The Left Mark

Moving Up in the World

I was a damn good kick-ball player on the hard concrete of 1^st grade recess.   Now I know that sometimes the memory re-crafts things as time goes by, adding an extra layer of polish here and there so that it better fits the demands of nostalgia.   But that’s how I remember it anyway.   I kicked the ball with the power of 12 mules and could have outrun Forest Gump in his prime.  As a result, I tended to  get picked first in pick-up games, and I’m not gonna lie to you – it felt good.

So it came as a pretty big shock to me when Nina and I started having children and I found myself slipping in the rankings.   I know other dads who have complained of a similar problem, but it has always seemed particularly acute in our family.   It makes sense that I wouldn’t be on the top –so I don’t want to come across as some unreasonable whiner– Nina is a superstar and she deserves her #1 ranking.   But I don’t feel like I’m running second.   If we had a dog, it would definitely be in front of me.   Our babysitters easily get the nod ahead of me.   All of Nina’s sisters….well, you guessed it.   The grandparents, my sister, casual friends, neighbors in our building, all would get picked long before me in a line-up.   Even inanimate objects like blankets, toys de jour, dime-a-dozen water bottles, old subway maps, and run of the mill art projects leave me in the dust.    But it’s ok.    I know my place; quietly at the back of the line –always ready to carry heavy items, change light bulbs in the ceiling, or occasionally catch a bug.   And of all the things I am low on the list for, bathroom matters are as low as it gets.  Even the mere mention of my potential presence during a session on the potty brings out a blood curdling scream from Jack.

But life is full of surprises, and every once in a while, even a blind squirrel finds a nut.   As it turns out, today was just the sort of breakthrough day that I’d been waiting for over the past few years.   It started around 2pm this afternoon.   Jack had been holed up behind closed doors in the bathroom for about 20 minutes.  I was watching the Yankee game and removing Max from random objects that he would climb every two or three minutes.  In one stretch, I caught him standing on a doorknob and removed him, only to find him one minute later standing on top of the trash can with a spoon in one hand and a 12 inch pot cover in the other like he was infant Captain America – all standard Sunday stuff.  

But then it happened.   It started with a low whisper, that didn’t sound too different from the wind in our fireplace.   But it wasn’t that.   It was coming from the bathroom.   I walked over and put my ear to the door, careful not to betray my presence.  It almost sounded like he was saying, “Daddy, I’m all done,” but that didn’t make any sense.  So I went and told Nina, and resumed my watch, swiftly plucking Max from his perch on top of a chair back.   But what happened next was not normal, not in the least.   Nina was turned away abruptly at the door with a, “No Mommy, Daddy please.”   You could have hung a picture off of either side of her grin as she came back around the corner.   At first, I didn’t believe it until she reaffirmed what I thought I’d heard as she giggled, “Your presence is requested.”

Now, I’ve changed about a million diapers, but this was new ground for me.   Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect as I opened the door and walked in.   There was no fan on, and the first thing I noticed was that it felt about 20 degrees warmer in there than anywhere else in our apartment.   And then the smell hit me.  I imagine that if it was possible to operate a dairy farm in a closet, it would smell like this.   After checking myself to make sure I wasn’t outwardly reacting –never show fear or weakness in front of your two boys—I casually looked down to assess the situation.   There was Jack, smiling up at his Dad.    He seemed to be standing on his head, holding some sort of nightmarish downward dog position, while grasping the toilet paper in his hand.   He looked up at me with his upside down eyes, and very simply said, “I’m all done Daddy.”    Now a lot of things were going through my head at this moment, but the one that rose to the top was the feeling that, “I’m back”.    Sure, there are definitely some lotteries in life that you don’t want to win.  But thirty plus years later, it still feels good to be number one.

Scoring Life

It’s late at night on a cross country flight that was delayed three hours before leaving JFK due to storms coming off the Pacific.   I believe I land sometime around 2am in San Francisco, and as I sit here, I find myself thinking about people’s lives represented as mathematical models.    Specifically, what’s been running through my head over the past weeks in the few slow moments of my life is the idea of real-time scorekeeping.

I’m 36 years old, have been married for years and now have two children.    Many of my friends and colleagues are in some sort of similar position, at least in a general sense – beginning families or considering it, moving further and further down the path of a career, and waking up in the morning with things like back pain for the first time.    I suppose the same is true for people all over the place at this stage in their lives, but I seem to find myself in a lot of conversations with folks who are assessing themselves.   Did they make the right decisions about what career field to get into?   Should they have stayed at that company longer?    Are they working too hard?    Should they be working harder?   Should they just flee their hectic city lives and head towards a simpler life?   Are they getting compensated enough?   Is there enough meaning in their lives?    In the end, I guess it all boils down to a single underlying question – are they living a good life. 

Years ago, I read Naseem Taleb’s great book, Fooled By Randomness, and one of the many parts that has stuck with me since was a section where he discusses why people who own stocks are less and less happy the more frequently they check their portfolios.   The basic reasoning is this – if a person loses a dollar or gains a dollar, the two events trigger different chemical reactions within the body.   For most people, the disappointment of the loss is not equal to the joy of the gain.    So if you bet a dollar on the flip of a coin and then flipped it 100 times in a row, settling up each time, the result would be a significant net disappointment, despite the fact that on average, you haven’t gained or lost anything.   Applied to the stock market, the situation is slightly different.    In general, markets tend to rise over time.   So, if you only check your portfolio once a year, in general that should be a happy event more often than not.     Conversely, no matter what the general trend of any stock may be, if you check it with infinite frequency, it should be up or down effectively 50% of the time.   So the casual observer is more prone to be happy.   And the trader with infinite frequency is prone to be unhappy, despite the fact that his portfolio may be performing far better.

I think it was this analysis, rattling around somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind in between sales trajectory curves and monte carlo simulation results, that probably led me to picture happiness in the context of the above questions on a visual basis – eg. plotted on a chart over the span of an 80 year life.    So if we look at it in this frame, how would you keep score for the following 8 “people”? 
When considered in this frame, it seems to me that the question itself is fundamentally useless, especially with respect to the validity of any finite measurement at a specific point in time.   Further to this point, we have to take into account that people often are not happy even when they are supposedly on top of the world.   In Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Big Short, he tells the story of Dr. Michael Burry, one of the first hedge fund managers to foresee the looming subprime crisis.    Dr. Burry positioned his fund Scion Capital perfectly for the fallout and made a fortune for his investors and for himself.    Before the profits started to flow in, with investors moving towards open revolt, he wrote an email to his wife saying that “It feels like my insides are digesting themselves.”    So when the market turned exactly according to his predictions and his $550 million fund generated profits in excess of $700 million in a single year, you would have thought that there would have been enough of an equal and opposite happiness reaction to make Newton proud, but nothing of the sort happened.   In fact, after it was all done, he wrote to a friend, “…this business kills a part of life that is pretty essential.   The thing is, I haven’t identified what it kills.  But it is something that is vital that is dead inside of me.”   

So what does this mean for those of us who are riding our own curve, anywhere from a third to half way across the chart?   First of all, there has to be a recognition that the individual cannot see all of the data, and as such, cannot score the game.    Second, I think my suggestion to friends and colleagues who are wrestling with an unhappy section of their own personal chart will be something along the lines of the following, “Keep flipping that coin as much as your thumbs will allow.    But just don’t bother checking to see if it’s heads.”

The Problem with a Narrowcast World

While most people would argue that the explosion of content creation technologies (web publishing software, video editing tools, audio mixing tools, cheap portable HD cameras, etc.), media channels (600+ and growing cable networks, millions of blogs, podcasting network, etc.) and distribution technologies (namely, the broadband internet) over the past decade has been a boon for consumers, I’m going to jump out and raise a red flag in the face of it all.      Because our brains are hard-wired to prefer corroborative information (even to the point of filtering out and/or ignoring non-corroborative data), the trend towards increasing consumption of narrowcast media creates a series of dangerous conditions, hurts individuals along the way, and at least in my mind, runs the risk of weakening society.

A Pencil and a Dream

Literature has benefited tremendously from centuries of equal opportunity business.   You do not need to be rich to write a book.   You do not need to have the right connections.    You just need a paper and pencil, a typewriter, or more recently, a computer.    The result has been the creation of a tremendously diverse global body of work, and with infinite time and no publisher restrictions, a voracious reader could get a pretty good look at the whole human experience in every corner of the globe over the past few hundred years.    But that is not how most people consume media by choice.   Most people prefer to focus.   No matter what you’re interested in, and what perspective you agree with, you could easily spend a lifetime reading nothing but books on that subject, written by authors with shared perspective.    This can be very comforting.

 

Three $500,000 Cameras, $2mm of film, a few million dollars of editing time, a 300 person staff…. and a Dream

Until very recently, feature film and television have been quite different from the open conditions of the literary world.    Television spent its first 40 years with essentially 3 channels available to distribute programming.    Feature film has been a similarly closed experience, driven largely by the huge cost associated with making a quality film, leading almost all mainstream filmmakers to have to access the necessary capital through a small number of major studios.    These conditions in television and film had two direct consequences.  First, the content that was produced was generally crafted to speak to as many different audience constituencies as possible.    As an audience member, you were likely to find occasional pieces that you really agreed with, and just as frequently, find pieces that you strongly disagreed with – as you were not THE audience, but rather, a very small part of a highly diverse audience.    Because fare was limited and aimed at broad swaths of the population, viewers were subjected to a much more diverse array of stories and perspectives than they would otherwise choose to watch in a more open system.

Second, a vast array of highly talented storytellers were never given the voice that their talent would have otherwise merited.

The “Democratization of Video Media”

The restricted nature of video media has changed rapidly over the past decade, and the pace of change is only accelerating.     iPhones with embedded video cameras and basic editing software are the poster child for this emerging era of video literacy.   Now, we’re all producers and directors.    When we couple a Twitter-like promotion engine with an increasingly video literate society, “channels” and “programs” will be rapidly replaced by “people channels I subscribe to”.

 

“I Love This Guy, He Thinks Just Like Me”

As news sources and opinion publications proliferate towards infinity, we all search (whether consciously or subconsciously) for our perfect channel of information.   Finding it is a wonderful experience – as you suddenly find that “this page has everything I want to know”.     The voice is highly resonant, as it’s basically your own.   You feel like you’re getting exactly the information you’ve been looking for, but without the clutter.     These “channels” can be broadly shared (i.e. MSNBC, FoxNews, The Drudge Report, the Daily Show, The Huffington Post, etc.), or much more narrow (i.e. individual smaller blogs like Davenetics).   The bottom line, though, is that you get exactly what you’re looking for with each of these, and nothing more.    It’s both comforting and easy.    Your viewpoints are validated, reinforced and, ultimately, entrenched.

But isolation, even if it’s unintended, is still isolation.    If we consider Darwin’s birds of the Galapagos, it’s hard not to wonder if information isolation will not have analogous social and cultural “evolutionary” ramifications.    If we remove ourselves from contact with anything other than self-selected information and communities, will we lose the ability to interact reasonably and productively with people outside of those communities in time?    How long would this take?    What kind of impact would this have on society, particularly the parts of it where people from different information communities are forced to interact?

 

Information Availability is NOT the Problem

My gripe is not with search engines and information availability.   Fact retrieval is easier now than ever before, and in some cases this can help create a more curious society – if I want to know the average lifespan of an albatross or birthplace of John Maynard Keynes, I can find both of these answers in less than 30 seconds on just about any cell phone from pretty much any place in the world.   I have seen in my own life how this has changed my relationship with small information and unknown trivia.   Whereas previously, I might have asked someone and given up quickly if they didn’t respond with the answer, now I find that I expect an answer for anything that sparks my curiosity.    With approximately 43 seconds of searching, I can tell you that the average albatross lives amazingly for 42.3 years despite a brutal life on the seas, and that John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, England on June 5th, 1883.

And I’m not in any way against narrowcast media.   After all, with this blog’s loyal readership of seven readers, I’m using one of the most narrowcast methods available to put forward my thoughts :)   Targeted sources of information can be great, for many of the reasons listed above.   But they need to be only a part of the total input.   

 

Calling for a New Era of BROADcast Information

Broadcast entertainment still works fine, so why can’t “broadcast” news (and I don’t necessarily mean it in the  traditional context, but rather defined as broadly targeted at a diverse array of people)?    Whether it’s American Idol, the Superbowl or the July 4^th blockbuster release of The Transformers, as a society, we have no problem sharing in experiences despite the fact that we may individually be very different people.  

I don’t know what the new format will look like, but I feel strongly that the continued decline of network news and the accelerating death of the major newspapers are somehow a very dangerous development.   So, while the venture community focuses on alternative energy sources/transmission technology, clean-tech, performance marketing and other hot areas du jour, perhaps some of the social entrepreneurs can take a look at something slightly less sexy…something that marries Walter Cronkite to Sergey Brin. 

The solution is not a television show or a newspaper.   It will almost surely take full advantage of emerging technologies.   My guess is that it will have attributes of Google News (democratized roll-ups of a broad array of news channels, ordered by popularity), it will prominently feature or be exclusively video, and it will openly (and proudly) incorporate the editorial input of a respected array of thinkers with a diverse set of belief systems.

And whatever it is, it won’t taste like medicine, but it’ll be good for us all.    

Great Press for Capt. Mckee

As readers from the early years of this blog know, I used to fish every year with a friend of mine in a flyfishing tournament in the Keys for tarpon, permit and bonefish.     With work piling up and a seemingly endless procession of weddings, I haven't made it down there for the last two years.    However, as much as busy schedules and constant travel could be blamed for my loss of interest in the tournament, I think one of the biggest reasons was that our guide moved  to Vieques, Puerto Rico.     Our final year fishing with Capt. McKee was definitely less jovial than others, partially because we were far off the leaderboard, but mostly because we knew that we were never going to win the tournament again.     I remember hanging out with Greg that Saturday night after two days on the flats.   We toasted the years past - in particular the year we won the tournament - and his last words to me were, "You guys should definitely come down to Vieques once I get set up.   There's not a person in sight, and there's more tarpon than you could imagine."

Now, two years later I found myself reading through the New York Times and I saw a picture on the cover of the Travel section that looked very familiar.    Upon closer inspection, sure enough, there was Capt. Greg McKee polling through the flats in Vieques.    It's a good article about a place that sounds like it deserves a visit from anyone who has ever wanted to catch a tarpon on a fly.    And I can tell you flat out that there's not a better guide on any flat than Capt. McKee.    Congratulations on the great press Greg.    Let's just hope for Greg's sake that Neil Bohannon doesn't read the New York Times!

An Ocean of Questions

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting on the roof deck of my friend Chris’ mother’s house in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  I’m five stories above the Pacific Ocean, but because of the way the sound collects on the concrete structures below and around her house, the acoustics of the crashing waves are actually amplified, making it sound louder than if I were sitting on the beach ten feet from the break. The house is wired throughout, and I’ve got some Tito Puente playing on my iPod through the stereo three stories below, which of course fires out the tiki bar speakers on the roof. Now, as the sun prepares to set midway through my first vacation in about three years, I was struck by an insatiable urge to whip out the ole’ laptop and update my blog for the first time in a long while. Isn’t technology great?

In fact, it so happens that technology is going to be the focus of this post.  I recently finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Abe Lincoln Team of Rivals (which is a truly amazing book and deserves a blog post of its own), and when I closed out the last page, I found myself so emotionally impacted by the amazing character and character-based accomplishments of this man that I needed something very different for a next book.  So, I grabbed a Christmas present from my Mom and Dad, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. And different is what I got.

