First off, glorious, fantastic news for my fellow Cubs fans: general manager Jim Hendry has been fired.
That established... every so often I post a little science project here. Well, here's another one:
1. Drink a cup of coffee and make sure the cup leaves a stain.
2. Sit there watching that stain as it dries.
Yes. That is your science experiment for today. It formed a ring, right? Your question is, why did it form a ring?
"Because the cup's base formed a ring and the coffee just stuck to it?"
...ooookaaaay, there's that too... tell you what, go get a flat-bottom cup and do it again.
"More coffee? Can't I just skull a 5-Hour Energy or something?"
YOU WILL DO AS THE INTERNET COMMANDS YOU TO, CITIZEN.
...
"It formed another ring."
Okay, now why did it do that?
"Because Obama refuses to do something about the illegal Colombians taking the jobs of hardworking taxpayers!"
Holy hell, man. It's COFFEE. The University of Pennsylvania recently- and I'm sure they have some larger purpose for this I'm not thinking of yet- looked into not only why that happens, but how to prevent it.
I'll let them explain.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Phrases You'll Probably Never Want To Use Again
Have you ever used the phrase "cakewalk"? You probably have, in the context of seeing something very, very easy.
You awful, awful racist, you.
The original cake walk was conducted on plantations in the South, and surely you can already see where this is going. Its original intent- or at least, its stated intent- was to give slaves a temporary chance to get back at their masters. Were they to actually get back at their masters, they likely would have done so through grievous bodily harm, which would be kind of bad for the master, so that wasn't done. Instead, they could just mock him for a little while, parodying overly genteel aristocratic mannerisms. This is something they were already doing in private, only now it was done in front of the master. (That's a $12 article, by the way.)
At the conclusion of this mocking, the slaves would pair up to form couples, and do a high-stepping walk, a promenade. The master would then judge all the walks, and award a cake to the best one. Thus the term.
The issue, of course, is that it's no longer really mocking the master if the master's throwing the party, awarding the prize for the best mocking, and has the last laugh by sending everyone back to work as his slaves afterwards. But that was never brought up much.
In fact, the whites eventually took the cakewalk for their own purposes, using it in minstrel shows by whites in blackface. Some tellings go that the whites didn't know they were being mocked, and maybe some never did, but now it was a moot point. Now the blacks were the ones being mocked, and it wasn't exactly subtle. No longer sending up their masters, now they were portrayed as really, honestly trying to be like their masters. And, of course, the other whites in the audience ate it up. Ha ha, look at those black people that aren't really black people but we'll pretend they are because then that makes it okay!
Eventually, though, the black community managed to take the cakewalk back, using it as something of a forerunner to other dance styles, such as the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. If those whites like the cakewalk, maybe they'll like some other dances of ours.
Over time, the meaning of the word 'cakewalk' shed all connotations except the recreational nature of the original event, and from there changed into a term meaning something easy (even though the dance itself isn't).
The cakewalk still survives to this day, though partially due to its history and partially due to its age, its usage has shrunk drastically. It survives in a very unlikely home: the Highland Dance community, where the high-stepping fits in with the generally athletic, ballet-like nature of the other dances used.
No word on if they bake any cakes for the occasion.
You awful, awful racist, you.
The original cake walk was conducted on plantations in the South, and surely you can already see where this is going. Its original intent- or at least, its stated intent- was to give slaves a temporary chance to get back at their masters. Were they to actually get back at their masters, they likely would have done so through grievous bodily harm, which would be kind of bad for the master, so that wasn't done. Instead, they could just mock him for a little while, parodying overly genteel aristocratic mannerisms. This is something they were already doing in private, only now it was done in front of the master. (That's a $12 article, by the way.)
At the conclusion of this mocking, the slaves would pair up to form couples, and do a high-stepping walk, a promenade. The master would then judge all the walks, and award a cake to the best one. Thus the term.
The issue, of course, is that it's no longer really mocking the master if the master's throwing the party, awarding the prize for the best mocking, and has the last laugh by sending everyone back to work as his slaves afterwards. But that was never brought up much.
