Ok, that's crazy awesome.

Here's CNN, finally, with a story where the "GOP Witch Hunt" angle does not predominate. 

Obama administration e-mails rais new questions on Benghazi

They'll say whatever they want. At least the story should get out, and not go down the memory hole.

James,

I wish you were wrong. But you're not. I read guys like Jim Geraghty, who summarized it well in his Morning Jolt, and my reactions are two-fold:

1. This is abominable! 
2. Almost nobody cares.

People do care, obviously. But the media (outside of Fox News) either ignores it or subverts it into a story about perfidious Republicans who just want to humiliate our President. A shameful mess.

Actually, the Greek roots would be "fear of the same." Perhaps, in my case, fear of the same political baloney that has kept the economy underperforming for years.

I'm also not familiar with his use of "exploit." Usually when we refer to exploitation, we talk about use for personal benefit. Saletan is apparently disgusted by the use of video of a disgusting practice (Saletan himself admits the practice is disgusting) . . . to end the disgusting practice.

Oh, what knots he ties himself into!

"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal... and this ball began to levitate ... hold on . . . this ball began to . . . one more time . . . this ball . . ."

No society can succeed without people being engaged for the common good. I lean libertarian, but addressing it purely in terms of freedom leads people to repeat FDR's false phrase, "Necessitous men are not free." At the point of electoral politics all we can do is offer immediate benefits, but, as Schroedinger's Cat points out, that's a loser: we've got nothing that competes with "free lunch." Our long-term strategy has to be to lay out cultural alternatives that induce skepticism and distaste for free lunches while strengthening families and local communities.

Absolutely. And those narratives that are most memorable are concrete, involve all of our senses, are exaggerated, or funny, or striking, or pornographic, etc.

There's something to this. Memory is selective, and has to be. No one advocates turning ourselves into involuntary human recorders (if such a thing were possible).

Memory allows us to sustain a discourse, to develop expertise, to internalize knowledge. So far my experience of the art of memory is that it's actually fun. It involves extremely imaginative and creative work.

Knowledge is "sticky." It's easier to remember more than less. Consider the Baker/baker paradox. Tell Person A, "remember that my friend's name is 'Baker,'" and Person B, "remember that my friend is a baker." B will remember this fact much more often than A. Remembering a person's name is an empty fact. That a person is a baker conjures up all kinds of visual, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile association that are easier to remember because they are richer.

Short term memory has a duration measured in seconds. Its capacity is fixed at 7±2 items at any given time. It's not affected by any of the techniques mentioned. You were able, apparently, to create some associations in long term memory and retain those items, but those associations were not resilient enough to persist after that night.

A casual perusal of the Summa Theologica shows the kind of memory techniques required: 631 questions, over 3000 articles, and each article typically references and quotes several written authorities, from the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, and earlier Church Fathers, to contemporaneous Muslim and Jewish philosophers. He did this without Google (which we might use today), and without a pile of written references in front of him, the way a writer might have done anytime in the last two hundred years. I may have know a few phone numbers in my time, but I can safely say it was well under 50 at its peak, probably more like 20. My parents, who to give a time perspective, were in the military in World War II, may have done more, but I'd be surprised if it was 50.

Wallet? Eyeglasses? I'm terrible with all of the above.

I have a leftist friend who displays cultural amnesia. "What do I care what principles guided the founding of country? Those principles aren't necessarily true, so we [meaning he] should determine afresh how to govern ourselves. Beside, the founders were really just following their own drives and wants, not adhering to principles, which are just ex post justifications for their power." This gives him leeway to avoid encountering those founding ideas to begin with, and thus to flush them down the memory hole. He does this automatically, reflexively, so his behavior resembles nothing so much as amnesia.

I'd say something similar was on display in President Obama's second inaugural address.

Hi, Ken,

As a practicing Catholic who upholds the teaching on contraception, I don't see how my faith bars me from supporting Jindal. Please explain.

Jindal is now officially this social conservative's current favorite in 2016. This is genius.