For people who are not familiar with Ray Kurzweil, it’s worth pointing out up-front that he is one of the most peer-respected inventors, thinkers and futurists around today, with, as his bio points out, “a twenty year track record of accurate predictions,” largely rooted in the future of technology. PBS named him one of “16 revolutionaries that made America”, along with other inventors over the past two centuries. He is the recipient of 13 honorary doctorates, as well as the Lemelson-MIT prize, which is apparently the world’s most prestigious prize for innovation. In short, the guy is no dummy.

The Singularity is Near is in many ways a simple book with a simple premise; that people mistakenly view the future, and the future pace of change, with an inherently linear frame, and as such, most people on the planet are essentially oblivious to the fact that technological innovation and adoption progress exponentially (and in some cases with an exponential exponent). More importantly, few people have an accurate idea of just how vast the changes that are coming down the pipe are, and how soon these paradigm shifting technologies will be here.

Understanding the Exponential Pace
Let’s think about this for a second. I know that I have certainly been guilty of using this linear frame to think about the future. Looking back, a common view of paradigm shifting technologies is that they happen about once a generation, and the same pace will hold true through our lifetimes. But this breaks down with closer inspection. It took the telephone about 60 years to become a mainstream technology. Radio, which was invented nearly 30 years later, took over 30 years to become mainstream. Television, took about 25 years to become mainstream. The PC, which was invented nearly 40 years later, took less than 20 years to become mainstream. But here’s where things get interesting, as we hit the “knee of the curve” (a term used to describe the point where the exponential nature of a curve really kicks in) following the PC. Mobile phones followed less than 10 years after the invention of the PC and became mainstream in just over 10 years. Most recently, the World Wide Web went from first commercialization to fully adopted mainstream technology in 7 years. As he points out the in book, according to this exponential pace post-knee “technological progress in the 21^st century will be the equivalent of two hundred centuries of progress (at the [linear] rate of progress in 2000).”

How is This Possible?
If you consider this statement – that we will have two hundred centuries (20,000 years) of progress, at the current rate of development, in the next 100 years – it’s totally understandable if you’re reaction is something along the lines of “No way. That’s impossible.”     But closer analysis will help you understand how something like this could make sense. Most non-technophobes are familiar with Moore’s Law – an observation made by Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, in the mid-1970’s that we double the number of transistors on an integrated circuit of the same size every 24 months. This has held true since then and is expected to hold true at least through 2020, and probably indefinitely beyond with the shift to three-dimensional molecular computing.  What does this mean to those of us in the rest of the world, who use computers to send email and watch YouTube clips, and who are more familiar with Roger Moore than Gordon? It means that computer processing power doubles every 2 years. But what’s really interesting, and what helps make an outrageous statement like the one above make at least some rational sense is that processing power is not the only technological component subject to Moore’s Law-like exponential advances. The same is true microprocessor cost, RAM prices, magnetic storage capacity and many others. When you boil it all down and consider how advanced computing power already is, then subject it to the already proven continual exponential growth, it’s hard to argue with his conjecture that by mid-2020’s, every person on the planet will have the ability to buy a $1,000 computer with enough computational power to equal all cumulative human thought throughout history (nearly 10 billion people) in less than one thousandth of a second. 

Then, when you consider the application-oriented impact that all of this processing power is already having, you start to see the whole picture. DNA sequencing data is growing exponentially. Brain scanning capability (resolution and speed) is growing exponentially. All aspects of nanotechnology (size, computational power, communication capability) are shrinking or growing exponentially, respectively. A great example of how computational power increases effect linear models is a look at the story of the human genome project. Quoting from the book, “When the human-genome scan got underway in 1990 critics pointed out that given the speed with which the genome could then be scanned, it would take thousands of years to finish the project. Yet the fifteen-year project was completely slightly ahead of schedule with a first draft in 2003.”

It is in this light that I started to understand just how different the tools of tomorrow will be from the tools of today. But, this is still just the backdrop of the post – albeit a necessary backdrop in order to appreciate the legitimacy of Kurzweil’s main point and real subject of my post.  Kurzweil’s central point is that as the computational power of available technology reaches that of the human brain, and then quickly surpasses it and all collective human brains, non-biological intelligence will become the driver of progress and will no longer be slowed down by human boundaries, thereby growing the exponent exponentially until all matter and energy near us in the universe is used for computation and the storage of information.  If this last part sounds like a bit of a stretch, consider what happens as we pass the point where non-biological intelligence surpasses biological intelligence, which he refers to as “the singularity”. After this point, non-biological intelligence will be able to evolve itself drawing off of a combination of (i) its super-intelligence, (ii) instantaneous access via the Internet to all available human knowledge at all times, (iii) the fact that non-biological intelligence is much more efficient at transferring information from one node to another vs. human’s highly inefficient language-based sharing mechanisms and (iv) the fact that it doesn’t need coffee breaks or get tired. Oh yeah, and don’t forget that it will continue to get access to exponentially more computational power over time after the singularity, at the very least – a point that is almost certainly dramatically over conservative given the fact that the current exponential growth pace is based on non-superintelligent human progress. How realistic is this? Well, artificial intelligence (AI) systems are already in use today doing things like scheduling airline traffic, reviewing data from surveillance satellites, monitoring the stock markets for insider trading and other fraud, and aerospace engineers have even been using genetic algorithms (so-called because of their ability to actually evolve on their own) to design highly sophisticated equipment like new jet engines. In short, the integration of non-biological intelligence into society is already well underway.

Before we get to the singularity though, the first step will be the integration of biological and non-biological intelligence, and this was actually much more interesting for me because as I thought about it, I was somewhat stunned to realize that I actually believed it was possible in the somewhat near-term given the exponential advance frame from above. Naturally, this is a highly controversial topic, and one that will undoubtedly be met with highly emotional responses – namely fear, disgust, disbelief and outright rejection. And understandably so, as this quickly becomes a religious question (readers of this blog will now finally understand why I choose this topic as the first thing to write about in so long).

D.A.R.Y.L. on Steroids
The integration of biological and non-biological intelligence has already begun with numerous experiments ranging from hybrid neural networks to devices aimed at replacing damaged areas of the brain causing diseases like Parkinson’s. But this is only the beginning. Kurzweil believes that by the 2040’s, we will have fully non-biological entities that we could upload new or existing human personalities to that will be able to easily pass the Turing test – essentially meaning that they will be conversationally utterly indistinguishable from biological humans. As far as I can tell, people will fall into two camps on this matter. People who are in any way religious or faith grounded (even so casually that they might frequently say that they are not religious at all), will find it very difficult to believe that this is possible.  It just clashes too much with a traditional view of the human soul. In their minds, even if these non-biological entities are possible (a point they will certainly contest) and no matter how realistic, they will believe in their heart that these things will not truly behave like humans, and most importantly, they will not BE human. Purely rational atheists who view the human body as nothing more than a highly evolved machine, made up of nothing but chemical and electrical mysteries that are all ultimately solvable with the proper equipment and insight, will find themselves believing this to be possible. Perhaps they will be as shocked at themselves as I was as I thought about this, as viewing their own personalities in the frame of nothing more than an elaborately evolved collection of analog and digital, chemical and electrical processes can be a disconcerting thought experiment.

If we can perfectly reverse engineer the brain (and if you fall in the purely rational camp, there seems to be no reason to believe that we will not be able to do so with the proper advances in technology – which seem to be right around the corner as per the above backdrop information), can we so easily say that a non-biological person would be any less “human?”  Again, from a purely rational perspective, I think the answer has to be ‘no’. If the engineering is perfect and the non-biological brain functions exactly as the biological one, it would be hard to view this non-biological entity as casually as we view a toaster, for example.

What would the creation of non-biological humans mean to modern monotheistic religions that are built around the central role of humanity in the universe and their interplay with a God? If people are just biological machines that can be perfectly replicated by other people, does this in any way damage God’s role in the universe or the legitimacy of His accomplishments?  Or conversely, what could the failure to achieve something like this given adequate technology mean to atheists and their beliefs about the essentially random and ultimately irrelevant role of humans in the universe?

While one could easily look at this impending success or failure point and think that it will represent an “answer” to some of the super-questions like ‘does God exist’, I’m sad (or happy – depending upon how you want to look at it) to say that I don’t think this will happen at all. Ultimately, I don’t see the results of advances in this technology, or any technology for that matter, shedding much light on these questions. It may shift the goal posts a bit, so to speak, but as has happened again and again throughout the progress of science, the more philosophical role of God should remain untouched. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts on topics like Intelligent Design, regardless of how much we learn about what the physical rules of the universe are and how things work the way they do, there is simply nothing that science can ever offer us about WHY the rules are as they are. Astrophysicists can tell you Einstein’s cosmological constant to fifteen decimal places and tell you what that means to the expansion of the universe, but they can’t tell you why it is what it is.

But long before we get to have that argument over campfires with our non-biological fishing buddies, however, there seem to be a lot of practical questions that need to be addressed as we head towards “the singularity.” As a soon-to-be parent and the husband of a teacher, it strikes me that we’ll likely need to give the entire education system a major upgrade, probably a lot sooner than people think. With so much of today’s education focused on the accumulation of a somewhat narrow base of knowledge across a wide array of subjects which will enable us to function productively in society, it seems that the focus of curricula will need to be adapted to make us more efficient and effective users of the tools that will be at our disposal.  For example, I doubt it will it still make sense to spend months learning the key dates and names of the American civil war or the advance of the European explorers, when we will be able to download the entirety of this information into the non-biological component of our brains in a matter of minutes. Instead, it seems that the focus should be reoriented towards exercises that help future generations harness their creativity to better use the technology at their disposal. This creativity can be then be applied to subtopics like problem solving, the arts, interpersonal dynamics (conflict resolution, etc.), critical analysis and design.  Instead of learning about General George McClellan’s failed 1862 Peninsula Campaign, students might instead be asked WHY he failed against General Lee’s smaller army, and to design a tactical simulation that would have succeeded in accomplishing Lincoln’s goal at the time – namely, ending the civil war three years earlier than it ultimately did, and saving tens of thousands of American lives. I have to admit, taking all of the time in schools that is currently needed for data/background accumulation and transitioning it to guided critical analysis sounds pretty interesting to me and makes me somewhat jealous of our kids.

What does this mean for real estate prices?
Ultimately, regardless of whether or not these technological advances happen exactly according to Kurzweil’s aggressive timeframe, it does seem likely that we will experience his three revolutions (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) during our lifetimes.   While the scope of what we can expect in the future unfortunately takes the wind out of my sails a bit on my excitement over wifi networks and iPods overlooking the Pacific, it does open up a whole host of questions. And isn’t the inherently human characteristic of asking questions what life is all about?

So, as I prepare to shut down my computer and go back to the task of staring at the ocean, I strangely find myself stuck wondering about what genetic and nanotechnology advances will mean to real estate prices in New York City.  Assuming we can extend life essentially indefinitely through gene therapy and nanobot-based cellular repair, it seems that the population growth will skyrocket and real estate prices will continue their relentless ascent. Maybe buying a place in New York does make sense? Of course, after the singularity it sounds like we will all be living in virtual Victorian mansions inside our $1,000 laptop supercomputers, which does make a $2 million studio apartment seem a bit unnecessary. Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to let it play out. And anyway, it’s time to change the Tito.

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PC Strikes Again: Why Kerry's Joke is Inflammatory for All the Wrong Reasons

I have always had a problem with the concept of "political correctness".     In my mind, the very idea of self-censorship or societal censorship because some specific verbiage isn't PC, misses the point by a wide mark.   In a sense, it teaches us that while it's ok to perpetuate stereotypes behind language, it's wrong to give voice to them in certain circumstances and around certain people.    As far as I can tell, this linguistic sweep-under-the-carpet gives beliefs - the real problem - a hiding place where they can fester over generations, while language is polished and buffed for everyday use.    

I was particularly angered during the past few days as John Kerry's "botched joke heard round the world" took over the airwaves.      It proved once again that John Kerry is a hopelessly inept communicator.   But that certainly isn't news to anyone that's had even a single ear to the rails of politics over the past 4 years.    So why did this story become the top headline on every 24 hour news channel and every newspaper in America?    Because what Kerry had said was terribly un-PC, and was immediately recast by operatives from coast-to-coast as a callous implication that American troops are stupid.    If you believe Kerry, the fact of the matter is that he was actually trying to make a joke about president Bush, and that the botched joke was actually supposed to poke fun at the problems that arise from naive foreign policy born out of intellectual laziness.   There's nothing terribly inflammatory about that - or funny for that matter.   What is inflammatory, is any discussion about a condition that exists in this country and has ever since the switch to an all voluntary armed forces; namely, that the burden of defending the United States is and has been disproportionately carried by lesser privileged citizens, while wealthier citizens with more opportunity have largely taken a pass - their children going on to high-priced colleges and their parents developing foreign policy with little impact on the people in their social circles.   To be certain, there are exceptions to any generality, and there most definitely are here.     But the fact remains that military marketers spend more money, more time, and greater attention focusing on under-privileged Americans, and consequently, that's where the bulk of the enrollment comes from.

What should be inflammatory is this very condition.    It's unfair, and a good argument could be made that it leads to if not bad policy, certainly different policy than would be passed if the armed forces were a true cross section of American youth.   Unfortunately, the knight in shining armor that is PC stepped in, and will instantly and completely squelch any and all debate about the underlying condition, the actual existence of which caused everyone to react so viscerally to a bad joke.    Kerry has now issued numerous apologies (comically confusing as usual), many Democrats have distanced themselves from him and canceled joint campaign events, and no one with serious political ambition will ever bring up this issue again.....which is a good thing, right?

Unfortunately, we seem to be heading into a period politically where language matters above all else, and substance rides shotgun or not at all.    This was evidenced recently by the "big news" that the Bush administration was changing the way it talked about Iraq - abandoning "stay the course" in favor of a more emotionally pleasing slogan.    Aside from a few newspapers and pundits, little attention was paid to the fact that nothing had actually changed strategically or on the ground in Iraq.    Will the troops be any safer if our civilian leaders start calling enemy bullets "happy metal feeling conveyors"?    I expect that this shift will be somewhat short-lived, though, as it is built on the belief that Americans are stupid.    They're not.    They're just busy and prone to believe that people are inherently good-natured, and for the most part, honest.    When sloganeering and cries of violations of the sacred PC are used too haphazardly, and too obviously - as they are now - to divert attention from the truth, my suspicion is that people will wake up and look beyond the language.

Just don't tell anyone I wrote this.   It's probably not PC, and I don't want to hurt my chances running for assistant coach of our softball team next spring.

A 7 to 1 Horatio

It’s a well known fact within mathematical circles, spheres and tesseracts that children named Horatio are better at statistics than children with all possible other names. And while the reasons behind this reality have long dominated pediatric psychology research grant allocations, little in the way of hard fact has been unearthed to explain the phenomenon. Is this trend indicative of the premonitory powers of a mother and some sixth sense connection that develops throughout the pregnancy? Or, is it rather that children named Horatio are somehow infinitesimally less scared of mathematical terminology, like say the word “ratio”, and therefore end up feeling slightly more comfortable than their peers in early math classes.

I have to admit, though, that I think wasting time and money trying to figure out why is missing the point, and perhaps more importantly, the opportunity in this field. The real question is what can we name our children to make them good at other things, and how bulletproof is this emerging trend? Can we take it for granted that children named Landis will have easier paths to become successful real estate speculators than, say, competitive cyclists?

