“It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.”

Holy shit, you have to read this.

How did we get so big so fast?

Neat video from NPR about somehow in the last two centuries we went from 1 billion people to 7 billion.

It was just over two centuries ago that the global population was 1 billion — in 1804. But better medicine and improved agriculture resulted in higher life expectancy for children, dramatically increasing the world population, especially in the West.

As higher standards of living and better health care are reaching more parts of the world, the rates of fertility — and population growth — have started to slow down, though the population will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

U.N. forecasts suggest the world population could hit a peak of 10.1 billion by 2100 before beginning to decline. But exact numbers are hard to come by — just small variations in fertility rates could mean a population of 15 billion by the end of the century.

On this day in 1787, the Federalist Papers make their appearance

Today in 1787, the Federalist Papers made their appearance into the American public sphere. Printed in three New York newspapers, the essays (which were written and printed in an extremely rapid pace—often three essays per week) would help defend the idea that the United States needed a new Constitution, a Constitution that would grant far more power to the federal government than the governing Articles of Confederation.

To celebrate the day, here is one of my favorite passages from the series, from Federalist Paper 1, written by Alexander Hamilton, but signed Publius (an inspiration for my own nom de plume). I broke out some paragraphs merely for readability:

An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good.

It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Go ahead, read the whole thing (and more of them) over here.

You should watch this short video about copyright

Do it.

The invention of the high-five

(Yes, I’m still the guy that high-fives.) I had no idea what the story of the invention of the high-five entailed. Jon Mooallem at ESPN Magazine writes about the inventor, gay baseball player Glenn Burke, who had a hard time with rumors of his homosexuality in the 1970s, which led to him going to Oakland and eventually leaving professional baseball:

After unproductive years in 1978 and ’79, Burke hoped for a fresh start in 1980 under new A’s manager Billy Martin. But the gay rumors followed him to Oakland. Martin threw the word “faggot” around the clubhouse and didn’t play Burke. Some teammates even avoided showering with him. Burke, accustomed to being the heart of the clubhouse, felt crippled by the discomfort he was causing. His unhappiness was compounded by a knee injury and a demotion to Triple-A. After playing just 25 games in the minors in 1980, he abruptly retired, feeling it was his only option.

He was 27 years old. “It’s the first thing in my life I ever backed down from,” he later said.

Burke started hanging around San Francisco’s Castro district. He became a star shortstop in a local gay softball league and dominated in the Gay Softball World Series. “I was making money playing ball and not having any fun,” he said of his time in the majors. “Now I’m not making money, but I’m having fun.” Jack McGowan, a friend in the Castro who has since passed away, once said of Burke: “He was a hero to us. He was athletic, clean cut, masculine. He was everything that we wanted to prove to the world that we could be.”

In the Castro, Burke’s creation of the high five was part of this Herculean mystique. He would regularly sit on the hood of a car — whichever one happened to be parked in front of a gay bar called the Pendulum Club — flash his magnetic smile and high-five everyone who walked by. In 1982, Burke came out publicly in an Inside Sports magazine profile called “The Double Life of a Gay Dodger.” The writer, a gay activist named Michael J. Smith, appropriated the high five as a defiant symbol of gay pride. Rising from the wreckage of Burke’s aborted baseball career, Smith wrote, was “a legacy of two men’s hands touching, high above their heads.”

Just add that with Gary Glitter and Freddie Mercury to your list of sports cliches that came straight from gay Americans.

Congratulations Plato, Missouri

If you missed it, Plato, Missouri has been crowned the population epicenter of the United States. Guaranteeing them notoriety status amongst other awesome places of nowhere such as Monticello, Indiana which hosts an over sized lawn chair, and Boys Town, Nebraska which is the home of the world’s largest ball of stamps.

Congress has always been kind of shitty

I’ve been making my way through Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. It’s an extraordinary piece of historical non-fiction, spanning the era between the end of the War of 1812 to the Mexican American War. I have the paperback edition, and it’s quite simply too large to handle comfortably. But, as its Pulitzer would attest, an incredible and magnificent tome.

In any case, I thought I’d pass along an anecdote that I hadn’t heard before but found entirely amusing.

It’s important to note that the 26th amendment, which prohibits congress from giving itself pay raises, was not in force at the time. Although meant to be the 2nd amendment and passed by the 1st Congress, it was not ratified by the states until 1992.

The 14th Congress was an extremely productive congress. After the War of 1812 came to a close, they, led by such luminaries as Henry Clay and  John Calhoun, passed a still-historic amount and breadth of legislation.

So, of course, they voted themselves a modest pay raise. And, as a result, two-thirds of the congress (sure makes that 2010 “wave” seem more like a mild current) were either voted out of office or declined to seek reelection.

Now, here’s the balls maneuver. At the time, the so-called “lame duck” session was almost a year long, as the next congressional term didn’t begin again until December (the 20th amendment, much later, dialed it back to January). What did these brave men do with the lame duck? They repealed the pay raise for the next congress, while keeping it for themselves.

Look at these fucking top marginal tax rates in a historical context

Visual Economics offers a great chart featuring the history of the top marginal tax rate:

Green line is the top marginal rate for married couples filing jointly (most years dividends were tax like ordinary income until 2003), orange is the top rate for income from capital gains. The top corporate tax rate is included for comparison. Your marginal tax rate is the rate you pay on the “last dollar” you earn; but when you view the taxes you paid as a percentage of your income, your effective tax rate is less than your marginal rate, especially after you take into account the deductions and exemptions, i.e. income that is not subject to any tax.

