This flies a bit in the face of what public health research tells us about how healthy Americans are. More than one-third are obese, according to the most recent Centers for Disease Control numbers. About 10 percent of Americans live with a chronic condition, like diabetes or high blood pressure. This data suggests there’s some space between how healthy we think we are, and how healthy we actually are.
It might be more interesting to figure out what Americans mean by “good health” rather than simply deciding that they’re wrong.
This blog finishes by noting that yesterday–the day a new Pope was anointed (crowned? elected? appointed?)–those two issues were trending on Twitter, while the Pope was not.
The last time the pope retired was in 1415, when Gregory XII resigned to try and resolve the Western Schism. Now, there was partisanship for you, partisanship which makes our divided politics look like a scuffle in the park. At one point, there were three people claiming to be the Pope in the west, one based in Rome, one in Avignon, and one in Pisa. The period of the Avignon Papacy was started, as most things are, by secular politics. The Pope of the time, Boniface VIII , and the French King, Philip IV, had a running feud centering around the limits of papal power in France. Philip thought there were rather a lot of limits; Boniface did not agree.
This led to the issuance, in 1302, of the Bull Unam Sanctam, which asserted the Church’s authority over all kingdoms temporal (the quote in the title comes from it). Philip did not take Boniface’s statement lightly and…
Okay, this is as close as I’ll come to shilling for my new book (which, you’ll note, has already been panned by a disgruntled reviewer at Amazon). My friend Phillip Barron has just built me an author website. Please check it out if you’d like. There’s a blog over there that I’m sure I’ll use about as often as I use this one.
Update: if you’d like to buy the book, it appears to be in stock here and here.
That the Republicans will cave in, raise the debt limit, and things will go on as before.
What if they don’t?
What if they simply say “Okay, you want to run things that way, go ahead.” So, they keep passing continuing resolutions (since actual budgets have been beyond the House for a few years), and leave it to Obama to figure out how to circumvent the debt ceiling for that particular bit of spending. Another coin? More 14th amendment invocation? More IOUs?
The Republicans get to hammer the President for continually violating their fiscal prudence, a lovely message going into the 2014 midterms which, after all, are on what most members of the House focus.
I don’t blog any more (that’s a discussion for another day — or not). But since I still have the keys to the place, I’d like to add my voice to a growingchorus supporting Erik Loomis, who, as you may know, is now subject to a deeply hypocritical and craven witch hunt. I wish I were more surprised by this turn of events, but alas, I’m not.
If you have a moment and are so inclined, the Crooked Timber post linked here and above has some suggestions about how best to express solidarity with Erik.
This map is not of the actual results, though it does contain some of them. I flipped Ohio, Florida, and Virginia. I wanted to point out that Obama would still have won EVEN IF he had lost those three seemingly critical states.
That’s a remarkable statement for a Democratic candidate. That’s a remarkable statement for *any* Presidential candidate.
The really big development this Presidential cycle has been the popular rise of such statistically-oriented political analysts as Nate Silver. They mix math, polls, GDP, magic sauce, wizardry, SCSI-termination mojo into a prediction about the election that is SCIENTIFIC.
This is not a post about those people, or not entirely about them. Instead, this is a post about aggregating all their (and other pundits) predictions and seeing if the magic of crowd-sourcing and the wisdom of the crowds works in political prognosticating.
We hear that lots of states are now in play that weren’t before: Pennsylvania, Arizona, and so on. But where do the candidates think the votes are? Where are they actually going to rally the faithful and convince the unconvinced? Just about exactly where you would expect. President Obama is winging around the country:
California and Illinois are likely fundraising visits; the others are exactly the swing states that everyone’s been watching all along.
How about the campaign with the Big Mo? Governor Romney is heading over the next few days to Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, and Virginia, exactly where you would expect. Sorry, I couldn’t find a fancy graphic on the Romney campaign web site.
But perhaps the VP candidates are stealthily heading to newly viable swing states? Nope. They’re both in Ohio today.
The odd thing is that, after all the muss and fuss of the past six months, all the …
I’m teaching a Cornell Adult University course this week on the Battle of Antietam. The course starts tomorrow, but I scouted various parts of the battlefield today, to check them out and refresh my memory. I took photographs to share (warning! Large file sizes!).
The War Correspondent’s Arch, at Gathland State Park, where the Battle of Crampton’s Gap took place. It’s a fascinating spot, deep in Maryland’s back woods, up in mountains, but intersecting with the Appalachian Trail. Bill van Gilder, a local potter, who lives near by, told me of sending messages to friends who live near the Trail in North Carolina, via hikers who come through the area. Turnaround time? About three months.
After Gathland, I moved on to the Antietam battlefield, starting with Burnside’s Bridge. I tried the exciting new panorama feature in my iPhone and got this of Burnside’s Bridge and its…
I don’t have to regard Ferguson as a professional by the standards of any of my worlds, as a person entitled to say that he’s inside any of those sets [scholar, intellectual, expert], . He’s left for other climes, and they’re welcome to him.
Worth reading the whole thing.
(FYI, “Gentleman Reading Mail, Part II,” originally scheduled for Monday, has been shifted to Wednesday. My apologies: SOS (start of school))
Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist says that although he didn’t want Paul Ryan to be the GOP vice presidential nominee at first, he is now pleased with the pick and predicts that he will do for domestic policy what Dick Cheney did for national security.
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This blog is a blog about history, Yiddishkeit, and the Muppets, neither exclusively nor necessarily in that order. And as William Gibson said about this very blog (no, really), “History can save your ass.” Yiddishkeit and the Muppets are just extras.
is the associate director of the Cornell in Washington program and a senior lecturer at Cornell University. He teaches courses on European history, modern military history, guerrilla war, and the role of popular will in waging war.
is an associate professor of history at UC Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize in 2004, and his new book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, will be published by Harvard University Press in fall 2012.
is a professor of history at UC Davis, and the author of several books on US history including The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, and Murdering McKinley, among others.
is a professor of history at UC Davis. She is the author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford, 2009); Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (North Carolina, 2002); and Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (North Carolina, 1996).
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