The Arab League

An interactive map from The Economist lets you click on member-states of the Arab League for relative scores on democracy, corruption, and press freedom, as well as overall stability:



You know what country looks pretty damn shaky? Iraq. Odd, what with our having bombed them into the age of liberal pluralism just eight years ago... Syria is similarly close to head of the line on the instability index, though most indications are that the government there would have no compuntion about brutally dispatching the opposition at the slightest whiff of unrest. Then again, the same could be (could have been) said for Qaddafi in Libya. And while the Gulf oil states mostly look pretty quiet for now (Bahrain excepted), no one's holding the reins on this tiger.

For what it's worth, here's an interesting take on what the future of the House of Saud may look like.

The 2010 Census: Population and Congressional Apportionment

Hey look, I have a blog! Guess I'll post something.



Yep, it's census stuff, from here. Roll over states for their particulars. I think it mostly speaks for itself - the Rust Belt continues to Rusts, the Sun Belt continues to... not rust. One thing I notice about the latter, though, is that there seems to be a bit of consolidation relative to earlier decades. Whereas growth had been widespread across many southern and western states from the 70s through the 90s, it seems a bit more focused in the last ten years, mainly centering on the states associated with megaregions: the Piedmont Atlantic (Georgia and the Carolinas), the Texas Triangle (Texas), and Florida (Florida) in particular. Less urbane states in the broader region, like Tennessee or New Mexico didn't gain as much in the past decade, relatively speaking. Blip? Trend? I speculate half-heartedly, you decide.

Global Peace Index 2010

Vision of Humanity is out with their 2010 Global Peace Index, a rating of the "state of peace" in 249 nations around the world:



Each of 149 countries are ranked on a five-point scale for 23 indicators, including, e.g., number of homicides; access to weapons; political instability; deaths from conflict (internal); weapons exports; number of displaced people; and number of conflicts fought.

So what is the most peaceful nation in the world? Those honors go to plucky, placid New Zealand for the second year in a row. (Being small, wealthy, and surrounded by ocean would tend to keep the dander down, I'd imagine.) The rest of the top 10:

2. Iceland
3. Japan
4. Austria
5. Norway
6. Ireland
7. Denmark
8. Luxembourg
9. Finland
10. Sweden

All ten of the most peaceful nations in the world are also among the most wealthy; the top three are all island nations. And - do I even need to mention it? - the entirety of Scandinavia is represented here.

The bottom of the scale is a bit more eclectic:

140. Democratic Republic of the Congo
141. Chad
142. Georgia
143. Russia
144. Israel
145. Pakistan
146. Sudan
147. Afghanistan
148. Somalia
149. Iraq

A smattering of countries from the former USSR, Central/South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Some very poor countries, others (Russia, Israel) middle-income or higher. Peace comes in just one flavor, it would seem; conflict comes in many.

Some other country rankings I choose to highlight for my own capricious reasons: Germany (16), UK (31), France (32), Botswana (33), Laos (34), Bhutan (36), Vietnam (38), Sierra Leone (53), China (80), US (85), Kazakhstan (95), Iran (104), Mexico (107), South Africa (121), Thailand (124), India (128), North Korea (139). The report notes the top five risers on the list since 2009 (Ethiopia, Mauritania, Hungary, Lebanon, and Haiti), as well as the five biggest fallers (Cyprus, Russia, Philippines, Georgia, and Syria). The complete list is here (pdf), along with regional analyses and discussions of the top and bottom 10. Inexplicably, and a bit annoyingly, the folks at VoH continue to leave the beautiful and glorious Kyrgyz Republic off their rankings, along with a handful of other countries.

You can play with their map, which has a slider showing their rankings back to 2007, and also view maps for each of the component indicators. One trend I notice: a slight but steady movement towards greater peace in Africa. Is this just a blip, or the beginning of a long-term trend? It would certainly be wonderful if it were the latter.

I discussed the 2009 version of the map here.

The Company You Keep

A provocative series of maps from Esquire's politics blog depicts the countries of the world according to a couple of controversial policies:



The countries that ban gays in the military, according to Esquire, are Cuba, China, Egypt, Greece, Iran, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, United States, Venezuela, and Yemen

The countries that execute people are Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, China, Comoros, Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Korea, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United States, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe

And the countries that do both:



That is some pretty rarefied company for the United States: Cuba, China, Egypt, Iran, Jamaica, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, and Yemen. The US's only company in the Western hemisphere are Cuba and Jamaica. Other than that it's just a handful of countries in Africa, a handful of countries in the Muslim Middle East, and a few in East Asia. No European countries on the list. The only other developed country is Singapore.

