Further Scrutiny

I was recently telling a friend that I want to focus my political support this year toward good Congressional candidates. We already know what we can expect from Obama, and “better than the Republican alternative” is a pretty low bar. He’ll still get my vote, but there have to be some candidates out there for office at some level or another who are better and more reliable on various issues. Specifically, Congress has been doing a terrible job, and we need to improve it. My own district offers no alternatives to the incumbent, but others do, and while I can’t vote for them, I can donate to them, volunteer for them, and encourage others to do likewise. At the least, we can all be aware of who some of these alternatives are.

So I was talking up the importance of these various Congressional races, including some primary races, and my friend asked, “OK, when are the primary elections in those states?” And I realized I had no idea.

Now I do.

Two different sites that have compiled lists of the various election dates are Daily Kos and Politics1. Daily Kos is partisan, but they’re communicating the info especially to their own side, so partiality here shouldn’t imply to any less liberal voters that the calendar here is therefore less reliable. Politics1 is a more objective source generally, and it’s good that they’ve also got much of this info, but I like the Daily Kos calendar better. It’s a lot easier to read, and it’s sortable. Check it out.

The earliest Congressional primaries I’m particularly looking forward to are in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Those are in March, April, and May, respectively.

Politics1, meanwhile, has a clickable map that’s probably the most convenient way to discover various candidates in various states. A highly valuable resource.

Looking back critically over my few previous posts here from three years ago, I find them kind of embarrassing. The generally mediocre writing is often banal, pretentious, prolix, or all three, and I sometimes made dull topics duller.

I’ll try to do better in the future.

I had the good fortune to be invited to a Bastille Day party last week (actually on the day before Bastille Day, since July 14 was a Monday).  Of course I was happy to enjoy the company of friends at the party, but the occasion of it got me thinking about the French Revolution.  It’s been years since I’ve studied it at all, and one of the principal aspects of it that comes to mind for me is the Reign of Terror.  What reasonable person can really appreciate a revolution that leads to people living under a reign of terror?

So I was uncertain of how to feel about Bastille Day, since it’s part of that revolution.  It came before things spiraled out of control, though, so perhaps it, and the stage of the revolution it marked, do deserve celebration as an escape from the absolute rule by the monarchy and hope for popular rule, as distinct from the later bloodthirsty power-grab by Robespierre and company.

Naturally I want to know which people and events in history to admire and which to abhor. In determining the best opinion to have of the French Revolution generally or, more likely, various aspects of it separately, I need to better determine the extent to which those various aspects are distinct or coherent.

For a start, this entails pinning down how much time elapsed between the storming of the Bastille and the Terror, as well as the details of each of those.  Then I’d do well to review the beginnings of the revolution (which could be marked by the Tennis Court Oath) and the course of subsequent events as things went from hopeful to brutal.

In my effort to grow as a librarian, I’m turning to print resources whenver possible, along with the always-convenient electronic sources.  In this case, I found on the reference shelves a 1988 volume from Facts on File by John Paxton called Companion to the French Revolution.  At around 230 pages altogether, its entries tend to be concise but informative, and there aren’t bibliographies with each entry, but there is one good one at the end.  It’s a handy little book.

Some quick checking of dates gives a little distance between the storming of the Bastille and the beginnings of the Terror, and consequently some hope for respectability.  The bastille was stormed in July of 1789, and the Reign of Terror began in September 1793.  Even before The Terror, the guillotine wasn’t used until April of 1792.  So perhaps the revolution wasn’t yet marked by the killing of whoever the revolutionaries could get away with.

Well, it might have not been as bad at the outset as it later became, but it still wasn’t really good.

Apparently, the Bastille was built in 1369 for defense against the English, though for most of its life, and in 1789, it was a state prison.  According to Paxton, “it was attacked and captured on July 14, 1789 by workers…who feared they might be caught between the king’s [cavalry] and the guns mounted on the Bastille’s towers [and who] need[ed] to capture the powder stored in the fortress.”  Okay.  So far, so good.

