‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the ‘sphere
Bloggers were glad to see Christmas draw near.
Their laptops were turned off and all put away
The bloggers were swearing to take off the day.
Their children were nestled all snug in their beds
While visions of extra time danced in their heads
With a father or mom not distracted by writing
No posts to compose, and no links to be citing.
But we all know that vows were just meant to be broken
And the vows of a blogger can be a mere token.
There’s always a chance that some sort of temptation
Will rise up to make them of fleeting duration.
For instance, there might be found under the tree
A sleek Mac; well, what better sight could there be?
And who could neglect it and wait the whole day?
It cries to be tried out, one just can’t delay.
Or maybe somewhere there’s a fast-breaking story
Important, and possibly leading to glory.
It can’t be ignored, there’s really no choice,
So add to the din every blogger’s small voice.
And then there are some who may just like to rhyme
(I’m one who at times must confess to this crime),
And it’s been quite a while since Clement Clarke Moore
Wrote his opus (though authorship’s been claimed by Gore).
So it seems about time it was newly updated
And here’s my attempt – aren’t you glad you all waited?
Forgive if it sounds a bit awkward to read.
In writing, I set a new record for speed.
I had to get under the wire and compose it
Before Christmas Day. Now it’s time that I close it.
But let me exclaim (or, rather, I’ll write)
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!
Here’s a video of the original, with some 50s-type nostalgia for those who remember. There are a few odd anomalies (“safe in their beds” instead of “snug in their beds”). But it brought back memories of pincurls, and the days when parents were assumed to sleep in twin beds (even though I don’t recall that most people did).
I’m pretty sure I had the book on which this is based. The illustrations look very familiar:
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous Christmas Eve post.]
… a creature was stirring.
On Christmas Eve I was expecting a visit from my son, who was flying in as a rare treat. I had tidied up, and was putting on the finishing touches while waiting for him to arrive from the airport. As I was poised at the top of the staircase on my way down from the second floor, I saw a movement on one of the lower steps.
A dark shape. A small dark shape—very still, and then in motion again. With tiny little ears, and a long tail.
A mouse. Very much stirring.
I let out a shriek, like in the cartoons. Yes, I know that mice do not hurt people. But yes, they give me the willies when they startle me and scurry around—like—mice. The few times when this has happened before, they’ve always sought the little opening from whence they’d come and scurried away, hardly ever to be seen again.
But this mouse seemed to be lost and disoriented. Maybe because it was almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and no creature was supposed to be stirring. In the midst of my unreasonable fear was a sort of amusement. What was it doing here, this evening of all evenings?
The mouse was still on the staircase landing, and although I assumed that somehow it had managed to climb the three stairs to where it was, it appeared to be perplexed about how to get up or down from there. I watched it from what I considered a safe distance at the top of the stairs, and I could see it moving back and forth, back and forth, first towards the wall and then towards the edge of the step, but it could not seem to get the courage to make a break for it.
What did I do? I called my son and asked how far away he was. Forty-five minutes. And then I settled in, not for a long winter’s nap but for a long viewing from a good vantage point to monitor the mouse’s position till my son would arrive. For the moment, the mouse seemed quite well-contained on the stairs, but I didn’t trust that—and sure enough, slowly but surely, with many fits and starts, it managed to get back down those three stairs to the ground floor.
Now, it turns out that watching a mouse is actually sort of interesting. This one darted from stair-bottom to hall to bathroom to bedroom and back again (my place is built upside-down, with the bedroom and bathroom downstairs and living room and kitchen upstairs). I had a special horror of the mouse being in the bedroom—so after its one foray into the bedroom for five minutes and then out again, I slammed the bedroom door shut and placed a thick towel to block the crack at the bottom. The towel seemed to act as an effective barrier, like a small mountain range, and the mouse didn’t venture into that room again.
But back and forth it went—along the wall in the hall, into the bathroom, up a few stairs and then back down them again. I noticed that it seemed to get smarter and smarter; each time it climbed the stairs it was better at it, until it seemed as though it had been doing this all its little life.
And then by trial and error it found the molding along the side of the stairs, which then acted as a sort of ramp by which the mouse could easily climb all the way to the top. This filled me with dread. I was conceding the downstairs for now, but the upstairs was my territory! But what to do? That molding-ramp made it so easy; the mouse was coming up in a determined sort of way, till I could look into its beady little eyes and it could look into mine. I let out another involuntary yelp, stamping my feet and clapping my hands, trying to make enough noise to frighten it off.
I looked and sounded completely and utterly ridiculous.
