Tag Archives: history

statistical analysis of the Supreme Court

A statistical analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that it is not all that partisan after all. Okay, I admit it, I am really just pretending to understand half the words in the abstract below. It’s always kind of fun when physicists dabble in fields outside their usual boundaries, like economics or politics.

Partisan Intuition Belies Strong, Institutional Consensus and Wide Zipf’s Law for Voting Blocs in US Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court throughout the twentieth century has been characterized as being divided between liberals and conservatives, suggesting that ideologically similar justices would have voted similarly had they overlapped in tenure. What if they had? I build a minimal, pairwise maximum entropy model to infer how 36 justices from 1946–2016 would have all voted on a Super Court. The model is strikingly consistent with a standard voting model from political science, W-Nominate, despite using 105 less parameters and fitting the observed statistics better. I find that consensus dominates the Super Court and strong correlations in voting span nearly 100 years, defining an emergent institutional timescale that surpasses the tenure of any single justice. Thus, the collective behavior of the Court over time reveals a stable institution insulated from the seemingly rapid pace of political change. Beyond consensus, I discover a rich structure of dissenting blocs with a heavy-tailed, scale-free distribution consistent with data from the Second Rehnquist Court. Consequently, a low-dimensional description of voting with a fixed number of ideological modes is inherently misleading because even votes that defy such a description are probable. Instead of assuming that strong higher order correlations like voting blocs are induced by features of the cases, the institution, and the justices, I show that such complexity can be expressed in a minimal model relying only on pairwise correlations in voting.

Roman emperors were assassinated during droughts

This academic paper puts it pretty simply:

lower precipitation increases the probability that Roman troops, who relied on local food supplies, starve. This pushes soldiers to mutiny, hence weakening the emperor’s support, and increasing the probability he is assassinated.

The modern lesson might be that if ecological change starts to hurt your society, it might be better (for the ruler) to keep the military well funded and let everyone else suffer.

how chili peppers got to Asia

There were no chili peppers in China or Southeast Asia until at least the 1500s according to this article. Chilis are native to South America.

The first mention of the chili pepper in the Chinese historical record appears in 1591, although historians have yet to arrive at a consensus as to exactly how it arrived in the Middle Kingdom. One school of thought believes the pepper came overland from India into western China via a northern route through Tibet or a southern route across Burma. But the first consistent references to chili peppers in local Chinese gazettes start in China’s eastern coastal regions and move gradually inland toward the West—reaching Hunan in 1684 and Sichuan in 1749—data points that support the argument that the chili pepper arrived by sea, possibly via Portuguese traders who had founded a colony near the southern Chinese coast on the island of Macao…

The article also suggests that it might have been Columbus himself who was responsible for calling this plant “pepper”. Because he thought he was in India, and had a habit of naming people and things using words already assigned to other people and things.

Goering on Propaganda

An article on History News Network has this disturbing quote from Hermann Goering:

The Nazis fundamentally understood that public opinion was merely something that could be manufactured: propaganda would make people believe anything the regime wanted them to. As Reichsmarshal Goering told the Nuremberg Tribunal: “it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

Blame the Jews, the Communists, the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, the atheists, anything to avoid looking internally for real causes of and real solutions to complex probems.

The Republic of Minerva

Here’s something I didn’t know: in 1971, a group of American libertarians created two small artificial islands on an unclaimed coral reef near Fiji and Tonga, (very roughly) a thousand miles or so off Australia’s east coast, and proceeded to declare a new country, which was then invaded and conquered by the kingdom of Tonga, and then washed away by storms.

The best Oliver could do was Minerva Reef, in the middle of the Pacific, 500 km (260 miles) southeast of Tonga.  It had never been claimed, despite being discovered as far back as 1854.  There were, however, serious problems establishing a settlement on the reef, not the least being that the reef lies some three feet above water at low tide and about four feet under water at high tide.

Undaunted, in January 1971, Oliver and a small party went to Fiji, where they chartered a 54-foot motor sailer and purchased the materials to create artificial islands on the reef.  On their arrival at Minerva, the party unloaded large hunks of coral wrapped in chicken wire, concrete blocks, sand and other rubble, which allowed them to build two micro-islands on the reef.  On one of these islands, they built a small stone tower and hoisted its flag: a yellow torch of freedom on a solid blue background.  The founding fathers of Minerva hoped to expand the reclaimed land until it would eventually support a city of 30,000 citizens…

Taking up the challenge was King Tāufa’āhau Tupou IV, the heaviest monarch in the world, weighing in at over 440 pounds. On June 21, 1972, he led an expeditionary force to invade the Principality of Minerva.  Without an army or navy to call on, the king recruited a five-man convict work detail to undertake the invasion and, to add gravis to the expedition, a four-piece brass band played the Tongan national anthem from on-board the royal yacht Olovaba to inspire the troops.  Taking courage, when he saw that Minerva was unoccupied, the king decided to personally lead his force.  Once the tide was out, the king went ashore.  After tearing down Minervan flag, he read aloud a proclamation of sovereignty.  The reef now belonged to Kingdom of Tonga.

I like to think I have a creative mind but I certainly couldn’t have made that up.

