The New Electoral Math: Paying Voters to Vote

In this latest Presidential race we can be sure about three things:

1) We're about to elect a Harvard-educated and aloof technocrat more comfortable with crunching the numbers than pressing the flesh.

2) He will claim a mandate to represent all Americans in order to implement an unspecified agenda (even though he's not on speaking terms with roughly half the country).

3) Privately neither candidate is too optimistic or delusional to believe they can reconcile their campaign rhetoric with the business of governing over a house divided on every major issue except one: let someone else (besides our soldiers) take the hit for a growing government supported by a dwindling tax base.

Pity our next President-elect. They need to suppress their better angels and the notion of a shared sacrifice, lest they're booted from the beltway by the same people that hoisted them to victory.

Pity our citizen-voters. They missed out on the boom-boom Bush years and the hush-hush Obama-Bush sequel. There are scores to settle that make the middle class squeezes of the past feel like a hot compress in business class.

But there is a way to restore credibility to the electoral process.

There is a way to give political candidates the breathing room they'll need in order to fix stuff, i.e. raise taxes and lower services, without being impeached by the alienated opposition.

There is a way to impose certainty on the tentative nature of change as in: "I'm certain I'll be paying more for less and won't insist our politicians pretend it away." The return of animal spirits awaits the bravado of certainty in the bag. Without our reliable strut, we're in the same rut.

Most pointedly, how do our deplorable political parties fight their way back to respectability? How do they wear their vested interests proudly? How do they dismiss bipartisanship with the straight face of tomorrow and not the smirk of today?

The check's in the early balloting mail

They can rally support, not with platitudes and empty promises, but with cash paid out to the non-party members who matter: people who can't decide who to vote for.

Surely this is illegal, right? Well, the 24th Amendment bans poll taxes but says nothing about direct marketing to electorates or the setting of voting prices. To liberals this may sound like another cynical ploy to kick self-interest up another discouraging notch. The death knell for the commonweal and the greater good.

But let's think this through. The act is genuine. It's an investment by political parties and their donors. Here's how we speak directly to a polarized and cynical people. We channel cash to those unregistered Americans who decide elections through their indecision.

Why steal an election?

Why steal an election when you can buy one fair and square?

Paying for votes can mean a lot of stops on the low road to dysfunctional government. Is this what George W. Bush called "fuzzy math" without taking exception to the numbers in his opponent's budget plan? Is this a basic deduction one can make around the political meme-seekers trying to rationalize the downhill momentum of Citizens v. United, voter fraud, or those impending fiscal cliffs? Is this the new normal depicted last month in Bill Clinton's convention speech as basic arithmetic?

Paying for votes could put to rest all this talk about voter fraud and all the latest court challenges to voter ID. There won't be any checks drawn on the accounts of the deceased once all those on-shore voters cash in on the action. Direct payments to voters will have the same impact on public apathy as robotic cars will have on the speeding ticket industry. It will obliterate negative campaigning for good. In the meantime, all those moochers, freeloaders, and deadbeats can do something constructive while biding their time for the next great wave of American prosperity to kick in.

What is the color of your skin in the game?

Whether you count yourself as a 99 percenter or a jet-setter, or the 47% on autopilot for an entitled silver spoon feeding, there's one group that we can all set our growth beams on -- that's the unwashed and unvanquished object of those Super Pac spoils: the undecided voter. But would those undecideds be a vanishing breed if the Coche brothers and the George Soroses, and the casino kingpins could cash out directly? That's right. They could pay directly for those votes instead of roulette-wheeling their dealings to local broadcasters in swing states.

Direct is a form of both payment and marketing. Why not a form of government? After all, our elected officials spend a good 70% of their time fetching for dollars when their only real conviction is to be re-elected. Who has the time for convictions when they may need to replace them in the interest of unexpected events or languishing sound bytes caught on tape? What's the difference between an elected official on the take and the "takers" who vote them up or down from office? The difference is that representatives get rewarded for keeping themselves in power while their constituents get the spoils of free speech piling up on their cable screens and in-boxes.