In fact, the whites eventually took the cakewalk for their own purposes, using it in minstrel shows by whites in blackface. Some tellings go that the whites didn't know they were being mocked, and maybe some never did, but now it was a moot point. Now the blacks were the ones being mocked, and it wasn't exactly subtle. No longer sending up their masters, now they were portrayed as really, honestly trying to be like their masters. And, of course, the other whites in the audience ate it up. Ha ha, look at those black people that aren't really black people but we'll pretend they are because then that makes it okay!
Eventually, though, the black community managed to take the cakewalk back, using it as something of a forerunner to other dance styles, such as the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. If those whites like the cakewalk, maybe they'll like some other dances of ours.
Over time, the meaning of the word 'cakewalk' shed all connotations except the recreational nature of the original event, and from there changed into a term meaning something easy (even though the dance itself isn't).
The cakewalk still survives to this day, though partially due to its history and partially due to its age, its usage has shrunk drastically. It survives in a very unlikely home: the Highland Dance community, where the high-stepping fits in with the generally athletic, ballet-like nature of the other dances used.
No word on if they bake any cakes for the occasion.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
At Least They Still Have Drinking
A bill will be introduced to the Russian legislature later this year that over the next several years will impose many of the same restrictions on smoking as in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world. In fact, Russia intends to go even further than most, stopping just short of a total ban.
The restrictions, which include high taxation, graphic warnings about the dangers of smoking, the banning of sponsorships and most ads, and restrictions on where tobacco can be sold or used (tobacco could only be sold in large supermarkets and could not actively be displayed as being for sale), would bring Russia into compliance with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Currently, 174 countries are party to the convention and 168 are signatory; the most recent party is St. Kitts and Nevis. The United States, while progressing along the path, remains non-party along with 20 other nations.
10 have signed but not ratified: Argentina, Cuba, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Morocco, Mozambique, Switzerland and the United States.
11 others did not sign or ratify; the deadline to sign was June 29, 2004: Andorra, Dominican Republic, Eritrea, Indonesia, Liechtenstein, Malawi, Monaco, Somalia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.
40% of Russia's population smokes, with 400,000 deaths in Russia per year being blamed on smoking. And while the ban is welcome among most everyone else, questions arise as to how stringently it will be enforced, given Russia's poor reputation for corruption. According to one Russian blogger quoted in the Moscow News, "In order to have doubts, one only has to walk through any train, where anyone who feels like it smokes right under the ‘no smoking’ signs. It is not a question of how heavy the punishment is, but of its inevitability. And we don’t have that. Who will enforce the law? The cops, of whom 99 per cent smoke like chimneys?”
Meanwhile in America, holdouts are getting creative. Reports indicate a rise in roll-your-own-tobacco stores, where a smoker dumps loose tobacco into a machine which then rolls it into cigarettes, one at a time. (One such store recently opened here in Watertown; I am not giving them free advertising.) Not only do they get the cigarettes, they get them cheaper, as roll-your-own-tobacco stores don't carry the high taxes prerolled cigarettes do. The anti-tobacco fight, as a result, is shifting towards closing that loophole; Arkansas banned roll-your-own-tobacco machines in April and more states are expected to follow.
Nobody said quitting smoking was easy.
The restrictions, which include high taxation, graphic warnings about the dangers of smoking, the banning of sponsorships and most ads, and restrictions on where tobacco can be sold or used (tobacco could only be sold in large supermarkets and could not actively be displayed as being for sale), would bring Russia into compliance with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Currently, 174 countries are party to the convention and 168 are signatory; the most recent party is St. Kitts and Nevis. The United States, while progressing along the path, remains non-party along with 20 other nations.
10 have signed but not ratified: Argentina, Cuba, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Morocco, Mozambique, Switzerland and the United States.
11 others did not sign or ratify; the deadline to sign was June 29, 2004: Andorra, Dominican Republic, Eritrea, Indonesia, Liechtenstein, Malawi, Monaco, Somalia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.
40% of Russia's population smokes, with 400,000 deaths in Russia per year being blamed on smoking. And while the ban is welcome among most everyone else, questions arise as to how stringently it will be enforced, given Russia's poor reputation for corruption. According to one Russian blogger quoted in the Moscow News, "In order to have doubts, one only has to walk through any train, where anyone who feels like it smokes right under the ‘no smoking’ signs. It is not a question of how heavy the punishment is, but of its inevitability. And we don’t have that. Who will enforce the law? The cops, of whom 99 per cent smoke like chimneys?”
