Why the Strategic Vision Polling Scandal Sucks (And Why it Might be Important)

In case you missed it, there was a survey of Oklahoma public high school students that got released the other week, one of those our-kids-are-so-dumb-they-think-coleslaw-is-a-country findings that gets everyone worked up once a year or so. These students got asked 10 basic questions about the US government, and none of them could answer even eight of them correctly. Three out of four students didn't know who the first President was. Some news outlets and blogs picked up the story and then it got dropped because American high schoolers being dumb is not exactly news.

Here's the problem with that survey: those numbers that seem surprisingly plausible might very well have been made up entirely. Or so says political statistician Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, who published several posts suggesting that Strategic Vision, the polling and advertising company that conducting the survey, tends to get results that--to put it delicately--do not necessarily resemble numbers you would get if you actually conducted random surveys of people, and rather resemble the numbers you would get if you made some data up.

Silver uses some math that I won't get into here (math sucks, right?), but one red flag is easy to understand, even if you went to Oklahoma public high school: out of 1,000 students (supposedly) tested, not even one got eight questions right. The more you think about it, the less sense it makes. Students as a whole might be dumb, but there wasn't a single civics nerd in the whole bunch? If that's a truly random sample of students, that's pretty weird.

It's pretty much impossible to prove that numbers aren't random, but if Silver's suspicions are correct, this could be one of the more important scandals of the year, something that could actually matter in the long run, unlike all those stories about politicians sticking their man-parts in odd places. If surveys and polls are being fudged or falsified, we're one step closer to living in a 1984-esque nightmare where there is no such things as facts. Think that's an exaggeration?

Look at how much we already distrust media sources. Thirty years ago, Americans mostly trusted the news. Liberals and Conservatives may have gotten commentary from different places, but they got news stories from sources considered "objective." The New York Times was really the "paper of record" and Walter Cronkite was "the most trusted man in America."

Now? Conservatives watch Fox News, Liberals watch MSNBC, and each side distrusts and attacks the other's media. CNN and the Times are slammed for the stories they don't run and the bias that's inherent in the stories they do carry. If the Watergate scandal broke today, a large portion of the country would be convinced it was a liberal media plot to bring down the unfairly persecuted Dick Nixon. The only entities that are (mostly) regarded as unbiased are the companies that conduct public opinion polls.

Some pollsters do lean left or right, of course, meaning they are generally hired by one side or the other, but their results are regarded as facts. During election season, reporters of all affiliations treat polling numbers like sports scores, and no matter how many people yell at each other on cable-news splitscreens, you'll almost never hear a talking head say, "I think those poll numbers are a lie." Pollsters are more trusted than any pundit, because the poll numbers are what many pundits use to make their arguments. Although we don't think much about polling agencies, I think many Americans trust pollsters more than the government, the church, the news, or their teenaged children.

When we discuss polling numbers being added up so that 2+2=5, we're discussing the removal of the last foundation of objective political journalism. What if both parties created their own polls, willfully falsified the numbers, and released a mix of inaccurate and accurate information--or what if that's what the public thought they did? Liberals and Conservatives would have no way to even begin discussing current events with each other, and the talking heads would have one more thing to yell at each other about, and what once was "news" will become "opinion."

Strategic Vision, for its part, has promised to release its "crosstabs," which will break down the demographics of the (possibly conducted) polls, but it's unclear how that's going to disprove Silver's suspicions. They've also threatened to sue him, a threat which he doesn't seem to mind. The print media, meanwhile, hasn't picked up the story at all, probably because so far as we know, no one at Strategic Vision is having sex with someone they shouldn't have.

But the dead tree guys have reason to stay away from this story. It's not like an entity that the public implicitly trusts has potentially lied to a whole bunch of people, including the supposedly-savvy media, right? Right? Because that would really be a scandal. Read more!

Why Drinking Age Laws Suck

Should we be making it easier for teens to drink?

When I was under the drinking age, I would have said, "Hell yes, make it easier for me to buy alcohol!" Especially after a night of driving around aimlessly and complaining about having nothing to do, I would launch into rants about how draconian and oppressive US alcohol laws were, and how in Europe you could walk into a pub when you were 16 and blah blah blah. Then I turned 21 and stopped thinking about teenagers not being able to drink until yesterday, when I came across this quote from a former heroin addict in an article about the rise of teenage heroin use in Long Island:

“Believe it or not, as a high school teenager, (heroin) was easier for us to get than alcohol,” he said. “It’s cheaper than anything out there.”

