Scrolling Blog

Click Once; Scroll for Days

Buy Me a Beer: Just $2 While Supplies Last

Thursday Substack

“These two were the kind of blokes you’d kill to share a pint with. Their letters crackle with wit sharp enough to slice through the fog of our current idiocy.”

Monday Substack

Weather Apps

I consult three weather apps, mostly because I'm a loser, but also because they often don't agree. I've been watching it carefully this year (also the year that I've noticed that they most diverge), and I've concluded:

The Weather Channel app is the best for accuracy, but it loads slowly and malfunctions frequently.
The Accuweather app is best for speed and detailed information (e.g., 15 day forecasts), but it's not quite as accurate as the Weather Channel app.
The weather app that comes pre-loaded with the iPhone is not accurate, but it loads fast and doesn't malfunction. Bonus: its easy-to-find UV index score is nice.

Welcome to Summer

It's been a long Winter and a grueling Spring. Are there any other types of seasons? I guess we'll find out, starting today. I'd be half-tempted to turn this three-day hustle hiatus into a lost weekend, but dang, I have too many good books to read.

Thursday Substack

This is Huge

I might have to reconsider my position on this matter:

Monday Substack

Majeres wants his patients to kill orcs, but he’s begging them to put the blade down more often. If you’re always swinging, everything starts looking like an orc. Every moment is a project, every dream a checklist, every impulse a plan. The left hemisphere never stops scheming, plotting, gaming out the next move. It’s a machine that doesn’t know how to quit.

BYCU

Thursday Substack

Jones’ plan is dirt-simple: hand over a few abandoned parish buildings in Philly, Detroit, or Baltimore to a couple of Benedictine monks. Let them turn those crumbling shells into monasteries, oases where young Catholic couples could live cheap and lean, guided by a 21st-century take on Benedict’s Rule.

San Francisco: Perverse for 150 Years

Monday Substack

I hope to make this a series: two-minute biographies of men and women with robust right hemispheres. Or, to be more precise, "of men and women who appear to have had robust right hemispheres."

I believe every saint could be in this series, but a person doesn't need to be a saint to have a dominant right hemisphere, so this series won't focus on the saints (though a few are already in the queue).

Striving is the sound of your own defeat. Even straining for virtue or goodness is a fool’s errand, a pompous parade of self-aggrandizement. The man who aches to polish his soul is already sneering at what he is.

Thursday Substack

I’d even argue that Montaigne couldn’t have done much more than teach us to unlearn. If he’d started to do anything more constructive, he would’ve cut against everything he was (un-)teaching. In this, he may have been the modern age’s first superfluous man, beating Albert Jay Nock to the skeptic’s modest punch by 400 years.

Monday Substack

I'm talking about more than silence, something more manifest--a presence, a thing with its own existence and merit. Just as the devil is the manifestation of that (otherwise philosophically-correct) notion that evil is merely the absence of being, this thing I'm describing is a presence, a thing with its own existence and merit.

BYCU

Huberman is kinda spearheading the current neo-neo-neo-Prohibitionist crusade against alcohol, which, let’s face it, is crutched by legalized marijuana: “Look at me. I’m sober. More stoned than a groupie at a Grateful Dead concert, but alcohol-free.”

Anyway, Huberman first said an average of one drink a day would rot your skull. I shrugged it off, my Friday-night benders clocking in at five or six drinks, neatly bundled, leaving my inner boozehound unbothered.

Then he tightened the screws: four drinks a week, he declared, unless you’re sweating through workouts or chanting mantras to fend off the poison (which I do, thank you—call it my penance). My liver smirked, unscathed.

But then he later dropped the hammer: two drinks, max, and—get this—any alcohol’s a ticket to ruin. That’s when I dug up this old Mencken quote and read it thirty times, each line a shot of defiance against this joyless, meddling age.

Welcome to May

Few places are prettier than Michigan in May. Tulips, blossoms (pink and white), approximately 100,398.78 hues of green, and crisp blue lakes. Bonus: the mosquitoes aren't bad yet. A wonderful place to be.

Thursday Substack

I've tightened and (hopefully) enlivened a feature essay from a few years ago.

Without Johnson’s Dictionary, Jane Austen’s quips, the Declaration of Independence’s fire, and Shakespeare’s tempests would be Beowulfed to us, almost entirely indecipherable, except to philologists and other masochists.

