Here we are, dear reader…Christmas Eve 2025.  All is quiet on the West Coast…almost boringly so.  I was bitching about being bored at a bar today when I was reminded of the Eggnog Riot of 1826 and I thought, “Hot damn!  That’s right.  This is something my dear reader needs to be reminded of.”  So let’s get to it.

It was Christmas Eve, 1826, and the United States Military Academy at West Point was sitting on a powder keg of repressed adolescent testosterone and enforced sobriety.  The administration, in a fit of puritanical buzz-killing pique, had declared the campus dry.  No booze.  Nary a drop.  Which, if you know anything about military history or just human nature in general, is sort of like trying to stop a tidal wave with a sternly worded memo and a napkin.  You are essentially begging the universe for catastrophe.

Which, of course, is precisely what they got.

The cadets – one of whom was a young Jefferson Davis, who would later go on to make some arguably poor career choices involving secession, decided that a Christmas without spirit(s) was unconstitutional.  Or at least un-American.  So, they did what any self-respecting group of future leaders would do: they pooled their resources, bribed a sympathetic enlisted man (bless his mercenary heart), and smuggled in gallons of whiskey.  Gallons.  Enough rotgut to pickle a horse.

This illicit nectar was destined for the holiday eggnog.  Of course, eggnog is a polarizing beverage at the best of times – a sludge of dairy and regret that sits in your stomach like a concrete block – but when spiked with contraband whiskey by a bunch of sexually frustrated cadets in wool uniforms, it becomes a revolutionary accelerant.

The evening started quietly enough, presumably with some light caroling and the surreptitious passing of cups.  But as the ethanol hit the bloodstream, the shit hit the fan, and the decorum disintegrated faster than a cheap tent in a hurricane.  By the witching hour, North Barracks had transformed into a scene from a Bosch painting, if Bosch had been really into muskets and drunken singing.

The logistical grandeur of the chaos is staggering to contemplate.  This was about 70 cadets – roughly a third of the student body – getting absolutely, catastrophically shithoused.  Far beyond tipsy, they were operating on a plane of existence where gravity was a suggestion and authority was a hilarious abstract concept.  Around here, we refer to people in this state as Alconauts.

When the officers (the poor, beleaguered “tactical officers” whose job it was to maintain order) tried to intervene, things went sideways.  Captain Hitchcock, a man who probably just wanted to go to bed, burst into a room to find a party raging.  He tried to read the Riot Act.  In response, a cadet tried to shoot him.

Let me repeat that for the folks in the back: a cadet tried to shoot a superior officer over eggnog.  The pistol misfired, or Hitchcock would have been the first casualty of the War on Christmas.

The riot spread.  Windows were smashed – glazing being apparently being the enemy of liberty.  Banisters were torn from staircases.  Furniture becomes airborne.  Muskets – actual functioning muskets – are waved around with the kind of reckless theatricality that suggests both a deep commitment to chaos and a total misunderstanding of firearms safety.  Additional officers attempting to restore order are greeted not with obedience but with slurred threats, drunken philosophy, and the kind of belligerent holiday cheer that makes you wonder whether the entire institution was built on a cursed ley line.

Swords were drawn.  One cadet reportedly tried to duel a superior officer.  Another attempted to lead a breakaway faction of equally hammered comrades in what can only be described as a proto-revolutionary splinter movement.  It was Animal House with bayonets.  At one point, Jefferson Davis, thoroughly pickled, stumbled into a room to warn his comrades that the officers were coming, only to realize the officers were already there.  He shouted, “Put away the grog, boys!” which is 19th-century slang for “Hide the evidence, we are so fucked.”

The “Eggnog Riot,” as it was later dubbed by historians with a flair for the absurd, raged until Christmas morning.  When the sun rose over the Hudson, the barracks looked like they had been shelled.  The hangover was no doubt biblical.  The commandant was apoplectic.  The court-martial that followed was one of the largest in U.S. military history.  Nineteen cadets were expelled, though many, including Davis – managed to wiggle out of serious punishment because they hadn’t actually broken anything important or successfully murdered anyone.  Nonetheless, careers teetered.  And the academy’s reputation is dragged through the snow like a corpse.

