Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

They were already tested. Noam Shalit, Gilad Shalit's father, made the following offer to the flotilla organizers last week: if you will take a package to my son, I will lobby the government and try and convince them to let you through to Gaza.  His request was rejected.

Another writes:

Beinart insists that anti-blockade activists should demand the release of Shalit, a uniformed soldier captured on the battlefield. For what it's worth, I am against the blockade and in favor of Hamas releasing Shalit, but I am also in favor of Israel releasing the thousands (I've heard the number 11,000) of Palestinians who are rotting in Israeli prisons without trials.

By the way, everyone knows Corporal Shalit's name – how many of us can name a single Palestinian being held by Israel? Beinart? Anyone?

Scott Adams contends that there is no such thing as a bad idea, just bad execution.

A study finds that positive events outnumber negative events and that we therefore use far more positive words than negative words:

The researchers say we've adopted a number of habits of convenience that reflect the frequent use of positive words in our language (in turn reflecting the greater frequency of positivity in the world). For example, positive words tend to be 'unmarked' – that is, the positive is the default (e.g. 'happy') whereas the negative is achieved by adding a negating prefix (i.e. 'unhappy'). Rozin cites four more such habits. Here's one more: when stating pairs of good and bad words together, it's nearly always the convention to mention the positive word first: as in 'good and bad' and 'happy and sad' rather than the other way around.

In one handy chart.

Spring-boarding off a series of articles by William Saletan, Jonah Lehrer reveals the true nature or remembering:

We like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated. And that is why it’s so easy to convince naive subjects that they met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

Video above via David Craney who provides a false memory test and digs further into the research.

Ezra Klein wants so know why no one is suggesting it:

Expand short-term deficits to boost employment and commit to credible deficit reduction in the long-term. The right move for deficit hawks would be to release a proposal that pairs a generous jobs bill with serious long-term reforms (for instance, a bill providing $300 billion in immediate stimulus and also lowering the cap on the mortgage interest deduction, bringing back the full estate tax and cutting defense spending). This moment, viewed correctly, actually offers a substantial opportunity for long-term deficit reduction because the need for short-term deficit spending gives hawks a bargaining chip that will bring liberals to the table. But no one seems interested in offering that deal.

Steinglass thinks we should pay more attention to the Dutch.

John Sides asks if 538 is good for political science:

I think 538 helps political science by showing people, and especially journalists, that you can use quantitative evidence to understand politics. That’s one reason I’m glad for its new relationship with the New York Times. I don’t always agree with all of Nate Silver’s analyses — see, e.g., here or here — but they are quite an improvement over the views of people who think that a conversation with three Iowans absolves them of paying attention to systematic evidence or academic research.

The way I look at 538 is that it’s pushing analysis of politics closer to Moneyball, and further away from a world in which pundits simply make stuff up. The more that happens, the more doors will be opened to what political science can offer.

This enlightening and funny animation/lecture on time perspectives is the prefect coda to a slow Sunday:

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Nathan Schneider profiles the Templeton Foundation:

John Templeton built a place where the right's hardened partisans, like Dreher and Rosen, can settle down and turn to life's real Big Questions, in peace, for all mankind. But the foundation meanwhile has associated itself with political and religious forces that cause it to be perceived as threatening the integrity of science and protecting the religious status quo. This is quite the reverse of the founder's most alluring hope: a spirituality finally worthy of our scientific achievements. As a result of such alliances, though, the foundation is also better positioned than most to foster a conservatism—and a culture generally—that holds the old habits of religions and business responsible to good evidence, while helping scientists better speak to people's deepest concerns.

On issues that range from climatology to stem cells, science has too often taken a back seat to the whims of politics, and Templeton's peculiar vision offers a welcome antidote to that. To live up to this calling, Big Questions are one thing; but the foundation will have to stand up for tough answers, too, as it did when announcing the findings of a major study that intercessory prayer doesn't improve medical outcomes, or when rebuking intelligent design.