And yet it was effective; the little thing stopped in its tracks, then turned and went back downstairs again, to my great relief. Then a few minutes later it came up the ramp-molding again, and I re-enacted the same stupid pantomime I had before. The mouse kept coming—up up up, light and fleet of foot, relentless and implacable. I actually thought of throwing something at it to head it off—perhaps my shoe, like Clara in “The Nutcracker.” But oh, for a platoon of tin soldiers like hers! (I’ve cued up this video to start at the right spot, although it’s mistitled because these are not meant to be rats, they’re mice):
But alas, we were alone, just the two of us, mousie and me. And I didn’t really want to hurt it, which I thought might happen if I threw my shoe, so I reached for a pillow—and at that moment I heard the key turn in the lock and my son walked in.
I’m always happy to see him, but perhaps never so happy as this time, as I stood at the top of the stairs in a semi-crouch, clutching a small pillow and making silly-yet-hopefully-scary noises at a mouse that was climbing a molding-ramp on the edge of the staircase.
My son managed to keep his disdain under control long enough to catch the mouse in a plastic container and escort it outside to be released, but not before we took a photo though the plastic. Yes, the mouse is kind of cute. But no, I don’t want him in my house, not on Christmas Eve or any other time.
At least one poll shows Trump with approval at 50%. Maybe it’s an outlier, maybe it’s meaningless, but maybe not.
Some details:
Trump continues to post strong margins with men, nearly six in ten of whom approve of his performance, compared to just over a third who disapprove. Women remain more skeptical, with approval and disapproval nearly evenly split but tilted slightly negative. Age breakdowns, however, may raise alarms for Democrats heading toward the 2026 midterms. Trump runs even among voters under 40 and posts clear net-positive approval among voters 40 and older, including a +5 margin with seniors — a bloc that often turns out heavily in midterm elections.
That rather surprises me, after all the talk of young Trump supporters on the right turning against him because of various schisms and influencers. The male/female divide does not surprise me.
More:
… Trump [earns] approval from more than eight in ten GOP voters. Democrats remain overwhelmingly opposed, though a quarter still register approval — a notable figure in today’s polarized environment.
The InsiderAdvantage results are more favorable to Trump than the broader national picture reflected in RealClearPolling, which currently shows the president below water overall. Still, a net-positive approval rating at this point in a presidency is a rare commodity in modern politics.
Modern politics is very very divided and often rather evenly so.
They’re so used to presenting one side of the issue that they find anything else to be anathema. They’re used to journalism as leftist activism. For most of them, I bet it’s what they’ve been explicitly taught.
CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss created a firestorm when she recently pulled a 60 Minutes piece about illegal aliens and CECOT, the prison in El Salvador.
Weiss made it clear in a memo to staff this week that she expected more from them in that story and what they put out to the public. One of the main things that she thought was missing in the piece was a new comment from the Trump administration.
One of the people on the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, apparently wrote to colleagues saying they had tried to get administration comments but there was no answer, and “Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.”
However, guess what? The administration had answered. Fancy that:
According to Axios, the Trump administration provided three on-the-record statements from the White House, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security. There was even a more than 300-word statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. None of that was included in the final story.
I would guess that the vast majority of people working in that newsroom find it horrific to have to present the point of view of this administration as part of their stories – unless, of course, it makes the administration look bad or they can twist the answer in order to make the administration look bad. The idea that the boss would call them to task for that sort of behavior is probably extremely new to them, and abhorrent.
In a marathon interview on “The Shawn Ryan Show” released Monday, the former first son said the Biden-era immigration approach became “a disaster” and acknowledged the chaotic Kabul exit that left 13 U.S. service members dead was “an obvious” failure.
Hunter Biden argued the U.S. needs “vibrant” legal immigration but warned the country “doesn’t want immigrants that are coming here illegally, draining us of resources” and being “prioritized above” veterans and other Americans struggling at home.
(2) If you’re curious about those weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, this video seems to me to be the most reasonable source of information I’ve seen so far:
(3) The head of security for Brown University, Rodney Chatman, has been placed on leave pending investigation. I wrote about Chatman previously in this post.
… 98 mayors across Minnesota have sounded the alarm in a no-nonsense letter to Walz and state lawmakers, blistering the state’s fiscal mismanagement. The distraught mayors warned that what was once an $18 billion surplus has not only vanished under the far-left governor’s watch; the surplus has been replaced by a projected $3 billion deficit for the 2028–29 budget cycle.
The mayors went bottom-line, warning that Walz’s policies have strained their cities, harmed residents, and pushed Minnesota down in national economic rankings — evidence, they said, of the state government racing headlong toward “fiscal disaster.”
