35 years ago, there was a famous essay by Robert Fulghum entitled “All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” I endorse everything in that essay, and I wish to supplement it. The lessons did not come solely from teachers. Classmates and parents gave lessons too.
My kindergarten started in 1957.
2025 is ending. 2026 will soon begin. When I was a child, there were a lot of books out about the Apocalypse coming with the Millennium. There were books with the prophecies of Nostradamus, with special concentration on the verses about a great war to come, when New York would be bombed, etc. We had nuclear bombing drills at school. They would probably not have been effective, but we had them. I grew up figuring I would not make it past 1999 or 2000. I never pictured myself in old age. I never thought about the year 2025, let alone 2026. Even 1999 was forever away in 1970 or 1975. But 2025? That was doubly forever away. And now, it has passed beneath the bridge of my present.
My father used to compare himself to various relatives in terms of lifespan. I suppose he had reason to do so. His mother dropped dead of a massive heart attack when she was fifty-three, I believe. His father had had heart attacks starting at around age thirty-seven. Grandpa died at sixty with his fifth or sixth heart attack. “I’ve passed Mom,” my dad said when he was fifty-four. “I’ve passed Dad,” was at sixty. His next target was his grandmother, Stewart. She had died at eighty. He passed that milestone. After that would have been Grandma Kistler, but he did not make it to eighty-five. He was two months short. His target after that would have been his grandfather Stewart, who had lived to be very close to eighty-eight. Most of his grandparents gave him long targets. There was only his patrilineal grandfather who died at no more than twenty-five. Lead poisoning. The sudden kind. It was in East St. Louis. That still happens a lot there. Some towns don’t change much even over a century.
Yesterday, Matt Walsh had an article on Daily Wire that discussed “new” evidence that ADHD is likely not an actual condition, that treatment with Ritalin and Adderall is only temporarily effective and likely causes long-term stunted growth and psychological problems. The article appears to be behind the paywall, so I can’t link to it. But there is a YouTube video that I suppose duplicates the argument of the article.
Governor Kathy Hochul of the renowned Empire State has signed into law a bill to compel social media sites to display a public service announcement:
Governor Kathy Hochul negotiated a chapter amendment and signed legislation that will require social media platforms to display labels warning of the dangerous impact certain features can have on young users’ mental health. Legislation S4505/A5346, under the chapter amendment, requires social media platforms that offer addictive feeds, auto play or infinite scroll to post warning labels on their platforms. This legislation builds on the Governor’s ongoing efforts to address the youth mental health crisis statewide.
The White House has announced plans to bring back the battleship. I have a couple of immediate thoughts to be followed by the more interesting questions.
One, the main military mission this ship is designed for is to maintain, support, and protect Trump’s ego. Let’s stipulate that from the outset: whatever else is going on, this is Donald Trump putting his name on something big and flashy. That said, that’s largely irrelevant. If the ship is good and necessary, I don’t mind Trump’s name on it any more than I would excuse it if it’s a boondoggle.
A tragic story came out of Canada. A 44-year-old man died after waiting more than eight hours in an emergency room with chest pain, blurry vision, and a blood pressure of 210.
This story establishes the human cost of delayed care. No one involved acted maliciously. Not the doctors. Not the nurses. Not the triage staff. They were inundated, operating exactly as the system is designed to function under extreme load. This was unfortunately not a unique experience, as over half a million Canadians leave the ER every year without being seen.
A friend gave me this book for Christmas. I don’t usually read books by politicians, but How to Test Negative for Stupid by Senator John Kennedy (R, Louisiana) is one of the funniest and entertaining memoirs I’ve read in a long time. He is definitely one of a kind, known for the very humorous quips and questions he makes during Senate hearings. He has a thick Southern drawl, which can lead an unsuspecting witness or nominee to underestimate him, but he is smart as a whip.
