A visual comparison of the past and present.

Who knows the legend René Laloux? 🤔 One of my favorite artists of all time 🫶🏽 If not .. give yourself 72 minutes and watch Fantastic Planet! You might never look at imagination the same way again 😉

We don’t talk enough about how autocrats view taxpayer dollars—not as public resources to serve the people, but as a pot of gold to enrich themselves and their allies. Their focus isn’t public welfare; it’s personal profit and power.

I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is. University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages. Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures. There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them. If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings: Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them. Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.

Possibly the most eloquent man of his time. Like Orwell, he spoke and wrote in a way that got to the point and explained it well.

1929, Finding his voice. Animated cartoon which illustrates how sound is added to a motion picture

The American Society of Cinematographers Awarded Robby Müller the prestigious ASC International Award in 2013 for his lifetime contributions to the art of cinematography. One of the very best of my lifetime had Zero Oscar Nominations!

39 years ago a dead character gave life to my career, so I'm very pleased to announce that coming July 21 DC Comics is releasing a volume of all my Deadman stories! Written by Mike Baron and Tim Seeley.

Aboriginal people of Australia .... DNA confirms that the indigenous culture is one of the most ancient cultures on earth, they are from Africa. The first Aboriginal genome sequence confirms that the indigenous people of Australia left Africa 75,000 years ago. A genetic study has found that Aborigines are descendants of the first people who left Africa up to 75,000 years ago, confirming that they may have the oldest continuous culture on the planet. Indigenous Australians were the first modern humans to traverse an unknown region of Asia and Australia, says Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, who led the study. “It was a really amazing journey that required exceptional survival skills and courage,” he says. A century-old lock of hair, presented to an anthropologist by an Aboriginal man, has led to the discovery has the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians. © Yemi Africa #drthehistories

🧐🤔YOU WANTED A WALL, TRUMP? YOU’LL HAVE ONE. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded to Trump’s threats: “So you voted to build a wall. Well then, dear Americans — even if geography isn’t your strong suit, and you see America as a country rather than a continent — you should know that on the other side of that wall stand 7 billion people. And if the word ‘people’ doesn’t resonate with you, let’s call them ‘consumers.’ Those 7 billion consumers can switch from iPhone to Samsung or Huawei in less than two days. They can trade Levi’s for Zara or Massimo Dutti, and within six months replace Ford and Chevrolet with Toyota, KIA, Mazda, Honda, Hyundai, Volvo, Subaru, Renault, or BMW — brands that are already more popular in many places. They can cancel DirecTV. And even if they choose not to, they can stop watching Hollywood films and turn instead to higher-quality productions from Latin America or Europe — with richer storytelling and better filmmaking. Believe it or not, people can skip Disney and visit the Xcaret resort in Cancún instead — or explore destinations across Mexico, Canada, or South America. Even in Mexico, you can find better burgers than McDonald’s — with higher nutritional value. Have you ever seen pyramids in the United States? Egypt, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Sudan have ancient wonders — none of them in the U.S. If they were, Trump would probably have bought and resold them by now. We know Nike isn’t the only sneaker brand. There’s Adidas — and even Mexican brands like Panama. We understand economics better than you think. And we also know that when those 7 billion consumers stop buying American products, unemployment will rise, and your economy — trapped behind its own self-imposed wall — will begin to collapse to the point where you’ll be begging for help. We didn’t want to do this. But you wanted a wall? Well. You’ve got one.” Her approval rating has reached a historic level — according to a recent poll, it stands at 85%.

To those wondering what my dad would have to say about Trump, here’s a clue from the past…

🖊️The Dave Fleischer Story🖊️ Here’s a mini doc we produced featuring rare never before audio from the man himself! youtu.be/kVokqq5Xf5Q?is=nid1… Please subscribe to our channel and share so we can produce more! #fleischerstudios

🖤We are testing out our new YouTube memberships to see if people would subscribe to watch the new restorations! Would love to keep uploading if there’s interest and monetary support🖤 youtube.com/@fleischertoons?…

Marie Wilcox realized she was the last person on Earth who could speak the Wukchumni language fluently, so at 82, she taught herself to use a computer and spent seven years typing a 6,000-word Wukchumni dictionary, the first written record of the language in history, to save it from extinction.

CONGRATS AGAIN to "DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME REIMAGINED" by Talissa Mehringer, an Honorable Mention, Internet Archive’s 2026 Public Domain Film Remix Contest 🏅 A short music-film remix celebrating 1930s choreography, lavish sets, and the versatility of early screen performers. Watch the full short film ⤵️ archive.org/details/dream-a-… #PublicDomain #PublicDomainDay

Our first Popeye fest is later this month!

