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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Independence Day 2022

At such a time as this, brevity feels advisable.

I just reread the 4 July post from 2018, and was struck by its continued resonance.  Though I think the Democrats of 2022 have progressed even beyond their more perfect resonance with the Democrats lamented in the 1860 op-ed at the New York Times, this passage from that old piece still rings (nor should we kid ourselves that it’s not a fit for at least some portion of the GOP):

The American Spring will be forward, not back

A tweet caught my eye today, and stirred up a need to write about the American situation and where we ought to be heading.  The tweet promoted a Human Events opinion piece by Jane Coleman, which is well worth the time and easy to commend to your perusal.

"Why were we doing this in school, I wondered?" – @janebcoleman https://t.co/Xp7ocuW4tY…

— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) June 16, 2022

It’s about CRT as it is manifested in America’s schools,

TOC Ready Room 28 April 2022: How do you solve a problem like the Navy? (and other naval musings)

Modern naval problems, it turns out, look pretty much like naval problems from any time.  The parameters are resources, logistics, geography, and technology.

This will be a tweet-enriched lightning round.  The big punch comes at the end.  It’s a doozy (and yes, I know:  if I were tediously pedantic I’d spell it Duesy.  Life is short).

A number of negative things are happening in a concentrated burst.  One is that the Navy brass – “Big Navy” – has just proposed to whack out a big chunk of the fleet for the foreseeable future.  With a target over the last half-decade of 355 ships, the Navy would decline from its current 296 ships to 280 in Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27).  In the best case among three options proposed by the Navy, the fleet would recover to 299 by FY32, 10 years from now.

Thanksgiving 2021: America’s mightiest blessing

Most years now, one of the things I do for the major holidays is look at what I wrote the year before to see how it has held up.

Doing that in 2021 took me back to this post for 2020.  Surprisingly, perhaps, it wasn’t about the pandemic or the lockdowns, at least not in any direct or explicit way.  It was about something that was getting almost no attention at the time: the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival in the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock.

A Tyler O’Neil article at PJ Media was a pretext for writing about something I was already concerned with.  He highlighted an exceptionally important concept from the Mayflower Compact executed by the arriving settlers: the idea of a “Civil Body Politic.”  America’s connection with that concept is unique, historic, and essential, as in, going to our essence as a nation.