I’ve noticed a common phenomenon. Let’s call it the boomerang effect.
Lament the rise of an opinion or policy without noticing how your preferred policies helped cause it.
Vaccination rates down — because you wrecked the reputation of vaccines during the pandemic by over claiming.
Anti-immigrant feeling leading to difficulties for legal immigrants — because you welcomed millions of illegal immigrants and prevented them being deported.
Prosecution of political opponents — because you did it too.
Dislike seeing people cancelled for their opinions — because you started it.
Rising climate scepticism — because you censored reasonable criticism of climate extremism.
Anger at trans rights activists — because you shouted down concerns about men pretending to be women in sports and prisons.
Government attacks on universities — because you turned them into ideological madrassas.
Patriotic nationalism turning uglier — because you told people flags were racist.
Criticism of judges — because they became nakedly political.
Defunding of biotechnology — because you failed to call out dangerous gain-of-function virology as the likely cause of the death of 20 million+ people.
Etc etc
Matt Ridley, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-27.
January 4, 2026
QotD: The boomerang effect
January 3, 2026
America’s secret UBI programs
On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds puts the Somali daycare scandal into its proper perspective: it’s not old-fashioned graft but something far bigger and far more destructive to the pillars of western society:
The explosive unveiling of the wildly extensive Somali-run daycare scams in Minnesota has drawn attention to a huge shadow economy, and not just in Minnesota. America, it turns out, is full of people, companies, and organizations that basically live off of fraud. We’re not talking old-fashioned waste, like $600 hammers or $1200 toilet seats. We’re talking about entities whose sole reason for existence consists of being a conduit for taxpayer money to flow directly to the people controlling them, with some of the proceeds being diverted to politicians and political organizations.
People are noticing.
This reverses an old joke told by my Nigerian relatives. A Nigerian visits his rich relative in the United States and is awed by the penthouse apartment, the limo, the private jet and so forth. “How did you make so much money?” he asks. The relative points out the window. “See that bridge? 15%. See that shopping mall? 15%. See that train station? 15%.”
The visitor, inspired, returns home to Nigeria and becomes fabulously wealthy. His rich cousin from America visits and says “How did you make so much money so fast?”
“You see that bridge over there?”
“Nope,” responds the confused relative. The Nigerian cousin points at himself and says “One hundred percent!”
Well, this joke has now been turned around. Leaving aside that we don’t really even build train stations, bridges, or even shopping malls in this country anymore, now it’s America where people are pocketing one hundred percent and not even trying to actually deliver any goods or services. That the people doing this are mostly Africans only adds to the irony.
But what happened?
Well, several things. At base, people defraud the government for the same reason that dogs lick themselves — because they can. One of the things you find in these programs is that there are virtually no controls to ensure that the recipients of the money are legitimate, that the money is spent as promised — in essence, that the bridges get built. (Or, in the case of California, the high speed rail lines.) That lack of controls, of course, is no accident. The systems are designed to promote fraud and to make it hard to catch or punish.
Second, the culture is weaker. In a high trust society, people get angry when there is fraud and move to punish and ostracize the perpetrators. In a low-trust society, people expect it.
Older generations of politicians used to engage more in what George Washington “Boss” Plunkitt called “honest graft”. He defined honest graft as legally exploiting insider knowledge and opportunities from one’s position for personal financial gain, while also benefiting the public or party. A classic example he gave was learning about upcoming public projects (like a new park or bridge) and buying nearby land cheaply before the plans became public, then selling it at a profit to the city. He famously summarized it as: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” comparing it to savvy stock trading on Wall Street. In contrast, dishonest graft involved outright illegal acts, such as blackmail, embezzlement, or extortion (e.g., shaking down gamblers or saloon keepers).
God knows what he would have said about simply taking money for nothing. Would his reaction have been horror? Or admiration?
Is The Matrix a Right-Wing Story?
Feral Historian
Published 2 Jan 2026This is gonna be one of those crazy comment feed vids … The film has made its mark on American political discourse, not only with the adopting of some of its terminology but with opposing sides claiming the story as their own. The Matrix resonates for reasons far beyond authorial intent or individual pieces of inspiration, it has transcended that. And yet, as much as it resonates with the Right, perhaps it shouldn’t when we get to the core of it.
This one really has to be considered in its entirety. Trying to argue about individual sentences in isolation on this one is to miss the point entirely.
