I’m not the first, the tenth, or even the thousandth person to observe that one of the most dispiriting and shocking things about the Trump era is not the fascism, it’s the complicity. Big law, big business, higher ed — all have bent the knee. The most powerful institutions in the country squatted and peed like frightened puppies when Trump raged at them. As Ta-Nehisi Coates said not long ago, of Harvard and Columbia, “Y’all are sitting on $40 billion? And you can’t oppose this man? Either you’re cowards or you’re with him. And if you’re with him, you never believed in the things you were talking about to begin with.”

So when someone doesn’t? It’s pretty great.

Chuck Redd, the jazz drummer/vibes player who refused to play his annual Christmas Eve jam at the Kennedy Center? Hero. Bela Fleck, banjo player? Did the same thing, also a hero. And now comes the union auto worker who heckled Tubby as he toured a Ford plant in Dearborn. He’s been suspended, but my guess is, he’ll be back on the job soon. And he, too, is a hero.

We all know why Trump keeps the ass-lickers around him. Because they let him do whatever he wants, and because they spend every moment in his presence telling him how great he is. There’s a reason the Roman emperors had a slave whispering in their ear during their triumphs, telling them the mob is fickle and they are but men made of flesh and blood like everybody else. Blessed be the truth-tellers, for they will come out of this era with their dignity intact.

Unlike, say, Tim Cook.

Meanwhile, I texted a friend in Minneapolis and asked if things are as bad there as they seem. His reply:

Yes. I have a little Catholic school on the next block. Now a lot of Latino kids. Families line up to pick them up in the afternoon. There haven’t been any cars for days. (His son’s) friend got arrested at a protest. ICE detains you and holds you for 10-12 hours then kicks you out. No paperwork. No charges. (Son) works at a restaurant doing double shifts because ICE is patrolling around the homes of Hispanic coworkers. Can’t drive down the street without them on patrol. A woman yesterday was trying to get to a doctor appt. ICE broke her window, cut her seatbelt and dragged her out of her car. Last night Hannity ran a video of it as an example of anti ICE protesters trying to hit agents.

I’ll leave you with that.

Today — Sunday — feels like it’s going to be a good one. I started it with a bowl of whole-grain, steel-cut oatmeal, just to, y’know, piss off Croaky.

Also, I’m going to swim in 90 minutes and need the carbs.

One of my Facebook group check-ins is with Belle Isle Photography, a group for guess-what. It’s overfull of the bald eagles that have been nesting there for a while, but every so often you get a banger like this, by Terry McNamara:

Notice where the predators started the feast: In the back, where the flava lives.

In keeping with Det. Dale Cooper’s advice in “Twin Peaks,” one way I’m trying to cope with winter this year is giving myself a little treat once in a while, and on Saturday we took a drive up to the Anchor Bay region of the Lake St. Clair flats, and crossed the water on the car ferry to Harsen’s Island, a popular spot for summer cottages less than an hour’s drive away. Even allowing for it being midwinter here, I wasn’t impressed. As I’ve said before, Lake St. Clair makes more sense as a river delta than a lake, and the area around it is naturally quite swampy. (One street in Grosse Pointe is called Grand Marais, i.e. large swamp.) So the areas that don’t have cottages on them are mainly taken over by phragmites, a.k.a. the common reed. Acres and acres of them, so driving around and through the island mainly looks like this:

Every spring, a column of smoke visible for miles rises in the northeast, as the annual Burning of the Phragmites takes place on Harsen’s and adjacent Walpole Island.

Then we jaunted up to Marine City, and had a nice fishy lunch at a seafood place on the river. Perch for me, walleye for Alan. Then it started to snow, so home we headed.

I know, I know — I should have been at a demonstration opposing ICE, but I just couldn’t. Tubby is coming to town on Tuesday, to address the Economic Club, and I’ll go to that one. I should make a sign: EVERYBODY IS LAUGHING AT YOU. Maybe. There’s time.

I can’t even offer any bloggage today, because I feel like I’ve reached my limit of bad news for a while, and I have to turn away from the despair, if only for a while. I’m cleaning closets today. I last went through the one I’m neck-deep in now maybe…four years ago. And I’m finding all the stuff I couldn’t part with then, and am equally loathe to part with now. The English Struwwelpeter? Can’t let that go, even if it is preserved in Project Gutenberg. The subtitle is “merry stories and funny pictures,” and everything you need to know about Germans is contained in the fact they consider a virtual horror movie of terrible things happening to children merry and funny. Here’s a short one, to give you an idea:

One day Mamma said “Conrad dear,
I must go out and leave you here.
But mind now, Conrad, what I say,
Don’t suck your thumb while I’m away.
The great tall tailor always comes
To little boys who suck their thumbs;
And ere they dream what he’s about,
He takes his great sharp scissors out,
And cuts their thumbs clean off—and then,
You know, they never grow again.”