It's May Day

For the Commies. For the rest of us laborers, it's the Feast Day of St. Joseph the Worker.

Monday Substack

I was so excited by this find on Saturday morning that I worked on this essay on and off all weekend.

that I worked on this essay on and off

BYCU

At some point, "craft" crosses into "art." This normally happens for me around the third drink.

Thursday Substack

Wittgenstein, though, was another story. He was disgusted by the competitive uproar, like he’d just been forced to watch a Harvey Weinstein biopic and needed to scrub his soul with lye.

Amen to This

The Pope of Mercy wasn't the Pope of Peacefulness. I long ago tired of squinting through the mess he loved to create.

My parish's former priest would often guffaw and say he liked to shake things up and make people uncomfortable. I thought then, and think now, "Life's hard enough already. Why do you like making it harder?"

Some people make life easier for others. Some make it harder. You can judge which bucket Pope Francis sat in.

Fradd offers a more compassionate take:

Substack Monday

My apologies for not posting this on Monday. Such are the delays caused by the joyous holiday.

Holy Thursday

"[I]n the agony of Gethsemane the ultimate consequences of our sin had their hour. . . . God permitted his Son to taste the human agony of rejection and plunge towards the abyss. . . Gethsemane was the hour in which Jesus' human heart and mind experienced the ultimate odium of the sin he was to bear as his own . . .". Romano Guardini, The Lord.

Thursday Substack

Monday Substack Post

The left hemisphere craves the predictable, the tidy, the known. It’s why we’ve paved over half the planet and turned our cities into sterile grids of glass and concrete. Unusualness—a stranger’s accent, a wild idea, or just some guy in a tattered coat muttering to himself—throws a wrench in the works. It’s uncertainty, and the left hemisphere hates uncertainty like a cat hates a bath.

Even Better Stuff at The University Bookman!

Outlining Sanity in the Garden, by Eric Scheske.

Good Stuff Over at Substack Notes

Well, that's one man's opinion, anyway.

https://outsidemodernlimits.com/notes

BYCU

Intuition precedes rationality and implicit knowledge precedes explicit (McGilchrist). Beauty leads to truth (Balthasar). Emotion drives moral reasoning (Haidt). Reason is the slave of the passions (Hume).

A few stiff drinks after the work week stifles my rationality, lets me see truth, and makes my reason the happy slave of passion. I don't think that's what the Latinists mean by in vino veritas, but it's close enough for me: It's Friday.

Monday Substack

BYCU

I heard a story about a drunk guy trying to ride a kangaroo home from the bar, but I couldn't find it, so I'm guessing it's an urban legend. While searching for that story, I came across this video. I didn't know kangaroos were dangerous to man or animal. I also know that guy who threw the punch isn't, either. He broke his wrist while throwing the punch and dropped his left.

In a related story about a kangaroo killing a man, the People headline says no one Australia had died in 100 years until a pet kangaroo killed its owner. Pretty astounding.

Kangaroo Kills Man, Blocks Paramedics from Saving His Life in Australia's First Fatality in Nearly 100 Years

Thursday Substack

Sucked into Twitter

I clicked on my Twitter tab so I could navigate to Gmail to contact my IT guy. I got sucked into my Twitter feed. Every time; every freakin' time. There's just so much amusing stuff on social media. It really is the crack cocaine of the digital world.

This gotta be the slowest police chase ever 😭

pic.twitter.com/jIvay28qPB
— Trump Family *PARODY* (@Mai_ASUR) April 1, 2025

Monday Substack

Rationalism or irrationalism, the left hemisphere runs the show either way in the modern world. Left-hemispheric logic sets the goal, and its preferred weapon is rationalism, but it’ll grab any piece of equipment to score. Even the irrational.

A Bookshop in Narnia

One of the most unusual Substack publications. Two Californians flee the Left and move to Narni, Italy, where they open a bookshop in honor of C.S. Lewis, who apparently named "Narnia" after the town. I've just started going through the pages but it looks interesting . . . or it's at least a cool niche.

BYCU

These people oughtta be shot.

The People Who Never Get Hangovers

This New York Times piece says 25% of drinkers don't get hangovers. At all. The bastards! I suppose they also don't lose their hair, gain weight when they eat junk food, or have to repay bank loans. The injustice of it all.