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Britain’s government – a modern-day Ship of Fools
On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman takes a break from discussing events in India and Burma during the Second World War to consider the current British government:
The 1519 title page of Sebastian Brant‘s 1494 satirical book Ship of Fools
I began life as a medievalist and often find myself instinctively going back to old texts when contemplating today’s problems. I have been forced to think much in recent days about the incompetence of our current governing class in respect of their understanding of defence and its value. More especially, their failure to understand how to use the military instruments of defence to uphold our national interest. The Ship of Fools, which first appeared in Plato’s Republic but was resurrected in Europe in the late 1400s as a metaphor for desperately poor leadership, is the perfect allegory for me. It tells a simple story that resonates with thoughtful people in every age who look on in wonderment at the idiots governing them. The story is of a ship with a crew who talk (and drink) a lot, but with their cloth ears make all the wrong decisions. The result is chaos. In the 1480s the ship in question was the Church of Rome, but the allegory is easily transportable to Britain in the early days of 2026. What on earth is going on in defence in the UK as we enter 2026? I can only surmise that in the UK at least, we are in a ship governed by fools.
I was going to start this piece by complaining that our government simply doesn’t understand Clausewitz, but I thought that this might be a little too obtuse for most politicians. But one of Clausewitz’s points about the use of military power is pertinent to our age. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 he did so not because he had an existential hatred of Slavs, or of the Tsar. Indeed, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I had a remarkably friendly relationship. He did it because the practice of friendly diplomacy between the two leaders had failed. Napoleon had attempted to persuade the Tsar to refuse the British trading rights in Russia’s ports. Alexander I had demurred, so Napoleon considered that the only thing left to him in his tool kit of levers to persuade Alexander to change his mind, was force. So, he marched on Moscow. We know the story and its outcome well, so I won’t rehearse it now. Using this as an example, Clausewitz was simply saying that in the hurly burly of diplomacy, war is one of the tools available to a national leader to persuade an opponent to change course. Hence, we get the oft misquoted Clausewitzian maxim that “War is the continuation of policy with other means”.
Clausewitz was correct, of course. Yet we in Britain have forgotten this, if politicians over the past three decades have really understood it. Since 1990 I am not sure we’ve had any politicians who’ve truly understood it, despite the fine words we get from successive Secretaries of State about the first priority of government being to protect its citizens, etc. This, without action to demonstrate any understanding of how to achieve the protection of our citizens, is merely St Paul’s clanging cymbal. Put frankly, we no longer have an Army, Navy or Air Force able seriously to achieve any form of influence on the European stage — let alone deter an enemy or fight a serious war — and the state of the Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD) is abysmal I’m told, though you wouldn’t know this from the hollow rhetoric regularly emanating from No 10. We are deluding ourselves if we think we can exercise real influence in Europe or anywhere else for that matter if we don’t have the practical means to do so.
The truth is that the cupboard is bare.
How have we got to where we are? The primary reason over the years has been the saving of money for politicians who have simply not valued investment in the hard practice of defence, unless it is in a shipyard in their constituency. The end of the Iron Curtain in 1989/90 meant, to many people in the corridors of power, that we no longer needed to bear the burden of spending 5% of GDP on defence.
But a second problem is only becoming clear to me. I hope I am wrong, but I can only conclude that we now have a government that actively hates the idea of defence, and while it will never admit it, is determined to remove it as one of its levers or instruments of power. I came across this in a meeting recently. Why do we need defence, the argument seemed to go, when we should be encouraging the international community to regulate itself by means of adherence to international laws and norms of behaviour? Should not our effort as a country be in building up these international systems and structures of law and governance (many based on the United Nations as an idea and a regulator) and rely on these to reduce the potentiality for war? Surely, building up arms simply makes war more likely, not less?
Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
Penelope vs Clytemnestra in Greek Mythology
MoAn Inc.
Published 10 Sept 2025I’m trying out shorter videos on the channel, so this is a very basic breakdown explanation. Clytemnestra and Penelope are polar opposites, and their characters bookend The Odyssey. One is seen as the best wife, one is seen as the worst. They’re supposed to be compared and contrasted in this way: Agamemnon’s homecoming to Mycenae is a warning to Odysseus about what could potentially go very, very wrong with his own return to Ithaca. There are so many fascinating ways to dissect these two women, so please don’t take this as a be-all-end-all!
Voice of Erica Stevenson, host of MoAn Inc.