Names certainly are a tricky business. Take NFL wide receiver Peerless Price for example.    In the last two years, he’s had a grand total of 51 catches for just over 600 yards and 3 touchdowns. 122 other receivers had more catches than him in 2005, so it seems to me that by any objective measurement, he probably should have been named something like Peerful or Just-Barely-Good-Enough-to-Be-in-the-League Price. But then again, perhaps he only made it to the NFL because of his name. It’s at least possible that without a name like Peerless, he would have practiced a little less hard in high school, taken college ball a little less seriously, and who knows, perhaps he would have ended up a statistician. But I guess that would have screwed up the numbers for all the Horatios, rendering this whole line of thinking moot. Oh well, I guess you could always name your kid Bill. Then at least you have a serviceable name and a fall-back career with the IRS.

Making Every Vote Count

A Simple Proposal for Improving the Electoral Process
 

Long before the 2008 election, it simply won’t matter whether or how most Americans vote. Whether they stay home, vote for Ronald McDonald, pick a name out of a hat, or spend countless months deliberating over the right choice for America’s future, their decision will be essentially meaningless with respect to the ultimate outcome of the election.

While this is a bit of an exaggeration, in terms of perception, the reality is that this is how most Americans will feel (and will be told by the media) as a result of a flaw in the design of the Electoral process, which assigns the entirety of each state’s electoral college votes to the winner, regardless of their margin of victory (true for every state but Maine and Nebraska).

In the 2004 presidential election, 31 states (including the District of Columbia) had voter margins exceeding 10%, setting up a scenario where the results of those states’ elections, and the subsequent assignment of their allocated electoral college votes, was known with near certainty long before the actual election. Another 10 states had margins exceeding 5%, leaving only 10 states where the results were close enough to leave a sense of uncertainty. The media made this point clear. And worse, the candidates and their campaigns made this equally clear by focusing their campaigns on these few states and essentially eliminating all communications in the other 40 states.

The effect of this condition is predictable and disheartening. Voter turnout varies significantly based upon whether you live in a state where your vote “matters” or not. As shown in the chart on the right (click the chart to enlarge), average voter turnout in states with greater than 10% election margins was nearly 7% lower than turnout in states where the results were less certain. While this is certainly influenced by the increased media attention and “get out the vote” campaigns in those hotly contested states, the undeniable fact is that voters in the vast majority of the states feel somewhat left out of the democratic process, and they often show it by becoming disinterested and removing themselves entirely.

Past Debates about the Electoral College
Designed originally as a means to help keep the smaller states from being rendered powerless by the more populous states, the Electoral College is no stranger to debate. As recently as the 2000 election, a chorus of people called for an end to the Electoral College, arguing that it was an antiquated process that was no longer relevant in modern times. However, the difference between their argument and mine is one of goals. In 2000, the voices of change were advocating it largely out of political convenience, namely because their candidate (Al Gore) had lost the election despite winning the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. My position and proposal are not motivated by a desire to help shift circumstances in the favor of my candidate (as evidenced by the chart below which shows that the results of the 2004 election would have remained the same under my proposed change – again, click chart to enlarge), but rather, a sincere concern and a desire to avoid a political outcome that I foresee in the future – where presidential elections are decided in a few swing counties in Florida and Ohio, while the rest of the country becomes a passive spectator, watching as $500mm of television ads are run in Dade and Cuyahoga counties.

My Proposal – Alter (not Eliminate) the Electoral College
I am not proposing that we eliminate the Electoral College. However, I believe that by simply changing it so that Electoral College votes are allocated pro rata according to the actual election results in that state, two important changes will happen. First, from the perspective of individual voters, the perception of voting importance will be universally and immediately increased. And second, from the perspective of politicians, every vote will count the same – a vote in Ohio will no longer be more important than a vote in Utah, and as a result, candidates will have to speak to the entire country as opposed to carefully dissected swing subpopulations.

In the chart below, I have attempted to demonstrate how this proposal would  impact the results of the 2004 election.    For the purposes of this chart, I chose to use two decimal places.    However, in a real election setting, I think you would have to eliminate rounding entirely.    This obviously would mean the end of the human role in the Electoral College, as you cannot have 5.53467 individuals from Arizona casting votes for President Bush, but I think it's a small and necessary change, which would dramatically improve presidential politics.

Why Change The System?
Many of the initial people that I've spoken to about this proposed change have reacted in similar ways.    Their first response is usually something along the lines of "hum, that makes sense", but they quickly follow it up with some variant of "yeah, but I'm sure they had some good reason for designing it the way it is, so it's probably better just to leave it as is."     In actuality, there seems to be at least reasonable data to support the idea that the actual process of the election of the president was given relatively little thought (as compared to other more controversial matters at the time) beyond ensuring that George Washington would be elected the first President.

The reality is that, regardless of the legitamacy of the original idea, the world has changed enough in the past 200+ years to merit at least an honest assesment of whether or not we're still employing the best system for the conditions of our time.    The advent of radio, then television and now the Internet have dramatically changed the communication landscape from the original print world within which this system was devised, and given how dramatically each of these has impacted our own lives, it seems fair to assume that they would have some impact on presidential politics as well.    While I think there is data to support my belief that a simple change like the one that I am proposing would positively impact voter turnout (which would be a good thing), that's not the underlying reason for this proposed change.    The real reason is that as politics gets increasingly sophisticated with the continued development of instantaneously integrated nationwide real-time tracking polls, many Americans will be increasingly left out of the system - ignored because their vote is meaningless in a state that was decided years before the actual election - and our country's top official will be elected based upon how well his or her views sell in Florida or Ohio, rather than in every living room in America.    While this might be in the best interests of people in Dade or Cuyahoga county, it sure doesn't seem like it's in the best interest of our country. 

My Fatwah

There comes a point in a man's life where he can no longer suffer the repeated embarrassment and outright disrespect directed at him from another.     The decisions made in those situations can define that man, and his life.    In choosing properly, even if aided by luck, heroes of history are born and men of average intellect crowned geniuses.   On the contrary, the wrong decision can put in motion an uncontrollable series of progressively worse events, with the end being so remote from the beginning, that neither side can remember how things got started, or more importantly, how to get back to normalized relations.

It is with these thoughts weighing heavily on my mind, that today, April 7, 2006, I am issuing a fatwa declaring jihad on trout - in particular, rainbow and brown trout.    The plain and simple truth is that I have been wronged by trout, on a consistent basis, for close to 10 years now.    It took me a while to  realize that this was the case, as, I understand now,  I have become very good at covering up failures with aphorisms, spouting things like "Hey, no worries - that's why they call it fishing and not catching" with greater and greater consistency over the years.    But, with winter ending and thoughts of the Delaware River starting to sprout in my mind like eager tulip bulbs, something snapped in me this year and forced me to conduct an honest accounting of the situation.   

The results of that analysis were not pretty.    I haven't caught anything on my 6 weight that I would disrespect by catching on a 2 weight in at least 8 years.   And, if you don't count fishing in the Keys, I probably haven't caught anything more than 10 x bigger than the flies used to catch them in just as long.   In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if most of the fish that I have caught, were actually not trying to eat my flies, but were merely trying to wrestle or play with them - thinking it was a buddy given their comparable sizes.    Enough's enough.    I'm done taking this lying down.    Trout and I are no longer friends, and the sad truth is that we probably haven't even been on speaking terms since the summer of either '95 or '96.   

So, what do I intend to do about it, and why, you might ask, do I think that openly declaring a jihad will do anything other than further strain an already  floundering relationship?    In response to the former, I have come up with the following:

My 10 Step Plan for Catching a Trout Bigger Than a Carrot:

1. Change my fly line - It's clearly cursed.   Or it smells bad.
2. Learn to think more like a trout - There are a number of good books on this, although, to my knowledge, none of them were published by trout so that does cast some doubt on their accuracy.
3. Invest more in flies - While I do have a pretty good collection of flies, they don't seem to work.   Maybe they got too close to my cursed fly line.
4. Be humble in my approach - There's no need to go for the long cast if there are good pockets closer.    Although it may seem more exciting to throw 40 yards of line out, mending becomes an issue and trout don't seem to be impressed by casting length.
5. Become better at mending line - Trout hate flies that don't get a natural drift.    They seem to particularly hate it when my (cursed) flies get a bad drift.
6. Fish more often - You can't catch a trout in Manhattan.   
7. Don't be fooled by false rises - Sometimes, it seems that trout rise again and again, but never take a fly.   In these situations, it can only be assumed that these trout are actually miniature dolphins (or another closely evolved species), and are coming to the surface for air.
8. Don't be angry if false rises are proven to be mocking - See above.   If, it is rather determined that trout are not actually mammals, and the false rises are actually trout mocking my casts, done for no plausible reason other than to taunt me, do not get angry and cause a scene.   The offending trout don't deserve that pleasure, and it may damage chances with other trout, further up the river.
9. Change flies more frequently - If a fly ain't workin', get it back in the box.
10. Don't fear the "dry fly as indicator, nymph or emerger hanging off the hook" set up - Very complicated, and can be annoying in windy conditions, but I think that trout respect the effort.

While nothing in life is certain, I can say that I feel much better going into the 2006 trout season with a solid plan ready for execution.     As for whether or not my open declaration of jihad will negatively impact my relationship with trout, only time will tell.   That said, I'm not really sure how they would find out anyway.   Given the daily page views numbers on my blog and the fact that, to my knowledge, no trout own computers, it seems difficult to believe that any trout would stumble upon this post doing a Google search on "Collmer trout jihad  Delaware River".    I guess Blackberry's could be a problem.    Otherwise, it would have to be through word of mouth, and the big problem there is that, seeing as I've never seen a trout with ears, I don't think they'd be able to hear someone giving them the warning.    But then again, that could just be that all of the trout I've caught have been too small to grow ears yet.   

When Good Haiku Goes Bad

Just shy of 3am, it was clear that there was only one option left on the table. After a solid three hours of arguing, my buddy Gavin and I both knew that further discussions weren’t going to do a damn bit of good, and that with this being the case, we were going to have to terminate our friendship.

This may sound extreme now, but it really didn’t seem so at the time. We had, after all, had a pretty good run of things for the past 12 years. He was probably my first friend at Cornell. We met as freshmen on the men’s soccer team, later joined the same fraternity, and shortly thereafter, both quit the soccer team together. We had worked together at the Clubhouse, slinging drinks to three hundred 21 year-old students a night, with a combined fifty valid IDs – but hey, ID was last post…now we’re talking about the dangers of poetry and I don’t want to get off topic. After college, Gav moved out to Jackson, Wyoming and I moved to New York. Even though these two places are a lot further apart than the 3,000 miles separating them would suggest, we remained close and it seemed like this was a friendship that was built to withstand the tests of time and geography. That is, it seemed that way until 3am last Saturday night.  So, as we shook hands and prepared to move on with our separate lives, there were no hard feelings and no plans of reconciliation. There was only the cold unarguable knowledge that some wrongs can’t be righted, and some Haikus have too many syllables.

It had all started about 7 hours earlier that night. We were at a wedding reception at Cornell, sitting perhaps no further than 300 yards from the place where Gav and I first met. Nina and I were at one table. Gav was at another. With the mood being just right, the wine flowing, and everyone hunkering down for what all expected to be a great night, I decided to do a very normal, rational thing. I decided to challenge Gav’s table to a Haiku war. And blame it on another table.

The rules seemed fairly self-evident; (i) bring your ‘A’ game, and (ii) no tears. So, after getting the waitress (she was barely old enough to drink in the Clubhouse, which meant she probably didn’t have a driver’s license yet) to bring us a couple of pens and some paper, Nina, Wise (aka Filth Munchem), Tracy, Wittink, Long Island Lou, CC and I set to the task of crafting our opening volley. After a little debate, some syllable counting on fingers, a wax seal and a determination of which table to blame it on (table 18 suckers), we flagged our waitress and briefed her on the plan. We explained the importance of the fact that upon delivery, our identity must remain a secret, and that she should make it clear that table 18 was the aggressor. She took in our instructions, took a deep breath, and began a circuitous route to her destination carrying the following sealed message:

You table eight punks
Worthless brown nosing anti-hunks
Unknown tables watch
- Table 18

Now, astute readers may already see the writing on the wall for the coming tragedy, but as sorry as I am now to admit it, we (and in particular I) were oblivious. But, let me get back to the story. A few minutes later, our purposely casual glances around the room could easily see the waitress handing the declaration of war to Gav, and much to our surprise, pointing directly at us! There was nowhere to hide – the battle was on. We sat back, ordered another round of drinks and prepared for what we expected would be a 20-30 minute creative process, followed by the delivery of some laughably weak response. Then, we would declare ourselves victors, clink glasses in celebration of the syllabic steamrolling we had just delivered, and target another unsuspecting table.

However, even before our new drinks had arrived, the waitress was back with a response. It hadn’t even been two minutes. Something seemed off, and we all knew it. Didn’t table eight have any pride? Anything slapped together in that short a time didn’t stand a chance against our masterpiece. I tore open the folded note and prepared to read the retort. After a little theatrical throat clearing, I began:

Second line seven
Not eight bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch
Bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch.

Silence. It was crushing. Somehow, in all of the excitement of the battle, we (read: I) had mistaken “anti” for a one syllable word.  Worse yet, they had caught this oversight in about 5 seconds, further highlighting the obviousness of our blunder. And worst of all, before we had time to come up with a reply, I looked up and there was Gav bearing down on our table with a grin from ear to ear.

 “So,” he started, “Little bit of a misfire there, huh?”

There it was. I had a few seconds to come up with a response. I quickly thought through my options. Could I argue that classical Haiku was actually a more flexible form of poetry and specifically left room for the occasional 8 syllable second stanza? What about some sort of relativistic contraction of syllables, like space and time in a gravitational field, in this case strangely caused by the mass of the passing Cayuga Waiters? Neither of these options seemed sufficient, so instead I blurted, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s seven syllables.”

 “Collmer, you’re kidding right?” a perplexed Gavin asked back.

 “Hell no I’m not.” Pride had taken over, and my better instincts seemed to have been moved far away from my mouth’s driver’s seat (think that little seat in the back of old station wagons that faced backwards at the road behind you). “Anti,” I said as fast as possible, moving my hand quickly through the air like a deranged conductor.

 “You’re not going to admit that you’re wrong?” he asked again as his perplexed look turned to one of simple disappointment.

 “Nope,” I replied. “I don’t see how I can admit to being wrong, when it can clearly be pronounced with one syllable.” With that, I had entrenched my position behind a bunker of pride. There was nowhere to go but down, and so it was no surprise to anyone that seven hours later Gav and I shook hands and wished each other good luck in the rest of our lives.

 Now, it is two weeks later and I’m faced with the very real possibility that I may never be able to eat at (or even be allowed into) the best restaurant west of the Mississippi.    I am a very proud man, and I may be slightly more stubborn than the next guy, but I’m not an idiot. So, I am taking the opportunity to apologize in the biggest public forum I know, my blog, and to openly admit that “anti” is a two syllable word.

Main Entry: ¹an·ti
Pronunciation: 'an-"tI, 'an-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural antis
Etymology: anti-
: one that is opposed

Gav, you got me. Maybe someday I’ll see you around.

On String Theory, ID and Why I’m Starting a Bowling League

As the volume of the “debate” around Intelligent Design continues to rise in both public and private spheres across the country, a secondary, but perhaps more fundamental question has risen; what are the attributes of science, and what does something need to do in order to qualify as science? While this is a critical point to consider before entertaining any serious debate between one purported theory and another, it seems that most people overlook this subtlety in the rush to salvage the structural integrity of this load-bearing pillar for their religious or scientific beliefs, depending upon which side of the isle they sit on. The question I ask is – is there a shared isle to sit on either side of at all, or is this “debate” similar to arguing whether the speed of light is faster than the Lord’s compassion, or whether it’s hotter inside a volcano than in hell.

