For some time now, I’ve been extremely interested creating something of an encyclopedia documenting all instances of the United States’ imperial adventures. Specifically, I’ve been interested in countries in which the U.S. either overthrew a democratically-elected government, or countries in which the U.S. helped to keep an existing brutal dictatorship in power despite democratic opposition.
That the U.S. regularly overthrows democratically-elected governments should come as no real surprise to most people who are literate and somewhat familiar at all with global history. However, in all my searching, I have never found a single exhaustive source which compiled all instances of U.S. imperialism along with proper academic citations for future reference, so I have taken it upon myself to try to get together such an admittedly ambitious collection of information.
So far, my highly incomplete tally has resulted in the creation of this map:
The problem is two-fold:
#1) I would like to create a ‘clickable map’ so that readers can click on each highlighted country and be brought to a page detailing important dates, information, credible academic sources and possibly even direct quotes and page numbers.
The problem here is that I have little to no experience with html code and am unable to find good programs to generate such a ‘clickable map’ of the data on the American Empire.
#2) This project would obviously be much richer if it were structured as a “wiki” for all like-minded people with an interest in this subject to be able to contribute.
Now the problem here is that I’m not sure of the best way of going about accomplishing this task. I’m considering switching this blog out of wordpress.com so that I can host it myself, but does anybody here know anything about ‘wiki’ software and hosting said software on a wordpress.org blog?
Can any kind soul help me with these problems?
Tories tank in the East, NDP hits 1 year high nationally
Published 31 July, 2007 Atlantic Canada , Canadian Politics , Canadian Politics (domestic) , Conservative Party , current events , Dion , Elections , Elizabeth May , Green Party , Harper , Layton , Liberal Party , NDP , New Brunswick , Newfoundland , news , News, Commentary & Op/Ed , Nova Scotia , politics , Polls , Progressive , socialist realism 6 CommentsUsing the highly accurate technique used in the polling industry known as the ‘rolling average’ (the concept of which is familiar to anybody who’s visited the Paulitics Polling Resource), it is obvious that the Conservatives are in trouble in Atlantic Canada.
Now, before I show you the actual graph of rolling averages for every poll conducted in Atlantic Canada in the past six months, do keep in mind that the technique of rolling averages, by definition, makes huge swings in popular support less marked. Thus, both spikes and drops in support tend to be flattened and appear less dramatic.
So, with that, let’s look at the rolling averages for Atlantic Canada courtesy of the Paulitics Provincial/Regional Polling Resource.
So, on the 28th of March of this year, the Conservatives were at roughly 37% in support in Atlantic Canada, which was an improvement over their 34.7% showing in the last federal election. However, since then, the Conservatives have dropped 12.4% — not in an individual poll, but in the rolling average of polls.
Put another way: Take 3 Atlantic Canadians who voted Tory in the last election. Now take one of them away and dress him in either NDP orange or Green and what’s left is how many Atlantic Canadians polls suggest would vote Tory in the next election.
Moreover, at the national level, we see declining support for both the Liberals and the Conservatives as demonstrated here (in fact the combined Liberal & Conservative parties’ rolling average has never, in the past 12 months of rolling averages, been lower than it currently is: 62.4%).
So take these two phenomena together and we have very bad news for the two mainstream, uber-capitalist parties; very good news for the three smaller, less capitalistic parties; and even worse news for Peter MacKay.
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