Dec
27
2025

Breaking: George Will Gets In One Last John Milton Reference for 2025

His end-of-year retrospective: As 2025 slinks offstage, at least that’s something to cheer about. (WaPo gifted link)

What Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” can be said of 2025: No one ever wished it longer. As this year slinks offstage, remember some memorable moments:

Cracker Barrel stumbled into crisis when many Americans who have too much spare time became enraged because the restaurant chain deleted from its logo an elderly man in overalls. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement social media graphic said: “If it crosses the U.S. border illegally, it is our job to stop it. People. Money. Products. Ideas.” Particularly pesky ideas. A trans-identifying male Transportation Security Administration agent at Dulles Airport sued the TSA because its discriminatory policy would not let him (now her: Danielle) conduct security pat-downs of female travelers. After 32 years at Ford Motor Co., an executive retired with 2,229 examples of colleagues’ verbal pratfalls, including: “He’s going to be so happy he’ll be like a canary in a coal mine.”

Mr. Will is 84, and I wish him many more years of health, wisdom, and puckish humor.

Also of note:

  • Year-end suggestion/reminder: Wikipedia doesn't deserve your money. Jerry Coyne describes How Wikipedia distorts Israel and Jews in the interests of the site’s “progressive” ideology. Jerry's triggering event is Wikipedia's Israel article which contains:

    Following the October 7 attacks in 2023, Israel began committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

    The next sentence is:

    Israel and several other countries, including the United States, dispute that its actions constitute genocide.

    But (to belabor the obvious) the Wikipedia wording implies that Israel's "genocide" is not a matter for dispute.

    Jerry provides some third-hand testimony about how this slander is apparently not fixable. One of his readers reports:

    As an example, a friend of mine noted that the Wikipedia article on Israel states that Israel started a genocide on Oct 7, 2023. She decided to try and edit it. She jumped through several hoops and I will share a quote from what Wikiedia sent her:

    In short, you are not permitted to edit any page on Wikipedia related to the Arab-Israeli conflict until your account is 30 days old with 500 substantive edits (not edits made simply to reach 500). I will tell you that the current wording of the article was reached after extensive discussion and deliberation amongst Wikipedia contributors; you are free to review that discussion yourself, it may be accessed from Talk:Israel (see the FAQ at the top). 331dot (talk) 19:38, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

    Edit requests are permitted if they are wholly uncontroversial (something that no reasonable person could possibly disagree with) and do not require extensive discussion to reach a consensus. 331dot (talk) 19:48, 23 December 2025 (UTC)

    Jerry adds:

    But this kind of redaction is only the tip of the iceberg. In this discussion you’ll learn about the “Gang of 40”, a group of ideologues who seem to spend nearly all their time as lay editors of Wikipedia articles about Israel, Palestine, and Zionism.  (There is even an article on “Gaza genocide recognition.”) You’ll learn that Wikipedia either has no response to this kind of bigoted malfeasance or doesn’t seem to want to fix it. Yet Wikipedia was, at the outset, dedicated to giving just the facts and documenting them.

    And it’s not just Judaica.  Rindsberg notes that Wikipedia is also determined to ensure that the “lab leak theory” for the origin of covid remains a “conspiracy theory” (I myself am agnostic about the issue), and to the denigration of Trump.

    The lesson is clear. You're pretty safe relying on Wikipedia for (say) the results of the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. Once you venture into any hot-button issues that "progressives" have decided to own, you are in 1984 territory, where dissenting opinions (and inconvenient facts) are memory-holed.

    I've been dodging Wikipedia's donation nags for weeks; are they over yet? Anyway: not one thin dime.