Culture How to Survive Liberal Thanksgiving This year, Thanksgiving is ours. It all starts with a text: “Can’t wait to see everyone for Thanksgiving! Let’s be civil this year!” You remember last year, when someone “accidentally” sent your MAGA cap down the disposal. You know the text was not intended for your cousin who livestreams her dietary needs (“I guess no one remembers—again—I’m vegan.”) The text was aimed squarely at you, the family’s only conservative. Every November families across America who haven’t spoken to each other since last Thanksgiving gather everyone under one roof. You may think this is about cranberries and gravy, but really it’s about not talking politics while everyone wants to, as if a political ceasefire and a political battlefield decided to have a baby. The other 364 days a year the country is divided. Today, it is grandma’s table that is divided, the one with ailing Grandpa Joe who only gets about half the jokes on The Daily Show anymore and Aunt Lisa, who brought the Jello salad in an NPR tote bag. It is going to be a long day, because Thanksgiving isn’t just a meal; it is a ritual of arriving after noon, watching the Detroit Lions lose on TV, and snacking before a 17-course feast consisting of at least two dishes no one touches (green beans and that Jello salad). This is not going to be like the time you first heard Dark Side of the Moon. Think of it like gas station sushi, something to be endured, not enjoyed. But this year is different in one important way. This year we won. No more Biden in the White House, no more Hillary, no more serial impeachments and Russiagate to get your cousin with the nose ring to predict Trump will be out of office in a few weeks. Nope, this is our turn, our guy in the Oval Office. The key here for you is the pivot, the deflection, being the bigger man. You already won the next three years’ worth of Thanksgivings, so why bother with explaining China policy to some bored undergrad relative who also doesn’t want to be there? It’s not like you’re going to end up in anyone’s will after all this anyway. At least you won’t be alone: Surveys show two out of five Americans bite their tongues on Thanksgiving, though it’s unclear if they mean holding back or if they actually look forward to the pain. More than half of Americans say talking about politics with people they disagree with is stressful and frustrating. So to help, here are some tips. The trick to disarming liberal relatives isn’t to argue more effectively about ICE; it’s to arrive bearing gut-busting amounts of carbohydrates. Nothing disarms a political privateer faster than a pie, even if you had to buy it at Whole Foods and everyone can see you replated it. You could quote Ron Paul all day and your aunt will still frown, but show up with a good dessert and suddenly you’re “such a sweet boy.” Save the snark like “voting for Trump doesn’t mean I eat puppies, dammit” for much, much later. New Year’s, maybe. When the conversation turns to politics, because, see, your other cousin read this article in the Atlantic, it is time for the strategic nod. Don’t worry when she is staring directly at you and muttering “and that is how democracy dies until we get a woman president”; just nod, like “I heard you and I am chewing. A lot of chewing.” This is your Marvel move: engaged, even thoughtful, and open-minded. You chew. You think of Rush lyrics from 2112. You imagine what you’d reply on X. Think judo, not boxing. Keep in mind this hack works better with some gnarly leg meat in your mouth than with a forkful of mashed potatoes, so eat strategically. Remember, your cousin probably thinks she is saving democracy between bites. Don’t show the table anything from your phone. No one has ever changed their political mind because of a social media post, and they certainly won’t do it over stuffing. Also, don’t forward anything that proves a point. Of course you are right. Just smile. Bring along the nonpartisan version of Uno. The red and blue cards become orange and purple, and there’s a veto card that skips the turn of a politically chatty player and makes him change the subject. Remember the dog doesn’t care about politics. The dog loves you unconditionally because it cares not for tax policy or SNAP benefits as long as it gets a bowl of horrid dry crumbly Costco dog food once in a while. Even if he’s not your childhood pet, sneak him bits of turkey breast under the table and it’ll be cool later when you need him, as dogs agree with everyone who drops food. When things get too intense, simply spring up and announce, “Looks like the dog needs a walk,” and retreat. You’ll return far less concerned about the discussion, which has shifted to Kamala–Buttgieg chances in 2028. No dog? Step outside for that important work Zoom you just remembered. “No, grandpa, I can’t believe what’s happening in this country, a work call on Thanksgiving, what has this world come to?” Try “coping ahead.” Before arriving for Thanksgiving, visualize a bingo-style card of things you might hear that would otherwise provoke you, stuff like “Democracy is literally on the line,” or “Fox isn’t a real news station,” or “how could anyone have voted for someone convicted of 34 felonies,” or anything to do with Orange Man (center square). Just be glad words like “mansplaining” and “whataboutism” seem to have run their course. Each time something said does hit on your card, enjoy a small sip of eggnog, or something from that bottle of gross sherry that’s been on the table since the Carter administration. Timing is everything. As the table dissolves over coffee into competing monologues stolen from Colbert, slip away and collect your jacket. If someone tries to rope you into “one more thing about January 6,” feign a sudden fascination with helping wash the dishes. Usually the serious political relatives are still at the table while the others move into the kitchen, relieved another Thanksgiving has ended without a call to 911. Your exit line should be light as the door bumps you on the way out, something like “next year, let’s all agree to just fight over football.” Scientists say sharing a meal releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone that promotes forgiveness. You will put that to the test this Thanksgiving; that’s better than pretending you have the flu and skipping out. Because remember, our democracy, like Thanksgiving, survives not because we agree, but because we keep showing up to talk to each other.  