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Sometimes, a pet can add to your life:
- In Scotties Playtime, Ali Redford has been saving up items with which to greet the New Year, presenting bits and pieces, mostly short videos. Most about a minute or less.
Pretty good: Bright, humorous, cheerful, short.
One exception is Josh Johnson – the best 11 minutes on the list. - Infidel753 researches and sees 5 important happenings in 2025 that will likely change history, and two probable 2026 events that will profoundly affect the US.
- Brian Beutler is a bit more cautious, releasing kinda sorta predictions for 2026: 21 low confidence but plausible might‑happens.
Key title:
My Non-Prediction Predictions For 2026 - CalicoJack in The Psy of Life finds a unifying answer to the perennial question of why Trump does the things he does.
He applies his observation to seven areas, including the use of the DOJ to go after pretty much anyone who has opposed him, imposition of impulsive tariffs, and his consistent betrayal of Ukraine.
The answer is simple, he’s a narcissist, and he is seeking revenge for the many narcissistic wounds that have been inflicted on him since coming down the golden escalator in 2015.Key need:
Understanding this destructive, homicidal, and suicidal drive will help us resist Trump’s assault on the US and the world more effectively. - Julian Sanchez goes to ancient Greek philosophy for insight on Trump:
I always thought Plato was pretty pollyannaish on this point, but this is decent evidence for the view that a man of bad character will therefore be unhappy even with every external trapping of success and good fortune.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) December 26, 2025 at 7:34 AM
- Sarah Cooper helps Trump help us understand that his MRI was not for anything, really, but was the best MRI in the history of MRIs:
- Why are nuclear weapons so dangerous?
Picture Credit: YouTube Michael J Scott points to the power of explosions and the potential of mega-deaths, but adds a factor that magnifies the danger and the terror:
The most frightening aspect of nuclear weapons has never been their explosive power alone. It is the speed at which decisions must be made, the lack of perfect information, and the absolute dependence on human judgment in moments where judgment is most likely to fail.Multiplying the danger:
Imagine for a moment Donald Trump sitting in the Versailles-decorated Oval Office, trying to figure out what to do if some suicidal maniac on the other side of the world decides to launch a nuke our way. Does it scare you? It should. - Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit notices a clear and deliberate signal that Trump is on Russia’s team.
- Back when, author and educator Amanda Nelson made the case that we are not even close to Germany’s Weimar Republic just before Hitler.
Now she checks back to see if she was right then and if she still is:
- Sometimes reality makes a reductio ad absurdum argument more absurdum than reductio.
Journalist Marcy Wheeler at EmptyWheel dives into prospective courtroom arguments about the long sought accused January 6 attempted pipe bomber. The most interesting may be whether Trump’s hasty and ill-considered blanket pardon of pretty much everyone involved in that day’s violence means the defendant shouldn’t be charged at all.
Yikes. - PZ Myers begs the United Kingdom to learn from our horrible, horrible mistake and avoid electing as Prime Minister a British version of Trump
Latest revelation on Nigel Farage:
Farage’s behavior as a schoolboy. He was a goose-stepping bully singing Hitler youth songs! - Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger maps out polling around the country by state. The map shows Trump’s job approval is really bad. On prices/inflation it’s flat out horrible.
- Remember when Trump announced that he was making deals that would drop drug prices by 5000%, even though scientists say you can’t drop prices by more than 100%?
Well, the drug companies really did agree to drop prices down to the low price they are already required to charge for people on Medicaid. But the new prices will only apply to people on Medicaid.
Got that?They agreed to charge what they were already required to charge to the folks they were already required to charge what they have been charging.
M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has links as drugmakers now announce price increases on over 350 medications.
- News Corpse sees Trump officials leaping from wishful thinking to wishful fantasy:
Walking us through a dreary small business landscape with tariffs pushing up costs, deportations even of legal immigrants reducing available staff, and the result ‐ ‐ higher and higher rates of business failure.
And yet we have this:
Kelly Loeffler: "I don't think small business owners have ever been so excited to pay their taxes thanks to President Trump."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 28, 2025 at 9:16 AM
- From The Onion, tech billionaires are threatening to flee California over a proposed tax on vests.
- Another day, another lawsuit:
tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings us more court activity, as sometime Trump ambassador and current Trump appointed head of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, sues jazz musician Chuck Redd for a million dollars in damages.
Seems Redd, willing to help a good cause, agreed to participate in this year’s free Christmas Eve concert.
But Trump turned it into a Trump-fest, with Trump his own self as host.
This came right after Trump pretended to change the name of The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
to
The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
Which name change can actually only come from Congress.Redd, wanting nothing to do with Trump, dropped out.
So where is the damage?
As tengrain points out about the million dollars:
Got that? The FREE concert was costly.Okay, it’s hard to contrive damages to non-participation in a free concert.
The real damage seems to involve the bruising of Donald Trump’s delicate sensibilities.
