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Mike Franc, at Human Events in 2005, identified the real reason for celebration at the first Thanksgiving.

Writing in his diary of the dire economic straits and self-destructive behavior that consumed his fellow Puritans shortly after their arrival, Governor William Bradford painted a picture of destitute settlers selling their clothes and bed coverings for food while others “became servants to the Indians,” cutting wood and fetching water in exchange for “a capful of corn.” The most desperate among them starved, with Bradford recounting how one settler, in gathering shellfish along the shore, “was so weak– he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.”

The colony’s leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford called “communism.’ Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (“taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealth’) bred “confusion and discontent” and “retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers’] benefit and comfort.”

Just how did the Pilgrims solve the problem of famine? In addition to receiving help from the local Indians in farming, they decided allow the private ownership of individual plots of land.

On the brink of extermination, the Colony’s leaders changed course and allotted a parcel of land to each settler, hoping the private ownership of farmland would encourage self-sufficiency and lead to the cultivation of more corn and other foodstuffs.

As Adam Smith would have predicted, this new system worked famously. “This had very good success,” Bradford reported, ‘for it made all hands very industrious.” In fact, “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been” and productivity increased. “Women,” for example, “went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.”

The famine that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims in 1623 gave way to a period of agricultural abundance that enabled the Massachusetts settlers to set down permanent roots in the New World, prosper, and play an indispensable role in the ultimate success of the American experiment.

A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims’ economic recovery. Their success, he observed, “may well evince the vanity of that conceit–that the taking away of property– would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.’ Bradford surmised, ‘God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The real story of Thanksgiving is the triumph of capitalism and individualism over collectivism and socialism, which is the summation of the story of America.

Andrés Roca Rey enters the arena every afternoon with the intention of “fighting with the greatest possible truth.”

Christopher North went all the way to Lima, Peru to see one matador at work, and the very long trip was clearly worth it.

I have just made a 13,000-mile round trip to watch a bullfight. I’d like to tell you that I also went to admire the exquisite latticework of Lima’s 18th century balconies, to savour the city’s matchless cuisine, to linger reverently in its Viceregal churches. Doing so would make me come across as a more rounded human being. But the truth is that I went for one weekend and for one matador.

And what a matador! Andrés Roca Rey is the world’s Número Uno, the first Peruvian ever to claim the top spot. Eighteen months ago, interviewing him for this magazine, I wondered whether he could rise any higher. He was already the torero of the moment, combining easy grace with suicidal courage. But this summer in Spain, he went up another gear, triumphing in plaza after plaza, culminating in an extraordinary performance in Bilbao. Despite being badly knocked about by both his bulls, he came back with such unhurried elegance that with a unanimity I have never known before, the critics proclaimed it the corrida of 2022.

Peru, like many less developed countries, gets excited when one of its citizens achieves recognition overseas. Even those Peruvians who have no interest in toreo know about Roca Rey — rather as English people who know nothing about cricket know about Ian Botham. To watch the return of the national hero to the ring where he began his ascent — that, surely, was worth an 18-hour flight. …

I made my way to the 257-year-old Plaza de Acho, the greatest bullring in the Americas. Bullfights in Lima are always special, but the buzz that Sunday had a different quality. You could sense the excitement everywhere — among the touts, the anticucho sellers, the lines of police. Crime in the Lima borough of Rímac is normally rife but that day even the muggers and pickpockets were more interested in getting hold of tickets.

Lima brought forth the fatted calf for its famous son. Before the opening parade, we were treated to a performance of the national dance: the marinera, performed both on foot and on that other national symbol, the Peruvian pacing horse. Bands from the army, navy, air force and police played marching tunes. Then 14,000 voices belted out the national anthem. Afterwards, high on the patriotism of the moment, they chanted against Peru’s Leftist president, Pedro Castillo.

A modern bullring, like a Roman amphitheatre, is a forum for public grievances. I happened also to be in the Plaza de Acho in November 2000, when word came through that Alberto Fujimori, the effective but corrupt autocrat, had resigned. It was fascinating to watch the news rustle through the stands. The Fujimorista crowd noticed a Congressman who had been accused of taking a bribe to vote against the president. Without any pre-arrangement, they began tossing coins at the poor fellow until he was driven, puce with rage, from the ring.

