MOTHERBRAIN

Signs of the Times

From my two-block walk from BART to the office this morning:

44 Presidents in Convenient Chart Form

(Via Agency Spy, Thanks Krissie)

(via the Onion via Matt)

Vote with your Dollars—How Companies Have Donated Politically

I've been meaning to post about GoodGuide for a few months now, ever since someone at work first emailed out the link. The basic gist of the website is that it helps you make more better purchasing decisions based on "what is important to you." It rates products on health, environment and social performance. Anyways, I just went there for the first time in a while and noticed that they've created an embeddable app that maps out political leanings (Rep. or Dem.) of companies based on their donations. I've had to temporarily increase the size of my middle column ... which is annoying, but I couldn't get it to fit otherwise. See below:

Democratic

Republican

GoodGuide.com political contribution data for over 100 companies
View data for other companies at GoodGuide.com

Everything I know about Mavericks, I learned from Top Gun

"Maverick, it's not your flying, it's your attitude. The enemy's dangerous, but right now you're worse than the enemy: you're dangerous and foolish. You may not like the guys flying with you, they may not like you. But whose side are you on?"

- Iceman

Meanwhile, some of my favorite (paraphrased) quotes from friends over the Internet about the debates:

• "Who had "maverick" in fantasy debate?" - Jamie (who has a great newish blog)
• "New rule, you can't be a maverick and call yourself a maverick" - Kevin D.
• "if she winks one more time I'm going to punch her face." - Krissie
• Mark Bates is wondering when general McClellan came back from the dead to fight in Afghanistan.
• "Newculer" - Sarah P. 

Here's the problem though.  No one is really talking about Biden.  Palin is doing a great job at what I think she was hired to do, draw attention away from the Obama campaign. 

Consider search volume from Google:

While McCain's trend line is mirroring Obama's, with less volume, Palin has charted her own course and is averaging way more interest than the big O. No one is searching for Biden.  And that's probably not because they already know everything there is to know about him. 

I keep reading about and talking to people who insist that Biden won.  And factually, rationally, he probably did.  The problem is that people make decisions emotionally, then back up that decision immediately with rational reasoning.  Palin did a great job of bringing that Pitbull/hockeymom thing to the debate, which even when she didn't have anything to back it up, made it look like she was bringing the pain.  And while it irritated the ever loving hell out of both Krissie and I, I could see how it would appeal to a lot of people. 

The other thing that Palin is good at is sounding different.  I get a sense that when people hear politicians talking about political things that they have just started tuning it out, they've heard it a million times before, and we've learned not to trust rational arguments about politicians and their past since most of the time they are instantly refuted and the truth ends up being somewhere in between.  So what we have is someone who talks a lot different than the usual politician doing a good job of stealing the show from an actual politician.  Did you ever see that Family Guy episode when Stewie hijacked Brian's radio talk show and turned it into "Dingo and the Baby"? 

All of this has me worried.  I feel like politicians are learning how to game this system in a whole new way...and I don't like it.  This shouldn't be such a circus.  This is the future of the most powerful civilization on Earth ... which seems to now be teetering on the edge of a very dark and very scary abyss. 

Talking Ourselves Into A Recession

Over the past year or so, while the media has been feverishly scratching the word “recession” into our retinas even though there continued to not be one, it seems like they have finally gotten their way.  That’s made me wonder about the role of media in this whole economic slowdown thing. 

As a consumer, I am going to run my financial life a certain way unless either experiencing directly a habit-altering event, or if the threat that such an event could happen is made more severe.

As a 24/7 media outlet, I have to attract eyeballs as much as possible for as long as possible.  Feel good stories give people the warm and fuzzies, but disaster, doom and peril are good for ratings, especially when it’s close to home for enough people. Just ask the Weather Channel what happens to their ratings in Virginia Beach when a hurricane is heading up the east coast. 

The problem here is that unlike a hurricane, an economy is an ever-changing thing.  A hurricane’s path isn’t influenced by the media the way that human behavior can be. 

As Live Science points out: 

“Warnings about a recession create a similar self-fulfilling prophecy — or, thought of another way, an anti-placebo effect. Just as a placebo (a non-effective "remedy") can make people feel better simply on the basis of their belief and expectation, recession worries can make people panic because they feel like they should.

In fact, much of the expert advice for how to survive a recession (save money, reduce debt) actually perpetuates it. Later this year the government will be issuing checks to taxpayers in an effort to stimulate the economy, but that will have little impact if those dollars go into savings accounts instead of being spent on consumer goods.”

Which makes me wonder if there's a way that media can be used to help correct the problem. Or is that too weird and Orwellian?  Maybe it’s just a matter of waiting until something more interesting comes along and distracts us.  Maybe our short attention spans will save us in the end.

Here’s hoping the election does the trick…