Monthly Archives: December 2025

Megalography:

1. The depiction of great or grand things, such as heroes and gods. [Art And Popular Culture]

I must say the definitions presented in the DuckDuckGo summaries for megalography had a greater variance than average. Noted in “DINING WITH DIONYSUS,” Benjamin Leonard, Archaeology (January/February 2026):

Inside a large house in a part of Pompeii called Regio IX, a team from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii unearthed a splendidly decorated dining room that eighteenth-century excavators had stumbled upon but largely ignored. Opening onto a garden, the vaulted room is lined with partially preserved columns painted a rich red that frame frescoed wall panels. Archaeologists were surprised to discover that the frescoes represent a rare example of a megalography—a group of paintings depicting nearly life-size figures, in this case part of the retinue of Dionysus, the god of wine. Researchers have dubbed the residence the House of the Thiasus, after the term for a Dionysian procession, and have dated the frescoes to between 40 and 30 B.C. on the basis of their style.

Those readers who have been watching the market cap DJT, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp, slowly sliding were no doubt surprised to see it jump quite a bit today.

Did Trump Media announce excellent, unexpected results today? No.

From OilPrice.com:

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the operator of Truth Social, announced Thursday it has reached a definitive agreement to merge with TAE Technologies in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $6 billion. The move effectively turns a social media company into a deep-tech player, targeting the massive power requirements of the artificial intelligence boom.

The deal, which is set to close in mid-2026, would create one of the first publicly traded fusion energy firms. TMTG is putting up $200 million in cash at signing and another $100 million when the merger paperwork is officially filed.

For TMTG, the deal offers a bridge to the physical infrastructure world. For TAE, it provides a massive cash injection and a direct path to the Nasdaq.

Uh huh. So DJT senior management thinks it can leverage Truth Social and nuclear fusion for money making synergies?

The tie-up comes as the tech world faces an increasingly desperate hunt for electricity. AI data centers are devouring power at rates the current U.S. grid was never designed to handle. This has sparked a “nuclear renaissance” among big tech firms; Microsoft recently signed a deal to help revive the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Amazon has been buying up data center sites located right next to existing reactors.

That’s a big bet, especially given that much of the big boost in energy consumption involves the shakiest of the commercial “AI” technologies, generative AI. Long-term readers know I’m dubious on this technology.

The jump in valuation appears to be all about speculation. What does TAE bring to the difficult problem of fusion engineering? What’s their big insight? Can AI remain the big pie in the sky, or will the promise so urgently asserted by the AI zealots turn out to be empty?

Will the deal even close? There are no guarantees in a deal like this. If the deal falls through, there’s no reason for the valuation of DJT to remain this high.

High risk. High reward?

In case you were wondering if we’re going to war anytime soon, maybe we are:

Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

DONALD J. TRUMP
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Or maybe not. Just how much does a post to a poorly-attended social media platform count towards official business? Foreign leaders must regard amateur crap like as true headache-inducers. Who put American military forces under the control of a half-baked twerp like this? they must wonder.

Oh, doo doo doo doo doo … add musical notes where needed.

I didn’t see the Presidential Address last night due to having other obligations – exercise, which is important at this point in life.

However, seeing as I’m located in Minnesota, the local news station on the CBS network carried a clip of the Address that directly mentioned Minnesota. They’ve also provided a summary:

I’ve mentioned before that Speaker Johnson is a weak Speaker or a Speaker with an outre agenda, and we’re seeing it again:

The media is all a-twitter about the latest scandal – Chief of Staff Susie Wiles dishing on her boss, the President.

Vanity Fair published a swath of interviews Whipple conducted with Wiles in a two-part series Tuesday that raised eyebrows in Washington due to the chief of staff’s unusually candid quotes. Wiles tends to stray from the spotlight, seemingly preferring to carry out her job behind the scenes at the White House.

In the fourth paragraph of the two-part interview, Wiles was quoted as saying Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality,” that Vice President Vance “has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and that Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is a “right wing absolute zealot.” [The Hill]

And after it was published?

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles forcefully pushed back on Vanity Fair’s framing of her interview with author Chris Whipple, calling Tuesday’s sweeping article a “disingenuously framed hit piece” on her, President Trump, the Cabinet, and White House staff.

“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team,” Wiles wrote in her first authored post on the social platform X since October 2024.