Payouts are the new rebates

But paying  for votes is not just limited to electorates. We pay our kids to attend school. We pay farmers not to grow food. We pay food companies to market diabetic-inducing groceries for the express lane. We subsidize oil exploration so Exxon Mobil can super-size our addiction to oil. Actually We pay that one out twice before pausing to fill our tanks. That second hit happens when our taxes confront the debt our Chinese suitors assumed to underwrite our military occupations. What occupy movement is this? Those countries with high concentrations of hostility that invade our embassies, dis Israel, or worse, threaten to choke our economy.

And therein lies the choke hold. Us decided voters hold as few surprises as we do cards for deciding elections. Show me a reliable party line voter and I'll show you an oblivious politician. Exhibit A: the 41 states without battleground status. A counted vote is as worthless to the voter as it's money in the bank for the candidate -- a blank check for spending political capital on carving out electoral districts, complicating the tax code, or even settling personal scores.

The transparency of market-based democracy

The sincerity of a bribe might smell bad to some but it's a lot more understandable than the slippery abstractions that pass for campaign promises: putting us back to work? Change we can believe in? How about payments we can deposit? Who needs to pander when we've got a budget that operates below the radar of campaign ads, let alone media scrutiny? Delivering votes by channeling campaign funds to voters means that capitalism is hard at work, even if our politics are too fractured to lift a tiny compromising finger.

What if we put our votes on the auction block? The true undecideds and even us softer core fence-sitters? How would this all work then? And what would that do to the Australian ballot? That's our right to vote without personalizing the transaction. Why would the major parties want to invest in the American voter when we're protected against needing to account for our ballot choices? Here's how that could play out:

1) Voter puts opening bid up on their social media page

2) Voter bundles bid with other undecideds in their districts

3) Voting brokers increase buying power of these undecided blocs (and takes a cut of the buy-off)

4) Parties examine registration history and make their pitch to the aggregator (READ: Google, FaceBook, Twitter, etal.)

5) Bloc members vote to accept winning bid from said party and sign contract binding them legally to (a) vote; and (b) reflect the endorsed party positions and candidates

What's a little pressure among peers?

Does that mean we still vote by secret ballot? Absolutely.

Want to spell the difference between the uncertainty of polling data and the final vote count? It's the sound of that pay-for-vote check being cashed at the corner ATM. That's when the party can enforce the voters' contractual obligations. It's the line crossed once the volume of accepted bids eclipses the margin of error from the last election cycle.

Baring an onslaught of legalized immigrants, the entrenched turnouts of both parties will shine in glaring relief the tendencies of those bankrolled voters to stick or stray. If the backed party candidate loses, is it because the opposition lured in more voters? Doesn't matter.

My brilliant strategist buddy Canuck surmises that future payments will freeze up should this doubt persist. Someone on the losing side didn't pull his lever weight. They ruined it. For everybody.

Jeez, talk about disenfranchisement.

Kissing French Street Hello

One of the telltale signs that your heart is in lockstep with your head is that your home and hearth is also your most prized capital investment.

An indication you're on the cusp of home sweet investment is the positive tipping point behind the rejoinder formerly known as there-goes-the-neighborhood. The gentrified winds are blowing on my squatting parcel and summoning these changes down the newly-paved Route 47 off ramp known as French Street:

1. Gardening of plenty: Reclamation of river bed fertility
2. The planning principles for doing this: Mother Permaculture (you go, girl!)
3. Kitchen channel for home cooking: Energy star foodie cathedral
4. Clearing the air rights: Demolition of skanky, derelict trees
5. Stubborn with the thermostat: Extra helpings on the insulation

All these soaring resolutions bring out the domain master in me -- the dominatrix of domesticity. All unannounced particles of crumbs that cross my slippers prompt the next dust cloud gathering before the welcome mats reawaken.

