Category Archives: Landmark

An Economist Answers Some of My Questions About "Capital in the 21st Century"

by BoydWooreycu Posted on April 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday I posted a couple of very rudimentary comments regarding Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster new book, Capital in the 21st Century. I had questions about Piketty’s estimates of r (return on capital) and g (economic growth) in the past and—much more importantly—how they were likely to play out in the future. But all I had were amateur musings because I am, after all, only an amateur.

However, yesterday Brad DeLong tackled some of the questions I asked in a far more rigorous and disciplined way, teasing out a lot of unstated implications along the way—including the importance of various measures of r and how they relate to the probability of increasing future wealth concentration in the real world. It’s a long post, and complex in places, but highly recommended. If you’re willing to work your way through it, DeLong provides a framework for thinking about Piketty’s model that helps you start to make sense of both the book and its conclusions.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve gotten a couple of questions about why I seem unduly skeptical, or even harsh, about Piketty’s book. It’s obviously a landmark work, I don’t really mean to be unfair. But it’s a book with innovative and untested ideas that has obvious appeal to anyone left of center, and I think this is precisely the time to avoid unquestioning hosannas. Affinity bias makes us all sympathetic to Piketty’s arguments, and that’s why we should instead question it carefully and thoroughly.

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An Economist Answers Some of My Questions About "Capital in the 21st Century"

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IKEA makes big investment in wind energy (some assembly required)

by KaleyMaxey Posted on April 12, 2014

WINDË Power

IKEA makes big investment in wind energy (some assembly required)

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ShutterstockLet’s hope that couch holds up in a stiff breeze.

IKEA — though not exactly a friend to forests, and way too fond of dubious meatballs for our taste — still wins greenie points for having a Scandinavian way with alternative energy. Ninety percent of its massive warehouse stores will soon host rooftop solar panels, including sunny south Florida’s largest solar array, and Brits will be able to buy solar panels in U.K. stores starting this summer. On Thursday, the company one-upped its own clean cred by announcing its investment in a giant wind farm in Illinois.

Hoopeston Wind is the most recent in a series of wind investments by IKEA, including several farms in Canada, where the furniture behemoth is the largest retail wind investor. The Illinois farm will produce 98 megawatts of electricity when it comes online in 2015, or enough to power 34,000 Expedit-enhanced homes. That’s more than twice the electricity that all of IKEA’s U.S. operations consume, and about 18 percent of the company’s global consumption. All of those megawatts will be sold locally, and IKEA will count them toward its overall renewable energy goal: to be totally carbon-free by 2020.

When it comes to putting up wind power, IKEA is actually lagging. (Maybe they were struggling to read the instructions?) The American Wind Energy Association credits Walmart, of all companies, with kicking off the airy trend when it started buying a lot of energy from a Texas wind farm in 2008. Microsoft and Facebook both made flashy commitments to wind energy last year, while Google has been steadily ratcheting up its wind game for years.

This wind rush could be about, yes, corporate responsibility and a commitment to a more sustainable world. It’s also about the bottom line. Volatile fuel prices are driving smart companies to make long-term investments in more reliable power — and we’re OK with that, as long as they fix those wasteful bookcases, too.

Right now, IKEA’s new farm is saddled with the very Midwestern name Hoopeston Wind, but the company already stole our punchline about rebranding it:

“We haven’t figured out if it will say ‘IKEA’ on the blades,’’ [Rob Olson, chief financial officer of IKEA U.S.,] said. “Or maybe we’ll use the iconic names for our products on the wind turbines? We’re not sure.’’

WINDË coming soon to a utility near you.


