Cara and I spent the weekend in New England, visiting the University of New Hampshire and the University of Vermont (left), mostly for the purpose of affirming that she really hopes to be attending the University of Kentucky or Texas A&M this time next year. The ride up Friday night was stressful, taking place in the tail of a tropical storm that has whacked us in New York Thursday night; the ride across to Vermont on Sunday was pretty but taken too early to get he benefit of the changing leaves; and the ride home was rushed, since Cara had forgotten to cancel her Monday night babysitting gig. Oh well. The visit to UNH confirmed my impression from five years ago that the school was nice but not first-rate. UVM, on the other hand, seems like a wonderful place (and in charming Burlington! And between Lake Champlain and the mountains!) But was cold, and Cara has consistently expressed her preference for warm and if necessary hot. One cool thing at UVM: the washing machines in the dorm are online. You can see when they’re available; check the time left in your cycle; and receive an email that tells when your load is finished. Plus they’re free! Kind of hard to believe Cara is making this leap. Yikes

Allow me to join the chorus praising The Social Network, the new film directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin‘s exceptional screenplay, loosely based on the creation of Facebook. I’m not sure if Mark Zuckerberg is exactly like the character depicted on screen, but as he has been written, and as he has been portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg (whom we have loved ever since Roger Dodger), Zuckerberg is an undersocialized brain who yearns for popularity and recognition but who can’t get out of his own way. When he finally gets to do something cool–to be cool–he grabs with both hands, even if he ends up being despised and friendless. I particularly like the way he ends up–still on the outside, with an online experience instead of real relationships, the creator of something cool but alone and lonely. The movie lets you see something else–how Facebook itself is a reflection of Zuckerberg’s idea of social relationships–narcissistic, status-oriented, mostly one-way. (Although what do I know? I don’t live on Facebook like my kids do.) Fascinating. One more thing–an exceptionally well-cast, well-acted film.

The above chart is from a paper by Michael Norton of Harvard and Dan Ariely of Duke (the author of Predictably Irrational whom I had the privilege of interviewing in January 2009). Ariely does incredible work showing the difference between the way things are and the way we perceive them to be, and he and Norton make a great contribution by showing how incorrectly Americans view wealth distribution in America.

The top line is the actual U.S.wealth distribution. The second is what Americans think the wealth distribution is. The bottom line is what Americans think the wealth distribution should be. Oddly, the results are based on a survey taken in 2005, before the financial crisis. No doubt wealth is even more unevenly concentrated now.

On The Baseline Scenario, James Kwak connects the findings to “one of the themes brought up in Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Americans really think that society should be considerably more equal than it is, and that attitude has not shifted appreciably during the past thirty years. Yet our political system produces policies that make America more and more unequal, predominantly by cutting taxes for the very rich. Hacker and Pierson’s point is that there has not been an ideological shift toward conservative positions in the country at large (at least not on this issue). Instead, it’s the game of politics that has changed, so policy has become more disassociated from the preferences of the people.”

Reading in The Washington Post the excerpt from Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward‘s new book, I was reminded of nothing so much as –me!

In The Coup, I described the people Vice President Godwin Pope saw gathered on the floor of the House of Representatives as he sat on the dais awaiting the president’s State of the Union address: “`On the right, the guardians, our military chefs, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not our most valiant warriors, mind you, or our bravest, or our most most bloody-minded, or our most efficiently lethal, but six professionally accomplished, ribbon-bedecked commanders who have learned, through decades of bureaucratic maneuvers, that the answer to every military question, whether it’s about money, time, firepower, or troops, is “We need more.”’

In Obama’s Wars, Woodward writes “From the beginning of the review, it irked Obama that [General] Petraeus, [Admiral] Mullen and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, had been out campaigning for more troops on top of the 21,000 that Obama had approved shortly after taking office. In September 2009, Petraeus called a Washington Post columnist to say that the war would be unsuccessful if the president held back on troops. Later that month, Mullen repeated much the same sentiment in Senate testimony, and in October, McChrystal asserted in a speech in London that a scaled-back effort against Afghan terrorists would not work. . . .The only distinctly new alternative offered to Obama came from outside the military hierarchy. Vice President Biden had long and loudly argued against the military’s 40,000-troop request. He worked with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to develop a “hybrid option” – combining elements of other plans – that called for only 20,000 additional troops. It would have a more limited mission of hunting down the Taliban insurgents and training the Afghan police and army to take over. When Mullen learned of the hybrid option, he didn’t want to take it to Obama. “We’re not providing that,” he told Cartwright.

Obama should have read my book.

Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam in The Washington Post today tell us about Super PACs, “a new political weapon. . . [that] has emerged in recent weeks, allowing independent groups to both raise and spend money at a pace that threatens to eclipse the efforts of political parties.” The report says that these committies spent $4 million last week, and “are quickly becoming the new model for election spending by interest groups. . . . The super PACs were made possible by two court rulings, including one early this year by the Supreme Court, that lifted many spending and contribution limits. The groups can also mount the kind of direct attacks on candidates that were not allowed in the past.” A lot of these groups are affiliated with conservative causes, like the Club for Growth and Karl Rove‘s outfit American Crossroads, but liberal groups like Emily’s List are also players. “Groups favoring GOP candidates have outspent Democratic supporters by more than 3 to 1, mirroring an overall surge in spending by the Republican Party and its allies in recent weeks.”

Spending by Super PACs, spending by corporations, spending by lobbyists–the system is awash with money, so much of it designed to influence elections. The dirty secret is that all the money is kept inside–it goes to the politicians, to the lobbyists, to the media moguls, to the networks, to the advertising agencies and media buyers. All of it, ultimately, supports the efforts of those people to keep their jobs.