Under the Effluence

[caption id="attachment_1104" align="alignleft" width="300"] Knotweed pops through a patch of cardboard mulch like so many pimples gathering after a teen pizza binge.[/caption]

This gushing of OCD on display tackles a very different agenda beyond the foot-wiping at the front door. There are no such dust-ups on the Hazmat-strewn floors of my backyard. Chards of broken bottles, oxides of batteries, remnants of socks, and the spew of non-degradable garage sale relics form an open burial pit of squalor. This caliber of decreptitude is normally reserved  for a harder core of hillbilly location.

That's when rugged individualism goes it alone and flies past the D.I.Y. stop sign and straight into the DDA ("don't-do-anything") ditch. That's the post industrial stench rising from the fertile river beds of Hadley:

"No other species fouls its own nest," as my second spouse liked to say in a categorical rejection of another isolated mountain culture. The flock of the church of humans has been known to place claims on the privacies contained within these soggy, crumbling mountain isolations. Abuse of the land is no less inevitable than the slicing through of these edens-turned-junk-yards by the rampaging of cold flood flash points into the convulsing rivers.

If my scavenger escavations are no more burials than treasures then my true anal obsession is taking wide open aim at nature's own neighborhood bullies. That's not the occupation of the soil by years claims on its transfer station status. That's the feeding on its natural generosity by the invasives -- namely the conspiracy of Japanese Knotweed that strangulates a less aggressive and more local population.

Godzilla the Gardener

My obsession reminds me of the fascist four-year-old games that I used to play in pursuit of childhood justice fired by World War II movies, newsreels, and riveted fixations on "Victory at Sea." My fighter squadrons were fresh on the heels of those unrepentent Pearl Harbor bombers. "Take that!" I'd shout, pumping my payloads into the tails of those nose-diving dragon gunners. "Take that to your Emperor of Knotweed!"

That's the viligence that captivates the digging up of the necks of these vermin by the clenching of my dirt-stained fingers and insatiable shovel. The vehemence only deepens when they rewire the rooting systems I've disrupted. I've created my own barriers by patching together some cardboard mulching around the most infested areas. The counter-insurgency lies somewhere between feeling the need to squeeze out the latest outcrop of whiteheads from these lawn pimples and playing whack-a-mole with a tenacious and cunning adversary. This is certainly the gaming board when a new strain peaks its head above a crack in my patchwork.

My tree guy Matthew tells me that I'll need to keep my retribution guard up for at least another two years to wrest control away from the invasion of these garden snatchers. Given the small dimensions of my yard I intend to maintain a heavy footprint on the lay of this promising land patch.

On Living Solitary and Small

Here's what it's like to move into a new and empty home by yourself when just the idea of it delivers a serious buzz:

* I can walk the boat to the pond or run the fan or fan the incense or un-run a color choice or the number of napkin boxes I opportune. And that's not even messing with the cabin zoning as the AC can be as noisy or as borderline lukewarm as I want.

* I can bump into bumpable unpacked boxes and not have to explain the noise or wonder if I'm bumped up to noisy neighbor status.

* I can agonize over a soap dish at Cedar Chest. I can play out the cleaning habits of the three women I've co-starred in the preening of house. These three women will have agreed on little except that Alan Rickman is the pinnacle of sexy and that their co-star was raised by wolves.

So which civilizing influence will tilt the battle to burnish my OCD credentials in the cracks of my early post polyurethane floors? Is it the Dust Vac or the Swiffer? Am I persuaded to visit the Murphy's Soap upon the soft, placid cork in the kitchen? Do I Lemon Pledge the electronics? Where will an all-purpose generic suffice? Do I suck down moths in mid-flight or wait for the dust-up in the morning glare? When are spiders the enemies of my enemies and when do I have to vanquish the suspect in a potential spider bite case? When is it time to dispense with dry mops and play whack-a-mole in the stubble of the backyard? I turn my ADD shopping list to the insidious weeds that require my train wreck brand of root canal and trunk piles.

