The POTUS was tweeting again, as usual from his personal perch on the world wide web, a well known, titular source of truthful pronouncements

Not noted in the caption is what the patient is afflicted with. I thought about that for a second and then – head slap – he’s sick with TDS, of course!

Now, can you even imagine if some rando blogger on the Internet, virtually unknown, had posted this AI-slop as a snarky way to slander Christians? Blasphemy! The POTUS does it and he earns thousands of likes. What’s up with that

A deficit of trust exists in this country, between its citizens and their government institutions. It seems to me, and others I listen to as well

Each of us is born into an indifferent world. Give him a name, feed and protect him, get him a basic education, grow him up into an adult, nudge him to be productive, obey the laws of the land, then send him off and wish him good fortune. Copy/paste the next one in the bassinet. That is as much good will as we might reasonably expect a stranger to extend to a newborn in this world. This is because care for a new person’s well being falls off roughly in proportion to genetic distance from the parents. It is a simple fact of the human condition that beyond grandparents, possibly aunts and uncles as well, every newborn begins life in a world populated by indifferent strangers. Care is a finite resource, nobody possesses a bottomless well of it. Providing care for those in your genetic orbit moves your needle closer to empty, and one hopes one’s tank doesn’t run dry before the kids learn to care for themselves

A second fact of the human condition: no one of us can, in a way that ensures a durable outcome, care for all the world’s children. One can say she cares about a stranger’s well being, but the mere expression of caring about something is not equivalent to the action of caring for something. Some of the most affluent individuals in this world will incorporate to provide resources to strangers, some of whom will be children, sure – drilling deep wells in sub-Saharan Africa to provide clean water for example – but that is a kind of second hand care that I’m not talking about. A parent who reads to her child is evidence of care for the child, purchasing a dairy cow for a family halfway around the world is to care about caring. A person who knits you a cap cares for you; the hallmark birthday card merely says, thinking about you

A third fact of the human condition is the axiomatic if not also alarming truth that by simply being born into this world, the individual has assented to the preexisting social contract

Facts four and five are death and taxes

Facts three through five set you in relation to the government, which doesn’t care for you, or even, really, about you, they just want you to uphold your side of the contract, be productive and pay your fair share of taxes. In return, the government promises to keep you safe. When you’re born, they assign you a nine-digit number to keep track of you. If you never become productive, or stop being productive in old age, there’s something called the safety net. In times of war the government will select some people from the population, those most able to fight, and put them in harm’s way, reducing their individual safety, in order to keep the rest of the population overall safe. So they say anyway

Over many years, surely as long as I’ve been alive, we TheAmericanPeople have been endlessly reminded by the president that keeping us safe is his highest charge. Good day, citizens of America, presidents have always said. I will work tirelessly to keep you safe, that is my responsibility, your safety is my highest cause, no more beyond. Most often we hear this spoken during auspicious ceremonial speeches, like on inauguration day, or during solemn conversations with the country with the president seated in a high-back chair, aside a stone hearth, legs comfortably crossed, gentle flames lapping and embers crackling. Only the most cynical citizen or ideological anarchist would push back on this, the president’s oath

Somewhere along the way, though, trust in the government was broken. Certain intellectuals in society today believe this represents the largest existential crisis the country has encountered in modern times. Others are more sanguine, and more of the mind that this, too, shall pass. I’m not sure where I come down on this

From time to time, as noted earlier, certain AmericanPeople are going to have to be made unsafe to keep the rest safe. In doing so, some of these individuals will die while fighting to keep others safe, or return home wishing they had, or enter a lifelong battle with a constellation of incurable mental health disorders, maybe treatable with psychedelic drugs, nobody knows for sure