Meanwhile in America, holdouts are getting creative. Reports indicate a rise in roll-your-own-tobacco stores, where a smoker dumps loose tobacco into a machine which then rolls it into cigarettes, one at a time. (One such store recently opened here in Watertown; I am not giving them free advertising.) Not only do they get the cigarettes, they get them cheaper, as roll-your-own-tobacco stores don't carry the high taxes prerolled cigarettes do. The anti-tobacco fight, as a result, is shifting towards closing that loophole; Arkansas banned roll-your-own-tobacco machines in April and more states are expected to follow.
Nobody said quitting smoking was easy.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
It's The Other Recall Election Day, Wisconsin
Yes, there are still two recall elections. I told you about them last week.
If you're in one of the two districts, vote. Control of the state Senate may no longer be on the line, but that doesn't make the races worthless.
If you're in one of the two districts, vote. Control of the state Senate may no longer be on the line, but that doesn't make the races worthless.
Monday, August 15, 2011
The Worst Presidential Campaign Ever
Among the many things you're going to hear over the course of the 2012 Presidential election is that it's a "big election". Sooner or later, someone is going to tell you that in any Presidential election. Of course it's going to be a big one. It's THE Big One. The one race that everyone employed by any given party is ultimately devoted to. It's the one every party- EVERY party, big, small, fringe and joke parties alike- prep for first, last and foremost. If a party runs no other candidate for no other office, they are at least going to go for the Presidency.
(How wise a strategy this is, as opposed to focusing on state and local races, is another matter entirely.)
The issue we're focusing on today is the relative value of 'big'. In the grand scheme of Presidential elections, where would any given race rank? What is the biggest of the Big Elections? On what race did the most ride on the outcome?
The answer to that is likely 1860, involving Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Incumbent President James Buchanan's administration was completely consumed by the issue of slavery, as was the Lincoln-Douglas election. Douglas pledged during the campaign that a Lincoln win would mean Southern secession. Lincoln won, without a single vote from the South (he was not given ballot access). Douglas' warning quickly came to be.
1864 is likely second place on the list. The Civil War was going badly for the North at the time, and Lincoln was vulnerable because of that. Had his 1864 opponent, George McClellan, won, odds are he would have sought peace with the Confederacy, or at least, the Democrats would have made him do it. The only thing that saved Lincoln was that the tide of the war turned in his favor before Election Day.
We won't get into every election we've had, or even any further into these- though given enough time, knowing myself, I would probably try- but that's the high-water mark. Secession and the outcomes of the Civil War and the slavery issue rode on those two elections.
However, what's also kind of fun to look at is what it looks like at the bottom of the table. Has there ever been a small Big Election? One where both candidates looked so utterly alike, or so utterly subpar, or the stakes were so utterly low, that the outcome really didn't matter?
Yes. Yes, there has. And it came not very long after the two biggest.
Dateline, 1872. The incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, was rather popular nationwide, as the North's victorious general in the Civil War, the one that took Robert E. Lee's surrender and the President most in charge of Reconstruction. He would go on to get hit with multiple corruption scandals in his second term (spoiler alert), scandals that would deeply mar his legacy and his historical ranking but that didn't come into play here. He was popular. The Democrats were still in disarray from the aftermath of the Civil War, with reminders of their secession being all anyone really having to bring up to beat them. So the election ought to be a breeze, right?
Well, it's not like Grant's going to go unopposed. Enter the Liberal Republicans.
...you need a second to get all the laughing out of your system?
...okay, let's continue. Because the Democrats were in such disarray, and because a win over them was such a given, the Republicans began to feud over just how far they should go to the left. Back then, parties didn't exist just to exist, as they basically do today. Parties were created to aim for a specific goal. Once that goal was achieved, the party dissolved and the component people went on to new parties with new goals. Under this system, the Republican Party should have died when slavery did. The problem was, the Republicans couldn't agree on whether it was really dead or not. (PDF file. Or really, less a PDF file than an e-book.) Some- the Liberal Republicans- figured that slavery was dead and wished to move on to new goals. Others figured that slavery was still existent in other forms that just weren't called slavery, and without Reconstruction, outright slavery could very easily resurface.
