Link Banana

Two recent mentions of the psychological trick caught my eye. First: in his review of Nudge, John Cassidy — while pointing out that Senator Obama’s policies share logic with those of the book — offer this interesting test:

If you think you are too smart for this description to apply to you, try this simple mental exercise. Take the last three digits of your cell phone number, obtaining a number between zero and 999, and add two hundred to it. Write down the resulting figure and put the letters AD after it. Now, consider this question: When did Attila the Hun invade Europe?

Unless you are an expert on the Dark Ages, or your brain is unusually wired, the chances are that your answer will be pretty close to the date you write down. Say the last three digits of your cell number are 787 and the number you write down is 987 AD. Then, most likely, 900 AD will sound like a reasonable answer to you, and so will 1050 AD, but [440, the correct answer] will sound wrong. That was certainly how it worked when I tried the exercise.

Also, Matt Yglesias suspects a local developer is employing the technique to show why he should move.

This very nearly made me cry.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Every once in a while, something leaps out of this boring part in the election cycle and makes me pay attention. Today, it was this line from John Harwood on Meet the Press. He says it at the very start of the round table, at about 27:30 in the web video.

If we found out that there was a secret poker game when Tony Rezko was paying Barack Obama to write Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and to organize Muslim English professors form a new Weather Underground chapter, maybe Barack Obama could be stopped.

This one was too rich not to share:

Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the favorite, Big Brown. Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter.

I’ve been thoroughly bored by the last few months of the presidential campaign, but this bit of counter-intuitive advice got my attention:

Even as Hillary Clinton trails Barack Obama in pledged delegates, the popular vote, and number of states won, she has made it clear that she plans to stay in the race for the nomination. All of which brings me to this logical conclusion: It is time for Barack Obama to drop out.

If Clinton had the good of the Democratic Party in mind, she would have given up her bid the day after the Mississippi primary, which Obama won by 25 points. The delegate math was as dismal for her campaign then as it is now, even after Pennsylvania, and she was facing down a six-week gulf before the next election.

But Hillary Clinton isn’t going to drop out. There simply isn’t a function in her assembly code for throwing in the towel.

Obama, on the other hand, is fully capable of it. And if he’s really serious about representing a new kind of politics, now is the time for him to prove it in the only meaningful way left. Moreover, were he to play it right, dropping out now nearly guarantees that he’ll be elected president in 2012.

There’s good reason to find Colson Whitehead’s piece “too clever by half,” but I enjoyed it.

People think I have it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, what with the whole having to be everywhere in the country at once thing. One second I’m nodding enthusiastically in a sales conference in Boise, Idaho, and the next I’m separating conjoined triplets at the Institute For Terribly Complicated Surgery in Buchanan, N.Y., and then I have to rush out to Muncie, Ind., to put my little “Inspector 12” tag in a bag of Fruit of the Loom.

It’s exhausting, all that travel. Decent, hard-working folks out there have their religion and their xenophobia to cling to. All I have is a fistful of upgrades to first class and free headphones. Headphones That Should Have Gone to a More Deserving Passenger.

But not just any half-eaten waffle… as the auction declares:

THIS IS BARAK HUSSEIN OBAMA’S BREAKFAST FROM THIS MORNING, 4-21-08 AT THE GLIDER DINER IN SCRANTON, PA. WINNER GETS HIS USED DINER PLATE WITH HIS USED SILVERWARE AND UN EATEN PORTION OF HIS WAFFLE & SAUSAGE LINK. IT WAS WRAPPED WITH SARAN WRAP IMMEDIATELY AFTER HIS DEPARTURE AND IS NOW IN THE FREEZER AWAITING THE LUCKY WINNERS BID!!! THIS IS 100% AUTHENTIC AS YOU CAN SEE HE WAS AT THE DINER BY THE PICTURE AND IT WAS ON ALL LOCAL NEWS STATIONS. THIS PLATE WAS WRAPPED BY THE WAITRESS THAT SERVED HIM. GUARANTEED AUTHENTIC, HIS DNA IS ON THE SILVERWARE. ALL PROCEEDS GO TO HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT!!!! HAHA

(via Mr. Sullivan)

It certainly makes an interesting mashup.

(via Douthat)

Nothing in this piece is terribly surprising, but still I like to know how events in the United States are understood in other parts of the world. It would happen that though Hillary Clinton and John McCain are preferred by most Israelis, Mr. Obama is generally the favorite of Arabs. With one caveat:

Some Arabs are less smitten. Anti-Syrian politicians and activists in Lebanon may worry about Mr Obama’s willingness to start talks with Iran, fearing that they could result in America “selling out” Lebanon in exchange for a deal elsewhere in the region. But, for now, he seems to be the candidate of choice among Arabs.

Michael Eric Dyson makes some interesting points in this LA Times Op-Ed. Pointing to some of Dr. King’s controversial statements made after 1965 to mostly black audiences, he says that Revered Wright is clearly a descendent of King’s split opinion on race.

Perhaps nothing might surprise — or shock — white Americans more than to discover that King said in 1967: “I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.” In a sermon to his congregation in 1968, King openly questioned whether blacks should celebrate the nation’s 1976 bicentennial. “You know why?” King asked. “Because it [the Declaration of Independence] has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives.” 

I’m sure many will find this pointless or perhaps even insulting (it’s undeniably hostile to Mrs. Clinton), but I think it’s rather funny.