Practically every page has a laugh-out-loud passage:
I didn’t think I could have an even greater appreciation for the military than I already had until I read Johnny Joey Jones’s book, Unbroken Bonds of Battle: A Modern Warrior’s Book of Heroism, Patriotism, and Friendship. Recently I heard about it and was intrigued to know more about the Marines who signed up for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), or “the bomb squad”: what motivated them to join the military, and particularly EOD, what that team demanded of them, and how they responded to the call.
Jones included not only parts of his own story in this book, but the stories of about one dozen men and one woman who served with him. Many of them wrote their own essays, and Jones offered his own commentary on their essays.
Relationships
Over the last few decades, a societal war on men has been waged. Masculinity is now toxic. Recently, young while males were locked out of much of the white-collar job market. Boys are in an educational crisis. Marriage and fatherhood are being devalued. Noticing these trends is discouraged, and opposition is disparaged.
The Relentless War on Masculinity: Does it Ever End? by David Maywald documents what is happening and why. He shows the legacy modern misandry has created, the tools fourth-wave feminism uses to maintain a gynocentric culture, the struggles men and boys face today, and what solutions exist.
Maywald opens the book by showing that in Western cultures — Anglosphere and Nordic societies especially — gynocentrism is real. He documents how courts, politics, education and job markets are stacked against men and favor women, often unfairly. He uses hard facts and statistics to buttress his arguments.
As a fifteen-year veteran of this site, I’d like to make an appearance once a week or so, at least to tell myself that I’m still part of this project. However, as in many novels, powerful forces collide to keep us apart:
1. Storms & Outages: One of those forces was last week’s high winds that caused an unfortunate chain of events, especially because of wimpy trees around here that collapse onto powerlines:
To close out the year the 3WHH barflies recorded a special Boxing Day edition, in which, following the obligatory McDonald’s news for John and a breaking story that indicates President Trump really does mean it about defending Western Christendom, we review our predictions for 2025 from a year ago (which, unlike the old McLaughlin Group predictions, turned out to be fairly good in most cases); then discuss what each of think is the most significant story of 2025, and offer predictions for 2026.
We couldn’t make the Substack livestream work, but we’re going to sort that out in the next week before our first show of the new season next weekend, which will be 2026!
Remember that phrase?
I do.
It’s referred to, on Wikipedia, as a series of slogans and public influence campaigns from the 2010s and beyond, particularly gaining steam (ancient energy metaphor) when then-President Joe Biden suggested (just six short years ago) that out-of-work coal miners had an obvious option and alternative career path, if only they’d stop resisting the inevitable dissolution of their livelihoods and get with the program:
We have a special Christmas season episode to tide everyone over through the holidays. Steve Hayward sits down with Rob Long, who’s just wrapped his first year at Princeton’s Theological Seminary. They discuss dramatic career changes, the storyteller’s take on the link between show business and the saving souls business, and the modern cultural discomfort with the faith of our fathers.
Just how are you going to pass the time on Christmas Day after you’ve got the roast in the oven (at low temp, of course) and you’ve finished your obligatory annual screening of Die Hard? How about a special Christmas Day edition of the Three Whisky Happy Hour!
Lucretia took time out from the kitchen to host this ad-free episode which features a discussion of the law governing religious symbols on public property, and why they are NOT violations of the Estasblishment Clause of the First Amendment (the phrase “separation of church and state” is not even hiding in any of the emanantions an punumbras of the Constitution, so don’t even look). Discussion also turned to wondering why liberals are increasingly hostile to religion—especially Christianity—and Steve offers his theory that the decline of patriotism among liberals, which also shows up in opinion survey data, is connected to the decline of religion among liberals, too. (He gave the full analysis of the matter in this Substack post a few months ago. One sentence summary: politics, the substitute diety for the left, isn’t going well for them right now, which makes them angry.) And did you know that Christmas itself is now a”far right” plot? That’s what Politico thinks. (Yes, we know: “Politico thinks” is an oxymoron.)
On a small bookshelf in the hallway of our home, there’s an insignificant looking chunk of concrete no larger than a pincushion. The bottom of this little concrete nugget reveals a small sticker with a name and address, written in German, over which a handwritten note:
Authentic piece of the wall of Berlin – to Mari & Jim.
