The Melting Pot

On this day:

54
Roman Emperor Claudius is poisoned to death under mysterious circumstances. His 17-year-old stepson Nero succeeds him to the Roman throne
409
Vandals and Alans cross the Pyrenees and appear in Hispania.
1307
Hundreds of Knights Templar in France are simultaneously arrested by agents of Phillip the Fair, to be later tortured into a “confession” of heresy.
1773
The Whirlpool Galaxy is discovered by Charles Messier.
1884
Greenwich, in London, England, is established as Universal Time meridian of longitude.
1917
The “Miracle of the Sun” is witnessed by an estimated 70,000 people in the Cova da Iria in Fátima, Portugal.
1972
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashes in the Andes mountains, near the border between Argentina and Chile. By December 23, 1972, only 16 out of 45 people lived long enough to be rescued. Survival can be a mixed blessing.
2010
The 2010 Copiapó mining accident in Copiapó, Chile comes to an end as all 33 miners arrive at the surface after surviving a record 69 days underground awaiting rescue.

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“There’s nothing Christian about Christian nationalism.” -- James Talarico. Strong answers to unasked questions are always political fun.

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Unknown hackers have remotely compromised industrial refrigeration systems across hundreds of French supermarkets, forcing cooling units into continuous defrost cycles and spiking temps up to 50°C (122°F). (Le Monde) Imagine waking up in the morning with the sole goal of gratuitously harming strangers.

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The U.S. is a net diesel exporter.

"...if Trump were really concerned about the price burden on Americans (and the midterm prospects of Republicans), he could simply end his imbecilic trade war with Canada, our ally and neighbor. Because of the complexities of the global diesel market, as well as such inane American policies as the Jones Act and the discouragement of new refining capacity, we do import some diesel despite being a net exporter. The vast majority of those imports come from Canada — from which we could easily import more if necessary without violating sanctions laws and lending comfort to our Russian enemy. But Trump being Trump, he’d rather appease Putin than admit that his trade policies antagonize our allies while crushing Americans."--from a NR article on Trump's strange decisions on diesel, which includes this: 

"The second reason for doing the diesel deal with Putin is, as ever, corruption. In early October, the New York Times reported that Trump is working on an even more execrable multibillion-dollar oil deal with Putin: The U.S. would waive sanctions so that an investor group could buy up oil fields, refineries, and gas stations around the world that are owned by Lukoil, the Russian energy giant. The deal has been negotiated by Trump’s aforementioned emissaries, Kushner and Witkoff. Among the major beneficiaries are said to be one of Trump’s major donors (Todd Boehly, who has donated $2 million to Trump political causes) and Middle Eastern executives who have business ties to Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff. These include Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the top security official of the United Arab Emirates — who, as I detailed in a series earlier this year, is a part owner of the Trump and Witkoff families’ crypto enterprise, into which Tahnoon has poured $2.5 billion. (That enterprise is the main explanation for the jaw-dropping increase in Trump’s net worth during his second term in “public service” — well over $2 billion in just 20 months.)

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There's a movement growing aimed at Peter Thiel's legal use of a legal government tax program devised to help people avoid impoverishment in their old age by the tax and spend governmental system and the failing government social security plan. 

Seemingly the demand for equality does not cut both ways.

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A Six Flags Over Georgia park visitor died after an incident on the Goliath roller coaster on Monday. Four others were injured in the incident.

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Bednar is a free agent.

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The Melting Pot
 
My seventh grade teacher would repeat her mantra daily as she wagged a bony finger at us: "Remember, children, America is not a melting pot of culture." 

I puzzled over this at the time, and it was years before I understood what she meant. Her point is, years later, a basic question in this country: what binds the people of this country together? How does a free people not spin off in all directions? Do the individual cultures transplanted here have to be managed and constrained? Where does the nation-state start to conform to unify? What must be lost?

Wasn't America the great melting pot?

No, not of culture, but there has been a melding. The essence is that the men and women of America have come together and agreed that all men are created equal, that all men have an inherent value that makes them equal among each other and before the law. And, as a result, every man can pursue his life freely as long as he adheres to this essential principle. That is the country's foundation and it allows the separate cultures to develop as they will. It permits the diverse peoples in the country to pursue their different lives and beliefs, to pursue their separate cultures, and not surrender their many cultures into a common alloy. The Americans are joined in the mind, not at the hip.

Other cultures are joined by a common history. Or ethnicity. Or religion. It will be difficult for an Algerian to be French. Sadaharu Oh was never truly Japanese. A Mormon will not find peace in Saudi Arabia.

America's unity is not in a melting pot of culture. It is a philosophy, an a priori agreement of its citizens of the rights and responsibilities of man.

“What do We mean by the Revolution? The War?” Adams wrote to Jefferson in his old age. “That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People.”