In a recent speech at Cornell University, former president Hunter R. Rawlings offered the following definition of science. “Science is defined as the ability to develop new knowledge through hypothesis testing, modification of original theory based upon repeatable, experimental results, and renewed testing through refined experiments that yield still more refinements and insights.” (His full speech, which can be found here, put forward a compelling call to action to members of the Cornell University faculty and student body to enter the public debate on this subject.) When viewed within the frame of this definition, it is hard to argue that evolutionary theory and ID can even be compared. They are, in fact, quite different animals all together.

Darwin’s theory of evolution (which is actually an advancement of earlier thought by French naturalist – Jean Baptiste Lamark), has spawned tens of thousands of different experiments in the nearly 150 years since its original publication. These experiments have led to tremendous advancements in our understanding of biology as a whole, as well as specific advancements in medicine, agriculture, and numerous other applied fields. ID, on the other hand, has yet to lead to even a single experiment testing its validity in the decade since its origin.

So what does this mean for evolution and ID? In my mind, it does little to prove or refute the validity of either, as long as they are both classified in their respective categories. Evolutionary theory is a scientific principle, which has been tested for over a century, and should remain the subject of countless tests in the name of advancement in the centuries ahead. As part of these tests, it may still be that serious flaws are discovered and the theory needs to be adapted. But this has yet to happen. Conversely, ID is a question of individual beliefs and faith. It does have a part in school curricula, but as part of religious studies courses.

Does this mean that evolution “wins” and ID “loses”? The answer, at least in my mind, is not at all. In some ways, I guess, this can be looked at as the beauty of comparing two non-comparables; that you can find a compelling co-existence, as long as you are willing to allow for separate planes of thought. As science continues to unlock and shed light on the laws of the universe, it doesn’t (nor does it aspire to) offer any insight into why the rules have been written the way that they have. Science gives us relativity as an explanation of the relationship between matter and energy, but does not attempt to explain why such a relationship exists. It is in this question of why, a question that can never be answered or tested, that a home for ID exists.

Interestingly, another debate of similar nature has begun to gain momentum recently. I have chosen to note it because it exists entirely within the scientific community, and the fact that it exists at all shows that the definition of science referenced above is not some random wild card that scientists are using to arbitrarily fend off competitive beliefs. I’m speaking, of course, of string theory – the so-called “theory of everything”. For over 30 years now, some of the smartest minds in the world have struggled through endless pages of theoretical math to uncover the theory of everything, a singular mathematical law that would bind relativity and quantum mechanics, thereby governing the behavior of all matter, in all circumstances. The problem is that correct science is often beautiful in its simplicity and elegance, and string theory is anything but simple and elegant. It requires a minimum of 10 or 11 (and perhaps as many as infinity) dimensions in order to be comprehended (which is a funny thing to say). More importantly, throughout its 30 year development, string theory remains completely untested. This is because it seems to be impossible to “test” without something like a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way. And, unfortunately for string theorists, with current budget deficits, a rising China to compete with, and under-funded domestic school systems, it seems unlikely that we’ll start construction on a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way any time soon. So, with the mounting evidence of the “untestability” of string theory, some of its original proponents are turning against it, essentially calling it junk science – a phrase recycled from the ID debate.   Unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, which spawned nuclear science and modern electronics respectively, string theory has brought us nothing.

Now that I’ve made a case for why string theory and ID can hang out together during recess as classmates at Interesting Things To Talk About But Not Science High (the Fighting ITTTABNSH Wildcats), let’s talk about why the bowling league that I’m starting IS, in fact, a scientific endeavor.  After the hype following the distribution of the initial flyer ( Download mollys_cup_onepage_clean.pdf ), many people claimed many things. However, two popular camps emerged. Camp A held that this was one of the best ideas ever (no offense to Darwin, Einstein and Heisenberg from above).   Camp B held that I was crazier than a shit-house rat. The reasoning from both camps is sound and compelling, but luckily for us, we don’t have to wait for appropriation of funds for a galactic particle accelerator to figure out which camp is right. All we have to do is bowl…and that’s an experiment that I’m looking forward to performing.

Literary Genius in a Strange Place

Literary genius is often found in the places you would least expect to find it.    Such is the case with the description of this item, which appears to have been recently sold on eBay.   

* For the record - I did not stumble upon this item as I browsed through eBay looking for a new pair of leather pants.    It was forwarded to me by a friend, who, as far as I can tell, must have been browsing through eBay looking for a new pair of leather pants.

There's a New Reverend Al in Town

I know that I've been extremely delinquent in my posting recently and I'm sorry about that -- I've been quite busy with work.    However, I thought that readers who have enjoyed (or hated) my musings over the years on religion in politics, religion in my life, and religion in general, might get a kick out of this clipping from The Oregonian earlier this year.

Congrats to Dan and Jenna.    They're great friends, and being a part of their wedding was one of the best days of my life....and certainly something that I never thought I'd ever experience.

A New Right Fielder For the Orioles

After two months of research, I've finally come to the conclusion that the Orioles would be better off with Georgia Angelos (Pete Angelos' wife) in right field than with Sammy Sosa there.    I had expected this all along, but it was good to see that the facts support my initial hypothesis.   

There are a number of reasons for my conclusion.    Some of them can be backed by statistics (i.e. the impact of the double plays that he consistently grounds into).    Some of them cannot (i.e. the impact on team and city morale from his rolled-up sleeves on his uniform).   Regardless, a careful look at the tangible and intangible considerations make it clear that new coach Sam Perlozzo has only one option - replace Sammy with Georgia.

Granted, I know that many people will object that Georgia is (a) old, and (b) married to the owner, which could have adverse effects on her salary negotiations.   But, I don't think these arguments hold much water for two reasons.   First of all, since she is old, I think it is unlikely that she will ever make contact with a pitch.    I just don't see how she could catch up to a major league fastball, unless she used a really small bat (<10 ounces) and choked up significantly.    Furthermore, with a bat that small, I don't believe she could put a ball in play.    So, right there, you could wipe out the 14 double plays that Sammy has grounded into this year.    With Javy Lopez hitting behind Sammy (now Georgia), it's safe to assume that at least two-thirds of those runners would score, plus additional runs for prolonged innings, etc.    Conservatively, I estimate that the impact of this change would be a net positive of 22.1 runs so far this season.     Since the Orioles have lost a lot of close games, and Sammy seems to specialize in timing his GIDPs for critical situations, I assume that those 22.1 runs would turn 14 losses into wins, putting the Orioles square in the middle of the wild card race.    With regard to the potential for nepotistic salary negotiation, leading to an unfair ballooning of the Orioles payroll, I don't see it as a problem.   At $75M, the Orioles payroll has room for expansion, and if Georgia is going to produce, then she deserves to get paid.

Secondly, let's address the sleeves.    I'm not exactly sure when Sammy stopped being able to wear shirts without the sleeves rolled up, but in 2005 it's just plain embarrassing.    If he was hitting a lot of home runs (i.e. circa 2002), then I think he could potentially get away with looking like this much of a douche bag, but even then it's a stretch.   Since he does not hit home runs, and all he does is ground into double plays, then I think the rolled up sleeves is not even on the table as an option.   Perhaps Sammy got so jacked up on steroids that he can't reach his sleeves to roll them down, but that still doesn't explain how they get rolled up in the first place, and I'm sure he could either pay someone to do it for him, or take the shirt off and roll down the sleeves while the shirt is on a table or something.     As it stands, I can feel the collective embarrassment level for the city of Baltimore rise every time he struts up to the plate with his "guns" a' blazing.

While I don't claim to know everything about baseball and will certainly leave the big decisions to the coaching staff and Jim Beattie, I do think that this one simple change would pay serious dividends on an immediate basis.

Thoughts on an Article from McSweeney's

Let's get one thing straight before I even begin this post.   Namely, that I would never condone beating up a 12-year old boy.    Unless, of course, you were a 12-year old yourself, and the recipient 12-year old had initiated the whole thing (i.e. had "really been asking for it"), leaving you no course of action save a one-time ass-kicking.      Furthermore, and equally important, I'd like to state on the record that this is a subject that I probably haven't thought about since the period between roughly the spring of  '83 through the fall of  '87.   However, a friend sent me an article from McSweeney's the other day that got the old juices flowing on the subject.

The article, titled "A Realistic Assessment of How Many 12-Year Olds I Could Beat Up Before They Overtook Me", is a deeply insightful piece on this matter.    I think it was particularly striking to me, because I was recently arguing with some friends of mine about how many yards I could rack up in a season of Pop Warner football.    Needless to say, my side of the argument was that, at 6'-2" 200lbs and with 30 years of wisdom under my belt, I could post near-record numbers, as long as I remembered to stretch.    The other side of the argument held that Pop Warner is more legit than I think, and that those little monsters would ding me up pretty badly over the first two games, slowing me down enough for one of them to lay me out in game 3, thereby ending my chance at the record book.   A third side held that in the thrill of the competition I would, in fact, forget to stretch, and that my season would come to a screeching halt in game one, courtesy of a pulled hammy.

Now, my run at the Pop Warner record book aside, I have to admit that I think the author of that article is underestimating the average 12-year old in 2005.     These are not the same 12-year olds from our childhood.   There is, in my estimation, a sort of inflation that occurs in all matters of childhood development.    On the mental/maturity side, I can say with absolute certainty that the 12-year olds I occasionally ride on the subway with in the morning on my commute to work talk about things that I didn't even know existed until I was at least 28 or 29.    And they talk about these things really loudly, so  I think that their vocal cords might also be more mature than mine were at that age.    Also, kids seem to be different physically these days as well.    There's supposedly a 14-year old kid playing for the DC United.      How the hell is that possible?   

Given these factors, and two other points that I think the author of that article failed to take into account - namely that (i) men always seem to overestimate their abilities in these types of discussions, and (ii) there's a good chance that an author for McSweeney's was never quite an All-American athlete - I think that we as readers have to downwardly revise his estimates, and assume that 4 - 5 12-year olds is probably more realistic.

I, on the other hand, am pretty sure that I could take 7....as long as I remember to stretch.

* PS - I talked to Nina about this last night and she seemed to think that under normal circumstances she could probably take one, possibly two 12-year old girls.   However, she hurt her back this past weekend dancing with a 7-year old, so I have to assume her analysis is iffy.

The Ultimate Sharpshooter

I thought it was pretty damn hard hitting skeet with a 12 gauge from 30 yards.     How these guys are able to hit a comet 85 million miles away with a missile traveling at close to 23,000 mph is beyond me.      It seems funny to me that a group scientists and engineers that are sophisiticated enough to be able to pull something like this off successfully, can't think of a better way to describe the comet's shape than "sausage-like".    

One thing is clear to me, though.   They must have better contact lenses than me.

What is the Right Government Role in the Sale of Unocal?

As the debate widens about the pending sale of the American company, Unocal, whether or not the US government should have a role in such a transaction seems to me to be one of the more interesting debate topics to hit the news pages in some time.     The facts are as follows:   Unocal is a large, but certainly nowhere close to the largest (at ~1% of US prodcution), American oil company.    Chevon was about to purchase the company for $16.6B, but was trumped last week by an unsolicited bid for $18.5B by Chinese company, CNOOC.   CNOOC, which is contolled by and 70% owned by the Chinese government, will be financing its bid largely through cheap financing structures made available at below market prices by the Chinese government.

The question on everyone's mind is, given that we are in the early stages of a 50 year "war" for contol of the world's fuel supply with China, should the US goverment somehow move to stop this transaction in the interests of national security?   

Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times today saying that he believes the US gov. should move to block the transaction.     Forbes weighed in as well, discussign the growing debate in Congress on the issue.    Chinese publications are also weighing in on the conversation.    Finally, no debate would be complete without a piece from the Washington Times :), in this case, a piece about imminent war between the US and China over Taiwan.    Let's hope that reports lacks as much credibility as the newspaper that published it.

While I understand the concern, I have to say that this seems to me to be a very, very slippery slope and that the US government has no business stepping in to stop a transaction of this nature.    It seems that a better reaction would be to use this as a catalyst to get serious about funding R&D for new forms of energy, both because it makes strategic sense, and because we just might find ourselves in a position with something to export to the rest of the world....which would be a welcome change.

I'm interested to hear people's thougths on this sensitive issue, though, as I know that this is a deep and complex debate that we'll still be discussing many decades from now.

Osmosis, Globalization and You

It's been a long time since I took my last biology class.    So when I was thinking about some of the recent global trends in relative education levels, ambition, intellectual production and the national R&D spending that influences these factors, I was surprised to find that I kept thinking of osmosis - that's right, (from Webster) "the diffusion of fluid through a semipermeable membrane from a solution with a low solute concentration to a solution with a higher solute concentration until there is an equal concentration of fluid on both sides of the membrane".      

To me, it seems that the laws of osmosis -- and the tendency of fluids to diffuse in such a manner as defined above -- offer a perfect frame to view the prospects of American quality of life for the generation ahead, given our present course.    What do I mean?    Consider a quick look at GDP per capita figures.    If you assume that the cold war and other factors have led these figures to take form in some sense in relative isolation, at least when compared to the today's increasingly global trade community shaped by the post-cold war geopolitical climate and the Internet, then you could argue that these recent factors have brought together "cells" with very different properties, positioned them right next to each other, and immediately made their exterior membranes more permeable than ever before.

If each "cell" had the same internal properties, then you would have to assume some gradual evening of the currently quite divergent GDP per capita figures.    But, of course that's not the case.    Unfortunately, while many of those internal factors still favor US prospects and would point towards a very slow osmotic process, an increasing number of factors actually favor the reverse, and as such, warrant significant concern from the prospective of an American.    High school math and science scores continue to plummet.    As an interesting recent Foreign Affairs article pointed out, the US is falling significantly behind in Internet Infrastructure.    The number of patents and scientific papers coming out of the US has dropped significantly recently, and for the first time in over 150 years, was exceeded by other countries.     Finally, as if to sum it all up in one fell swoop, I was told recently by a graduate professor at an Ivy League university that "foreign students just come in better prepared and seem willing to work much harder".

Coming up with a formula that incorporates osmotic flow rates and global economics, and then spits out an accurate prediction for what's ahead is more than a little out of my league.    But I have noticed that I am very good at seeing the obvious these days, and what seems obvious to me is that if we don't get serious about doing the things necessary to maintain our leadership position in the world, before long (and I don't think it will be nearly as long as most people would tend to think), we'll find ourselves in the unenviable position of being more "average" than we'd like to be.      

There are obviously a lot of things that need to be done to put us back on the path to maintained leadership, but it seems that perhaps the most important (in that it impacts all of the little items below) is the idea of bringing back a culture of investment AT A NATIONAL LEVEL, and eliminating the harmful concept that all taxes are an affliction that need to be cured or eliminated.     Our country has done some of its most amazing things during periods of great investment, and with an aging infrastructure that can barely handle the current population, we're going to need to get back on that horse in a big way in order to handle the new 100 million more people that we'll be adding in the next 50 years.

Who knows, if we do it right maybe more kids will be interested in science, pay attention in their 9th grade biology class, and get scared by osmosis the same way I am.   

Oblivious To Irony

President Bush held an orchestrated event yesterday at the White House, during which he attempted to put faces on his opposition to the Stem Cell research bill that passed in the House yesterday by holding a number of babies born through in-vitro fertilization.