Within government, Grant also faced pressure from members of Congress trying to take advantage of the spoils system. Also known as patronage. Also known as hiring your friends and major donors to work for you in cushy government jobs as opposed to treating it like any other job with applications and exams and such. This would prove to be one of Grant's corruption scandals, but really, the spoils system had been used and taken as a given for decades beforehand, and people only cried foul about it when Grant tried to slow it down by refusing some of the patronage appointments made by Congressmen. Every time Grant refused to let someone appoint their friend to some post or other, he made a new enemy. Then he made the mistake of partaking in patronage himself, appointing friends and family, and he got hit with the charge by the Liberal Republicans... many of which were trying to take advantage of patronage themselves. (Including, if my fellow Watertown residents will examine page 10 of the PDF file, Carl Schurz.) It was blind leading the blind and hypocrites attacking hypocrites.
It all led to the Liberal Republicans wanting to run someone else in 1872. The man they chose was Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune. You may know him as the 'Go west, young man' guy, whether or not he actually said it first or not. They nominated him in a separate convention, deeming themselves a brand-new party.
To the shock of the Liberal Republicans, who were aiming for Charles Francis Adams and let the convention get away from them. Carl Schurz went to a piano and started playing Chopin's Funeral March. Political boss Thurlow Weed wrote to a friend, "Six weeks ago I did not suppose that any considerable number of men, outside of a Lunatic Asylum, would nominate Greeley for President." Other feelings were similar: they didn't know how things got to the point that Greeley grabbed the nomination, but he did, he was going to be a disaster, they were screwed and they knew it.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were aware that they were still in the national doghouse. They knew they didn't have anyone on their roster that could take out Grant. But they really, really wanted Grant to lose. So they had a brainstorm: they would nominate Greeley as well. Greeley was keen on halting Reconstruction, which was a nice selling point, and besides, nominating Greeley meant that there was only one major Grant opponent instead of two. Two Grant opponents would just split the anti-Grant vote and allow Grant to win. (Some members of the party, the "Straight-Out Democrats", wanted an actual Democrat, and ran Charles O'Conor as their nominee. He didn't want it. They gave it to him anyway. O'Conor didn't campaign.)
Horace Greeley had never successfully run for office before. He had been appointed to serve three months in the House to finish out someone else's term, and had run for office seven times at various levels, but never won. It showed. If a vegetarian atheist socialist who's never won a race for public office sounds like a fringe left candidate now (though there are certainly some who would vote for such a person based on that profile), imagine how it looked when one ran a major-party campaign against an incumbent war hero in 1872. Greeley had no idea what he was doing. The Democrats turned out not to be of very much help, because Greeley had attacked them just as much as Grant and the feeling was mutual. They had no idea how to help each other out and often wondered why they should, but somehow the Democrats still thought they had a chance.
Think if the Greens tried to nominate Ralph Nader, let the convention get away from them and wound up with Cynthia McKinney, and then the modern-day Republicans, concluding their field was terrible, nominated McKinney too and spent the rest of the campaign trying to convince each other that, no, really, we seriously nominated Cynthia McKinney, same as the Greens, and now we're trying to make her President so that we can beat Barack Obama. The Greens would be angry because they didn't get who they really wanted, the Democrats aren't budging from Obama, and the rank-and-file Republicans will be trying to figure out just what the hell is going on here well into the following spring.
It was a loud, boisterous, deeply confusing election, but in the end, Grant easily swept aside the in-way-over-his-head Greeley, who by Election Day just wanted the damn thing to be over. The score was 286 electoral votes to 66. When the results came in, he said, "I am the worst beaten man that ever ran for that high office. And I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly know whether I was running for President or the penitentiary."
"Now, hold on," you may be saying. "You said this was the least consequential of all, didn't you? You've got a dispute here over whether Reconstruction should be continued. Blacks saw their rights rolled back for decades after Reconstruction ended. How is that not consequential?"
