In my “Resolutions for 2011,” #11 was “I shall make a 11th resolution before April 30th, 2011.” I now have one (aside from changing “before” to “by” next time around, since that’s what I intended).

In a recent chat about times long past, I mentioned that my second-least favorite part of my high school art classes was the teacher I had from eighth through twelfth grade. She was a nice lady, but she was a loon. By the end of my junior year, I’d had enough of her and registered for Creative Writing instead of her art class. At senior orientation, she told me that “they” had put me in the wrong class by mistake, so she got me switched “back” into AP Portfolio. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t a mistake, and suffered another year.

I then mentioned that my least favorite part of those classes was ruining a pencil sketch by painting over it. Granted, painting over the sketch was the point of most assignments, but I could never get those sketches back. We didn’t have a copier in the room, we didn’t have any pantographs lying around (though in the art room, there could’ve been a hundred of them and we might never have found them), and cameras were still several years away from being everywhere.

Sketching was the most funnest part of my art classes. That in mind, I hereby resolve that:

11. I shall make a pencil sketch at least once a week.

I’m off to buy a sketch book and some art pencils.

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Here’s an article about a tax reform proposal called the Purple Tax Plan, purple because it’ll appeal to both blue and red states. Regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of the plan itself, the article is a reminder of the importance of tax simplification. If tax collection is less confusing, we’ll be better able to think about who pays how much, about whether taxes are too high or low, and whether we’re getting a good product for the price we pay.

I just noticed that the comments were closed on all but the most recent post. That’ll happen from time to time for reasons unknown. Maybe there’s a bug in the system. Maybe I clicked a button behind the curtain and inadvertently deactivated the comments. So let me say the following regarding comments:

1. I don’t want anyone to have to sign up or sign in or leave an e-mail address in order to comment on my stuff. Anyone (aside from spammers) should be able to comment on any post if they so desire. If comments are turned off, please let me know.

2. If you comment on a post and it doesn’t appear right away, try not to panic. As long as the software doesn’t think you’re a spammer, your comment goes into a queue. I have to approve the comment before it shows up on this website. I will never reject a comment unless specifically asked to by the author (e.g., somebody misspells something and is mortified by his or her error, and begs me to delete the mistaken comment). I will edit and have edited comments to protect identities, national security, and the moral character of the people of this good Earth.

It was confirmed this week that not only does the iPhone track your location, not only does it transmit that data to whatever computer it syncs with, but Apple has been gathering that data. Pete Warden developed an open-source application that lets you look at that data yourself. It didn’t work on my MacBook, so I had to use a version that worked on a 32-bit Mac.

I of course am shocked and appalled, but not enough to keep me from showing the map of where I’ve been since last July 7th (and probably not enough to keep me from buying another iPhone):

The tracking is not entirely precise. It keeps track of cell towers and WiFi networks that your phone connected to, however briefly. For instance, during the time period in question, I didn’t go to Rockford or Belvedere (IL), or Wisconsin, or Alabama, or Asheville or Hendersonville (NC), or Columbia or Myrtle Beach or Charleston (SC). I don’t think I was in Roanoke, but that may have been part of a trip to Central Virginny, I’ll have to look up exactly when I was there. I was maybe 50 miles away from some of those locations. I didn’t know cell signals could go that far, but there you go.

I looked at the data for this past Wednesday, the day I first downloaded the tracker. It was more than a little bit off. I was in two, maybe three locations that day: my house, school, and I might have stopped at Dad’s house after work. However, my cell signal was detected near the intersection of Hodges and Beach, in Ortega, on Townsend, on Heckscher, south of Green Cove Springs, south of Middleburg on Blanding, up in Cary (which is a few miles northwest of the 10 o’clock position of 295), at two locations in St. Augustine, in Gainesville, and at an airport near Lake City. That’s a scattershot list of locations, ranging from a few miles away to two hours away. Big Brother better go back to the drawing board.

An article in the April 19th online edition of the Daily Mail asks: “Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens?”

Apparently the CIA has just released a memo showing that just ten days before his assassination, President Kennedy demanded access to confidential files regarding UFOs. This has understandably led to conjecture that he was assassinated by Mysterious Organization X in order to prevent him from learning the terrible secret of space.

Let’s simplify this conspiracy as much as possible. Mysterious Organization X arranged for Lee Harvey Oswald (or whichever “true assassin” you prefer) to shoot the President, and presumably covered it up by paying a mob-connected nightclub owner to kill Oswald.

Fun idea, but real life has to be a different story. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply say, “What memo?”, stonewall the matter and spare yourself some effort? Never mind stonewalling, wouldn’t it be easier to burn the memo and claim no knowledge of it? I imagine you’d risk less trouble by destroying a few documents that most of the government doesn’t know about anyways than by assassinating the Leader of the Free World.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time an agency went about achieving something in a convoluted way. Maybe MOX operatives are hourly.