And yet, American survives.  Hell, America thrives.  Some of the riot’s participants go on to be  respected officers, engineers, and public servants.  The republic doesn’t crumble because a bunch of 19-year-olds got black-out drunk on weaponized eggnog and tried to overthrow their dorm monitors.

It’s a beautiful, stupid reminder that even the most disciplined institutions are only ever one bad decision and two gallons of whiskey away from total anarchy.  And I kind of respect the commitment.  If you’re going to ruin your military career, you might as well do it while defending your right to get wasted on spiced milk punch.

So raise a glass – preferably one not spiked with enough whiskey to trigger a congressional inquiry – and toast the cadets of 1826, who gave us the greatest holiday riot on U.S. military history.

And if I don’t see you tomorrow, have a very merry Christmas.

N.P.: “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” – Gary Hoey

Alright, dear reader, I suppose it’s time to officially switch into Christmas gear for a couple of days, so here we go:

As my young and historically benighted reader might not know, Christmas in the 19th century was a very different thing than what we have now.  No Santa, no reindeer, none of that horseshit.  What changed?

It’s December 22, 1823.  The world is a grimy, pre-industrial smudge-pot of coal dust and dreadful hygiene.  Christmas, to the extent that it’s even a thing, is a muddled affair of stern religious observance mixed with a bit of wassailing-adjacent public drunkenness.  The idea of a jolly, fat man delivering toys is about as plausible as a steam-powered unicorn.  St. Nicholas is still some gaunt, vaguely terrifying Turkish ghost bishop, not a cookie-addled home invader with a branding deal.

Then, some ink-stained wretch at the Troy Sentinel in upstate New York, likely fueled by bad whiskey and the bleakness of a Tuesday, decided to run a poem.  Anonymously.  Because of course.  You don’t sign your name to something so patently deranged.  It was less poetry and more hallucinatory fever dream printed on newsprint, a piece of pure, uncut narrative insanity that would, against all odds, hijack an entire holiday.

As one who has always cherished and aspired to the societal role of writer as cultural terrorist, I say with certainty that “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is the single most effective piece of cultural propaganda ever deployed.  Before this poem dropped, our conception of Santa was a chaotic mess.  But after?  Bam.  Instant fat-guy-in-a-red-suit consensus.  This anonymous screed built the character of Santan from the ground up, bolt by bloody bolt.  It dictated the whole damn scene: the sleigh, the eight tiny named reindeer.  Before this, did anyone think to call a flying ungulate “Vixen”?  No.  It’s genius.  It’s the kind of specific, world-building detail that worms its way into the collective brainstem and just stays.

The poem itself is a masterclass in lexical precision, sort of a high-velocity descriptive barrage.  The narrator, roused from a “long winter’s nap,” witnesses a whole psychotropic tableau unfold on his lawn.  It goes beyond a “jolly old elf.”  The text insists on a near-forensic level of detail.  The twinkle in his eye, the dimples, the cherry nose, the beard “as white as the snow.”  And the stump of a pipe held tight in his teeth, the smoke encircling his head “like a wreath.”  He’s not described as a saint but a hard-living, possibly Dutch, magical trucker with a serious tobacco habit and a bottomless sack of contraband.  He is a “right jolly old elf,” a creature of pure, unadulterated joy who laughs with a belly that shakes “like a bowlful of jelly.”

This portly specter doesn’t just arrive; he comes in “with a bound.”  He works fast, a blur of fur and soot, filling stockings with a twitch of his wrist, a creature of pure, libidinal efficiency.  He’s like Seal Team Six.  He’s all business.  No small talk, no bullshit.  Just a quick nod, a finger laid aside his nose, and then – poof – up the chimney like a bat out of hell.  The closing lines, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night,” aren’t a gentle blessing; they’re a mic drop.  A declaration of a new world order delivered from the seat of a flying sleigh, disappearing into the cold, indifferent sky.