Simple. Between the time of the election and the time the Electoral College met, Greeley died. The campaign had drained too much out of him. He lost control of the New York Herald to Whitelaw Reid, his wife died a week prior to the election, and he was getting savaged the whole time as only major-party Presidential candidates can, from three sides, with almost nobody coming to his aid. Not only that, he was in the middle of recovering from getting swindled by a diamond hoax that may very well be covered here in detail in its own right at some point. It was too much for one man to take. With that, the field was essentially reduced from two to one. Greeley's electors were instructed simply to use their own judgment, and they scattered to the four winds. (Had he won, Greeley's running mate was Benjamin Gratz Brown. Whether he would have also ended Reconstruction appears questionable. Back then, Presidents didn't get to choose their own running mates, and while Greeley was sure that Reconstruction should end, Brown was wavering on the issue.)
Historian Eugene H. Roseboom later wrote in the 1957 book A History of Presidential Elections, "Never in American history have two more unfit men been offered to the country for the highest office."
Surely, we can do better than that. It's kind of hard not to.
(How wise a strategy this is, as opposed to focusing on state and local races, is another matter entirely.)
The issue we're focusing on today is the relative value of 'big'. In the grand scheme of Presidential elections, where would any given race rank? What is the biggest of the Big Elections? On what race did the most ride on the outcome?
The answer to that is likely 1860, involving Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Incumbent President James Buchanan's administration was completely consumed by the issue of slavery, as was the Lincoln-Douglas election. Douglas pledged during the campaign that a Lincoln win would mean Southern secession. Lincoln won, without a single vote from the South (he was not given ballot access). Douglas' warning quickly came to be.
1864 is likely second place on the list. The Civil War was going badly for the North at the time, and Lincoln was vulnerable because of that. Had his 1864 opponent, George McClellan, won, odds are he would have sought peace with the Confederacy, or at least, the Democrats would have made him do it. The only thing that saved Lincoln was that the tide of the war turned in his favor before Election Day.
We won't get into every election we've had, or even any further into these- though given enough time, knowing myself, I would probably try- but that's the high-water mark. Secession and the outcomes of the Civil War and the slavery issue rode on those two elections.
However, what's also kind of fun to look at is what it looks like at the bottom of the table. Has there ever been a small Big Election? One where both candidates looked so utterly alike, or so utterly subpar, or the stakes were so utterly low, that the outcome really didn't matter?
Yes. Yes, there has. And it came not very long after the two biggest.
Dateline, 1872. The incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, was rather popular nationwide, as the North's victorious general in the Civil War, the one that took Robert E. Lee's surrender and the President most in charge of Reconstruction. He would go on to get hit with multiple corruption scandals in his second term (spoiler alert), scandals that would deeply mar his legacy and his historical ranking but that didn't come into play here. He was popular. The Democrats were still in disarray from the aftermath of the Civil War, with reminders of their secession being all anyone really having to bring up to beat them. So the election ought to be a breeze, right?
Well, it's not like Grant's going to go unopposed. Enter the Liberal Republicans.
...you need a second to get all the laughing out of your system?
...okay, let's continue. Because the Democrats were in such disarray, and because a win over them was such a given, the Republicans began to feud over just how far they should go to the left. Back then, parties didn't exist just to exist, as they basically do today. Parties were created to aim for a specific goal. Once that goal was achieved, the party dissolved and the component people went on to new parties with new goals. Under this system, the Republican Party should have died when slavery did. The problem was, the Republicans couldn't agree on whether it was really dead or not. (PDF file. Or really, less a PDF file than an e-book.) Some- the Liberal Republicans- figured that slavery was dead and wished to move on to new goals. Others figured that slavery was still existent in other forms that just weren't called slavery, and without Reconstruction, outright slavery could very easily resurface.
Within government, Grant also faced pressure from members of Congress trying to take advantage of the spoils system. Also known as patronage. Also known as hiring your friends and major donors to work for you in cushy government jobs as opposed to treating it like any other job with applications and exams and such. This would prove to be one of Grant's corruption scandals, but really, the spoils system had been used and taken as a given for decades beforehand, and people only cried foul about it when Grant tried to slow it down by refusing some of the patronage appointments made by Congressmen. Every time Grant refused to let someone appoint their friend to some post or other, he made a new enemy. Then he made the mistake of partaking in patronage himself, appointing friends and family, and he got hit with the charge by the Liberal Republicans... many of which were trying to take advantage of patronage themselves. (Including, if my fellow Watertown residents will examine page 10 of the PDF file, Carl Schurz.) It was blind leading the blind and hypocrites attacking hypocrites.
