Thanksgiving 2022: The brief

The best meditation for Thanksgiving 2022 would be, I think, a very short one.

In fact, just four brief points.

One, politics aren’t expected to be widely popular at the Thanksgiving table this year.  This from The Hill, citing a Quinnipiac poll:  “A new Quinnipiac poll found that 65 percent of Americans hope they can avoid talking about politics with family and friends this Thanksgiving.”

The White House communication team has put out talking points about President Biden’s accomplishments, as the White House sees them.

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Football Follies 2022: NCAA Week 13 – Rivalry Madness!

Time marches on, and the old sanctity of Rivalry Weekend at Thanksgiving has been diluted a bit in the last few years what with COVID scheduling, conference osmosis, and the rise and fall of Inevitable Champions.  It would have been hard to imagine Bedlam outside of Thanksgiving weekend, back in that antediluvian year 2019, but now that OU is committed to the SEC move, we’ll have to get used to holding the game Whenever (maybe in Week 0.5, in Singapore, or something).

Anyway, we all know who’s got something really big to settle – Ohio State and Michigan, silly (Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler rise from the pumpkin patch…) – and the rest of it’s all good, even if the odds are it won’t be that significant to the C%FPozzlesquat, given that things are mostly going as expected.

TOC Ready Room 22 November 2022: Drive-by edition; Poland missile impact, Biden FBI/Israel, Special Counsel and other Trump

Increasingly, I agree with those who say we need an “audit” of U.S. support to Ukraine.  I put “audit” in quotation marks because a mere audit of the tens of billions flowing to Ukraine – and to military contractors – won’t get the job done.  What’s needed is a wholesale policy scrub of the Biden administration’s handling of the problem.

As always, I begin by affirming that the U.S. needs to support a fight to reverse and end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The U.S. shouldn’t have direct military engagement in the fight, nor should NATO.

But it matters what strategy we’re supporting and how military assistance to Ukraine is executed.

It matters at least as much how the fight in Ukraine is affecting NATO’s security conditions, posture, and unity.

Football Follies 2022: NCAA Week 12

For some reason we’re always a bit suspicious of high rankings for Oregon, but we admit, the loss to Washington last week was unexpected.  Let the “what ifs?” now proliferate, for the PAC 12 and yea, even unto the C#@Pflugenheimer.

For some other reason (probably; though in a metaphysical sense who knows), we had major computer problems this past weekend, and had no means of chiming in with the usual facts & insights as football did its roll.  It appears that running a diagnostic and system clean-up has put the evil boxes back on the path of righteousness.

We can’t proceed with this week’s Follies without mentioning the heartbreaking loss suffered by the Virginia Cavaliers on Sunday night in the shooting of a team charter bus.

Veterans Day 2022: The torch of freedom

Last year, I posted for the second time a recurring Veterans Day article, long a tradition at TOC and Liberty Unyielding 1.0.  In 2022, it appears for the third time.

In the preface for last year (2021), I felt that much had changed since the current article first appeared in 2020.  (An earlier article was published annually from 2009 to 2018.)

Oddly, though, in 2022 my sense is that the sentiments of 2020 are being reaffirmed.  The problem of threats to freedom continues:  more intensely, and in the same patterns.

The creed of American veterans, the yeoman warriors who have taken up arms for our nation’s purposes, has not changed,