Source
IKEA investing in Illinois wind farm, Chicago Tribune
IKEA Buys Illinois Wind Farm in Global Renewables Push, Bloomberg

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

by LesliJZAuqcp Posted on April 12, 2014

Walmarts and all

Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

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Walmart

Out on the mean streets of the U.S. organic foods industry, Walmart has stepped onto the corner with both guns drawn. On Thursday, the superstore behemoth announced its plan to partner with Wild Oats (which you may recognize as a former subsidiary of Whole Foods) to offer a line of organic goods at unprecedentedly low prices in 2,000 of its U.S. stores. To start, the line will offer primarily canned goods and other pantry staples that will cost up to 25 percent less than those of other organic brands.

At first blush, this appears to be great news. Cheaper, more accessible organic food – isn’t that one of the prerequisites for the kind of healthy food system we’ve all been waiting for? The New York Times notes that Walmart’s big move could ultimately create a larger supply of organic goods, pushing down organic prices in the long run.

From The New York Times:

“We’re removing the premium associated with organic groceries,” said Jack L. Sinclair, executive vice president of Walmart U.S.’s grocery division. The Wild Oats organic products will be priced the same as similar nonorganic brand-name goods.

If that sounds suspicious to anyone familiar with organic growing practices, it should. For those not as well-versed, we’re here to help! We spoke with Coach Mark Smallwood, executive director of The Rodale Institute in Kutztown, Penn., about how Walmart could manage to offer such low prices, and what that might mean for organic farmers across the country.

Smallwood explains that the concept of a “premium” associated with organic food is misleading, because the price of an organic good reflects the true cost of its production.

“The issue is that there aren’t the subsidies available to organic farmers that there are [for conventional farmers.] So there’s a question in my mind about how Walmart is going to pull this off and be able to make profit,” Smallwood said. “And for them to even come out and make that statement before they’ve started is a huge question mark. Somebody’s going to have to pay, and my hope is that it’s not the organic farmer.”

Smallwood also shared his concern that if Walmart were to incentivize large-scale organic production, industrial organic practices would become more widespread. In this model, farmers adhere to just the bare minimum of organic standards and ultimately end up depleting soil health on a piece of land, abandoning it, and moving on to another.

“Will a large agricultural operation come in and buy up tens of small family farms and put them all under one name, and then create that slash-and-burn model?” Smallwood said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s the [possible] downside.”

For the optimists in all of us, let us remember that it’s too soon to know exactly which approach Walmart will take. As Smallwood says: “The potential is there for [organic farmers] to be treated very well, and paid handsomely for the wonderful artisan stewardship of the planet. What is that worth to Walmart? We’re going to find out.”

We reached out to Walmart specifically to ask if the company was planning to source from small-scale farmers, and where its farmers would be located geographically. This was their response via email:

Regarding your questions, we are working with our suppliers to create a surety of demand which ultimately helps us pass along savings to our customers. We’re using our scale to deliver quality, organic groceries to our customers for less. When we do this, it’s a win, win, win situation for our customers, our suppliers and our company. Our customers can trust that they will save money at Walmart, our suppliers can count on us for the demand and we are able to offer innovative new products.

Hey — we didn’t say it was a good response. Since it provides exactly none of the specifics that we sought out, we’ll just have to wait and see, and hope for the best.


Source
Walmart to Sell Organic Food, Undercutting Big Brands, The New York Times

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.

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Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

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El Niño could raise meteorological hell this year

by JacquelLiddell Posted on April 11, 2014

El Niño could raise meteorological hell this year

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It’s more likely than not that El Niño will rise from the Pacific Ocean this year — and some scientists are warning that it could grow into a bona fide monster.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center put out a bulletin Thursday saying there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that El Niño will develop later this year. Australian government meteorologists are even more confident — they said earlier this week that there’s a greater than 70 percent chance that El Niño will develop this summer.

Not totally clear on what this El Niño thing even is? Andrew Freedman explains at Mashable:

El Niño and La Niña events refer to fluctuations in air and ocean conditions in the tropical Pacific. El Niño events are characterized by warmer than average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, and they add heat to the atmosphere, thereby warming global average temperatures. They typically occur once every three to seven years and can also alter weather patterns around the world, causing droughts and floods from the West Coast of the U.S. to Papua New Guinea.