The poem is a Trojan horse of holiday mythmaking.  You read it thinking you’re getting a cozy fireside ditty, but what you’re actually getting is a full-scale cultural operating system update.  The whole thing is engineered – whether consciously or not – to be repeated, recited, reprinted, and ritualized until it becomes indistinguishable from the holiday itself.

And we certainly complied.

We recited it in classrooms with the same solemnity usually reserved for national anthems.  We printed in on greeting cards, stitched it onto pillows, slapped it onto department-store displays.  We let it take over our Decembers until the poem wasn’t a poem anymore – it was the blueprint for an entire season of sanctioned madness.

For decades, the authorship was a literary mystery.  Clement Clarke Moore, a stuffy academic, eventually claimed it, but the family of a Dutch-descended dude named Henry Livingston Jr. screamed bloody murder, insisting their guy wrote it.  Personally, I think authorship is a very big deal, but most seem to think the mystery is an essential part of the power of the poem.  They argue the point isn’t the author, but rather the blast radius.  This anonymous poem, slipped into a provincial newspaper, became the foundational text for the modern commercial-religious-industrial complex we call Christmas.  It’s one of the most reprinted poems in the language, not because it’s high art, but because it’s a perfect machine.  It did its job with such terrifying competence that we’re all still living inside its weird, sugary, reindeer-powered world, more than 200 years later.  You can’t escape it.  It’s in the air.  It’s in the goddamn malls.  It’s the ghost in the machine.  And it all started on a Tuesday, with a little bit of anonymous ink.

N.P.: “Forsaken” – Adam Hurst

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, dear, young, likely historically ignorant reader.  And this morning, with the right kind of awareness, you can still smell the cordite and betrayal, even eighty-four years later.  Imagine the Pacific sun rising over Oahu, sailors still half-drunk on Saturday night liberty, and then the sky itself vomiting steel and fire courtesy of those treacherous, rotten, shit-sucking Imperial Japanese bastards who thought they’d invented the concept of a sucker punch.  Spoiler: they hadn’t.

Pearl Harbor was a cosmic joke gone lethal, a nation’s collective hangover suddenly cured by the shriek of dive bombers and the sight of battleships belching smoke like dying dinosaurs.  America, caught pants-down, coffee not yet brewed, suddenly found itself staring into doom.  And that doom was painted with the Rising Sun.

Cue the doctrine that would later be branded FAFO – though back then it was more primal, less acronymic, more like the raw animal snarl of a country that had just been cock-punched across the Pacific.  You mess with the sleeping giant, you wake up in a nightmare.  And the nightmare came in the form of two massive fuck-off mushroom clouds, each one a vengeful sermon preached from the pulpit of modernity.  Hiroshima.  Nagasaki.  Cities turned into ashtray metaphors, the ultimate “don’t try this at home” PSA.

It wasn’t pretty.  It might not have been noble.  It wasn’t the sanitized heroism of war movies where the trumpet swells and the flag waves in slow motion.  It was brutal, humiliating, and final.  Japan went from swaggering imperialist bully to shivering, sniveling, kneeling supplicant in less time than it takes to say “unconditional surrender.”  The lesson was scorched into the earth itself: America doesn’t just retaliate; America retaliates with biblical fury, with the kind of overkill that makes future enemies pause, sweat, and complete reconsider their life choices.

Pearl Harbor Day isn’t just about remembering the dead – though we must, always – it’s about remembering the moment America decided to stop playing nice.  The day we got sucker-punched and responded by inventing the most terrifying mic drop in human history.

So raise a glass today, not in celebration but in defiance.  To the sailors entombed in steel coffins at the bottom of the harbor.  To the civilians who never saw the bombers coming.  And yes, to the awe-inspiring fire that ended the war.  Pearl Harbor was the opening act.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the encore.

But here’s the part that curdles my bourbon, the rotgut truth that keeps me pacing the floorboards at 3 a.m.: the America that once answered treachery with firestorms and unconditional surrender papers now looks like it’s been neutered by its own self-appointed moral hall monitors, the ones who think hashtags are strategy and empathy for narco-terrorists is diplomacy.  We’ve gone from steel-jawed brawlers to therapy-session sissies, from a nation that could vaporize two cities before breakfast to one that can’t even decide if its borders are real.

