September 27, 2004
We Set The Bar Pretty Low Around Here
As a father of little boys, you inevitably have in your head the folkloric stories of sons dreaming of growing up and doing all the grownup things their dads do: becoming a race car driver like dad, or a fireman. In our household, apparently, the same logic is at work, only with a small twist. Here's a conversation I had yesterday with our 3-year-old Clay, walking back from a morning in Prospect Park:
ME: You know how tall you're going to be in fifteen years?
CLAY: No?
ME: You're going to be as tall as daddy!
CLAY (big smile): Really?
ME: That's right.
CLAY (excitement rising in his voice): And then I can drink coffee!?!
ME: Um, yes... But that's not the best thing about... Oh, never mind.
Perhaps it's a sign that you have a problem when your son thinks the whole reason to look forward to adulthood is being allowed to have an iced latte.
Posted by sberlin at 10:18 AM | Comments (1)
September 22, 2004
My Tiny (And Brief) Life
So enough about the battleground states and Fallujah, enough about Rathergate and the latest Zogby polls: I got my copy of The Sims 2 yesterday!
Here's a brief summary of my first two hours with the game. I spend twenty minutes installing it while I skim the manual. Then I launch the game, and immediately opt to create a new family. The Sims 2 gives you far more control over the appearance and personality of your Sims, and so I spend what seems like hours crafting as exact a replica of my own family as possible, down to this new pink retro-preppy Izod shirt my wife just bought, and the striped pajamas our youngest boy wears. When I finish re-constructing the four of us, I find a nice little starter home in what seems like an appealing neighborhood, buy some furnishings with the remaining money I have, and we move in. And then, almost immediately, the Sim based on me burns to death in a kitchen fire.
Nice.
Posted by sberlin at 09:39 AM | Comments (1)
September 20, 2004
On Today's Menu: Flame Bait
Okay, you all know that I believe in the blogosphere as much as anybody, and that I've spent the last ten years of my life championing the power of bottom-up media and distributed intelligence. So I've been thrilled to see the team effort over the past ten days that toppled the CBS documents story. But could we have a brief reality check for just one split second? For all of you announcing that Rathergate is a watershed moment in the history of journalism, the moment when the swarm Davids finally outfoxed the big media Goliath -- remember that this was a story that was uniquely suited for the living-room journalism that flourishes in the blogging world. You didn't even need Google to crack this case: 95% of the relevant facts that proved the documents to be forged were available simply by switching applications. If there's a watershed here, it's this: from this day on, you can be sure that any time a national news story appears that revolves around Microsoft Word's auto-formatting features -- the blogosphere will OWN that story!
Think about the other major stories that broke in the last year or so involving misrepresentations or other abuses of power: the Plame Affair, Abu Ghraib, the whole missing-WMD madness. Did the bloggers contribute anything substantive to the reporting -- to the facts, not the opinions -- of those stories? No, because the central elements in those stories were not matters of typography; to advance them you couldn't just launch Microsoft Word or Google for "Niger documents." Until the blogosphere figures out a way to contribute to those kinds of stories -- and not just ones where a knowledge of font trivia makes you a genuine expert -- I think we'll still prove to be better at framing the news than making it ourselves.
Posted by sberlin at 04:09 PM | Comments (1)
September 10, 2004
Forgeries?
Whoa! Who thought typography could be this thrilling? This is like the final scene in Jagged Edge!
Posted by sberlin at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)
September 09, 2004
The Mud-Slingers Denounce Mud
None of you will be surprised to learn that I'm enjoying the surge of stories and newly discovered documents surrounding the President's National Guard tenure, though of course all of that should be taken with the caveat that it's not what he did back then that's relevant; it's whether he's lying about what he did back then that matters. (The old anti-Clinton distinction, in other words.) But one thing in the coverage of both this scandal and the swift boaters has consistently driven me crazy: television pundits who spend entire shows covering these decades-old stories, and who then have the audacity to complain about the campaigns not focusing on The Issues That Real Americans Care About. (Chris Matthews and guests were doing this last night, but it's a refrain that appears on pretty much every political chat show.)
The next time you hear that complaint registered by a TV personality, I advise you to visit the web sites for Bush and Kerry, and read through the transcripts of their recent speeches and appearances. You will find, almost without exception, that they are talking constantly about Issues That Real Americans Care About: outsourcing, new forms of energy, tax relief, medical liability, the Iraq reconstruction, cargo inspections. Here are two representative excerpts from the last two days:
THE PRESIDENT: Let me tell you something interesting about Wayne's business. He is called a Subchapter S corporation. That is an accounting term, or legal term -- legal term.
MR. LAM: Yes, it's a legal term.
THE PRESIDENT: Legal term. You and I aren't lawyers.