There was a particularly brutal El Niño from 1997 to 1998, which killed an estimated 23,000 people and caused tens of billions of dollars worth of damage. The looming El Niño could match the intensity of that outburst. More from Mashable:

Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center in Miami, said conditions are changing rapidly in the Pacific, going from 50/50 odds of an El Niño, to a setup that eerily resembles the circumstances that preceded the monster El Niño of ‘97-’98.

“It’s something we haven’t really seen since the ’97 El Niño,” Blake said of the westerly wind bursts and ocean observations.

El Niño events aren’t our fault — they’re just a fact of life on planet Earth, caused by inherent instability in Pacific Ocean weather patterns. But we may be making things worse for ourselves. Scientists reported in July that El Niño is arriving more frequently now than had been the case before we started heavily polluting the skies with greenhouse gases. And in January, a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change forecast that more El Niños will be of the extreme variety as we continue to warm the globe.


Source
ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Watch, NOAA
Unusually Intense El Nino May Lie Ahead, Scientists Say, Mashable

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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El Niño could raise meteorological hell this year

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Weather-related blackouts in U.S. doubled in 10 years

by wqds234der Posted on April 11, 2014

Weather-related blackouts in U.S. doubled in 10 years

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Shutterstock

The current U.S. electrical grid is a far cry from smart. Climate change and aging infrastructure are leading to an increasing number of blackouts across the country.

A new analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central found that the number of outages affecting 50,000 or more people for at least an hour doubled during the decade up to 2012.  Most of the blackouts were triggered when extreme weather damaged large transmission lines and substations. Michigan had the most outages, followed by Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

Severe rainstorms, which are growing more tempestuous as the globe warms, were blamed for the majority of the weather-related outages.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

The researchers listed two main drivers of the trend:

Climate change is, at most, partially responsible for this recent increase in major power outages, which is a product of an aging grid serving greater electricity demand, and an increase in storms and extreme weather events that damage this system. But a warming planet provides more fuel for increasingly intense and violent storms, heat waves, and wildfires, which in turn will continue to strain, and too often breach, our highly vulnerable electrical infrastructure. …

Since 1990, heavy downpours and flooding have increased in most parts of the country, and the trend is most dramatic in the Northeast and Midwest. Some of this heavy rain is likely to be associated with high winds and thunderstorm activity. Researchers have found that these regions have already seen a 30 percent increase in heavy downpours compared to the 1901-1960 average.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

Solutions to the problem include more small wind and solar power installations built close to where the electricity is needed — and an overhaul of the country’s overburdened and outmoded grid system.

This research won’t come as a surprise inside the White House. The Obama administration put out a call for more spending on grid infrastructure last year when it published similar findings in its own report.


Source
Weather-Related Blackouts Doubled Since 2003: Report, Climate Central

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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GMO labeling would be outlawed by new bill in Congress

by EsmeraldaYarnol Posted on April 11, 2014

GMO labeling would be outlawed by new bill in Congress

By

mikescottnz

State-led efforts to mandate GMO labels are blossoming like a field of organic tulips, but members of Congress are trying to mow them down with legislative herbicide.

Maine and Connecticut recently passed laws that will require foods containing GMO ingredients to be clearly marked as such — after enough other states follow suit. And lawmakers in other states are considering doing the same thing. The trend makes large food producers nervous — nervous enough to spend millions defeating ballot initiatives in California and Washington that also would have mandated such labels. They worry that the labels might scare people off, eating into companies’ sales and profits.

So a band of corporate-friendly members of Congress has come riding in to try to save the day for their donors. A bipartisan group led by Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) has signed onto legislation introduced Wednesday that would run roughshod over states’ rules on GMO labels. Reuters reports:

The bill, dubbed the “Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act,” was drafted by U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo from Kansas, and is aimed at overriding bills in roughly two dozen states that would require foods made with genetically engineered crops to be labeled as such.