I'm beginning to understand why I revel in these minutiae flare-ups. This house was built by men. However unlike in most cases, a woman's hand is not present in the expression of the home. I'm free to second-guess my own interior decoration in the privacy of this creation. I have amnesty blankets of permission to make up my mind. This act holds certain unintended consequences. Sometimes this contains savage consequences in my marriages -- especially when I saw the choices as two avoidable extremes:

(A) Making a fuss about it or,

(B) Complete suppression.

Talk about no one being vested in a sunk cost situation.

Playing out scenarios like juggling calendars is one such hazard. I’m traveling too far over too few hours and I misplaced a few priorities along the way: Especially when my sense of obligation and devotion are locked in private competition.

This sounds like a simple case of arguing over control. But to be more concrete here, the conflict is fundamental. It’s the appointment-cancelling version of a gagging reflex. That’s a reference to our impulsive aversion for event planning – namely who’s the sponsor and what are the attendance requirements:

• What do I say to whom?


• How do I listen in a sincere, attentive way?


• Where does non-verbal dialog outflank both of these channels?

Another is my mastery of the self-limiting nature of failed relationships that go on for too long. Show me a reason to avoid an argument and I'll show you another expectation that I could learn to live without.

In place of this master miscasting I have an open and not so fragile invitation to live in a state of generous communication. Anyone who opens the bulkhead to the basement of their brains has free and welcome access to my attic whenever the sump pump forgets to take its allergy meds. I really mean that.

Yes, I am both the kind and queen of my castle. And that's just the warm-up for the ultimate victory here. I attain the unnatural born rite to exercise a woman and Governor Romney's prerogative -- the right to change my bleeping mind.

Home Stretch

The pulsating membranes of a home are springing to life. The floor plans are now sanded, stained, and open to trafficking feet. The brittle bones of an 1875 farm house have been reclaimed by the construction methods and materials of tank-less hot water systems, natural gas stoves and hearths, mini-splits, and spray foam insulation.

I am humbled by good fortune, astonished at the outcomes, and deeply gratified as:

1. An info-geek whose architectures are purely mental constructions -- even after my user-tenants take occupancy. (The concentration of ownership in data "clouds" is one aspect of climate change I'm better prepared to handle than a flood in my basement).


2. A weary refuge released from the splintered floorboards of past broken homes.

Point 2 does not imply a replay of this road map. Contrary to industrial grade spiritual traditions, I have come to know absolution as a two-way street. I feel nothing but resolution and regard for my fellow passengers from these prior home wrecks.

That said, my gratitude extends beyond life lessons and circumstances to Lesley Theall. Lesley clearly saw my handyman challenges extending beyond hammering and measuring to include project managing the orchestrations of home-building from scratch. She knows that merely pitching a mailbox at 4 French Street would earn instant ribbon contention in the soap box derby of my personal Home and Garden network. She saved me from myself.

As I transitioned from land parcels to housing options I also received the good counsel of realtor Maryellen Stokarski. Maryellen knew there are few options between empty-nesters looking to downsize and younger couples with McMansions in their sights. So she led me to my love at first sight moment. That's not an overstatement considering the monogamous nature of this transaction (the property never made its way to the MLS listings)!

I am particularly grateful to Peter Gelinas of Valley Building Co. and his capable team of contractors for their dedication to details, deadlines, team play, and an innate ability to anticipate issues that will never surface because of their design work, coordination, and craftsmanship.

Here are the spoils of their handiwork.

[caption id="attachment_1079" align="alignleft" width="300"] Living room: man cave or conference facility?[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1080" align="alignleft" width="300"] Site of future privacy room of reading library.

Wall-to-wall screens at porch side.[/caption]

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300"] Hickory owes nothing to consistency and has thus found a home in my kitchen.