Researchers suspect it's a genetic thing that ties into an enzyme that helps these people metabolize alcohol quickly. Or maybe it's tied to the immune system: the stronger the system, the weaker the hangover.

But the most fascinating possibility of all: it might be tied to stress. "People who are hangover resistant also usually report low levels of anxiety overall, Dr. Stock added, while those who are already stressed or depressed are more likely to suffer hangovers — and bad ones at that."

Stress is increasingly popping up as the leading health risk indicator, but heck, if I could drink all the time without getting a hangover, I'd be pretty relaxed too.

Thursday Substack

One of the Niftiest Health Lists Ever

Even better: the author isn't infatuated with his prose and doesn't expect us to be either. He just gets down on it.

Kuntsler is Optimistic

James Howard Kunstler is the leading curmudgeonly prose writer on the Internet, but the curmudgeon is unbelievably optimistic about Trump's prospect of stopping the lawfare and jailing of the biggest criminals of the Biden era.

Monday Substack

“AI gives us tiny conveniences but takes away our humanity in massive, unseen chunks. The tangible benefits blind us to the intangible costs.

“It's a classic hemispheric head game.

“That literal-minded left hemisphere laps up anything it can tally on a ledger. A perk it can see, it grabs with both mitts. A loss too fuzzy to quantify, it sniffs at and shoves aside . . . until the tab comes due and we’re screwed six ways to Sunday.”

This Trade War Thing Has Now Officially Gotten Out of Hand

On March 13, 2025, Reuters reported that U.S. President Donald Trump threatened a 200% tariff on European alcohol imports like wine and cognac. Link

Better stock up. Reminds me of a W.C. Fields anecdote. After Pearl Harbor, he was seen hauling twelve cases of gin to his apartment. Someone asked him why he bought twelve cases. He replied, "I'm expecting a short war."

Thursday Substack

Filing it shortly before bedtime. Such has been my hectic week, I barely got the Thursday edition published. Please let me know if you see any typos. I had to rush this one a bit.

Elves and Dwarves in the Hemispheres

I previously wrote about elves and orcs vis-a-vis the Hemisphere Hypothesis. Elves have a healthy balance between the hemispheres, with the right firmly in control. Orcs, on the other hand, have no or very little right hemisphere, with the result that they're severe left-hemispherics. This Substack note has me thinking I should add dwarves to the analysis: They have two functioning hemispheres (like elves) but their left hemispheres are unruly (like orcs . . . and like most of us in modernity).

St. Patrick in a Punchy Nutshell

St. Patrick’s a Romano-British kid, snatched in one of those Irish raids that got bolder once the last Roman legions bailed from Britain in 410—like wolves sniffing out a limp flock. He’s hauled off, spends years as a captive, then pulls a Houdini and breaks free. Here’s the kicker: he goes back to Ireland, this time with a Bible and a mission, and turns the place Christian. Fast-forward, and the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes swamp Britain, stomping out the cross and dragging it back to pagan muck. Christianity’s all but a ghost there—until after 600, when Irish monks, fired up by Patrick’s legacy, sail across the Irish Sea and start reconverting the joint. They nail it, too. It’s one of those quirky history boomerangs: Britain sends Patrick to baptize Ireland, Britain goes heathen, then Ireland’s monks bounce back to save Britain’s soul.

Monday Substack

Thursday Substack

It's my birthday. Please give me a gift (I have no shame) and forward this Substack piece to anyone who might enjoy it.

BTW: I suspect this analysis also helps explain why neuroses often don't develop until later in life. It takes years to spin that web of neuroses.

In case you're craving a Ben and Jerry's

Monday, March 10 is National Abortion Provider Appreciation Day(Opens in new window), created to honor Dr. David Gunn, who was murdered by a white supremacist anti-abortion extremist on March 10, 1993. From this tragedy sprang an annual commemoration, where we celebrate the compassionate, courageous abortion care providers around the country who are fighting for reproductive freedom.

But while we celebrate their care, it’s important to recognize that providers’ work is now harder than ever. From increasing legal attacks to even physical violence, abortion care providers are being targeted across the country—and they need our support.