That sounds absurd on the face of it, but then I thought back to my not-far-removed days as a teetotaling teen trying to find an intoxicant. Was it any easier to find alcohol than any other drug? I mean, you could find alcohol, there were liquor stores and gas stations all over the place, but getting it into your hands was more difficult. If your community enforced the drinking age like mine did, you had to: 1. find someone's older sibling; 2. Acquire a fake ID; or 3. Find a shady-looking adult on the street and pay them to buy you booze.

Unless the older sibling is feeling charitable, all three of these options cost money and take a fair amount of time, which raises the cost of acquiring alcohol for teens. More importantly, going through these channels means that you're going to end up in contact with some pretty shady people--the kind of people you would go to if you wanted to buy weed, or coke, or heroin.

Marijuana and alcohol are often denounced for being "gateway drugs," meaning that people--especially teens--who use them end up going on to harder drugs, which is where things can really start sucking. But one of the reasons these drugs are "gateways" is the channels teens use to get them are similar to the channels they go through for the bad drugs. The guy who sells fake IDs might have a coke business on the side; my local pot salesman also sells prescription pills. Entering the teenaged black market so you can experiment with alcohol or pot (things nearly everyone tries) also gives you access to drugs that ruin your life.

The above linked article compares the prices of drugs: a bag of heroin costs $5 to $25 for an eight hour high. That's a pretty good deal, if you want to get really fucked up. The problem with heroin is that it's too good at what it does--addicts feel so good when they're high and so bad when they aren't that they don't see a reason to do anything else. If you're a teen who is already predisposed to drug use, and you find a drug that's cheap and will get you really fucked up, and you haven't been educated enough on the difference in degree between alcohol and heroin--alcohol isn't good but heroin is really really fucking bad--why wouldn't you pick up a bag of horse from your dealer buddy?

On the other hand, if you were already comfortable with alcohol, and it was socially acceptable to drink in front of adults, and you weren't going through shady people to buy alcohol and being forced to drink in cars and parking lots, would you buy that bag? Or would you say, "No thanks, beer's good enough for me?" Or would the question never come up, because you wouldn't know the dealer?

We can't stop teens from drinking and getting high, because we can't really stop anyone from drinking and getting high. But Jesus, with the amount of attention we focus on drugs, you would think we could stop teens from shooting up. Maybe if we made it more legal to drink, and didn't turn a large percentage of teenagers into criminals for having a drink, we could avoid some of the worse consequences of teen drinking. Read more!

Why Razors Suck

Has technology made our lives better or worse? That's quite a big question, one of those questions that earnest young philosophy undergrads discuss when they get hammered. Some technologies, like the airplane or the cock ring, have unquestioningly made our lives better and without any technology at all we'd still be wandering the African savannah looking for food. On the other hand, thanks to technology that savannah is now is danger of being flooded by rising sea levels or blown into oblivion by advanced missiles.

And then there's the technology that is simply inexplicable, neither a giant leap forward or a step down the path leading to our own destruction, but a little hop that gets us nowhere in particular. If you want proof that these technologies exist, just watch TV after 2 a.m. and take a gander at the array of devices that you can use to vaccum your floor or slice tomatoes extremely efficiently. Or you can go to your local chain pharmacy, head towards the razors, and look at all the different ways a man can go about removing hair from his face.

Once upon a time, if a man wanted to shave, he had two options: go to a barber or shave himself. Either way, the device used was a straight razor, basically a blade with a handle attached to it. If there are any pretentious young men out there who've ever tried to shave with a straight razor, you probably didn't try it twice. You end up with a bunch of stubble still on your face and there's so much blood in the sink from your cuts your mom thinks you're suicidal and calls the fire department. Not that I would know.

Then, getting back to our history, someone invented the safety razor, which is pretty much what it sounds like. All of a sudden, you could shave your face (or your legs, if you were a woman or a nontraditional man) without cutting yourself up. Voila. Problem solved.

Then razor technology became, to quote Joe Biden, more fucked than a whore at the Republican Convention.

