It’s hard to overstate how insane the US was after declaring war on Germany in 1917. One filmmaker was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making a movie about the American Revolution, because it portrayed British soldiers in a negative light
A guy in Texas was sentenced to 3 years in prison for saying “I hope Wilson goes to hell”; when pacifist Hutterites in South Dakota refused to buy war bonds, the county sheriff seized all their livestock and auctioned it off

This week is the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so it’s worth remembering what Kennedy’s major takeaway from the episode was When the crisis ended peacefully, Kennedy met with the joint chiefs of staff and was stunned when they were furious with him. Curtis LeMay told Kennedy the incident was “the greatest defeat in our history.”

So many “smart, serious” people got this so wrong when there was plenty of evidence from the beginning that he was a Little League Trump playing for the other team. You’d think some of them would have been humbled by being so wrong, and yet

https://twitter.com/marxistrealism/status/1584598687258669056

The “draft Cuomo” movement was cranking up at the exact same time he was proposing Medicaid cuts so steep they would have made New York ineligible for federal pandemic relief nysenate.gov/newsroom/in-th…

Today’s Columbus Day in the US, a federal holiday since 1937, largely thanks to the efforts of Italian-born newspaper publisher Generoso Pope, the most important single advocate for Mussolini in the US in the 1920s and 1930s The Times obit from 1950 says Pope was “accused” of fascist sympathies, which he “resented bitterly.” Pretty funny! Pope was a member of the Fascist League of North America, organized a Madison Square Garden tribute to Il Duce, won awards from Italy for supporting fascism, etc

People are dunking on Rod, but it’s good to look at the major drivers of the cost of US healthcare: bloated administration; profiteering/rent-seeking; and over-use of high-tech equipment, which is closely related to profiteering and rent-seeking

https://twitter.com/roddreher/status/1575117632721879040

One-third of US healthcare spending (over $1 trillion per year!) is devoted to administration, by far the highest in the world. US healthcare has entire job categories that exist nowhere else, like “claim-submission specialist” and record-coder

I saw a claim in an old Yippie paper that Rolling Stone took a giant loan from a Xerox exec to turn against the counterculture, and thought that sounded ridiculous until, lo and behold, in Joe Hagan’s definitive biography of Jann Wenner: The source for the claim in the Yippie article was Susan Lydon, one of the founders of Rolling Stone who had to deal with Wenner’s hippie misogyny while shaping the editorial voice of the young publication

An odd detail from history: the time when the OSS helped arm and train the Viet Minh, and supported their declaration of independence from France. That’s Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap flanking the OSS mission leader, Allyson Thomas. Ho’s OSS code name was “Lucius” When the OSS operatives - called Deer Team - parachuted behind Japanese lines to link up with the Viet Minh, Ho was seriously ill from malaria and hepatitis. OSS medic Paul Hoagland treated his ailments, possibly saving his life

Ronald Reagan ordering the invasion of Grenada two days after 241 Marines were killed in Beirut is the kind of political chutzpah his successors could only admire. A master class in “don’t look at that, look at this” It was also called Operation Urgent Fury, which is a very funny name for an invasion by the world’s preeminent military power of an island nation with something like 8,000 soldiers in its army

I love to criticize the prestige media, it’s one of the few ways I can still feel pleasure, but to describe this as “doxing” is pretty sad I think some of this is online weirdos who regard answering the phone as an ordeal comparable to Greek firewalking just finding out about basic reporting. How dare you read easily available documents or knock on someone’s door!

Larry Flynt once paid a spook $1M to kill Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, Frank Sinatra, and Walter Annenberg. Ambitious! Flynt thought better of it, though, and canceled the check. A month later, the spook was dead - poisoned, alleged a Flynt aid, by Larry himself. Who knows if that happened, but it isn’t out of the question. Flynt was surrounded by violence; two of his bodyguards murdered Roy Radin, would-be producer of “Cotton Club,” a bad-vibes-only movie if ever there was one.