Newmark's Door

Love the video clip of Paddy Chayevsky telling, in the late 70s, Vanessa Redgrave not to spout her political views at the Oscars. 

How much as changed in two generations.

"Before 1913 there was no income tax, and the United States was a much freer country. Initially, the government sold the federal income tax to the American people as something only the rich would have to pay."

Article mentions an example I used in class: in 1900 people in New York City and some other major cities were worried about the huge increase in horses they were going to need for their growing populations. Specifically, where they were going to put all the horseshit?

Two of the most famous photos from the Vietnam War were apparently not exactly what they seemed.

Noted historian Allen C. Guelzo--even more noted by virtue of having taught a class my wife attended--in brutally plain language crushes the "1619 Project" of the New York Times. (I haven't read it, but I trust Prof. Guelzo. I read the Times these days mostly for its food section.)

This is a good news/bad news history. Good news: people in the past proved to be more capable of adapting to environmental changes than you might have thought. Bad news: to so adapt, they required flexibility, flexibility that modern Big Government likely will dampen, maybe severely.

Very interesting answer. 

Link via Marginal Revolution.

Socialism at work:

Between the winter of 1958 and the spring of 1961, it is variously estimated that between 16.5 and 45 million Chinese living in rural areas died of starvation and related illnesses, a cataclysm now known as the Great Famine. Its onset coincided with the start of Chairman Mao Zedong’s national development plan, the Great Leap Forward. Today, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) refers to this period as the ‘Three Years of Natural Disasters’.

I'd guess that anybody who's reached double-digit years on the planet needn't be reminded of just how awful people can be. But on the off chance that somebody you know does need to be reminded, may I suggest you send them to "Leninthink". (The author is a chaired professor at Northwestern.)

V. I. Lenin pegs the meter of how monstrous one person can be.

"Capitalism has been the great engine of unimagined prosperity and unimagined improvements in worker conditions."