Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

December 25, 2025

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Christmas really a pagan festival?

The celebration of Christmas is suffused with probable pre-Christian elements, from the Yule Log to the Lord of Misrule (an official appointed to oversee the festivities) but this should hardly surprise us. After all, the priority of early missionaries was to ensure that people came to believe in the Christian God. Customs with no direct bearing on the basics of belief were often left alone; for example, it was several centuries before Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany began to interfere in pre-Christian funeral rites or betrothal customs. The medieval church did not, as some think, demand control of every aspect of people’s lives. However, whether surviving pre-Christian customs should be called pagan is debateable, since ‘paganism’ seems to imply something to do with the cult of pagan deities. It is pretty clear that such cults disappeared fairly quickly, within a few decades of the Christianisation of most European nations, even if many other traces of pre-Christian culture remained.

So, is Christmas pagan? In the sense that Christmas is a festival that retains, in most cultures, elements of pre-Christian midwinter festivities, the answer can be yes – provided we’re prepared to use the word ‘pagan’ in quite a loose way.

I blame Saturnalia:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 25th, 2025

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM 328 CHAUNCEY STREET, APARTMENT 3B:

Posted at 8:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 25th, 2025

December 24, 2025

WINSTON CHURCHILL’S CHRISTMAS EVE MESSAGE TO AMERICA (1941): “This is a strange Christmas Eve. Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle…. [B]efore we turn again to the stern task and the formidable year that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

Posted at 10:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

THE NORTH POLE’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

I’m told Santa’s pretty flexible about this stuff; the items in the second photo wouldn’t be a bad choice, either.

Posted at 9:16 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

BARI WEISS CHIDES CBS REPORTERS OVER ‘WINNING BACK TRUST’ IN CHRISTMAS EVE EMAIL, while claiming 60 Minutes backlash was due to ‘slow news week:’

Weiss defended her decision in a Christmas Eve email with the subject line ‘Building Trust.’

‘Right now, the majority of Americans say they do not trust the press. It isn’t because they’re crazy,’ Weiss began the message, which was leaked online by Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker.

‘To win back their trust, we have to work hard,’ she continued. ‘Sometimes that means doing more legwork. Sometimes it means training our attention on topics that have been overlooked or misconstrued.

‘And sometimes, it means holding a piece about an important subject to make sure it is comprehensive and fair.’

* * * * * * * *

‘We are not to score points with one side of the political spectrum or to win followers on social media,’ she said, in an apparent reference to veteran journalist Sharyn Alfonsi’s argument that ’60 Minutes’ had been advertising her ‘Inside CECOT’ segment on social media all week.

Instead, Weiss said, CBS News journalists ‘are out to inform the American public and to get the story right.

That’s certainly a valid goal for the network to shoot for; Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Katie Couric and Scott Pelley have all just entered the conversation.

Exit quote: “Sources at the network even told CNN, ‘People are threatening to quit over this.’”

Let them. It’s an awfully hollow threat, considering How many J-school graduates would absolutely kill to work for any network television news team.

Related:

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

US DENIES VISAS TO EU EX-COMMISSIONER, FOUR OTHERS OVER TECH RULES:

The measure targeted Thierry Breton, the former top tech regulator at the European Commission, who often clashed with tech tycoons such as Elon Musk over their obligations to follow EU rules.

Breton was described by the State Department as the “mastermind” of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a major piece of legislation that imposes content moderation and other standards on major social media platforms operating in Europe.

The DSA has become a bitter rallying point for US conservatives who see it as a weapon of censorship against right-wing thought in Europe and beyond, an accusation the EU furiously denies.

The DSA stipulates that major platforms must explain content-moderation decisions, provide transparency for users and ensure researchers can carry out essential work, such as understanding how much children are exposed to dangerous content.

Breton, who left the European Commission in 2024, on X slammed the ban as a “witch hunt,” comparing the situation to the US McCarthy era when officials were chased out of government for alleged ties to communism.

Well, it’s nice of Breton to self-identify, but then, as James Lileks wrote twenty years ago, “‘McCarthyism’ today doesn’t mean false accusations of communism; it apparently means calling self-identified communists by their proper name.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

OLD AND BUSTED: TDS.

The New Craziness? BDS! Disgusting: Julie Roginsky Goes Full Hitler on Bari Weiss.