MR. LAM: No, sir. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: A Subchapter S corporation, like a sole proprietorship, pays taxes at the individual income tax level. So when we reduced all rates, individual income tax rates, we're helping Subchapter S corporations like Wayne's. (Applause.) Now, did it help you? The tax relief help at all? I'm sure -- that's called, leading the witness. (Laughter.) Yes, it helped, Mr. President. (Laughter.)
MR. LAMB: Yes, it helped. (Laughter and applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Let me tell you something. Listen to that rhetoric of this campaign. I'm running against a fellow who promised about $2 trillion -- well, I think maybe a little more than $2 trillion, thus far -- of new spending. So they said, how are you going to pay for it? He said, oh, we're just going to tax the rich; we're going to raise the top two brackets. That's called, taxing the rich. And guess who he taxes? He taxes Wayne. By running up the top two brackets, he's taxing nearly a million, about 900,000, Subchapter S corporations and sole proprietorships.
And from Kerry:
In the last three years, West Virginia lost 11,000 manufacturing jobs. But just today, a report came out that shows we’ve replaced those good jobs with low wage jobs – ones that pay an average of $9,000 less. A lot of them are part-time or temporary and don’t provide any health care or benefits. That is wrong. That’s George W. Bush and that’s why we need a new direction for America.
But if you think it’s tough to get by on $9,000 less, you haven’t heard the half of it. Health care costs are up, tuition is up, child care costs are up, gas prices are up, and family income has fallen. So people are working two jobs, three jobs, working nights and weekends, just to make ends meet.
Four years ago, George W. Bush told us he wanted to create an economy where there was “high-paying, high-quality work” for everyone. He now says prosperity has returned and we’ve turned the corner. Well, that’s just plain wrong.
No mention of the National Guard, no mention of the swift boats. If the media wants a substantive campaign, it's sitting right in front of them, waiting to be covered. But of course tax breaks for S Corporations don't make very good television, which is why they invariably don't get covered. And that in itself is fine: television is in the business of improving ratings, not civic discourse. Just don't complain about our declining political discourse when you're the one dragging it down.
Posted by sberlin at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2004
George Bush's Cocaine Parties At Camp David
As much as I dislike our commander-in-chief, I have a hard time believing the tales -- emerging from Kitty Kelly's new profile of the Bush family -- of W. doing cocaine at Camp David during his Dad's administration. But the story reminds me yet again of the free pass that Bush has historically received from the press on the question of his cocaine use, which he has studiously dodged with cute answers like "When I was young and irresponsible I was young and irresponsible." Now, I'm against the "politics of personal destruction," and I thought Monicagate was a colossal waste of time. But Clinton wasn't supporting legislation that threw people into jail if they had affairs with their interns. Bush, on the other hand, has been a strong supporter of the war on drugs for his entire political life. So letting him joke his way out of answering the question is unacceptable. If a politician has actively supported the Drug War, then it's not the "politics of personal destruction" to ask whether he's ever served time in the opposing ranks.
I wrote about this issue for FEED after the DUI arrest came out, days before the 2000 election. Sadly, what I wrote then is just as relevant today:
Here are the facts: possession of one to four grams of cocaine -- the amount that a semi-regular user with a bank account might keep stashed away in a drawer -- is a second-degree felony in the state of Texas. That puts it at the same level as Sexual Assault, Indecency with a Minor, Burglary, etc. George W. Bush supports those punishments, and so presumably he sees inquiries into those other offenses as the "politics of personal destruction" as well. Imagine a press conference transcript that reads: "Q: Have you ever robbed someone's house?" "A: "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible (wink)." "Q: Have you ever committed sexual indecency with a minor?" "A: Look, the American people know that I made mistakes when I was drinking."
Would we accept such an exchange? Of course not. Refusing to answer the question of whether you kidnapped in your early years would disqualify you for city councilman, much less the highest office in the land. But that's precisely what's happening with Bush's cocaine stonewall when you think about it in the context of the drug war policies he currently supports.
Posted by sberlin at 10:39 AM | Comments (2)
September 03, 2004
The Sermon On The Mound
Okay, so Bush gave a good speech last night, particularly the last twenty minutes, where he finally made the Tom Friedman case for Iraq, and not the "smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud" canard. But I had to chuckle at that opening video, thinking back to the Democrats' version. Both films introduced the candidates by reviewing personal anecdotes that aimed to demonstrate their courage and character in difficult situations. But the contrast was telling.
For Kerry, it was pulling a Green Beret out of the water while sustaining enemy fire in the Mekong Delta. You might think that was impressive, but wait until you hear what the President did! When he was throwing out the first pitch at the World Series, he threw it from the top of the mound, more than sixty feet from home plate. And he did it in a tight-fitting jacket!
That's our leader. Other politicians would have thrown from in front of the mound, a mere forty-five feet away, or maybe even made some calls to influential people to see if they could get into the National Guard instead of throwing that pitch. But not George W. Bush.