Mamma had scarcely turned her back,
The thumb was in, Alack! Alack!

The door flew open, in he ran,
The great, long, red-legged scissor-man.
Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come
And caught out little Suck-a-Thumb.
Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;
And Conrad cries out “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast,
That both his thumbs are off at last.

Mamma comes home: there Conrad stands,
And looks quite sad, and shows his hands;
“Ah!” said Mamma, “I knew he’d come
To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb.”

Imagine what they did for masturbators.

There’s also a volume of my late great-aunt’s teaching material, poems she would read to her students. The ink is so faded it’s barely readable, but it’s part of our family’s history and I will lug it through the next few years.

Back to it. Happy week ahead, all.

For years, gun nuts — er, enthusiasts — have told us they need all the weapons they own because an out-of-control tyrannical government might need to be put down, so the people could take it back.

Well. Here we are. And to judge from MAGA, they’re all perfectly happy to live in a police state.

Where are the people who spoke out so passionately against jackbooted thugs? Now they tell you to DO AS THE OFFICER SAYS, IMMEDIATELY, if you don’t want to get shot in the head. I ask you.

At least the so-called MSM has found a little bit of spirit. Both the NYT and WP have published detailed video analyses that clearly show the administration and its toadies are lying about what happened in Minneapolis Wednesday morning. And the Star-Tribune, the local paper, published the name of the gunman. Jonathan Ross.

Michelle Goldberg, in the NYT:

Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”

Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”

Yep. Oh well. More will be revealed.

But while we’re on the subject of Things That Are Infuriating, why is Elon Musk not chased through the streets by a raging mob? He should be:

Grok, the chatbot run by the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) is generating nonconsensual pornographic images of women with their clothes removed and wearing bikinis with swastikas on them.

This follows a recent wave of criticism directed against X for Grok’s weak moderation policies, which allow users to ask Grok to “strip” clothes from pictures of women, including minors.

Users of X can reply to a picture of someone, tag Grok, and write “put a swastika bikini on her” or a similar prompt. Grok will then reply with an image of that person wearing no clothes other than a swastika bikini.

Multiple accounts by women who’ve suffered this indicate that Grok, the chatbot, says “I’m sorry this happened to you without your consent” and then…does nothing. This is my shocked face: 🙄

Finally, Eric Zorn wrote a lovely tribute to his father, who died earlier this week:

My world is smaller and sadder than it was a week ago, but larger and more joyous for having had him as a father.

I have also heard from scores of readers of the Picayune Sentinel empathically relating to my loss and welcoming me “to the club that no one wants to join.”

Nearly all my friends are already in that club, having experienced the loss of at least one parent, if not a sibling, spouse or child. I’m conscious of wanting to share my experience here without suggesting that mine is in any way sadder or more deserving of attention than the experiences most of you have had and hopefully all of you will.

By hopefully, I mean that death will come to your family in the appropriate order — parents preceding their children in death, the elder preceding the younger. And not too soon.

Amen.

Now the weekend is nearly here. I’m planning an outing, destination unknown. Hope yours is great.

A friend sent along a weird story from my alma mater the other day. (Not the usual alma mater, which no longer exists, but my first alma mater, the Columbus Dispatch.) It’s about the spread of evangelical Christianity among the Ohio State football team. The top:

Like the Great Awakenings of years gone by, a religious revival is emanating from Ohio State’s campus.

The mouthpieces of revival aren’t buttoned-up pastors yelling about fire and brimstone. And they aren’t speaking under tents or at church pulpits.

They are Ohio State football players. Often, their platform is on the field and on social media. And it stays the same, even when they falter on the field, as they did in the College Football Playoff. Their message?

“JESUS WON.”

Ai-yi-yi. This is not a sports story. It’s not even really a religion story, or rather, it’s a religion story with quotes like this:

“It was the most surreal feeling. The second I hit the water and came back up, I felt weightless. Like the feeling of all the burdens on me that felt like they were physically weighing me down were taken away in that just outward profession of my faith,” he said.

And this:

“What has taken place in my life and the lives of other people on this team — and I know I’m here to talk about football — but it’s a true testament of the Lord that I serve.”

