Monday, December 29, 2025

Monday Musings - December 29, 2025

1. The final Monday of 2025 has arrived. Christmas Day has passed and we are looking forward to the New Year with some trepidation. We will party and greet the new year, but the joyous celebration may soon evaporate as the realities of the world overcome our senses.

2. NFL Family Football Report. As weeks go, at least the family teams were 3-3, .500, which is certainly better than they have been doing. The Steelers failed to win the AFC North Division. That loss sets up a "Win and In" game next week with the Ravens for the division crown with the loser watching the playoffs from their sofas. The winner of that game will be the only family team in the playoffs. Collectively, the teams are 41-54-1, .432, for the season.

Ravens (8-8) overcame Packers (9-6-1), 41-24

Dolphins (7-9) swam past Buccaneers (7-9), 21-20-17

Steelers (9-7) tackled by Browns (4-12), 6-13

Commanders (4-12) were lassoed by Cowboys (7-8-1), 23-30

Chiefs (6-10) fell to Broncos (13-3), 13-20

Lilly, Arthur and Finn Watching Football
Odenton, MD
December 28, 2025

3. Watching football is a family affair. Yesterday we managed to get four adults and three dogs onto the sofa for the games. The dogs were quite comfortable and staked out some prime real estate complete with pillows to enjoy the contests.

4. And writing of sports teams, Arsenal, of the Premier League, continues to maintain a 2-point advantage over Man City and 3-points over Aston Villa--their opponent tomorrow. This is a very important game.

5. Whack-a-mole. The US Military is being used to play Whack-a-Mole across the globe. Whether it be sinking unarmed power boats in the Caribbean Sea or Pacific Ocean, striking ISIS positions in Syria, or for some unknown reason wasting valuable munitions to do something in Nigeria, apparently our president who claims to be committed to peace is spending our national treasure willy-nilly around the planet. Yet, he won't commit our support to Ukraine where the focused application of US weapons could actually bring a terrible war to a conclusion.

6. Today in History. On December 29, 1890, in one of the final chapters of America’s long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Native Americans had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. Many Lakota believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians.

On December 15, 1890, reservation police tried to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Hunkpapa Lakota leader, who they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, at the Standing Rock reservation and killed him in the process.

On December 29, the U.S. Army’s 7th cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Lakota Chief Big Foot (a.k.a. Spotted Elk) near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it’s unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it’s estimated almost 150 Native Americans were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.