The bill specifically prohibits any mandatory labeling of foods developed using bioengineering.

Large business groups cheered the legislation, which could receive its first hearings in the summer. “The GMO labeling ballot initiatives and legislative efforts that many state lawmakers and voters are facing are geared toward making people wrongly fear what they’re eating and feeding their children,” said the American Farm Bureau Federation’s president.

But groups that believe Americans have a right to know what they’re eating and which farming technologies they’re supporting are of course opposed, characterizing the bill as a desperate salvo by Big Food in the face of overwhelming support for GMO labels. The opponents have dubbed the bill the Deny Americans the Right to Know Act.

“If the DARK Act becomes law, a veil of secrecy will cloak ingredients, leaving consumers with no way to know what’s in their food,” said the Environmental Working Group’s Scott Faber. “Consumers in 64 countries, including Saudi Arabia and China, have the right to know if their food contains GMOs. Why shouldn’t Americans have the same right?”

Whatever you choose to call it, the bill is unlikely to have success beyond the GOP-controlled House.


Source
U.S. bill seeks to block mandatory GMO food labeling by states, Reuters
GMO labeling bill would trump states, Politico

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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GMO labeling would be outlawed by new bill in Congress

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Climate change just reshaped America’s wildfire strategy

by FlorineCastanon Posted on April 10, 2014

Climate change just reshaped America’s wildfire strategy

By

EricF2000

Like a tree in a greenhouse, America’s forest fire problem is growing ominously. Rising temperatures and declining rain and snowfall are parching fire-prone areas and juicing conflagrations. On Thursday, following years of meetings and scientific reviews, the Obama administration published a 101-page strategy that aims to help meet the country’s shifting fire threats.

The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy divides the nation according to fire risks, and profiles the communities that face those risks. “No one-size-fits-all approach exists to address the challenges facing the Nation,” the strategy states.

Despite covering 70,000 communities and 46 million homes, the strategy can be boiled down to guidelines that aim to do three main things: restore and maintain landscapes that are resilient to fire; brace communities and infrastructure for occasional blazes; and help officials make wise decisions about how and whether flames should be doused. Here’s what that all looks like in flowchart form:

Click to embiggen.

“As climate change spurs extended droughts and longer fire seasons, this collaborative wildfire blueprint will help us restore forests and rangelands to make communities less vulnerable,” said Mike Boots, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Climate change just reshaped America’s wildfire strategy

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Here Is a Video of 25-Year-Old Jon Hamm Being Super Awkward on a Dating Show

by stevenjakoby Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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So, you’re walking down a street and you see a sign or a building or a landmark and it triggers some long forgotten memory from your past and you’re swept up in it and a wistful smile crawls across your face and you look up to the sky and put your hands on your hips and then you look down to the ground, then finally straight ahead, and you chuckle and my God, you were so young and stupid—but wasn’t it good to be young?—but then you stop chuckling because you think about the memory more and you remember it in detail and my God, what were you doing, did you really act like that, did you really say that, my God, did you really look like that, and boom boom boom is the sound of your heart pounding and your anxiety is rising and you recall vividly that you didn’t think you looked ridiculous when you were on this street corner when you were young and now you worry all of a sudden that you actually thought at that time—gasp!—that you were cool and fun and neat and attractive, and people liked you, you thought, but they couldn’t have liked this person you’re remembering because this person you’re remembering, young you, is objectively humiliating, and now you begin doubting everything—is north north?—but especially yourself, that is what you doubt the most, because if you thought you were cool then and you were wrong, maybe you’re wrong about thinking you’re cool now, and maybe it’s all a lie, everything you tell yourself about yourself, maybe you’re not really very cool, maybe you’re not really very happy, maybe you’ll never be very cool, maybe you’ll never be very happy, maybe your hands still sweat, and your lip still quivers, and your hair still looks all a mess, and oh God, dear God, blessed God, it’s true, you think: you’re still the same silly shamefully awkward 25-year-old you never wanted to be in the first place.