Because let’s be honest: the left has been busy sanding down the teeth of the beat, turning the war machine into some sort of pitiful daycare center where Teletubbies go to fuck…where illegal immigrants, cartel apologists, and anti-American imports get tucked in with warm milk while the citizens who’d actually bleed in the next war are told to shut up and check their privilege.  It’s a grotesque inversion of priorities, a carnival of cowardice dressed up as compassion, and it makes me wonder it the next Pearl Harbor will be met not with mushroom clouds but with strongly worded press releases and congressional hearings that drag on until the enemy has already planted their flag on our soil.

The spiraling nightmare is this: we’ve traded resolve for rhetoric, fury for focus, and the raw animal snarl of a wounded giant for the mewling of bureaucrats who thing “restraint” is a virtue when the sky is on fire.  Imagine the next sucker punch – missiles streaking, ships burning, civilians screaming – and instead of the old America rising from the smoke with clenched fists, we get committees, hashtags, and a chorus of “this is not who we are.”

But history doesn’t give a shit who we are.  History only cares who wins.  And if we’ve lost the will to win – if we’ve let the pussification of America become our defining trait – then the next Pearl Harbor won’t be remembered as the day we woke up.  It’ll be remembered as the day we rolled over, pulled the blanket up, and let someone else write the ending.

So here’s the mic drop, the blistering sermon carved into the bones of this day: Pearl Harbor was the warning, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the answer, and the only question left is whether we still have the guts to answer again.  If not, then the obituary of America will read like a parody: a nation that once nuked its enemies into submission but later surrendered to its own cowardice.

N.P.: “Funeral March” – 2WEI

N.P.: “Overlord” – Thorr

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

World Leaders Scramble as Author Jayson Gallaway Reported Sober

GLOBAL – A seismic shockwave has ripped through the international community today following startling, unconfirmed reports that author Jayson Gallaway has recently achieved total, verifiable sobriety for the first time in recorded history.  The news, which began as a whisper in clandestine intelligence circles, has ignited a firestorm of panic across global markets rarely seen outside of nuclear near-misses, and sent heads of state scrambling for emergency briefings.

White House officials compared the event to “Israel and the Arab states uniting to conquer Europe, but with worse long-term consequences.”  Pentagon spokespersons refused to rule out pre-emptive action.

For decades, Gallaway’s legendary, almost heroic, consumption of intoxicating substances of all species and vintages has been a reliable constant in a world of flux.  His sobriety, should these reports prove true, represents a geopolitical shift not seen since the reunification of Germany, leaving world leaders to grapple with a terrifying new reality: a clear-headed Gallaway.

“We are viewing this development with the utmost gravity,” stated the British Prime Minister from a hastily assembled press conference at 10 Downing Street.  “For years, we operated under the assumption that Mr. Gallaway was, at any given moment, at least three sheets to the wind.  This new paradigm forces us to re-evaluate our entire national security strategy.  We are raising the threat level from ‘Substantial’ to ‘Oh God, He’s Hydrated.’  RAF Typhoons are now escorting any transatlantic flight that might contain a sober American writer.  Pubs will remain open 24 hours a day as a national defense measure.”

Similar scenes of alarm are unfolding worldwide.  Speaking from an underground bunker beneath the Elysée Palace, French President Emmanuel Macron warned, his voice trembling slightly: “We simply do not know what a sober Jayson Gallaway is capable of.  The man once wrote an entire novel while drinking nothing but absinthe and children’s tears.  Total clarity of mind represents an asymmetric threat to European cultural stability.  Effective immediately, France is closing all borders to anyone carrying a laptop and a suspicious lack of hangover.  Cultural attaches have been deployed.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz appeared visibly shaken: “This is worse than 1989, because then we at least knew what a sober Germany looked like.  We have no precedent for a sober Gallaway…it could be just as disruptive. The Bundeswehr has tripled air patrols over the North Sea as we brace for literary shockwaves.”

From Beijing, a spokesperson for President Xi Jinping issued a terse statement: “The People’s Liberation Army has been placed on high alert. If Mr. Gallaway begins producing literature at full cognitive capacity, the ideological fallout could cross the Pacific in hours.  We are prepared to intercept any manuscripts launched by balloon.”