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QotD: “Fumbling towards bicameralism”
And yet, “self-deception” shouldn’t be possible. How can you lie to your self? It raises all kinds of heavy epistemological issues, explored in a fun little book called Self-Deception by philosopher Herbert Fingarette. As I recall (it has been years since I’ve read it), Fingarette ends up advancing a kind of split-consciousness theory, too, as the only internally consistent one. How could it be otherwise? The “liar’s paradox” is a fun little game to play in the first class meeting of Logic 101, but nobody can really live that way … and yet we do deceive ourselves, all the time, and no one more than SJWs, whose lives indeed seem to be nothing but “self-deception.”
Bicamerality explains that. The “god” that lives in the smartphone says X today, so X it is. That same “god” says not-X tomorrow, so now it’s not-X! It’s not self-contradiction, it’s not self-deception, for the simple reason that there’s no real “self” at all.
Finally, it explains what might be the most frustrating thing about the Left, the thing that’s likely to end in a nuke or two here before too long: Their utter inability to see the glaringly obvious consequences of their actions. Those of us who tend to see “Leftism” as a big conspiracy love to point out that if they, the Left, were just stupid (childish, contrarian, herd animals, whatever), cold impersonal chance alone would guarantee that at least some of their fuckups would benefit us at least some of the time. Much like The Media’s “retractions” and “admissions” and so on, the “mistakes” always always always go in only one direction … ergo, they’re not mistakes.
That’s the reef on which we “emergent behavior” types always crash. To me, “emergent behavior” still seems like the best explanation … but however the behavior emerges, it’s always retarded. They’ve never made a non-stupid decision, not once, and it’s always stupid in exactly the same way. I remember waking up one morning to the sound of something crashing into my bedroom window. I figured it was a bird, which happens all the time, and it was … except that it kept happening, monotonously, every fifteen seconds or so. I got up to look, and here was a robin, smashing itself into the glass over and over and over again. It was early spring — mating season — and this stupid robin had mistaken its own reflection for a rival. I must’ve watched this bird slam himself into the glass for ten minutes, “attacking” his “rival”, before he knocked himself out cold …
That’s how the Left do. Always. They simply can’t learn, and they can’t change their pattern. The only explanation for that, therefore, must be that it’s programmed. Literally. Zero consciousness involved. They do what they do because they literally cannot do otherwise. Their “god” has put “rage” into their thumos. Just as Achilles would’ve literally jumped off a cliff had his “god” told him to, so the Left does … well, pretty much everything their teevee tells them to.
Needless to say, this has some important implications for practical action. How does one “get inside that OODA loop”, as the keyboard commandos like to say? In the land of the utterly unconscious, the one-brained man is king …
Severian, “Striving Towards Bicamerality”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-20.
Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
January 2, 2026
“The report is a wonderful, almost pristine, example of pure Expertism, the perfect blend of scientism and bright red euphemism”
Despite our decade-long vacation from economic development, common sense, and growth, there appears to be one key area where Canada is a world-beater: inventing euphemisms for physician-induced death:
“See that guy over there, Mugsy?”
“Yeah, boss.”
“He needs to be provisioned.”
“You got it, boss.”
I have a small collection of euphemisms for killings, curious deaths and murder. Most of them are comedic, like Wodehouse’s “handing in his dinner pail”. You know the serious ones: expedited, eliminated, liquidated, liberated (from Real Genius), handled, disappeared, etc.
So you can imagine how thrilled I was to discover a new one, invented by Canadian doctors: provisioned.
You are provisioned when a doctor slips you the needle or some pills, on purpose, to send you instantly to your Particular Judgment. (The doctors will get theirs at later dates, and boy wouldn’t you like to be, as they say, a fly on the cloud for those.)
Doctors — white-coated physician killers, we can call them Rxecutioners — are increasingly enjoying collecting paychecks to kill Canadians.
According to the official “Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada“, 16,499 ex-Canadians were produced, or rather provisioned, in 2024. Some 22,535 applied, but 4,017 of them cheated their Rxecutioner by dying early. Can you picture the dejected look on the killer-doctor’s face, his needle poised, poisoned and dripping, only to find his customer left without him? Sad.
These numbers were up from 2023, but the rate of growth of killings (provisionings) has slowed; it was 6.9% from 2023 to 2024. If that deceleration stays about the same, Rxecutioners will put some 17,500 under in 2025. And slightly more than that in 2026.
