The Consequence of Matters

On this day in 1974, the first Universal Product Code was scanned at a supermarket cash register. The UPC bar code system was originally invented specifically for grocery stores, to speed check-out and help them keep better track of their inventory, but it proved so successful that it spread quickly to other retailers. The first patent for a bar code went to N. Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1952. Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology, overheard the president of the local food chain, Food Fair, asking one of the deans to research a system to automatically read product information during checkout. He told his friend Woodland and they began work on the idea. The first system used ultraviolet ink, which was expensive and faded quickly. Convinced that the system was workable with further development, Woodland left Drexel, moved into his father's apartment in Florida, and continued working on the system. His next inspiration came from Morse code, and he...

You don't consume coffee. You just borrow it in the morning. Then you spend the rest of the day giving it back to the world.

On this day in 1215, King John of England placed his seal on the Magna Carta. He wasn't the first English king to grant a charter, but he was the first to have it forced on him by his barons. John had two problems. One was that he was trying to defend what was left of the Angevin Empire, the land in France that had been the possession of William the Conqueror when he became conqueror, and Eleanor of Aquitane when she became queen. The Empire had always been in an iffy no man's land, though it had been holding on since William reasonably well. The central problem in the Empire was that William had been a vassal of France when he was just William of Normandy. So had Eleanor. So William and his successors were trying to maintain the position that they were vassals of France when they were in France, but kings fully equal to the French king when they were not. The French had been on a long campaign to restore logic and order to the world by kicking the English out. That's w...

Today is Bloomsday, a day to celebrate James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, whose action takes place on June 16th, 1904. It’s called Bloomsday because the main character in the book is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad salesman who lives on the north side of Dublin. Bloom is introduced in the fourth chapter of Ulysses; he eats breakfast and serves his wife breakfast in bed. Bloom doesn’t have much work to do on June 16th, so he spends most of his day wandering around Dublin doing errands. In the morning, he leaves his house on 7 Eccles Street, walks south across the River Liffey, picks up a letter, buys a bar of soap, and goes to the funeral of a man he didn’t know very well. In the afternoon, he eats a cheese sandwich, feeds some gulls in the Liffey, helps a blind man cross the street, and visits a couple of pubs. He thinks about his job, his wife, his daughter, his stillborn son; he muses about life and death and reincarnation. He knows that his wife is planning to cheat on him that afternoon a...

On this day in 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte met his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, in Belgium. Napoleon had been defeated previously by the Sixth Coalition and exiled to the island of Elba. But the allowance guaranteed to him by the Treaty of Fontainebleau was cut off and rumors circulated that he was to be transferred to a remote island in the Atlantic. Napoleon escaped from Elba and thus began the Hundred Days, as he tried to regain power in France. By the start of June 1815 the armed forces available to him had reached 200,000, and he decided to go on the offensive to attempt to drive a wedge between the oncoming British and Prussian armies. The French Army of the North crossed the frontier into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, in modern-day Belgium Napoleon and Michael Ney led the French army of around 69,000 troops against the Duke of Wellington who commanded 67,000 multinational — British, Dutch, Belgian, and German — troops, and the added forces of Gebhard von...

It was on this day in 1964 that the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act after a long battle in the Senate, on the 99th anniversary of the final end of slavery. It was this piece of legislation that made illegal all segregation on the basis of race in the United States. The text of the law was extremely specific, listing all the places of public accommodation where segregation was forbidden, including any inn, hotel, motel, restaurant, cafeteria, lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, gasoline station, motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium or other place of exhibition or entertainment. The bill began in the Kennedy administration in his Report to the American People on Civil Rights on June 11, 1963. Kennedy sought legislation "giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments"—as well as "greater protection for the...

Oh for Christ's sake! Republicans found a way to have an economic stimulus and STILL screw people over. The bill that the White House and Senate Republicans negotiated with themselves is not, as it has been billed, a direct cash payment. It is an early refund on next year's taxes, size to be determined by what you got on your 2018 taxes. This means it is tilted toward the people who need it least -- the wealthy, defined as "those who paid the largest number of dollars in taxes." This will go up to $1200 per adult and $500 for each of their children. Those with little to no tax liability (i.e. the poor) will receive $600 because hey! If you don't pay taxes you clearly don't need money.If their total earnings are less than $2500, they get nothing. If they did not file a return (which you are not required to do if you earned less than the standard deduction, about $12,000 for individuals and about 24,000 for married) also will get nothing. And if your ...

On this day in 1904, my favorite author of all time was born: Dr. Seuss. He's the author of more than 60 children's books, including Horton Hears a Who! (1954), One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (1960), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), Hop on Pop (1963), Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! (1975), The Butter Battle Book(1984), and of course, The Cat in the Hat (1957). He was the grandson of German immigrants, a Dartmouth graduate, and an Oxford dropout. His mom was 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, a competitive platform high diver who read him bedtime stories every night. His dad inherited a brewery from his own German immigrant father a month before Prohibition began in the U.S., and eventually became a zookeeper who brought young Theodor with him to work. The future Dr. Seuss grew up around the zoo, running around in the cages with baby lions and baby tigers. At Dartmouth, he majored in English and wrote for the campus humor magazine. But one night he was caught drinking gin w...

Photo ID laws, as noxious as they are, have minimal effect on elections. Most people who lack photo IDs aren't likely to vote in the first place, and such laws were passed only in safe Republican states. Pushing hard for things like this is a mark of the Republican Party's desperation. When Barack Obama was elected, I was teaching at Spelman College. I told my students I never thought I'd live to see this day. I grew up in the last dying vestiges of Jim Crow. Segregation was not legal any more, but I never had a non-white class mate at school until I was a freshman in college in 1977. I thought we had finally turned a corner. The thing is Republicans didn't have a lot of options. Demographic changes have been reducing the white share of the electorate by a point or two every election cycle, and the Jim Crow generation is finally reaching EOL. Republicans recognized this too. After Obama was elected, they conducted a post mortem that concluded: "In 1980, ex...

If you're wondering why Moscow Mitch wants to let states go bankrupt, his comment about pensions is a tell. Republicans hate unions and they hate public sector unions most of all. A good way to seriously damage unions is to destroy their pensions, but you can't. Those are part of negotiated contracts. Ah! But if you're in bankruptcy restructuring, you are allowed to set aside union contracts. McConnell is using a pandemic to crush public sector unions. Throw that log on the pile of reasons to think of him as a total scumbucket

A few years ago, I was given a Teacher of the Year award at Spelman College. Two years later, they slung me out for being a bad teacher. That's a problem with Spelman in that it values appearance over substance. In fact, currently it values substance not at all. But it gave me the opportunity, at 55 years old, to explore the job market. I thought my future would be in high school at that point since they are always crying about the inability to find qualified hires. That turned out, in fact, to be by far the hardest interview to get as schools are not interested in paying the premium for people whose educations demonstrate actual knowledge of their subject. I did get a few college interviews, at places from from UC San Diego to Harvard, one of which mercifully turned into a job offer. But while I was making the rounds, I argued to every institution I spoke with that if what you propose to do going forward into the future is to make people travel a great distance and set up ho...