Is this journalism or a tent revival? I was encouraged to check out the byline’s short bio on the website, and learned the writer’s beat: “Kindness/Religion Reporter.” What’s more, “She is currently supported by the Center for HumanKindness at The Columbus Foundation.” Say what?

(I should mention, these fellowship-funded reporting jobs are pretty common, usually so that a small-but-poor news outlet can have a reporter with a dedicated beat like criminal justice, the environment, health care, etc. But I’ve never heard of one dedicated to…kindness.)

But to be sure, the Center for HumanKindness, one word, exists. Mission statement:

The Center for HumanKindness is on a mission to inspire acts of kindness and strengthen social connections in our community. Every kind act—big or small, seen or unseen—makes a positive difference for individuals and the broader community.

As nasty as I can be, I am often a very kind person. Please, thank you, big tipper, give a sandwich to the hobo, help a stranger who slips on the ice, all that. But my nasty side says I am sick of Be Kind bumper stickers, the dumb Day of Kindness social-media static, all of it. In Nance’s world, the Center for HumanKindness would be called the Don’t Be An Asshole Center.

Because all this Be Kind propaganda comes at a time when we are being absolutely manhandled by people for whom “unkind” is the mildest possible description. This doesn’t feel like a time to respond with kindness, but rather, with a right cross to the nose, a kick to the ribs and a HOW DO YOU FEEL NOOOOOW, STEPHEN MILLER. At some point, “be kind” starts to feel like wallpaper, like peace signs in the ’60s.

Oh well. At least the day got off to a good start:

That’s for Bob (not Greene), a swimmer who appreciates a fresh workout. And the country playlist was perfect for this morning. One of the second-hour guys ambled out from the locker room and said, “So this is why Charlie was singing ‘Jambalaya’ in the shower.”

Time to clean a bathroom and feel productive. My closet-cleaning is way behind schedule.

One goes to bed on a quiet-ish Friday night, one wakes up on Saturday morning to discover that even though we are observing Dry January, somehow overnight, we acquired Venezuela. Like we’d drunk-ordered it from a catalog.

What was worse was running my usual Saturday errands, turning on WDET where they were carrying the presser live, and hearing the commander-in-chief rambling on about crime in Washington. Seriously, he sounded way more senile than Biden ever did. Then the baton was passed to Pete Hegseth, and he went on in the same vein, heaping hosannas on Tubby and boasting about the “lethality” of our military. He loves that word, lethality. I reflected that I’m often contemptuous of these people, often exasperated, often angry, but on Saturday? I was fearful. For all of us.

Because Cuba is next, I fear.

I really don’t have anything to say about this, because it would come out in all caps and no one wants that. We are a nation led by idiots, fools, toadies and [insert a few more insulting words here]. And honestly, what’s the point? We all know where we stand, and that the only power we have is to work and vote against it. So let’s do it.

As for the others, as Hegseth likes to say, they have fucked around, and they will find out.

How was your weekend? I spent Sunday getting Christmas out of the house, and as always, it feels like I have another room in my house now. Time to settle into 2026 and make a difference.

And this update:

It didn’t take long, did it?

The other day I scrolled past this video on some social network. It’s from the NYPost, and if you don’t have the interest in clicking, it depicts Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Bezos partying in St. Barth’s. The cutline describes them as being at “celebrity hotspot” Nikki Beach, and sure enough, you can see them sitting in a booth as a howling DJ narrates a birthday parade of the usual crap — sparklers in a big bottle of something, presumably champagne, someone carrying a sign, etc. Mrs. B stands up on her seat and shakes her hips. Mr. B smiles broadly. What a good time they seem to be having.

The Bezoses were not alone in the Caribbean. There are apps that show the position of every vessel with a transponder, and apparently a bunch of billionaires and their yachts were spending New Year’s in St. Barth’s. So the Bezos were with their people. People who understand them, people who know their struggles, people who get them, because they’re the same.

And they spend their time at clubs where they stick sparklers into bottles of champagne. Honestly, I’d drown myself. Just go right over the rail into the warm Caribbean, hope an outgoing tide would carry me away.

I had my club years, don’t get me wrong. I remember yelling over the music, dancing, having fun. But — and this is key — it was over by my…27th birthday. I wasn’t 61 (as Bezos, aka Baldilocks, is) or 56 (as Lauren Sanchez, aka Beelzeboobs, is). Those two nicknames, which are perfect, are not mine, but I found them online and will use them forevermore.