The second floor landing banister view of the front door. (Note that patch of cork flooring on the lower left)

Lowe's did the carpet with lightening speed but I completed their customer satisfaction survey even faster[/caption]

Scenes from a Marriage Review

Tim Burton packs most of his romance into the iris of the camera lens. That is to say that the substance is in the style. He'd much rather feel with "looks" than plumb the depths of character or twist with a thickening plot. Case-in-point:  There are enough plot holes in Dark Shadows to strike a Vampire in broad midnight.

One lingering character twist that wrung true in style and substance was the unrequited Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). In an inspiration that outlasts the spoiler alerts, she carves out her own aortic cavity. The scoop? Prove to Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) that her passions for the warlock prince were more heartfelt than hateful. She offers her engorged life force on a pulmonary platter. But it shatters with brittle abandon. Sucked bloodless by the fangs of her own jealousy.

That haunting image taps a spinal shiver in me. It's less about making a muscle with our hearts. It's more about a failure to connect the fatal flaw I see and experience in the wistful intimacy of lifetime human coupling -- that failure to bridge passion with companionship.

I can count the number of times I've abandoned this quest in wedding bands. That admission is not born of resignation or cynicism but this humble conclusion: (1) we court and mate and sometimes procreate. (2) Somewhere between the packages we craft to adorn ourselves and unravel to the delight of our partners we discard those wrinkled wrappings. (3) The thrill remains faithful to the chase. 4) Once familiarity catches up, the mystery vanishes ... along with the allure of the packages we bear.

Can we learn to bear and receive other gifts? That has been the question I've asked myself. But the closest to an answer I've received are three strongly independent and beautiful women who have little else to share except a legal contract with both our names and the fluid sealing of this in ceremony.

I just came back from a teaming event with my colleagues where we got together and self-organized our priorities, roles, and responsibilities. After the planning session we congregated at a bowling alley called "Splittsville." I had no idea this was a pun on our chosen afternoon recreation. Alas, my mind was in the gutter -- just like those balls I was bowling.

But strikes, spares, and misses aside, I spent a good chunk of time talking with the women in my group about their marriage lives. I was especially interested in their own definitions of marriage success, regardless of their status as spouses or parents.

A couple of insights really excited me -- not in terms of the steaming hot throbbing stuff but in re-igniting the hope I could find a woman willing to hang with the changes as those packages unwrap. That there will be a woman with "a slow and easy smile" who can remain attentive and vested without feeling forced to shed the comfort of her own skin:

1) BAGGAGE CLAIM: No human is responsible for another person's happiness or heartache. We're here to listen, help, hold, heal, and challenge. But the marriage contract is not a liability agreement. I don't want someone carrying my baggage and I expect the same in return. The person who declared this has a rich spiritual life and as many moms as I have had marriages.

2) WORK-IN-PROGRESS: The reasons folks stay together are constantly evolving. It's not reasonable to expect that the dynamics in play at the outset burrow into the relationship for life. We're constantly latching on and letting go. But it helps to recognize those changes. Assuming no change is a recipe for a stuck relationship. As Woody Allen laments in Annie Hall:

"Relationships are like sharks. If they don't keep advancing, they begin to suffocate, and die."

My question for Woody is what kind of movement does the advancing invite?

3) TWO WAYS ABOUT IT: Dialog is the entry point for communication. All those adages about not going to bed angry or carving out a date night as part of a well-oiled calendar planner all have their merits. But one person cannot perform a wholesale unloading without some unburdening of that load. In fact one colleague went so far as to say that she's integrated performance reviews from the workplace into the partnership aspects of her marriage.

4) BARGAIN PARTS: Quirks are the indelible etchings of personality. Our cognitive wires are not crossed. These are not choices. They are soul-bearing and they're who we are no matter how we may sublimate or conceal them. But there's no hiding from the looking glass of intimacy. That's a two-way mirror the couple must hold up in the bargain and for one another. For the chemistry to flow, it's got to be unconditional on both ends.

Can the original spark re-ignite? My jury will remain out as long as necessary before it can say "I do" and "it can" again.

Nesting for Now: Building a Home With a House

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="341"] Unofficial team portrait[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_985" align="aligncenter" width="158"] Feng shui ... or bust[/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="217"] French vanilla siding on N. Hadley's biggest small house[/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="273"] That truncated look from the deck-side[/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="239"] Back wall of kitchen and living room[/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="225"]First floor landing rights[/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="239"]

Mayhem in the master[/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="239"]

Dungeons without doors[/caption]

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="239"]

Life begins at the hop but it ends better on the porch[/caption]

Artificial News Market Forecast 2012-2027

There's a new storyteller on the horizon of human discourse. In May's Wired, The Rise of Robot Reporters, Steven Levy chronicles the first tentative steps of a Chicago-based start-up called Narrative Science to dis-intermediate a news media in decline. Narrative Science, says board member and former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt, is a "company that turns numbers into words." What it does with that contrivance is the news room equivalent for turning the post Gutenberg belief in movable typefaces into delusions of pure wish-fulfillment -- and profit.

Why Narrative Science?

It's cheaper to manufacture  stories by tweaking algorithms. How does Levy rationalize that "Ninety percent of a news" will be baked in huge software ovens by 2027? Intelligence engines like those of Narrative Science will expand the sense-making machinery of the market -- not displace the last journalists standing. But what happens when the robonews creates press accounts of events now off the official storytelling radar? Will we cast ourselves as the protagonists in stories of our own making? In a customized news product will we even feign an interest in outcomes that don't include us or the generic abstractions that fill up the media calendars of today? Think consumers, voters, fans, parishioners, and the faceless legions that don't really "get us."

And when our self-interested leaders and blowhard media step over the line, they lump us into these groups and we get defensive. Sometimes we even tune out at not-so-subtle recent suggestions that bad news made a personal appearance in places and people we know and love.

So we sequester ourselves in experiences we control. And in a market of one we prefer to curate our own media pages from a source that will remain blameless: It earns our trust by presenting our own acceptable truths within worlds of our choosing. And if Narrative Science releases an insemination product we are no longer mere readers, listeners, or viewers but receivers to signals we were born to host. We can we can select spheres of our influencing too. That's something no self-respecting journalist could deliver without compromising personal dignity and the professional reputation needed to stay employed: their power to persuade.

Why the News Media?

They can only shrink to a former glory profile that cuts a running hum of temporal impressions. What does persuasion look like to the reporter in the street today? It's a sharp elbow above our personal radars and into the realm of foreground noise. But do we really need the paparazzi in camouflage for celebrity safari? Do we care that news organizations are in the business of embedding their checkbooks into an improvised explosive called the corporate news exclusive? When the competition for attention shifts to sports, who'd really pine for the locker-slamming platitudes of the post game show? Do the players long to justify their mistakes to sensation-seeking error-prone reporters? The fantasy league stats can speak for themselves.

Why us?

It's not that we can't handle the truth. And it's not that we turn away from bad news. It's that we prefer not to face someone else's truth -- especially the kind that means bad news for us. How is this behavior written into code? Levy writes about a strict adherence to data patterns as a perceived bug in the program:

"[N]ot long after the contract began, a slight problem emerged: The stories tended to focus on the victors. When a Big Ten team got whipped by an out-of-conference rival, the resulting write-ups could be downright humiliating. Conference officials asked Narrative Science to find a way for the stories to praise the performance of the Big Ten players, even when they lost."

In other words the new black media box couldn't read the social cues. It couldn't weight the institutional pecking order of big amateur athletics: that the elites lost to the lesser-thans. Other rewrites don't address hierarchies but the airbrushed portraits of our personal histories:

"Likewise, when the company began covering Little League games, it quickly understood that parents didn't want to read about their kids' errors."  