It all led to the Liberal Republicans wanting to run someone else in 1872. The man they chose was Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune. You may know him as the 'Go west, young man' guy, whether or not he actually said it first or not. They nominated him in a separate convention, deeming themselves a brand-new party.
To the shock of the Liberal Republicans, who were aiming for Charles Francis Adams and let the convention get away from them. Carl Schurz went to a piano and started playing Chopin's Funeral March. Political boss Thurlow Weed wrote to a friend, "Six weeks ago I did not suppose that any considerable number of men, outside of a Lunatic Asylum, would nominate Greeley for President." Other feelings were similar: they didn't know how things got to the point that Greeley grabbed the nomination, but he did, he was going to be a disaster, they were screwed and they knew it.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were aware that they were still in the national doghouse. They knew they didn't have anyone on their roster that could take out Grant. But they really, really wanted Grant to lose. So they had a brainstorm: they would nominate Greeley as well. Greeley was keen on halting Reconstruction, which was a nice selling point, and besides, nominating Greeley meant that there was only one major Grant opponent instead of two. Two Grant opponents would just split the anti-Grant vote and allow Grant to win. (Some members of the party, the "Straight-Out Democrats", wanted an actual Democrat, and ran Charles O'Conor as their nominee. He didn't want it. They gave it to him anyway. O'Conor didn't campaign.)
Horace Greeley had never successfully run for office before. He had been appointed to serve three months in the House to finish out someone else's term, and had run for office seven times at various levels, but never won. It showed. If a vegetarian atheist socialist who's never won a race for public office sounds like a fringe left candidate now (though there are certainly some who would vote for such a person based on that profile), imagine how it looked when one ran a major-party campaign against an incumbent war hero in 1872. Greeley had no idea what he was doing. The Democrats turned out not to be of very much help, because Greeley had attacked them just as much as Grant and the feeling was mutual. They had no idea how to help each other out and often wondered why they should, but somehow the Democrats still thought they had a chance.
Think if the Greens tried to nominate Ralph Nader, let the convention get away from them and wound up with Cynthia McKinney, and then the modern-day Republicans, concluding their field was terrible, nominated McKinney too and spent the rest of the campaign trying to convince each other that, no, really, we seriously nominated Cynthia McKinney, same as the Greens, and now we're trying to make her President so that we can beat Barack Obama. The Greens would be angry because they didn't get who they really wanted, the Democrats aren't budging from Obama, and the rank-and-file Republicans will be trying to figure out just what the hell is going on here well into the following spring.
It was a loud, boisterous, deeply confusing election, but in the end, Grant easily swept aside the in-way-over-his-head Greeley, who by Election Day just wanted the damn thing to be over. The score was 286 electoral votes to 66. When the results came in, he said, "I am the worst beaten man that ever ran for that high office. And I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly know whether I was running for President or the penitentiary."
"Now, hold on," you may be saying. "You said this was the least consequential of all, didn't you? You've got a dispute here over whether Reconstruction should be continued. Blacks saw their rights rolled back for decades after Reconstruction ended. How is that not consequential?"
Simple. Between the time of the election and the time the Electoral College met, Greeley died. The campaign had drained too much out of him. He lost control of the New York Herald to Whitelaw Reid, his wife died a week prior to the election, and he was getting savaged the whole time as only major-party Presidential candidates can, from three sides, with almost nobody coming to his aid. Not only that, he was in the middle of recovering from getting swindled by a diamond hoax that may very well be covered here in detail in its own right at some point. It was too much for one man to take. With that, the field was essentially reduced from two to one. Greeley's electors were instructed simply to use their own judgment, and they scattered to the four winds. (Had he won, Greeley's running mate was Benjamin Gratz Brown. Whether he would have also ended Reconstruction appears questionable. Back then, Presidents didn't get to choose their own running mates, and while Greeley was sure that Reconstruction should end, Brown was wavering on the issue.)