A caring father forbids his young daughter from taking a 10:00 PM run in Central Park. The daughter complains: It’s a city park, Dad, open to all, I have a right to run in that park whenever I want, you ought to let me go! Dad sits his daughter down, briefs her on what Aristotle meant in the Nicomachean Ethics by the prudent versus the practical. He adds that his ne plus ultra charge as a father is to protect his family from harm. The most practical way to avoid getting mauled by a bear is to stay out of the bear’s den, he says. You have rights, honey, but the bear has teeth and claws and doesn’t even care about you, or your rights. There are no bears in Central Park, Dad. Sure, he says, but bad actors in this world may take many forms. Dad, maybe if we learned more about bears we could understand why they want to maul us. Timothy Treadwell tried that in Alaska, honey, but the bear killed and ate him anyway, and his girlfriend, too. Maybe there’s a different approach that would work, Dad? I can’t rule it out, he says, but you can’t expect every extant danger to your safety in this world to be rendered benign simply because you come to understand its motivation to harm you. Wouldn’t you agree it is more prudent to run where, and when, you are less likely to encounter bad actors? Dad, no where is 100% safe. Indeed, we live in scary world. All our practical efforts to enjoy a good life are posed with risks to our safety, we ought to prioritize the safety of our values. So far as you and I are concerned, as my daughter you make my life good, by bringing you into this world I committed myself to keep you safe, and it follows you ought to keep yourself safe. Think of it as a kind of contract between us. By the way, back to your question about a different approach, even if you could practically de-fang every bad actor who may do you harm there are new people being added to this world all the time. You’d never get them all and it only takes one. Dad, I see what you’re saying, but isn’t avoiding bad actors the same thing as appeasing them? I don’t think so, honey. Giving in to bad actors, substituting their values for yours, is the ethics of Pacifism. If while out for a run you are accosted by a bad actor, unprovoked, who would do you harm, and you don’t resist, or fight back, that’s pacifism. On the other hand, avoiding the encounter in the first place does not involve the surrender of your values, it’s a prudential approach to protect them

Bravery is often recognized from afar, sometimes conflated with heroism, valor, concepts with no touch point in reality, what philosophers call floating abstractions. Have you noticed how readily a hero dismisses his label? Hell, I’m no hero, I wasn’t brave, I did what I did because I could not do otherwise

In various spiritual traditions pride is seen as a character flaw. They are wrong. Pride is an intentional property you keep to yourself. Nobody else is ever entitled to assign the value of that psychological feature in you. Actions some call brave others will view as shameful. That’s the problem with most moral judgements, people who make them suppose others are the authors of their own thoughts (and actions)

A dog returns to a burning house, licks his owner awake, along with the dog the owner makes it out, avoiding certain death by asphyxiation. No one calls the dog brave. There are no “genes” for bravery, no material basis whatsoever for bravery, not in the dog, and there’s no evidence that 50 million years of brain evolution added the property in the human brain. It’s merely a conceptual salve for the human condition, a metaphysical story we tell ourselves. Worse, is when you become the subject of someone else’s story. Tell your own story

Any world traveler will tell you to act prudently in your adventures to foreign lands. Even the government, in its publication of cautions and alerts to its citizen travelers, knows this. Another way it tries to keep you safe. Regardless of customs and traditions of the people living in those foreign lands, whether you like them or not, for goodness sake be careful, be prudential in your peregrinations, where you go, when you go, who you interact with, etc.

Maybe instead of bravery what we ought to admire about the soldier is his skill? But when the secretary of war is caught humming Onward Christian Soldiers prior to a press briefing no one is surprised, because it does not seem the man is able to understand the world outside his parochial moral framework. Amusingly, a very similar theocratic framework he says is the corrupt basis of America’s enemy du jour, only the deity is different. This is a laddish dry drunk who is a member of a church whose leader has stated on network TV in no uncertain terms that he would like to see the United States become a Christian nation, without any public school option whatsoever, where straight men marry straight women whose role is to submit to the husband and breed more Christians. He was asked: What about citizens who would resist? Well, he said, that will be a problem for the church’s missionaries to solve, wink wink. God works in mysterious ways and all that. And now, more recently, the vPOTUS has become, in addition to America’s fraud czar, a foreign missionary as well, traveling to Europe to admonish its leaders to steer their countries back to becoming more God-like, the right God, of course, not the one the POTUS mocked in a tweet, wherein he said in order to liberate Iranians from a murderous regime, he will need to annihilate them. Just Don being Don