But all this is likely to change as the gears of the military bureaucracy seem to be slowly but inexorably grinding towards repeal of Don't Ask-Don't Tell. In which case the US will join only one other country in the executes-people-but-allows-gays-in-the-military pile: Israel.

What I find most interesting here, though, is the matter of American exceptionalism. To the extent that this term refers to the tendency of the US to embrace more authoritarian-conservative policies, it turns out the US isn't all that exceptional - except within the Western World (i.e., for these purposes, Europe + Latin America + Anglophone settler countries). It joins with a geographically coherent coterie of nations in clusters across parts of Africa, the Middle East, and much of South and East Asia.

But these areas couldn't be more unlike eachother - politically, culturally, linguistically, historically, religiously, geographically... They just tend to be alike in embracing more authoritarian policies. This consistent authoritarianism just seems to be independent of any other variable. Odd. (Of course, you could also take the view that the anti-authoritarianism of Europe and Latin America and perhaps part of Africa is exceptional, and what needs explaining.)

Hanging of the Parliament

So they went ahead and had those elections in the UK, as you may have heard. The result was a major victory for primary colors, as this Wikipedia map shows. (Blue = Conservatives; Red = Labour; Yellow = LD; assorted = regional and minor parties):



The political parties, however, didn't do so hot. Oddly, though electoral politics is supposedly a zero-sum game, all three major parties managed to lose. The Tories fell short of the majority they were hoping for; Labour lost a ton of seats and had their worst showing in decades; and the Lib Dems, despite anticipation of major gains and predictions that they might crack 100 seats, actually lost a handful of seats. The Tories now have 305 seats, to Labour's 258, and the Lib Dems' 57, with the rest distribute amongst various regional parties and a Green. With ~323 needed to form a majority, the parliament is, as they say, hung.

For comparison, this is what the map looked like after the last election, in ought-five:

UK Election Calculator

The BBC has an election seat calculator for the upcoming UK elections:



I will say this: UK electoral democracy appears to be pretty messed up. Like, US-caliber mess up. I say this because as you can see, I've set the calculator so that the 3 majorest parties all get just about the same percentage of the vote (a third each, if you want to check my math). Yet look at the seat distribution that results from that popular vote outcome:



See? Messed up. Everyone gets the same number of votes but the Tories and Lib Dems combined don't have as many seats as Labour. W, if I may say, TF? I assume this is a function of the Lib Dem vote being highly concentrated in ethnic areas? And the conservative vote being somewhat concentrated in rural areas? But I'm sort of projecting from the American political scene, so that may be way off base.

At any rate, the BBC's "poll of polls" currecntly shows the Conservatives with a slight lead: 33% to 29% for each of the other two parties. That would result in 285 votes fo Labour to 244 for the conservatives, and a whopping 92 seats for team yellow. Democracy!!!And since this would result in a hung parliament, I assume the High Court would intervene and choose the victor in a 5-4 ruling according to their own political predilections. What, isn't that how everyone does it?

The Reformed State Map of the US

A proposal for electoral reform from fakeisthenewreal:



It's neat and all that the US was the first modern country to adopt many democratic institutions - we did it way back in the 18th Century, before the French Revolution even. Bully for us! However, a side effect of our early adoption of 'democracy' is that we have a lot of weird anachronistic leftovers from the pre-1789 era. Slavery was one, but fortunately we finally managed to get rid of that. But other, less significant but still not insignificant pre-democratic inconveniences remain. This map is meant to address some of these issues. Says fitn:

The electoral college is a time-honored system that has only produced results in conflict with the popular vote three times in over 200 years. However, it's obvious that reforms are needed. The organization of the states should be altered. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size.... [This plan] overrepresentation of small states and underrepresention of large states in presidental voting and in the US Senate. Preserves the historical structure of the electoral college and the United States unique federal system, balancing power between levels of government. States could be redistricted after each census - just like house seats are distributed now.

Fifty states, as you see here, each with just about the same population. Yes, this would help with the problem of the electoral college system for picking presidents, which is insane by any reasonable standard and without which we might have avoided a certain period of unpleasantness from 2001-2009.

