TV Quote of the Day (Norm Macdonald, on 20th-Century German Militarism)

“The entire earth, there’s only one country that frightens me – that’s the country of Germany. I don’t know if you guys are students of history or not, but… For those of you who aren’t, Germany, in the previous century – in the early part… they decided to go to war. And who did they choose to go to war with? The world. So you think that would last about five seconds and the world would f------g win, and that would be that. But it was actually close!”—Canadian stand-up comic, actor, and writer Norm Macdonald (1959-2021), “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip and Trickery” (special), Sept. 18, 2017

Well, there are a whole bunch of people right now who are not “students of history,” and that would be those American voters who put back in office a President who complained relentlessly about the cost of paying for the defense of Europe.

Now, as Isaac Stanley-Becker’s story in the new January 2026 issue of The Atlantic notes, Germany, which turned away from its militaristic tradition in atonement for World War II, is re-starting its war machine in earnest. 

It’s not just Vladimir Putin’s threat to Ukraine that has scared it, but the harsh rhetoric of Donald Trump (given unforgettable form by his chief attack dog, Vice President J.D. Vance, at the Munich security conference earlier this year).

And all of that was before the release late last week of the administration’s new national security strategy.

By overwhelmingly shifting blame for the rise in tensions in Europe from Russia to European democracies (which, the document helpfully informs us, is risking “civilizational erasure”), the reactionary regime in Washington is laying out nothing less than “a clear plan for subversion in Europe,” aptly notes Tara Varma’s summary for the Brookings Institution. 

Europe’s only alternative, she concludes, is clear: “prepare, invest in its own security and resilience, and resist these intimidation and influence operations coming from its closest ally.”

It might take a while, but MAGA will rue the consequences of what it has wrought in a rearming Germany. As Macdonald noted, this principal power in Central Europe was awfully good at making war in the first half of the 20^th century. The United States learned, to its regret, that isolationism only allowed that war machine to run amok.

Who is to say, in a country where the far right is rearing its head again, that history won’t repeat itself?

The image accompanying this post, of German troops parading through Warsaw, Poland, in September 1939, comes from the National Archives at College Park, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S).

Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Judging a Man)

“You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.”— Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Lord Jim (1900)

Quote of the Day (Megan Nolan, on Going Home to Ireland for the Holidays)

“I go home for the holidays in Ireland, and whether you like it or not, going back to the place you were raised and known best in the world only once a year tends to invite focused reflection on what is actually taking place in your life. People keep asking you about it, for one thing: what you’re up to, how the boyfriend is, what you’ve got planned for next year. There were only so many times I could respond to those questions by saying I was fairly desperate to move to New York, actually, and the boyfriend is fine but we hadn’t discussed the prospect of me moving, funnily enough, but no doubt things would resolve in some way without me having to take any action. The encroaching reality of another year was too much to ignore. The general melancholy I always feel around Christmas—a time that compels me helplessly to contemplate how many more I will get to share with my family—was joined by another, more specific, sadness: the relationship I was in had come to an end.”— Irish novelist and essayist Megan Nolan, “Merry Ex-Mas,” The Financial Times (“How To Spend It” supplement), November 2025 

The image accompanying this post, showing mid-morning crowds on Grafton Street in Dublin, Ireland, was taken Dec. 19, 2005, by Irish typepad.

Quote of the Day (Quinn Slobodian, on the Current ‘Libertarian Eugenics’)

“All told, the picture is one of a consistent, if unacknowledged, libertarian eugenics. The high-tech fertility market privileges those able to pay for genetic advantage. The retreat of public health abandons the social minimum needed to ensure that all children can survive and thrive. And immigration policy redraws the body politic along racial lines, achieving by exclusion what mid-century welfare states once sought through inclusion. What emerges is not a paradox but a 21st-century return of social Darwinism, wrapped in a language of choice, freedom and national greatness.”— Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, “Libertarian Eugenics Is on the Rise,” The Financial Times, Nov. 15-16, 2025

The image of Quinn Slobodian accompanying this post was taken at the book presentation of the German edition of "Crack-Up Capitalism" (Kapitalismus ohne Demokratie), at the University of Frankfurt, on Nov. 21, 2023, by Toter Alter Mann.

Verse of the Day (A.M. Juster, on an Ambitious Government Bureaucrat)

“Your uphill climb will never stop;
   scum always rises to the top.” —Poet, translator, and essayist A.M. Juster (pseudonym for Michael J. Astrue, former head of the Social Security Administration), “To My Ambitious Colleague,” in Sleaze and Slander: New and Selected Comic Verse, 1995-2015 (2016)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Gregory of Nazianzus, on God’s Appearance to Humanity)

“He whom presently you scorn was once transcendent, over even you. He who is presently human was incomposite. He remained what he was; what he was not, he assumed. No ‘because’ is required for his existence in the beginning, for what could account for the existence of God? But later he came into being because of something, namely for your salvation, yours, who insulted him and despised his Godhead for that very reason, because he took on your thick corporeality. Through the medium of the mind he had dealings with the flesh, being made that God on earth….He was carried in the womb, but acknowledged by a prophet yet unborn himself, who leaped for joy at the presence of the Word for whose sake he had been created. He was wrapped in swaddling bands, but at the Resurrection he unloosed the swaddling bands of the grave. He was laid in a manger, but was extolled by angels, disclosed by a star and adored by Magi. Why do you take offense at what you see, instead of attending to its spiritual significance?”— St. Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop of Constantinople and “Doctor of the Church” (c. 330-390), On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

Photo of the Day: Late Fall, Hackensack River, Bergen County NJ

I took this image a week ago today, while walking through Johnson Park in Hackensack, NJ. With temperatures dropping, the number of walkers like myself weren’t as numerous as they were earlier in the year—and I expect that to be even more the case through the holiday season.