A deficit of trust exists in this country, between its citizens and their government institutions

Humor, and its edgy cousin, ridicule, have had an important role in human discourse since, I suppose, the dawn of language, roughly one hundred thousand years ago. Five hundred years before Jesus arrived on earth the Greeks used ridicule in burlesque plays as a way to criticize Athenian war policies. In Medieval societies, satire was widely used by certain elites to shame public figures who acted dishonorably. Sound familiar? During the Enlightenment, possibly because humans began to take themselves too seriously, ridicule was viewed by some as incivility, even as others continued to defend it saying it was a weapon of truth, a valuable tool in opposition to bigotry and fanaticism. Fast forward to modern times, ridicule is widely acknowledged by bloggers and other mediums of despair as the last refuge for the hopeless. When individual human agency is futile to change, where you refuse to succumb and cheer the cause of your captors, thrust your arm at the sky, hold it rigid there with middle finger taught and laugh out loud, ridiculously loud. If nothing else, it’s the American Way

Uh, Orange One, a Pro Tip for you – Real men don’t buy other men shoes [1]. I mean can you imagine the ignominy, a more cringe-worthy expression of utter emasculation on display by males of the Sycophancy, being seen out and about kowtowing to their Supreme Leader in a pair of ill-fitted Florsheims? That must be quite literally the inverse of feeling Great Again. A good friend emailed me to ask what maga must-have is next – government-issued undergarments, approved by the Orange One himself? Something similar to the Mormon tradition. Quoting my friend directly: “Plenty of room for one’s package and roomy in the hips for women to pump out the next generation.” Brilliant! A nice touch of authenticity would be to custom stitch into the crotch area propitiating slogans like Trump Was Right or America First. And now, for a limited time only, when you pay with trump coin your second pair is free

1. I have, myself, purchased shoes for certain women in my life, but never for a man

The Supreme Leader ordered the killing of an aged Imam. Not surprisingly, the Israelis were in on it too. Epic Fury! I’m curious how many big tuff Warrior Ethos guys it took to come up with that name, or, for that matter, Midnight Hammer. Sounds like the titles of Clancy books. Ordinarily, when a world leader dies, deepest sympathies are effusively extended to the victim country by other world leaders, embassies, dignitaries, and various bureaus of mourning. This time pretty much all you hear is good riddance m’f*cker. Although, if you ask me, it would be a mistake to think nobody is mourning his death

Khamenei was the thirty-seven-year running Imam of Iran, a country of over ninety million people, the vast majority of whom are adherents to a sect of Islam known as Shia, not to be confused with the competing sect of Sunni, widely practiced in other Islamic countries, places like Saudi Arabia, northern Iraq, Egypt and others. About 1.6 Billion people in the world identify as Muslim, 85% Sunni, 15% Shia [1]. In a predominantly Shia country like Iran, the Imam’s role is to be the chief leader of the country’s mosques, the deliverer of sermons, chief authority in all religious education [2], in addition to other lofty roles that have to do with providing religious guidance. Unlike the Sunni variant, so far as I can tell, Shia Islam also regards the Imam, aka the Supreme Leader, as the sinless and inerrant descendant of The Prophet (Muhammad), and as such the infallible interpreter of right and wrong, kind of like how our Supreme Leader views himself. The point I want to make here is that Iran is a country of deeply pious people steeped in Islamic traditions that date back many hundreds of years. Far from separating matters of Church and State, as has been done in many other countries, in Iran the two are, since the 7th century, for all intensive purposes fused together. Not surprisingly then, religious people in Iran want to be free to practice their religion, publicly in full view of others during daily prayers, for example, or privately inside mosques. I understand that there are apps now, especially suited to young Muslims, that one can load on a smartphone and use to provide spiritual guidance and “instructions” for how to pray properly and demonstrate obeisance to Allah. The Imam in Iran is so deeply revered, he is (was), effectively, not only seen as the Supreme Leader, but more importantly, the nation’s Spiritual Leader. This reverence extends beyond the borders of Iran to Shia adherents around the world. Kind of like how our Supreme Leader wants us to believe he is revered around the world. But in the case of Khamenei, despite the unmistakable evidence of cruel despotism directed at his own people, his years-long admonition – Death to the Great Satans in this world! – enjoys a lot more support in the Muslim world than the Satans may want to admit, and thus will likely “complicate” the speedy compliance of their complete and utter surrender to the Greatest Satan. Is what I’m thinking