But the real advantage is in the Senate. Right now, Wyoming has as many senators as California. Vermont has as many as Texas. That's just straight up retarded. It's certainly not democratic. And don't give me any of that crap about how it preserves the sovereignty of states as the Great and Omniscient Founding Fathers intended, because do you know why they ended up with this provision that every state have an equal number of senators? To protect regional interests from the will of the majority; i.e., to protect southern interests; i.e., to protect slavery from meddlesome northerners. (And like just about everything unseemly in American politics, it all somehow goes back to the legacy of slavery...) Nothing approaches this level of blatant anti-democratic institutional structure in the free world. What's more, we can't even amend the constitution to allow for proportional representation in the Senate: the Founders made sure of that by making it the one thing that couldn't be repealed by amendment. Brilliant! So we would have to hold a constitutional convention and start over from scratch if we wanted to reform the Senate in a way that would really live up to modern norms.

Or - we could follow this guy's plan: just take the scissors to the ol' state map and produce what you see above. There would still be two senators per state, but every state would have equal population, so representation would be proportional. A fantastic idea! This would be much fairer than the system we've got going on now. In particular, as it stands, rural areas are way, way overrepresented in the Senate; having two senators each for neo-states like SF Bay, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Dallas would remedy that.

As for the electoral college, it wouldn't solve the problem entirely. It would still be possible to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college, but at least it wouldn't be due to the fact that the smallest states get overrepresented in the electoral college (e.g., North Dakota gets 3 EVs, because of its 1 representative + 2 senators, though it only has the population to justify 1).

Of course, there would be some logistical problems in re-organizing state governments throughout the country. But bah, I say. Small potatoes: the senate is dysfunctional as it is and it is going to end up killing the country. My own personal choice would be for us all to just ignore the Senate until it went away, sort of like the House of Lords. But this plan strikes me as the next best thing.

Nine Chinas

Patrick Chovanec, an associate professor of business-type stuff at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has a map of what he calls the Nine Nations of China up at The Atlantic:



Chovanec, inspired by Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America, sees China as "a mosaic of several distinct regions, each with its own resources, dynamics, and historical character," and notes that "taken individually, these 'nations' would account for eight of the 20 most populous countries in the world." The nine regions are:

The Frontier (colored salmonish on the map): Population a mere 86 million. It's China's outback, or more pertinently, its Empty Quarter. Lots of wild landscapes, ethnic minorities, and exploitable resources - a milieu Americans might find faintly familiar!

The Refuge (contemplative purple): Pop. 110 million. An agricultural breadbasket consisting of the provinces of Sichuan and Chongqing, it's remote but close to self-sufficient; sheltered by high mountains, the be-pandaed region sounds like a Chinese pastoral idyll, albeit one that's now lurching somewhat gawkily into industrialization and increasing integration with the rest of China and the world.

Shangri-La (ethereal light blue): Pop. 132 million. Purported home of the legendary paradise on earth, Shangri-La is, naturally, beset by environmental degradation, drug cultivation (an historic producer of opium and, more recently, the far deadlier tobacco), and poverty: it's the poorest of the nine regions. It's also comprised of about 30% non-Han minorities.

The Yellow Land (a very yellowy yellow): Pop. 359 million. A massively fertile land watered by the Yellow River, this region has more people than the United States. It has also served as the center of Chinese political power since roughly forever; it's the real belly of the whatnot.

The Crossroads (sullen dark blue): Pop. 226 million. So named because of its geographical centrality, and because it has historically stood between regions that compete for its resources; the region's never risen to a position of dominance within China, despite its placement on the Yangtze and main transportation corridors of the country.

The Back Door (debauched orange): Pop. 112 million. Once known as Yueh, this region in the south of China was a sort of Wild South for northern elites: a place of exile, full of jungles, gambling, smuggling, shadowy secret societies, and monkey-eating. Anchored by Hong Kong, it's boomed on the back of massive exports of late; presumably becoming less awesome.

The Straits (green like money): Pop. a paltry 59 million. Formed by Fujian on the mainland and the ever-ambiguous Taiwan, the region has been primarily a sea-faring one for centuries; its colonies throughout southeast Asia still remain tied together in many ways. The Asian tiger-dom of Taiwan has driven this to become the wealthiest of China's regions, though its political future is anyone's guess.

The Metropolis (tawdry pink): Pop. 147 million. The area around Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangtze has been the one region to seize preeminence from the Yellow Land at various points in Chinese history. After a period of neglect during the years of High Communism in China, Shanghai has led the country towards what seems to be its ever more urbane, cosmopolitan, and capitalistic future.