Go Lions! The post How to Survive Liberal Thanksgiving appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs War with Venezuela Won’t Solve America’s Economic Woes Regime change rarely proves as straightforward as it appears on PowerPoint slides in Langley. In April 1939, American unemployment reached 20.7 percent. For Henry Morgenthau Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, this was bad news. In a private meeting he confessed to two senior congressmen: “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work… After eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an enormous debt to boot.”  Today, Americans know how the Great Depression ended. It ended with the onset of war in Europe. FDR truly believed that, if Britain and France went to war with Germany, the quagmire would make the British and French Governments heavily dependent on access to U.S. credit markets and resources, thereby ending America’s economic Depression. FDR welcomed the stimulus that war provided. In 1939, Joseph Stalin hoped war in the West would be a quagmire fatally weakening Germany and its opponents. Stalin believed this development would open the door to a massive Soviet invasion from the East that would supplant Nazism with Communism. Thus, Stalin eagerly supplied the German war machine with the oil, iron, aluminum, grain, rubber, and other mineral resources Berlin needed to launch its war against Britain, France, and the Low Countries. Ultimately, both FDR and Stalin miscalculated just how costly and risky the new conflict in Europe would be. War broke out in 1939, and in 1940 German military power rapidly defeated Western allies, though Britain fought on. The next year Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Today, the Trump administration faces some conditions that FDR would recognize. Scott Bessent, President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, confronts a national sovereign debt of approximately $38 trillion. Liquidity strains also persist in parts of the financial system, and the dollar’s long-term reserve status is under significant pressure and scrutiny.  Among the ideas under discussion by Bessent is a more enthusiastic official embrace of stablecoins—cryptocurrencies deliberately engineered to remain boringly pegged one-for-one to the dollar by holding equivalent reserves of cash or high-quality cash-equivalents in regulated accounts. In plain language: digital dollars that promise never to fluctuate like Bitcoin but can circle the globe in seconds without ever touching a traditional bank.  Bessent publicly argues that well-regulated stablecoins will also extend the dollar’s dominance into the blockchain era. Trump appears sympathetic; there is, after all, not enough gold on the planet to return to a metallic standard, and simply printing more fiat currency will further debase the dollar. Wall Street, ever helpful, is delighted to assist in kicking the can a little further—ideally down a blockchain-paved road. Meanwhile, the Trump White House is charting a new course to war, this time in the direction of Venezuela. Has the administration concluded that the rapid conquest of Venezuela could induce the kind of economic stimulus that rescued FDR’s failed policies and restore economic prosperity inside the United States? Compared with the Russian or Iranian armed forces, Venezuela’s military is almost Lilliputian. Nicolás Maduro presides over a hard-left, bitterly anti-American regime that is bankrupt, internationally isolated (save for Havana, Moscow, and Tehran), and yet sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves—303 billion barrels, according to OPEC’s latest assessment. In addition, Cuba still depends on Venezuela for the overwhelming majority of its subsidized oil imports. A post-Maduro government amenable to Washington could, in theory, sever that lifeline and simultaneously open the spigots to international operators able to produce without the chronic interruptions that have reduced output from over 3 million barrels a day to less than 1 million. Some in Washington and on Wall Street whisper that predictable, disruption-free extraction of Venezuelan heavy crude, gold, emeralds, and rare-earth deposits could be treated by markets as a form of informal collateral against America’s own balance sheet—a 21st-century echo of the 19th-century bondholder practice of looking to Egyptian cotton or Peruvian guano to secure sovereign loans. Even if the profits formally accrue to a friendly Caracas government, every barrel would still be priced and settled in dollars rather than Chinese renminbi, thereby extending the petrodollar’s lease on life by another decade or two. All of this assumes, of course, that regime change proves as straightforward in practice as it appears on PowerPoint slides in Langley or at SOUTHCOM headquarters located in Greater Miami. It further assumes that Russia, preoccupied in Europe and the Middle East, will politely decline the invitation to turn the Orinoco Basin into its next low-cost proxy battlefield; that Venezuelan forces and associated militias will disband rather than wage a protracted insurgency; and that Brazil and Colombia will remain quiescent spectators while their border regions become the new Ho Chi Minh trail. Regrettably, American military experience in Ukraine and the Middle East suggests a different outcome. Russian military power has proven steadfastly resistant to attrition and grown stronger with each passing year. Israeli resolve to annihilate the Palestinians and crush its neighbors remains boundless, and Iranian resistance to Israeli hegemony is indomitable.  