Relax

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

The Heckler

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

The New Osama

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Obama’s Schizophrenic Politics

City Journal:

Cyril Connolly once said that imprisoned in every fat man was a thin one wildly signaling to be let out. A similar drama has for some time been unfolding in the mind of President Barack Obama. Outwardly, the president seems a cool and commonsensical pragmatist, a dispassionate lawyer with a no-nonsense approach to solving problems. But another, very different character writhes passionately just beneath the surface of the president’s consciousness. This is the messianic dreamer of the social millennium, the prophet of the moment when “the perfection begins”—an intoxicated visionary who signals frantically to be released from bondage.

During the campaign for the White House, the lawyer of modest and sober mien was generally in control. Only occasionally did the wild man slip his shackles. In June 2008, candidate Obama relaxed his vigilance for a moment, and the social prophet in him rose up ecstatically to proclaim the “moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless,” a golden age “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The mystic was quickly put back in his cave; in the weeks leading up to the election, the level-headed, pragmatic Obama, with his Spock-like habits of reserve, closed the sale.

Then, with the great victory won, the prophet was loosed. The president pledged to redeem the country through a vast expansion of the social state—the $787 billion stimulus program; the long march to bring health care, some 16 percent of the economy, under Washington’s control; the push for cap-and-trade restrictions on carbon emissions that the administration itself privately concluded would cost Americans up to $200 billion a year in new taxes. When a Republican lawmaker questioned the contents of the stimulus, the president replied simply, “I won.”

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Legacy of the Stone-Age Mind: Research suggests we remember better when we’re in survival mode

ScienceLine:

Imagine you are stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land, with nothing but the clothes on your back.  In order to survive, you’ll need to find steady supplies of food and water and protect yourself from predators.

You now share the mindset of our savannah-wandering ancestors, and, says one researcher, being in that mindset can improve your memory.

James Nairne, a psychology professor who studies the evolution of memory at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, has found that people better remember items from a list when they put themselves in the place of prehistoric humans, and imagine how those items might help them survive.

Human memory has evolved, Nairne suggests, so that thinking of something in terms of its fitness-relevance — how it could help us survive and reproduce in our ancestral environment — makes us more likely to remember it.

“Getting people to think about survival works [to improve memory] really well, presumably because that’s why our memory systems developed in the first place,” Nairne says.

Scientists agree that mental traits, like physical ones, are shaped by natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists investigate how the selection pressures our distant ancestors might have faced shaped our cognitive functions.

Most evolutionary psychology research has focused on stimuli rather than processes, what we think about rather than how we think about it.  But Nairne’s work centers on how people remember when their survival is at stake. He looks at how situation influences memory — specifically, a situation our ancestors likely faced during the Pleistocene Era, which ended 10,000 years ago, when most scientists think our modern cognitive traits developed.

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The Elephant Whisperer

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

The Accelerator

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.