The Rust Belt (industrial alienation gray): Pop. 109 million. This is Manchuria, the locus of a certain prickliness between Russia and Japan a century ago. Japan held the region from 1931 until World War II; it went quickly to the Communists, and it became a stronghold of the socialist state. The reform era, though, hasn't been kind to the region; parts are almost as bad off as Michigan, if you can believe it. Pastimes include grain alcohol, decline.

Chovanec's got much more in his capsule descriptions, not to mention his blog.

Support for US Health Care Reform in Three Dimensions

A nice map repetition from a New York Times op-ed shows support for health care reform along axes of income and age:



The accompanying opinion piece is by Nate Silver, Andrew Gelman, and Daniel Lee. Say the authors:

Using a statistical method called multilevel regression and post-stratification, we ... mapped opinion on health care, breaking down voters by age, family income and state. We’re used to thinking about red states and blue states, but the geographic variation is dwarfed by the demographic patterns: younger, lower-income Americans strongly support increased government spending on health care, while elderly and well-off Americans are much less supportive of the idea. But in general, senators seems to be less interested in what their constituents, old and young, rich and poor, might think about health care, and more interested in how they feel about President Obama.

This may actually be good news for the Democrats. Although the Annenberg surveys had shown health care subsidies to be quite popular — they had 67 percent support nationally in 2000 and 73 percent support in 2004 — that was back when they were a mere abstraction, and before voters might have been considering how to pay for them. Nowadays, President Obama enjoys higher approval ratings — in the low to mid-50s, according to most polls — than do the Democrats’ health care reform plans, which are mired in the mid-40s in most surveys. Conditions being what they are, Democrats would rather have a referendum on the president than one on the health care bill itself.

Support for Obama seems to be driving attitudes about health care reform to some extent, and not the other way around. Of course, a lot of what this has to do with is trust. As Machiavelli said, reform is hard: vested interests who benefit from the status quo will oppose it at every turn, and they tend to be well-organized, while support for reform tends to be diffuse and shallow. Whether you're going to support a large intervention in a system that, for all its shortcomings, is our system - the one most of us have grown accustomed to - will depend in large part on whether you trust the folks who are doing the reforming. And of course, if you're already a beneficiary of guaranteed government-provided health care, like everyone in the US over the age of 65, you really don't have much incentive to support reform; unless, that is, you aren't entirely self-interested, and actually care about, for instance, the ability of young people to acquire health care when they're in their 20s and don't have access to the kind of job stability that's necessary to acquire employer-based health insurance; or who can't get health care in the free market because of a pre-existing condition like asthma; or are just too poor to afford quality health care.

But of course the maps show a geographical dimension too. Support tends to be lower in Republicaan-leaning regions like the Plains and the Utah-Idaho-Wyoming triad of conservative Western states; it tends to be higher in the Northeast and Great Lakes states. (By the way, when and why did Wisconsin become more liberal than Minnesota?) What will be interesting to me is to see how support shifts once a bill is actually passed. My guess is that support will increase across the board, once there are a bunch of headlines about Obama signing "historic leegislation" and all that. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past Congress to end up with such a watered-down bill, with so many sops to the health insurance and health care industries, that it just pisses everyone off.

Bloomberg Wins, More or Less

The New York Times has an interactive block-by-block map of Tuesday's vote for mayor in New York City:



Plutocrat Michael Bloomberg beat out bureaucrat William Thompson to win a third term as mayor. He is a popular mayor, but he rammed a repeal of term limits through the city council and spent roughly nine gajillion dollars of his personal fortune on his re-election, which may have turned off some New Yorkers, and the election ended up much closer than most anyone expected - he won only 51-46. (The Times says, "[t]he results in the mayor’s race are likely to be personally bruising to Mr. Bloomberg, a man of no small ego who told the public last fall that his financial acumen made him uniquely qualified to pull the city out of a deep economic funk.") I would also like to believe that voters were squeamish about continuing to name the city's wealthiest resident as its civil leader, the sort of practice that makes it really hard to stifle the chortles when you start talking about "American democracy."

At any rate, says the Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won re-election Tuesday, but voters were less enthusiastic about him than the last time he ran in 2005. The mayor did well in high-income white areas of Manhattan and Queens, and also in election districts dominated by immigrants, like Flushing and Brighton Beach. But his vote fell sharply in black neighborhoods, especially southeast Queens, where the black middle class has been hard-hit by foreclosure.