Recently, I wrote about lighting the Chanukiah for Chanukah in our home, and lighting the “candles” on the one we built outside. I was in charge of the inside one, and my husband took care of lighting the outside one. Each night, we could appreciate how the light grew, reminding us in a moving way that the “light can grow” if we make the effort.
In these dark times, growing the light is up to each one of us. It’s easy to get buried in the shadows and the darkness; we keep hoping for miracles instead of working hard to actualize G-d’s intervention in our lives. We pray that the attacks on Jews will stop, that the radical Islamists will throw down their weapons. We hope to save our country from criminal illegal aliens and that ICE agents are safe. We hope for sanity on the part of our adversaries and reconciliation for the sake of our country. We wait . . . and wait . . . and wait.
This is about the everyday stuff that we overlook. This morning I went out to feed the chickens and grabbed a wool watch cap from the stash of hats and gloves in a closet by the door. This one is a lot thicker than the others, and I looked at the tag inside. It was a military watch cap I was issued, probably in 1982.
Later I looked up the company on the tag. Apparently they aren’t in business any longer. These caps are listed on eBay for $50-60. We have a bunch of different yet similarly styled caps, and I’ve even purchased some for our firefighters with our department name on the side. I like them a lot, and most are lighter weight than this classic.
I’m just back from Japan for a fairly brief break on a project that will fire back up a couple of days into the new year. I’m relaxing in my normal way, engrossed in a historical novel. For the last few months that’s been the Marius Mules series by SJA Turney. I’m enjoying them, and I’m happy to point anyone in that direction if they enjoy Julius Caesar’s Roman legions having at it with the Gauls. I’m not going to tell you that it’s high literature (it isn’t), but it’s fun and I enjoy it.
My phone rings and I grudgingly answer. I’m not big on phone conversations, and this one very quickly becomes one I really don’t want to hear. My wife is calling and she is in a panic. She has a reason to feel this way. She was at HEB, the regional supermarket, shopping for Christmas dinner. No big deal. She moved on to Walgreens to get something and found that she did not have her purse. The purse she just used at HEB to buy items for Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, she is no longer at HEB.
Today is a nice, warm, early winter day in north central Texas. So I am working on our front porch, which means I get a front seat view of the many, many deliveries being made to my neighborhood by aerial drones from the Walmart store about 2 miles away.
Our local Walmart has been offering aerial drone delivery since August, using drones from an outfit called Zipline.
This poem appeared in Kipling’s book Rewards and Fairies, a children’s book. It opened the story “The Conversion of St. Wilfrid.” I think we can include it as doggerel for the purposes of Doggerel of the Day. It was not written as great poetry. It is one of the finest Christmas poems I know, so I thought to run it today.
Rudyard Kipling
One of the issues I stumbled across back in the day was word-processor files/documents that retain fragments of material that had been deleted or overwritten in the document as presented. Anyone with the skills to examine such files’ raw format could find the proposal elements that were cut, the spelling mistakes that were corrected, or the seventeen versions of the summary that did not pass muster. This issue is especially interesting when documents, for example, are abridged to produce a lower classification version of a document. I suspect that most federal workers are unacquainted with the issue and unlikely to take steps to frustrate hackers like me from prying loose the deepest, darkest secrets that the authors never intended their documents to convey. In the down-classification scenario, it would involve the “spillage” of the higher classified information redacted not from the document’s file, but solely from the document as presented by the word processor.
So it was with some amusement that I ran across this tidbit:
What does it mean to be American? How does one become an American? Join us for this special episode as Peter Schramm, past Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center and Professor of Political Science, discusses his family’s flight from Communist Hungary, move to California, and growing up in his adopted home, learning the answers to those questions and, in his career, teaching native-born Americans about their homeland and the legacy they had been gifted by past generations.
In this season of reflection and the impending start of a new year, take some time to consider what being American means for you, and how you fit into our great story as we approach our 250th birthday.
