Nast and Thanksgiving

 

In 1992, a KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the United Kingdom, bringing with him a trove of official documents he’d absconded with across his 30-year career. Those documents revealed that the KGB had actually worked to spread misinformation that the CIA was behind the JFK assassination, going so far as to forge a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to CIA officer E. Howard Hunt (best known today for his involvement in the Watergate burglary) to implicate him and the CIA in the assassination.

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An interesting interview with former Israeli prime minister Olmert on BBC by a newsreader who was pointed, biased (against Israel), and hostile.

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A report is afoot that will be dedicated specifically to a form of geoengineering known as solar radiation management. This is a technique that essentially involves spraying fine aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. The idea is that, once it’s reflected, there’ll be less heat and temperatures will go down.

They plan to block the sun.

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                            Nast and Thanksgiving

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.