I just hope Jimmy Carter stays alive long enough to see Trump take back the Panama Canal. pic.twitter.com/unPTa144do

— Anthony Cumia (@AnthonyCumia) December 23, 2024

Es ist ein’ Ros’ Entsprungen is an early German Christmas carol and Marian hymn performed in a harmony written by Praetorius in 1609 by the Dresdner Kreuzchor.

The thing is, @IndiaWilloughby, I really do enjoy cigars, whisky and facing down totalitarians, so by the same arguments that make you a woman, I am indeed Winston Churchill.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2024

Incredibly well said
pic.twitter.com/wQloRXMuUP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2024

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use… pic.twitter.com/s9iTNtcLIR

— Reads with Ravi (@readswithravi) December 19, 2024

RIP London. pic.twitter.com/Q5vz1NVzVe

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) December 19, 2024

—————————-
Edward Gibbon on the Victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers, 732 A.D., in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 52:

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

It wasn’t enough for the treasonous intelligentsia to give away the British Empire, they next proceeded to give away Britain, too.

What do you suppose would Nicholson or Napier say, if you predicted that one fine day, Labour would be in power, the former Conservative Prime Minister would be a Merchant caste Punjabi and the head of the opposition Tory Party would be a female Yoruba?

When someone asks you why the Department of Education should be abolished… pic.twitter.com/2wutgzuxrI

— I Meme Therefore I Am (@ImMeme0) December 19, 2024

BREAKING NEWS:

Former part-time McDonald's fry cook donates his next 4 years salary ($1.8 million) to support Homeless veterans.

He starts his new job in January. pic.twitter.com/8wNVo5TQxx

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) December 17, 2024

HT: Karen L. Myers.

My theory: The US experiences generational waves of a form of secularized puritan Great Awakening, continuing the prior pattern of religious Protestant awakenings. The waves hit every 20-30 years. Four in the last century: actual Communism in the 1920's-30's ("Red Decade"),… https://t.co/fxKYhoAeDh

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) December 15, 2024

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I don’t think this pattern is quite so predictable and regular as all that, but I think Marc Andreessen is on to something real.

Religion, in both its better and worse forms, even including the famous heresies, strikes a chord in humanity by embodying universal truths and by satisfying perpetual human emotional needs.

The satisfaction of some of these emotional needs, consolation for mankind’s inevitable death and so on, are healthy and life-giving functions. Others, however, the fire-and-brimstone, penitential, and fanatical satisfactions leading to prohibition of pleasures, intolerance, and even bonfires of art and unbelievers are pathological yet equally regularly present.

The whole Environmental Movement, and especially its Catastrophist Junk Science component, obviously has all the features of the standard dualist heresy.

Zoe Strimpel laments one more appalling cultural contribution from the worst-ever generation.

If there’s one thing Generation Z can be relied on to do, it’s make things creepy and weird where they were previously straightforward and commonplace. Having weirded out romantic intimacy, they’ve come for Guinness. It has become so popular among Gen Z that pubs this December are experiencing a Guinness shortage. …

[Now] there is “splitting the G,” in which drinkers attempt a single first swig so the remaining liquid ends up intersecting the Guinness logo. It’s a trend that combines a lackluster approach to downing a pint with something that sounds vaguely sexualized. No doubt we’ll soon be told that “splitting the G” is problematic.

Sales of this bog-standard staple have been helped along by the sorts of influences (and influencers) that would have the dyed-in-the-wool pub-goers of old Dublin turning in their graves. Take Kim Kardashian and pop star Olivia Rodrigo, the former very publicly sporting a pint of Guinness while in London last year, and the latter wearing an excruciatingly uncool-cool T-shirt reading “Guinness is good 4U.”

The Guinness obsession is part of a wider fetishization of the mundane. There are now TikTok accounts that teach women how to dress their boyfriends in old-people clothes, the so-called “grandpa core” aesthetic. Young women are also increasingly searching out goodwill store interior fittings, in the hope that a battered old lamp will help them appear quirky. For those not involved, it looks more like an attempt to intellectualize the boring task of filling your home or dressing yourself.

Part of the reason for this is the explosion in university education. Teach millions of young people to analyze their lives, and they’ll start treating everything as though it must be filled with meaning. Each decision is now part of an aesthetic, a conscious choice to be a “Guinness drinker,” which no doubt comes laden with semiotic irony, rather than choosing things because — you know — you like them?

RTWT

Plastic recycling is a “dead-end street."

That quote…unbelievably…is from @Greenpeace.

In my new video, we debunk the recycling religion. pic.twitter.com/loe7F7gS2L

— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) December 12, 2024

HT: Ed Driscoll.