Then come the next sentences: “One hundred and seventy-one civilians were killed in the action.  The dungeons were opened and the seven prisoners released.”  Oh.  Well, I’m happy to drink wine and eat French food and party with francophiles, but it’s hard to be enthusiastic about an event that killed 171 civilians.

Still my hostess at that party was a knowledgeable history professor, so she’s likely to know something that lends some virtue to the whole thing.  Likewise, as I understand it, Thomas Jefferson was so enamored by the whole revolution as to be blinded by the horrors that eventually came.  There must be reasons for his enthusiasm.

I’m going to have to look into this further and find what there may be to admire here.  In the meantime, I guess I’ll just be glad mid-July offers an occasion for a good party.

I was considering in a recent post how much I don’t know about rivers.   Soon after I found an intriguing reference source in the library where I work.  It’s a multivolume work from 1994 by Ruth Patrick called Rivers of the United States.

“The extent and number of riverine systems in the contiguous United States” is so large as to make necessary a system of selection of rivers, she says near the beginning.  The system of the U.S. Water Resource Council she cites is less than perfectly clear to me.  It designates 18 watersheds and groups the rivers in those watersheds into five groups based on dissolved solids.  It seems as if they’re measuring dissolved solids per liter to the negative first power, whatever that means.   Whatever that L-1, but with the -1 raised like an exponent, means, the dissolved solids categories are 0-250 mg, 251-500 mg, 501-1000 mg, 1001-2500 mg and 2501-26,000 mg.

That’s not completely helpful.  More helpful is the table in volume 2 of that same work that presents the “Discharge Statistics for Major United States Rivers.”  This, of course, entails listing these major U.S. Rivers.   The sections of the table are broken down by region, which is also helpful. 

I’m curious what criteria determines if something qualifies as a major river.  For instance, the Susquehanna is included but not the Juniata.  Certainly, the former is more major than the latter, but what specifically gets it into the list?  A footnote clarifies this:

Rivers are included based on their drainage areas, discharges, and importance to their region of the country.  This procedure was deemed appropriate because arbitrary use of any on criterion would result in omission of rivers in many areas and inclusion of many similar rivers in other regions.  For example the Penobscot is included because it is important in northern New England, with its discharge of 11,580 cfs (cubit feet per second) and drainage area of 6670 square miles.  Yet it is dwarfed by the Skagit, which has greater discharge but only half the drainage area, and by the Colorado, which has a fraction of the Penobscot’s discharge but more than 36 times its drainage area.

So it’s still kind of subjective.  Of course, even after noting all these, it still remains to get some estimate of minor rivers.  (The minor ones I don’t necessarily want all named.  An estimated number would be nice.)

For now, though, it seems worthwhile noting what the U.S. Geological Survey determined for this study to be the major rivers of the United States.  Those follow in the extended entry.

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I learned recently there’s a river in West Texas called the Canadian, which seems kind of weird. Not long before that, I had read of Hanover College’s search for a collection development librarian to build a “Rivers Institute collection to emphasize the cultural, scientific and economic components of the Ohio River Valley.” It’s not the job for me at the moment, but it does sound kind of intriguing.

Knowledge of America’s rivers, and perhaps the world’s, is something I’ve been meaning to develop for a while, ever since just before I moved to Pittsburgh for a year and realized, with some sense of novelty, that the Monongahela flows northward. Evidently, many Pittsburghers find it novel as well. A newspaper article in 2004 noted that many local to the ‘burgh believe the Mon is remarkably rare in flowing northward; in fact, it explains, it’s actually pretty common. Still, there is something counterintuitive to it. It feels like it should hardly ever happen. After all, I’ve been looking at maps all my life, and north is pretty much always up. Water flowing up would have to be special, right?

One surprising name or direction aside, the point is that there all kinds of things that I don’t know offhand about the rivers of this country or planet. I suspect I’m not at all unusual in this. For instance, how many rivers altogether are there in the U.S.? How many of various sizes? How do we measure them in order to categorize them for such a breakdown? For that matter, what really distinguishes rivers from streams and creeks?  Size, presumably, but what are the thresholds?  What are the scientific, cultural, and economic components of not just the Ohio but all these rivers?