Posted by sberlin at 09:46 AM | Comments (1)
August 31, 2004
The Insanity Of The National Poll
There are some purists out there who despise all political polls by default. I'm not one of those people. But I do have an aversion to polls that are basically meaningless, particularly when they dominate the news cycle. As the election fast approaches, every other day sees the release of a new poll -- from the LA Times, or Gallup, or NBC News -- offering the latest news on the national popularity contest between Bush and Kerry (with Nader usually thrown in as an alternate 3-way scenario.) When you hear chatter about one side being on the upswing, it's almost always because a new national poll has come out suggesting a few points of change in the race. (Though invariably within the margin of error, given how close the race is.)
But as we learned in the 2000 election, these polls are almost entirely irrelevant to the question of who will win in 2004. Bush could win the popular vote by 3% and still lose in an electoral college landslide, were he to surrrender Florida and Ohio. All that matters are the voters in the swing states -- and it's almost impossible to make any judgment about the shifting views of those voters from a national popularity contest. When I see the headlines again and again reporting national polls, I feel like I'm in some strange kind of wonderland, where the lessons of 2000 have been ignored. Sure, national polls show you general trends in the electorate that might be predictive of trends among voters that matter. But all sorts of polls could do the same. They might as well be running headlines saying: "New poll of unlikely voters shows Bush taking a small lead." Presumably people who don't vote still follow the candidates from a distance, and their changing opinions move roughly in synch with the voting population. But no one runs polls of non-voters because the Founding Fathers devised an ingenious scheme whereby people who choose not to vote don't have a say in who gets to be President. (Funny, huh?) The Framers also came up with another scheme whereby the national popular vote also has nothing to do with who gets to be President. Perhaps someone should alert the pollsters?
Posted by sberlin at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)
August 22, 2004
The Political Brain
Today's Sunday Times Magazine is running an essay of mine on the neuroscience of political affiliation -- as embryonic a line of research as you're likely to find, but an intriguing one. I first started mulling over the ideas this spring, when the Times covered an early study commissioned by two Democrat consultants that performed fMRI scans on people as they viewed campaign ads. The typical response to these studies at the time was that there's something creepy about political hacks using brain scans to make more effective ads. But to me -- having just written Mind Wide Open -- it seemed much more interesting, and much less creepy, if you looked at these results more as a political science experiment than an exercise in neuromarketing. Instead of scanning brains to devise more persuasive means of securing votes for Candidate X, scan brains to find an answer to that most mysterious of questions: how do political values form in the first place?
You can see how I ended up answering the question in the piece itself, but one thing is probably worth reiterating here: whatever conclusions we end up extracting for this line of research won't come exclusively from the neuroscientists. You'd need sociologists and political scientists and philosophers -- not to mention those political strategists -- to make sense of the results, to put them in context, and to propose new avenues of research. The neuroscientists would be mostly there to explain the results in terms of brain anatomy and function, leaving it to the social scientists to interpret the results on the level of human experience. In other words, the scans don't give you answers. They give you new kinds of questions.
Posted by sberlin at 09:15 PM | Comments (1)
August 20, 2004
What I Didn't Do On My Summer Vacation
I've just returned to Brooklyn, after almost three weeks with the family (and assorted friends) in the lovely seaside village of Westport, Mass. I'm tempted not to mention anything more about this spot, because it is strangely undiscovered compared to just about any other stretch along the Atlantic between New York and Boston, and given the vast readership of this blog, I could easily spoil the place with a single enthusiastic post. But let me just say this: the entire Coastal Villages stretch from Dartmouth to Little Compton, Rhode Island is as scenic and delightful as anything I've experienced in this area: endless lines of stone fences lining the gently sloping farmland descending down to the shore, with its dunes and tidal rivers and occasional rocky points jutting out into Rhode Island Sound. There are fancy bits, to be sure, particularly in Westport Harbor and Little Compton, but nothing compared to the extravagance and absurd prices of the Hamptons or much of Cape Cod and the Islands. There are working farms throughout the area, sometimes within eyesight of the ocean. Anywhere between NYC and Boston, you know you're in a place that's either wonderfully undiscovered or wonderfully conserved when you've got land still cheap enough that it makes economic sense for the cattle to have ocean views.
This trip also marked a milestone for me: the longest stretch of time that I have experienced with a sub-28.8 dialup connection for nearly a decade. So I have an excuse for the nonexistent posting. Plus, I was looking at this all day from the deck of the house we were renting:
At any rate, I'm home now and looking forward to the back-to-school energy that always kicks in for me in early September, even though I haven't actually been in school for about twelve years . Lots of exciting things to report here in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, be sure to check out this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. More later when it's linkable.
Posted by sberlin at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)
