Mike Wolf

William Proxmire campaign costs. $145.10.

Default mental mechanism is belief

“Why you can’t help believing everything you read”

Dan Gilbert research on how belief works:

“How mental systems believe”

“Unbelieving the unbelievable”

Japanese Innovations

Japanese innovations that changed the world

Foreign Policy: Is Japan the most innovative country in the world

At 1,200 patents per million people, Japan has the highest rate of patents in the world—even when you account for multiple counting.

Military spending as % GDP

Wikipedia: Countries by military expenditure

US spending over time, from here

Interactive data from World Bank

Economic Growth Worldwide

Interactive resource here

Immigration in the US

Foreign-born population by state

Fish and North Korea

Salmon that funds North Korea

Trump approval rating declining and now stable.

7 Rules for reading Trump’s numbers

On historians talking about Trump ,100 years in the future, the apocryphal statement from Zhou Enlai about the significance of the French Revolution “It’s too soon to say”

Stats on Medical costs (including projections).

Cancer survival rates:  (from here)

In the UK, more than 330,000 cases of cancer were diagnosed in 2011. That compares favorably with the rate of cancer in the US—396 per 100,000 people in the UK vs. 451 per 100,000 in the US.

But even though people in England, where the UK’s largest population is, are less likely to get cancer, five years after diagnosis, only 56% of English cancer patients survive, compared to 65% of American patients.

<snip>

However, if American healthcare was indeed better than Britain’s National Health Service, then the number of deaths from cancers should be fewer in the US than in England and Wales. This can be explained and measured by another statistic—the cancer mortality rate—and it turns out that they aren’t very different for the two countries.

Review of HR McMaster’s book “Dereliction of Duty”

WP article on lessons (possibly learned) by McMaster.

What does Kim Jung Un want. (Tufts) (Foreign Policy) (BBC)

(Source) (American war library)

PBS battlefield vietnam timeline

National archives: casualties

Two buildings => two countries. Muslim intellectuals reconsider Jihadism after the response to 911. (Article in New Yorker)

“We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,” Fadl wrote in his fax, which was sent from Tora Prison, in Egypt.

Fadl’s fax confirmed rumors that imprisoned leaders of Al Jihad were part of a trend in which former terrorists renounced violence.

Percentage of military recruits, by state.

44% of recruits come from the Old South.

Smoking rates in the US Military (Wikipedia) In 2005, the smoking rate of military personnel was found to be 32.2%, compared to the civilian rate of 21%

Smoking rate among civilians.

ISIS using drones. 

Other drone examples.

ISIS dropping bombs on tanks from drones.

Iraqui invasion of Kuwait   (US “gives a green light“)

Project Eagle The American Christians of N Korea

Robert S. Kim contributes to a fuller understanding of Asia in World War II by revealing the role of American Christian missionary families in the development of the Korean independence movement and the creation of Project Eagle, the forgotten alliance between that movement and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), called Project Eagle. (Connects to family of our own Bob Sargent)