Meanwhile, the FLOTUS was sent on a new mission to the UN security counsel, where, fresh out of hair and makeup, seated with prestige at a long wooden table fashioned from American Ash, as chief advocate for the betterment of the world’s children, she had whispered in her ear the news that her husband had potentially just committed a war crime by bombing a girl’s school in Midan, Iran, killing the schoolchildren, 7-12 year old girls [3], and also, the whisperer continued, the president wanted you to know that in your absence, Ms FLOTUS, he made the executive decision to finalize the selection of the gold-matched drapes to be hung alongside the floor-to-ceiling windows in the new ballroom of his own design, the likes of which, he wanted us to assure you as well, the world has never seen. Consistent with its modern usage, the FLOTUS, on hearing this news, was described as nonplussed

1. A lot of people don’t know the vast majority of the world’s Muslims live in Asia, not the Middle East
2. Iran has public schools, but all education in those schools is religious based, promoting Islamic theology, beliefs and rules. There is no appetite for anything resembling a secular, objective education. For instance, most (not all) of the Iranian scientific workforce have schooled and trained abroad
3. Along with challenging topics in science, math and literature, the girls are inculcated in religious laws and traditions that will direct their own subjugation as women, reinforced by the chanting of political slogans and simultaneous stretching exercises

Why do I mention whales? Because soon we will be among them. Whale camp is a secret place with a Bortle night sky rating of 2 – 2! The whales will swoon us. Mother and baby. Do whales have eyebrows? We shall see. We hear they come that close. We are packed, prematurely perhaps, and ready to go. Just you wait and see.

Catherine O’Hara has passed. She was the most talented woman working in showbiz the past 40+ years, and if you disagree with me about that, by any measure whatsoever, I will unfriend you for life

Asked for relationship advice, Catherine had this to say

“People always say, ‘Communicate,’ right? ‘Tell them how you’re feeling.’ We do a lot of it with jokes,” she told PEOPLE in 2024 of her marriage. “We’ll make fun of each other instead of yelling at each other. Sarcasm helps!”

Beautiful

Over fifty Nibblets were mailed this year! This marks the seventeenth consecutive year (except 2024) that we (HW & I) have artfully crafted this missive, stuffed it in an envelope and then licked, stamped and mailed it to our many friends and family who, on the evidence of feedback received from them over the years, continue to have a perplexed curiosity in our shared, annual experiences. For me, composing the Nibblet is kind of like that one amusing thing your friends will say only you can do justice to, such that at some mixed party together they cajole you into performing it again and again, and so for their sake you keep it up. Actually, that’s not quite fair; this annual Christmas letter, by now more a New Year’s letter given we seem to be mailing it later and later with each passing year, at least for me (and I suppose HW as well), has become a labor of love. Because let’s be honest, HW and I (and our pup(s)) are as ordinary an American family as there is. So to know that certain people on the mailing list make a point of asking us as early as Q4 each year: “When is my Nibblet arriving this year!” well, it tickles us pink. One year, in fact, an alarmed recipient emailed me to say her Nibblet arrived in her mailbox soaking wet, unreadable, and could she please get a replacement