- In addition to the threatened lawsuit, Trump’s guy at the center goes to oxymoronic insult.
– Redd is worthless anyway and nobody would want to hear him
– Cancelling really cost the Center because everyone wanted to hear himJason Linkins senses a lack of forethought:
I love how the capitalist geniuses weren't prepared for the most obvious outcome of stapling the name of one of the most disliked living humans to the building
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) December 27, 2025 at 11:48 PM
OH! and I have a thought:
Oh come on!
The prospective suit is based on two solid legal principles:
– Disliking Donald Trump is against the law.
– Damages totaled a million dollars for cancelling a free concert, thereby losing all the income from tickets for which nothing was to be paid.— burrland01.bsky.social (@burrland01.bsky.social) December 30, 2025 at 12:42 PM
- There has been lots of coverage about Trump’s humiliation in getting the lowest ratings ever while he hosted a Kennedy Center event.
From The Borowitz Report, Trump is taking bold action, cutting the prices of the free tickets by 5000%.
Evan Jeung on Unsplash - The Propaganda Professor begins his Week in Stupid with a warning from a right-wing group about Democrats and Communism.
The right-wing Intercessors For America (IFA) has issued a “prayer guide” so you can overcome (with the sheer power of prayer, doncha know) the “Communist takeover of the Democrat (sic) Party”. If the tired old conflation of Democrats with Communists and the use of “Democrat Party” instead of Democratic Party aren’t loud enough signals of stupidity for you, just consider some of the sure signs of Communism enumerated in this handy little guide. Union organizing. Anti-racism. Universal Basic Income. Student debt cancellation. Public housing. Done shuddering yet? And just for good measure, the cover of the guide boldly displays, strangely enough, the Turkish flag. Apparently the dear folks at IFA confused the crescent and star for the hammer and sickle.The professor ends with Trump somehow thinking the United States had boats in Greenland more than half a century before the US was a country.
- In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson looks at the odd circumstances around Trump’s announcement of what may be an imaginary attack that nobody, even the target supposedly attacked, knows about in Venezuela, a country not known as a center of drug manufacturing, as part of an anti-drug effort that seems not to be about drugs.
Quoting Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:
It’s a good commentary on 2025 that the US President announces a major military attack on a foreign country and even the straightest arrows think, 50% chance it’s an attack, 50% chance president is on another cognition bender.The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.
- At The Moderate Voice, Kathy Gill links to an opinion piece in The Hill suggesting that Trump is doing nothing different militarily than every President since Harry Truman (with heavy emphasis on Harry).
Kathy Gill has facts in hand to correct that specific slope down The Hill.
- In Hackwhackers, Trump resisted releasing the Epstein files, then agreed to release the Epstein files and signed legislation requiring the release of the Epstein files.
Now he seems to have changed his mind again:
Completely innocent himself, of course:
… “No more” except for those including his political opponents, that is.
- Dave Columbo provides a helpful reminder about the Epstein files:
- Frances Langum offers up Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi with the year’s biggest lie (not counting Trump himself).
This 30 seconds is just the first part of possibly the most inept cover-up ever:
- Journalist Arturo Dominguez summarizes his work this year with a unifying lesson: White Christian Nationalism is doing more damage and harming more people than is generally recognized.
- The manager of a local bar in a small Wisconsin town orders an employee to take off his Charlie Kirk tee shirt, then burns it. The publicity is immediate and the outrage comes within seconds.
The bar manager apologizes and resigns (Good!), and the outrage continues across the state. The local Sheriff says he will investigate. Public figures point to the ex-manager as part of the left’s unhinged hatred.
Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson goes to what I recognize as who is without sin mode with a slight difference.
James knows some of these stone throwers well. He names names and their parallel sins, many of which dwarf the shirt burn.
The main problem I have with James is his annoying habit of forcing me, and perhaps others like me, to moderate our broad caricature of contemporary conservatives. Turns out not all are MAGA‑Volk.
- In Rural Missouri, Jess Piper reviews the legislative pre-filings by Republicans, including making it harder and longer for women to escape abusive marriages.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz has a New Year message for those who have walked through 2025 hell.
Hell can teach:
The easy seasons, the cool and comfortable days, these are nice, but they rarely teach you anything. They don’t show you what you’re made of.
But hell? Hell is a teacher. Hell is a truth teller. Hell is revelatory.
And you, you’re stronger than you think. - SilverAppleQueen finds a brief sonnet by Ernest Dowson at the end of the 18th century for an expression of overwhelming despair and a faint, distant, feeling of hope.
- Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes has a sense of, maybe God or angels, but a sense that we are looked after.
- As has everyone else, how about a link to Vagabond Scholar and his annual Jon Swift Roundup.
Accurately described:
The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves - @whiskeywhistle98 gives her husband a chance:
Climbing the mountain to this year’s wisdom from our time‑tested gurus:
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