To recount the facts, ’60 Minutes’ hack, Sharyn Alfonsi, known for using the show for her politicized hit pieces was outraged that her piece on the El Salvadoran prison CECOT was temporarily pulled for additional sourcing. The left-wing dominated mediasphere pounced because in their heart-of-hearts, media is supposed to be used as a weapon against all things conservative and/or Trump.

Taking Roginsky’s fevered take at face value, she has fully bought into the belief that deporting criminal illegal aliens is morally wrong, CECOT is literally a concentration camp and that Weiss killed the story in order to protect the newest Hitler, Donald Trump. She’s not alone in this belief. Its held from the lowest six follower ‘#StillWithHer’ mouth breather to the so-called elite wandering the MS NOW hallways. Her take, however, it the most vomit inducing by a long shot.

Close. This is an ‘intellectual’ so her point is not that Weiss is Hitler. No it’s more nuanced than that. Weiss, you see, is Hitler’s propagandist.

It’s not even a new insult; Jenin Younes, national legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, tweeted in September that “CBS literally hires modern day Goebbels to manage its editorial output.”

But then, in the future, everyone will be Joseph Goebbels for 15 minutes:

● Robert DeNiro calls Stephen Miller the ‘Goebbels’ of Trump’s Cabinet.

● Biden Compared Trump to Goebbels, Used Hitler in a Campaign Ad.

● Biden compared Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to Goebbels.

● Robert “Beto” O’Rourke defends likening Donald Trump to Nazis like Hitler and Goebbels.

● Outsports writer Dawn Ennis responded to [Martina] Navratilova by likening the legendary LGBTQ rights activist to …. Joseph Goebbels.

● Los Angeles Times Review of Andy Ngo’s Antifa Book Compares Him to Nazi Josef Goebbels.

Posted at 5:52 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

MERRY BURGMENTUM!

 

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

THE REAL WAR ON CHRISTMAS:

In Germany, Christmas markets this year are festooned with concrete barriers and police armed with automatic rifles.

The famous Christmas market in Salzburg, Austria, now includes 33 surveillance cameras and 24-hour security guards.

It’s the same story in France. Authorities in Paris have canceled the city’s New Year’s Eve party. Parisians will not be celebrating on the Champs- Élysées this year.

“Unfortunately, in France, there is such a turn toward savagery that everything becomes a pretext for violence,” said Bruno Retailleau, the head of France’s center-right Republican party.

There have been numerous ill-conceived or foiled attacks at Christmas markets—from Bavaria, in southeastern Germany, to Leipzig, in the east-central part of the country, to Lublin, Poland.

Last December a Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, Germany, left six dead; five were killed in the 2018 Christmas market attack in Strasbourg, France. This year the global terrorist group ISIS urged its followers to re-create those attacks across the West. The September 18 edition of its newsletter Al-Naba urged Muslims to target “Christians and Jews” and “kill by all means.”

Those orders, it seems, were followed in Australia earlier this month, when two gunmen killed 15, including children, at a ceremony to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. Authorities say the alleged gunmen, Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, were inspired by ISIS.

Far left Politico Europe’s response is to blame the victims of the attacks, and, err, last time I checked, the man who is colloquially known as “the reason for the season:”

Related: It’s come to this:

UPDATE: Decline is a choice:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

RINO ADAM KINZINGER PUTS PARAMOUNT+ ON DOUBLE-SECRET PROBATION!

To be fair though, it’s great to see that Kinzinger is no longer pretending to be even conservative-adjacent, when he’s declaring a centrist liberal like Bari Weiss to be “clearly a right winger,” as if it were some sort of terrible slur.

 

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

GIRLS WILL BE BOYS AND BOYS WILL BE GIRLS. IT’S A MIXED UP, MUDDLED UP, SHOOK UP WORLD, EXCEPT FOR LOLA:

Why did People magazine do this? Two reasons: They’re staffed by SJW leftists who want to be champions in the war on gender and/or reality. Secondly, they’re terrified that their fellow SJW leftists in the social media mob will once again pretend they’re in a 1930s Universal horror movie and they need to break out the pitchforks and lanterns and find and kill Frankenstein. In 2023, Jeremy Clarkson wrote thusly about his longtime former employer:

Remember, what everyone on every BBC platform fears more than anything is a Twitter backlash, so to try to keep that festival of left-wing madness happy, they have to be even more left wing and even more right-on. And they have to make sure that every show is pitch-perfect to the BLT+ community and the ethnic minority communities and the community communities, and when you’re thinking defensively like that, the concept of informing and educating and entertaining pretty much goes out of the window. Could I do Top Gear there now? Not a chance.