From JCC:

[Today is] the 150th Anniversary of the start of the ACW, War Between the States, War of Northern Aggression, War for Southern Independence, War of the Rebellion, or whatever name you choose to call it. I’m curious to see a post on the impact it has had on American culture/society today. I realize that this could be a lengthy post, so it doesn’t need to be a dissertation by any means. Just the opinions of a man born in the North and who attended college in the state that started it all. Political polarization suggests the country is still divided as badly today as it was in 1860, and I’m curious to read your thoughts about it.

Not only did I attend college in the state that started it all (that would be South Carolina, folks), I lived in Manassas, Virginia for five years and played soccer on fields very close to Bull Run. Allow me to make the following two points before responding to your request:

1. I’d like to believe that slavery would have ended without a war, without losing a million lives, without the huge price tag, and without diverting so many resources from productive use to military use. I’d like to believe that enough people would have had enough moral courage to abolish it, or, barring that, that enough people would have seen its economic inefficiency to abandon it.

2. I think an obvious-in-retrospect-deal could have prevented the war, if someone had thought of it and fought for it early enough: a constitutional amendment banning slavery and abolishing tariffs. I don’t know that either North or South would have favored it, but it would have fixed the two biggest problems of the era.

Now, the impact on our society today? You can read about that in all kinds of books, journals, and websites, by scholars more scholarly than I am. Here’s the super-short, anecdotal version of something I’ve noticed: the war made Northerners overly condescending and Southerners overly defensive.

Northerners don’t think about the war as often as Southerners do. That makes sense; losing stings more than winning soothes, and the war was fought almost entirely on Southern soil. But I think Northerners, when they do think about the war, are overly condescending towards the South. Don’t get the wrong idea; the South was clearly and by far the more wrong of the two sides in the war. But what many Northerners who bash the South forget is that northern ports brought in a lot of slaves until 1808, and thereafter northern mills spun a lot of slave-picked cotton into textiles, and northern clippers moved a lot of cotton and textiles overseas. Northern hands weren’t exactly clean. Furthermore, for most Northerners, their knowledge of the narrative ends at Appomattox and Ford’s Theater. They forget that when Reconstruction ended, the North abandoned the former slaves and left them in the hands of Jim Crow for the next 90 years. Furtherfurthermore, when southern blacks began moving northwards to find industrial work, Northern whites didn’t exactly welcome them with open arms. There’s a reason there were far more “sundown towns” up North than down South.

I think the war made Southerners overly defensive, almost absurdly defensive at times. I’ve lived in the South most of my life–in Manassas, Jacksonville, and Clemson– and discussed the war many-a-time with many-a-person. I’ve never encountered anyone down here–not even in the red-neckiest, plantationest, stars-and-bars-wavingest, General Forrest-lovingest, deepest-southiest, sweet-tea-drinkingest corner of Dixie you can imagine– who said slavery was good, or that they were proud of it. I’m sure some Klansmen out there believe it, but I haven’t met them and have no plans to do so. The South is ashamed of slavery; deeply so, I think. But instead of letting it go at that– acknowledging slavery was evil, that it did far more harm than good, wishing it had never happened– too many Southerners then try to downplay slavery as a cause of the war. Sure, other factors were important, such as the tariff, Lincoln’s election, the states’ rights argument (which, incidentally, the North could make as well; some Northern states tried to nullify the fugitive slave law), but none of those factors were nearly as important as slavery– and Southern governments would have told you that at the time. When folks downplay slavery as a factor of the war, well… the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

All that said, I am unconvinced that racism is worse down South than it is up North. Racial tension today isn’t necessarily worse in one part of the country than another, it’s just different. A recent study showed that of the ten most racially segregated metro areas in America, a whopping none of them are in Dixie. I’m not surprised.

With a little luck, in another 150 years, our descendants might have as little emotional investment in the Civil War as we currently have in, say, Queen Anne’s War. But I doubt it.

Argument begins in the comment box below. Keep it… civil.

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(I apologize for the David Caruso-esque closing to the previous segment, but circumstances demanded it.)

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I almost forgot to address JCC’s claim that “Political polarization suggests the country is still divided as badly today as it was in 1860.” Here goes:

No. Not even close. We’re not even as badly divided as we were in 2000, or 1968, or 1912… Ask me again in 2012. No battle in today’s political arena is even remotely as divisive as slavery was back then. I think it serves the interests of political parties (i.e., cash contributions and votes) and political commentators (i.e., ratings and ad revenues) to have people believe it, but we just aren’t that divided.