Followed by sycophancy so honeyed that it makes me gag. But looking over more of her quotes, it just seems like someone lit themselves up and ran around in circles in order to distract from a far more horrendous report – say, the Epstein Files – just getting ready to drop.

Indeed, something like alcoholism, since it’s treated as a disease rather than a personal failing these days, and Trump is a famous teetotaler in any case, actually makes him look better.

And Wiles running around screaming that the media mislead her just seems ingenuous in the extreme.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a story to watch, but keep an eye out for other incidents, reports, and activities that may be of far larger significance in the end.

Fantod:

A fantod is a very bad mood or a feeling of extreme upset or anxiety. The word usually appears in the plural form, fantods, as in “I had the fantods all morning.” [Grammarist]

Noted in “A centennial look back at Edward Gorey’s macabre art and guarded life,” Mark Dery, WaPo:

Conservative critics who succumb to moral-panic attacks over such questions insist that Gorey’s sexuality was his own affair. Who gives a stuffed fantod whether the man was gay, asexual or, as he put it, “neither one thing nor the other particularly”? The answer, obviously, is: anyone who loves his work. Whatever Gorey was, his art is “culturally queer,” as the critic J. Bryan Lowder would say, to the tips of its ornately ringed fingers.

The ambitious reader might want to look for Gorey’s visual rendition of a fantod, thus to understand how one might stuff a feeling. We have several Gorey books lying about the house, and my Arts Editor is a fan.

When the information available to consumers is immediate and undeniable – inflation, I mean – it doesn’t matter how many lies spew forth from the President and his minions, does it?

36% approval, and I’m betting another drop in the next poll. Gallup, if anything, leans conservative.

But will the Democrats have the smarts to move towards the center and expel those with implicit or explicit autocratic impulses? I think it’s too late for the formation of one or more third parties, but I suppose someone credible will take a shot at it.

And we’re not at all impressed with a wannabe Mafia don – or his puppeteer – trying to order his Indiana minions about with this message via Heritage Action:

In case the above disappears…

President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state.

Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.

And, if the news had not reached my reader, Indiana GOP members, ordered to redistrict to “guarantee” more seats for the GOP in the House next year, thumbed their noses at the orders:

And I suppose our house isn’t built for it.

But it’s supposed to warm up soon enough.

Dentil:

I would be hard pressed to choose my favorite architectural term – but dentil comes pretty close to the top of my list. Even if you didn’t wonder about the similarity between dentil and dental (the word is derived from the Latin “dentes,” meaning teeth), looking at a neat, orderly band of blocks ornamenting a cornice just looks like teeth ready to chomp down on something tasty. [Gardens To Gables]

Visit the link above for useful illustrations. Noted somewhere in this video from Our Restoration Nation hosted by Laine Berry:

People get the oddest tattoos.

Murder at the Embassy (2025) is the second in the Miranda Green murder mystery series, the first being Invitation to a Murder (2023). This time, Green is becoming known for her success as a private detective, a mixed blessing as she’s British and this is the 1930s. The private secretary to the British ambassador to Egypt has been found shot to death in the embassy, and as Green happens to be in Egypt, but not at the embassy, the ambassador calls her in.

It’s the classic setup: variously annoying characters, from the Egyptian chief of security to an American actress whose connection to reality is skewed, all pointing at each other. Green and her mildly autistic nature encounters patriarchal attitudes, Nazis, unprincipled cads, barely sketched in interlopers, and an odd lesbian.

That last leaves a trail to the biggest question here, and that is Why? for so much of this story. Fine, we have a lesbian. This attribute doesn’t repel (nor attract) Green or anyone else, nor do anything else to advance the plot or even add to the ambiance. Midway through this story I found myself thinking two or three more drafts of the script could have made for a tighter, more satisfying story. Or, what is the point of the American actress? We kept hoping she’d be the murder victim, but no such luck.

But let’s not leave on a sour note. The lead is a charmer without knowing it, and that almost doubles the charm as she charges through social convention, leaving apologies scattered in her wake even as the murder victim looks more and more like a Nazi. Two characters who start out with a classic spitting nails at each other relationship, and who I was convinced wouldn’t change, ended up building some chemistry in quite a natural way that enhanced the story. And the sets or CGI or on location is gorgeous – if too clean, as my Arts Editor pointed out.

If there’s a third installment, will I watch it? Probably. Will I expect great things?

No. The scripts are too lazy.