Something really interesting:

The Wealth Tax Act of 1935, applied the top rate to income over $5 million and had only a single taxpayer: John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

The Crucifixion

Phil Ochs’s Crucifixion:

This is one of Phil’s two songs about the late John F. Kennedy (although in his intro on the There and Now – Live in Vancouver 1968 album he extended it to Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and to “hero killing” in general), the other song being That Was The President. Phil was also quoted (on 15-Dec-1965) as saying this about the song: “It’s a song about Christ-killing, how all America and even, especially, New York loves to create heroes to moralize to them and then kill them violently, bloodily and dig the death so much, every detail of the death. It’s a song about Jesus Christ. It’s called The Crucifixion. It’s a song about Kennedy. And maybe a song about Dylan.” (In an interview a few months earlier, Phil expressed the belief that it would soon be too dangerous for Dylan to play out in public because he had become one of those heroes.)

Continue reading »

The Dog Hitler Hated

Apparently, Hitler’s Nazi government didn’t take too kindly to imitation, especially from dogs:

A Finnish dog which gave Nazi salutes so annoyed Germany’s World War II government that it launched a campaign against its owner.

Tor Borg’s wife had reportedly given Jackie the nickname Hitler – saying the dog’s strange way of raising its paw and barking reminded her of the Fuhrer.

Newly discovered documents show Mr Borg was interrogated by the Germans on suspicion of insulting Hitler.

Ok, fine: “It was unclear whether Adolf Hitler had been involved in the saga himself.” But, it’s kind of funny thinking of him being as obsessed with a dog as his government agencies.

BBC has a picture of the pooch (with a kind-of funny caption joke). Original auf Deutsch. (Actually funny caption joke if you can read it)

Booze and Big Love

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution notes a paper, titled “Women or Wine, Monogamy and Alcohol,” that purports a correlation between teetotalling and polygyny:

Intriguingly, across the world the main social groups which practice polygyny do not consume alcohol. We investigate whether there is a correlation between alcohol consumption and polygynous/monogamous arrangements, both over time and across cultures. Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world. We provide a series of possible explanations to explain the positive correlation between monogamy and alcohol consumption over time and across societies.

This is made even more interesting by the thought that the production of beer may have been one of the impetuses for ancient humanity to settle down and start civilization.

The Decade

Stephanie Fox at io9.com shows us in chart form some of the amazing ways the world changed in the past ten years; Charlie Jean Anders explains:

So what’s changed? Technology has gotten unimaginably smaller and better — just look at the differences between an iMac in 2000 and an iPad in 2010. (See here for a similar comparison.) The world’s population has grown, and for the first time more people live in cities than in rural areas. China’s electricity consumption has quadrupled. And the costs of technology are becoming more apparent than before. But really, the data speaks for itself.

Sources include World Bank via Gizmag, U.S. Census, Internet World Stats, Department of Energy, NASA via AOL News, IUCN Redlist, Swiss Reinsurance via Globe and Mail and USA Today, USGS, Box Office Mojo.

Apportionment!

Apportionment is coming! Time to take congressional seats and electoral college votes away from the NY, PA, and the OH’s of the nation and give them to places like TX. On December 21 the Commerce Department will release the 2010 Census numbers online, and you can already play around with previous data in their cool widget.

There is lots of good to come from making data more accessible through the internet this time round. Many opportunities to criticize gerrymandering and what not from the media and yours truly. Get ready.

A letter from Harry to Bess

One of my favorite stops on the old Internet information superhighway is Letters of Note, which highlights generally awesome letters from or to famous figures. Tuesday, they posted a letter from new President Harry Truman to his wife Bess, in which he complained about the ghostly noises in the White House and, really, his new job. This paragraph, though, may well be the greatest paragraph ever written:

I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches — all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth — I can just imagine old Andy and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show, the din is almost unbearable. But I still get some work done.

The very first New York Times election map

Matthew Ericson, the deputy graphics designer at the New York Times, found the first election map printed in the New York Times, printed a day after the election on Wednesday, November 4, 1896. Holy crap. The states in white went for Republican William McKinley (M’Kinley), while the states in black went for Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

Interstingly:

The speed with which the results made it into print boggles the mind given the technology of the day (especially considering that in the last few elections in the 2000s, with all of the technology available to us, there have been a number of states that we haven’t been able to call in the Wednesday paper).

I, for one, love the fact that it’s the 1896 election, of all presidential elections. It was a quite interesting and important election. It was the first election in decades that the Republican won the popular vote, and it solidified the Republican Party as the party of dominance until 1932 (with the exception, of course, of Wilson’s 1913-1921 term, which happened as a result of Republicans Taft and Roosevelt splitting the vote in 1912).

The whole thing was over the gold standard (sound familiar?): Republicans wanted to keep it, while Democrats cited a massive depression (Panic of 1893) as reason to leave it for a freer standard based on silver. Business leaders were scared of the Democrats’ proposals, and flooded the McKinely campaign with cash: as percent of GDP, about three billion dollars in today’s money. Wildly outspent, Bryan became the first candidate to travel the country and speak directly to voters. Some Democrats, angered by the takeover of their party by the silver advocates and afraid of Bryan’s appeals to end the gold standard, split from the party, starting the National Democratic Party (the Gold Democrats). Their quixotic third-party bid seemed to only have an effect on Kentucky’s results, but they did tend to return to the Democratic Party, and many of them were helpful in Wilson’s ascendancy to the Oval Office.