Razor manufacturers, apparently bored out of their minds, thought: it one blade was good, two would be better. And if two blades are better, three would be the best. And four would be supermega awesome, and five would be the motherfucking shit-king, master of the house, keeper of the inn, boss hog supernova excellent. And somewhere along the way, we got electric razors, then battery-powered razors because you don't always have an outlet when you need to shave. There are now razors that dispense shaving lotion (check out how the on/off switch is a "feature" in that listing), razors that pulsate against your skin , razors that have microchips, and for the ladies, a razor that will literally give you orgasms. Clearly, razors are evolving at an incredibly rapid rate. We can only hope that they will never become self-conscious.

Attention, R&D department heads of major shaving product companies, who I assume are avid readers of this blog: WE DO NOT NEED ANY MORE RAZORS. WE HAVE MORE ALL THE RAZORS ANYONE COULD CONCEIVABLY WANT. Nothing more is required of you. We can get close shave without cutting ourselves and that's really all we want. With the energy required to manufacture and power these devices and their microchips, you are probably hurting the world more than you are helping it. The only people who buy your products are people who aren't sure what their dad wants for Father's Day. Your industry is so stupid The Onion mocked your five-bladed razor before it even existed. If you want to help us, maybe you should turn your attention away from our beards and figure out a way to stop the savannahs from flooding. Read more!

Why the Baucus Bill Sucks

Let's say you go to the movies with your family. You want to see the new Sam Raimi horror-comedy, your older artsy brother wants to see a documentary about the exploitation of the natives of Papua New Guinea, and your little sister wants to see some faux-Pixar animated film. None of you can stomach each other's tastes, and all the movies start at different times, so no compromise seems possible—until your mom steps in and declares you're all going to see a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston. You all hate the film, of course, since it has Jennifer Aniston in it, but at least you all hate it equally.

Does that situation sound awful? It sure does, but that's exactly what happened last week with health care reform: Senate Finance Committee Chairman (that title means he is extremely powerful, for some reason) Max Baucus introduced the Jennifer Aniston of bills—hated by nearly everyone, but because all the alternatives are hated even more by segments of the population, it's impossible to get rid of.

The Baucus bill is extremely complicated and I don't pretend to understand all of it. But basically, the idea is to create “co-ops,” which would be like private health insurance companies but a little different; fine people who don't have health insurance; and subsidize poor people who don't have health insurance. The government wouldn't be in charge of insuring people, but it would still cost 800 billion dollars somehow. And illegal aliens wouldn't be able to get health insurance (but aren't almost all of them uninsured anyway?).

Maybe that doesn't sound so bad to you, but if you take this bill apart, the more reasons you have to hate it. If Baucus had introduced the Mandatory Heroin Use Act of 2009, at least heroin addicts would support it; under this bill, they'd be fined for not having insurance.

Here's why you should hate this bill:

If you're a liberal, you were holding out for a public option or a full-blown government health insurance takeover (and a pony, while you're dreaming). This ain't that. You're saying, “This is the best those motherfuckering Democrats could do with the White House and Congress? That's not change, that's more of the same!”

If you're a Republican, you hate that this bill costs a lot of money. To break down Republican opposition further, there are four three camps:

1.Libertarian: “I want to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid, so double-fuck this! I'm going to go smoke some weed and fire my guns at some cans!”
2.Fiscal Conservative: “We shouldn't be spending this much money during a recession, plus I probably already have health insurance so I don't really care about insurance reform.”
3.Racist: “This will give my money to those lazy--”
3.Career politician: “Any bill that gets passed looks like a victory for Obama, so we're just going to vote down anything that comes up.”

If you're a policy nerd, you are probably concerned about something in the bill that will make it cheaper for employers to get rid of health insurance altogether, destroying the current health care system.

If you are concerned about the influenced of business on politics, you won't like that this bill seems to complete a deal made between the health industry, the White House, and Congress.

Oh yeah, and Obama should hate this bill too, since it contradicts his goals by scrapping the employer-insurance system (see above) and basically screwing the middle class.

Even Baucus's fellow Senate Democrats have a variety of problems with this bill.

And even Baucus shouldn't like this bill too much, as there's evidence that all this hemming and hawing about health care reform is killing his poll numbers (and numbers of other senators). 50 percent for an incumbent senator who runs an important committee is about as bad as it gets, unless you got some woman pregnant and lied about it.

Whoops, one more: speaking of committees, who hates this bill the most? That's right, Baucus's own Finance Committee, who submitted 534 amendments to the bill. Yeah, 534—more than a 16-year-old boy masturbates in an entire week. Basically, Republicans on the committee wanted to do add some vague language in order to take shots at the idea of government health care (and ACORN, while they were at it), and Democrats wanted the bill to turn into the public option. So I guess only God and whatever talk show hosts have His home number know what's actually going to happen with this bill.

