Month: May 2011

Kelly Hodgkins shares a technique to "make yourself smarter in 20 days":

University of Michigan psychologist John Jonides shows that you can use n-back mental training exercises to increase your intelligence. N-back exercises require you to remember how far back you saw a symbol or heard a noise in a series. It is a way of measuring fluid intelligence which governs how you think abstractly, reason and solve problems. This part of your intelligence begins to decline when you hit your 30s or 40s. Oh noes.

All is not lost as Jonides' research team found that 20 minutes of n-back training a day for 20 days can improve your fluid intelligence for up to three months. You don't have to see a shrink to train, just grab your smartphone and search the app store for n-back exercises. There are also desktop apps as well.

A reader writes:

As I was driving in to work this morning in liberal Portland, Oregon, I was struck by the bumper sticker on the car in front of me. It captures why Palin should not be underestimated ever (and thank you for always reminding of us that). Her ability to secure the Christian vote (while not acting very Christian) is one of her most underestimated strengths. Though this bumper sticker does not call out Palin, this driver is her base. It reads:

Jesus Saves
Obama Spends

The meme is everywhere, including t-shirts.

Tyler Cowen wonders:

[I]t is an interesting question why there is no popular movement to encourage driverless cars.  Commuting costs are very high and borne by many people.  (Here is Annie Lowery on just how bad commutes can be.)  You can get people to hate plastic bags, or worry about a birth certificate, but they won’t send a “pro-driverless car” postcard to their representatives.  The political movement has many potential beneficiaries but few natural constituencies.  (Why?  Does it fail to connect to an us vs. them struggle?)  This is an underrated source of bias in political outcomes.

Cowen advocates for driverless cars here. I suspect that the lobby doesn't exist because the idea of driverless cars gives a lot of people, including yours truly, a case of the tremors.

Brian Montopoli is caught up in Palin's cat-and-mouse strategy:

Since Palin and her team won't share where the potential candidate is headed, reporters and producers have little choice but to simply stay close to Palin's bus. This has resulted in scenes of the Palin bus tooling down the highway followed by a caravan of 10 or 15 vehicles – including a massive CNN bus – all trying to make sure they don't lose sight of the Palin bus.

It adds up to a dangerous situation, says CBS News Producer Ryan Corsaro. "I just hope to God that one of these young producers with a camera whose bosses are making them follow Sarah Palin as a potential Republican candidate don't get in a car crash, because this is dangerous," he said.

Montopoli also notes a classic Palinism (recorded in the above video found on YouTube):

Palin says she isn't offering advance notice for the trip because "we don't want to disrupt people on their trips and their vacations," which is somewhat hard to fathom. (An unannounced trip, which doesn't allow vacationers to plan for the disruption created by the potential candidate, her entourage and the press, would seem more disruptive than a scheduled trip.)

Steve Benen is getting fed up:

This might sound crazy, but if major media outlets feel like they’re being jerked around, and don’t like being treated “like paparazzi,” they could … I don’t know … go cover something else? Maybe the news organizations could get together, agree to send an intern with a cell-phone camera to follow the bus and serve as some kind of pool reporter, and end this madness?

Private healthcare costs way, way more than public healthcare. The goals of financial sanity and promoting the free market and, in this case, contradictory. Or at least, that's what the comparative international data is telling us. And given that we can readily see massive public resistance to privatizing Medicare, shouldn't explaining and improving the efficiency of the private sector be the Republicans' major focus?

Creating your own jean band:

Ian Buruma shifts the discussion on Mladic's capture:

There is no doubt that he is guilty of serious war crimes. And a trial, however unsatisfactory, is in most cases still to be preferred to an assassination. But trying him for genocide, even though it will be hard to prove that he ever intended to exterminate Bosnian Muslims as a group, just because they were Muslims, will further muddy the term’s already vague definition. Mladi? was engaged in ethnic cleansing, which, though reprehensible, is not the same as genocide. Loose definitions will encourage more military interventions, thus more wars. By invoking Hitler’s ghost too often, we trivialize the enormity of what he actually did.