(via Donklephant)

Making it through Kelefa Sanneh long New Yorker piece about visiting Trinity United Church of Christ did nothing to increase my affinity for the publication, but he did make an interesting point.

Across the street from Trinity’s main entrance is a small building with a sign that says, “St. Matthew Gordon AME Zion.” Its presence, for anyone who notices it, is a reminder of the scrappy little church that Trinity used to be, and of the scrappy little churches all over the city, each harboring dreams of fruitful multiplication. For Wright, black Chicago’s highly competitive religious market was a challenge and a spur; for a different preacher, in a different era, it could be a threat. The media frenzy has obscured, and postponed, the real test facing the church. Bad press does no real harm to a church that relishes an air of opposition, and that relies on cheerful givers, not on mainstream sponsors. (On the contrary, Moss told NPR, the controversy “has brought the entire church together.”) But the next challenge will become increasingly clear. After thirty-six years with Wright at the helm, an idiosyncratic megachurch is trying to change its leadership without changing its identity. Once Wright’s moment in the media spotlight is over, his church will have to figure out how to get along without him.

For The New Republic, Eve Fairbanks may or may not be reading too much into the effectiveness of Wikipedia editors:

To test the air, I undertook my own little, highly unscientific experiment. I made a professional-looking but somewhat negative edit on each of the candidate’s pages. For Hillary, I wrote a line on the hopelessness of her chances even when you count superdelegates; for Obama, I added a phrase about his loss of some white support. My Obama edit was fully scrubbed within three minutes, by an editor I’d never even seen before. My Hillary edit languished untouched for four hours until Schilling finally got around to deleting it. But, even then, he carefully preserved my skeptical text and pasted it onto the separate history-ofHillary’s-campaign page, a gesture of acceptance. It has remained there, a little wart on Hillary’s Wikipedia face, untouched, ever since.

(via Slashdot)

Though I wouldn’t vouch for the veracity of this, it’s undeniable that it’s an interesting and reasonable account:

According to a Democratic strategist unaligned with any campaign but with knowledge of the situation gleaned from all three camps, the answer is simple: Obama blew it. Speaking to Edwards on the day he exited the race, Obama came across as glib and aloof. His response to Edwards’s imprecations that he make poverty a central part of his agenda was shallow, perfunctory, pat. Clinton, by contrast, engaged Edwards in a lengthy policy discussion. Her affect was solicitous and respectful. When Clinton met Edwards face-to-face in North Carolina ten days later, her approach continued to impress; she even made headway with Elizabeth. Whereas in his Edwards sit-down, Obama dug himself in deeper, getting into a fight with Elizabeth about health care, insisting that his plan is universal (a position she considers a crock), high-handedly criticizing Clinton’s plan (and by extension Edwards’s) for its insurance mandate.

(via The Page)

The whole world seems to be expect massive and sweeping change when a new president takes office in 2009. The Economist, which has a large special report elaborating the point, doubts that’s what will happen.

There are several ways in which the next president can indeed act fast to restore America’s world standing. But the list is short. The mere fact of not being Bush will bring a dividend of goodwill. On top of this, he or she should send out an early message that on some issues the change of guard will mean a change of heart. An America that closed Guantánamo, imposed a clear ban on any sort of torture (by the CIA as well as the army) and shut the CIA’s secret prisons could once again claim to lead the free world by example and not just by military power. A new president should also say more forthrightly than Mr Bush ever dared that America means to co-operate in the fight against global warming, and will consider joining the International Criminal Court. Mr Bush’s cavalier rejection of the Kyoto protocol, and his hostility to the ICC, did much to antagonise the world even before the war in Iraq.

All these would be welcome changes of substance and symbolism. But even this short list will throw up difficulties. Closing Guantánamo may require America to try the suspected terrorists it can build a case against but let the others go free—free, if nobody else takes them, on American soil. And although it is easy for a president to promise international co-operation on climate change, it is hard to make Congress enact laws that trample on vested interests, threaten to hamper growth or price Americans out of their huge cars. The Senate would not have ratified Kyoto even if Mr Bush had asked it to.

The same people who brought you crowdsourced color names, have crowdsourced the evaluation of media bias. Their results look interesting, even if I’m not sure they’re trustworthy. (It appears they let people know the source of the story, which could very well change their perception of that story’s bias.)

I apologize for bringing this up over and over again, but this dialogue between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury is the deepest and most penetrating discussion about race and Obama’s speech that I’ve seen thus far. (If you’re impatient, you may want to skip the first ten minutes.) Would that cable news commentators were half this good.

Bonus: The latest music video made by Barack Obama supporters. (via Coudal Fresh)

Apologies to those — including Mr. Obama’s campaign — already tired of hearing about it, but Dan Schnur had something interesting to say about Barack Obama’s now-everywhere speech.

It was another conciliator from a distant era whose advice was perhaps most useful as Barack Obama prepared to explain his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “If a problem cannot be solved,” Dwight Eisenhower once said. “Enlarge it.”

Speaking of the Obama speech… Though I’ve never been as down on Mike Huckabee as most, I was never a fan. And then he says something like this:

As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!” I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

(via Donklephant, through Daily Kos)

The Daily Intelligencer has compiled a useful roundup of opinions on yesterday’s speech by the usual suspects. As you could expect, the right generally denigrated it and the left generally praised it. But, if you actually read the list you’ll get the nuances within those positions.

On a lighter note, The Onion reports that no one wants to give that black guy change.