New friends here invited us to a New Year’s Eve party at their house, for which the ever radiant HW had prepared a fondue to be shared by all, shown here in our house prior to departure, the dipping components packaged and co-mingled in a shallow ceramic dish ready for transport, while the crock pot containing a melange of gooey cheeses was coddled and transported ever so carefully by yours truly. Not so carefully, however, as to prevent the basket inside which the crock pot had been placed from listing a bit during the carry out to the car, causing the glass lid on the pot to shift, enough that a small portion of cheese escaped and found its way onto my pant leg. HW to the rescue: she quickly deployed a Wet Ones from the car’s console and restored my appearance to eye candy worthiness. “Ugh, men.”

Not a lick of pretension or braggadocio was evidenced by any of our fellow partygoers, never mind that many of them, I’m quite certain, had impressive professional back stories to share. Some of the people in attendance we knew from prior interactions in and around the community. Catered food appeared on tables distributed throughout rooms in the house, intermixed with items others had brought (e.g. HW’s fondue), and the drinks were flowing but to a one everybody there was chill and genuinely festive, behaving without airs. I like that. Somebody said to me, Your wife is beautiful. I liked that, too. I rechecked my pant leg, the cheese stain was completely gone

It’s not only Generative AI that tends to sycophancy, and as disturbingly good as it is creating deep fakes, it’s not too shabby at exposing shallow fakes either, if you follow me

Dear Mr. President

I trust you are well, sir

For many years I was not well. You see, at the start of your first term in office, I was diagnosed with early onset TDS. Over time the symptoms became increasingly more severe, to the point where, most recently, certain friends and colleagues have noted concerning changes in my behavior, most notably a feverishly contemptuous tone whenever I spoke and wrote about you. But that has changed, and I must say, rather suddenly, and unexpectedly. Which brings me to the purpose of my letter to you, sir: It regards your recent act of American adventurism in South America. Cynics with nothing better to do than criticize you, sir, have referred to this as another obscene example of American Jingoism, when instead, for me, it has served as a literal wake-up call, an awakening to you, sir, to your character and moral fiber. It’s as if all those years I was battling the symptoms of TDS, I was in a kind of coma, until one day, inexplicably, I sat up in bed, my eyes, which had been shut tight, were suddenly wide open! Many of my erstwhile friends and colleagues are calling this a miracle. Some of them are God-fearing, as I understand you are as well, sir, and so that analogy makes sense to me. What I’m trying to say, sir, is I’m over my TDS, I’m feeling much better now – I am, finally, able to see and think clearly again

Chief among the symptoms of a TDS pathophysiology is a long solar eclipse. Imagine yourself as the Sun, sir, and we here on earth, your subjects, needing your power and force of will, and the dark object that passes between us represents the Leftists and related Garbage. Further, imagine if you will, sir, in the case of the TDS sufferer, unlike the passing moon in an actual solar eclipse, the dark object in the afflicted mind inexplicably halts its orbit; it gets stuck, leaving the mind in the dark. That’s what happens to the TDS sufferer. What I’m trying to say, sir, is something in my mind “restarted” the orbit of that dark object, it has moved out of the way, I no longer hear the voices of your naysayers, to the point where I now feel reborn in your light

You have a gift, it is for certain, sir, reducing to digestible, bite-sized chunks Byzantine foreign policy. Mr President, what I’m getting at is, who knew, prior to Einstein, the relationship between energy – energy! – and mass was linear; indeed, who knew, prior to Jesus of Nazareth, He was the way, the truth and the light. Who knew your second term in office would feel to so many of us like The Second Coming. What I want to say to you, sir, is that I’m out of the dark now, and I love you