Does anyone else find this choice of events a bit odd, given the fact that less than 30 years ago, the very same people and groups who are now strongly against stem cell research were strongly against all forms of non-traditional fertilization?  Stranger yet, those groups were using the exact same arguments against the science that led to the babies that the President held up this morning - eugenics, a race of clones, etc.    I believe they discussed the repetitive nature of this debate a bit this past Sunday on George Stephanopoulos show THIS WEEK, which makes it somewhat more surprising that the President's handlers would set up a photoshoot so clearly teed up for comments on the irony of this seemingly flip-floppy stance.

Perhaps one way to get people to examine their default stance of opposition to science would be to pass a law that makes it such that if you're against certain otherwise legal scientific pursuits, you cannot benefit from the outcome of its research.    Just a thought.

Why I Didn't Win the Derby

As it is now Monday morning, I've had about 36 hours to reflect on why I did not win the Kentucky Derby.    First of all, I've spent way too little time in an OTB over the past year - and over the first 30 years of my life for that matter - to be taken seriously.    As I inched my way forward, slowly closing in on the ominous ticket window amidst hundreds of people screaming at OTHER races that didn't seem to have anything to do with the Derby, there was only one thought going through my mind - namely, when you get up there, stick with the plan no matter how much the lady in the window heckles you or how badly the members of the screaming throng laugh at you.     After 30 minutes, my time had almost come, as there was now only one person between me and the ticket woman, and I still had no idea whether or not a superfecta was considered an "exotic bet", and if so, how to fill out one of the multitude of wager cards.   Luckily, the old lady in front of me must have bet on every horse alive on the planet, as well as put down some futures on other horses that were yet to be born, so this gave me a little extra time to compose myself.    

When she finally wrapped up, I had decided to go with plan A (put down your wagers on the two horses to win first, as this is child's play and will make the woman think you're a pro, and then move into the heavy stuff that could require "a little hand holding") over plan B (jump right into the superfecta, hope for the best, and then finish with the winner bets, hopefully providing enough of a buffer that the people directly around will forget about the first part of the transaction).        Picking the winners was simple.    I went with Greeley's Galaxy at 22-1 (since Nina went to Horace Greeley high school) and Buzzards Bay at 44-1 (where Nina's parents live).   With that behind me, I tried to grease the wheels a bit with a $2 Trifecta box (boxing a bet means that you buy every possible combination of those horses - in this case meaning 3 x 2 x 1 = 6 combinations).    Since this is not considered an exotic bet, it's  apparently about the trickiest verbal bet that you can make without having to fill out one of those crazy cards.     With that behind me, I moved in for the main event - a $1 superfecta box, meaning 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24 combinations.    I non-nonchalantly mumbled something about a superfecta and started waving my pen near the card, threatening to make a mark on it and hoping that some advice would be offered.   None was.    So, I dove in and started coloring in holes that I thought MIGHT correspond to the holes that represented my horses.   As it turned out, they didn't.    Luckily for me, though, before the masses got wind of the fact that there was a rookie at a window, the woman at the counter hushed her voice and said, "just tell me what horses you want".    It must have been clear to her that any further attempts to correctly fill out the card would have ended up with the same result.

With the high pressure of successfully making a wager now behind me, I walked out of the OTB grinning from ear to ear with that all encompassing high that comes hand-in-hand with knowing that you're about to win a lot of money.     Which brings me to the second reason for why I did not win the Derby - I was way too cocky about my bets.     The way I figured it, the superfecta would probably pay out about $50-70K, a roughly 290,000% ROI on my investment.    Of course, the chances of this happening were roughly 1 in 116,280 without taking into account the fact that 3 of my horses were significant long shots, likely making the odds much worse.   But that didn't phase me.    In my mind, the money was essentially as good as won.    I called one friend to brag about my imminent good fortune.    I told another that I was going to pay to have all of 74th Street covered in fur, and that I was going to buy everyone below 44th Street a ham.    

But as the race neared, a calming collectedness came over me.    I reminded myself that nobody likes someone who gloats, and with the exception of everyone below 44th street who likes ham and a couple of weird people on 74th Street, most people would be less than fired up about my horse picking talent.    So, as the horses were being led to the starting gate, I was gazing out the window, thinking to myself about how gracious I would be as my fourth horse crossed the finish line.     I wasn't going to run around the room screaming.     I wasn't going to jump into anybody's arms.    I was going to calmly stand up, shake hands with the friends I was watching the Derby with, and then make some (totally untrue) speech about how it was all luck and that any one of them could  have won just as easily.      

The gates closed.     A couple of deep breaths.     The gates opened, and my mind started to wander.    I started to worry that 74th Street might start to smell bad with all of that fur after a couple of rain storms, particularly in the fall when the ginko trees started to shed their fruit.     Perhaps I might have to alter that part of the plan.    Then the excitement in the room started to build, horses started to cross what seemed to be a finish line of sorts and one of my buddies was screaming awfully loud in my right ear.

Which brings me to the 3rd reason why I didn't win the Derby this year - none of my horses finished in the top 10.    The good news is that I guess my street will smell fine this fall, but I wonder if I need to send some sort of note apologizing to everyone below 44th street that got their hopes up for a ham.

 

The Battle Between Customization and Simultaneity

I was forwarded an interesting link today to a short streaming segment offering a view on the trajectory of current trends in technology and media.    As a generally early adopter and middle of the road tech geek, I like some of the thoughts here, but it brings up a fundamental problem that I have with some of the underlying theory behind the blogging revolution - perceived by some to be on the road to total takeover of broadcast-style media.    As a blogger, it's clear that I am a fan of some aspects of the technology.   However, I don't believe in the all-out revolution theory because I think the "psychology of simultaneity" (an important and almost always overlooked piece of the equation) outranks the individual benefits of customization, at least when it comes to mainstream entertainment and news.

Personalized media has been something that I've been fascinated by for quite some time.    Most of my friends will remember the company I started in 2001 to look at the opportunity to create non-linear television programming using cable video-on-demand and personal video recorder technology entering the marketplace at that time.    Ultimately, we were a bit early to the opportunity, and decided not to commit production money at the time, but I'm still a strong believer in the power of the concept.    The difference, however, with that implementation and the customized experience projected as part of the future vision offered above, is this idea of simultaneity.   

What do I mean by simultaneity, and why do I think its so important?    
I think that a large part of the reason that shows and movies become social phenomenons is that people really don't want to miss what other people are seeing, and there's a certain unspoken comfort that comes along with watching something that you know a lot of other people are watching.    This still holds true in the age of Tivo.   I still talk about all of my favorite shows with my friends, we just don't talk about them 10 minutes after they aired on television.    We talk about them a week later, when we know that everyone has now had time to watch their recorded episodes.    I believe (and could certainly be wrong) that if you take out this experience of simultaneity (or now semi-simultaneity) you remove a big piece of the enjoyment that this entertainment offers its viewers.

Largely because of my beliefs about the power of simultaneity, I don't think we'll ever see a day, like the one projected in that "Museum of Media History" segment, where everyone gets their own customized news, etc.    Just because technology allows something doesn't mean that the hard social wiring of the human race are going to demand and adopt it.     This point extends down from mainstream media and news, into the blogs themselves, and the long-range potential of blogging.    And on this point, my guess is that the majority of people will end up being a lot like me - there will be some fascination with the idea of creating a historical record of your own thoughts (with little real care for whether or not people read it, other than a desire to create debate), but that mainstream credentialed media will always be the place I turn for trusted news that I know other people are reading as well.

For the record, my friend Jon Neil (who is now a published art critic in May's Modern Painters - nice work Neil!) had a somewhat similar reaction, but from a different viewpoint:

Nicely produced, but not very compelling.  "Googlezon"?  "Friendsterbot"? C'mon folks.  Not too imaginative.  Using the pi symbol in the Epic shadow was, however, very clever.  I thought it was a bit too long to leave the message about media commercialism/vacuousness until the end.  I always get the feeling with these kinds of things that the creators think they're onto something new, which makes the fictional Museum of Media History all the more ironic.  Similar techno-optimism and dystopian projections have accompanied the introduction (and commercialization) of every new communication technology (the stuff people were publishing about the telephone is particularly hysterical).  But, I have to say, I enjoyed it; though I wonder how it would play without the foreboding sentimental tunes.

Why Do You Do This To Yourself?

I don't have any idea how squash came up in the conversation, or how the various individuals' relative skills began to be questioned, but in the end none of that really mattered.    All that mattered was that it was now 2 o'clock in the morning and a whole lot of trash talking had transpired.    By sometime mid-afternoon the following day, the starting shortstop for this summer's softball squad (the C.A.C. Smokers) would be anointed, someone would be shaved in an unnatural manner, and an awful lot of pride would be won or lost.

Now, this may have been a natural conversation in some settings, but it certainly wasn't normal in the Hog Pit.    While the last few years have been quite kind to New York City's Meatpacking District, and across the street in the SoHo House there were probably 5 such conversations going on at that very moment, smart money would be on the fact that this was, without question, the first time anyone had ever argued over who was a better squash player in here.    Established back when the only people wearing high heels in this area were working girls and men on the corner of 13th and 9th, the Hot Pit is one of the few bars in Manhattan where you can order a Pabst Blue Ribbon AND have it served in the can.  It's a place that my friends had frequented for years before the meatpacking district became a good place to bring a date, and even though Willie Nelson is replaced on the juke box by Bono way too much for my liking these days, we still go there from time to time.      So, with a good friend in town from Canada who could have received mail there about a year ago, it was no surprise to anyone that it was PBRs a plenty for this Friday eve.

For the record, my squash game is probably slightly above average (and significantly below strong).  What I lack in technique is generally made up for by decent athleticism, and more importantly, my annoyingly hyper-competitive nature.    With this being the case, it was no surprise to anyone in attendance that when the topic of squash came up and Undy proclaimed that he was the number one seed at Deerfield, my response was something along the lines of "that may be the case....but I didn't go to Deerfield."     Even as I said this I knew that I was digging myself a potentially embarrassing hole, but much to my chagrin, I couldn't control my mouth.    When, a second later, another friend chimed in that he'd bet me my starting shortstop position that he'd mop the court with me by virtue of his finely tuned Greek game, I responded that it would give me a certain ease this summer to be fielding balls in the hole knowing that I'd earned it the old fashion way.    My fate was sealed.

The worst part about the feeling I had at that very moment was that this wasn't the first time I've done this to myself.   About 3 years ago, I was out with a bunch of friends when one of them bet me $100 that I couldn't score a point on our friend George.   Sure George was one of the top singles seeds at Cornell in tennis, and the same in squash, but how could I not manage a single point over the course of a whole game?   It didn't seem possible.     I accepted the bet.    Needless to say, my game with George the following day was not very enjoyable, and shortly after it began, I had lost 3 sets 0-9, 0-9, 0-9...and George had won a hundred bucks.  It was the  memory of this embarrassing day that was dancing around in my head at 9:45am the next morning when my cell phone started ringing.    I didn't need to see the caller ID to know who it was.   I just got out of bed, put the shoes that hadn't been worn since the match with George in a bag, and started brushing my teeth.   

Nina knew that something had gone drastically wrong when she came home from the gym to find me in this position.    She saw the bag and the racquet on the floor, took one look at me, and said almost hopefully, "You didn't?"     I nodded.   "Why, with who?" she asked apologetically. 

"Underwood", I said.    This was met with a frown.   

"He's probably pretty good," she said, adding, "Didn't he go to Deerfield?   Isn't that all they do there?"   

I shrugged and started to smile betraying that there was more to the story.   "And Jimmy B."

"Jimmy the Greek?"   She said this as she simultaneously figured out that she already knew the answer and lost all sympathy for my predicament.  "He probably started playing squash when he was like 2 years old.   That's all they do over there.   He could probably beat you with a just about anything you could wrap a grape leaf around."      Now done brushing my teeth, I tried to move in for an "encouragement hug", but was met only by her back as she walked away announcing to the room, "I don't know why you do this to yourself."

Sitting on the subway for the next 30 minutes, I had a plenty of time to think about this question of why I continually do this to myself.    Why am I so competitive?   And, is this really a bad thing?    This got me to thinking about a guest on the Daily Show late last week, who was talking about research she did while writing a book recently on the negative impact of our national school system's "self-esteem epidemic".   She talked about how there was no longer any duck-duck-goose, how tag was replaced with a game called "circle of friends", and how dodgeball was simply unthinkable.   In short, competition - because there are winners and losers, and losers could suffer lowered self-esteem - was being removed from the childhood experience.   This seemed to me to be a terribly dangerous trend, both because competition is fun (I realized this as I thought about it) and because all of those American students were going to be cripplingly unprepared when they started competing in the real world and realized, as Christina Sommers pointed out on the show, that "there's no circle of friends in the global economy."

An hour later, as I was lacing up my shoes amidst a new round of trash talking, it was clear to me that there was no place I'd rather be right then, and I knew why I did this to myself - because it was a hell of a lot of fun, and because I could handle it win or lose.   As it turned out, I did a little of both.    I may have lost my shortstop position, but at least I have all of my hair.

The Non-Factor in British Politics - Religion and Moral Values

I went to a great event last night that two friends of mine, John Caplan and Gordon Gould, started a couple of years ago called Citizen Table.    The events, which are sponsored by The Week magazine, are essentially an excuse to get some interesting people together and talk about things outside of traditional topics of jobs and politics.    Last night's topic was the impact of the upcoming British elections on America.    It was moderated by Sir Harold Evans (who recently published a very interesting book on innovation and invention in America), and pitted Sidney Blumenthal against a guy named Andrew (I'm embarrassed that I didn't catch his last name).

There was a lot of the standard stuff about liberal values vs. conservative values, etc. and in many ways the conversation could have reminded an audience member of similar discussions about American races.    However, there was one striking difference.      Religion and "values" were simply not issues.    At one point someone asked about this, and the answer from both sides was that "these really aren't British issues" and quite matter of factly, that "In Britain, religion has no place in politics - faith is just something that people keep to themselves."   

I wondered about this a lot throughout the rest of the evening.    Why is it that two countries that are seemingly similar on many other issues, can be so different on this one critical issue?   How have the two populations evolved to view this so differently?

Thoughts on the Ideas That Drive the Brand

I had an interesting meeting with Joel Kotkin last night.   Joel is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and "an author and speaker who focuses on post-urban American culture...specifically suburban, exurban and rural America."      To get a  feel for some of Joel's thinking, check out this article he wrote recently for The Weekly Standard, or this article for New Democrats Online.

We talked about a lot of things, but what stuck with me the most after the meeting was the idea that Democrats need to get back to thinking like FDR when he called for "frankness and vigor" in facing the challenges that lay ahead of America in the Depression.   In the next ~50 years, the population of the United States is going to grow by nearly 100 million people, from ~300m to ~400m.    The infrastructure, whether physical (schools, roads and mass-transportation, etc.) or informational (fiber outside of the cities) is simply not there to handle this growth.

If we really want to maintain American primacy in the world, he said, we need to "get back to Nationalism".    While he admitted that "nationalism" is a tricky word, I think that the point that we need to, as I re-phrased it "believe in America"...and invest in building an American infrastructure that is capable of fostering the next generation, is a good one, and a potentially great platform for Democrats to begin to build their platform for the 21st century.