And I guess I should add that as an uninsured American, I hate this bill too. So I'm forced to get health insurance, which will involve a lot of choices and paperwork that I won't be able to understand? I don't even know how these mystical “co-ops” or “marketplaces” will function. I guess I'm around the poverty line, so I'll get some subsidies, but I'd rather just have the straight cash as long as the government is committed to giving me money anyway. (If insurance is so great, by the way, shouldn't not having it be punishment enough?)

Does anyone have a reason to enjoy the Baucus Bill? Well, there's only two groups that I know of. First, headline writers, who picked up a free alliteration opportunity (“Baucus Bill Bombs” is the low-hanging fruit here, and some people went for it). Secondly, Native Americans probably aren't too pissed, because they won't have to pay a fine for being uninsured, thanks to their own tribal (underfunded) insurance system. So that's the upside here: Max Baucus did not oppress Native Americans any further by introducing his terrible, terrible bill. And this bill won't directly lead to another Jennifer Aniston movie so I guess that counts as an upside. Read more!

Things That Don't Suck: Staying in Bed

Anyone who's ever had a child or a pothead roommate knows how difficult it is to get someone out of bed in the morning. Physically waking them up is never the hard part (if you have trouble, try splashing a little water on their neck or pretend that you are about to smoke some weed), the tough thing to do is convince them to take the covers and go to school or work.

But really, why should they? School is boring, work is hard and boring, and nothing in the day ahead is going to make them feel as good as they do when they're in bed--until they get back into bed after a long day of learning powerpoint or delivering pizza.

As far as I can tell, the main reason anyone ever gets out of bed is to earn enough money so your bed is not taken away and you have to sleep on a bench. If you are ambitious, you might want to earn more money to afford a larger or more comfortable bed, but I wouldn't advise that, as climbing the career ladder would leave you with less time to enjoy your bed.

But what if everyone stayed in bed, some busybody is asking somewhere--how will anything ever get done? ! I answer that with another question: what's so great about getting things done? If everyone stayed in bed longer we'd certainly have fewer wars, and fewer traffic jams, and less crime, and less stress. Lying in bed uses none of our precious natural resources and produces no harmful greenhouse gasses. What's the real downside?

Imagine if the September 11 hijackers had woken up on that fateful morning and instead of jumping right out of bed, praying eight or nine times and strapping on their guns, they had stayed under the covers for an extra five minutes that then stretched into half an hour, wriggling their toes in the hotel sheets and watching the soft gray light come through the blinds. I don't know for sure, but I bet those gentlemen, after thinking about how good the cool side of the pillow felt, would have said, "You know what? I'm not going to get on that plane today. I'm going to go to the hotel restaurant and get myself a big breakfast--with bacon. God bless America! God Bless American mattresses!"

As awesome as staying in bed by yourself is, staying in bed with another person--or multiple people, if that's your thing--is clearly way better. That's another of the main reasons to getl out of bed: to find someone who wants to lie in bed with you. Some people go from bed to bed fairly frequently and get criticized for it, but we should be encouraging this--they're just looking for the most comfortable bed possible, a far more noble goal than writing the Great American Novel or becoming Sub Vice President of Accounts.

A word of caution is needed here: like all good things, you can overdo lying in bed. Lying in bed for long periods of time and feeling miserable is a possible symptom of depression, and you should spend some time out of bed, if only so you'll enjoy being in bed more by comparison. (Also, you'll want to occasionally make yourself a sandwich, and you should not bring mustard or meat into bed with you.) If you are hiding under your pillow because you feel like you can't face the world, you're doing something wrong--lying in bed is supposed to be fun.

But don't get me wrong--I'm not advocating sloth or a lack of ambition. You can engage in a great number of activities while lying down. Marcel Proust wrote much of In Search of Lost TIme while bedridden, and Jabba the Hutt ran a successful smuggling business without ever standing up. The ancient Romans reclined whenever they could, including at most meals, and the modern Upper East Sider spends a great deal of his life lying on a couch under analysis. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I wrote this entry while lying in bed, and maybe you're even reading this while in bed. If you are in bed, God bless you. The world needs more people to stay in bed whenever possible.

(The painting is by Gretchen Schmid, if you were wondering.) Read more!