Among the blessings for which I was grateful last week: I did not sit down for Thanksgiving dinner with Charles Blow.

If you've never heard of Charles Blow, that, too, may be a blessing. But since I've opened this door, I'm obliged to inform you: He's a columnist for The New York Times which means he's among the highest-paid opinion writers in America. His Nov. 27 contribution to the national discourse was headlined "The Horrible History of Thanksgiving."

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The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the November 29 jihadi attack at London Bridge, where a Pakistani Islamist stabbed two people to death and injured three others. The suspect, 28-year-old Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist, was subsequently shot dead by police.

Khan, from Stoke-on-Trent, was convicted in February 2012 of plotting — on behalf of al-Qaeda — jihadi attacks against the London Stock Exchange and pubs in Stoke, in addition to setting up a jihadi training camp in Pakistan. He was sentenced to an "indeterminate sentence," meaning that he could have been kept in prison beyond his original minimum term of eight years due to the danger he posed to national security.

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Over the weekend, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham insisted that President Donald Trump's unannounced visit to share turkey dinner with American troops in Afghanistan was "truly about Thanksgiving and supporting the troops." Grisham is right: Trump's trip was all about the season—but not Thanksgiving season. Instead, the president's trip signaled that his reelection campaign is now in full swing. With his approval rating stuck in the low 40s, half the country now favoring his impeachment and removal from office, and suburban Republican women deserting the GOP, Trump is attempting to showcase his foreign policy achievements while conveying the image of a less chaotic presidency.

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It is said that in politics, as in warfare, the adversary always gets a vote. Today, there is perhaps no clearer example of this truism than the struggle taking place over Iran's connection to the World-Wide Web. For, even as the Internet has emerged as a crucial medium for expression, politics and coordination among Iran's assorted opposition factions, it has also become a domain that Iran's clerical regime has tried to dominate – with considerable success. Just how much became apparent in mid-November, when a new cycle of unrest precipitated by the Iranian government's decision to significantly hike domestic prices for gasoline rocked the Islamic Republic. Predictably, those "petroleum protests" quickly became a broader outpouring of discontent directed at the Islamic Republic and its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Yet the uprising was quickly defused by the Iranian regime's adroit response, which included a rapid, comprehensive shutdown of Internet access throughout the country. Early on November 17th, the Iranian regime blocked virtually all Web traffic within its national borders and kept it off for nearly a week, until regime security forces had succeeded in sufficiently gaining control of the situation. The online capabilities exhibited by the Iranian regime in recent days aren't, in fact, new. They represent the culmination of a decade of painstaking official investments in suppression technologies and Internet control mechanisms.

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The Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system continues to make headlines as it knocks Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets out of the sky. The system is the crucial lower tier of Israel's layered missile defense system, which guards Israel's skies from threats near and far. The David's Sling system covers middle-layer threats, and the Arrow system defends against long-range projectiles.

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WHEN BOSTON police officers declared an illegal strike in September 1919, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge condemned the men for "desertion of duty," and upheld the decision of the commissioner of police to fire the strikers and hire replacements. "There is no right to strike against the public safety," he declared, "by anybody, anywhere, any time."

Coolidge's resolute stand made him a national hero overnight. In November he was reelected in a landslide. A year later he was Warren Harding's running mate on the GOP national ticket, and won election to the White House in his own right in 1924.

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Part 1 in a series

Much of modern environmental activism, which owes more to zealotry than evidence, has spawned a nasty perversion — let's call it the Pseudo-Scientific Method. As employed by environmental campaigners and the activist scientists who enable them, it has little to do with scientific discovery or the accumulation of knowledge; rather, it is "advocacy research" that creates "evidence" to support a pre-determined public policy — usually, inappropriate regulation or even bans.

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"Trump has betrayed the Syrian Kurds" — so goes a popular refrain regarding the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the areas of northeast Syria held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The events that have followed — namely, a Turkish invasion of parts of SDF territory along the border and the deployment of Syrian government forces in some SDF areas — have been characterized as a strategic disaster for American interests, with some commentators even proclaiming the withdrawal as indicative of a U.S. imperial decline and U.S. disengagement from the Middle East.

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