Anyway, this observation dovetailed with something I read about the various photos included in the Epstein photo dump. Such ghastly rooms, where so much terrible stuff happened. No warmth, just weirdness. All that money and they can’t even hire an interior decorator?

How have we spent the last 50 years venerating the rich when they live like this? I ask you.

Onward. I swear, I keep clicking Unsubscribe on Semafor emails, but for some reason I keep getting it. In a recent issue, asking “what media leaders got wrong in 2025,” I read this, by Ryan Broderick:

This might be slightly premature to say, but I think the death of Charlie Kirk — and Trump World’s subsequent forced national observance of grief — is having the opposite effect of what I initially thought. If you had asked me in September what would happen, I would have said that Kirk’s murder was the American Reichstag fire, the moment the Trump administration and its great and powerful cyber army would finally conquer the information landscape and complete their authoritarian crackdown on free speech.

And a bit of that happened, sure, there was harassment, and doxxing, and people lost their jobs for insensitive posts about Kirk. But it didn’t last. Only a few months later, there is no bigger joke on the internet than Charlie Kirk. Every feed is full of Kirkified slop and AI brainrot mercilessly making fun of MAGA’s martyred influencer. The tail of history is long and these things always evolve, but, as it stands currently, Kirk is the Harambe of the 2020s and MAGA has never felt more cringe, old, and worst of all, boring.

Ain’t that the truth. And you know why? The widow Kirk. Everybody grieves differently, but when you’re taking the stage maybe a month after the assassination of your husband, wearing skin-tight leather pants, enough makeup to shame Tammy Faye and with pyrotechnics announcing your entrance, even true believers are going to be put off and perhaps ask, “Who are these freaks?”

Finally, in the ritual of closing the 2025 planners and starting the 2026 versions, I found the list of books I read last year. Nineteen, well under my goal of 25, but much of my fall was spent reading for the writing class I took, so: oh well.

That’s what fresh slates are for. Full speed ahead, and have a good weekend.

I was thinking earlier today about that glorious run we had in the late ’80s, when one money-grubbing televangelist after another was going down in flames. Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were the biggies, but they were big enough to deflate the entire grift, and that was enough. Jeff Borden and I toured Heritage USA when he was living in North Carolina, and I believe it was after Bakker’s fall, when Jerry Falwell was running it. It was…sad, but served to cement so many of my feelings about both evangelical culture and the American South, which is not my kinda place, except for visits here and there.

There was another great time, during the Clinton impeachment, when Larry Flynt, pornographer and patriot, was taking down the GOP morals squad. Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, all those hypocrites. They didn’t all stay down, but it was great to see them take fire.

We need another run like that. I feel like it must be coming, but seeing yet another of the good guys, Tatiana Schlossberg, go out early? It feels terrible. Why her and not her terrible uncle? He’s the idiot who guzzles raw milk, and she didn’t even get to see her daughter turn two.

Mixed bag at midweek, so let’s go.

Those of you who live in Michigan know we had something called a “bomb cyclone” Sunday and Monday. The U.P. had a full-on blizzard, but downstate it was a little bit of snow, a 40-degree temperature drop from one day to the next and fierce winds that made that 22-degree final temperature feel like knives on the skin. I considered talking Alan into driving south to observe the seiche effect on Lake Erie, but that wind? :::shudder:::

A seiche (French for “wave”) is what happens when a fast-moving weather system pushes lake water so hard that it effectively drains part of the basin. Western Lake Erie was high and dry, while Buffalo saw their water rise by several feet. There was one earlier this year, and the pictures were amazing, but this one was better. Here’s one from a local meteorologist’s Facebook page, credited to Austin Lada. Anyone lose a snowmobile through the ice a few years back?

Those are zebra mussels covering it, by the way. Invasive species, but the war was lost long ago.

The next time this happens, we’re going, dammit.

Some excellent journalism to point you to, also. First, the Chicago Tribune’s long read about “Operation Midway Blitz,” better known by its popular name, ICE Assholes Invade Chicago Because It’s a Blue City. It’s very well-written, with excellent photos, too. I believe that’s a gift link; at least, I hope so.

I still have a few gift links to share before the month ends, so here’s a social-media talker: Robert Draper’s NYT profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m not fooled by her apparent conversion, but there’s some spilled tea here:

For Greene, the decades that (Jeffrey) Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

Hmm. OK.

Finally, you’ve heard the expression “I did not have (astounding news event) on my bingo card,” I’m sure. Well, with the help of bingo-card generators, you too can have one. Here’s mine, from bingobaker.com:

Let’s see how I do. The next time we speak, it’ll be 2026. Remember: All we have is ourselves. Make it count.