It seems to me that one of the things that Democrats suffer from these days, is an inability to articulate what taxes are used for.   Many of the small government/lower taxes base seem to believe that taxes are simply a way of re-distributing wealth from the rich to the poor, or as they see it, from the producers to the parasites.   What they don't seem to pay attention to is the fact that the vast majority of federal/state spending goes towards infrastructure critial to educating their children, paving their roads...in short, making it possible for them to live the American dream.   So, why shouldn't Democrats be able to take back patriotism, by showing the essential cynicism of the vision of starving American government blindly?    If you refuse to take the small present day hit to invest in the future, eventually you will necessarily fall behind those that do.    A policy that mandates that outcome doesn't seem very patriotic to me.

Scientific American Editorial on Evolution

This mock editorial from the April issue of Scientific American is pretty entertaining.

Joe Camel for DNC Chair

There’s no question in my mind that the brand of the Democratic Party is broken.
 

As the behind the scenes campaign for DNC chair progressed throughout December and January, it seemed to me that one of the central points of debate should have been how healthy our brand is. I listened. But I didn’t hear anyone asking whether or not is was cool to be a Democrat?
 

Now, with the race over, Dean elected Party chair, and all sides digging in for a generation-long battle to make Democrats the majority Party again, I think that many people are still missing the point. On one side of the intra-party argument, those that think all is well with the Democrats argue that Kerry got more votes than any presidential candidate in history (winning or losing), with the exception of George W. Bush. If Kerry had only articulated the Democratic message a little better, they argue, with a little fewer words and a couple less flip-flopish soundbites (regardless of whether or not they were actually flip-flops), then we would have a Democrat in office and all would be peachy.
 

On the other side (the side I reside on), stand those that argue that “Kerry” (not the person, but the impression on the American voting public) was essentially a creation born from a flawed platform, at no necessary fault of his own. Sure he made some missteps, but in general, Kerry ran about as good a campaign as he could have. The difficulty that he faced and ultimately couldn’t overcome, was how to articulate a clear, consistent, and understandable message based upon the beliefs of a party that doesn’t currently have such a thing. If you ask any Republican what their party stands for, you’ll always hear the same thing: lower taxes, strong defense, personal freedom, and traditional family values. If you ask Democrats the same question, the only consistent answer that you’ll hear is something along the lines of “I’m not really sure”.

 

It’s Never Cool to Not Know What You’re Talking About

I’ve long theorized that one of the real draws of the Conservative platform is its simplicity. It’s a lot easier to say that Hilary Clinton is evil than it is to explain why universal health care actually reduces costs to the system by fostering more preventative medicine and thereby reducing occurrences of serious illness. The Conservative movement has done a tremendous job of putting forward policy soundbites across the board that are easy to understand, memorable, and easy to articulate to friends. No one has ever embarrassed him or herself trying to explain the pillars of the Conservative platform and exposing that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Their points may be bad policy, but they understand the points that they’re making. This is important, because as much as the Conservative push may seem anti-intellectual, all people, regardless of political camp, enjoy sounding like they know what they’re talking about.
 

On the flip side, I’ve seen many a Democrat begin an argument with a Conservative and end up embarrassing themselves in front of their peers by demonstrating how little they know about their own side. This usually quickly degenerates into an angry argument, without substance.
 

If a Carpenter Shows Up at a Worksite with no Tools, He Looks Like an Asshole

The simplicity of the Conservative message makes it easy to run and be successful on that platform. If we look at the last couple of election cycles, there seems to be a pattern of stronger Democratic candidates losing to weaker Republican opponents. This has happened too frequently to be without cause. I think that this is influenced mainly by the brand associated with each party and the policy “toolset” that comes with being a candidate on each respective platform (which ultimately influences the overriding brand). Without a simple toolset (or arguably any toolset), Democratic candidates across the country are forced to flounder just like John Kerry did, wrestling with the nuances of the Democrat’s broken message, and end up sounding either like idiots who constantly contradict themselves, or like “true politicians” carefully dancing their way through a minefield of otherwise non-dangerous issues.

So, where do we go and how do we fix the problem? My argument is that it is not a crisis of leadership, as some would say, or a crisis of infrastructure, as is currently the vogue thing to say. Instead, we have a crisis of message simplicity. If this is true, then Democratic strategists and emerging new leaders in the Party should be focusing on crafting a messaging platform that is similar to the current Republican platform in its simplicity. In the end, Democrats have a lot to learn from Joe Camel. He was nothing but “Cool”. Everyone that ever touched the Camel brand knew this…and they sold an awful lot of cigarettes as a result. Democrats shouldn’t focus on trying to be cool like Joe (witness the Kerry on a motorcycle Late Show debacle), but they should learn from the power of his simplicity.

The Omnipresence of God

It's been a long time since I last posted on my blog, and I have to admit that I've missed it a great deal.     So, what better topic to bring me out of my blogging hibernation than my continued fascination with religion.    I know that this is a touchy subject, and I want to be clear that in writing this post I am in no way trying to "win people to my side" or propound on why I am right and others are wrong.   To the contrary, my previous posts on religion started some of the best dialouge that this little blog has seen, so let's see if we can't repeat some of that success.

I Realize God is Omnipresent - But Does He have to be in Every Story?
As the Great Backlash continues to march onward, gaining strength with every day despite that fact that there appears to be nothing left to backlash against, it seems that we are finally reaching a point where a majority of issues are viewed through the lens of religious faith.   Perhaps this feeling is influenced by the fact that it's hard to find a news story these days that isn't about Terri Schiavo, but I don't think it is.    Books like God's Politics are near the top of the non-fiction bestseller list, and Tim Lehaye's Left Behind series has now sold something like 50 million + copies (presumably these count in the fiction column).    Moral Values were supposedly key to Bush's re-election (I actually think this "Moral Values" catch all was more indicative of the fact that people didn't/don't believe Kerry had ANY values, than showing some countrywide shift towards evangelical belief, but that goes against the thread of this post, so I'll leave it alone).    Whether or not Creationism should be part of the US public school curricula seems to get more attention than how to fix the current shortcomings of an eduction system that has US high school students consistently testing in the 3rd decile worldwide in math and science.   Medical progress seems tied to stem cell debate.    Environmental policy is purportedly influenced by politicians' interpretations of biblical passages about Man's dominion over the Earch (Bill Moyers recently wrote a fascinating review for the New York Times Review of Books on this subject).    Some argue that Foreign policy is influenced by the "need" to have Jews reclaim the entire original Kingdom of David before the return of Christ, and on....and on....and on.

Watching all of this transpire in the media at the headline level, I find myself wondering if it has always been this way.   If so, then it would seem that our country has been built with the perfect equilibrium of faith and science, belief and curiousity.    If not, then I wonder where we are heading with this newfound desire to incorporate faith into every aspect of pubic life.

Religion in the US Government
It wasn't always this way.    Brooke Allen wrote a piece (it's an amazing article and well worth a read for anyone interested in this subject) earlier this year in The Nation about the role of God with our founding fathers.     In it, he starts by asserting that, contrary to what George W. Bush and Tom Delay would tell you:

Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enllightenment ones.    God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspiciously absent.   The omission was too obvious to have been anytime but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot."   But as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954.

As someone clearly out of the mainstream on this one, I have to accept the possibility that I am woefully wrong on this issue.  And, as I recently discussed with my friend Brian, I may be heading towards a really miserable 10 years starting the day I get on the subway and there's nothing there but me and a bunch of clothes people have "left behind".    However, I have to say that I hope I'm at least partially right and that people will begin to get back to keeping their beliefs to themselves before this gets too out of hand.    Perhaps Ben Franklin said it best when asked about his own belief system a few weeks before he died:

Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.

As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any particular marks of his displeasure.

For safety sake, however, it's also worth noting another of Ben Franklin's quotes on the matter:

A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.

Testing the Flickr Software

  guinness casting undy in fore 
  Originally uploaded by acollmer.

This blog post is really just a test of the Flickr software.   

It seems pretty cool, and can be found at flickr.com

ac

A Better Map For Depressed Dems

There seems to be a sense of panic amongst many Democrats.   I've spoken to a number of life-long Dems in the past couple of days and the general sense I get from many of them is a feeling of displacement.   They're worried that they no longer share the values (sorry for the use of the buzzword du jour) of the majority of Americans.   They're worried that a true blue person doesn't quite fit in an increasingly red country.   While it's certainly right for Dems to take note of the fact that we're getting whooped right now, this should be done with an honest assessment of the real facts.

1) From what I've read, the evangelical vote was actually no higher in 2004 than it was in 2000.   The country has not shifted as dramatically as many people think towards being a religious state.

2) The fact that "values" was listed as the number one issue for the majority of voters is a bit deceiving.   Values is a somewhat ambiguous word and I think for many voters, they simply lumped an uncertainty about what Kerry stood for as a values issue.   I view this as largely Kerry's fault for not being able to stand up to his handlers on what he should say, and consequently shifting messages way too frequently.   However, more importantly for the future of our party, I really believe that this is a direct result of a  broken platform with an unclear message.   Until Dems have an easily understood set of pillar issues, I would expect this misunderstood "values" vote to keep rearing its ugly head.

3) Over 55,000,000 voted for John Kerry and a large portion of those that voted for Bush, did so more because of Kerry's shortcomings, because of the war, because of uncertainty about the actual degree to which Bush's conservative agenda will actually be implemented, than because of any dislike of progressive values.

The reality is that we live in much more of a purple nation (click on the image above or the link to see the blown up map - and here's a link to a whole slew of intereting maps) than current Dem panic would suggest.   So, let's not get too carried away being depressed about losing the America that we all love as an ideal and as a country.   It's still here.    And the best thing that Dems can do with all of their current energy is start applying it to doing things like figuring out what the new message ought to be for the progressive movement, what new organizations need to be put in place, and what new leaders need to be brought to the fore.

I expect the NDN to play a large role in helping us get there.   They're helping to bring more and more people into this discussion (you can read about it on the NDN blog) on a daily basis, and have been leading it in a positive direction for years now.   

That's where I'll be turning my post-election "depression".

Confusion on the President's Intentions on Abortion

There seems to be a real expectation gap between Democrats and moderate Republicans on what the President intends to do with respect to abortion rights now that he has his mandate.   Democrats seem to unanimously agree (and fear) that he will move swiftly to begin seeding courts with conservative judges, who, in the President's own words during the debates against John Kerry, "celebrate the culture of life".     With as many as 4 seats on the Supreme Court potentially opening up during his second term, many Democrats fear that some of the progress on women's rights and other issues will slip away for an entire generation based upon these nominations.  For many voters, this concern alone was enough to put them in the Democratic camp.

Moderate Republicans, on the other hand, simply don’t believe this to be the case.    One Republican friend recently wrote me the following in a discussion on the matter after I forwarded him a link to an article, with the email subject reading: “It’s Already Happening”:

“I’m not sure it is clear cut that GWB truly "wants" RvW overturned.  Republicans in general actually like that it still exists; In part, because some (like myself) are pro-choice, and in part because every 2 years, it allows for an election "talking-point" that favors Republicans. For example, in this past election, GWB was able to mobilize his base (a group I do NOT consider myself a part of) by pointing to "possible" judicial changes, and aligning w. their moral values. This gets them out to vote against what is perceived as a "liberal Democrat"... If RvW actually overturned, it does two things...a) eliminates this issue as a political mobilizer and b) potentially stokes a fire under the Dems. base as "now they've done it" mentality....

Maybe this is wrong, but I've read about it from a few places.”

In general, this is the attitude that almost all of my Republican friends have taken, at least when speaking to me.    They have either rightly read through the President’s veiled comments, or managed to so delude themselves, that the actual overturning of the Roe v. Wade case and subsequent illegalization of abortion would actually shock them.   

Only time will tell whether Democrats are being overly reactionary about these issues and moderate Republicans have the President’s true intentions understood, or if Dem fears are warranted and many a moderate Republican is in for a rude awakening on just how conservative the man they have chosen to be the leader of their party actually is.

The View From Up North

I don't really have time to write a thoughtful post in the aftermath of the election. I will soon, and I have a lot to say about the changes that I believe Democrats need to make in order to be more successful in 2008. In short, I think we need to really listen to what people said when voting; both what the actually said to exit pollers and what they said implicitly in choosing a candidate.

For now though, I thought I would share a map that a buddy of mine from Canada sent me yesterday. It's pretty funny, and in light of the fact that over 1/3 of all voters nationwide identified themselves as "evangelical", perhaps it's not that far from the truth.

Something to Consider

I just got the following email from a good friend of mine:

"Collmer, If you ever run for office, want to be held in sort of public eye, you better not speak like that outside of a very tight group of people that will never sell you out. Let's just strike that comment from the record and move on."

What did I say to elicit this response? I merely used a comparative analogy to put the concept of a war on terrorism, as it has currently been packaged for the American public, in context. I told him that, on average, there have been more deaths worldwide (or in the US) from lightning strikes than from terrorism. I then asked him if, in light of this fact, he thought that I could get the American taxpayers to agree to spend $200 billion per year on an initiative to once and for all eradicate lightning.

Given the historical success (or rather, lack thereof) in using force to end terrorism, this doesn't seem like too ridiculous of an illustrative analogy.

For the record, our conversation ended after this exchange because he had to get back to duct taping the plastic sheets over his window after reading today's Drudge Report headline.

Guest Post - Welcome to the Apocalypse: Election Legal Wars

Here's another guest post from Ben Geyerhahn in Pennslyvania. As a lawyer, he's been called there to, amongst other things, prepare for election day mishaps and legal needs. His sentiments echo a concern that I've voiced with increasing frequency over the past couple of months. The "whatever is in the best interests of our country's democracy" attitude is no longer in effect, in my mind. Both sides will fight tooth and nail in the event of any sort of questionable voting practices, as is too be expected given the amount of personal and financial capital that has been invested in this election. Let's hope we have a decisive election.

Welcome to the Apocalypse: Election Legal Wars
by Ben Geyerhahn
Its almost cliché to say that the nation is deeply divided these days so everyone keeps asking what happens if things aren’t decided on November 2, 2004. In my view, failure to select a president on November 2 would be a disaster.

The nation is truly divided, but not in the way you may think. It is cleft in three. There are Democrats, Republicans and the rest. The remaining group pays less attention to politics either because they’re indifferent or because they are disgusted by the rancor of politics. Many of these folks believe that all politicians are crooks, and the dirty little secret of politics is that both sides encourage this belief.

Each side attacks and runs negative advertisements to convince the other guy’s undecided voters that all politicians are bad guys and drive these voters away from the process. After all, convincing the other guy’s voters to stay home is just as good as getting your own folks to the polls. Going Negative by Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar describe this phenomenon in heartbreaking detail.

What does all this have to do with an Election Day legal war? In all likelihood, this election will result in record turnout. I believe that as much as 60% of the electorate may turn out. These levels haven’t been reached since the 60s. For the first time in decades, people are engaging. As a partisan, I believe this is a good signal for Democrats and will avoid an Election Day train wreck, but if it doesn’t the legal war will be nasty.

Nearly a billion dollars has been invested in this election and thousands and thousands of man-hours have been logged. People and institutions have incredible personal and financial commitments in this election that they will not easily give up. Additionally, unlike 2000, both sides foresee conflict and are preparing for it.

The result of such a war is beyond my vision, except for this; it will not be good for voters. I believe it will further divide us, and drive even more people away from the process. The legacy of this election should be that the people looked long and hard at these candidates, that each side was passionate about its views, expressed those views on election day and that we decided who would lead us in a voice clear enough that it did not require judicial interpretation. Anything short of that would be a disaster.

Guest Post - A Game of Inches

The following post was written by a friend of mine named Ben Geyerhahn who is currently working for the Kerry campaign as part of the advance staff in Pennsylvania.