Flashback to 2022: Variety More Concerned Over Misgendering Ezra Miller Than His Assaulting Victims.

As for the rest of us, as Jim Treacher rhetorically asked: Why Should I Use Ezra Miller’s Preferred Pronouns?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

UNEXPECTEDLY! US economy unexpectedly surges 4.3% in third quarter — its strongest growth in two years.

The US economy grew at an unexpectedly strong pace of 4.3% in the third quarter — the highest rate in two years — according to a government report released Tuesday.

Vigorous consumer spending on services such as health care and products like recreational vehicles fueled the surge in the gross domestic product, which is comprised of the value of all goods and services produced across the economy, for the July through September quarter.

The inflation-adjusted annual rate of 4.3% marked an uptick from 3.8% growth the previous quarter and beat analyst expectations of 3.2% growth, according to economists polled by The Wall Street Journal.

President Trump took a victory lap in the wake of the report, crediting his tariff policy for the strong growth.

He wasn’t the only one, as this administration continues to repair the damage caused by the Biden Politburo’s myriad crises by design:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

SO MUCH FOR A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES:

Avatar: Fire and Ash is another box office disappointment for Disney, which had hoped the film would provide a short-term boost. The previous sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, opened to more than $134 million domestically in 2022 and went on to earn nearly $685 million in the U.S., while Fire and Ash debuted with just $89 million. Adjusted for inflation, the decline is even more pronounced, signaling a sharp drop in audience interest and raising doubts about the franchise’s once-reliable box office pull. I stopped caring about the franchise after the original film.

To be fair, audiences don’t help. We get tired of endless sequels and remakes and see them as a sign of Hollywood laziness, yet we aren’t exactly rushing to theaters for new IPs anymore. The problem is that, between ticket and snack costs, a night out at the theater is far more expensive than it used to be. Given the high cost of a night at the theater, people are more than willing to wait for movies to become available on streaming services or DVD. This is where Hollywood is cannibalizing its own box office profits.

These days, movies hit streaming so quickly that audiences don’t think the wait is too much to bear for a film they want to see. When I was a kid, it felt like movies wouldn’t be available on home video for at least six months after they left theaters, giving us far more incentive to go to the theater to see the movies we wanted. Hollywood hasn’t figured out how to make moviegoing relevant again, and if it doesn’t, theaters will be a thing of the past.

In a way, they already are, sadly:

Related: The Strange Case of Avatar and Its Missing Cultural Footprint.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

CUE THE MELTDOWNS: Bari Weiss Dropping the Hammer With Big Changes After 60 Minutes Story Fiasco.

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss created a firestorm when she recently pulled a 60 Minutes piece about illegal aliens and CECOT, the prison in El Salvador.

Weiss made it clear in a memo to staff this week that she expected more from them in that story and what they put out to the public. One of the main things that she thought was missing in the piece was a new comment from the Trump administration.

* * * * * * * *

According to Axios, the Trump administration provided three on-the-record statements from the White House, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security. There was even a more than 300-word statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.  None of that was included in the final story. While the story was pulled here in the U.S., it ran on an app in Canada, so people were able to pick it up and see what was in it.

The left’s freakout over Weiss, and her desire to reign in what they view as their exclusive institution have been quite instructive to watch:

But then, it currently is the left’s version of what Fleet Street calls “the silly season:”

UPDATE:

 

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

CHANGE:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 24th, 2025

December 23, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comment section, on the eve of Christmas Eve.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 23rd, 2025

OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS; Golden Fleet of Trump Class Ships to be Built:

If you haven’t heard about the new Golden Fleet, behold this piece from the U.S. Naval Institute News:

The centerpiece of the Trump administration’s revamp of the U.S. Navy is the largest surface combatant America will build since World War II.

The U.S. Navy will buy two new “battleships” as part of the “Golden Fleet” effort, President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan announced Monday at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump said the Navy will start by purchasing two ships and eventually purchase 10, with a goal of 20 to 25 in total for the class with the start of construction planned for 2030.

“The U.S. Navy will lead the design, along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person,” Trump said.