I’m eager to see whether there’s a good central information source that collects answers about their commonalities. How polluted or clean are they? How many are used to transport goods commercially and how much such transport? How many are dammed for hydroelectric power? The Harrisburg Senators AA baseball team in Pennsylvania play on an island in the Susquehanna River.   How many other rivers have islands with such developed parks?

Matt Yglesias points to an article about Siberia’s Yakutsk, the coldest city in the world.   It says that “Yakutia, the region of which it is the capital, covers more than a million square miles, but it is home to fewer than one million people” and “Locals claim that there are enough lakes and rivers in the region for each inhabitant to have one of each. “  That’s a lot of rivers.  I mean, obviously the local saying is hyperbole; there’s not really a million rivers, but still, how many rivers do they have if they’ve got such a joke?  In not only that region but elsewhere as well.  Siberia must be busting with the things.

A cursory glance around the web reveals a few good sites about rivers, but I’m not sure it’s exactly a vast wealth.

I have found at least one answer so far, though.  Apparently, all “linear flowing bodies of water” are streams, according to the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) from the U.S. Geological Survey and Board on Geographic Names.  That includes both rivers and creeks.  So it seems the Mississippi River is a stream.  What, then, is the difference between a river and a creek?  Nothing we can count on, it turns out.  Apparently, the GNIS allows for rivers that feed into creeks, so neither size nor source are really reliable.

Evidently, it’s just whatever seemed good to the people who happened to name a given linear flowing body of water.  Maybe, then, it’s just about seeing how many streams in the country have a name that includes the word “river,” to begin with.  That’s not a number I’ve found yet.  One way or another, though, I do want to piece together the major elements of our geography in order to finally build a decent sense of the world around me, and waterways are a key part of that.

Rogier van Bakel, critical in the past of magazine subscription marketing, points to this news of an upcoming endeavor called Maghound.com from Time, Inc.  to offer a sort of Netflix-style subscription management service for print magazines, allowing customers to subscribe to titles of their choosing, at discounted rates, for only the duration they want.  It’s an intriguing plan.

From the Folio article:

Maghound.com allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for a mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. Unlike traditional subscriptions, members aren’t locked in their memberships and can cancel whenever they wish…..The pricing for a membership is tiered—three titles for $3.95 per month, five titles for $7.95, seven titles for $9.95, and $1 per title for eight titles or more.

This project has really exciting potential.  Right now, the site isn’t showing more than 2 or 3 magazines they’ve got there that I’d consider subscribing to, but if they can get any 4 or 5 from a specific 20 or so additional titles, I’d probably sign up.  Of course, I’m forced to judge their offerings from the web site as it stands in late June, two months before the launch.  The article about it says it has 280 titles already on board and possibly 300 by the September launch and 400 by the end of the year.  The Maghound site only currently shows 46 (if I count right) of those.

I would consider The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Wired, & Time.  I’m not sure if those four would be enough to get me to sign on, though.  I don’t know if I’d consistently want to stick with three of those four.

Titles not currently showing there that would interest me include:

The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, The Economist, The Believer, Business Week, Newsweek, Reason, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The American Conservative, The Freeman, American Heritage, National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Scram, Washington Monthly, Newsweek, ESPN, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, The Walrus, Helix SF, Locus, and Subterranean.

I’m eager to see what the full 300 titles they offer are in September.

Update: I just realized their pricing model doesn’t really make sense.  Wouldn’t you expect the price per title to go down as you increase the number of titles you’re subscribing to?  But with “three titles for $3.95 per month, five titles for $7.95, and seven titles for $9.95,” you’re looking at $1.31 per title if you subscribe to three, $1.59 each if you get five, and $1.42 for each if you get seven.  That’s just weird.  Maybe the idea is to really deter people from subscribing to five titles?    Really, why is there a penalty for a medium number of titles?

Tags: magazines, subscriptions

Recently, Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report pointed to a piece in The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog by Michael Dobbs wherein Dobbs explores and debunks John McCain’s ridiculous claim to be able to cut $100 billion from the federal budget with no trouble at all by cutting earmarks. He won’t be specific about them, though, because in reality they don’t add up to a fifth of that. Dobbs’ reporting and analysis there is revealing, valuable, and relevant. Every U.S. voter should read it.