Here are 5 reasons why we need to stand with them on Abortion Provider Appreciation Day—and every day.

https://www.benjerry.com/whats-new/2024/03/stand-with-abortion-providers?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=engage&utm_term=photo&utm_content=stand-with-abortion-providers%20--%203-10

Monday Substack

"The Buddhists probably didn’t even invent mindfulness. It’s more likely one of those notions that flared up like a brushfire across the globe during that wild stretch Charles Taylor dubbed “The Great Disembedding,” circa 500 BC. The Buddha was navel-gazing under his bodhi tree, Lao-Tse was scribbling cryptic one-liners, Jeremiah was raging at Jerusalem’s walls, Pythagoras was getting mystical about geometry—all in the same cosmic heartbeat."

From Whence This Death Wish?

Mapped: European Fertility Rates by Country

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-european-fertility-rates-by-country/

TDE is a Proud Member

BYCU

"Bill James, baseball’s philosopher-analyst, once estimated that 18 of the 25 greatest mangers were alcoholics."

Thursday Column at Substack

“Left hemisphericism is a problem for all modernity, but it’s especially problematical for the young. It makes them cocky, preachy, and ripe for the picking by every sanctimonious cause that oozes dogma like a sweaty chain-gang hero in a Southern prison flick. Maybe a little dirt under the nails, a dose of right-hemisphere redemption, is what they’re starving for.”

Joe Sobran

I second the motion.

Monday Substack

The Return Eudemon

I just returned from a whirlwind trip to the Keys. I enjoyed the entire trip but was underwhelmed by Key Largo and the other keys. Key West, OTOH, was great. I'll write more about it later.

Thursday Substack

81% Want Violent Illegals Deported

I guess that's encouraging, but what goes through the head of that 19%? It's gotta be a self-loathing thing that grows into a hatred of one's own nation. Just graspin' here.

Idealism and Fetishism Go Together

The Nazis were a bunch of perverts, too.

I think it's because the idealist and the pervert both reside in an abstract world of fantasy. Once they get into power, they can flex both . . . and it's not pretty.

Christopher Rufo is Tweeting out the story. Bring a strong stomach.

https://x.com/realchrisrufo

Monday Substack Essay

Give this Catholic Renegade a Little Love

If you want a quick-paced watch that's free, check out "Blood Father" on Amazon Prime. 2016 Mel Gibson. 1 hour; 28 minutes. Pretty intense, with splashes of humor. I would give it a 6.5, but since the director showed such respect for the viewers' time and kept it short (reminds of "Taken"), I give it a 7.3.

Give this Catholic Aggregator a Little Love

He brings it day after day, to little fanfare. The publication deserves better.

Asperger's is a Terrible Thing to Waste

This kid-spawning freak will be known as the greatest man or greatest villain in history. Right now, I strongly lean "man."

BYCU

Check out this hilarious collection of mock pulp fiction covers. Every one of them cracked me up.

Come on. Don't Start with the Bread and Circus Pandering

Every billion dollars saves every American about $3.33. If I've done my math correctly, DOGE would need to shave $1.5 trillion from the budget to equal $5,000 for every American citizen. Of course, only half of Americans are taxpayers, so the necessary shavings to justify this expenditure is probably closer to $750 billion, but still. I think DOGE is still under $10 billion in savings so far. That's great, and I applaud, but come on. It doesn't justify a DOGE dividend like this, especially when you look at the federal debt.

But hey, if they send the checks, I'll cash mine.

Thursday Substack

Condorcet, that starry-eyed prophet of progress, once predicted that civilization would produce 37,000,000 poets like Homer and 37,000,000 philosophers like Newton when the common man's resources were plentiful and his work time limited. Instead, we got 16 seasons of A&E's Hoarders.

Moria Redux

A Collection of Memes

Monday Substack

Kuntsler Friday

The exorcism of the USA just keeps revving up. You can tell by the number of revolutions-per-minute Elizabeth Warren’s head spins while she spews pea soup at the cameras. Who knew what a demon-infested slough USA Management Central was? And yes, I would like some insight as to how humble civil servants like Liz Warren accrue a $12-million fortune . . . and $30-million for Samantha Power (ex-USAID-chief) . . . and more than a $150-million for Nancy Pelosi. Could it be as simple as just good stock-picking? (Is that how they spend their time?)

He later asks, when speculating about who orchestrated the colossal Kafka cinema these past four years, "Who made mental illness aspirational?" Killed me. He kills me every Monday and Friday, and it's all free.

