Akkam’s Razor

• What does Barack Obama’s brain look like?: Scientific American Blog - The tendency to get stuck to beliefs is especially worrying when it affects politicians’ decision making, but Lehrer credits president-elect Obama with having a nuanced understanding of the human mind’s potential pitfalls. Obama, he says, is especially skilled at thinking about thinking: “I imagine that if you took a scan of his brain, you would see lots of activity in the prefrontal cortex, which doesn’t mean that he doesn’t experience the primal emotions that come from the amygdala.”
• Bernie Madoff’s Victims: The List -

• Schumpeter on Political Parties (Harper’s Magazine) - A party is a group whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power. If that were not so it would be impossible for different parties to adopt exactly or almost exactly the same programme. Yet this happens as everyone knows. Party and machine politicians are simply the response to the fact that the electoral mass is incapable of action other than a stampede, and they constitute an attempt to regulate political competition exactly similar to the corresponding practices of a trade association. The psychotechnics of party management and party advertising, slogans and marching tunes, are not accessories. They are of the essence of politics. So is the political boss.

The twilight of the Bush Presidency provides many loose threads, with a long list of rogues who may know ‘where the bodies are buried’. I suspect that the Bush legacy will include NOT pardoning the most notorious of his merry band of thieves, such as Scooter, Rummy, and Fredo Gonazalez, in order to preserve his legacy, but also to provide ‘red meat’ for the lunatics to fight over as a Democratic Congress and President attempt to restore order.

That’s why I think Obama should pardon the operators who executed potentially un-Constitutional orders from above - the nameless and faceless non-political law enforcement officials, military personnel, and other career governmental employees. None of them deserve to be haunted with the specter of future prosecution on the grounds of political opportunism, regardless of the party that benefits. But with strings attached.

• Is Obama Planning For Battle Against A Looming Depression, Not A Recession? - No doubt, Obama is smart to treat this crisis as potentially as bad as what the country experienced in the 1930s. He would be committing presidential malpractice if he under-treats the condition, and I'm thrilled that Obama picked a professor from my alma mater (Berkeley) to serve as his chief economist. But the noticeable shift in Obama's discussions about our economic situation, along with hints that he'll be putting on the backburner any tax cut rollbacks or efforts to tackle the deficit, are quite revealing.

• TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Why We’re Rescuing Wall Street and Not the Auto Industry: Citigroup Versus General Motors - Viewed from Wall Street, Citi is too big and important to be allowed to fail while GM is simply a big, clunky old manufacturing company that can go into chapter 11 and reorganize itself. The newly conventional wisdom on the Street is that the failure of the Treasury and the Fed to save Lehman Brothers was a grave mistake because Lehman's demise caused creditors and investors to panic, which turned the sub-prime loan mess into a financial catastrophe — a mistake that must not occur again. So, by this view, the government must do everything and anything to keep Citi alive. But GM? GM is just … jobs and communities.

• Daily Kos: Cardinal Stafford criticizes Obama as ‘aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic’ - Cardinal James Francis Stafford, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See, delivered a lecture on Thursday saying that the future under President-elect Obama will echo Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane. Criticizing Obama as "aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic," he went on to speak about a decline in respect for human life and the need for Catholics to return to the values of marriage and human dignity.
• Bailout is not that likely… -

• Psychology of Cyberspace - Article Index -
• Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history LEWIS H LAPHAM / Harpers Magazine v.309, n.1852, September 2004 1sep04 -
• The New York Times > Week in Review > Image > Dissecting the Changing Electorate -
• Secret Service blamed Palin for sudden spike in Obama death threats | Crooks and Liars - There was a reason, I think, that people were repelled by the ugliness that proceeded from the McCain/Palin campaign this year — common sense, after all, should tell you where this kind of ugliness was heading. It showed up at the polls.

  The problem is finding a way to put out the fuse that they lit.

• Observations on film art and FILM ART : It was a dark and stormy campaign - So the campaigns may teach us something of interest about narratives: You can’t have a gripping narrative without some suspense. You can do without curiosity or surprise, but a story lacking suspense won’t keep us turning enough pages to be curious or surprised. (4) Maybe that’s why the McCain campaign never had a “compelling narrative.” It didn’t build up enough of a sense of how it would win or how, after the election, the future would be different.