The President on Capitol Hill: A Theory of Institutional Influence

Abstract

reality is a social construction" (p. 14). In this reading, Derrida and Foucault paved the way for Breitbart and Hannity. It speaks strongly for the impact of ideas. Readers who take the title literally may wonder whether the bulk of a nation has "lost its mind," or whether it is only the 46 percent who chose a casino magnate. Patterson inspired me to look back a few years. In 2008, a contender with an African parent and an unusual name won with 9,549,105 votes to spare. Up again, his margin was still 4,984,100. If those electorates seemed pretty open-minded, they were largely similar to 2016's, not to mention today's. We are taken to the author's native state, much of it now Trump terrain. "Their opinions were honest and heartfelt," Patterson recounts, "rooted in a lifestyle they've always known" (p. 47). The message is that these beliefs deserve respect and warrant an attentive hearing. That is a tenet of political civility. But there is another step. It is to grant that there can be a cogent case, let's say, for allowing military-level weaponry in any household so disposed. Or that to maintain that all conceptions must be made to end in birth can be an intellectually viable position. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito provide as many footnotes, citing evidence and authorities, as Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Not a small lesson from How America Lost Its Mind is how hard it is to engage when every node on the spectrum insists it is empirical and analytical. It has been a long time since I have met a book as gratifying as Patterson's. He forces his readers to think, especially where issues defy familiar responses. At least this was the experience of this reviewer.

Sports Medical Image Modeling of Injury Prevention in Wushu Training

“…Mechanical modeling of skeletal muscle was based on hill theory. Then, the kinematics data and inverse dynamics data are used for multibody dynamics modeling and analysis [ 7 ]. Finally, the static optimization method is used to estimate the muscle force, and the fusion analysis of the model is carried out.…”

Empire and Revenge: Outlining Vladimir Putin’s Motivations for War

“…A final event that occurred during the Trump presidency and that influenced Putin that he would likely not face a challenge from the us in the event of an invasion of Ukraine was the insurrection in Washington on January 6, 2021. It demonstrated that the us was weak, divided and collapsing politically (Liévano & Coe, 2021). More importantly, it suggested that the future president, Joe Biden, would have to focus most of his attention on domestic political, leaving little time for a coherent foreign policy.…”

“…The instability usually has been the result of the excessive use of resources to fund global aspirations. In other words, Russia's history is replete with examples of imperial overstretch (Kennedy, 1987). Two examples are worth noting.…”