If I were Yahweh I’d be really embarrassed if Megyn Kelly, former Fox News host, claimed to be Christian:

In December 2025, social media users widely shared a clip of Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host, talking on a podcast about a reported strike by the U.S. military on an alleged drug boat. One post on X (archived) said:

Megyn Kelly on alleged war crimes: “I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like [President Donald] Trump and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”

Or maybe she’s playing to the audience. Probably happened all the time in societies in their disintegrative phase as people put social position over and above being good.

The Democrats continue to pile up surprises, and the goats are GOP is running scared. The news is courtesy conservative pundit Erick Erickson, who can’t seem to figure out he’s allied with fourth-raters, wealth idolators and prosperity church cult members: Democrats won a special election in Georgia’s District 121 to the Georgia House of Representatives.

A year ago, Republican Marcus Wiedower won the seat with a margin of 22.2 points, beating Democrat Eric Gisler. He resigned in October 25th for a “business opportunity,” and so a special election was called. Mr Gisler went for another bite of the apple, and this time he beat Mack Guest IV, by 1.8 points – although comparing actual vote counts, Gisler received only 5,873 votes in winning the special election, compared to 12,567 in losing the general election. It wasn’t a popular affair.

Still, Mr Guest, in his first run for office, suffered a bigger slide in votes for the Republicans. He may simply be a bad politico.

But Erickson is reading this as a harbinger of disaster:

Republicans are simply not showing up.

Now, we can all go through the litany of excuses both sides use in these special elections. But the pattern is consistent from Mississippi to Miami to Georgia to New York — Republicans are not motivated to show up.

And why should they be?

On the day the Justice Department arrested several men for trying to smuggle NVIDIA chips into China, the President announced the United States would permit NVIDIA to sell their advanced graphics processing units to China. The United States, by most estimates, right now has a compute advantage over China of 32 to 1. Giving China these chips will reduce the advantage to 1.3 to 1.

And a few other plaints that can be plausibly traced to the President’s avaricious nature. A candidate-cum-President of whom he ignored his chronic mendacity. I don’t have a lot of sympathy, except that I live here, too, and treachery to the Chinese will hurt me as well.

The 2026 election, now sitting on a doorstep near you, should be quite interesting – whether or not it’s held.

Stand-up comic. How an AI stands up, I don’t know. And it certainly can’t be metaphorical, right, because of the context? Well, maybe.

Anyways, back on point:

i asked chat gpt to fact check an article for me

— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) 2025-12-08T21:33:20.280Z

Ya gotta love that tone of disbelief.

Geologists divide time into eras, and anthropologists divide human history into rough segments as well. American historians should do the same, with the time of the Cold War known as the Era of (Desired) Competency, and the collapse of the Soviet Union marking the transition to the Era of (Amateur) Personality, the time when social influencers, from President Trump on downward, based on little more than flapping their gums, had an outsized influence on American society and politics.

Can we return to Competency? Stay tuned.

Readers may or may not have noticed that Netflix is acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery for …

The cash and stock transaction is valued at $27.75 per WBD share (subject to a collar as detailed below), with a total enterprise value of approximately $82.7 billion (equity value of $72.0 billion). The transaction is expected to close after the previously announced separation of WBD’s Global Networks division, Discovery Global, into a new publicly-traded company, which is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026.

The numbers involved are a bit eye-watering, but otherwise it’s just the usual business maneuvering that goes on everyday.

And then this comes along:

Paramount Skydance (PSKY) announced on Monday a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in an all-cash deal worth $30 per share, or roughly $108.4 billion, as the company moves to top Netflix’s (NFLX) deal struck last week to acquire the storied studio. [yahoo!finance]

The CEOs involved are always important, but now it’s a step up in this case because …

The tentative deal between Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix, agreed to by the boards of both companies, has yet to receive approval under the federal government’s antitrust review process, where success is far from guaranteed.

My bold. And who runs intruder Skydance Paramount?

David Ellison (born January 9, 1983) is the son of Oracle Corporation co-founder Larry Ellison, a centibillionaire. He is an American film producer serving as chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Paramount Skydance since August 2025. [Wikipedia]

And Larry Ellison is fabulously rich and famously ruthless.