Those big blue splotches mostly correspond to the majority African-American neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and El Bronx. Bloomberg got like 90% in the swankier districts of the Upper East Side, and Thompson did about as well in his best districts in places like Bed-Stuy and Brownsville. Bloomberg did well among Jews and white Catholics; it seems like the Hispanic vote leaned toward Thompson, though it's a bit hard for me to tell from this map.

UPDATE: Commenter Gaurav links to a New York Magazine post that compares the NYC election map to the city's white population, based on a map from the Digital Atlas of New York City (which I posted about before). Here's the distribution of the city's white population:



That's a tasty correlation! And Andrew B links to this map from the Digital Atlas showing Hispanic population. Definitely looks like they went for Thompson pretty strongly.

Maoists in India

The New York Times has an article about the escalating fight against Maoist rebels in India. It includes this map:



Says the Times:

India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

The rebels claim to represent many of India's impoerished people, especially among its indigenous tribal groups. Despite their violent tactics, they have some support among intellectuals in India, including the writer Arundhati Roy. They're not to be confused with the above-ground Communist Party, which is a force in Indian politics.

Where the Uninsured Are

NPR has a map of the uninsured by congressional district and by state.



On the face of it, it looks like the usual, albeit paradoxical, story: areas that vote more Democratic, and which support a broader social safety net, have less need of one, since fewer people are uninsured in those areas; whereas Republican-leaning areas, where support is presumably greater for the status quo (the maintaining of which seems to be the Republican approach to health care), tend to have more uninsured. Unfortunately, this map doesn't do a good job of letting you see urban congressional districts, so the appearance of the map could be rather unrepresentative of the country as a whole, and especially of Democratic-leaning areas (many of which are in cities).

However, you can also see uninsured numbers by state, which reveals that of the 26 states (counting DC as a state for wishful thinking purposes) where the uninsured are less than 15%, 21 were won by Obama in 2008. And of the 13 states where the uninsured are more than 20%, 10 were won by McCain. (McCain won 7 of the 12 15-20% states.) That's a rather striking correlation, no?

Meanwhile, Nate Silver uses math n' stuff to create a map that projects support for the public option for every congressional district:



Based on a few polls in certain states and districts, Nate created a regression analysis to project what support across every district in the US would likely be, based on a few variables, including poverty rate and Obama's vote share in the district. He found that:

-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 291 of the 435 Congressional Districts nationwide, or almost exactly two-thirds.
-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 235 of 257 Democratic-held districts.
-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 34 of 52 Blue Dog - held districts, and has overall popularity of 51 percent in these districts versus 39 percent opposed.

By implication, the public option was favored in 56 of the 178 Republican-held districts. Nate breaks out the projected support numbers for every district in his post.

Thanks to Matt Osborne for that one.

Deutschland Wahlergebnisse

Germany had an election; Der Spiegel has a map (under the Wahlkriese tab):



(According to Babel Fish, 'erobert' means 'conquered' (evocative!) and 'gehalten' means 'held,' so you can see where parties made gains, especially the CDU and Linke.)

The link comes from the San Francisco Examiner, which says:

The results are in on Sunday’s elections in Germany, and the big news is that it is a big win for the center-right. In the vote for proportional representation (Zweitstimme), Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (the Christian Democratic Union and the Bavarian Christian Social Union, CDU/CSU) got 33.8% of the vote and the free-market Free Democrats (FDP), Merkel’s preferred coalition partner, got 14.6%, for a total of 48.4%. The Social Democrrats (SDP) got only 23.0%, their lowest share in history, while the Greens (Grüne) got 10.7% and the Left (Linke, more or less the former Communists) got 11.9%. The SDP has been willing to enter into a coalition with the Greens, as it did in 1998-2005, and with the CDU/CSU, as it has in the so-called Grand Coalition since the 2005 election, but not with the Left.

Both of the two largest parties got smaller percentages than in the last election, in September 2005, but the drop for the CDU/CSU was minimal, while the SDP share dropped from 34.2% to 23.0%--one out of its three voters went elsewhere. The percentages for the three minor parties all rose, with the FDP getting the largest percentage in the 60-year history of the Federal Republic. My sense is that voters in Germany, as in Britain, are engaging here in tactical voting.

If my brain is functioning properly (not certain!) that means right/center-right parties got 48.4% of the vote, and left/center-left parties got 45.6%.

