History

So, they're not going to put a woman on the $20 bill after all but on the $10 bill. This has resulted in the usual silly stuff, like, so, another example of economic inequity -- downgraded to the $10! There is even a minor controversy about getting rid of Hamilton instead of Jackson:

Two views of the Magna Carta, the 800th anniversary of which was yesterday. One, hey, let's stop revering the stupid thing. For one thig, it didn't actually work. For another, it wasn't actually "the first of its kind," but one of many documents from that era codifying limitations on government power. Finally, it wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement of liberty, considering it protected only men of the noblity and wasn't exactly kind to Jews.

Is this a big deal?

Hey,  global warmists, join me in looking back at Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" theory, which, well, bombed:

Since World War II, the Unites States is one for five in armed conflicts, so the question is, why has America stopped winning wars?

Following the news is such a part of my job that it's tough to give it up sometimes even on vacation. This time I managed to do it, though. So I came back to work ready to look freshly at unfolding events and discovered, alas, it was the same old crap they'd been shoveling when I left.

One of the darkest days in American history:

Forty years later, the images remain searing: Throngs of desperate South Vietnamese civilians trying to scale the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, hoping somehow to squeeze aboard one of the helicopters evacuating U.S. personnel and their associates in the face of an onslaught by North Vietnamese forces.

[. . .]

This seems to be amusing lots of folks on the right:

Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t just running against Republicans. She’s also running against parts of her husband’s legacy.

George Will on why today’s very lame and PC mindset, and why free speech is more threatened today than it was during the eras of the Alien & Sedition Acts, or the Red Scares. “Today’s attack is different. It is an attack on the theory of free speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech . . . What we have today is an attack on the very possibility of free speech. The belief is that the First Amendment is a mistake.”

Anal retentive fussbudget stomps his little feet and demands we stop saying the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865: