Joseph Enterprises started the Chia Pet in 1981 and it’s remained lodged in our collective unconscious every year since then because of massive advertising every holiday season and a weird kitsch appeal that never seems to get old. I honestly still think these things are cool; you do too, admit it.

Now they’re capitalizing on Obama-mania with an ultra-classy likeness of the 44th President. There are two versions of Chia Obama: Happy Chia Obama, and Determined Chia Obama. Joseph Enterprises accurately portrays the full range of our president’s emotional expressions.

Very nice. You can order your very own from the Chia Obama website

Time Magazine just published a series of photos of Barack Obama taken in 1980, when he was a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles. They were taken by Lisa Jack, who was an aspiring photographer at the time, and asked him to pose for some black and white photographs for her portfolio. The word Serendipity has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate; this is a good example of serendipity.

Read on for the rest of the pics:

Every day, you’re assaulted with advertisements and news and non-stop information. And every single person spewing that information has an agenda, even the “unbiased” journalists and news anchors and political pundits and survey takers. Everyone has a mind, and each mind has it’s own opinions, and those opinions make their way into the information being spewed. That’s just how it is.

So when you read articles or hear reports with seemingly hard, indisputable facts, you have to take it all with a grain of salt. Consider the recent election.

Scientific American ran an article with 6 different maps all showing the election results across the United States, all in a different way. It’s the way they’re displayed that determines everything. Check it out:

Mark Newman, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, took maps of the 2008 election and made a series of “cartograms” from them. He took state-level and county-level election results and population data and to make different representations of the United States. It’s a nice example of how facts can be interpreted in many different ways.

This is the main map. It shows the lower 48 states colored either red or blue depending on who won each state: Red for McCain and Blue for Obama. This is the map you’ve probably seen many times over already.

This map is the the United State stretched and skewed by special software so that each state is sized according to it’s population.

This map has each red/blue section broken down further from the state level to the county level, which gives a more accurate picture of the country as a whole.

This map shows each county re-sized according to it’s population, and then colored red or blue. This map in particular shows how Obama has the advantage in large cities and population centers, while McCain has uniform support across the more sparsely populated American landscape.

When the map is broken down to shades of purple indicating levels of support, a whole other aspect of information becomes visible. Instead of just the red/blue or win/loss colors, shades of color in-between can illustrate areas where a candidate just barely won, or won convincingly.

Finally, when you combine all of these maps, you can see the country broken down by the population of each county, and election results shown on a scale of colors from red to blue.

My point isn’t that these maps are a better way of looking at the election results, just that there are different ways of displaying the same facts. They illustrate the ability of the media-makers to broadcast facts in a way that jives with their opinions.

I don’t generally agree with Paul Krugman. Most people in his own profession don’t generally agree with Paul Krugman, but he has a voice and it’s loud in the American scene, so I’ll address it.

He says we just ended “the monster years“; 14 years of monster rule, in fact. I agree with him there, partially. Although I think he completely misses the point. What he fails to address is what caused those monster years. He fails to address the (ir)rationality of the American voter.

The American voter put those monsters in power, the American voter caused the insanity we see everyday in politics. How can you agree with Krugman and say we’ve emerged from 14 years of monster rule and not place any blame on those who elected the monsters?

But now, somehow, they’ve changed? They’ve learned? Today they’re different and renewed and advanced in their knowledge because they elected someone that you agree with? They’re no longer fools, they no longer are drawn by empty rhetoric and entranced by beautifully crafted catchphrases. Well, maybe some, but this time they’re the good catchphrases, right?

Wrong, just because a “good guy” won doesn’t mean the system is right. The system is diseased, don’t let the warmth of Obama sunshine fool you into thinking the last 14 years didn’t happen, because they did, and they happened because of democracy, not in spite of it.

The American voter is the monster, you’re the monster, and the monster years will never end.

Human beings tend to think they’re rational creatures, and that they make sound decisions based on all the available facts. They think their memory is an accurate record of things that have happened to them. But the reality is that we all have a slew of cognitive biases that can alter our thinking… and even our memories.

Psychologists have names for all the different fallacies and biases that influences our thinking: cognitive dissonance, inattentional blindness, blind spot bias, better-than-average bias, introspection illusion, self-serving bias, attribution bias, representative fallacy, availability fallacy, anchoring fallacy, hindsight bias, and the one I’ll be talking about here: framing effects

The way a question is “framed” often has an influence on how people answer that question, that’s what the term framing effects means. For example, look at this classic study done on framing:

Let’s say you work for the Centers for Disease Control and there is an outbreak of a deadly disease called “The Mojave Flu” in a town of 600 people. All 600 people in the town are expected to die if you do nothing. Let’s say you have come up with two different programs designed to fight to the disease:

With Program 1: 200 people in the town will be saved
With Program 2: There is a 1/3rd probability that 600 people will be saved, and a 2/3rds probability that no people will be saved.

In the study, 72 percent of the subjects picked Program 1. Now consider the same scenario worded differently:

With Program 3: 400 people in the town will die
With Program 4: There is a 1/3rd probability that nobody will die, and a 2/3rds probability that 600 people will die.

Now which do you pick? In the study, 78 percent of the subjects picked Program 4, even though the net result of the second set of choices is exactly the same as the first set (Programs 1 and 3 mean the same thing, and Programs 2 and 4 mean the same thing).

In Aldert Vrij’s book Detecting Lies and Deceit, he describes an even more interesting example:

Participants saw a film of a traffic accident and then answered questions about the event, including the question ‘About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?’ Other participants received the same information, except that the verb ‘contacted’ was replaced by either hit, bumped, collided, or smashed. Even though all of the participants saw the same film, the wording of the questions affected their answers. The speed estimates (in miles per hour) were 31, 34, 38, 39, and 41, respectively.

One week later, the participants were asked whether they had seen broken glass at the accident site. Although the correct answer was ‘no,’ 32% of the participants who were given the ‘smashed’ condition said that they had. Hence the wording of the question can influence their memory of the incident.

That example highlights an unsettling aspect of framing effects, the fact that they can actually influence our memories.

This concept is used in advertising all the time, but the most fertile ground for framing effects is politics. Buzzwords and political terms are constantly changing and being invented to try to stay on the positive side of public opinion.

Frank Luntz is a well-known example of a political consultant who has tried to work with Republican candidates on framing various talking points and buzzwords to make them more appealing to the general public. Among other things, Luntz is responsible for the re-framing of the term “global warming” to “climate change”.

Framing effects are powerful, they have a profound influence on people, but when we recognize that these biases exist, we can gain some measure of control. We all have to understand how fragile our brains and memories are, and that will strengthen them. If we know these biases exist, it’s easier to try to avoid them. So the next time you hear a politician speaking or an advertisement telling you to buy some product, listen closely to it, and try to decipher it’s real content. It’s one more step toward the eventual goal of overcoming bias.

It’s almost sacrilege to say “Don’t Vote” in the US these days. People are shamed into voting by the loyal minions of mainstream politics. But does a higher voter turnout actually help society? In Bryan Caplan’s book, Myth of the Rational Voter, he explains in great detail, and with extensive citations and statistics, how the average voter has certain cognitive biases that cause him to vote in ways that have a net negative outcome for society (they’re not uninformed, Caplan argues, they’re misinformed, which is much worse). And since the solitary goal of politicians (the successful ones, at least) is to get elected, their policies are based on pandering to the misinformed public. So their whole ideologies, the ideologies of both major parties, have come to represent policies that are damaging to society as a whole. In effect, democracy is destroying the United States.

But it goes deeper than the fact that most voters misunderstand the issues. It goes deeper than the fact that both major candidates represent ideologies that are abhorrent to most economically educated people. It goes deeper than all of that. You shouldn’t vote because voting is pointless. It’s a complete waste of your time. It’s a suggestion box for slaves.

A lot of people are trying to convince you to vote. They’re mostly celebrities and other self-important social suck-ups who don’t have a clue about the politics they’re supporting or the related economics anyway. But why? Why is so much money, influence, advertising, and general energy going toward encouraging people to vote? Because the system wants a high turnout. They don’t care who wins, and they know both candidates are the same. They just want you to think you’ve made a difference. It’s the same principle as a dictator claiming 100% voter turnout, it gives him legitimacy. It fools the fools into thinking they have an actual stake in the political process. On top of that, the masses cannot fathom a society where their voice doesn’t matter, so they convince themselves it does. But as Wendy McElroy said, “Voting is not an act of political freedom, it’s an act of political conformity“.

Think of it this way… do you have more freedom in your local supermarket, or in your local government? As Arnold Kling says:

The absence of monopoly means that you can exercise exit, even if you cannot exercise voice. The presence of monopoly means that, at most, you can exercise voice.

Neither my local supermarket nor any of its suppliers has a way for me to exercise voice. They don’t hold elections. They don’t have town-hall meetings where they explain their plans for what will be in the store. By democratic standards, I am powerless in the supermarket.

And yet, I feel much freer in the supermarket than I do with respect to my county, state, or federal government. For each item in the supermarket, I can choose whether to put it into my cart and pay for it or leave it on the shelf. I can walk out of the supermarket at any time and go to a competing grocery.

The exercise of voice, including the right to vote, is not the ultimate expression of freedom. Rather, it is the last refuge of those who suffer under a monopoly.

Your voice does not matter in this process. Don’t believe me? Ask any economist. Read what Steven Landsburg has to say on the subject, for instance. Look at the numbers. You are statistically irrelevant and you will not make a difference.

So skip it this year, and go do something positive with your time. Blog about something you’re interested in; go help out a homeless person or donate some money to your favorite charity; go read a book like Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter or Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market; go to work and actually make some money or go to the store and spend some. Whatever you do, just don’t vote.

Reason Magazine’s Remix of this popular ad:

Also, this is my favorite sentence of the week:
“After the election, the new President will be viewed as having a “mandate” to enact policies (including policies that were never proposed during the campaign). Meanwhile, the vast majority of voters are expressing their identity, not their policy preferences.”

It comes from Arnold Kling’s recent post entitled “The Wonders of Democracy“.

This is a great talk by Philip Zimbardo about what evil is. Evil, he says, is not a individual condition, it’s the result of circumstances. He cites the Stanley Milgram’s experiment on human behavior, and the Stanford prison experiment and the problems at Abu Ghraib, all leading up to the conclusion that all humans are equally capable of evil.

What does this have to do with advertising? Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works. This is a wonderful video on that subject. Check it out.

Every year hundreds of the biggest marketers, agency heads, and all manner of people involved in advertising get together at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference. And every year, they vote on the best advertiser of that particular year. This year Barack Obama won with a pretty substantial 36% of the vote, beating out the two runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Nike, Coors and Sen. John McCain filled out the bottom of the vote.

“I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers,” said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions “To see what he’s done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it’s created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It’s very easy for people to participate.”

Linda Clarizio, president of AOL’s Platform A, said of Barack Obama, “I think he did a great job of going from a relative unknown to a household name to being a candidate for president.”

But some people weren’t particularly happy about getting politics involved in the voting. Mark Kaline, recently appointed global media director of Kimberly-Clark Corp., said. “Quite frankly, because political advertising kind of goes against a lot of what ANA stands for, I don’t think it belongs in the voting. … A lot of political advertising is false and misleading, and marketers at this conference don’t expect to see that kind of stuff.”

Here are the results:
Obama 36.1%
Apple 27.3%
Zappos 14.1%
Nike 9.4%
Coors 8.7%
McCain 4.5%

The Obama followers are getting weird. I get it, for whatever reason, people are suddenly starting to see how screwed up government is, and they think his government will be different for some reason. But there’s a sense of rabid cultism, fetishism almost. So this fits in perfectly: The Obama dildo.

I really don’t know what to say about this one. It’s a 7 and a half inch, gold likeness of Obama, with a set of balls at the base. Also, the box says “Commemorative Edition”. So I guess it’s a collectors item. Amazing.

The world is a bizarre place, no doubt. Check out the pictures of the Head O State after the jump, you don’t want to miss this one:

(via Head O State)

Barack Obama has become the first presidential candidate to advertise in a video game. The Obama campaign purchased ad space in the Xbox live versions of 18 different video games. The ads will run up until Nov. 3, and only be displayed in 10 major swing states.

The ads show that Obama is willing to embrace new technology, and that may be the most important aspect of this whole video game campaign.

Obama’s face and name will be on billboards and signs in “NBA Live ’08″, “Burnout Paradise”, “Nascar 09″, “Need For Speed Carbon”, “Need For Speed Pro Street”, “NFL on Tour”, “NHL ’09″, “Skate”, and “Guitar Hero”, among some others. And the 10 states that are targeted include some major battleground states: Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, and Colorado.

No word on how much the ads cost yet, but that should get leaked in time.

Generally, the 18-34 year old demographic is hard to reach, so advertising in games could be a smart move. I’m just not so sure it’s smart for Obama. Among 18-34 year old video game players, he’s already the candidate of choice. The ads may just be a wasted wad of cash.