2025. Those of us striving to maintain the good, the true, the beautiful, and our precious homeland felt a hard-to-name force displacing us from the “past, people, place, and prayer” (Kingsnorth).
That force, soon to be coupled to Deterministic AI, is moving us in the direction of History deemed as an evolutionary process called Progress, as if later was better. Paul Kingsnorth, in his book Against the Machine, calls the force “The Machine.”
This year, The Machine’s red in tooth and gear displacement process included Charlie Kirk being shot in the neck and killed in front of the whole country in daylight. Kirk, as everyone knows, was a Christian and spoke in terms of the “past, people, place, and prayer.” Since the murder, the growing response is the rejection of what The Machine did to Kirk and is doing to them – the Process of Dehumanization.
People want the values Kirk spoke about and represented. They want to invest in precious lasting values – the good, the true and the beautiful – and they no longer want a modern Machine culture that generates everything the way central banks generate money: fiat morality, fiat identity, fiat community, fiat justice, fiat politics.
It is no surprise that in 2025, people and countries, sensing a constant state of flux, uncertainty, and manipulation in the fiat USD, were buying precious metals. The go-to values of physical commodities such as gold or silver increased in 2025.
At the beginning of 2025, gold was $2,640/oz. Recently, it was $4,550. Gold will likely hit $10k/oz. in 2026.
Silver, at the beginning of 2025, was $29/oz. Now, it’s over $77/oz.
Going Forward, a Few Recommendations:
The U.S. needs to uncouple from any involvement with the corrupt money-laundering country of Ukraine. We should not provide any security agreements to Ukraine. We should walk away and let Europe deal with Europe. Ukraine can become part of the EU (money-laundering system).
The U.S. needs to uncouple from its involvement with Israel. Israel can go off and do its own thing.
There should not be one-size-fits-all federal AI regulations. Better, keep AI out of our lives.
Big Tech’s Darkest Failure: How an AI Chatbot Manipulated a Child Into Suicide
Americans should resist all attempts in their state to build energy-hoarding data centers and more 5G (spy on us) towers.
At a minimum and no more, the U.S. should establish, by law, one day voting on paper ballots with a secure chain of custody.
Americans should resist all attempts to ID them digitally.
Americans should resist all attempts to go cashless and converting to a digital currency that will track all of purchases and decide who’s in and who’s out.
The U.S. should deport all illegal invaders. They are not refugees. They are opportunists. The open borders “compassion” behind “Welcoming the stranger” is exactly like a judge applying ad hoc justice to multiple offence criminals because they are minorities and because of their “circumstances.”
A Few Obvious Predictions:
Democrats will continue presenting themselves as saving the world while doing everything they can to tear it down using massive fraud, abortion, assisted suicide, anarchy, and more. The Left will continue with its Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The deep-state media tells them what to think about everything.
Globalists will continue to globalize. They will continue to try to amass power over people and make them worker bees with a hive mind. Unless Kingdom Christians say “No More!”
The Islamification of the West will continue its takeover of U.S. communities and states unless Kingdom Christians say “No More!” Why repeat “Thy will be done on earth as it is on heaven” if it has no meaning here and now? Mamdani to use Quran for swearing in ceremony.
Trans-cultists, Islamists and the mentally ill will continue to kill. The media will continue to say that guns kill.
Humans will continue to lose their humanity with associations and applications of things that move them away from the good, the true, and the beautiful in the name of novelty and efficiency.
Literary life:
This year, beside the books shown on the side bar under Goodreads, I read:
The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus by Andrew Klaven
Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch by David Mamet
The Silent Corner: A Novel of Suspense by Dean Koontz
The Best American Mystery Stories Of The Century: The Definitive Anthology of 100 Years of Crime, Mystery, and Thriller Short Stories Edited by Tony Hillerman
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
(I encourage everyone to read Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity at the beginning of 2026. See what Kingsnorth means by The Machine and understand how it affects you. The book is referenced on my blog here Displaced in Place and here The Hound of Hell.)
What to start a literary life? I recommend this website:
House of Humane Letters – Recover the Lost Intellectual Tradition
Media:
I am not on social media. It is a waste of time and worse. The Machine will use it to distract you while it moves you where it wants you to go.
If I watch TV, I typically watch true crime shows such as The First 48 and Homicide Hunter. The rest on TV is not worth viewing.
Except, I did watch the first episode of Pluribus. The 1st episode was subscription free on Prime. Watching Pluribus, I was reminded of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The series looks interesting. For more info, check out this podcast: In “Pluribus” An America Without Division, But At What Price? – New Books Network
I recently purchased the Criterion Collection DVD of Babette’s Feast. I watched this last weekend. What a blessing!
Babette’s Feast, based on a Karen Blixen story, is a delightful tale of generosity in 19th century Denmark. A lavish feast evokes the transformative power of God’s grace. “Mercy and truth have kissed.”
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The Right Brain Needs Your Support
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, philosopher and literary scholar is the author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. His work on the divided brain has helped millions of people find wisdom, meaning, and guidance for living in the modern world.
Iain and Demetri [Kofinas] begin their conversation exploring McGilchrist’s core thesis about the divided brain, how the left and right hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways, where we see evidence of an increased preponderance in left-brain thinking, and how this has impacted the way we conduct science, reason through problems, use our imagination, and apply wisdom to the world.
Iain believes that our civilization is caught in what some have described as a metacrisis, exacerbated by the encroachment of the left hemisphere onto more and more areas of lived experience. We see it in the procedurally abysmal manner in which modern medicine goes about formulating diagnoses, the ever-increasing obsession with process over outcomes, the commodification of writing, the rise in depression, the policing of language, and the reverence for machine-like efficiency and profit maximization at the expense of almost everything else.
The Metacrisis: Finding Reality & Meaning | Iain McGilchrist
British psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author Dr. Iain McGilchrist about intelligence, mental illness, and AI.
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A New (Year’s) baby has arrived:
Kingdom Venturers 