Now in Detroit

A guy to the left of McElroy?

https://www.newsmax.com/us/edward-weisenburger-pope-francis-donald-trump/2025/02/12/id/1198915/

It’s a fine state of affairs in the Bergoglio church! It reminds me of the title of Matt Fradd’s current episode on Pints with Aquinas: “Why would ANYONE want to be Catholic right now?”

I was discussing Pope Francis with a potential Catholic convert. He asked how I could believe in a Church with a guy like that at the helm. I responded, “A guy like that at the helm is why I’m Catholic. You know he wants, with all his heart, to promote heresy, but he’s metaphysically constrained: it’s simply not possible. If even he can’t go heretical, the Church must be true.”

Now at Substack

Antonio Gracias recently said he was shocked during his first days with DOGE to realize that America had gone from a bloated bureaucratic state to a state of near-open thievery by our overlords and their minions. America, he believes, was teetering on the edge of becoming a kleptocracy, but our Tony Stark with a Twitter addiction showed up in the nick of time. His sidekick, Big Balls, then shot the culprit as he was killing his victim.

The Mind Boggles at the Cognitive Dissonance

You cannot form your Conscience in a manner that equates illegal immigrant status with criminality. Was that the Pope's statement?

Monday's Substack Column

Exactly

It's plausible that America was on the cusp of becoming a Latin American kleptocracy.

Newest at Substack

A reader wrote to me this morning, expressing concern that this piece implies that we can remedy Original Sin by putting the right hemisphere back into its master position. That's not what I think. I think we can get closer to our "pre-apple Adam" brains if we put the right hemisphere into the master role, but I'm afraid Original Sin ain't goin' anywhere, no matter what the most ardent Trump optimists believe.

Greenwich Village Falling

The Village had all the ingredients of a perfect urban ecosystem: charming old-world architecture, deep history, and a multiethnic character; affordable rent, a working-class Italian community that resisted rapid gentrification; ample public space (Washington Square Park), and a robust network of platforms for artistic expression. It resisted exploitation, mass demolition, and unchecked gentrification for much of the twentieth century. It had just enough charm and architectural dignity to be appealing, situated in Lower Manhattan, yet it remained a little too violent and working-class to draw the wealthiest mid-century elite.

The Village was rough and beautiful. It was jazz and folk, black and white, gay and straight. A pedestrian walking down MacDougal Street in the early 1960s would hear a cacophony of “strumming, coffee machines, and smatterings of applause” from coffeehouses and clubs. It was a place where a young Ornette Coleman could “dyna[mite] known boundaries,” and young folkies from out of town could enter a “more liberating world” just by knocking on the right door (often that of Village fixture, guitar teacher, and blues singer Dave Van Ronk).

Hollywood Falling?

[T]he film industry is abandoning Hollywood. Huge new production facilities are getting built everywhere except California.

There’s a mad rush to build a huge new studio in Las Vegas.

Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, New Jersey and other states are also aggressively competing for projects.

Just last week Apple TV+ agreed to film more projects in France.

Pressure for more “local content” are coming from all over the world. Netflix recently bragged that it has 40 projects underway in Europe, and may be even more committed to Southeast Asia.

It kinda makes me nostalgically sad, but Hollywood has been a moral and ideological cesspool from the start (though a few early titans tried to keep it ideologically non-toxic). It's hard to muster remorse at the prospect of it fading away and becoming Homelesswood (when I went there in 2019, I was struck by all the riff-raff that crawled around Hollywood's tourism area, and it seems the problem has gotten far, far worse since then).

[Not] BYCU

This has gotta be the most ridiculous marketing scam since the Pet Rock. I doff my hat to the fellows who pulled it off.

Thursday Column at Substack is Up

For some reason, podcast episodes "drop," while columns go up. Oh, those crazy metaphors!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this piece. Please share.

The Michigan Review

I had no idea this rag even existed . . . and it was at UM when I was there. The shame I feel.

Welcome to Number 9

Grandchild IX arrived this morning. Jude Francis Scheske.

And So Mexican-American War II Begins

New at Substack

A new era has dawned: Starting with this short essay, I will write now only for my own entertainment. No conceit is too great or too small: if something doesn't amuse me, I won't include it. It could be the turn of a phrase, it could be an off-color reference, it could be a rant that's over-the-top in its exaggerated prose, it could be an interesting fact. If I find it amusing, it meets my newly-minted publication litmus test.