After years of expenditure measured in hundreds of billions, Washington is unable to identify any tangible strategic gains for the American people in Eastern Europe or the Middle East. Even more troubling, 70 percent of American households continue to live paycheck to paycheck and show little enthusiasm for yet another open-ended war. History is never kind to empires that mistake “technically recoverable” resources for the extraction of actual resources (heavy oil) under conditions of guerrilla warfare. One suspects that when the final bill for this Venezuelan adventure arrives, the stablecoins will still be worth exactly one dollar—though the dollar itself may well turn out to be worth much less than its present custodians imagine. The post War with Venezuela Won’t Solve America’s Economic Woes appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Latest Step in the Establishment Campaign to Stop Elbridge Colby  Senate Republicans are working overtime to isolate and undermine the Department of Defense undersecretary. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) After nearly one year into the Trump administration, there is one thing bringing Democrats and Republicans together on Capitol Hill: the urge to kneecap Elbridge Colby. Senate Republicans in particular have struggled with a loss of relevancy in the Trump vortex, but when it comes to the issue of war and maintaining business as usual, especially military force projection and the war in Ukraine, they suddenly find their collective backbone. Nothing gets the old predator instincts moving like a realist treading on their marked territory. Colby, who was confirmed as undersecretary of war for policy by the skin of his teeth with the begrudging help of Senate hawks like Tom Cotton, is now increasingly isolated, as the Senate Armed Services Committee just scrapped a confirmation vote for his deputy, Alexander Velez-Green, and Austin Dahmer, the nominee to be assistant secretary for strategy, plans, and capabilities, on November 19. Both are widely considered realists, “prioritizers,” and allies for Colby in a front office at the Pentagon that is increasingly described as “chaotic” and “dysfunctional”—those being the more polite characterizations shared by sources with The American Conservative this week. The die has been cast, and the odds are not in Colby’s favor. For those who saw him as the antidote to decades of wrong-headed policies that overextended U.S. armed forces and supplies in foreign wars and endless deployments—or as Charlie Kirk once said, “one of the most important pieces to stop the Bush/Cheney cabal at DOD”—this is a real blow. “While senators may have concerns with the nominees themselves, stalling their nominations could be a way to even more clearly signal their discontent with Colby,” wrote Joe Gould and Connor O’Brien for POLITICO after SASC cut off a realistic pathway for Velez-Green’s and Dahmer’s confirmation.  That’s an understatement, said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, in an email to TAC. “Republicans are stuffing President Trump’s DoW [Department of War] nominees for two reasons: One, they oppose Trump’s foreign policy. Two, they fancy themselves shadow commanders-in-chief.” As such, he added, “they want [Sen.] Mitch McConnell’s foreign policy, not Donald Trump’s.”  Trump, of course, had campaigned on a Jacksonian version of restraint, rebuking the architects of the past two decades’ wars of choice and leaning into the idea that, rather than serve as a global policeman, the U.S. must be prepared to strike hard only if provoked.  Whether he has always been consistent on that score is a matter for debate, but realists like Colby have found a place because of Trump’s disdain for the old Cold War thinking of McConnell and others like SASC Chairman Roger Wicker, both of whom have criticized Trump’s foreign policy, especially his desire to bring an end to the Ukraine War not on the battlefield, but at the bargaining table.  For his part, Colby agrees with Trump, and has long argued that the U.S. should prioritize deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, believing that Washington has squandered its readiness for multifront wars. While realists agree and believe the U.S. should refocus on what it can do, the ossified Washington establishment insists that lots and lots of instant money will prepare America to fight wars in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East all at the same time. There is an entire political and financial economy in Washington and Brussels committed to this enduring fantasy. Conforming is essential. What they are doing to Colby “is a telling indicator of how far the bomb-everything-at-once old guard is willing to go to thwart a thoughtful and effective proponent of prioritizing deterrence in East Asia, where America’s biggest future challenges and opportunities lie,” Sohrab Ahmari, U.S. editor of UnHerd, told TAC. POLITICO said the senators who scuttled the nomination were complaining that they were being “kept in the dark” on the National Defense Strategy. They are probably fuming over reports that the strategy, which supposedly landed on Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk in September for approval, reflects a pivot to the Western Hemisphere and the homeland, a shift that downgrades even the Indo-Pacific, apparently. This is a real departure from past policy strategies, which identified Russia and China as the major “pacing threats.” It is also what Trump wants, say observers. “They [senators] think SASC should have outsized influence on the NDS, a document that statutorily belongs in OSD,” said Logan. “But here again the reason they’re trying to insinuate themselves into the document is because they want to shape it themselves, or at least be able to leak what they don’t like to the press.” In his strained November confirmation hearing before SASC, Velez-Greene refuted the idea that somehow the policy shop was going rogue and wasn’t even conferring with the secretary’s office during the NDS process.  “I believe we developed that document in direct coordination with the secretary’s front office for his direction and intent,” Velez-Green said. “With respect to interagency coordination or notification, there were discussions, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to discuss the particulars in this setting.” Senators are also reportedly miffed about a “pause” in U.S. aid to Ukraine this summer, which turned out to be a tempest in a teapot, but for which Colby has somehow taken the blame. They are also disgruntled about Colby’s review of a Biden-era deal to sell nuclear-powered American Virginia-class submarines to Australia (a review that concluded with no interruption of the deal), and more recent news that the Pentagon has decided to bring home a rotational brigade of troops (approximately 3,000) from Romania. This was also somehow partly blamed on Colby, though Secretary Hegseth and ultimately President Trump have the final word on all of these decisions. “The heat coming down on Elbridge Colby is based on an embarrassing misunderstanding of his role as undersecretary for policy,” said Logan. Sources who spoke with TAC say McConnell, the lone Republican vote against Colby’s confirmation in April, is the ringleader of the Colby detractors advancing the notion that he is acting off the reservation and “freelancing” foreign policy within the E-Ring.  “He is pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration,” one unnamed source told POLITICO in July. “They all view him as the guy who’s going to make the U.S. do less in the world in general.” More recently, Cotton went so far as to liken Colby’s shop to a Peanuts character. “I understand that media reports can be wrong, believe me, but it just seems like there’s this Pigpen-like mess coming out of the policy shop that you don’t see from, say, intel and security and acquisition and sustainment,” he said in the recent hearing for Dahmer’s nomination on November 4. The acrimony coming from the powerful former Majority Leader’s office and more interventionist Republicans is longstanding and began, sources say, when Colby clashed with colleagues serving as an advisor on the Mitt Romney presidential campaign in 2012. Years later he was considered but passed over for an important post with the Jeb Bush campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015. His sin? According to the Wall Street Journal at the time: Mr. Colby has prominently advocated against a military strike on Iran and has called for the Republican Party to move closer to its roots of pragmatism and containment.  Specifically, Mr. Colby has argued that an open-ended military attack against Iran could be a worse outcome than a nuclear-armed Iran and that containing a nuclear Iran was both “plausible and practical.” The bad blood continued through Colby’s tenure during the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018. His critics, especially the pro-Israel crowd at Jewish Insider, attempted to revive the Iran brief against him to kill his confirmation earlier this year. “This is a story that’s now more than a decade old, in terms of a lot of the antipathies that linger in the elite establishment of the Republican Senate in particular,” a source with knowledge of the Pentagon told TAC.  He added that McConnell’s office is likely coordinating the campaign against Colby. TAC contacted McConnell’s longtime aide Robert Karem, a “forceful interventionist” who was on the Jeb Bush campaign in 2015 at the same time as Colby, and now works with McConnell as a clerk on the Senate Appropriations Committee Defense Subcommittee. Karem referred TAC to the committee communications team, which declined to comment for the story. Not every Republican on SASC jumped on the bandwagon against Colby in these recent hearings. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo) said he saw through his colleagues’ complaints. “I think much of the criticism, which is cloaked in terms of transparency and communication, really is just an effort to undermine a shift in our foreign policy orientation, which I support, which is to realism, as opposed to some of the failed points of view that have dominated permanent Washington over the last 30 years,” Schmitt said, noting that the foreign policy status quo “has repeatedly failed the American people.” Today, the nominees are in limbo and the NDS has yet to be released. They are victims of a self-sustaining organism driven by orthodoxy and conditioned to defend itself against threats—Threats like “realists.” According to POLITICO, “nominees that aren’t confirmed by the end of a Senate session [mid-December] are returned to the White House to be renominated the following year, restarting the confirmation process unless senators agree to keep certain nominees.” Without some Executive intervention, the pathway forward for Velez-Green and Dahmer looks uncertain at best. “Everybody wants to maintain their piece of the pie,” said TAC’s source, “and they’re going to do whatever they can to not allow change to happen.” The post The Latest Step in the Establishment Campaign to Stop Elbridge Colby appeared first on The American Conservative.

