Let's all be Thankful

 

While the woke disparage Thanksgiving as an affront to Native Americans, environmentalist call it a sin against climate change, and the Ivy League dismisses it as "November recess," Americans continue to bless the day with their generosity, just as the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag did four hundred years ago. Here students at Urbana High School in Frederick, Maryland, distribute Thanksgiving turkeys to families that need them.

Which reminds me! Time for the annual token to Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. I'm not religious, but I love that name!

China enlists the Flying Tigers against us

When I discovered that the Flying Tigers are better known in China than in the United States, I realized that the People's Republic had set about to use Claire Chennault, the American Volunteer Group, and the US Army squadrons that followed it as propaganda to bring the United States around to its way of thinking. November brought a great escalation in this campaign First up was the government's English-language China Daily and its "Edgar Snow Newsroom. (Snow was one of Communism's "useful idiots" in the 1930s: an American who wrote Red Star Over China as a whitewash of Mao Zedong and the People's Liberation Army: "Chinese communism," he assured us, "... might more accurately be called rural egalitarianism." Walter Duranty meanwhile was providing the same service for Stalin in the New York Times.)

The newsroom's mouthpiece is Ian Goodrum, a Texan who in 2016 joined the Communist Party USA (yes, it still exists) and soon got a job in China. On the air, he's very effective and nowhere as shrill as he is in his writings. On his Veteran's Day broadcast, he made the usual switch of airbrushing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist regime out of history, as if Chennault had come to China on behalf of Mao Zedong. The Old Man of course was an anti-communist to the bone, who wrote of his first meeting with Chiang's wife: "Granted an interview by Her Excellency ... who will hereafter be 'The Princess' to me." He was as good as his word, and during the Civil War his paramilitary airline not only supported the Nationalists but eventually fled with them to Taiwan and supported US troops during the Korean War.

You can see the interview here -- and how sweetly reasonable it is! We meet Bill Peterson, a B-24 gunner in the 14th Air Force, who happily agrees that what we must do is restore American and Chinese cooperation to where it was in the good old days of the Second World War. Next up is no less than a Chennault granddaughter from his first marriage: Nell Callloway, president of the Chennault Aviation Museum in the Old Man's home town of Monroe, Louisiana. And finally there's Larry Jobe of the Flying Tigers Historical Organization, who like the others pleads for Americans to understand and love China.

There was a reprise a few days later, following the virtual summit between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. Mr. Peterson was reinforced this time by Cynthia Chennault, the Old Man's daughter from his marriage to the formidable and anti-communist Anna Chan. Prof. Chennault (she taught Chinese history at the University of Florida) hoped that "Americans and Chinese will not be blocked by past failures, but together open new paths of collaboration for the world's well-being." And who can argue with that? The Associated Press story ran in full on the Washington Post and many other American newspapers, and even the supposedly right-wing Fox News fell for it.

While this perfumed breeze wafts from Beijing, of course, Xi Jinping militarizes his artificial islands in the South China Sea, flies a hypersonic missile around the globe, crushes Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang, steals American and European technology, beats the war drums over Taiwan, and elevates himself to leader-for-life with the goal of making China the world's premier military power and the model for how other countries should govern themselves. I don't think that Mr Peterson, Mr Jobe,  Ms. Calloway, and Prof Chennault would be at all happy with how that works out. Blue skies! — Daniel Ford

Let us now celebrate immigration

I earlier had occasion to note two immigrants' contribution to defeating the Covid Plague. They were a husband-and-wife team of scientists, the children of two "guest workers" from India, now working at the German firm BionTech, which teamed up with the American drug giant Pfizer to produce the world's most successful vaccine against Covid. But it seems that the immigration story doesn't end there, because BionTech itself was founded by Dr. Ugur Sahin and his wife, Dr. Ozlem Tureci, both with Turkish origins. (He was born there; she was the daughter of Turkish immigrants.)

And that's not all! The head of Pfizer's competitor in the Covid race is also an immigrant. Born in France, Stephane Bancel came to the US to get an engineering degree from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 2011 he became CEO of Moderna, and turned the company toward developing vaccines. Though not as widely used as Pfizer's similar jab, Moderna's is arguably more effective in developing antibodies against Covid.

Elon does it again!

Was there ever a better advertisement for immigration? Elon Musk, who came to America from South Africa by way of Canada, has done it again: he launched the first civilian spacecraft to orbit the earth, with an all-civilian and properly diverse four-person crew. Aboard were a billionaire and a cancer survivor and physician assistant at St. Jude's Research Hospital; three whites and one black; two men and two women. And although the billionaire was the designated commander, and the black woman was the designated pilot, in fact the SpaceX Crew Capsule was entirely self-driven, just the way Mr Musk wants his Teslas to be. It was a great three days for him, for legal immigration, for the U.S., and for our new passion of inclusivity.

 

The Taliban atop Mount Biden

 

Was ever a nation more humiliated? I suspect that even the flagpole was left behind as America scrambled to get out at whatever cost to its standing in the world.

What can I say?

 August 16, 2021 -- "A date," as another president said in another time, "which will live in infamy." Alas, this time the infamy is ours. Joe Biden has given us the Bay of Pigs, the fall of Saigon, Desert One, and 9/11 all wrapped into one shambolic package.

More gold for the USA

 "I freaking love living there," said Tamyra Mensah-Stock when some idiot asked her how she liked representing the United States after she won gold in wrestling yesterday. Watch the joy on her face at https://twitter.com/i/status/1422649220482408454