An interesting topic came up in a group chat this weekend. Here was the precipitating statement:

Are old-fashioned manners outlawed these days? As a childless uncle and aunt, we’ve always been very generous to our nephews and niece. Now that they’re adults — my niece is studying law but the boys are working — we send them sizable checks. As of today, still no thanks. Hell, we’d settle for a text. All three are good people, yet they seem unaware of basic common courtesies.

It so happens this is something I’ve noticed myself. Wedding gifts in particular don’t seem to be acknowledged. (Not by Deb’s boys, I hasten to reassure her. They wrote lovely thank-you notes.) I bought one a few years back, working from the online registry, and as soon as I hit Purchase a robo-email landed in my inbox: Bob and Sue thank you for your generosity! The hell they do. They checked a box, maybe, on their registry, to enable the robo-reply.

I know I didn’t get a proper thank-you afterward.

And having had a wedding of my own, and knowing how insane they tend to get, I don’t think this is always a hanging offense. Couples get overwhelmed, cards fall off of boxes, shit happens. But with wedding gifts in particular, so often they’re sent directly to the bride’s or couple’s house before the wedding. You want to know they arrived, at least. Porch piracy is a real thing. But it seems weird to ask, although Alan did, once. He got a mumbled yeah I think so and only learned later the marriage didn’t survive very long, and maybe that’s why the thank-you was never sent.

I blame parents for not teaching their children better manners, although given the way Gen Z reacts when asked to do anything involving setting a pen to paper, maybe they did and they were just ignored. As my friend says, just send a text. It’ll probably be enough.

So, the great interregnum of the year is upon us. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas; I know we did. Gifts and food and more food and cocktails at 3 p.m., all of it. I got some wonderful gifts, large and small. I’m currently waiting for what is supposed to be more apocalyptic weather on Sunday, torrents of rain followed by plunging temperatures that may or may not lead to snow, but will surely freeze the puddles left behind. Good thing this is my vacation from my early lifeguarding shifts.

And I’m doing Dry January, again. In fact, I’m looking forward to it, after all the rich food and 3 p.m. cocktails of the past few days. I want to eat vegetables and drink sparkling water, or just plain old water. Settle in for the long haul until spring not feeling like the Goodyear blimp.

Couple quick things: For four days now, I have been unable to load this site — my own site! — on my phone, but it works fine everywhere else. Anyone else having the same problem? I get this error:

J.C. says he blames “the DNS services your phone’s provider is serving your phone with.” I have no idea.

Another housekeeping note: I reloaded the WordPress app on my phone, thinking it would be easier to post more often, with photos and such. Alas, these posts (like yesterday’s) seem to default to closed comments, even though I thought I changed that setting. I’ll keep tinkering, but be advised I’m aware of the problem.

Finally, let’s all take note of the example of Chuck Redd, the jazz musician who cancelled his Christmas Eve jam at the Kennedy Center after the toadies running it added you-know-who’s name to the building. Harvard is buckling. Big Law buckled. Big Media buckled. But this guy didn’t. Let a million Davids bloom. Keep your slingshot handy. We are on our own, we all know that now.

I was at the Eastern Market on Saturday when a Waymo taxi passed me. Someone was behind the wheel, which I take to mean it’s still undergoing testing, but we’ll likely have the driverless vehicles in Detroit before long. I texted a friend that I look forward to setting one on fire during the bloody riots of summer ’26. I was joking, but only kinda. We all know the year ahead will be grim, as the midterms approach and the Trumpers get more desperate. Be like Chuck Redd. Maybe we’ll get through this.

An unlucky pig and parts of many more, as the pork-eating holiday approaches.

I know many of my readers here are older men, and older men are famous for their love of military history, so I’m asking one of you to explain it to me like I’m five: Why would we be investing in a new class of naval battleships, when naval battleships haven’t been relevant to modern warfare since the Second World War? And how many times have we been told the next war will be fought with drones and software? How do battleships play into that?

Seriously, I want to know. This makes no sense to me.

I know I’ve been scarce around here of late, and I will likely be scarce going forward. I’m writing this while watching my kitchen floor dry, and I still have a few things to do before I’m ready for the holiday. So let this be the last one for a while, unless some photos present themselves. I wish every last one of you Merry Christmas or whatever holiday you observe, including Festivus. I do not have a lot of problems with your people, because in fact, you’re the best.

Back later.