September 2017 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • Fueled by supercharged sea temperatures, the 2017 hurricane season was a terrible, terrible season for hurricanes devastating coastal regions of the United States. One reason is that these storms not only were powerful and hit densely populated areas, but they set records for rapid intensification. Beyond all the human suffering, one thing I find disturbing is that I feel desensitized at this point when I think back to how I felt after Hurricane Katrina. The first major city destroyed is a shock, but later you get numb to it if you are not actually there. Then finally, a remote island territory is all but wiped out in what should be shocking fashion, and the public and government response is decidedly muted. This is what the age of climate change and weapons proliferation might be like, a long, slow process of shifting baselines where the unthinkable becomes thinkable over time.
  • In a story that U.S. media didn’t seem to pick up, China seemed to make a statement in its  official state-run media that it would defend North Korea in case of an unprovoked attack by the U.S. and its allies. John Bolton  and Lindsey Graham made comments suggesting they think any number of Korean dead would be a price worth paying for an unprovoked U.S. attack. The Trump administration is openly using Nazi propaganda.
  • During the Vietnam War the United States dropped approximately twice as many tons of bombs in Southeast Asia as the Allied forces combined used against both Germany and Japan in World War II. After the Cold War finally ended, Mikhail Gorbachev made some good suggestions for how to achieve a lasting peace. They were ignored. We may be witnessing the decline of the American Empire as a result.

Most hopeful stories:

  • It’s possible that a universal basic income could save the U.S. government money by replacing less efficient assistance programs.
  • There are also workable proposals for a U.S. single-payer health insurance program, although this one would somewhat obviously mean the government spending more money, which it would have to collect in taxes. People would come out ahead financially if the taxes were less than the premiums they are paying now, which doesn’t seem that hard, but of course this is politically tough given the incredibly effective propaganda the finance industry has used to kill the idea for the last 50 years.
  • Utility-scale solar energy cost dropped 30% in one year.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • The FDA has approved formal trials of Ecstasy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
  • I learned that the OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook named “ten key emerging technology trends”: The Internet of Things, Big data analytics, Artificial intelligence, Neurotechnologies, Nano/microsatellites, Nanomaterials, Additive manufacturing / 3D printing, Advanced energy storage technologies, Synthetic biology, Blockchain
  • In automation news, Tesla is testing automated truck platoons. And there’s a site that will try to predict whether robots will take your job.

rise of fascism in the U.S.?

Openly fascist attitudes are undoubtedly more visible in the media and on the street over the past year or so. I have been reading the headlines, but hadn’t seen a whole lot of photos or footage until recently. What I see now that I am looking, for example in this video and article from The Intercept, is pretty shocking. It definitely has echos of semi-official street gangs that did the bidding of Hitler and Mussolini early on, with the government not yet openly involved in the violence but choosing to look the other way. The next step after this is traditional elites outside the government, like business, organized labor and organized religion, choosing to align themselves with what they perceive as the winning side, because they think that will lead to the largest personal gain. Eventually, all these groups unite based on a narrative of internal and/or external enemies, agree that the threat is great enough to abandon traditional political institutions, and our republic is no more.

Or not. We seem to have taken some steps down this slippery slope of an openly fascist movement with significant popular support, and some government, business, and political elites looking the other way. We can hope that the right wing movement isn’t actually growing in membership but is simply more visible and emboldened by events over the past few years. One thing on the side of the republic is simple demographics – outside of an absolute fascist state taking power by sheer force, the angry white men do not have the numbers to dominate the rest of our society. I think that may be the case, but it is not safe to count on it. The vast majority of reasonable people need to resist, not through violence because that only fans the flames, but by taking full advantage of our still semi-functional political system to get this thing under control. That means actively recruiting and supporting rational politicians, fighting for a system where one person gets one vote and money gets no votes, and nonviolent protest actions if and when it becomes clear that is the only thing that can get the attention of our politicians and elites.

Trump’s Russian Laundromat

The New Republic has a long history of Trump’s ties to Russian mobsters. At the absolute minimum, he is guilty of taking their money and not asking any questions.

The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.

But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.

It’s entirely possible that Trump was never more than a convenient patsy for Russian oligarchs and mobsters, with his casinos and condos providing easy pass-throughs for their illicit riches. At the very least, with his constant need for new infusions of cash and his well-documented troubles with creditors, Trump made an easy “mark” for anyone looking to launder money. But whatever his knowledge about the source of his wealth, the public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians—including the dirtiest and most feared of them all.

Congo

This disturbing article in The Week reminds us that there is still a nasty war going on in Congo, and that part of the driver is fighting over minerals used to make smart phones.

A brutal civil war in Congo has displaced more people in the past year than the wars in Syria and Iraq…

The government of President Joseph Kabila appears to be behind some of the atrocities. After the rebel faction Kamuina Nsapu rose up last fall against Kabila’s government, both the Congolese army and the rebels engaged in atrocities. But the most horrific attacks in recent months have been the work of a new militia, Bana Mura, which the U.N. says was created and armed by Kabila’s government. Bana Mura militants, of a different ethnic group than the Kamwina Nsapu, have slaughtered whole villages, going door-to-door and killing everyone they found — babies, parents, grandparents…

Impoverished Congo has $24 trillion worth of mineral wealth in the ground, including cobalt, diamonds, gold, and coltan — a highly valuable ore containing the heat-resistant element tantalum, used to make the circuit boards in smartphones, laptops, and other electronic devices. The proceeds, often made off child labor, fund the rebel factions and the Congolese military — much as “blood diamonds” did in Sierra Leone. U.S. companies participate indirectly, by buying tantalum and circuit boards, and directly, by investing in Congolese mining: Just last year, U.S. hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management was hit with a record fine of $412 million for bribing Kabila for mineral concessions.