The quibble I’m raising here, on the other hand, has virtually no impact on the question of anyone’s fitness to be U.S. President or our nation’s political or economic future otherwise. Rather, it has to do with the politics of our past. Specifically, is Dobbs (and subsequently Benen) correct in characterizing McCain’s nonsense as “voodoo economics,” if that term is understood to mean what it popularly meant from the time of the 1980 campaign and the Reagan administration?

I’m not suggesting Dobbs (or Benen, probably) is confused about what the term has meant in the past, but it seems here that they’re using it much more broadly. That’ll tend to dilute meaning and weaken the impact of language. Particularly as increasing proportion of the electorate is too young to remember the argument over Reaganomics. Many of us who were children in the 80s or later and know the phrase at all were probably exposed to it principally from Ben Stein’s famous scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

anyone?…..something d-o-o economics…

From that all you’ll get (besides entertainment from the students’ reactions, especially the one suddenly woken up to a pool of drool on his desk) is that the Laffer Curve predicts, controversially, that you’ll get the same amount of revenue with two different tax rates and that George Bush called it “voodoo economics.” The Laffer Curve prediction and controversy is helpfully explained in this glossary of economic terms from The Economist.

Now, I’d really hate to rely for a source on a John Hughes film, but that brief snippet of Stein boring teenagers actually seems to match up pretty well with other sources and add a bit of useful insight. The Encyclopaedia Britannica simply notes that in his 1980 campaign for the Republican nomination, before he gave it up and supported and joined with Ronald Reagan, George Bush said Reagan would need to engage in “voodoo” economics” “in order to increase federal revenue by lowering taxes.” Jame T. Patterson, in his book Restless Giant : The United States From Watergate to Bush V. Gore, says that Bush was ridiculing Reagan’s call for a 30 percent tax cut. TIME magazine also describes the 30% tax cut proposal as specifically provoking the “voodoo” comment. If we take John Hughes together with the Britannica encapsulation and the Patterson and TIME references, it seems to imply that the Laffer Curve led Reagan to seek a 30% tax cut in order to increase tax revenues, leading Bush to make the “voodoo” remark. Of course, it seems awfully shaky to depend on a conclusion patched together from such tiny pieces (one of which, again, is comedy with a kid drooling on his desk).

Fortunately, I feel a little better leaning on this 1997 article from Nouriel Roubin, an NYU professor about supply-side economics and whether it’s accurately characterized as voodoo economics. He says Bush’s criticism referred to “an extreme version” of “the argument that lower tax rates would improve private sector incentives, leading to higher employment, productivity, and output in the US economy.” As it turns out, Roubin disagrees with the argument and concludes “voodoo” does fit.

The point here, though, is not whether the theory works. The point is that it was a specific theory and not one McCain was making reference to. What McCain’s trying to feed us is, as Dobbs says, “fantasy,” “magical,” and “wishful thinking.” It’s not what “voodoo economics” was coined to refer to, though.

Reaganomics, whatever else you want to say against it, was rather more complex than McCain’s shadow of an illusion of a plan here. Calling McCain’s nonsense “voodoo economics” is to give it too much respect.

I’ll acknowledge again that I’m no expert on economics or political history. There’s a lot for me to learn and a lot to relearn. Each subject will certainly warrant further scrutiny.

In the meantime, scrutinize this awesome remix:

Tags: 1980, economics, history, McCain, Reaganomics, voodoo economics

The rationale.

Life is in so many ways a mystery. Don’t we all want to make sense of what we can? This is intended as such an effort.

The blog’s name, framed comparatively as it is, raises the question “further scrutiny of what, and further than what?” Of many, many things, and further than that which has resulted in my previous understanding of a given subject. The subject matter and depth will vary, so any readers that might come along may find different items esoteric or obvious. We’ll see. Ideally, there will be details here which are of use or interest to other people. Mostly, though, I’m sharing with you my own minor investigations of mundane mysteries and hoping that it adds up to something worthwhile.