Historian Eugene H. Roseboom later wrote in the 1957 book A History of Presidential Elections, "Never in American history have two more unfit men been offered to the country for the highest office."
Surely, we can do better than that. It's kind of hard not to.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Random News Generator- Burundi
Burundi is one of the poorest nations on Earth, having been repeatedly devastated by civil war. They have seen two genocides between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities. In 1972, Tutsis killed Hutus. In 1994, Hutus killed Tutsis in something of an extension of the more well-known genocide going on in Rwanda around the same time. Both of the 1994 genocides were set off by the same event, that being the shooting down of a plane containing the presidents of both nations, both Hutu.
The bulk of the violence only ceased in 2006, though even then, one splinter group, the National Liberation Front (a Hutu group), continued to fight for two more years. Burundi has since turned its attention to rebuilding the smoking crater that has become their home. In terms of GDP per capita, they rank ahead of only DR Congo.
Among the mediators who helped broker peace, or at least tried to, was current South African president Jacob Zuma. Zuma wrapped up a three-day return to Burundi on Friday in which the two signed an economic pact. The scope of the pact seems to be fairly comprehensive, with various articles on the topic mentioning cooperation in agriculture, defense, education, energy, finance, infrastructure, sports (Times Live mentions South Africa sending 3,000 soccer balls), transportation and tourism.
Zuma was also called upon to help soothe once-again-rising tensions in Burundi before they degenerate into another war. Last year, Pierre Nkurunziza was re-elected president with 91% of the vote (and without opposition) after the opposition claimed it to be a rigged election and boycotted. Much of that opposition has since fled the country or went underground.
The chief opponent: Agathon Rwasa of the National Liberation Front.
Zuma, however, declined to get involved this time. Hopefully, someone will.
The bulk of the violence only ceased in 2006, though even then, one splinter group, the National Liberation Front (a Hutu group), continued to fight for two more years. Burundi has since turned its attention to rebuilding the smoking crater that has become their home. In terms of GDP per capita, they rank ahead of only DR Congo.
Among the mediators who helped broker peace, or at least tried to, was current South African president Jacob Zuma. Zuma wrapped up a three-day return to Burundi on Friday in which the two signed an economic pact. The scope of the pact seems to be fairly comprehensive, with various articles on the topic mentioning cooperation in agriculture, defense, education, energy, finance, infrastructure, sports (Times Live mentions South Africa sending 3,000 soccer balls), transportation and tourism.
Zuma was also called upon to help soothe once-again-rising tensions in Burundi before they degenerate into another war. Last year, Pierre Nkurunziza was re-elected president with 91% of the vote (and without opposition) after the opposition claimed it to be a rigged election and boycotted. Much of that opposition has since fled the country or went underground.
The chief opponent: Agathon Rwasa of the National Liberation Front.
Zuma, however, declined to get involved this time. Hopefully, someone will.
Friday, August 12, 2011
God Is On Hold
If you have felt strangely empty, desperate to feel like you're doing something with your life, why not make your computer do something and then take all the credit?
All this could be yours with the latest donate-screensaver-time-to-large-scale-computing project, LHC@Home 2.0. CERN- the guys with the Large Hadron Collider, the thing some people worried might create a black hole and kill us all- needs some help in looking for the so-called Higgs boson, aka the "God particle", a particle that gives mass to all other particles. They're looking to simulate particle collisions.
If you'd like to help out, head here. Or rather, bookmark it and come back in a bit. They got a tad overwhelmed with volunteers and are trying to make room for more. If you can't wait around that long, here are other projects. Or continue to feel strangely empty. Your call.
All this could be yours with the latest donate-screensaver-time-to-large-scale-computing project, LHC@Home 2.0. CERN- the guys with the Large Hadron Collider, the thing some people worried might create a black hole and kill us all- needs some help in looking for the so-called Higgs boson, aka the "God particle", a particle that gives mass to all other particles. They're looking to simulate particle collisions.
If you'd like to help out, head here. Or rather, bookmark it and come back in a bit. They got a tad overwhelmed with volunteers and are trying to make room for more. If you can't wait around that long, here are other projects. Or continue to feel strangely empty. Your call.
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