Tag Archives: history

A roadmap to a Democratic Senate supermajority A worthy criticism made by many observers on the Democratic side is that most of the plans being painstakingly described by the Presidential candidates will come to nothing, because the filibuster in the Senate will kill them all. The GOP will then run on the “do nothing” socialist democrats in 2022 and 2024 to retake the Congress and Presidency. As things now stand, that is a reasonable position. Bear in...

Is There An Objective Reality? Yes. So this is the ontological question: is supposed apparently “objective” reality really real? I come at this as someone who in the past questioned this.  I had my period of post-modernist questioning of objective reality. This culminated in a paper, which  I presented as a major address to receive a major recognition at my university, “Belief: Its role in economic theory and action,” American Journal of Economics and...

run75441: Catching up something we missed. NDD pointed out AB had missed a post on the 15th Amendment which happened two days before the last posted (17th) “Live Blogging  the 15th. “ Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: December 15, 1868 Sen Orrin S. Ferry (R-Conn), in the course of offering a joint resolution to lift the disabilities mandated by the 3rd Section of the Fourteenth Amendment against those who participated in the rebellion: [I]t does seem...

The Afghanistan War (posted by run75441) The Washington Post has over the last 7 days published a detailed account based on many secret documents they have spent years obtaining to provide an accurate account of what has happened during what is now the longest war the US has been engaged in. It is an impressive account, which I have tried to follow, although with finishing a semester I did not read every word of it. But it is a serious and important...

Noah Smith’s The End of Econ Blogging’s Golden Age, Bloomberg Opinion. December 17, 2019. “If someone asked you to name the greatest economics blogger of all time, you might name Paul Krugman, or my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen. But there’s a third name that deserves to be on that short list: Mark Thoma, an economics professor at the University of Oregon. On Friday, Thoma announced a well-deserved retirement. But the changes his blog made in...

Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: December 17, 1868 In the Senate, Senators Dixon and Ferry, both Republicans from Connecticut, continued the debate from several days prior concerning a federal imposition of African-American voting rights on the States: Dixon: [M]y colleague … proposes to amend the Constitution of the United States in a manner which to me is very revolting, not because I hate negro suffrage, but, sir, I do desire that the proud old...

The endowment effect and the taxation of wealth As you may recall, I am reading the histories of a number of past Republics which have had various levels of success. Without getting too far ahead of myself, it appears that one constant is that, once plutocratic oligarchies are entrenched, they will refuse to yield power or money, even to the point of destroying democratic or republican institutions.  In other words, David Frum‘s observation that “If...

Short video backgrounder.  Virtually no one in the West remembers this and those that do likely don't consider it a major historical event of the period. All Chinese are intimately familiar with the Opium War as the onset of a century of humiliation for their country, and the Chinese are extremely nationalistic. Armstrong EconomicsThe Opium WarMartin Armstrong

Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: December 7, 1868 In the Senate: “Mr. Craving asked, and by unanimous consent obtained, leave to introduce a joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States: . . . “No State shall deny the right of suffrage or abridge the same to any male citizens of the United States twenty-one years of age or upwards except for participation in rebellion or other crime and also excepting Indians...

I looked at this at first, wondered what it depicted, thought it might be a piece of art, and puzzled over it a bit. It is a topographical depiction (Lidar) of the Mississippi River. If you look closely, you can see roads and various plots of land in addition to the movement of the river bed over time and the various elevations. One of the key techniques used in modern cartography has its beginnings in 17th century map-making. Relief shading techniques as...