A unique achievement. The post Who was the first person to win a Grammy as a solo artist, duo, and as part of a group? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Following the demise of Blind Faith, after one album and a single tour, guitarist Eric Clapton, trying to escape the hype that surrounded Cream and Blind Faith, landed a “low-key” gig with Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. It was here Clapton met the future Dominos. Delaney & Bonnie and Friends backed Clapton on his self-title solo album and they all contributed to George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” triple album. As this was going on, Clapton became obsessed with Harrison’s wife, Pattie (née’ Boyd) who was flattered by Clapton’s attention. When it came time to name the band, they settled on Derek & The Dominos. There was no ‘Derek’ per se, rather it was a nickname Clapton had acquired. Derek & The Dominos made its debut at a London benefit concert for Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Civil Liberties Defense Fund at the Lyceum Ballroom. The line-up was Clapton, Bobby Whitlock (piano, organ, vocals); Carl Radle (bass); Jim Gordon (drums). Ex-Traffic guitarist Dave Mason also appeared but he didn’t stay in the group. Shortly after the show, Clapton and his fellow Dominos headed for Miami to record. The sessions progressed slowly. Taking a break, Clapton went to see a promising emerging guitarist. Duane Allman’s playing so impressed Clapton that he asked Allman to take a break (ten days) from the Allman Brothers Band to work on the “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” album – the title inspired by the classic love poem, “The Story of Layla and Majnun.” Allman accepted. Clapton called Allman the “catalyst” for the “Layla” album. It was a perfect pairing. Allman was a guitarist on the rise with something to prove, trading licks with a living legend and not about to give ground. Allman turned out to be one of Clapton’s best musical choices. At the center of the album was “Layla,” with a fiery dual guitar opening (played by Clapton and Allman) and driven by Clapton’s unbridled vocal passion as an ode to his beloved Pattie. Everyone was expecting great things. Layla But “Layla” only made it to #51 on the Billboard Hot 100 which was way below expectations. “Layla’s” failure and the tepid sales of the ’70 release “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” accelerated Clapton’s spiral into drug addiction and depression leading him to disband Derek & The Dominos. “We were a make-believe band,” Clapton reflected over a dozen years later. “We were all hiding inside it. Derek and the Dominos – the whole thing. So it couldn’t last. I had to come out and admit that I was being me. I mean, being Derek was a cover for the fact that I was trying to steal someone else’s wife. That was one of the reasons for doing it, so that I could write the song, and even use another name for Pattie. So Derek and Layla – it wasn’t real at all.” Pattie divorced Harrison in ’77 and married Clapton two years later, in a ceremony Harrison attended. The marriage lasted a decade. The album should have done better, in addition to “Layla, the set contained a magical version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” which became a Clapton concert favorite, the Blues standards “Key To The Highway” and “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” and the Clapton/Whitlock’s songs “Bell Bottom Blues,” another ode to Pattie, and good time Rocker, “Tell The Truth.” Bell Bottom Blues Little Wing The original version appeared on Hendrix’s sophomore album, “Axis.” In hindsight, the dissolution seemed a bit hasty since “Layla” has become a Rock classic rivaling “Stairway To Heaven” and “Hotel California.” It’s often regarded as Clapton’s greatest musical achievement. Furthermore, “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” has been hailed as a masterpiece. In 2000, the gold album (500,000 units moved) was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.  ### The post Derek & The Dominos appeared first on RockinTown.

from The National Pulse: WHAT HAPPENED: Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed that he directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to update its website to reverse the agency’s prior position on childhood vaccines and autism. ?WHO WAS INVOLVED: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC, and Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.). ?WHEN […]

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