“The vast majority (95.6%),” of those slaughtered, “identified as Caucasian (White)”. Rxecutioner provisionings are the one area where Canadian rulers allow Whites to excel. Incidentally, what’s with “identified”? Maybe Canadian rulers will let people identify as different races.
But never mind all that. The report is a wonderful, almost pristine, example of pure Expertism, the perfect blend of scientism and bright red euphemism. All should read it.
Nukes Put Man in Space – W2W 060
TimeGhost History
Published 31 Dec 2025In the 1950s, as the Cold War escalated, the same rockets designed to deliver nuclear annihilation across continents became powerful enough to break Earth’s gravity. Missiles built to destroy cities turned into launch vehicles that carried humanity into orbit.
This episode explores the dark origins of space travel — from intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear deterrence to Sputnik, the Space Race, and the moment the sky stopped being a safe boundary. At the center of the story stands Sergei Korolev, a Gulag survivor forced to build weapons for the Soviet regime, who nonetheless pushed humanity’s first steps into space.
Sputnik shocked the world, ignited fears of a “missile gap”, reshaped global politics, and triggered massive investments in science, education, and technology — on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The same systems built for global destruction would ultimately give us satellites, navigation, communication, and the modern world we rely on every day.
This is the paradox of the Space Age: Weapons first. Wonder second.
– Nuclear weapons and rocket technology
– The Cold War and the birth of ICBMs
– Sergei Korolev vs. Wernher von Braun
– Sputnik and the global shock of 1957
– The myth of the missile gap
– How fear reshaped science, education, and space exploration
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“You had to be unacceptably racist in 1993 to predict where South Africa would be in thirty years”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Wesley Yang posted the comment in the headline. Will Tanner responded:
You did not, in fact. You just had to be paying attention
By 1993, South Africa was the only First World country left in Africa
America and the UN chased Belgium out of the Congo, and it collapsed into decades of civil war and famine
Mugabe destroyed Rhodesia after we aided the Soviets in helping him win. Angola and Mozambique became hells after Salazar died, the Carnation Revolution happened, and they were given up. Kenya and Sierre Leone all showed the hellish state of things that came with decolonization in the name of “democracy”
South Africa was the last man standing. It had a nuclear program. It had a space program. It had clean, reliable water and electricity. It had a thriving industrial sector. Crime was problematic, but not out of control
Now all of that was gone, for the same reason the Congo is a mess and Zimbabwe went from being the breadbasket of Africa to a famine-ridden mess: decolonization and equity
Anyone who paid attention could have predicted that. Maintaining First World life requires a First World mindset; that dies when handed over to race communists who are happy to backslide into the Stone Age if doing so means “equality” exists
And so South Africa went from First World to Third
And John Carter responded in turn:
When you stand back and look at this from ten thousand feet, a very dark pattern emerges.
In the aftermath of WWII, the newly established globalist institutions were used to give moral and financial support to decolonization movements, thereby chasing European countries out of what became the third world.
A governance structure that had successfully brought order, prosperity, and civilization to much of the planet was dismantled, leaving behind a chaotic mess of war and poverty.
Those same globalist organizations then embarked on a program of “foreign aid” that dramatically increased the size of that immiserated third world population (without actually improving conditions for them).
At the same time, their agents were busy at work within the governments of the former colonial powers, changing their immigration policies to allow immigration from more or less anywhere. Countries began adopting “multiculturalism” in the name of fighting “racism” … A newly developed postwar concept, which the media and education arms of the globalist project indoctrinated the youth to consider the worst of all possible sins.
Once the ideological and legal ground had been prepared in the former colonial powers, migration via legal and irregular pathways commenced, facilitated by — of course — the very same set of globalist NGOs that chased Europe out of the colonies.
Somehow, this new form of colonization is a good thing. Somehow, the European peoples enjoy none of the rights of “national self-determination” accorded to “indigenous” peoples which had been invoked to end colonialism.
As the populations of the third world were exploding thanks to the foreign aid being provided by globalist organizations, fertility in the first world fell off a cliff. The pill, abortion, feminism drawing women into universities and careers and therefore away from marriage and child-bearing, no-fault divorce destroying the family, and a gender war incited to new levels of bitter intensity every year which estranged the sexes, all served to reduce the white birth rate.