You can click on the Interaktive Grafik to see where each parties had strengths. The Christian Democrats did best in northwestern Germany, but showed strength in the southwest and parts of the east as well. The CSU, which appears to stand in relation to the CDU in Bavaria as the DFL party stands in relation to the Democrats in Minnesota, did well on their home turf. The Free Democrats did best in the south and in Schleswig-Holstein in the north. The opposition Social Democrats, who sort of tanked a little, had their best showing in the west, especially in Hessen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Niedersachsen. Linke, a left-wing party, did best in East Germany but poorly pretty much everywhere else. The Green Party, kind of oddly, did best in many of the same regions as the Free Democrats; those areas appear to be amenable to third parties, for whatever reason. They also did wellish in and around Berlin.

Michael Barone, the author of the Examiner article, notes: "What strikes me as uncanny is that the CDU/CSU tends to win in the historically Catholic parts of Germany (the south, much of the Rhineland) while the SDP and, in 2009, the Left tends to win in the historically Protestant parts of Germany." He's got some other observations about the vote (and also a few dubious conclusions about what this says about Europeans' desires for smaller government).

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias notes that the Pirate Party got a decent 2% of the vote in their first election. Not bad!

Who's Your Polluter?

The New York Times has another one of their ridiculously information-rich maps which shows all of the 200,000+ facilities around the US that have pollution discharge permits, viewable by state:



The orange dots are facilities that have been cited for violations, and you can mouse-over them to see who they are and how many times they've been cited.

All this information is thanks to the 1972 Clean Water Act. It makes you think: thank heavens for that progressive Nixon administration! If not for them, there'd be no Clean Water Act and no EPA. And given the paralysis of the political system these days, as the wealthy classes become ever more shameless about claiming their ever-larger slices of an ever-shrinking pie, even as a sense of social responsibility towards the society which allowed them to garner that wealth continues to erode, it seems very unlikely that political initiatives like that would be able to pass now.

An accompanying article starts off this way:

Jennifer Hall-Massey knows not to drink the tap water in her home near Charleston, W.Va. In fact, her entire family tries to avoid any contact with the water.

Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused painful rashes. Many of his brother’s teeth were capped to replace enamel that was eaten away.

Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.

“How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?” said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state’s largest banks.

Imagine if we didn't have the Clean Water Act.

The "Politicosphere"

I've posted before on a map of the Iranian blogosphere. But now I discover, via Matt Yglesias, that PoliticoSphere.net has such a map for the US:



The map represents the "612 most visible and influential websites and blogs." Each node represents a website, and the sizes of nodes are determined by number of inbound links. Colors represent ideological or issues orientation; here's what they mean:

Green - Environment and Energy
Pink - Feminism
Brown - Defense
Orange - Education
Light blue - Health Policy
Peach - International Affairs
Gray - Law
Red - Conservative
Blue - Liberal
Yellow - Infopros (sites like Huffington Post and TPM, as well as mainstream media sites)

At the PoliticoSphere site, you can click on nodes to show the corresponding sites' links to other sites. Unrelatedly, the map seems to be shaped like a hawk in flight or the nation of Kyrgyzstan.

The Cost of Cap-and-Trade by State

So there's a bill to do something about global warming that's wending it's way through the US Congress; it's known as Waxman-Markey, after its two main sponsors. The bill would institute a cap-and-trade system that would limit CO2 emissions; if implemented, it would ultimately have some cost to consumers - about $175/annum for the average American household by 2020. But those costs wouldn't be distributed evenly, and Nate Silver has a map of how those per-household costs would break down by state:



Nate has all the gory methodological details in his post. I just want to make two points:

1) This bill is, by itself, inadequate, has gotten watered down considerably already, and will undoubtedly be further watered down in the Senate; and, indeed, I'd be shocked if it passed the Senate at all. But the way to think about it, I think, is as a contribution to a conditional chain: if the US government fails to do anything in the reasonably near future to fight global warming, then horrible catastrophe is inevitable; but if the US does pass even a weak bill, then an international agreement becomes more likely; and if that happens, then altering the energy-intensive development of China becomes a possibility; and if that happens, then we might be able to moderate the slew of catastrophic consequences that are gathering for the end of this century.

2) The United States is not really a democracy, not by modern standards. I'm not talking about all the corruption, the lobbying, and the tilting of the playing field toward special interests, though you could surely make a decent case for the non-democraticness of the US on those grounds alone.