Don’t worry. Jon Hamm was a super awkward 25-year-old as well and look at him! You’re probably cool now, too.

(via Slate)

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Here Is a Video of 25-Year-Old Jon Hamm Being Super Awkward on a Dating Show

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Obama admin sued for dragging feet on studies of climate impacts

by ColemanPermewan Posted on April 4, 2014

Obama admin sued for dragging feet on studies of climate impacts

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Just over a year ago, we told you that the Obama administration would soon start requiring federal agencies to consider climate change when analyzing the environmental impacts of major projects that need federal approval. Bloomberg reported in March of last year that the new guidelines would “be issued in the coming weeks.”

But many weeks have come and gone and the guidelines still haven’t been released, so now activists are suing the administration to hurry things along.

The lawsuit revolves around the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to study the environmental impacts of projects they oversee and to develop strategies for reducing those impacts. Since passage of the landmark law in 1969, NEPA assessments have covered a variety of potential environmental impacts. In early 2008, major environmental groups petitioned the George W. Bush administration to include climate impacts among them. After Obama came into office, his administration said it would broaden the scope of NEPA studies to cover climate change, and in 2010, it issued draft guidelines to this effect, but they’ve been bottled up at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) ever since.

This week, frustrated after years of inaction, the Center for Food Safety filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court seeking to force Obama’s CEQ to finalize the new rules. From the lawsuit:

With the effects of climate change becoming more and more evident, prompt action is necessary to ensure that climate change analysis is integrated into all levels of federal agencies’ planning. Full analysis and meaningful consideration of these impacts before federal government decisions are made will strongly affect the extent to which climate change and its consequential dangers are limited or avoided in the coming century.

“The Obama Administration has repeatedly promised to take action on climate, but talk is cheap. Its delay here is unlawful, as well as inexplicable and irresponsible,” said George Kimbrell, a senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety. “This unlawful delay is the opposite of the Obama Administration’s repeated promises to address climate change. CEQ action is a perfect example of something the administration can do unilaterally, without requiring congressional efforts. Yet the CEQ process has mysteriously gone into a black hole.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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A Political History of "How I Met Your Mother"

by Sylvesterax6 Posted on March 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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How I Met Your Mother is not, nor has it ever been, a political show. It’s about Ted Mosby, Marshall Eriksen, Lily Aldrin, Robin Scherbatsky, and Barney Stinson doing funny, touching, and crazy things in New York City. It’s about Ted finally finding The Mother of his future children. It’s about love and the long-haul pursuit of it.

But the CBS sitcom (which concludes its ninth and final season on Monday night) has, over its eight-plus years on the air, snuck in some political and social commentary ever so slyly and gently into the background—and fore. HIMYM had its major ups and downs, as any long-running network series does. Some seasons gave the strong impression that creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas (and everyone else involved, for that matter) were just phoning it in. But when the show was good, it was really, really good—a cleverly framed and intelligent look at friendship, marriage, and heartbreak.

Here’s a look at how the show was good on environmentalism, gay rights, corporate satire, and so on:

1. Barney’s bank unintentionally started a bloody revolution in a foreign country.

It was a running joke (until recently this season) that none of the main characters knew what Barney (played by Neil Patrick Harris) did for a living. He works at Goliath National Bank (theme song sung by Barney, above), and he makes a lot of money. Barney’s general outlook on life—suits, cash, sex, strippers, sex, saying “bro” a lot, more sex—and his colleagues are clearly a caricature of fratty corporate culture. But the bank also fits in nicely with the heartless-and-evil-corporation trope.

Here’s one of Barney’s bosses (during the show’s fourth season) casually updating staff on the bank’s complicity in bloodshed and political tumult overseas:

And so, while those bribes did destabilize the regime and caused the death of most of the royal family, it did lead to looser banking regulations in Rangoon. So yay us.

