Market Power

150 Years Ago Today, The US Civil War Started

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Confederacy's attack on Fort Sumter.  Thus started the greatest conflict of Americans vs. Americans in US history.  For those wanting to learn more about the history of the Civil war, I found two sources indispensable.  The first is the trilogy by Shelby Foote.  A southerner, his writing provides an excellent presentation of both sides of the story.

The other sources is Ken Burns' epic documentary "The Civil War" which first appeared on PBS in the late 1980's.  Using unique techniques, he takes photos and narration to provide the feeling of movement so watching the documentary doesn't feel like looking at a photo album.  Like Foote, he presents both sides in a balanced manner.

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Railroad Entrepreneuers and Railroads, Then and Now

Stephen Karlson at Cold Spring Shops has some thoughts on the WSJ article on railroads that I linked to the other day.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

HT to Kip.

A Profile of Schell's Brewery

From the Fairmont (Mn.) Sentinel].

The Marketplace of Ideas in a Socialist Academics' Paradise

Abraham Lincoln (August 24, 1855):

When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Full quote here (2nd gray block, 4th quote).  Washington University, 2009.

The students set up a gulag complete with prisoners, guards and barb wire on the Wash U campus.

Students constructed a memorial to the victims of socialism as a stark reminder of the horrors of socialism, and of its victims.

“We’re hoping to elevate the thinking of students about the connection between socialism, tyranny, and murder. Too often, we tend to think about state control in the abstract. This event is an opportunity to show the student body what socialism really is,” said junior Dirk Doebler, student leader of Young Americans for Liberty and lead organizer of the event. “We’re just twenty years away from the collapse of the Soviet Union’s despotic enslavement of hundreds of millions of people, yet everyone seems to forget that socialism killed over 150,000,000 people in the 20th century. All that gets lost in the convenient narrative our professors would have us believe. With this event, we’re striking down false notions. We’re speaking truth to power.”

YAL leader John Burns reported on the event today.

The university shut it down… It was too offensive.

Full post with video here.  Via Glenn Reynolds.

I weep for the marketplace of ideas.

R.I.P Anniversary Berlin Wall

R.I.P. = Rest in Pieces.  The WSJ editorial staff on "why the Berlin Wall fell."

The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Winds of Change

Growing up in the potential firing line between the US and the USSR, the members of the metal band the Scorpions had special reason to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Here is a video of their classic ballad Winds of Change which is about this historical event.

Here is the original video.

It's important to remember that this song, recored in 1990, is about this moment in history written from that moment in history.  It is a song about hope and the dismantling of the the dark shroud that destroyed the hope of millions of people in Eastern Europe:  the Iron Curtain.

What Does Warren Buffet Have in Common with Cornelius Vanderbilt?

They are both railroad moguls, in a sense.  Here's an interesting history of American railroads.  It answers the question:  what profit opportunity does Buffett see in the Burlington Northern - Santa Fe?

The First College Football Game

"You men will come to no Christian end!"  Rutgers vs. Princeton 140 years ago on Nov. 6th 1869, Allen Barra lays out a nice story on the first college football game ever played.

Note how the rules of the game were set.

Here's something I didn't know.  Mr. Magoo, in a video below pitching Stag Beer, was possibly based on one of the student fans at the game.

Here is another account of that first game.

Happy 47th Anniversary, First Man Into Space

From APOD:

On April 12th, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human in space. His remotely controlled Vostok 1 spacecraft lofted him to an altitude of 200 miles and carried him once around planet Earth. Commenting on the first view from space he reported, "The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very clearly".