What I'm talking about, though, is the US Senate. Wyoming, which has about half a million people, has two senators. And New York, which has about 19,000,000 people, also has two senators. Florida, which might well be drowned in a century or two by rising seas, has 18,000,000 people and two senators. West Virginia, which produces a lot of coal, has less than 2 million people - and two senators. You see where I'm going with this? The United States government, which was revolutionary and awesome back in the 18th Century, should no longer be considered to have a legislature that meets modern standards for representative democracy. I'm not the first to point this out, of course, but it really doesn't get the attention it deserves. I mean, the form of government of the US is obsolete: why isn't this a matter for public discussion? And of course, the skewing of representative democracy tends to pull in favor of rural areas, which tend to both use and produce more in the way of CO2-heavy fossil fuels, and against urban areas, which are more energy-efficient and more supportive of efforts to fight global warming. So, to the litany of insidious aspects of the global warming challenge, add this: the outmoded institutional structure of the United States government.

The Revolution Will Be Variously Represented

Jeff Clark has made a word cloud of tweets from Iran:



Says Clark:

This is a Shaped Word Cloud created from the text of approximately 84,000 tweets containing the term #iranelection. The larger the word the more frequently it appears in the text. As usual you can click on a word to see the current twitter search results.

He's also maintaining a running tweet narrative that uses an algorithm to create a sort of synecdoche of tweets from Iran. Very interesting.

Unrest in Iran

Irantracker.org, from the American Enterprise Institute, is keeping track of protests and other incidents of unrest following the presidential election in Iran with this interactive map:



They also have day-by-day statistics for numbers of protesters, arrests, and deaths. They claim a total, through Thursday, of 33 deaths, 661 arrests, and more than 1.3 million protesters. They also have a lot of information and analysis on the political situation in Iran.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who's done excellent work following events in Iran and who's obsession with the situation has been feeding my own.

Red Iran, Blue Iran (False Iran, True Iran?)

We now have some supposedly "official" provincial election numbers from Iran, courtesy of Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, which means we can finally map the 2009 election. It was indeed - officially - a landslide:



Nate got the results on which this map is based from a student name Daniel Berman. The results are translated from Farsi, and supposedly represent the very much-disputed official results (the results that found Ahmadinejad defeating Mousavi even in Mousavi's home base of Eastern Azerbaijan). Here are the results broken down by province, with minor candidates omitted (Nate has detailed vote numbers). Provinces officially won by Mousavi are in bold:

Ardebil: Ahmadinejad 51% - Mousavi 47%
Boushehr: A 61 - M 36
Chaharmahal/Bakhtiari: A 73 - M 22
Eastern Azerbaijan: A 57 - M 42
Fars: A 70 - M 28
Ghazvin: A 73 - M 26
Ghom: A 72 - M 25
Gilan: A 68 - M 31
Golestan: A 60 - M 38
Hamedan: A 76 - M 22
Hormozgan: A 66 - M 33
Ilam: A 65 - M 31
Isfahan: A 69 - M 29
Kerman: A 78 - M 21
Kermanshah: A 59 - M 39
Khouzestan: A 65 - M 27
Kohgilouye/Boyerahmad: A 69 - M 27
Kordestan: A 53 - M 44
Lorestan: A 71 - M 23
Markazi: A 74 - M 24
Mazandaran: A 68 - M 21
Northern Khorasan: A 74 - M 25
Razavi Khorasan: A 70 - M 28
Semnan: A 78 - M 20
Sistan/Balouchestan: A 46 - M 52
Southern Khorasan: A 75 - M 24
Tehran: A 52 - M 46
Western Azerbaijan: A 47 - M 50
Yazd: A 56 - M 42
Zanjan: A 77 - M 22

This page has an Iranian province reference map, if you're curious. And Nate actually has his own map which represents the vote share on a continuous scale:



So now that we have these numbers, can we conclude that the election was a fraud? Well, as I said the other day, things are still hazy at this point and it's not really the time for definitive conclusions; but there is an awful lot of fishiness... Nate looks at the provincial votes and compares it to that 2005 election I was talking about; and he, having an actual proficiency in math and stuff, is able to do some statistical analysis of the correlations between the two votes. Here's his plot of Ahmadinejad's performance in that 2005 election against his performance in the currently disputed election (each diamond represents a province):



Says Nate:

These correlations are fairly weak, especially for the latter graph. Certainly not the kind of thing that will dissuade anyone who believes the election was tainted.

