January 1 is my favorite day of the year. It’s the day I anticipate all year long. Because on this day I add data points to my graphs and achieve absolute nirvana by contemplating them.

The graphs track how much I read each year and in what language, how many words I wrote, and how much time I dedicated to different activities. I started tracking my reading in 1997, so that graph has many data points. It’s not Big Data yet but it’s getting there.

You know how people say, “I don’t know where the time went”? Well, I do know. Down to the minute, I do.

And there you thought I had no hobbies.

Just for fun, I entered a paragraph from the article I’m working on into an AI tool and asked it to continue my thought. Unsurprisingly, it turned my idea into the most vapid, inane blether possible. I feel vindicated.

Here’s to a new year filled with excellent writing, enjoyable reading, and no fake slop.

Another direction of the unfortunate Europeanisation of Anheuser-Busch was the kind of music events that it sponsored. Companies sponsor cultural and sporting events in order to promote their wares to attendees. Anheuser-Busch sponsored a lot of country music festivals where people are likely to know and appreciate the Budweiser beer brand.

But the Belgian CEOs of the newly acquired Anheuser-Busch didn’t like or understand American country music. They started canceling these sponsorships and instead invested into techno music festivals. In Belgium, this is something that works for beer companies but in the US it doesn’t. Enormous amounts of money were redirected from advertisement that works to the advertisement that doesn’t.

It’s really funny that the social class which invented the expression “cultural competence” doesn’t believe that America deserves a culturally competent approach. Its representatives want to be in America but they don’t accept the possibility that America has culture.

Anson Frericks, the former executive of Anheuser-Busch, explains that the downfall of the company began long before the Dylan Mullvaney debacle.

The company was historically based in St Louis (which is why I’m interested in its history even though I never drank beer). In 2008 it was acquired by a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate. By 2012, almost all of the Americans in the leadership of the company were fired and replaced with Europeans or Brazilians. These people, and most importantly their wives, didn’t want to live in St Louis because they saw the city as provincial and backwards.

The company moved to New York. The European and Brazilian executives, and most importantly their wives, wanted to be part of the fancy set in NYC. This is not a group of people that drinks Bud Light or hangs out with anybody who does. The European and Brazilian executives, and most importantly their wives, felt like no social prestige was accruing to them by virtue of being associated with a Midwestern beer brand that catered to working-class Americans. But it was where their living came from, and the living was lucrative. If you can’t drop Anheuser-Busch, they reasoned, you can change what it stands for. You can associate it with the values that have currency among the fashionable people in NYC. The new leadership of the company started associating the company with the far-left values of the fancy set. Strangely, it didn’t occur to anyone among them that the customers won’t follow the brand into the boutique fru-fru territory.

There’s a lot more to the story but for now I want to share this aspect of it that stood out to me. We all know that Anheuser-Busch was destroyed but I wasn’t aware of this history of its Europeanisation.

This is another contributor to the growing cognitive gap:

Parents who have the self-control to put down their phones and talk to their children advance the kids’ intellectual and emotional development in ways that the screen-obsessed don’t.

A mega rich businessman was asked about the best way to cut costs and make a company efficient.

“The very best way is to close the company,” said the billionaire wistfully. “That’s when the costs go completely to zero.”

The administration of my university belongs to this school of business philosophy. They want to close it all down but they can’t do that outright so they dismantle it piecemeal.

Does anybody understand what’s happening with Ireland? They’ve gone off the deepest of ends but why? Why them specifically?

BREAKING!

The Irish government has announced their intention to ban anonymous social media accounts!

They want all accounts to be ID verified and they want to introduce an under 16's ban, similar to Australia. pic.twitter.com/5TIi1gfZxN

— MichaeloKeeffe (@MickOKeeffe) December 28, 2025

This is very unfortunate and sad. A formerly proud nation is turning into a frumpy, petty wokescold.

To offset my Christmas turkey disaster, I cooked an amazing duck cassoulet today. I can’t eat it because it’s not diabetic-friendly but judging by my husband’s reaction, my cooking skills are back.

I’m going to do a kick-ass New Year’s table because I’m so embarrassed about my Christmas fiasco. Negative motivation is everything.

This is the universal free childcare promised by Zohran Mamdani:

Did a quick search of daycares in a random city because of @nickshirleyy investigations.

Guys…something is up with daycares. 52 pages all look like this. Here’s just a few of the pages… pic.twitter.com/MVXkJWSZN7

— Aceofhearts (@everytime_11) December 27, 2025

Taxing remittances of any amount at 90% is crucial. But it’s not getting done.

Turns out that while I was away I missed the funniest development of the year. Trump tricked everybody into thinking that he was going to declare war on Venezuela so that people would tune into his speech and there would be motivation to watch and air it on the networks.

And, obviously, there was no declaration of war. Instead, everybody had to listen to Trump explain his economic policy. Good for him. The “war is coming” crowd deserves that and more. I’m loving this trick.

This is what being out of the country does to you. You miss everything that’s happening.