A Game of Inches - By Ben Geyerhahn

I am working hard for Kerry Edwards in the battleground state of Pennsylvania and it is not sexy. As Advance Staff, I work with surrogates, building round and town hall discussions, and angling for press. The work is hard and not particularly sexy, but very satisfying. It also gives me a close look at the political war that is being waged.

The politics we see on television and in the movies is the excitement of message positioning and inside deals. Addicted watchers of the West Wing love the hard-nosed politics of message and leveraging of political relationships. Although that world exists, it ignores the real work of politics in the modern age. In the absence of vibrant community organizations like the Kiwanis, bowling leagues, and the drift away from social organization detailed by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, reaching the electorate means reaching individuals not groups of common interest. Success in the political world means building a powerful organization that will deliver voters to the polls on Election Day. I was fortunate to enter the political world at a relatively high level, and I understand that everyone wants to contribute at a level equal to his or her experience, but this race will be won on the ground.

I believe we face the most important election of our lives, and I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that this election will be won on the ground. Convincing the slim margin of voters who are undecided, and perhaps more importantly assuring that the millions of newly registered Democratic voters actually vote is critical to putting a Democrat in the White House. Indeed, I believe that newly registered Democratic voters could make the difference in this election. The volunteers who convince these undecided and new voters to come to the polls and who actually bring these voters to the polls on Election Day will be the difference in this campaign. Although these volunteers are at the bottom of the campaign structure they will be the most important.

Anyone interested in having a real impact in this presidential election should volunteer to knock on doors and call voters. If Democrats commit to spending a few days in battleground states doing this backbreaking work, it will make a critical difference. I encourage any committed Democrat to find a way to volunteer to work on the ground. In this game of inches, every volunteer makes a difference.

Nature & Politics

I don't have too much time to expand on this, but a Republican friend of mine just sent me a pretty funny map showing the breakdown of the electorate in the state of Florida against the paths of the recent hurricanes that have hit the state. It's amazing what people can come up with when given Photoshop and a sense of humor.

Click on the image to be able to read the text.

Thoughts on Latest NDN Ad

The NDN just launched a new ad campaign that seems to be getting received fairly well, at least by Democrats. I hate to say it, but I'm not terribly impressed by the ad. I really liked the beginning… wasn’t terribly fired up (and sent simon an email saying so) about the negative part… and then felt the final half was very clichéd and hollow. I understand it’s hard to communicate in such a short time slot, but has there ever been a candidate on either side that wasn’t for creating jobs, improving education, strengthening communities and families, affordable healthcare, etc?

I think I’m perhaps just a confused cynic, but I thought that this ad fell right in line with many of the most popular complaints by the “other team”; namely that we’re just attacking Bush and not really offering any substantive plan for improvement.

Here's a link to a bunch of the Kerry campaign ads. There's one in here called "Juvenille" that I think is a lot more effective. It actually talks about substantive policy goals and projects a difference in strategy between the two candidates.

All of this said, I'm no political media consultant...and I'm smart enough to know it, so I'd love to hear some other opinions. In looking at the Daily Kos, it's clear that at least one person disagrees with me about the ad...which is good to see for the NDN.

Move Over Luke

I've been a bit of a delinquent blogger over the past few weeks, as things have been pretty busy here at work. That said, every once in a while, you come across something that has to be addressed immediately. This happened to me today.

Let me first say that the IFOCE has a very legit looking logo. A logo like this one demands respect. So, I have to say I was a bit shocked when I started digging a little deeper into the website. I have no idea if this is real or not, but either way it's funny. Of particular interest, check out the bio for Sonya Thomas. She's a very impressive young woman, and the wrap-up at the bottom is hilarious.

Putting Terrorism in Context

As is now clear from the tone of both conventions, the 527 sponsored ads that have been most effective, and the current media focus, the election dialogue is going to be dominated by "the war on terror". The degree to which this is the case, took another unsurprising turn today as Vice President Cheney stated that the country would risk another terror attack if it made the wrong choice in November. His exact quote was as follows:

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice," Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, "because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

That's right, according to the Vice President of the United States, a vote for Kerry is a vote for more terrorist attacks. This is a somewhat shocking thing to say in its own right, regardless of its legitimacy. However, I personally think it's more shocking when considered against a backdrop of current polling and known threat regions. Almost everyone would agree that the major threats to the United States are focused on the cities of New York, Washington, Chicago, LA and San Francisco, and the landmarks within those cities. Interestingly, all of these places will seemingly vote for Kerry in a landslide this fall. On the flip side, I think that few would argue that Billings, Montana or El Paso, Texas is legitimately threatened by terrorism. So what we have here is a situation where those who are living, working and sleeping on the defensive frontline of the "War on Terror" are voting for a very different prescription for safety than those who are cheering patriotically from the sidelines. I think that this point is particularly interesting when considered in light of the Vice President's most recent campaign comments.

Alan Krueger (the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Princeton University) and David Laitin (the Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University) recently wrote an article for Foreign Affairs called "Misunderestimating Terrorism". I found a particular passage in this article to be very eye opening from the perspective of putting terrorism in context:

"The State Department has rightly emphasized that the threat of terrorism remains serious, but a close examination of its data helps put the magnitude of the threat in perspective. In 2003, a total of 625 people -- including 35 Americans -- were killed in international terrorist incidents worldwide. Meanwhile, 43,220 died in automobile accidents in the United States alone, and three million people died from AIDS around the world. Comparative figures, particularly when combined with forecasts of future terrorism trends, can help focus debate on the real costs people are willing to bear -- in foregone civil liberties and treasure -- to reduce the risk posed by terrorism."

I believe that in order to beat Bush, Kerry and the Democrats need to figure out a way to put terrorism in context for the rural American public. Krueger and Laitin's question hits the heart of the matter. At the end of the day, how much real cost are people going to be willing to bear for a threat that is likely to have a much smaller direct impact on them than rising health care costs, domestic job loss, an education system that is not preparing much of the public to compete in today's global economy, and the long-term economic burdens of an exploding national deficit.

* As a footnote, the article also pointed out what is factually known now, but still not widely talked about amongst the general public, that contrary to what the 2003 Global Terrorism report initially stated and what President Bush and Vice President Cheney have repeatedly said that a) we live in a safer world now, and b) terrorist activity has decreased as a result of the "war on terror", the actual data points the other way. The initially release report experienced some "database errors", which led to faulty data. In fact, their were 169 significant terrorist acts in 2003 worldwide. This was the highest count in 20 years, and a 29% increase over the average over the previous 5 years. Needless to say, the administration has pointed to this non-partisan report with a little less frequency since the data was corrected.

Watching the Polls

I know that watching the polls can be a dangerous habit, but I've found it pretty interesting to look at how polls move over extended periods of time, particularly when considered against what was happening during that period of time to move the numbers. If anyone is interested, here are a couple of links that are interesting.

National Bush vs. Kerry polls.
National Bush vs. Kerry (with Nader in the race) polls.
Individual state polls.

FDR's "Second Bill of Rights"

Thanks to Angie Schiavoni for sending this along. It looks like Dems of the past understood the value of simple communication:

the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

the right of every family to a decent home;

the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

the right to a good education.

Bush Delivers Hard Hit...In a Rugy Match

Ok. I'm still waiting for the part that's actually newsworthy.

The fact that people are emailing around pictures of a hard hit in a rugby match -- as some kind of negative against the president -- is laughable. Isn't rugby a tough sport? What's wrong with working a guy over a bit? And why on earth would this have any bearing on someone's character? Next we'll hear the shocking story of how Kerry got his paddle wet in a crew meet.

While this picture is funny on the surface, the fact that people are trying to make this somehow indicative of his personality or character is beyond me. More than anything else, it's a sign to me of how ridiculous this political battle has gotten. Maybe I'm just a goon, but I think that this type of activity does much more damage than harm.

In the bigger picture, though, I think that this is actually quite troubling. In this environment (24 hour cable news world, multi-million blog "reporters"*, sopshisticated micro-demo polling and subsequent highly targeted communications schemes, etc.), would any real person ever choose to run for office?

* Yes, I know that I'm part of the problem with my 2 person audience blog.

That's No Way to Treat A Lady

I hate to say it, but my sources have informed me that my college car ("The Baron", "the Dusty Rose", "Mauve Thunder", and recently "La Baroness") has been sentenced to death. She was a hell of a car, and she will be missed.

Originally owned by Lucille Whitmer (my grandmother), Mauve Thunder spent her early years leading a relatively comfortable life in Pennsylvania, mostly in a garage. Offering Pennsylvanians a glimpse into what the future might hold, her digital speedometer was that rare opportunity to see tomorrow without sacrificing the ability to know how fast you were going today. MT's fortunes changed in a major way in 1995 when Lucille gave her one final filling (unleaded 87) and kissed her goodbye as I turned her north for a 2 year stint at Cornell University.

Those 2 years were not good to her. Ithaca is a long way from a heated garage, and the conditions in my fraternity driveway took a toll on this delicate beauty. My wife kicked in her grill. One of her friends kicked in her door. She was crashed needlessly and without remorse by a friend's girlfriend and Brian Keller (perhaps offering a glimpse into what fate had in store for her). Dan Jacobson kicked in her radio during an overcrowded trip to town. Her window was cracked by a passenger seat dancer coming home from a round of golf (needless to say, P-Funk was never allowed again inside MT). Her windshield wipers stopped working, but only when it was raining.

But through it all, did she ever complain? Was there ever a time when she refused to go where told? Never.

After college, I gave her to my folks and she spent stints working for my Dad and my sister. She particularly enjoyed working for my Dad, as it offered her a quick daily workout, and then the ability to sit atop Cornell's hill and gaze down at her former home, looking forward to her seemingly nearing retirement.

But it was not to be. She was "sold" to one of April's friends for $20 and a promise to have her inspected in 2001. Catherine must have done something right, because she was able to stave off MT's retirement until she was well into areas of the Blue Book that few have ever navigated. To be honest, I hadn't thought of her much recently...until I got the following email this afternoon from my mother:

Hi Alex -- Thought you'd enjoy this update on the good ol' Le Baron. Love, Mom

To: Catherine
From: "A. Bradford
Subject: La Baroness
Cc: Alan Raymond Collmer
Candace Whitmer Collmer

Catherine, I just want to update you about your 'ole 1986 Chrysler LeBaron.

I don't know if you remember or not, but Mike Parkhurst and I renamed the car, La Baroness. After you used it for a couple of years I sold La Baroness to the parts manager at Pritchard Dodge who fixed it up for his granddaughter to commute back and forth to TC3. Well, his granddaughter graduated with honors this year and is transferring to someplace in Rochester and La Baroness is now being retired after all the dashlights and speedometer failed and the granddaughter got a speeding ticket. Jerry thought $150 for a used dashboard light package was too large an investment to make in the 'ole beauty.

Now, the last glorious chapter: La Baroness will be part of the Trumansburg Fair later this month. Some Ithaca City police officers bought her from Jerry and she'll be in the final event of the Trumansburg Fair on Sunday, August 29, at 5 PM ---- the Demolition Derby!

I thought you ought to be informed of her impending, final demise!

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Love Ya',
Dad

Part of me feels like this is my opportunity to start one of those internet petitions and swoop into the T-burg fair at the last minute with 4,975,857,893 signatures from all over the world just in time to keep Big Foot off of her well worn bumper. But then, the more I think about it, I'm starting to realize that this seems like a fitting end, and I think that it's how La Baroness would like to go. She certainly lived a full life, she served every one of us with a quite pride, and she always loved being in the center of the action.

Thanks for the good years Mauve Thunder.

A Similar Concept...But With a Little More Firepower

Thanks to Kirstin Falk for pointing out that Cal-Berkley's George Lakoff (a professor of Linguistics there) is leading a similar thought exercise through his Rockridge Institute. Here's a list of their current projects. Of particular relevance to the discussion on the blog of late, check out this article on "Framing".

Interestingly, a group called the Commonweal Institute has begun conducting workshops to actually train people for casual conversations with neighbors and family members. Here's an article from a publication called the CommonDreams.org about this project.

When people start paying for political communications strategy workshops so that they can attend family reunions, it feels to me like the saying that everything is politics has reached a new level. Is the emergence of a viable third party the only remedy for this seemingly downward spiral into partisan bickering?

A First Pass at the Response Points

Here is a first pass at the Response Points to many of the popular statements made by conservatives these days. Thanks to Ben, Neil, Dave and everyone else who weighed in. Please feel free to send email tweaks and suggestions. I'll keep updating this original post.

1. Kerry is the 1st Most Liberal Senator in the US
Repsonse – This is not true. The rating that they are quoting only covers 2003, and only a small percentage of the senate votes. Of that small percentage, Kerry and Edwards missed most of them because they were campaigning. The actual report states all of this and even states that the data is misleading for this reason, but you don’t hear that part quoted by the Republicans.

2. Kerry is out of the mainstream
Response – He’s for workers rights, increased funding for schools, cheaper college tuition, a strong military, individual rights, universal healthcare and a rational pay-as-you-go economic policy. What part of this is out of the mainstream?

3. Kerry wants to raise taxes for all Americans
Response - Kerry has said he will roll back taxes on those making more than $200,000 per year, but will maintain tax cuts for the middle class, and perhaps reduce taxes further on the middle class by providing tax credits for college tuition and increasing the per child tax credit.

4. Kerry is actually NOT a war hero, and most of the people he served with are preparing to tell the true story about his service.
Response - This is just unsupported. Most of the guys he served with consider him a hero. Of the 6 people on his swift boat in Vietnam, 5 are actively supporting him and the other is dead. Overall, Bush has a slight lead in support from the military (54 vs. 40% as of June 4th) Download cbs_poll.doc

5. America is turning the corner (presumably both with terrorism and the economy)
Response – Again, this is simply unsupported. On the terror front, America is currently on its highest alert since 9/11. Afghanistan is being taken over again by the Taliban and Karzai’s government only controls Kabul. Jobs picked up slightly earlier this year but now seem to be trailing off again, and are still netting a loss against population growth. Furthermore, consumer spending, which is the ultimate driver of the entire economy, was at its lowest level in 3 years this past month. Here's the actual employment report for July.

6. Bush's No Child Left Behind program fixed the American education system.
Response - Ask anyone with school age children if they believe schools are adequately funded, and then remind them that the No Child Left Behind program was substantially underfunded (much less than what he promised in the State of the Union speech) to finance a war of choice that has proven unnecessary.

7. The Economy is Booming
Response – Again, the points from 5 are relevant. Furthermore, the economy ought to be booming. We’ve run up a completely unsustainable deficit. If you can’t invigorate the economy by spending $500b more than you have, then you really have a problem.

8. Deficits don't matter.
Response - Deficits increase interest rates, which puts a burden on those with adjusted rate mortgages. The federal government's debt also draws money away from private investment stifling capital markets. It took us 10 years of concerted effort to dig our way out of the deficits that Reagan built up during his presidency.

9. Democrats are weak on Defense.
Response – This is simply not true. World Wars I & II were fought and won under Democratic presidents. Many of the smart weapons that were used to win the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq were developed under President Bill Clinton, in an effort to enhance the efficiency of military spending which was criticized by many republicans at the time but is now widely considered quite prescient.

10. America is safer under Bush's foreign policy.
Response - The pictures from Abu Grhaib prison are a recruiting poster for Al Quaeda. Those would not exist if W hadn't decided to invade Iraq. More importantly, the US has become isolated from the world community by Bush’s policies. The war on terror is a global intelligence and police effort. Without the fullest cooperation of every country in the world, the war on terror is rendered less effective than it could be. Finally, Bush’s policies have pushed allies in the Arab/Islamic world towards extremism. This is one of the scarier ironies of the last 3 years. In an effort to keep Iraq from producing nuclear weapons that COULD end up in the hands of Islamic Fundamentalists, our policies so incited the fundamentalist population that Pakistan (which has the bomb) has seen its Congress go from having 2 Islamic Fundamentalist elected officials out of 271 in 2001, to 77 today.

