http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2017/msu-scholars-find-21-trillion-in-unauthorized-government-spending-defense-department-to-conduct/

Earlier this year, a Michigan State University economist, working with graduate students and a former government official, found $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.

The work of Mark Skidmore and his team, which included digging into government websites and repeated queries to U.S. agencies that went unanswered, coincided with the Office of Inspector General, at one point, disabling the links to all key documents showing the unsupported spending. (Luckily, the researchers downloaded and stored the documents.)

Now, the Department of Defense has announced it will conduct the first department-wide, independent financial audit in its history…

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/suvs-and-trust/547076/

The main evidence for this theory is a 2005 paper by media-studies professor Josh Lauer. Lauer points out that SUVs are neither more spacious nor safer than minivans and station wagons. Instead, he argues, SUVs reflect Americans’ growing fear of others and our desire to sequester ourselves and our families from them. In other words, he writes, the “space” people actually seek in SUVs is personal space, and the “safety” is not road safety but personal safety.

"… Philip Morris’s own application shows that in American people there is no statistical difference in the harm caused by IQOS product and traditional cigarettes."

https://theconversation.com/philip-morris-hides-data-in-plain-sight-on-dangers-of-new-heat-not-burn-product-87636

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/11/12/562802511/the-answer-to-life-the-universe-and-everything-it-s-63

This intangible boundary between the knowable and the unknowable is, at present, roughly a thousand, trillion, trillion meters across — should you possess the means to measure it.

At the other end, in the deepest innards of every single speck of cosmos, is a scale of a hundred billion, trillion, trillionths of a meter. It represents the last meaningful physical scale within our present understanding of physics, a place where space-time itself gets choppy, uncertain, and decidedly problematic.

Thank you, Grammar Girl!

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/how-many-spaces-after-a-period

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/01/how-wealth-inequality-has-changed-in-the-u-s-since-the-great-recession-by-race-ethnicity-and-income/

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 triggered a sharp, prolonged decline in the wealth of American families, and an already large wealth gap between white households and black and Hispanic households widened further in its immediate aftermath. But the racial and ethnic wealth gap has evolved differently for families at different income levels, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

https://theconversation.com/measuring-the-implicit-biases-we-may-not-even-be-aware-we-have-74912?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1509379696

In many cases, people don’t know they have these implicit biases. Much like we cannot introspect on how our stomachs or lungs are working, we cannot simply “look inside” our own minds and find our implicit biases. Thus, we can only understand implicit bias through the use of psychological measures that get around the problems of self-report.

https://theconversation.com/why-is-there-so-little-research-on-guns-in-the-us-5-questions-answered-85519

How much federal money is there?

In 1996, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment. The legislation stated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” While that wording did not ban CDC gun research outright, the legislation was accompanied by a US$2.6 million budget cut. That amount happened to match the amount the CDC had spent on firearms research the previous year. The message was clear. From 1996 to 2013, CDC funding for gun research dropped by 96 percent.

The CDC wasn’t the only federal agency affected. In 2011, Congress added a similar clause to legislation that regulated funding for the National Institutes of Health. However, due to a directive from the Obama administration, the NIH continued to provide funding for gun research. That push faded as the Obama administration left office.

Earlier this year, the NIH discontinued its funding program that specifically focused on firearm violence. While firearms researchers can still apply for funding through more general NIH funding opportunities, critics say that makes funding for gun research less likely.

What prompted these funding restrictions?

The Dickey Amendment was passed after a CDC-funded study led by physician and epidemiologist Arthur Kellerman found that having a gun in the home increased homicide risk. After the results were published, the National Rifle Association pressured lawmakers, arguing that the CDC was inappropriately using its funds to advocate for gun control.

http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/24/political-typology-reveals-deep-fissures-on-the-right-and-left/

The political typology reveals that even in a political landscape increasingly fractured by partisanship, the divisions within the Republican and Democratic coalitions may be as important a factor in American politics as the divisions between them.

https://volckeralliance.org/true-size-government

This paper provides an update of…the true size of the federal government’s blended workforce in the context of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech. Eisenhower not only added the term military-industrial complex to the national vocabulary in this address but also warned of the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” in “every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.”