Politics is not the art of the possible. It is choosing between the unpalatable and the disastrous.--Gailbreth
Terrific dinner last night.
"The Crown" is very good. Even Charles has come off well so far.
Stossel has a little article on the early Pilgrims' try at collective farming that preceded Thanksgiving. Collective farming — the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work — was an inefficient disaster.
Climate scientists claim that rising sea levels are caused by man-made global warming. Historical data from the tide gauge in Lower Manhattan shows that sea levels have been rising from about the time when Abraham Lincoln was president to now. Sea levels have been rising for about 20,000 years. Anthropologists believe that when the sea level was very low people were able to walk from Siberia to North America.
Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast was a Bavarian immigrant credited with developing the American cartoon. He arrived in the 1840s as a child and became the illustrator for Harper's Weekly. He developed the modern version of Santa Claus and the elephant as the Republican Party symbol. As such, this is a provocative drawing, from the Nineteenth Century.
Melanie Kirkpatrick’s 2016 book, Thanksgiving: The Holiday and the Heart of the American Experience (link added):
Terrific dinner last night.
"The Crown" is very good. Even Charles has come off well so far.
Stossel has a little article on the early Pilgrims' try at collective farming that preceded Thanksgiving. Collective farming — the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work — was an inefficient disaster.
When you consider what an enormous windfall gain it is to be born in America, it is painful to hear some people complain bitterly that someone else got a bigger windfall gain than they did.--Sowell"By the spring," Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, "our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger... So they began to think how ... they might not still thus languish in misery."
His answer: divide the commune into parcels and assign each Pilgrim family its own property. As Bradford put it, they "set corn every man for his own particular. ... Assigned every family a parcel of land."
Private property protects us from what economists call the tragedy of the commons. The "commons" is a shared resource. That means it's really owned by no one, and no one person has much incentive to protect it or develop it.The Pilgrims' simple change to private ownership, wrote Bradford, "made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been." Soon they had so much plenty that they could share food with the natives.
Climate scientists claim that rising sea levels are caused by man-made global warming. Historical data from the tide gauge in Lower Manhattan shows that sea levels have been rising from about the time when Abraham Lincoln was president to now. Sea levels have been rising for about 20,000 years. Anthropologists believe that when the sea level was very low people were able to walk from Siberia to North America.
On this day in 1947, despite strong Arab opposition, the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish state. The modern conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine dates back to the 1910s, when both groups laid claim to the British-controlled territory. The Jews were Zionists, recent emigrants from Europe and Russia who came to the ancient homeland of the Jews to establish a Jewish national state. The native Palestinian Arabs sought to stem Jewish immigration and set up a secular Palestinian state. Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine, and Britain attempted to limit Jewish immigration as a means of appeasing the Arabs. As a result of the Holocaust in Europe, many Jews illegally entered Palestine during World War II. Radical Jewish groups employed terrorism against British forces in Palestine, which they thought had betrayed the Zionist cause. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause. Britain, unable to find a practical solution, referred the problem to the United Nations, which on November 29, 1947, voted to partition Palestine.
Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast was a Bavarian immigrant credited with developing the American cartoon. He arrived in the 1840s as a child and became the illustrator for Harper's Weekly. He developed the modern version of Santa Claus and the elephant as the Republican Party symbol. As such, this is a provocative drawing, from the Nineteenth Century.
Melanie Kirkpatrick’s 2016 book, Thanksgiving: The Holiday and the Heart of the American Experience (link added):
[Thomas] Nast was an immigrant, having arrived in America from Germany when he was six years old, and “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” reflected what Nast saw as the immigrant’s passionate affection for his new country and commitment to its democratic values….
At the head of the table stands Uncle Sam, who is carving a turkey. Around the table are seated Americans representing an array of races and religions, identified in many cases by their national dress. Among the guests are an African American family, a Native American, a Chinese man with a long queue, an Irish American couple, a Spanish woman wearing a mantilla and holding a fan, a bearded Muslim with a fez on his head. Nast presents the people in this portrait respectfully, not as caricatures. His message is that every American has an equal right to sit at the Thanksgiving table.
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