So long, Mr Maduro, and good riddance

Appaently the former president of Venezuela is incarcerated in an American warship en route to the United States on charges of drug smuggling and playing about with weapons. No US troops were killed in the hoist, which Donald Trump in his trademark humility termed "a brilliant operation, actually." (There were injuried aboard an American helicopter hit by defensive fire.) A good job, and congratulations to the Seals or Green Berets or Delta Force commandos who went into Caracas and did the job. Oh, and also the CIA officers on site who fingered Maduro's location.

Wake up, Mr Trump!

It's hard to know what President Trump actually thinks, because so much of what he says is just noise that amuses him at the moment he uttters it. But he seriously seems to believe the liar who currently occupies the Kremlin, who most recently claimed that Ukraine launched 91 drones against his residence in an attempt to murder him. In the first place, we have to believe that Ukraine's spies in Russia are good enough to know where Putin happens to be sleeping on any given night -- a challenge that Mossad might be good enough to meet, but not many other intelligence agencies, including our own. Ninety-one drones! That's a lot of explosions and a lot of debris, though none has emerged. No matter. Trump is angry!

We're almost a year into Trump's second and final term as president -- almost a year since he first grumbled that Trump was "tapping him along." Tap, tap, tap.... He's still playing you for a fool, Mr President. When are you going to wake up to reality? That Nobel prize is looking ever more far out of your reach.

Rest in peace, sex kitten

My goodness, Brigit Bardot has died at the super-age of 91. I wonder if she, like me, ever had occasion to say, "Ah, to be ninety again!"

She was of course the prime sex object of my hormonal years. Such a face! Such a body! Such a saucy minx! She even melted the frosty eminence of Charles de Gaulle, who in 1969 chose her as the new "Marianne," the mythical French Amazon who has symbolized the country since the Revolution of 1789. ("Her sculpted bust" -- what else? -- "is displayed in town halls across the country," the Wall Street Journal solemnly tells us.)

At the age of 39 she transferred her affections from men to animals, not such of a change. "I am very, very alone, and I like it,” she said in a 2014 interview. “I am not happy.... But I’m not unhappy either... I have no regrets or remorse over anything,”

On Christmas morning

Our daughter married an Englishman, so we soon became comfortable with wishing people "Happy Christmas!" instead of the jollier American version. It's an improvement, I think. Happiness is, after all, a more substantial goal than merriment.

It's been an exhausting year, thanks in no small part to that hyperactive man in the White House. What can I say about a president who thinks it's fine to add his name to Jack Kennedy's on our national theater and to a new class of hyper-battleship, 880 feet in length and firing cruise missiles insead of cannon? "The U.S. Navy will lead the design, along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person," the president explains with his trademark humility. There'll be two Teump-class battleships to start, with the first to be named USS Defiant -- which, come to think of it, is a rather English name -- and as many as 25 when his "Golden Fleet" is complete.

This morning, for the first time in nearly four years, there was no Ukraine Daily in my inbox to mark the 1400th day of Putin's murderous assault on his small European neighbor. (Ukraine and Belarus were among the 51 founding members of the United Nations in the summer of 1945.) I hastened to the newspaper's website and found that, happily, it had survived Christmas Eve despite the drones and missiles launched upon the country, killing four civilians and wounding 35. Things don't look great for Ukraine. Mr Trump promised to end the war within 24 hours of taking office, and he can't even get Russia to agree to s ceasefire that offers Putin everything he wants except the keys to President Zelensky's office.

The sun has now risen on Christmas Day 2025, and by golly the day is white, with five inches of new snow! Such holidays were standard issue during the firt half of my life but have now become rare. Fingers crossed that we will also enjoy a Happy New Year!

Not a good day for Ukraine

It seems to me that Putin is getting everything he wanted: All of Donbas, including cities and towns he hasn't managed to conquer after throwing away a million men killed, wounded, or disappeared; all of Crimea, of course; and presumably the great slice of southern Ukraine now occupied by Russian troops. Weirdly, this last bit includes the Chernobyl-sized Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, now to be managed by the United Nations and half of its output reserved for Russian electric meters! Ukraine's army will be cut nearly in half, with no NATO or other foreign boots allowed, and the Kyiv government forbidden to join the European Union. The Russian language and religion will regain their former privileged status. And so on and on.