Here’s a modest proposal: let’s let voters sell their votes. If all this activity is involved in wielding economic power in order to gain political power mostly in the effort to preserve and enhance economic power, well, why shouldn’t those who have the ultimate political power share in the wealth. If BP wants my congressman to be reelected, why should my congressman and his handlers get money to attract my vote? Just let BP pay me for it.

What an amazing system that would be! On election day, I could go to the polling place and vote in the old-fashioned way. Or, some time before election day, I could go to an on-line exchange, and negotiate a price for my vote. Maybe I’ll give it to the Sierra Club for $10, but offer it to BP for $1000. Maybe I’ll sell it to the Sierra Club for $1000, and donate the cash back to them. I could sell it to a party, I could sell it to a cause, I could sell it to a comedian.

Why the hell not? The market is a ruthlessly efficient arbiter of resources. The only problem is the people can’t participate. What’s worse, they get bamboozled by candidates and interest groups, fooled with a lot of altruistic crap or negative nonsense. Why don’t we skip all this and get down to the nitty gritty and simplify the issue: I have a vote. What’s it worth to you?

What? You think this would be unseemly?

Let me ask you–what do you call what we have now?

George Blanda began playing pro football before I was born and concluded his career when I was 23, far too young and immature to understand him as anything but an anachronistic and vaguely humorous figure. Now I am trying to continue a career at an age far beyond that which Blanda had attained when he retired, and I admire and applaud his amazing longevity.

Drafted by the Bears as a quarterback in 1949, Blanda spent a decade doing little but placekicking for the Bears. When the AFL formed, he signed with the Houston Oilers, and led that team to the league’s first two titles. Let go by the Oilers in 1966–they thought he was too old–he signed with the Oakland Raiders and played with them for nine more years.

Blanda retired when he was 48. At the time, he was the NFL’s career scoring leader. No player has ever played longer. In one game, he threw seven touchdown passes, a feat only four other professional quarterbacks have equaled. In another game, he kicked a 55-yard field goal. He was voted the A.F.L player of the year in 1961. He threw 42 interceptions in 1962, a record. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1981.

In 1970, when he was 43, Blanda had an amazing five-game stretch in which he saved the game for the Raiders. On Sunday, Oct. 25, 1970, Blanda stepped in for the Raiders’ injured starting quarterback, Daryle Lamonica, and threw for three touchdowns in the fourth quarter to beat Pittsburgh. The next Sunday, against the Kansas City Chiefs, he kicked a 48-yard field goal with eight seconds left in the game, salvaging a tie. The next week, facing the Browns, Blanda entered the game with a little more than four minutes to play and the Raiders down by a touchdown. He threw a touchdown pass, kicked the extra point, and when the team got the ball back, drove the team and then kicked a 52-yard field goal that won the game with three seconds on the clock. The next Sunday, he beat Denver with a late touchdown pass; the Sunday after that, he beat San Diego with a last-minute field goal. “I really believe that George Blanda is the greatest clutch player I have ever seen in the history of pro football,” said Raiders coach Al Davis. The Raiders went all the way to the AFC title game that year.

Blanda died yesterday at 83. The thing young people don’t know about longevity is that you need more than willingness; you also need will, as well as desire; aptitude; talent; skill; determination, and most of all resilience. You don’t save the team for five straight weeks when you’re 43 if you get ground down after throwing 42 interceptions when you’re 35. Life is long; there are days of triumph and days of defeat.

Way to be a man, George.

Friends of this blog know of my interest in the widespread use of CCTV in the UK. This past week, CCTV was very much in the news when a running camera captured a woman in Coventry named Mary Bale strolling down an ordinary suburban street and picking up an ordinary tabby cat, which she proceeded to drop in a plastic wheelie bin, where it remained for fifteen hours. Bale has been arrested on charges of animal endangerment, which carries a penalty of a year in prison. She has also become a youtube celebrity, and the new face of British evil, all for “a split second of misjudgment that got completely out of control,” as she later admitted. In my mind, the key questions were asked (and answered) in an article in The Independent:
Who actually has CCTV cameras trained on their bins?
More people than you’d think. According to the electrical retailers Maplin, sales of home CCTV equipment jumped by 70 per cent between 2007 and 2008 in the UK’s biggest urban areas. A recent Which? poll suggested 2 per cent of dwellings have CCTV, which translates to an astonishing 300,000. Stephanie and Darryl Andrews-Mann, the cat’s owners, say they installed CCTV outside their house because their car had been repeatedly hit by careless drivers, and the bin happened to fall into its field of vision.
Isn’t CCTV rather expensive?
No. “You can now get a basic one- camera system for £30,” says leading supplier Spy Camera CCTV. Police tell victims of vandalism they are powerless to act without evidence, so are encouraging homeowners to install CCTV. “But you are legally required to put a little sign up saying you have CCTV,” warns the property expert Ross Clark.
Aren’t our streets already littered with CCTV cameras?
There are about four million cameras in the UK – one for every 14 people and reportedly more than in any other country. Privacy campaigners have questioned their efficiency, and a 2008 report by UK police chiefs concluded that only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV.
So the police don’t actually bother to trawl through all that footage?
Don’t be silly: they’re too busy catching criminals.

Thanks to my friend Rebecca Lavoie, one of my discoveries at Playboy (and yes, it’s LaVOY, not LaVWA), I was a guest today on Word of Mouth, a program on New Hampshire Public Radio, where Rebecca is a producer. I spoke to host Virginia Prescott (left) about my piece on lying in Details. Look out, human resource managers of the Granite State; a horde of falsifying job applicants is about to descend. Should you wish to listen to the eight-minute interview, click here.