Even the Vatican weighed in.  Pope Francis, speaking from the papal balcony, urged global prayer: “We fear this may be the End Times, only with better punctuation.”

Economists are equally baffled.  The stability of several key industries, from distilleries to late-night pizza delivery services, has long been tacitly linked to Gallaway’s lifestyle.  One analyst noted, “His sudden departure from the marketplace could trigger a recession.  We’re in uncharted territory.  It’s like if gravity just decided to take a day off.”

Indeed, whiskey futures plummeted 47% in after-hours trading.  The entire state of Kentucky has reportedly entered a state of mourning.

In an unprecedented joint statement, leaders from several G7 nations expressed their profound uncertainty. “What are his intentions?  What does he want?  We simply don’t know what this new, sober Gallaway will do.  We are calling for calm, but we are also moving our nations to DEFCON 2.”

This publication has repeatedly attempted to contact Mr. Gallaway at his secure, undisclosed suburban compound commonly known as “The Safe House.”  All messages, smoke signals, and carrier ravens have gone unanswered.  Neighbors report hearing only the ominous sound of a mechanical keyboard operating at terrifying efficiency.

Experts warn that if the sobriety continues unchecked, Gallaway could complete an entire book in 2026 – a scenario one NATO official described as “frankly apocalyptic.”  The world seems to be facing this prospect with a mixture of anticipation and sheer terror.

The world waits, borders sealed and skies patrolled, for the next move from Jayson Gallaway.  Whether this sobriety marks the dawn of a new era or the beginning of cultural upheaval, one thing is certain: nothing will ever be the same.
Further updates as the crisis develops.  Citizens are advised to keep a bottle of bourbon within reach at all times.

N.P.: “Blue Monday – Synth Riders Version” – Zardonic, REEBZ

I hope my dear reader had a great Thanksgiving.  I certainly did.  I LOVE Thanksgiving for myriad reasons, all of which are compelling and legitimate.  But every November, like clockwork, the turkey hits the table and guilt-industrial complex revs its engines.  The woke brigade, armed with hashtags and think-pieces, insists that Thanksgiving isn’t gratitude or family or stuffing-induced coma – it’s genocidal cosplay, colonial oppression reheated, white supremacy with cranberry sauce.  Cue the headlines: The Washington Post calling the holiday “hemispheric violence,” Time branding it a “harmful lie,” and The Nation demanding we “decolonize” the mashed potatoes.  Balls.

Sure, history is messy.  Nobody sane denies that.  But the annual ritual of progressive scolding has metastasized into a kind of performance art – an endless dirge where every bit of turkey is supposed to taste like original sin.  The World Socialist Website even manages to turn gravy into a Marxist metaphor: billionaires swimming in cash while workers drown in AI pink slips.  Meanwhile, activists petition newspapers to stop publishing Pilgrim accounts, as if the Mayflower Compact were Mein Kampf.

Well, fuck that.

Thanksgiving is not a seminar is grievance studies.  It’s a day when America, in all its cracked, contradictory glory, sits down and remembers survival.  The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag did share a meal.  They did sign a treaty.  They did cobble together the Mayflower Compact, which – whether you like it or not – was the first written constitution in the New World.  That experiment in self-government eventually inspired the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  That not propaganda…that’s history with teeth.

Thanksgiving is about grit, ingenuity, faith, and the stubborn refusal to fold.  It’s about family, cooperation, hard work, and gratitude – the values that built this country.  The woke bitching isn’t really about history; it’s about hating anything that celebrates America’s virtues.

Thanksgiving is a great day.  A day to eat too much, argue with relatives, and remember that despite the chaos, we’re still here.  The woke chorus can keep their dirges, their petitions, their performative shame.  The rest of us will keep the turkey, the pie, the football, and the gratitude.

Because sometimes the most rebellious act in a culture of perpetual outrage is simply to say grace, pour another drink, and pass the goddamn turkey without an apology.

N.P.: “One Vision – Extended Version” – Queen