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Holy sh**!
(Is my expert opinion)#AI #drone pic.twitter.com/qhb3ww56V7

— Ulrike Franke (@RikeFranke) November 22, 2022

Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927) inspired a really fantastic array of Golden Age of Art Deco posters. <link>

John Wolfstahl agrees with Secretary of Defense Austin that defending Ukraine against Russian Nuclear Intimidation is not only a local strategic goal, but desirable in deterring in advance nuclear blackmail world-wide.

]t was with some interest that I heard Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speculate i]this weekend that a Russian victory over Ukraine could lead to greater proliferation of nuclear weapons.

I have heard defense officials, including prior Secretaries of Defense, make such assertions in the past so I tend to view them with skepticism. In this case, however, Secretary Austin is on to something. …

Russia has not just invaded a sovereign country. It did not just annex territory of a state whose borders it had pledged to respect. And it did not just annex land from a state that agreed to free itself of legacy Soviet nuclear weapons left on its territory in 1991 and return them to Russia as the USSR’s designated successor state.

No, Russia has done all of this while threatening to use its nuclear weapons against states who might come to Ukraine defense and to insulate itself against counter-attacks. Moscow under Putin has done more than weaponize risk. Russia in this campaign has undermined the hard-earned norm against threatening to use nuclear weapons for territorial aggression and sought to use its nuclear arsenal as a shield behind which it could pursue an invasion, commit war crimes, and destabilize a continent for its own benefit. Protestations that any reference to nuclear weapons have been misunderstood aside, Russia under Putin has become the kind of state we have worried might develop in North Korea or Iran. Many analysts have expressed concern for years that North Korea in particular was a threat because it was an anti-status quo state that might try to use its nuclear weapons to carry out sub-strategic attacks against South Korea, and that it might miscalculate that their nuclear deterrent might protect them in the event it attacked the South from an American response.

Instead, Russia is the one who underestimated its own capabilities and now is dragging the world closer to the nuclear brink. And thus Austin was right to note one of the very tangible reasons why the United States should remain so committed to both deterring Russia nuclear use and ensuring Ukraine prevails. If Russia can hide behind its nuclear shield and prevent America and NATO from bringing many of their conventional advantages into the conflict, than others may see a similar path to victory against a stronger, more capable military adversary. If Russia – the second-best army in Ukraine[1] – can hold America and NATO at arm’s length while gobbling up a neighbor, then maybe other states will follow suit. It is likely this would influence nuclear decision making among US friends and allies. I think this is a lesser danger for US allies and treaty partners, however, since Putin has attacked many states but none of them US allies proper because he knows the risk. And there is a good argument that the depth and strength of NATO’s response to the invasion of Ukraine has likely done wonders for the credibility of the alliance, as evidenced by Finland and Sweden’s desire to join NATO as rapidly as possible.

But for the potential aggressors out there, states whose leaders are unaccountable and who may have territorial or strategic ambitions, the lure of nuclear weapons has always been balanced by the costs of going nuclear, both economically and politically. But if Russia can invade a state in the face of a much stronger set of conventional adversaries and get away with it because it has nuclear weapons, then the prospects that other states might up their interest in nuclear weapons should be a concern. And Secretary Austin put this in a way that was not overstated and did not suggest this was an on-off switch kind of decision.

This gets to the follow-on point that Austin did not make but that he might have/should have. If Ukraine can defeat Putin (defined as expelling him from all Ukrainian territory taken, at least since February) and avoid Putin escalating with nuclear weapons, then the United States will have done something both unlikely and important – demonstrate that nuclear weapons are much less useful as a tool for conventional military conquest than some might have believed, perhaps even unusable. Avoiding nuclear escalation by Russia is a key U.S. objective not only because of the horrors a nuclear strike would cause, or because it would likely draw the U.S. and NATO in the conflict with uncertain consequences. It matters because perhaps the only way Putin can avoid defeat is through nuclear escalation – nuclear use by Moscow is perhaps the easiest way for him to end a losing campaign and force a stalemate by going over the heads of the Ukrainians and raising the stakes for the west as high as he has raised them for himself. Put another way . . . keeping the Ukraine war conventional is the best way to beat Putin.

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I agree, and I think he is correct in noting that Russia’s attack on Ukraine must be opposed for being an absolutely outrageous violation of the post-WWII understanding that there should be no alteration of European borders by force.

On top of which, Russia’s perfidy in breaking its 1994 pledge to not only respect, but to defend, Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and its flagrant resort to shameless lying represents exactly the same kind of gangsterish behavior characteristic of Nazi Germany, and both offenses against decency and the international Order absolutely require opposition.