Anna Akhmatova's masterpiece should not exist. "Requiem" -- not the sacred choral mass, but her searing poem-cycle about Stalin's terror -- was so dangerous that to write it down could mean death. So she didn't. She composed it in her head, a few lines at a time, and entrusted them to a handful of trusted friends, who memorized the words and watched her burn the paper over an ashtray. Eleven people, all told, carried "Requiem" in their memories through the worst years -- and, as Akhmatova said later with quiet pride, "not one of them betrayed me." For years, one of the great poems of the twentieth century survived nowhere but in the minds of the people who had committed it to memory. The ritual was always the same. In her Leningrad apartment, which she assumed was bugged, Akhmatova would scribble a few lines onto a scrap of paper and pass it in silence to a trusted friend, most often Lydia Chukovskaya. The reader would review the lines, fix them in their memory, and hand the paper back. Then Akhmatova would say something harmless aloud for the hidden microphones -- "How early autumn came this year" -- and hold a lit match to the scrap until it was ash. Hands, matches, an ashtray: this was how one of the century's greatest poems was made, written on paper that was destroyed within minutes and preserved only in the memory, because memory was the only hiding place the secret police could not search. The poem had been born in a prison line. During the worst years of Stalin's terror, Akhmatova spent seventeen months waiting in the lines outside Kresty -- the notorious Leningrad prison where thousands of the arrested were interrogated and held before being shot or shipped to the Gulag -- hoping for word of her son, who had been arrested for no crime but his parentage. One freezing day, a woman in the line recognized the famous poet -- her lips blue with cold -- and whispered the question that would define the rest of Akhmatova's life: could she describe this? Could anyone? "I can," Akhmatova answered. As she later recounted, "It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face." That promise became "Requiem," a cycle of poems mourning not only her own son but the husbands, sons, and brothers of all the women who stood in those lines, and the millions the regime was swallowing whole. She had appointed herself their witness. "No foreign sky protected me," she wrote in its opening lines; "I stand as witness to the common lot." Anna Akhmatova was born on this day in 1889 near Odessa, Russia, and raised in Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial town outside St. Petersburg. She began writing verse as a child; when her father, scandalized at the thought of a poet in the family, forbade her to publish under his name, she took the name of a Tatar great-grandmother -- Akhmatova -- and made it one of the most revered in Russian literature. By her mid-twenties, with the collections "Evening" and "Rosary," she was famous across Russia, celebrated for her love poems. Then came the Russian Revolution, and behind it a long procession of grief. In 1921, her former husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed by the secret police. Her son, Lev, would be arrested again and again over the decades, disappearing into the Gulag for years at a time. Her close friend Osip Mandelstam died in a transit camp. Nikolai Punin, the great love of her middle years, would die in the camps as well. One by one, the regime took the people she loved - and one by one, it tried to erase them. © A Mighty Girl #archaeohistories

😱😱😱 And just like that, it’s completely VANISHED from the media. A sitting congressman, Ted Lieu, said on the record the Epstein files are being blocked because they show Trump raped and threatened to kill children. Lets make this viral again 👇

We ship to Japan! rockinpins.com/product/fleis…

Cecilia Payne’s 1925 doctoral thesis was one of the most important works in the history of astrophysics. At just 25, she used spectroscopy to show that stars are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, an idea that overturned what every major astronomer believed at the time. Her advisor, Henry Norris Russell, pressured her to downplay her conclusion, insisting it must be wrong because it contradicted established scientific opinion. Four years later, Russell published a paper confirming her findings and received most of the credit, even though Payne had reached the conclusion first and with stronger evidence. Over time, historians and scientists have corrected the record, recognizing Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as the person who truly discovered the chemical composition of the stars. Her thesis is now widely considered the most brilliant PhD dissertation ever written in astronomy. Before her groundbreaking thesis, Cecilia Payne had already made a quiet but radical contribution to astronomy: she was the first person to apply quantum physics to stellar atmospheres, using newly developed atomic theory to decode how elements absorb light at different temperatures. This was cutting‑edge science in the 1920s, so new that most astronomers didn’t yet understand it, and it allowed her to interpret stellar spectra in a way no one else could. In other words, her discovery about hydrogen wasn’t a lucky insight; it was the result of her being one of the only astronomers in the world fluent in both astrophysics and quantum mechanics at a time when the two fields barely spoke to each other. © The Historian's Den #archaeohistories