White fertility crashed just as the population bomb that had been set in the third world exploded, with the gates left open by carefully constructed legal frameworks that made immigration very easy and deportation very, very hard.
Update, 3 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
How did Ancient Romans build their roads?
Metatron
Published 2 Sept 2025Roman road construction was a marvel of ancient engineering that began in earnest around 312 BC with the famous Appian Way. The Romans developed a systematic approach that would serve their empire for centuries, creating over 250,000 miles of roads by 200 AD.
Their construction process started with careful surveying using tools called groma and chorobates to ensure straight lines and proper gradients. Roman engineers would then excavate a roadbed typically 14 to 16 feet wide, digging down 3 to 5 feet deep depending on local conditions and expected traffic. The foundation layer, called the statumen, consisted of large flat stones carefully fitted together. Above this came the rudus, a layer of crushed stone and mortar about 9 inches thick, followed by the nucleus, a finer mixture of gravel and mortar. The top surface, known as the summum dorsum, was made of large polygonal stone blocks called silex, fitted so precisely that no mortar was needed between them. These roads were built with a slight crown in the center to promote drainage, and ditches were dug alongside to carry away rainwater.
Roman construction crews, often composed of soldiers, would work in organized teams with specialized roles for quarrying stone, mixing mortar, laying foundations, and fitting the surface blocks. The entire process could take months or even years for major routes, but the result was a road surface so durable that many Roman roads remained in use well into the medieval period and beyond. Quality control was maintained through strict military discipline and the personal responsibility of engineers who literally put their names on milestone markers. By 117 AD, at the height of the empire, this road network connected Britain to the Middle East and North Africa to the Rhine frontier, facilitating trade, communication, and military movement across the known world.
#romanempire #ancientrome #romanroads
QotD: From Rousseau to Marx, Hegel to Gramsci
The fundamentals are clear enough. The New Left in America, which is the conveyor belt for everything from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) Green New Deal to Black Lives Matter, can trace its genetic roots back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who almost single-handedly upturned centuries of Western philosophical and theological wisdom.
Instead of believing that man is fallen, fatally flawed, and prone to selfishness and evil, Rousseau denied the reality of thousands of years of human history and posited that man is inherently good. Further, this goodness could be maximized by engineering society away from individual rights and liberties, prioritizing communal good, communal needs, and the communal will.
Thus civilization built according to how man actually behaves in real life fell out of favor; and eventually, Karl Marx’s collectivist ideology predicated on the subversion of individual human souls to the common interest (as defined by political leaders) gained steam.
Like an ideological scrapbooker, Marx picked and purloined the ideas of others to build his theory. Socialism is but a temporary stepping stone towards the eventual and inevitable end-state of all mankind, the utopian “Worker’s Paradise.” Marx stole the “inevitability” factor from Hegel and his eponymous “dialectic.”
Hegel, a profoundly religious man, unlike the rabidly and militantly atheist Marx, saw the history of man as a perpetual progression, a series of qualitative improvements in our collective lot as one new idea (antithesis) impacted upon an existing idea (thesis) and resulted in an improved conceptualization (synthesis) that has more truth value than the previous two ideas combined. This progression, so Hegel believed, would increase our enlightenment, until we perceived the ultimate synthesis, the purest version of truth’s expression, which is God himself.
Marx took Hegel’s key inevitability dynamic and removed the metaphysical elements. For Marx the intangible was irrelevant. His “dialectic materialism” posits that thesis and antithesis are instead expressions of the inherent conflict within society — the clash between the have and have nots, the oppressor and the oppressed, the capitalist and the exploited workers — which will result in a final revolution permanently removing class distinction and conflict from society.
This garbage is what Karl Marx sold the world with his books Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. And incredibly, some people believed this rubbish. So much so that they used it as a blueprint to sabotage and subvert multiple nations around the world, starting with czarist Russia and stretching all the way to Cuba and China. But then there was a problem. In all their attempts to effect a Communist revolution west of the Russian Empire, Marx’s followers would fail. America was an especially tough nut for Marxists to crack, because of how our nation was born.
America’s Founders, knowing full well that man is fallen and tends toward the selfish and the bad, built America with a system of separation of powers and also bequeathed us a written Constitution founded not on some absurd utopian collectivist vision of society, but built upon the recognition of the liberty of the individual and the unalienable God-given rights we each possess. Despite the advent of Progressive presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, America remained staunch in its resistance to socialism. Marx’s disciples, however, were not ready to surrender.