But, there are some important differences between the two races; in the first round in 2005, you had five candidates who were fairly competitive -- two conservatives, two reformists, and one (Rafsanjani) who is probably best considered a centrist (by Iranian standards). This time, you had only two candidates who received a competitive number of votes. And, obviously, Iran is a complicated and ever-changing place, with votes that may shift along ethnic fault lines in addition to political ones.

But Nate also points to a couple of specific discrepancies. In particular, conservative candidates collectively received about 20% of the vote in Lorestan in 2005, but Ahmadinejad won 71% of the vote this time around. Also, as I noted in that previous post on the portents of the 2005 election, Karroubi got more than 55% of the vote in Lorestan in 2005 (as he is an ethnic Lur and it's his home province). But in this election, with Karroubi still on the ballot, he supposedly only won 5% of the vote there. Could his vote really have cratered by 90%? And could those voters have almost universally moved to Ahmadinejad, rather than Mousavi? It scarcely seems possible, and this strikes me as one of the fishiest numbers in a whole school of them.

UPDATE: More numerical weirdnesses - one town had a turnout of 141%.

Reading the Geographical Tea Leaves in Iran

Did the conservatives steal the election in Iran? We don't know yet, but there's been more than enough fishiness to warrant asking the question. One place to look for signs that the election was stolen would be the distribution of the vote. The powers that be haven't released results by province yet, but Electoral Geography 2.0 does have this map of the Iranian presidential election of 2005:



This shows the first round of voting - again, from 2005 - in which Ahmadinejad actually came in second with 20.3% of the vote before winning the runoff against Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani with more than 60%. In the first round Ahmadinejad won the provinces of Tehran, Qazvin, Qom, Markazi, Semnan, Esfahan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Yazd, and South Khorasan. His share of the vote varied widely; according to this table, his lowest showing was 5.6% in Sistan and Baluchestan, and his highest was 55.2% in Qom.

But apparently in this weekend's election, Ahmadinejad won rather consistently across the board. Juan Cole sees the apparently flat vote distribution as containing signs of fraud:

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not...

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

Indeed; see the map above. And some of these observations are confirmed by this BBC report, ehich says that "[t]he [vote] figures, if they are to be believed, show Mr Ahmadinejad winning strongly even in the heartland of Mr Mousavi."

Is that plausible? In the first round of 2005 voting, here is how each of candidates did in their home province, again according to this table (the home provinces are based on cursory Googlings of these candidates, so I may be wrong on a couple of them):

Ahmadinejad (Semnan province): 34.8%, first place
Karroubi (Lorestan): 55.5%, first place
Larijani (Qom): 2.3%, sixth place (though I'm not sure Qom should is really a "home"province for Larijani)
Mehralizadeh (East and West Azerbaijan; he is an ethnic Azerbaijani): 20.6% and 28.9%; first in both cases
Moin (Esfahan): 11.2%, t-fourth place
Qalibaf (Razavi Khorasan): 34.8%, first place
Rafsanjani (Kerman): 41.5%, first place

And here's how the candidates did overall:
Ahmadinejad: 20.3%
Karroubi: 18.0%
Larijani: 6.1%
Mehralizadeh: 4.6%
Moin: 14.5%
Qalibaf: 14.5%
Rafsanjani: 22.0%

The only candidates to not win their home or ethnic-base province were Moin and Larijani. Given this pattern, it would be shocking if Mousavi, a more-than-credible candidate, didn't win in his own base of support (which, like that of Mehralizadeh, is in the Azerbaijans). But apparently, according to the BBC, that is just what happened. What's more, Mousavi's broader demographic base of support is in the cities throughout Iran; so for Ahmadidinejad to have gotten 57% in Tabriz, which is one of Iran's largest cities and the capital of East Azerbaijan, as Cole reports has been reported, really seems impossible - it would be like McCain beating Obama in Chicago.

All right, all of this amounts to circumstantial evidence that something weird happened with these elections. But is it definitive? Well, again, this blog has stumbled into speculation that is a bit beyond my pay grade. Nonetheless, it's worth noting some of the things that have happened in the last few days: former President Rafsanjani has resigned from the Expediency Discernment Council and the Assembly of Experts in protest of the election results; Iranian authorities have asked foreign reporters to leave the country; Mousavi has written a letter to supporters in which he calls the election results "appalling" and "a dangerous plot"; the Election Commission is supposed to wait three days to certify the results, but they went ahead and did it right away; and, of course, there have been large and sometimes violent protests in cities across Iran. I'm no expert, but those don't strike me as the sorts of events you'd expect to see following a fairly decided election.