Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

• Is secondhand smoke really as bad, health-wise, as it’s made out to be?
• New York City moves to ban the use of e-cigarettes in public places because it sends the message that smoking is socially acceptable. Soon it’ll be illegal to do something that looks like a prelude to smoking, like leaning your shoulder against a telephone pole and affecting an I-don’t-give-a-shit demeanor.
• If the UK can have a Cromwell statue, why can’t Russia have one of Stalin?
• The Morgan-Freeman-gets-mistaken-for-Nelson-Mandela joke comes true.
• Heartiste politely reflects on the PajamaObamacareBoy phenomenon.
• 1920s mug shots are pretty nice to look at.
• These days, the ability to claim the authority of science is the key to silencing your opponents.
• Alison Brie raps.
• David Bordwell takes a look at one of my favorite movie writers, Otis Ferguson.
• All of Ahnuld’s kills strung together in one supercut. Where do people find the time to make these things? (H/T Blowhard, Esq.)
• Is George W. Bush now a hipster icon? (H/T Glynn Marshes)
• Popular mythology holds Ronald Reagan to be responsible in some way for the AIDS epidemic. How odd.
• In the past (as in the 20th century) the Confederacy was typically seen as being just as American as the Union. Misguided and wrong, maybe, but American. Lee was taken to be a great American general regardless of his fighting for the wrong side. It seems to me that we now view the Confederacy as an external and hostile nation of bad guys — as a Kingdom of Not Us second only to Nazi Germany. In any event, I’m pretty sure that if you told Lee that his “entire purpose in life was to destroy the nation,” he would have punched you in the cheek.