hands. Somehow, that’s not something anyone is comfortable with.

Life without makeup. Just being you. That’s being true to yourself. And to the rest of us. She is the mother of two extraordinary children. Not an accident. Life is an unexpected thing. She will be the first to tell you she screwed up and was determined her kids wouldn’t do the same. They think they thought up the solutions themselves. Ha ha.

Here’s the thing. She’s so physically strong… but I saw her trying on a bridesmaid dress, and it was so gossamer and she was so suddenly frail in appearance that I withdrew to another room. Didn’t want to see. I guess I’m that old-fashioned. Because she’s another kind of angel. The difficult kind. I could hear her complaining even in her see-through gown.

What you can’t understand. She is the smartest, most beautiful girl in the room. Always. And she will never let you forget it.

Why she keeps getting fired. And fired. And fired. And fired.

But I still think she’s great. The other side of the other angel. One with a light all her own.

NPR’s Terry Gross. This fatuous idiot has had her day and then some.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg caught NPR in a whopper this morning. Here’s his whole post from The Corner.

Just now on NPR’s Morning Edition (yes, I often listen), a story on yesterday’s failed vote on Debo Adegbile began “a handful of southern Democrats joined Republicans yesterday to defeat President Obama’s choice to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division.” For what it’s worth the Democrats who voted no:

Chris Coons (Del.)
Bob Casey (Pa.)
Mark Pryor (Ark.)
Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.)
Joe Manchin (W.V.)
Joe Donnelly (Ind.)
John Walsh (Mont.)

And, of course, Harry Reid (Nev.), who did it for procedural grounds.

Not exactly Sons of the Confederacy.

But some put up with this kind of crap because of the slow fruity tones of the oh so educated who populate NPR and the teevee version called PBS. Where else are we going to get the high culture stuff we need to keep going in this vale of faux trailer trash tears? We have to have some beauty and art in our lives, even if we have to wade through lefty propaganda to get to the staples they trot out during pledge drives — blind tenors, Celtic women, and rhapsodic tours of Europe as experienced by Americans who have always known we made a mistake severing ourselves from the old world. You know. The better world, which has stronger ties to WGBH Boston than Boston has to Ohio and Nebraska. And they’ll sell us DVDs of our favorite culture chestnuts for $59.99, because we’ll also get a PBS baseball cap for free. And maybe a bookbag too.

All done. Netflix is infusing the streaming universe with offerings far better than NPR/PBS has provided in a generation. There are more gripping Brit dramas than Downton Abbey. Jeez. Wasn’t this already done by Upstairs Downstairs and the Forsyte Saga a quarter century ago? Yeeeeeah!

For the record, Neflix has the newer version of the Forsyte Saga, also long and mesmerizing to watch. In addition, they have the following shows, which should be catnip for the intellectual set:

The Art of the Steal. About the scandal of Philadelphia’s outrageous theft of the greatest private art collection ever.

Wagner and Me. Stephen Frye, a Jew, grapples with his heritage and his passion for the composer he regards as the greatest ever.

Verdi’s Otello. Placido Domingo. Not the blind guy.

Imaginary Witness. A tough look at Hollywood’s blind eye toward the Holocaust. Or if not blind, fatally flawed in the rendering.

In Search of Beethoven. Why some think he’s the greatest composer of all time. Me, I still prefer Mozart. But you have to be willing to hear the views of others.

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould. What the hell IS genius? Maybe this.

And a whole bunch more. We don’t need the tired, antediluvian, money obsessed public channels anymore. I haven’t even scratched the surface here.

The free market can do high culture better than the command-propaganda system. Shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Yeah. I have one of these. It’s called a trench knife.

Biff baff! The whole thing in a nutshell. Helk is a gifted physicist. His girlfriend is a dimwit communist. Apparently they find each other desirable. He’s brilliant. She’s a moron. In the great grand scheme of American egalitarianism, they’re the same thing. He votes, she votes, we vote, they vote, and let’s call the whole thing off.

Sad facts. The death of America is attributable to women. Why we’re doomed. Unless women wake up. It’s all simple. Women think they’re morally superior. Until they want to kill the thing in their womb. Which only they have the judgment to identify as cells or baby stuff.

I’ll say what nobody else will. Women are moral idiots. Without men, morality would never have been invented. Men knew that they needed some restraints on their own urges and desires. It never once occurred to women that they needed same. No major religion or moral philosophy has ever originated with women. Only the nastiness of witchcraft, lately dressed up as Wicca and Gaia.

What do you need to know? Women have babies. Mothers want babies. Other women don’t. More than half of babies gestated in New York City die. Really?

Yes.

Because women are so loving, blah blah blah.

But abortion helps the disadvantaged. Like Margaret Sanger the eugenicist promised.

Margaret Sanger wrote about her Ku Klux Klan speech in her autobiography, “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)

What did she say in her talk at the KKK Rally that led to twelve more invitations? Well, take a look at some of her past quotes:

1) “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

So I’m the bad guy. I get it. I love corporations. Which I haven’t eschewed for years and years of accusations and disgust. What’s important is the protestations of someone who hasn’t the slightest idea how economics work. You just say, “Corporations!” And we’re all supposed to fall down in Gaian despair.

Grow up, girls. And grow up, boyfriends of imbecilic girls.

Too much to ask? No. A vagina is not a brain. It’s just a vagina. Fun but not intelligent.

Hey! We’re busy!

Everybody got all upset that the president didn’t attend the meeting of the National Security Team the other day. Who cares about the Ukraine anyway? Nobody. Not really.

There isn’t going to be a war over Ukraine. There isn’t even going to be a crisis over Ukraine. We will perform our ritual war-dance and excoriate the Evil Emperor, and the result would be the same if we had sung “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” on a road trip to Kalamazoo. Worry about something really scary, like Iran.

What IS important is the president’s NCAA basketball tournament brackets. Think I’m kidding?

I’m actually not. Kidding, I mean. Reality check.

Things people forget. Putin is a tinpot dictator. His country has no economy apart from gangsters. China is similar. Every business model ever written demonstrates that excessive rapid growth leads to a crash. A generation ago, people were terrified that Japan would own us. Then they crashed. T’was ever so. Let’s not forget that despite Obama, America is far and away the richest nation that ever existed. Has been for more than a century. Still is. It could take another century to change that fact. We also have a military that can kick everyone’s ass even with two hands tied behind our ass with the sequester. Cuts? Awfulness? Sure. But screw with us for real and Hell will be rained upon you. Annihilation. Our nukes work. Everyone knows that.

The ultimate proof of American Exceptionalism. Yeah. We are so great, so rich, so powerful that we can elect the dumbest leader in the history of the world to date and survive it with a smile on our face. Compared to Obama, Caligula was a genius and Rome survived even him.

The bright side. We have a retarded president but even he can’t end us. We’re all a little poorer economically but we’re still richer than everyone else. Our poorest people have cell phones and hi-def teevees and the most expensive handguns made. The world is imploding at a frightening rate, but all it means in the grand scheme of things is that the world will wake up from its bad Obama dream and say, “America! Come back and save us from ourselves!” Which we will do. Even if our next president is a Democrat. Because he or she won’t won’t be an America-hating Alinskyite Marxist Anti-Semite Islamist sympathizer.

You see? We’re going to get through this. Anybody doubt that sequester military cuts can be undone in an instant? Anybody doubt that every nation in the world fears American military might if anybody had the balls to unleash it for real?

Anybody doubt that the American economy can soar again after the worst president in the history of the republic graduates to the chairmanship of the Ethnic Cleansing Committee of the United Nations?

No! We. Will. Be. Back. Obama has been, in retrospect, a necessary demonstration of why the world needs the United States of America. Like the useful idiot he was raised to be, he has shown everyone why they need us even if they don’t want to admit it. What invariably happens when the adults leave the room and put the kids in charge. Bullies aren’t smart, but they know opportunity when it is handed to them on a silver platter. So be it. Until you make them look like the nobodies they are.

Which brings us back to brackets. The manliest thing this pea-brained president can do, at this time of Ukraine bullshititude supreme, is go on ESPN and show the world that America really really really doesn’t care about Putin’s manboobs and homophobic homosexuality. What we care about is the only insanity that matters: March Madness.

Me? I’m as contradictory as it gets. I’m still rooting for Harvard to get to the big dance.

We can survive this. And we don’t have to settle. If Harvard doesn’t win, I’m rooting just as avidly for Villanova. If Duke or UNC wins again, THEN we’ll start talking about the end of life as we know it.

Get busy on your brackets, O. We need you to save the nation by an act of sheer obliviousness. I have every confidence.

You see this? It’s not about anger and resentment. It’s about living life.

After a break in posting, it’s always hard to rejoin the fray. I always need inspiration. But the universe provides. Fate dropped this pic in my lap. Note that it has nothing to do with the SI swimsuit issue. It’s about beauty instead. Won’t tell you her name or relation, only that when she sees this my wife will smile, no, beam.

Why there is still hope. She is caught here in a moment of standing still. Which she almost never does. She runs and runs and runs, seizing life every day. She can be a scold but that’s only a mask for her love of husband, child, and life. She won’t stand for anything that gets in the way of her appointment with perfection. And you know what? She gets closer to that goal than almost anyone I’ve ever met.

Why I love this picture so much. One moment when she seems to be realizing that it’s working. All the prodigious effort is succeeding. Do you know anyone like this?

Keep your eyes open. The angels of our better selves are out there.

He was a baby then. Just before we got him. A couple months old.

He’s been quite the boy for us. Life changing. He’s not a baby anymore. Mysterious, loving, conniving, unpredictable, wise at times, pure cussedness at others, affectionate, mischievous, occasionally morose, stupendously vital, fun, and beautiful, in every way the larger than life lord Sir Walter Scott declared the breed to be.

But still a baby when he wants to be.

Like when he detects the package containing his birthday present.

Have you ever seen such longing?

Happy Birthday, my boy. You can open your present when Mommy gets home.