I shan’t be surprised to hear that Skydance wins the day by, effectively, bribing the Administration to give them a pass on an acquisition, while denying Netflix permission for same. Yes, Ellison makes Trump look poor, but it’s also not a coincidence that Netflix is representative of change, a virtual icon of streaming of entertainment, while Paramount is closer to being Old Guard – and thus more likely to be closer to the President’s heart. Although Ellison didn’t make his money in movies, but in database technology. A small contradiction there.

Or you can just call it mercantilism and be done with it.

In any case, it’ll be shrill corruption, and I expect it to occur. I wonder how the bribe will be handled, and how the GOP will justify it. Sausage making at its best.

I’ve meditated on the proposition that, as generations pass, adults are fulfilling the responsibility to raise children to be adults less and less effectively. Various societies used to have tests, implicit or explicit, to pass into adulthood, and perhaps there are still some; I’m not an anthropologist.

But certainly not here in the States, outside of some sects.

Such tests are designed to impress upon the candidate the attitudes considered proper to a successful society. Whether they are appropriate and successful, again, I cannot say. But Erick Erickson’s observations of both left and right actually strike a bell for me:

The Biden Administration was overrun with white upper-income progressives from the non-profit world who’d never had a real job and could not relate to the real world.

The Trump Administration is overrun with the kids from wealthy white elites who live their lives online and have concluded that Twitter is real life because that’s where they spend their time.

The Biden Administration got radicalized by the white guilt of progressives. The Trump Administration got radicalized by an online horde of white kids who have convinced themselves that if it is buzzing on Twitter it must be real.

The elites and the experts deserve a lot of blame for people distrusting them, disregarding them, and discrediting them. But we’ve traded experts trained in a field of study for experts who learned everything they know from Twitter. We’ve gone from the elite of Harvard Yard to repeat residents of a Holiday Inn Express.

It does seem that way, doesn’t it? And Twitter, et al, have imparted important information to the extremists: They are not alone, and here’s more conspiracy theories that must be true, because they’ve been published.

As observed by many pundits, social media is not a communications medium for which we’ve evolved. Of course, that’s true of many mediums, but the lack of negative feedback, which discourages lying, hyperbole, and malice, even with primordial predecessors such as the old Coast to Coast radio program, and it being available 24 hours a day, may constitute a metaphorical further distance from normality than seen before.

And so we become burdened with arrogant young know-it-alls who only know social media. In my surlier moments I suppose I should add Just Like Me.

It’s something to think about, although I can’t imagine how to correct it. From what I read it seems the Ivy League colleges are on the edge of becoming little more than cesspits of autocratic confirmation bias vortices with way too much money to die sooner rather than later.

But we shall see.

We saw The Murder on the Links at Theater in the Round tonight. To be brief, we enjoyed it, but won’t remember it tomorrow – it’s not captivating. The fact that the murder happens on a golf course is more or less irrelevant; maybe Murder With Competing Theories would have been better.

But a comprehensible plot, a few fun twists, and accents that weren’t the worst in the world meant it was all OK.

I think this Axios article may give too much credit to the masters of MAGA:

“Double down”: Trump’s base sees ultra-MAGA as answer to GOP stumbles

Confronted with a growing string of GOP underperformances in off-year elections, key pro-Trump activists see more MAGA — not less — as the only solution.

Why it matters: The reaction suggests a movement uninterested in grappling with the limits of its appeal — a departure from the panicked introspection both parties have traditionally undergone after off-year disappointments.

Two observations:

1. True believers have the arrogance to believe themselves in possession of absolute truth, and consequently compromise is evil. This pushes MAGA leaders, and some of the base, into blaming past failures on insufficient purity – a sure path to Hell, for those of us with a religious bent.
2. The leaders of MAGA have been, for the most part, extreme figures excluded from real power & prestige until their entry into MAGA. If MAGA moves towards more acceptable positions, they lost power. I don’t seem them permitting such an attack on their position – they’ll gamble they can get enough of the country to accept them. What do they personally have to lose? Very little. Sure, they might still lose their power if they gamble on moving the country, but the alternative of becoming more reasonable puts their positions at risk.

These two thoughts will better describe how the MAGA leadership will careen into a flaming abyss of terminal obscurity.

[h/t Daily Kos‘ Greg Dworkin, from whom I grabbed this as I don’t care to give Axios my email address.]