11. America is so powerful that it doesn't need allies.
Response – It is true that the power gap between the American military and the rest of the world is unlike any in the history of civilization. However, as we are now finding out in both Iraq and Afghanistan, there is much more to waging war than simply winning the combat operations. To ensure long-term success, many years of rebuilding and police efforts are required and no single county can do this alone.

So, while I agree with Neil’s comment that Response Points alone are not enough, the fact is that many of these ideas are in circulation already…so let’s be prepared to address them. To Neil’s point, the initial PROGRESSIVE POINTS are going to be coming in the days ahead, but in the meantime, I’d like to get some feedback on the following platform pillars. As I’ve mentioned, I think that simplicity is the key, so here are the defining concepts of a progressive platform as I see them (with help from Dave Pollak – Thanks Dave.)

1. A teacher in every classroom
2. A cop on every street corner
3. Affordable healthcare for all
4. Full protection of individual rights
5. Sound economic policy driving growth today without sacrificing tomorrow.
6. A stable planet

Comment, suggest and criticize away.

The Answer to Talking Points - RESPONSE POINTS

As many people who know me know well by now, I have long held that Democrats are really losing a war of communication more so than a war of ideas. That said, let's quickly outline the 2 pillars of the current Republican/Conservative communication strategy.

Simplicity sells. Whether it's a new business opportunity, a recipe, a novel storyline, or a policy statement, people are drawn to things that they can easily understand.

Repitition Works. Furthermore, any marketer will tell you that repitition works and frequency of message matters. When you're watching TV and you see the same commercial over and over during a football game or a sitcom, and in some cases, even back-to-back, there's a hard track record of results that is backing that media buying strategy.

Given these two points, it's easy to see how the Republican/Conservative effort has been so effective over the past few years. Hillary is evil. It's your money. Kerry is the 1st most liberal senator in the US. Max Cleeland is not a patriot. Kerry doesn't support the troops. All of these are immensely understandable, and work very well in a 10-20 second soundbite. On the flip side, trying to explain why providing universal healthcare will actually lower the cost burden on the public over time, or how Kerry actually tried to separate the $87b for the troops into two separate traunches (a $67b traunch for the troops that he would ok immediately and a $20b discretionary traunch that he wanted more clarity on before ok'ing - a strategy that given the fact that of the $20b appropriate for discretionary spending, only ~$400 million has actually been used, seems to now have made a lot of sense), or how it is so patently ridiculous that Max Cleeland, a 1 limbed war hero, could be called anti-American, all seem to bump up against the bounds of the soundbite timeslot, leaving viewers unnecessarily confused.

So, I'm going to start tracking Talking Points and offering my own RESPONSE POINTS. Iincidentally, at the NDN strategy meeting in DC a few months ago, I actually proposed that we pay to have laminated 3X5 cards with just these RESPONSE POINTS, sent out to any Dem who wants them. People can print new cards as the weeks roll on. Whenever a friend of theirs (independent or wobbly Republican) regurgitates a Conservative talking point.....BANG, they'll be able to hit them with the RESPONSE POINT. This is a communication war and we need to arm our guerilla marketers with the tools to be an army of educated pundits.

The first step is to identify the Talking Points. I'll start with some popular catch phrases, but would love to have people submit things that I've missed.

1. Kerry is the 1st Most Liberal Senator in the US
2. Kerry is out of the mainstream
3. Kerry wants to raise taxes for all Americans
4. Kerry is actually NOT a war hero, and most of the people he served with are preparing to tell the true story about his service.
5. America is turning the corner (presumably both with terrorism and the economy)
6. Bush's No Child Left Behind program fixed the American education system.
7. The Economy is Booming
8. Deficits don't matter.
9. Democrats are weak on Defense.
10. America is safer under Bush's foreign policy.
11. America is so powerful that it doesn't need allies.

Please comment or email me with things that I've missed here. Over the next week or so, I'm going to incorporate suggested items that I've missed and start to build a set of simple RESPONSE POINTS.

Anyone can be a pundit.

The 1st Most Liberal(ly quoted rating)

For the past few weeks, anyone watching TV has undoubtedly heard countless references to the "fact" that John Kerry is the 1st most liberal senator and John Edwards is the 4th most liberal senator. The pundits that casually reference this "fact" always point out vaguely that this rating was done by a non-partisan group that monitors their voting history. Once established, this point leads nicely into the second most mentioned talking point, that John Kerry is "out of the mainstream" or "further left than Ted Kennedy".

The only problem is that neither of these points are true.

In fact, this rating only counts a very small subset of the total bills that were voted on, and of that small subset, both Kerry and Edwards missed more than half of the votes because they were campaigning. Furthermore, the rating is for 2003, not for their entire voting history, as usually claimed.

In actuality, both John Kerry and John Edwards are actually right of the median Democratic Rating when tracked over their entire careers in the Senate. Jon Stewart and the Daily Howler both went on the attack with regard to these points yesterday. In the case of Jon Stewart, it was actually pretty funny to watch because the Republican pundit who was spouting the data actually had no idea where it came from or what it referenced. Luckily for Democrats, 27% of men below the age of 30 get their news about politics from the Daily Show and other late-night comedies. Good news for Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Perhaps not so good news for America.

Pakistan's Predicted HVT - Coincidence?

As a pps in Paul Krugman's July 30th editorial in the New York Times, he mentions that the New Republic's report from earlier that month that Pakistani officials where being pressured by the Bush Administration to produce a High Value Target (HVT) in the war on Terrorism during the Democratic Convention, had actually come true.

This is a really interesting story, so I've posted the various component pieces for anyone to read and comment on. First, here's the original report from the New Republic.

Perhaps more interesting in light of the fact that it ACTUALLY HAPPENED JUST AS PREDICTED, is some of the comentary following the original report. For example, read this response from The National Review's Andrew McCarthy. In the article, McCarthy wastes no time slamming the New Republic's report as utterly laughable.

"So, for TNR, there must be a catch, which those paragons of rectitude down at the ISI are only too happy to provide. Thus, the "latest pressures from the U.S. administration" are driven by the "[upcoming] U.S. elections" (brackets in original), and have led to the unprecedented introduction of "target dates" into the equation. An official attached to the ISI directorate darkly recounts that "[t]he last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad" — in fact, the message has been conveyed, "it would be best if the arrest or killing" of high-value al Qaeda players could be accomplished by the Pakistanis in time to be "announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July" — which, TNR is quick to add lest we miss the hint, are "the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston." Judis and company do not tell us whether Powell or Tenet or Fox News have told the Pakistanis what time the arrest or killing should take place."

Unfortunately, it actually happened ("it" being the uncanny timing, not the actual capture). A HVT that had been apprehended "a number of days before" was announced just hours before the Kerry acceptance speech (here's the CNN announcement of the capture). It seems really hard to believe that the Bush Administration would be doing this, which leads me to believe that the timing of the announcement was pure coincidence....but it is pretty amazingly coincidental.

Senior Week For Senators

Nobody really thought she could pull it off. After all, the fatigue from 4 days without sleep was weighing her down like an iron nightshirt. Plus, it couldn’t have helped that she just had to spend the past 48 seconds holding the left leg of Governor Warner as he powered through what, at least for a few seconds, looked like it could have been the first legitimate challenge to Barack Obama’s 107 second formal announcement of arrival.

The inside word up and down Boylston Street was that while Barack’s speech might have been impressive, it was his one-handed, epic keg stand that truly put the fear of a bi-partisan God in the Republicans. How could he have kept drinking for that long? How did he keep from getting dizzy after being inverted well past the minute mark? Perhaps most amazingly, how did the self-proclaimed skinny kid with a funny name do it all while winking and giving the thumbs up sign to the camera?

But that was all in the dustbin of revisionist history now as Hillary mounted the keg with the eerie precision of an Olympic gymnast hitting the vault. With the landing stuck and her hair unfazed, the only question in everyone’s mind was whether the skinny kid had met his match. As the former first lady muscled past the half-minute mark, it was clear from the gleam in her eye that she had come to Boston to win. Then, in a gesture that was simultaneously brilliant, heartfelt and downright cocky, just before the minute mark ticked by, she freed a hand to sign to a deaf reporter that John Kerry was our man, and then lay out a couple quick bullets of her newly revised health care plan.

But the victory was not to be. In the spontaneous, un-choreographed spirit of the week, her non-signing hand slipped at the exact time that Barack had put up, ending her run for a sole claim to the throne as she fell accidentally into the arms of the little Edwards children. It couldn’t have been scripted better even if someone had had the foresight to plan it out, and as little Jack and Emma Claire ran out the door with Hill riding atop, it was clear to every Democrat in attendance that John Kerry was the man.

Unfortunately, just as surely as every risen sun sets and every Boston bar closes well before anyone wants to go home, Friday morning came around and the party was over. So now, as I sit here on the train heading back to New York, I find myself looking back at the substantive events and conversations of the past week, while looking anxiously forward to the months ahead and the work that we were all celebrating the opportunity to do. Looking back, I’m struck most with the feeling that Democrats actually care about the plight of every American and the subsequent greatness of our nation. Across America, there is an amazing paradox of people labeling Democrats as unpatriotic and then voting Republican because they can actually understand the impact of the $50 a month more that they get under the Bush tax cuts. They don’t understand that that saved money is more than made up for by increases in health care costs and that the only winner in this game of trickery is the pharmaceutical and insurance industry executives that will be descending upon New York in a month for a similar, but very different convention. They don’t realize that they’re actually accepting a bribe to vote against their own interests. Having been at the whole convention and talked to many different elected officials at all levels of government, as well as many donors and people working on the campaign, I’m struck by how few of these people will actually directly benefit from their work. They’re pushing Kerry and other Democrats because they believe it’s good for America and the American people, not because they’re going to get a tax cut and some additional business contracts. This is really interesting, when weighed against the other side where so many people are voting purely based on their own, near-term financial interests. With this being the case, I would ask any open-minded voter, which side is voting patriotic and which side is voting for short-sighted benefits for themselves. Who’s voting for a truly strong America and who’s voting for a strong ME.

All of that said, as I now look forward, I see three categories of work for me:

1) First, I’m going to attempt to convert 5-10 people who voted for Bush in 2000 to vote for Kerry this time around. While most of those people will likely be voting in un-contested states like New York and Massachusetts, I am going to make a run at my Grandmother in Pennsylvania to see if I can move her and, if I’m lucky, some of her pals in her retirement home.

2) Second, I’m going to continue to do everything I can to support the efforts of the NDN and to help drive the evolution of The Network into an organization of leaders working to positively impact our world through the long-term strengthening of progressive politics. It all starts with pride, and I hope to help build an organization that every member can be proud of. Personally, I’m already proud of what we’ve accomplished, but I’m much more proud of what I think we’re going to do in the years to come than what I know we’ve done to date.

3) Finally, I’m going to remain an optimist and do everything I can to combat the masked cynicism perpetuated by the conservative message machine, to bring pride back to progressive ideas and to fight the idea that government is necessarily evil.

So, Senior Week for Senators is over. I’m tired, slightly hungover, looking forward to being home, but most of all, proud to be a Democrat.

Screwball - A Craze in the Making?

Some games from childhood are too much fun to forget as you grow older. I'm a terribly competitive person, so in my case, it's just about every game. I remember playing tennis baseball when I was really little - doubles were off the wall above the green wind fencing, over the fence was an out, etc. I remember playing "who can throw a rock into that trash can 50 yards away". I remember almost every football game. But most of all, I remember playing stickball.

My good friend Mike Paolucci and his brother Pat have taken the "remembering" part and one-upped me. Their version of stickball growing up was played with the hard plastic juice containers that you used to be able to buy in the local deli. Because of the aerodynamics of the open (and empty) juice container, you have what basically amounts to an uber wiffleball. Now that they're older, and you can't buy those juice drinks anymore, Mike and Pat set out to manufacture the perfect containers...specifically for this purpose...and bring them to the mass market. Enter Screwball.

I've played a few times with Mike and Pat, and this game is awesome. With a little creative marketing, I think we could be looking at a game that kids all over the country will be playing in no time. You can check out the website here. The site is a lot of fun, but you have to play Screwball to really understand. When you have your knees buckled by a moon ball, flailing wildly and coming up with nothing but air, only to hang in on the next one and crush one over the fence, you'll feel like you're 12 years old again....and that's worth an awful lot more than the $19.95 you'll pay to pick up the game.

Incidentally, this is exactly why I love being an entrepreneur. Great job Mike and Pat.

Watching the Media

The idea that independent organizations need to be created to monitor the outright lies that seem to be perpetuated on a daily basis on many of today's popular news programs is not a new one. However, the extent to which these obvious misrepresentations happen in plain sight is still baffling.

I've started watching shows like the O'Reilly Factor and Scarborough Country so that I can stay in the loop on what's going on in the world (haha). Last night's Scarborough Country was a perfect example of what's wrong with these programs. Scarborough kicked off the episode by bringing viewers up to speed on what we know so far about the Sandy Berger incident (presumably these are facts) and then speculating on what it means. By breaking it up like this, he was able to create the impression that many of the "facts" that he was laying out for his viewers were undeniable (i.e. that he stuffed classified materials in his socks, jacket and undergarmets). He then used this base as a platform to speculate that since Berger destroyed the materials later, there must have been something really incriminating on those documents. Clearly, here lies another major Clinton scandal. Finally, he sarcastically closed his opening intro by stating that maybe Sandy Berger wasn't coverging up for Clinton, but we'll never know now because the documents were accidentally destroyed by Berger.

Luckily for anyone interested in knowing the real story, Scarborough and Pat Buchannon were not the only people on the show. His other guest pointed out that he and Buchannon were missing the critical point of this story -- that the documents Berger took from the archives were COPIES and that the originals were still in the archives. The 9/11 commission went through them after Berger, and anyone with the proper security clearance, for that matter, could see them to this day.

Amazingly, Scarborough and Buchannon seemed to ignore this point and kept talking about how Berger must have been covering for Clinton, and how embarrassing these documents must have been for him to risk his reputation...but how we'll never know now because they've been illegally removed and destroyed. Again, the other guest pointed out that they were missing THE SINGLE IMPORTANT POINT OF THE WHOLE ISSUE and reiterated how the originals are still in the archives, and further pointed out that if the archive security guards actually saw him stuffing documents in his socks, as was being claimed by Scarborough, wouldn't they think that the guards would have stopped him?

Regardless of the specific details of last night's broadcast, I came away placing more value then ever on efforts like David Brock's Media Matters.org to act as somewhat of a watchdog and point out all of the lies and stretched truthes that are perpetuated on the broadcasts of major news networks on a daily basis.

People in the news and entertainment industries know that the ratings wars have pushed news programs towards the entertainment side of the news-entertainment continuum. Through the introduction of stronger personalities, combative discourse and general flash, "news" has become self-reassuring and even "fun". Unfortunately, too many people do not realize that what they're now choosing to watch over the syndicated sitcoms and nightly news broadcasts that they used to watch is not "news". To me, it seems that the proper answer to this is not to develop similarly biased news programs as a counter, but to better monitor the real news. If I knew that a network or show was guaranteed to be accurate and honest in everything that it said, now that would be something that I could tune into.