Last summer, I was talking with one of my former editors who, IMHO, is one of the finest Catholic writers out there. He told me he religiously reads James Howard Kuntsler, primarily for his stunning prose. I've read JHK for years, but since that conversation, I've been reading him religiously as well, and now I've started dissecting his essays to figure out what makes them so amusing. The secret, if I've accurately plumbed the secret of JHK's fevered prose: Never write a dry paragraph like this one. If the paragraph ain't clicking with its author, everyone else is clicking away.

The First Four Days

Censorship, dead. . . Gain of function research, killed. . . CBDCs banned. . . CBP-app for aiding illegal migrants, discontinued. . . border fortified. . . homicidal alien mutts deported. . . World Health Organization, no thanks. . . Paris Climate Accords, fuggeddabowdit. . . DEI, vacated through all of government. . . Green New Deal, scrapped. . . “pride” in mental illness, cancelled. . . Ukraine War, headed for the negotiating table. . . all in four days and so much more coming.

Let's Hope This is Accurate and Davos is Dead

BYCU

From late last month, sorry I'm late:

Bucc-ee's!

http://pic.twitter.com/WJZm110H1t

Southern towns from Texas to Tennessee are attracting beautiful new Buc-ee’s locations, each of which will provide hundreds of entry-level jobs. The upcoming Memphis location is projecting a $2.5 billion economic impact, and the new Mississippi store will draw more visitors annually than Yellowstone. It’s impossible to capture the full majesty of Buc-ee’s on the page, but for the uninitiated, each location is kind of a spectacle: endless gas pumps, shining rows of porcelain urinals, beef jerky walls, kitschy beaver merch, road-tripping families… pure American spirit. Yes, a gas station chain that coastal elites have never heard of is making billions of dollars every year and reshaping middle America.

Merely Getting This Fundamental Legal Issue Resolved Would Help Enormously

Ross is Free

And federal government DEI and the El Paso immigration center are dead. I would hope even his most ardent haters appreciate his unabashed forthrightness, as well as his early follow-through with campaign promises.

His term is early, but wow: The Don ain't screwing around.

Addendum

Steven A. Smith, hardly a Trump fan, apparently appreciates Trump's follow-through:

The Day One Orders

Listed Here by Perplexity AI

The Inauguration Speech was Great

With a few clunkers. Renaming the Gulf?

And it's apparently a priority? Come on! Get Ross Ulbricht out. He said "Day One," but I'm willing to interpret that as "within the first 24 hours." Elon Tweeted this morning (Tuesday) that it's going to happen, though he didn't say when.

First Asian Voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame

Consolation to Detroit Lions Fans

25 Most Affordable Cities: Detroit is #1

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-25-most-affordable-cities-in-america/

From White Guy for Kamala to Removing Tampon Dispensaries from the Men's Room

He started training in the Brazilian grappling martial art form during Covid-19 lockdowns, and by 2023, was medaling in local competitions and boasting a blue belt. In 2024, he acted as an enthusiastic if awkward corner man for a featherweight fighter in UFC 298. The internet memed him, but the league greeted him with open arms, with one fighter climbing the Octagon’s sides to give Zuck a high-five. He called the mixed martial arts community “very welcoming” in a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan this week, his second appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in as many years.

Zuckerberg also invited UFC head Dana White to be on the board of Meta, calling him a “world-class entrepreneur with a strong backbone.”

The Zuckerberg of 2018 would not have publicly praised Trump, as he did this summer, for his reaction to his assassination attempt calling it “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The Zuck of the Covid era wouldn’t have talked to Rogan at all, much less marveled at Mike Tyson’s twenty-inch neck circumference in his prime. Pre-jiu-jitsu Zuckerberg wasn’t bow-hunting wild boar and harvesting meat to teach his children to “understand the circle of life” or saying corporate culture is too neutered in its current state and needs to balance that with more masculine energy and aggression.

It’s hard to think of a subculture that previewed the vibe shift more clearly than MMA — away from censorship and lockdowns, toward more messy freedom and fun. Here’s hoping all the time he’s practiced not getting choked out means fewer submissions in the future.

“Local coffee shops, like taverns in the past, provide a service that the masses desire. Because of coffee’s popularity, coffee shops can draw people together like very few other modern institutions. In my experience, coffee has become the new social lubricant that opens the door for important relationships and discussions. The best place to unite America is not national politics, but local businesses that bring people together.”