This is where the influence of a hunchback Italian cripple comes in.
Antonio Francesco Gramsci is the ideational grandfather to all that threatens modern America and our freedoms today, from AOC’s Green New Deal to the violence of Antifa. His writings, penned in an Italian prison cell, would be leveraged by the Hungarian Jewish writer and politician, Gyӧrgy Lukacs, each sharing the same conviction: Communism had failed in established Western democracies — as opposed to the backward and mostly peasant society of czarist Russia — because these societies are too resilient and too developed. For Marxism to flourish in the rest of Europe and America, these “bourgeois” societies must be dismantled piece by piece. From the inside.
The conceptual progeny of that realization leads straight to the panoply of Democratic Party articles of belief today — from Obamacare’s unprecedented intrusion into private healthcare choices to the anti-scientific insanity of transgenderism and beyond. This isn’t a random accusation, devoid of context. It’s not some accusation floating in space. The path from Gramsci and Lukacs to Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is a path that may be mapped historically, geographically, and institutionally.
Sebastian Gorka, “From Alinsky to AOC: Will Communism Finally Win in America?”, American Greatness, 2020-07-29.
Update, 3 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
January 1, 2026
Canadian government spending … with convenient “by recipient” lookups
It’s no secret that the Canadian federal government spends a lot of money every year. It’s public information, but it’s made available in a form that is very difficult to track across all the various ministries and other government bodies. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Reclamare has posted a free consolidation website that gathers all these separate reports into a single database that you can query on a by-recipient basis. This means that you can see how much money a given company or organization received from all government sources in one convenient result.
The link is https://thereclamare.github.io/CDN_Govt_Spending/. I hope you find this useful!
The consuls and the start of a Roman year
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 1 Jan 2025For New Year’s day, we look at how the year started for the Romans, when from 153 BC onwards, the new consuls assumed office. There were rituals, sacrifices and ceremony, and then the start of the political year.
To round off, some thoughts on what is planned for the year to come on this channel.
Oh yes, and for chickens read geese!
New Year’s memery
The period between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day (aka “Hangover Day” for amateur drinkers) tend to be pretty low-traffic periods for internet sites, and my experience is that my own readers drop in far less frequently until around January 2nd. Taking advantage of this, I can drop in a few low-effort posts to keep up appearances and get on with my usual holiday sloth with no-one the wiser. So … memes:
First, a tribute to yet another armpit of a year:
And on to the bright promise of the infant 2026:
Sorry, that was apparently a repeat post from every year since 2016, prompting this heartfelt apology from the powers-that-be:
Not so much a meme as an accurate recapitulation of our descent into the cultural cesspool we currently inhabit (h/t to Ted Gioia):
New Year’s resolutions? Here’s a suggestion:
Ian has the right idea:
It’s a fair question, isn’t it?
You can tell it’s not their first rodeo:
Not a meme, but in the general direction of memery — Dave Barry’s “Year in Review“. An excerpt:
The biggest story of 2025, to judge from the number of people who sent it to me, was this raccoon:
In case you somehow missed this story: In late November, this raccoon got into a state liquor store in Ashland, Va., by falling though the ceiling. Once inside, the raccoon ransacked the store, leaving a trail of broken bottles …
… and apparently consuming a large quantity of booze before passing out in the bathroom next to the toilet. That’s where the raccoon was found by a store employee, who called an animal-control officer, who took it to an animal shelter. When the raccoon finally sobered up, it was hired as director of security by the Louvre Museum.
No, seriously, it was released into the wild. But the photo went majorly viral, and the raccoon became a huge celebrity. We, the American people, LOVE this raccoon. And I think I know why: After the year we’ve been through, we can relate to it. We have had way too much of 2025; it has left us, as a nation, lying face-down on the floor of despair, between the wastebasket of stupidity and the commode of broken dreams.
New Year’s Good Luck “Pasta Fazool” (Pasta e Fagioli) – Food Wishes
Food Wishes
Published 31 Dec 2019Scientists will tell you that there’s no way eating pork, beans, and/or greens at the beginning of a new year can bring you good luck and great fortune; but our lab-coated, left-brained friends are missing one very important fact: People who think they’re lucky, are lucky.
For a fully formatted, printable, written recipe, follow this link: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/277…
You can also find more of Chef John’s content on Allrecipes: http://allrecipes.com/recipes/16791/e…
