This Week I Learned: Algae, Voting, Parties, Courts
This week includes a random fact about the environment that blew my mind. One tidbit about an election that happened almost 70 years ago that’s hard to imagine ever happening today. But then we get a little more topical about two pieces that relate to the current, and necessary, focus on racial disparities and relations in the United States.
Oxygen Producing Super Algae
At least I know I’m not alone in previously thinking trees and forests were the primary producer of oxygen on the planet. But nope. It’s actually Marine Phytoplankton that produces between 70–90% of the earth’s oxygen, depending on the source. The upper-limit number coming from the book Ketotarian by Dr. Will Cole.
While the difference is actually pretty large when you think about it, the real takeaway here is that this ocean floating algae is incredibly important, and yet I don’t hear people talking about it nearly enough. Yes, we absolutely need to be protecting the rain forests for many, many reasons, oxygen being one of them. But it’s important to know that the increasing pollution in our oceans is also affecting the earth’s greatest oxygen producer.
The Real Meaning of Court Rulings
It seems that whenever a high-profile case reaches the Supreme Court we look on to see what the new law is going to be. We cheer when it’s a ruling we agree with, and groan when the justices vote the opposite way. But what’s important to keep in mind is that court rulings don’t *necessarily* mean changes to the law. It simply means there’s precedence when a similar case comes up in the future.
After Brown v Board of Education was ruled on in 1954, ordering schools to desegregate, it took more than a decade for many schools in the South to actually begin the practice. According to The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, segregation continued unabated in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. In the South as a whole, only 1% of Black students attended the same school as Whites.
While court rulings are still important, I learned they don’t always create the immediate change I’d thought.
Two Parties, One Presidential Candidate
Today the Democratic and Republican parties are complete opposites, depending how you look at them. On the surface, they seem to hold opposing views on 90% of the issues. One supports a woman’s right to choose and the other opposes it. One hates giving any anything for “free” while the other supports social services and programs for those who need them. Now, I’d argue they are actually more similar than we think, but that’s actually a much longer article.
The point I’m getting at, is that in both 1948 and 1952, both parties approached Dwight D. Eisenhower to be their nominated candidate for president. They both wanted the same person to lead their party, something that simply wouldn’t happen today. The more I learn about the two-party system in the book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop by Lee Drutman the most interested I am in learning about early politics, and also the politics of other countries.
Back to Eisenhower though, he declined both party offers in 1948, said yes to the Republicans in 1952, and went on to serve two terms as a Republican president.
Who Exactly is Grandfathered In
The term “Grandfathered In” is rather common. Often used in a formal sense as a set rule that once you are eligible for something, or because you previously were, you are always eligible for it. Your power plant produces X amount of emissions, well yes we’re passing a new law about pollution, but we’d hate to make you spend money to be more green and protect our planet. So your plant is grandfathered in and doesn’t have to make any changes after this new law is passed.
Well, the history of the grandfather clause traces back to voting and the 15th Amendment (can vote regardless of skin color). When states ratified the amendment and expanded voting rights, they decided they didn’t actually want to do that. So in 1870 they added barriers to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests, but realized those would also keep White people from voting, which they didn’t want to do.
So they added the grandfather clause which said if you were eligible to vote before these poll taxes/literacy tests were implemented, or even if your descendants (father/grandfather) were eligible to vote, then so are you. This of course didn’t help Black people since they were just gaining the right to vote, and instead disproportionately helped White people. Which seems to be a common thread in American history.