"President-elect Donald Trump is preparing an executive order that could reshape U.S. cryptocurrency policy by establishing a Crypto Advisory Council, reviewing existing regulations and legal actions, and proposing a National Bitcoin Reserve. These initiatives aim to foster collaboration between the government and the crypto industry, create a more innovation-friendly regulatory framework, and position the United States as a global leader in digital asset adoption, sparking optimism among market participants and industry stakeholders."

BYCU: Hard Times Looming for Craft Beer?

After two decades of meteoric success, the craft brewing industry has hit an inflection point: More breweries closed than opened last year, the first time that has happened since 2005. . . .

What we’re seeing now is a combination of factors. People’s 10-year leases are coming up, and their rent is going up in a way that’s not sustainable. Beer is a low-margin business. In the 2010s, when people were coming and buying four-packs of hazy I.P.A. for $16, $18, $20 directly from breweries, that was a very lucrative time. But what is happening now is I think people are a little bit tighter with their dollars.

Now you have to make great beer just to have a seat at the table. What else can you do to endear yourself? If you’re a taproom business, you need to think about events. You need to think about what food you’re offering. You think about what nonalcoholic drinks you can have. What does it mean to be a brewery in 2025?

Catholic Missionary Just Released a Fiction Book

I'm only through the first chapter so far, but his brothers tell me that they are genuinely enjoying the story.

Lifetime Mystery Solved

This must be why dogs bury their nose in my crotch. I guess I didn't appreciate that I was emanating paradise down there.

New Page Published at TDE

The Outrage of the LA Fires in Ten Minutes

Just listen to the first part of this interview.

Multiculturalism, DEI, Wokism: These Ivy League Mind Diseases Have Real Consequences

As girls in Great Britain have learned over the past decades. Is Los Angeles learning it, too?

America's Most Livable Cities

Eat some salt with this list. It puts San Francisco at 18, but quite a few of the others (like Ann Arbor, Portland (Maine), and Des Moines) ring true.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-20-most-livable-cities-in-the-u-s/

Brews You Can Use

Drink like a Chicagoan: Drink Jepsson's malört. Jeppson's website says it's a traditional wormwood-based digest and a Chicago drinker's rite of passage.

Ed Zotti writes about trying a Chicago Handshake ("a shot of malört plus an Old Style, a popular beer in Chicago, to serve as flame retardant") recently. He said it wasn't nearly as bad as he feared:

I thought I’d be spitting up blood. I glanced at Charlie, who also seemed unfazed, then at Jess, who’d been watching for adverse reactions. “Like grapefruit and dandelions,” she said.

Imagine my predicament. I’d been expecting to write another crazy-stuff-they-do-in-Chicago story. Now I faced the prospect of having to tell a baffled world that an obscure beverage even locals consider revolting actually has its points.

Well, so be it. In this era of fake news, one need to call ’em like one sees ’em. We ordered another round. I started a fresh page in my notebook.

The initial sensation is deceptive — honeylike, some say, owing to the coating of the tongue, but you can make the case for an oil slick. This erupts into an interval of alcohol-fueled turbulence, like sex during July when the AC is out, and over just as quickly, leaving behind a lingering acrid taste, blotted only partially by the beer.

This last phase figures prominently in descriptions of malört. Grapefruit? I’ll buy that. (My limited dandelion consumption didn’t permit judgment.) What you’re looking at experientially, though, is an extended period of melancholy contemplation. Once that passes — and all things pass — you’re left with a modest glow, fortifying you to step out into a cold night.

Not a priority in Miami Beach, maybe. But — acknowledging that even in Chicago some will argue the point — I can say it works here.

Aside

Drinking essays are consistently funny and stylistically rewarding. From Kingsley Amis to the artists at Modern Drunkard Magazine to Ed Zotti at The Spectator, they're great.

BYCU

Pump.com

That "Tales from the Crypto" essay below is great. Ross Anderson recounts and takes down the miscreants, frauds, and freaks (collectively, "gamblers") who have invaded the crypto market over the past years. His account of Pump.com, where people could launch their own "shitcoin" and then pump it in hopes that morons would buy it, is especially humorous. In their efforts to use Pump.com's livestream feature to pump the price of their shitcoins,

A man threatened to hang himself; another, to shoot up a school; another, to kill his dog. A woman had sex with a dog; a man punched himself repeatedly; another threatened to waterboard a person tied up in the background behind them. The sex shows were relatively tame compared to people streaming themselves playing Russian roulette (thankfully, never getting unlucky). Crypto was supposed to free us from the evils of traditional finance, I remind myself, as I hear of the armed teenager who said he’d kill his entire family with a shotgun unless his coin reaches a market cap of $60,000.

