A selection of vintage balloons from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parades.

More. And. 

A collection of vintage slide rules for calculating the effects of nuclear weapons. 

Also, assorted film posters.  

Film of the atomic cannon test, May 25, 1953. A single 280mm shell was fired seven miles, yielding a 15 kiloton explosion.

And a gallery of toys with an atomic theme.

(h/t, Coudal)

A while ago, I posted some extracts from Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s article on Ernesto “Che” Guevara:

In April 1967, speaking from experience, he summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his Message to the Tricontinental: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine”… In a letter to his mother in 1954, written in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Jacobo Arbenz, he wrote: “It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches, and other distractions to break the monotony…”

With the above in mind, readers may be interested in Ted Balaker’s short film on the suckers who fellate this “social justice” icon.

“Rock and roll as well as jazz was what they called ‘imperialist music’… He hated artists, so how is it possible that artists still today support the image of Che Guevara?” Paquito D’Rivera.

Related: Harry’s Place versus defiant fellators, the chic of concentration camps.

(h/t, Daimnation!) 

Theodore Dalrymple ponders terrorism, its apologists, and those most readily drawn to it:

Although I am not an historian, it has long seemed to me that some acquaintance with the history of Nineteenth Century Russia is absolutely crucial to understanding the modern world, for it was there that the various forms of modern revolutionary terrorism, and politics as the pursuit of an ideological end, first developed. And the first terrorists were certainly not downtrodden peasants brainwashed by religious or other leaders: they were either aristocrats suffering angst at their own privilege in the midst of poverty, or members of the newly-emerged middle classes, angry that their education had not resulted in the influence in society to which they thought themselves entitled by virtue of their intelligence, idealism and knowledge.

This pattern has been repeated over and over again. Latin America is a very good example. Castro was the spoilt son of a self-made millionaire who had a personal grudge against society because he was illegitimate and sometimes humiliated for it; in other words, he was both highly privileged, with a sense of entitlement, and deeply resentful, always a dreadful combination. Ernesto Guevara was of partially aristocratic descent, whose upbringing was that of a bohemian bourgeois, who was too egotistical and lacking in compassion for individual human beings to accept the humdrum discipline of medical practice.

The leaders of the guerrilla movement in Guatemala (a country, oddly, with many parallels to Nineteenth Century Russia) were of bourgeois and educated origin; one of them was the son of a Nobel-prize winner, not exactly a true social representative of the population. The leader and founder of Sendero Luminoso of Peru, a movement of the Pol Pot tendency (and Pol Pot himself, of course, studied in Paris), was a professor of philosophy, and his followers were the first educated generation of the peasantry, not the peasants themselves. Peasants are capable of uprisings, no doubt, even very bloody ones, but they do not elaborate ideologies or undergo training for attacks on distant targets.

The rest.

Readers with an interest in mental hospitals may recall an ephemera item on the Danvers State Insane Asylum, with its decayed interiors and elaborate underground tunnel system.

In a similar vein, Lisa Rinzler has catalogued and photographed items found in the attic of the abandoned Willard Psychiatric Centre in New York’s Finger Lakes. Among the items found are hundreds of suitcases belonging to former residents, with photographs, drawings and notes by staff. One note, regarding a patient named Ethel, reads:

She is a manic of rather neurotic type, who is inclined to pout and grumble and find fault. It was discovered yesterday that she and Miss ___, another patient, had been in the habit of getting into bed together, probably at night, but they were found in bed together in the daytime and said to be having a jolly time. When discovered by Miss McMahon, charge attendant of the ward, they giggled and chuckled and told her there was a place for her if she would like to get in.

The site also includes recordings of recollections by former staff and inmates, spanning the 1940s through to the 1980s, with graphic descriptions of the facilities, treatments and the experience of a typical night shift. If the psychiatry of yore is a subject that intrigues, it’s worth a visit. Though you wouldn’t want to stay.