I have a feeling – or is it a hope? – that Candace Owens’ recent spewings may alienate even some of her real followers (as opposed to the bots). The context was that Ben Shapiro called her out for her hateful mendacity, at a recent TPUSA event, and this was her response.
Why do I highlight this? It’s disturbing to watch, but this woman does have influence on many people who celebrate her (hard to say how many because her audience is so bot-heavy). In this most recent clip, she’s also very obviously trying to incite a race war of black people against Jews:
Now that you’ve digested that, this is the book she’s holding up:
Der Talmudjude, by anti-Jewish German Catholic theologian August Rohling, claimed that the Talmud commanded Jews to steal, lie, cheat, and kill Christians.
Rohling had repeatedly spread the libel that Jews consumed human blood in murder rituals. The theologian’s scholarship was cast into doubt during a failed libel suit against one of his detractors, but Der Talmudjude has remained a mainstay of antisemitic texts.
The book was written in 1871 and was a Nazi favorite:
In addition there have been fabricated interpretations such as the 19th-century antisemitic book “The Talmudic Jew” by German Catholic theologian August Rohling, a popular text with the anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer in the years leading up to the Holocaust and the rise of the Third Reich.
And there it was, one of the digital right’s best-known figures, a woman with more than five million YouTube subscribers, hawking a book full of anti-Semitic lies. Rohling was a German Catholic theologian. He was an infamous Jew-hater. The Talmudic Jew depicts the Talmud as a ‘repository of anti-Christian hatred’ and a ‘manual for swindling Gentiles’, says Hussein Aboubakr Mansour. And of course it’s fraudulent, Mansour writes. It relies on ‘medieval anti-Jewish polemics and out-of-context quotations’.
Rohling later wrote a hateful pamphlet on the ‘human sacrifices’ carried out by rabbis. The Jews do indeed engage in the ritual murder of Christian children, he wrote. It was a pseudo-academic revival of the medieval blood libel. And it helped to whip up Jewphobic animus across Germany and beyond. That a 21st-century right-winger is citing this Jew-hater – worse, actively promoting his work – is extraordinary.
Perhaps no book has excited the intrigue of antisemites quite like the Talmud and which became its own self-contained myth. Just the mention of “the Talmud” is bound to conjure up worlds. It is difficult to say exactly why. Its sheer inaccessibility, certainly—the alien script running right to left like a mirror of proper reading. To European eyes it has always carried the aura of the esoteric, something halfway between scripture and spellbook. The very look of it suggests secrets. Perhaps that Jews possessed a textual tradition beyond the Bible, an “oral law” whispered down through generations and only later committed to writing, was itself suspect: what were they hiding? What had they added?
But the fantasy of the Talmud has always exceeded the Talmud itself. As a matter of fact, the real Talmud is a big disappointment compared to the muscular, mythological one; we would do better to make the distinction between the Talmud of reality and that of myth. One opens the former expecting occult mysteries and finds rabbis arguing about liability for damages caused by an ox. The gap between the myth and the text is so vast that one suspects the myth requires the text to remain unread. Rohling understood this, perhaps instinctively: his readers would never check.
Rohling claimed expertise in rabbinical literature that he did not have. His interpretations of Hebrew texts were dilettantish at best, fraudulent at worst. He relied heavily on medieval anti-Jewish polemics and on out-of-context quotations ripped from the vast sea of Talmudic disputation. The truth is, he likely never actually read the Talmud.
The Talmud is not a catechism; it is a record of centuries of legal debate among rabbis, filled with minority opinions, hypothetical arguments, and positions that were never adopted as normative practice. It is the definition of pedantry, written primarily in Aramaic, a language Rohling could not read, with Hebrew interspersed, in a terse and allusive style that presupposes familiarity with an entire tradition of commentary. It dwells, for pages—volumes, really—on the most mundane and technical details of daily life: the proper handling of food, the timing of prayers, the laws governing agricultural cycles, rules for feasts and holidays, the conditions under which an egg laid on a festival day may or may not be eaten, if and how to carry things on the Sabbath in what kind of vessel. It endlessly argues over these riveting and exhilarating questions. So exciting to read it should really come with a heart rate monitor. To extract from this a simple set of commands—”Jews must swindle Christians”—is not to misread the Talmud; it is to have never encountered it at all. It is to have read about it in other books written by other people who also never read it, which is likely what Rohling did.
But I noticed this sort of Jew-hatred online long long ago, at least as long as I’ve been blogging. There’s been a huge genre of web-based propaganda about the Talmud and how Jews are evil and their evil is expressed in the Talmud, and it’s probably based on books such as Rohling’s. I am relatively sure these falsehoods have been spread worldwide on the internet long before Owens got into the act, although she’s certainly doing her bit to spread the venomous stuff still further.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that “Venezuelan oil exports are at risk thanks to a partial blockade targeting sanctioned tankers — the kind that carry about 70% of the country’s crude.” The story continued, “Were Venezuela’s oil shipments to stop, or sharply decline, the Cubans know it would be devastating.”
Cuban exile and energy expert Jorge Piñón told the Journal, “It would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, no question about it.”
Communist Cuba has relied on foreign benefactors to stay afloat, pretty much since Fidel Castro and his butcher boys like Che Guevara seized power more than 60 years ago. In recent years, the regime — ruled since 2018 by Communist party chief Miguel Díaz-Canel — relies on the largess of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro for cheap oil the country can’t afford to buy at market price.
An elderly woman was savagely attacked in broad daylight by a man wielding a wooden board with nails in it.
Jeanette Marken, 75, was left permanently blinded in her right eye after being hit in the face with the makeshift weapon in Seattle, allegedly at the hands of repeat offender Fale Vaigalepa Pea, 42.
Family members told KOMO that a screw sticking out of the board gouged out Marken’s eye, and after several surgeries she was told she will not recover her eyesight in the eye. …
Police said Pea was ‘notorious’ for attacking random victims on Third Avenue in Seattle.
The bodycam footage showed a paramedic question the officer after he recognized Pea, asking: ‘Who is this guy?’
‘He’s a regular. He usually punches,’ the officer responds.
‘I guess today he decided to escalate from his usual.’
According to KOMO, Pea’s string of offenses dates back to 2011, when he stabbed two people at a party.
One of the victims in that attack was stabbed eight times, yet despite a jury finding Pea guilty of the savage attack, he received a sentence of just 18-months community custody.
Pea continued racking up criminal offenses over the years, including one in 2020, four in 2023, and one in 2024.
This year, the King County jail reported that Pea has been booked into custody a staggering eight times, for offenses including assault, indecent exposure, drug offenses, and property destruction.
However, KOMO reported Seattle Municipal Court and King County Superior Court records show none of his arrests this year resulted in charges – until the alleged attack on Marken.
This story is very familiar. Our criminal justice system in blue cities seems to be broken, and innocent citizens pay the price. This is not an accident; it’s a policy decision.
A Georgia woman suffered severe burns to her face and body after being doused with a toxic chemical in a random attack while she was strolling through a park — and her sadistic assailant is still on the loose.
Ashley Wasielewski, 46, was walking laps around Forsyth Park in Savannah Wednesday night after attending a Christmas program at a nearby church when a stranger approached her from behind and poured the corrosive liquid over her head, according to her devastated friends and family.
The perp is still at large. There’s a blurry photo of a suspect at the link; I can’t tell much from it. But my guess is that it’s another serial offender. These attacks, as far as I can tell, are often on white women or Asian women – at least, the ones that are reported.
[NOTE: Regulars here may remember that most years I put up a family Christmas recipe. And here it is again.]
This recipe was brought over from Germany sometime in the mid-1800s, and was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.
The name of the treat is lebkuchen. But it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins.
Flora’s Lebkuchen:
(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)
1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice
Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).
Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.
Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.
Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.
Grease and flour two 8 X 8 cake pans [NOTE: In previous years I sometimes said 9 X 9, but 8 X 8 is actually much better and makes for a far moister product.] Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester at 21 or 22 minutes to see if it’s done yet). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.
Meanwhile, make the frosting.
Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not exactly correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.
Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).
“Tucker’s a friend of mine,” [Vance] told Ahmari. “And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus.”
I had no idea that friends can’t be criticized when they lie publicly and often. “My friend, right or wrong” isn’t a principle of which I’m aware. When your friend is doing something mendacious and destructive, and it’s public and influential, it’s moral cowardice to say nothing.
Of course, this isn’t really about friendship. I think I’m on safe ground when I say that. Tucker Carlson isn’t all that charming. What’s happening here, I believe, is that Vance doesn’t want to alienate Carlson’s Jew-hating supporters. They vote too, right? I don’t know how numerous they are, But J. D. must believe they are numerous enough that he needs them in the coalition. It’s true that Vance and others are in a bind, if this group is large enough that it’s necessary for victory. But they’re going to alienate a lot of other people in the process, and not just Jews.
More from Vance:
Vance noted further that “the idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd.”
Meanwhile, the latest from good old friend Tucker to help you make up your own mind as to whether Carlson has a place in “the conservative movement”:
Pernicious mendacious garbage. The Qataris must love it, though.