After a few days of chaos, pump.fun turned off the livestreaming feature.

Anderson, btw, isn't anti-crypto. He's just anti-fraud and anti-stupidity. He strikes me as fairly agnostic when it comes to prognosticating crypto's future. He even seems a bit excited about companies like Jack Dorsey's company, Block (ticker symbol: SQ . . it used to be called "Square"). I bought a few shares this morning, but just a few . . . I'm not a hardcore miscreant, fraud, and freak.

Fun Fact

On the release of the Access Hollywood tape ["Grab 'em by the *****], some European betting shops said that Hillary had 25:1, 35:1 odds of beating Trump.

On Working without Working. Or Working While Walking the Little Way. Or Working Like a Zen Master

"There is no greater pleasure in ordinary life, so-called, than to see a bus-conductor, a teacher, anybody, really engrossed in his work, with no thought of its relative or absolute value, with no thought of its interest or profit to himself or others." R.H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1942, 2016 reprint by Angelico Press)

Greenland: The 51st State

In the Era of Crazy, Everything is Crazily Possible

http://pic.twitter.com/HoaRmab5NR

Quote

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

-Thomas Sowell

But I Believe Change is Coming

The More Education, the Dumber the Result

To be precise, the more education, the stronger the left hemisphere's grip on a person's existence, which results in more stupidity.

Happy New Year

"Happy Holidays" or "Merry Christmas"? (I use both.)

When do you stop saying "Merry Christmas" (technically, on January 6th, I suppose, but it starts feeling kinda weird to me by about December 28th).

And now, when do you stop saying "Happy New Year"? I'm thinking by January 9th this year: first full week of work is Monday, the 8th: HNY is probably still appropriate. Come the 9th? It starts getting a smidegon awkward. Definitely by the 15th, though Elaine in Seinfeld noted with irritation that she once got "Happy New Yeared" in February.

Thursday Substack

Monday Substack

Weather Apps

Welcome to Summer

Thursday Substack

This is Huge

Monday Substack

BYCU

Thursday Substack

San Francisco: Perverse for 150 Years

Monday Substack

Thursday Substack

Monday Substack

BYCU

Welcome to May

Thursday Substack

Related:

It's May Day

Monday Substack

BYCU

Thursday Substack

Amen to This

Substack Monday

Holy Thursday

Thursday Substack

Monday Substack Post

Even Better Stuff at The University Bookman!

Good Stuff Over at Substack Notes

BYCU

Monday Substack

BYCU

Kangaroo Kills Man, Blocks Paramedics from Saving His Life in Australia's First Fatality in Nearly 100 Years

Thursday Substack

Sucked into Twitter

Monday Substack

A Bookshop in Narnia

BYCU

These people oughtta be shot.

The People Who Never Get Hangovers

Thursday Substack

One of the Niftiest Health Lists Ever

Kuntsler is Optimistic

Monday Substack

This Trade War Thing Has Now Officially Gotten Out of Hand

Thursday Substack

Elves and Dwarves in the Hemispheres

St. Patrick in a Punchy Nutshell

Monday Substack

Thursday Substack

In case you're craving a Ben and Jerry's

Monday Substack

From Whence This Death Wish?

TDE is a Proud Member

BYCU

Thursday Column at Substack

Joe Sobran

Monday Substack

The Return Eudemon

Thursday Substack

81% Want Violent Illegals Deported

Idealism and Fetishism Go Together

Monday Substack Essay

Give this Catholic Renegade a Little Love

Give this Catholic Aggregator a Little Love

Asperger's is a Terrible Thing to Waste

BYCU

Come on. Don't Start with the Bread and Circus Pandering

Thursday Substack

Moria Redux

A Collection of Memes

Monday Substack

Kuntsler Friday

Now in Detroit

Now at Substack

The Mind Boggles at the Cognitive Dissonance

Monday's Substack Column

Exactly

Newest at Substack

Greenwich Village Falling

Hollywood Falling?