Chait points out that an important part of the Republican base – "disaffecteds" – more fiercely oppose Medicare cuts than even hardcore liberals. Douthat digests this:

I agree with the conservatives who are arguing that Republicans need to forge ahead on Medicare reform, because they’ll be demagogued on the issue no matter what they do. But forging ahead on entitlements doesn’t require defending every detail of the Ryan budget, or fighting the next election on exactly the same lines that the NY-26 race was fought on. That’s a battle I don’t think conservatives can win.

So what lines? That we need to means-test, ration, increase co-pays and premiums, and raise the retirement age? I can't see how that wins over the disaffecteds, who will rage even more at the feckless establishment. The only hope for the GOP is a Democratic bout of bipartisan fiscal responsibility – the kind that sends Paul Krugman into a foam-speckled rage. After the GOP brutally exploited fears about healthcare last time around, I cannot imagine the Dems are that game.

Ramesh Ponnuru urges the GOP to hang in, and make the case for privatizing Medicare carefully and methodically, and contrasting the actual Democratic alternative:

When you’re talking about Medicare, at those town halls or in interviews, don’t say that the alternative is bankruptcy and that the Democrats want to do nothing. No, the alternative is heavy-handed bureaucratic cost- cutting. The Democratic plan is cutting payment rates so that Medicare becomes as lousy a program as Medicaid, with doctors refusing to participate in it. The Democratic plan is letting an unelected board decide which treatments won’t get funded.

I'd support this if there were any solid evidence that patients can act as effectively as consumers. But there isn't. The idea of individual choice and market competition bringing costs down is very powerful. It's just wrong.

Liam Stack reports on the martyrization of Hamza:

In a revolutionary season that has seen countless “Fridays of Rage” in half a dozen countries, Syrian activists marched on a day that some dubbed “the Saturday of Hamza.” … In the Damascus suburb of Douma, protesters marched through the night chanting “Leave! Leave!” to Mr. Assad while holding signs declaring, “We are all Hamza al-Khateeb,” according to a video posted on YouTube. Video from another suburb, Dereya, showed women and children demonstrating, with a chorus of young voices shouting, “The people want the overthrow of the regime.” They held aloft signs that read, “Did Hamza scare you that much?”

Stack zooms out:

Revolution spread across Tunisia after the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit vendor humiliated by police officers who confiscated his cart. In Egypt, the death last summer of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old man dragged out of an Internet cafe and killed by plainclothes police a block from his home, was a rallying cry for the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square. The Syrian uprising was incited by the arrest in early March of a group of children, aged 8 to 15, caught spraying antigovernment graffiti on the wall of their schoolhouse in the southern town of Dara’a, Mr. Ziadeh said.

Enduring America captions the above video, "Demonstration in Aleppo on Sunday night, expressing sympathy for Hamza al-Khateeb".

Ben Smith has a moment of clarity:

There's really no evidence at all that she has a plan.

Jay Newton-Small differs:

I would say Palin’s goal is to torture the “lame stream media,” but there may be more going through her mind. In many ways, it’s a smart ploy. The frustration and time spent looking for Palin, only to have her say next to nothing, is driving the press wild. Even if it yields few stories, Palin still controls her own message by blogging the trip herself, and forcing everyone to check her website to see what she’s saying and where she’s going.

P.M. Carpenter's understanding of recent events:

If there are any politics here, they may relate to a formal Tea Party creation down the road, certainly by 2016, perhaps by the intervening midterms. For what we're watching now is the customary kind of sharp thinking and precise planning that precede the creation of foreordained calamities of the third-party breed.

I do think there's an implied threat that if the GOP won't buy this package, she'll go retail in a third party bid. And remember Perot helped elect newbie Clinton in an electoral college margin higher than Obama's in 2008. What Palin could do to an uninspired GOPer, like Romney or Pawlenty, could up-end national politics.