25 questions
When I started reading this list of questions, some of them initially struck me as naive. I don't know why I had that initial reaction, because thought about them some more and most of them strike me as damned good questions.
Not the end of Iraq combat operations
As spelled out by Antiwar.com, the Obama Administration is spinning furiously to convince us that the U.S. military is no longer conducting "combat operations" in Iraq, and the corporate media is eating it up. Since there is no more "combat" in Iraq, let's have a parade in downtown Baghdad!
Arianna Huffington pushes Hope 2.0
Arianna Huffington had people in me in mind when she wrote this post acknowledging that many progressives are sorely disappointed with Barack Obama. She suggests that the problem stems from his pragmatist temperament:
I get that the progressives, and the activists, and the young people who voted for the first time, and the disillusioned voters who returned to the polls in '08, feel slighted by the president. You thought you had a special connection with him, but it turns out he'd rather hang out with Larry Summers, flirt with Olympia Snowe, or play war games late into the night with David Petraeus. Face it: he just isn't that into you. But, in the end, it doesn't matter where the president's heart is -- it matters what he does. LBJ wasn't that into the National Voting Rights Act until Martin Luther King and the Selma march pushed him into it. If Obama is going to do the right thing for America's middle class by sticking to his promise to start winding down (for real) the war in Afghanistan in July 2011, and by prioritizing jobs over the long-term deficit, the passion is going to have to come from outside the White House.
We are in deep trouble, educationally speaking
I just spotted this on Slate: "Less than one in four high school graduates in 2010 who took the ACT college-entrance exam were found to have the skills necessary for basic entry-level classes."
Real life mind meld
Michael Balter reports that scientists are honing in on the real-life mechanism that allows two minds to meld during conversation:
Scientists have traditionally considered talking and listening to be two independent processes. The idea is that speech is produced in some parts of the brain, including a region known as Broca's area, and understood in others, including a region known as Wernicke's area. But recent studies suggest that there's actually much more overlap. For example, partners in a conversation will unconsciously begin imitating each other, adopting similar grammatical structures, speaking rates, and even bodily postures. This overlap helps people establish a "common ground" during conversation and may even help them predict what the other is going to say next . . . Some researchers think that so-called mirror neurons, which fire when one individual observes the actions of another, might be involved in these interactions.The scientists conducting the study argue that the experiments they've conducted demonstrate that listeners are active participants to successful conversations.