Some say, sir, the true measure of a man may be found in the dimension of his humility. I say the mark of a Great man may be found in his readiness to dismiss humility to the dustbin of pointless moral virtues. Men like you, sir, who enter this world with the correct morality already baked in, don’t come along very often. And thank God, we should, sir, that you just keep coming! I nearly suffered a relapse of TDS this morning when I heard the news from some garbage reporter on some garbage news network mocking your appointed Homeland Security warrior, who had concluded that the woman killed in Minneapolis was a terrorist (or worse, a nasty Leftist, as your VP later assured us she was). For a moment there, I teetered on relapse and wondered if the shooting might, in fact, have been a murder. But then – relapse avoided! – I heard you tell the truth, sir. The driver had viciously weaponized her vehicle to run over a federal warrior (who you said was recovering in the hospital – big Phew there, amirite, sir!) who, of course, defending himself and acting as he’d been trained to act, raised his sidearm and point-blankedly shot her three times, dispersing her brains into the back seat of the vehicle. As your duly appointed Secretary of War might say, sometimes in the fog of war it can be hard to see things as they really are, and I get that now

And not to dwell in the past, sir, but that website the Whitehouse put up recently, where the record was set straight on what really happened on Jan 6th, that was a longtime coming. I mean, c’mon, one would have to have their head buried in Leftist agitprop (and/or be afflicted with TDS) to not know by now that a DNA test confirmed the poop deposited that day in Nancy Pelosi’s desk drawer was in fact her own poop! She pooped it herself then claimed the perps did it, as a final, desperate act of a failed smear campaign against you. What I’m trying to say, sir, is I would have pardoned all those overly enthusiastic protesters, too, if I were you and had come to know this truth

Sir, even after the great strides your admin has made this past year to make us all great again (Bravo! btw), too many people, I’m afraid, continue to suffer from TDS. And I heard the Great Oz posit on some new and fresh podcast recently that the likely cause of TDS was a bio-engineered, loss-of-function virus leaked from a Leftist lab. Assuming that’s true, sir – and why wouldn’t we assume it to be true, after all, The Oz is a real doctor – perhaps you can find it in yourself to forgive TDS sufferers, for they know not what they do, sir. Some modern sufferers claim your hands don’t look so good, sir. “Well,” they say, “if the unsightly problem arose from all the hand-shaking the POTUS supposedly does,” as your pretty spokesmodel clearly explained on TV it had, “then the problem should be confined to his right hand,” they said – “gotchya, pretty girl!” Stupid Lefties, they don’t understand your greatness knows no bounds, sir; they should know your many gifts include being ambidextrous, as have been so many other great world leaders (less great than you, sir, but still). Obviously, you can shake with either hand!

World order, I now understand, sir, doesn’t emerge from the collective goodwill or “best practices” of namby-pamby, sissy world leaders. It isn’t something stumbled into. I mean, did the embarrassing failures of negotiators revealed in WikiLeaks mean nothing to the people of this country? (And btw, would you please pardon Assange). No! The new hemispheric order is going to have to be the product of the force of a single man’s will. You are that Man, sir. Have not your most ardent detractors, as I once was, read and understood the parable of John Galt? Their envy of you and your achievements, sir, is masqueraded as contempt for you. Sad!

People used to say the President “runs” the country. Laughable! libertarians chortled. Until you came along. Now even libertarians understand you really do run this soon-to-be-great-again country, sir, and all that prattle about “sovereignty of the individual” is only that. What this country has so badly needed for a very long time is an Übermensch, like you, sir. As a recovering TDS survivor, I get that now

And not only that, evidently, you’ve enough hours left in your day to run another country! And possibly even more (looking at you Greenland nyuk nyuk). Sir, what I want to leave you with is this: If your unequaled prowess as a world leader, combined with the sheer force of your moral will, sticking the landing as it were, hasn’t by now cured the afflicted of their TDS, well, I’m not sure what I can say about that, other than you are their (and my) Dear Leader, sir, not their psychiatrist!

My regards to the first lady, sir

In propitiation,
-Russ