I may have said the left was disappointed to lose the TN-07 special election on Tuesday, but right wing pundit Erick Erickson, on deeper analysis, appears to be horrified at the implications of a mere 8 point victory margin:

It is also fair to say that in a district that Trump won by twenty-two points just over 12 months ago, the Republican should not have won by less than ten points with turnout at roughly 2022 levels.

If we get to the midterms and every district shifts the way TN-07 did last night, the Democrats would pick up around 43 seats. Every single county in the district shifted left, some more than others.

Much like the Democrats, it doesn’t appear to have crossed Erickson’s mind to recommend Party reform, like, get rid of Trump and all his minions, adherents, and admirers, and get back to responsible governance. Yes, that might gut the Party, but moderate Republicans, who perhaps Erickson despises as he’s a purist with no skin in the game, should then return – although not in time for 2026 elections.

Speaking of the Democrats, will they reform before 2026? I have no special insights, but there’s precious little evidence that they’re in the process of recognizing their blunders and expelling those who blundered, especially out of self-interest.

I expect 2026 will be an exhibition of candidates who think the world operates one way and will fail to understand when the world turns unexpectedly and bites their hand off.

Underbus:

Verb used to describe the act of “throwing someone under the bus” or otherwise admitting someone’s wrongdoing for them.

• My sister was in trouble with my mom, so she underbussed me for something I did last week, and got herself off the hook.
• An underbusser is a grown tattletale. [Urban Dictionary]

Noted in “December 1, 2025,” Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American:

But Leavitt was careful to distance both the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from the order. When asked by a reporter, “Does the administration deny that that second strike happened, or did it happen and the administration denies that Secretary Hegseth gave the order?” she said: “The latter is true.” She attributed the orders of September 2 to Admiral Bradley, appearing to be setting him up for underbussing.

The usage appears to be subtly incompatible with the definition, but then is Urban Dictionary definitive? Merriam-Webster notes:

The left was disappointed yesterday, as Republican Matt Van Epps beat Democrat Aftyn Behn in the special election in the Seventh District of Tennessee. The victory margin was roughly 8 points, or 15,000 votes. While this is progress, as the previous election was won by the Republican by 22 points, it’s also true that special elections are not a great reflection of the general mood of the electorate.

That makes analysis difficult unless the analyst is on the ground in the district, and I am not. That Emerson College missed by 6 points (their prediction was 48%-46%) is disappointing and suggests they need to work on their adjustments methodology.

Speaker Johnson can stop sweating, now. If the weakest Speaker ever can stop sweating, period.

A few days ago Erick Erickson published a missive full of dismay. Here’s a sample:

While all of this was going on, President Trump was on social media calling for the arrest of Joe Biden and other assorted tirades.

There is clearly something off now about the Administration, and the President seems to be unleashing his frustration by tweet. The problem is that his various and assorted tweets do nothing about the cost of living. In fact, he is still dogmatically convinced that tariffs are making everything better.

One of the President’s posts again suggests tariffs could be a replacement for the income tax. But we know how much income taxes bring in, and we know how much tariffs bring in. The latter barely makes a dent in the budget. Also, if they are bringing in as much as the President says, that burden falls on Americans, not foreigners.

This tree had to be taken down his fall. We’ll miss it.

To his credit, Erickson’s expressed doubt concerning tariffs working as claimed from the get-go – but didn’t connect it to the essential extremism and amateurism, and its consequent dystopia, if I may hyperbolize slightly, of the President. This, of course, is because Erickson’s an admitted extremist himself, a purist, if you will.

But now he’s facing what’s been apparent to many observers for a while, and that’s extremism doesn’t actually work. Left or right, all the various extremist ideologies are not moored to reality, and the arrogance of trying to impose ideology, whether it’s concerning abortion, the gold standard, isolationism, or your favorite bugaboo, on reality is a guarantee of failure.

At issue is the simple fact that our perceptions of reality, for all that it’s critical to our survival, is actually quite limited. We can’t see down in microscopic realm, our sense of change over time is quite dubious, and, to stretch a point, when our philosophy fails, then for answers we pretend we know the mind of some metaphysical entity for which we have no evidence.

Erickson’s post tries to conceal some of his concern behind assertions that President Trump can still turn it around, but, truly, I suspect he’s really wondering if it’s time to call for Trump’s resignation and putting up with the cipher of J. D. Vance. This is symptomatic of the conundrum facing conservative voters. Do you go with the loony amateurs on the right, or the arrogant loons on the left?

Tough choice.