My first shared New York Times link of 2025: Ross Douthat, How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms: Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.

I thought all the oligarchs were being hypocrites chipping in their milion-per-oligarch contributions to the inauguration, but I now suspect they’re actually pro-Trump because of the alternative.

Reading Albion’s Seed and The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. 📚

Purdue plays Washington on the West Coast tonite at 9:30 West Lafayette time. This is now a B1G (f/k/a Big 10) conference game.

While I’m wondering whether to stay up and watch it live, the coin drops: my lads are going to be tipping off around bedtime per their circadian rhythms.

This could be a really tough game, and it will be a good omen if they win. If they can beat Oregon on Saturday, too, it will be a really good omen.

A Texas law requiring age verification for access to online porn gets argued in the Supreme Court today.

I have some NSFW thoughts.

On Sundays, my WordPress blog focuses on religious topics. I think today’s is pretty good.

I’m not an Elon Musk fan (I do acknowledge his genius, overshadowed for me by his manic stunts), but I gotta admit that “Grok” is kind of a genius name for a public-facing AI startup.

I’ve had many a deprecatory word for neo-Evangelicalism, but I really doubt that one of them decided to have some country music guys sing John Lennon’s Imagine at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

FIRE is good people - one of two public interest law groups I support financially. FIRE’s defense of pollster J. Ann Selzer against Donald Trump’s lawsuit is First Amendment 101 | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Without Boo Bouie, Northwestern is having trouble finding an answer to Purdue. 🏀

Finished Lord of the Rings trilogy. 📚 I think I’ll linger a bit for Appendices.

Who’d have thought that cat food could control cat dander so well that people who couldn’t stand to linger at our house can now linger for hours?

Fascinating: 2024 Was the ‘Device ID’ Election ( WSJ).

I was only trivially annoyed by digital political messages, perhaps because my footprint loudly said “not persuadable to MAGA.”

I see no evidence that Harris did as Team Trump did, but my wife was inundated with Harris messages.

Christmas box from Stonewall Kitchen teaches me, at age 76, that horseradish mustard can be wonderful. Now the acid test: will the Rural King version measure up?

A moderately worthy New Year resolution from Suzy Weiss: buy fewer but higher quality single-fiber clothes like silk shirts and wool socks.

I regularly lament, and notionally repent, of wallowing too much in current events to the detriment of real wisdom. One gauge of that is how few books I read.

Or so I thought. Actually, this wasn’t a bad year for book-reading:

1. Zero at the Bone
2. Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics
3. Septology (started; tabled)
4. Chance or the Dance
5. From Object to Icon
6. Darkness at Noon
7. Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies–and Why They Disappeared
8. Revolt of the Public
9. Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence
10. Cahokia Jazz
11. A Fever in the Heartland
12. A Canticle for Liebowitz
13. The Sun Also Rises
14. Ghosted
15. The Art of Not Being Governed (started; abandoned)
16. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
17. The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past
18. The Age of Nihilism
19. The Present Age
20. Harmony (started; abandoned; then-Prince Charles really didn’t say anything new or especially perceptive)
21. Orthodox Spirituality: A Practical Guide for the Faithful and a Definitive Manual for the Scholar
22. Beowulf
23. Lost Histories
24. Arise O God
25. Autopsy on an Empire
26. The Uses of Idolatry
27. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
28. The Poisonwood Bible
29. St. Paul the Pharisee
30. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
31. Living in Wonder
32. Rituals of Spontaneity

Huzzah! David Brooks, Ramaswamy Is Uninvited From My Sleepover.

Brooks is directionally right, Ramaswamy an uncultured barbarian. At least today, in this context, but I don’t think barbarianism changes overnight.

I’ve been punked: A Modest Proposal: Classical Schools Should Embrace AI

Whoa! ‘Dis you, @bbowman?

I’m inclined to think that the “Malaise Speech” was the last truly conservative speech by a POTUS. Corollary: Ronald Reagan ridiculing it, however effective politically, was not conservative.

In 1980, I voted and worked (a little) for Ronald Reagan, but wished nice guy Jimmy Carter “a long and happy life as a Baptist Sunday School teacher.” Well, he’s remembered more for Habitat than for Sunday School, but he sure had that long life.

Memory eternal.

Merry Christmas to me from my son. 127.3 proof this barrel.

Byzantine Hymn of the Nativity

Let this double as a reminder that “Arab” ≠ “Muslim.”

A Magnificat:

My flesh in terror and fire
Rejoices that the Word
Who utters the world out of nothing,
As a pledge of his word to love her
Against her will, and to turn
Her desperate longing to love,
Should ask to wear me,
From now to their wedding day,
For an engagement ring.

W.H. Auden, For the Time Being (about which @ayjay reportedly knows quite a lot)

This is my favorite verse from my objectively-favorite poem (measured by repeated reading).

I have gotten used to Fr. Stephen Freeman surprising and delighting me. Here he goes again: Looking Like Christmas - Glory to God For All Things

I’m not sure how, for instance, one shanghais 51 former high-ranking national security figures into almost instantaneously coordinating a convenient whopper about “all the marks of a Russian operation,” but apart from little lacunae like that, Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment explains a lot.