“World leaders in credit and banking,” indeed.

2. Marshall fights for environmental justice.

The biggest part of Marshall’s (Jason Segel) persona, besides love of family and devotion to monogamy, is that he’s a lawyer who wants to save the planet. He’s a staunch environmentalist, and wants to bring about change by arguing and winning landmark court cases:

(This season, things got awkward when Marshall shared a long car ride with an oil lobbyist.)

After Marshall starting working at the Natural Resource Defense Council, the NRDC (in real life) blogged about the character and HIMYM:

In last night’s episode of “How I Met Your Mother,” Marshall Eriksen finally quit his corporate law job at the (fake) Goliath National Bank, to volunteer with the (very real) Natural Resources Defense Council. Declaring, “I need to do better things with my life,” Marshall is excited by the opportunity to work with NRDC. “I’d be saving the oceans, saving endangered species,” he says. Or, “saving chicken bones and an old boot to make hobo soup” retorts his friend Barney. Except that, as Marshall noticed in a previous episode, those chicken bones and the old boot are unfortunately floating out to sea and dirtying our oceans.

3. The show is totally down with marriage equality and gay rights.

Well, except for Barney (initially), but only because he was for so long against the very concept of marriage. The show’s writing staff used his earlier opposition to marriage as a way to highlight the absurdity of the religious right’s argument that gay marriage would harm the American family:

4. HIMYM addresses the housing and financial crisis:

Shortly after the commencement of the financial crisis in late 2007, the show aired an episode in which Marshall and Lily (Alyson Hannigan) make the idiotic decision to buy a home they can’t afford. The following is Marshall convincing Lily that 2007 was a good time to buy; the scene is peppered with future Ted (Bob Saget) narrating why Marshall is wrong:

Marshall: We should buy a place!…Baby, real estate is always a good investment.

Future Ted: It’s not.

Marshall: And the market is really hot right now.

Future Ted: It wasn’t.

Marshall: And because of my new job, we are in such a strong place financially.

Future Ted: They weren’t.

Here’s the season-three episode:

5. The series went against stereotypes and made Robin a Canadian who loves guns.

Here’s Robin (Cobie Smulders) introducing Lily to the adrenaline rush of the shooting range:

6. Remember when people accused HIMYM of racism?

“HOW I MET YOUR RACISM?” the CNN chyron read. This was referring to a recent episode (and the controversy that followed) in which the cast spoofs old kung fu movies. The show was promptly accused of insensitivity and cultural appropriation.

Here is how Bays and Thomas responded to the outrage:

Hey guys, sorry this took so long. Craig Thomas and I want to say a few words about â&#128;ª#HowIMetYourRacismâ&#128;¬. With Monday’s episode, we set out to make a silly and unabashedly immature homage to Kung Fu movies, a genre we’ve always loved. But along the way we offended people. We’re deeply sorry, and we’re grateful to everyone who spoke up to make us aware of it. We try to make a show that’s universal, that anyone can watch and enjoy. We fell short of that this week, and feel terrible about it. To everyone we offended, I hope we can regain your friendship, and end this series on a note of goodwill. Thanks.

7. The show emphasized the importance of small local news stories!

In the first season, viewers find out early on that Robin is a journalist who wants to deliver hard-hitting political news coverage. And she ends up doing so, but not before being assigned to news items she feels are of little value and far beneath her. And then the following happens on live TV, where she sees why these stories matter. (Sadly, this clarifying moment doesn’t end in the most flattering way for her.)

And finally, as fans say farewell to the series, let’s rewatch this years-old HIMYM-related clip that is wonderful, but has little to do with the politics or social issues of modern America. It’s Neil Patrick Harris and Jason Segel doing a fantastic version of “The Confrontation” from Les Misérables. Just watch it. It’s truly great:

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A Political History of "How I Met Your Mother"

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