As a triple Trump voter, I give myself permission to state that Trump is a very aesthetic person. You may think he is a douche-canoe but he does have an eye. The ships will be pleasing to the eye AND with unsurpassed lethality. More from U.S. Naval Institute News:

“The future Trump-class battleship – the USS Defiant – will be the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans,” Phelan said during the presentation. “Now there will be work for shipyards everywhere from Philadelphia to San Diego, from Maine to Mississippi, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, and for manufacturers that will build components for this battleship in every state.”

America’s Newspaper of Record has printed a helpful cutaway guide to the state of the art technology to be deployed on these soon to be nautical legends: Check Out These Amazing Features On The New Trump-Class Battleship.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 23rd, 2025

HAYEK’S RULES FOR AI:

LLMs, much like human societies, are dynamic systems. With every retraining cycle, they receive an updated feed from the ever-changing internet, incorporating larger and larger subsections of the evolving digital world. Many models also incorporate explicit human feedback, e.g., Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, to shape their behavior. Even small changes to the input or the training process can lead to unpredictable, large-scale effects on the model’s overall output and functionality.

The dynamic, complex nature of LLMs finds a compelling parallel in Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” in which he explored economic and political systems characterized by billions of variables and interconnections. This structure aligns with the organization of LLMs. Hayek concluded that while we can understand the general principles that govern complex systems and predict the abstract consequences of interventions, we cannot predict the specific outcomes or the precise states of all their elements. In his broader theory of complexity, Hayek defines two types of order:

  • Taxis: A conscious, central design or constructed order. Traditional software falls into this category.
  • Kosmos: A complex, emergent, spontaneous, and functional order that arises from decentralized interactions and vast, unstructured data. LLMs function as kosmos.

The power of LLMs lies in their emergent behavior, which is far more complex than any human could consciously design. Treating LLMs as a form of kosmos represents the key conceptual breakthrough that has accelerated AI development.

Read the whole thing, despite my “accidentally” having had ChatGPT create an illustration of the wrong Hayek to accompany this link. (And I have no idea why there’s text on the back of her laptop. Was it over when ChatGPT bombed Pearl Harbor?)

Posted at 9:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 23rd, 2025

FASTER, PLEASE: Byron York: Trump’s most important achievement.

Second, this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced the departure of more than 2.5 million migrants who were in the country illegally. “Since January 20, 2025, DHS enforcement operations have resulted in more than 605,000 deportations,” the department said in a statement. “DHS has prioritized removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to return law and order to the United States. Additionally, thanks to the comprehensive efforts of DHS law enforcement, 1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported since January 2025.”

The first number — 605,000 deportations — has astonished some immigration enforcement veterans. In the past, the government’s deportations were in two categories. One was the number of illegal immigrants removed from the interior of the country, and the other was the number who were simply apprehended at the border and turned around back into Mexico. Obviously, the first category requires a lot more work for immigration enforcement.

Former immigration judge Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls, noted that the high-water mark of removals from the interior of the country was 237,941 in 2008-2009. (Arthur attributed that number, at the very end of the George W. Bush administration, to an effort by Bush to increase interior removals, appearing tough on immigration, in hopes of persuading Congress to approve an amnesty deal.) The total number of removals was then “padded,” in Arthur’s words, by the number of illegal border crossers who had been turned around upon arrival at the border and sent back to Mexico.

Now, Trump has virtually stopped the flow of illegal crossers at the border, so the administration’s number of deportations — 605,000 — is virtually all people removed from the interior. That is a huge number; Arthur called it “epic.”

Still though, those are rookie numbers. You’ve got to pump those numbers up.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 23rd, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 23rd, 2025

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Rate of glacier disappearance expected to peak by mid-2050s, scientists say. The number of glaciers disappearing worldwide is expected to sharply increase.

—ABC News, December 15th.

But why would anyone in New York City care, since it’s been flooded for 10 years?

Fourteen years ago, on June 12, 2008, ABC’s Earth 2100 offered a special on the then-far off year of 2015. Correspondent Bob Woodruff revealed that the program “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.”

The special featured one of ABC’s experts warning that in 2015 the sea level would rise quickly. An on-screen graphic showed New York City being engulfed by water. (Spoiler alert: That didn’t happen.)

—“Just How WRONG Were ABC and NBC’s Climate Predictions? (Hint: NYC Not Underwater),” NewsBusters, June 4th, 2022.

UPDATE: Merry Christmas from “Famous Ghanaian prophet Eboh Noah!”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 23rd, 2025
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