BREAKING: footage was just leaked from Twitter HQ in San Francisco showing current working conditions of the software engineers

Before @elonmusk bought Twitter they were drinking lattes and playing foosball, but now he’s making them do this. WTF

Pray for them #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/nZdGAGzGKT

— ELIJAH SCHAFFER (@ElijahSchaffer) November 18, 2022

BREAKING: footage was just leaked from Twitter HQ in San Francisco showing current working conditions of the software engineers

Before @elonmusk bought Twitter they were drinking lattes and playing foosball, but now he’s making them do this. WTF

Pray for them #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/nZdGAGzGKT

— ELIJAH SCHAFFER (@ElijahSchaffer) November 18, 2022

Yuri Bezmonov points out that elite cronyism revolving around Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) virtue-signaling investing resides at the root of the FTX/Alameda Investing debacle.

Most articles I’ve read about FTX are analyzing the mechanics of how it imploded, but they are not going deep on the characters involved because that would be politically incorrect. Have no fear, Yuri is here! It is the perfect story to dissect that includes pattern recognition, crony elitism, and physiognomy. The diligence below will grow more savage as you keep reading.

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is the quintessential soy bugman. Rule of thumb – never trust a vegan who wears cargo shorts with white socks. His parents were Stanford professors and his mother is a Democrat NGO bundler. SBF funneled $50 million to Democrats in this midterm cycle, second only to the perennial heavyweight George Soros. “Effective altruism” + “democracy” = stealing from people to give to Democrats. He also fraudulently transferred FTX customer money into his own hedge fund Alameda, run by soy bugwoman ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison.

The most underreported part of this tale is on the other side of the table – the investors. Sequoia is regarded as the one of the greatest venture capital firms of all time with a storied history of grand slams including household names like Apple, Cisco, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, PayPal, Reddit, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and Zoom. It has $85 billion in assets under management. Roloef Boetha is its well-respected leader, who was part of the legendary Paypal Mafia that included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Keith Rabois.

At the peak of the bubble in Summer 2021, Sequoia plowed $214 million into FTX. As is custom with smug VCs, they announced their investment with a 13,000 word epic of self-congratulatory masturbatory propaganda fellating the brilliance of SBF. They have deleted the piece from their website to hide their embarrassment, but the internet never forgets and archived it in full here. The worst moment came when the partners were simping over SBF’s pitch, while he was simultaneously playing a video game.

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Peter van Buren notes some of the pathologies.

As with the suspension of Trump (and on a much, much lesser scale, me) progressives cheered the deplatformings the way public lynchings used to attract a picnicking crowd. The left controls social media (as well as most mainstream media) and so day by day their unreal world becomes ethically more cleansed, more free of things they do not like, and with all the bad news (Hunter Biden) made to go away. The world online is the way they want it to be, with the real world held at bay behind the screen. Like living in The Villages in Florida, or maybe in the Matrix.

It is very much the same for what we’ll call social media 3D, things like renaming high schools and tearing down statues. Those acts are the equivalent of tweets. Nothing changes because of them, but everyone feels more righteous. Might as well send the 45 cents a day to one of those TV charities and think you are solving hunger in Africa. Or posting on Facebook that everyone should get vaccinated. Or, at least when gays were still performing as victims, changing your photo to a rainbow flag.

You see it also in the blurred lines between fiction and reality. A touchpoint for understanding Trump was the dismal novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Black empowerment? Wakanda. Economic equality is fictionalized by replacing every white person in a TV commercial with a black actor, and every other Hallmark romance with a same-sex couple. Same thing when our society over-celebrates the first transgender Jeopardy! winner or another children’s book where the cuddly caterpillar who does good deeds is nonbinary. NYC’s Shakespeare in the Park this year featured Richard III with the lead played by a black woman, no doubt as some imagine the Bard secretly intended.

But this detachment from reality, the appearance of action instead of action, is why progressives continue to have to “raise awareness” for the same old things over and over. In the end, nothing that happens online matters. Online is just propaganda of unknown real-world effectiveness. The left celebrates the deplatforming of Marjorie Taylor Greene, forgetting she is still a sitting congresswoman. Votes count, “likes” do not. Joe Rogan talks to 11 million people a week; Neil Young, his one-time media nemesis, not so many.

The danger of all this, as every purple-haired undergrad eventually realizes, is it creates learned helplessness. …

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An epic video of the interception of two Russian cruise missiles in a row by Ukrainian air defense systems. Kyiv region, November 15 pic.twitter.com/2In4KWCzAG

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) November 17, 2022

Factory Engraved! You can’t get that today.