Current Affairs

Body Fat and American Presidents

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On last night’s episode of The Colbert Report, Colbert interviewed Amy Farrell, Professor of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dickinson College, and author of the newly published book Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. Here is an excerpt from the summary of the book on Amazon: “Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness … Read more

A bit more on Messrs. Y.

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I previously wrote a bit about the document released a few weeks ago by Colonel Mykleby and Captain Porter.  Well here is a NY Times article (a brief one) on the issue.  I suspect the quick references to Bin Laden were added after this article was essentially finished, but there's probably more room here to … Read more

The Situation Room Photo

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Here are some interesting observations from the Situation Room photo from yesterday. 1. The photo on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's laptop is blurred. This is obviously a classified document. 2. As some of the people on Reddit pointed out, there is a burn bag next to Obama. Burn bags are used to burn classified documents. 3. Everyone … Read more

Osama Bin Laden is Dead

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A significant event in an ongoing story that has been a driving force in defining my generation. Michael FlynnMichael Flynn is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Binghamton University in 2013. His research focuses on the political economy of foreign policy … Read more

Obama’s Next Cabinet

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Via Steve Clemmons at The Washington Note, The New York Times has a story on who will be tapped to be the next Secretary of Defense.  And the winner is?  Mr. Leon Panetta!  Panetta is currently the director of the CIA, and according to the Times article, it is expected that Obama will soon announce … Read more

Welcome Aboard!

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The title is slightly inappropriate, as Italy had previously decided to send military advisors to Libya.  Maybe we should say welcome more aboad, or welcome aboard again.  Well…whatever.  The point is Britain and France had previously been pleading with their NATO allies for more support in the air campaign to remove Ghadaffi from power and … Read more

Healthcare Incentives

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I've apparently been sitting on this post for a while, so this might be (is quite literally) old news for many out there.  It's an op-ed piece from The New York Times from a few months back on the healthcare legislation (No, this it not about IR).    What caught my eye was at the end of … Read more

Facts and Stuff on the Distributions of Income and Race in America

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Via Andrew Gelman at the Monkey Cage, an article on this recent Gallup poll regarding people's income and their perceptions of income distributions, tax burdens, etc. 

The thrust of the article is that there are some disparities between where people fall in the overall income distribution and their perceptions of how the tax burden should be distributed—Not my normal thing, but interesting nevertheless.

More below…

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