The Serialization of Personal Reality

So how does artificial news tune out the necessary realities? According to Levy all it takes is for a battery of meta-writers to "educate the system." Meta-writers are the human-based interpreters who devise the templates for pre-assembling the scripts that the algorithms follow to spawn these production bylines:

1. From the blatantly transactional: What are the best restaurants in X city?


2. To the slightly obtuse: What are the best private tutors for my kid needing help in Y so she can get into $?


3. To the downright conceptual: Do I let Z medication run its course or elect to do the surgery?

Having addressed human events the real growth in the twenties will hinge on accounts of events without direct human intervention. Think about a camera crew assigned to your fantasy league. Imagine a press junket angling to photo-op their way into the gamifications of your choosing? What may have passed for myopic in a lapsed media age will set the standard for the new authenticity. What could be more sincere than to place our own creations on news platforms staged by the likes of Narrative Science?

Authenticity needs to act in cahoots with a disinterest and elevated credibility in order to be taken seriously outside our own orbits. That's where our flights of fancy are grounded in a fact base, no matter how self-selecting those data sets:

"They put a box core and play-by-play into the program, and in something close to 12 seconds it drew examples from 40 years of major league history, wrote a game account, located the best picture, and wrote a caption."

Headless hedders. Scoops without digging. Instant analytical gratification. Sounds like these alternative realities are being packaged to go. And no one's going to miss the classifieds.

Artificial News, Real Growth

The market potential for artificial news manufacture is limited less by 20th Century conventions like the public interest or journalism ethics than by legalities -- specifically the likelihood of fraud that manifests in our unwillingness to think for ourselves. Here are three hypotheticals:

1) Synthetic People. Narrative Sciences can juice the Klout scores of skin deep fabrications. That means the marketers don't have to pony up actual perks for the drones who tweet their praises.

The temptation to generate celebrity mannequins could falsify outcomes as much as personal appearances. Hammond foresees an appetite to flesh out the statistical accounts with off-the-field developments like player injuries or legal problems." That's right. The very thing purged from the news cycles of the little league press becomes fair game once the merchandise becomes eligible for demotions, endorsements, and all forms of a professional sport referred to by the Roberts Court as "free speech." Factoring in these frailties may create a better system: (1) for not only detailing but (2) analyzing our games, and conversely (3), gaming these very same systems by tossing a single grenade-like insinuation into the contagions of tomorrow.

2) Markets of One. The self-selecting machinery will reference a breadth of experience so shallow and constrained as to make our present day cable news echo chamber sounds as "fair and balanced" as the carnival barkers would have us believe:

"[T]he low cost of transforming data into stories makes it practical to write even for an audience of one."

In today's media climate all the pandering and hubris and alarmist jive in those opposition camps has been reduced to background noise. But there is no house divided in an audience of one. There are no deals to strike. There are no hard feelings to patch up. There is no further filtering or curatorship required. Our Google glasses have already filtered out all aspects of reality that hold no claims on us. And our narrative headsets bleed into our ears and bake a reaffirming acceptance into our tuning sections.

3) Disconnects. It's one thing to draw from forty years of big major league data records to depict or simulate an event. It's quite another to outsource its meaning -- how it connects to us. To Hammond that's the highest potential growth area -- not recaps of little league games but packaging management reports or handicapping empty prophesies like this blog post for example.

Then again if we lose our independent streak, could we also lose some of our misplaced anxieties about a world too big to fathom, let alone shape? This may be just what the national health plan doctor ordered, whether through our own initiative or underwritten by our bankrupt Nanny State.

The real story behind Narrative Science isn't about health care politics. It isn't that robonews will replace journalists but that it will sell us on the worlds we don't need to be sold on -- the ones of our own design -- until we can no longer detect where the authoring ends and our imaginings begin. No longer alerted, confused, entertained, or merely informed, we will be entranced. And it will take narcotics stronger than tomorrow's news to distract us from the stories we're told.