Over the past several years I've had frequent email conversations with old high school buddies who take this talking point (which is only now percolating into media awareness) as a given. What I find most striking is that these good ol' boys simultaneously hold several mutually exclusive sub-opinions:

1) The government in general (and the president in particular) has very little impact on the economy. The economy is moved by the invisible hand of the market; the only effect that a president can have is to slow down market growth by imposing taxes or regulations.

2) Republican presidents benefit the economy and Democratic presidents make it worse.

3) The fact that the economy has generally improved under Democratic presidents and declined or remained stagnant under Republican presidents since 1920 is irrelevant (see talking point 1).

4) The New Deal delayed our recovery from the Depression and prolonged our economic misery through burdensome regulation and public spending.

5) What finally ended the Depression, in spite of FDR's attempts to destroy the country and turn it into a Communist wasteland, was WWII.

What they can never explain to me is why the vast public spending on the military in WWII was beneficial, when vast public spending on the public infrastructure, welfare, and the arts in the New Deal was destructive. But, then, logic is not the point; the point is to invent a just-so story that will justify an absolutist opposition to government intervention of any type other than the military and police varieties.

Overcoming a procedural filibuster requires a supermajority of 60%. If there are 100 senators seated, that means 60 votes -- but if there are only 98 senators (i.e. until the Minnesota and NY seats are filled), only 59 votes will be needed. And if there are only 96 seated senators, it will take 58 votes.

This is an intriguing line of investigation, but from the cursory description in the press release (thanks to reader Alden for the source), it is not clear whether the researchers are aware of the rates of depopulation and the variation in those rates across the Americas, or of the ecological consequences of other human-induced changes occurring at the same time.

1) Rates. The demographic disaster of European colonization developed at different rates across the Americas. In the Caribbean (the first area colonized), the disaster was nearly complete: nearly (but not quite) 100% of the original population had died within 70 years of Columbus's first arrival. Similar disasters played out in some parts of the mainland (e.g. Nicaragua, where the population was almost entirely decimated by European slave raiders in the mid-1500s). But in the far larger population centers of Mexico/Guatemala and the Andes, depopulation was less complete and took place over a longer period of time.

In Mexico, the nadir occurred in the 1620s, more than a century after the conquest, and it left the region with roughly one tenth of its huge pre-conquest population. That is terrible, but it is worth pointing out that it was not necessarily experienced as a disaster by the people at the time. The reason is that, year by year, the population decline averaged out to something like 2% per year -- not much greater than what the ex-Soviet Union has experienced over the past twenty years. In fact, it wasn't until the twentieth century that historians looked back and pieced together what had happened.

In the Andes, the decline was even more subtle. The nadir was reached there in the 1700s, nearly 200 years after conquest, when the area held roughly 20% of its pre-conquest population. Again, that was a drastic reduction, but one that works out to an average annual decline of 1% or so. (There is good reason why the indigenous civilizations of these areas remains so vital in spite of the devastation.)

I suspect that the big question mark here is the Amazon. Recent archaeological work has hinted at possibly huge indigenous populations, perhaps even large cities, in the pre-conquest Amazon. It is still very unclear how large the Amazonian population may have been or when (and why) it declined; it is possible (no one knows) that the decline may have occurred prior to the European invasion. It certainly happened many years, even centuries, before European / Euroamerican occupation of the Amazon, which is still underway only now, 500+ years later.

2) Other ecological "events." One of the major impacts of European colonization on the Americas was the introduction of Eurasian livestock, especially sheep, goats, horses, and cows. If you're looking for another book to read and ponder, check out A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico by Elinor Melville, which describes how the introduction of sheep in central Mexico (and the lack of any kind of fences to keep them penned in) led, within less than a century, to the desertification of vast tracts of land north of the capital. Similarly, sheep and cattle bred into flocks and herds number in the millions by the 1600s and spread, slowly but inexorably, north from central Mexico into the north and eventually into areas that are now part of the US. The same thing happened in South America, notably in the Llanos of Colombia/Venezuela and the Pampas of Bolivia/Paraguay/Argentina. A common result in all these areas was the destruction of forests and the reduction of prairies to marginal arid land.

...heck is going on in the letters section? Invasion of the Troll People? I wouldn't call this Ruben Bolling's best cartoon ever (that's an awfully high standard), but I don't see what it is about this one in particular that has brought every snarky freeper crawling out from under their rocks.

Just sayin'.

BTW, welcome back bebop-o!

Thanks, I needed that laugh!