What Putin has failed to win on the battlefield, Trump now proposes to give him at no cost. It's a betrayal that makes Joe Biden's flight from Kabul look positively Churchillian.

3.7 cents for your thoughts!

A penny saved is a penny earned ... penny-wise and pound-foolish ... a penny for your thoughts ... a penny-pincher ... a penny whistle ... in for a penny, in for a pound?

Alas, you can forget all that. The other day, the Secretary of the Treasury visited the US Mint in Philadelphia to oversee the stamping of our last one-cent coins. They're now a losing proposition, each one costing 3.7 cents to produce. The president, meanwhile, keeps assuring us that inflation has been quelled and that we're enjoying the greatest economy in history. Obviously he hasn't paid cash for a cup of coffee lately.

A Ukrainian cruise missile

Every Saturday, the Wall Street Journal leads off its "Review" section by interviewing someone who's doing his or her best to change the world. Today's voice is that of Iryna Terekh, a 33-year-old Ukrainian. She set out to become an architect, hoping to make her country's Soviet-style cities more liveable. In the turmoil following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and Ukraine's far east, Ms Terekh dropped out of university to work as an engineer. After Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, she became technical director of Fire Point, designing drones and cruise missiles. They include the flamboyantly named Flamingo that saw its first combat use in August against a Russian FSB (secret service) base in occupied Crimea.

Flamingo is most often compared to the American Tomahawk, which is nearly 50 years old and has targeted terrorist bases since the Clinton administration. Most recently, we paid $1.4 million apiece for 149 Tomahawks. The Pentagon is okay with sending some to Ukraine, but Trump has demurred: "No, not really," he said last Sunday when asked about Tomahawks for Ukraine. (The US cruise missile is nuclear-capable, though it has never done so in combat, and Putin likes to spook American and European leaders by hinting that it might be a nuclear game-changer in Ukraine.)

The Flamingo has an engine mounted above its fuselage, rather like the German V-1 "buzz bomb" of 1944-45. "Thousands" of turbofan engines were junked in Ukraine when the Soviet Union broke up in 1990, Ms Terekh explains -- Ukraine was a major supplier of aircraft and assemblies for the USSR. Fire Point has refurbished and downsized them to give the Flamingo a range of 2500 miles while carrying a 2500-pound warhead -- nearly double the distance and quadruple the destructive power of the Tomahawk. Accuracy, of course, is quite another matter, but to judge by the August attack in Crimea, it's pretty good.

No Jews need apply

My granddaughter graduated from Yale last year with a keyiffeh on her shoulders, and she was hardly the only Yalie celebrating Hamas over Israel, which is to say: favoring Heinrich Himmler over the inmates of Auschwitz. The atrocities of October 7, 2023, were just a shadow of Adolf Hitler's Holocaust, but the goal was identical, to destroy the Jews next door, murdering and kidnapping as many as they could reach. The goal was to force Israel to retaliate, which of course it did, and turned the world against the Jewish state instead of the monsters who had defiled it.

Anti-Semitism has now gone mainstream in the Americas, Europe, and around the world. Ireland and Canada and dozens of other nations have recognized a "state" of Palestine, though no such state exists outside the fever dreams of the Hamas terrorists. And the actual state of Israel, on land where Jews have lived for three thousand years, is condemned as a colonial oppressor. "From the river to the sea," chant our students, their professors, and the likely next mayor of New York City, "Palestine will be free." How many of them can name the bodies of water they're chanting about? Indeed, do they even know what that freedom will look like, once eight million Jews have been murdered or forced into exile?

Twenty-odd years ago, I was a late-blooming grad student at King's College London, so that photo came as a shock. I emailed it to a friend on the faculty, and he confirmed that Jews do indeed feel unsafe at King's. He has talked to students who dress to disguise their ethnicity (avoiding the kippah or the Star of David) and who "deliberately [vary] their routes to and from the College at night.