Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Godfrey Hodgson: now When you’ve had enough of the dugout chatter from Denver on the cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a reporters’ masterpiece (up there with Norman Mailer’s) on the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama , and many other rapt studies of us. (Forthcoming: The Myth of American Exceptionalism .) Hodgson volunteers in conversation that what he missed forty years ago was the length and depth of the conservative cycle the US was entering with Richard Nixon’s election. Today, forty years later, Hodgson’s keynote is that the conservative ascendancy, having fomented the Iraq War and a Gilded Age of inequality, sounds far from broken. The “change” chord rings to Hodgson more of therapy than political reconstruction. The tune from America these days, he says, still sounds something like the Russophobic ditty sung in England in the 1870s — the song that gave “Jingo” to the lexicon of chip-on-the-shoulder patriotism. We don’t want to fight, But by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, We’ve got the men, And we’ve got the money, too. From a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, around 1877. Godfrey Hodgson: then The grandest thematic links between ‘68 and ‘08 — race and the American imperium — are oddly same and different, constant and transformed. Race in the Sixties meant riotous rebellion and a rights revolution; the race “issue” today refers to the apparently unpollable question whether Americans will vote a black family into their iconic White House. The debacle in Iraq would seem to cry out for some open straight talk about the limits of American power in the world, but this campaign shies from the general question. In 1968, Robert Kennedy, running against Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam, wanted us to lay claim nonetheless to “the moral leadership of this planet.” Eugene McCarthy mocked “the idea that somehow we had a great moral mission to control the entire world.” He was bolder and steadier than any of the major candidates for 2008 in opposing permanent counterinsurgency as our fighting posture in the world — this American assumption for itself of “the role of the world’s judge and the world’s policeman.” It is the relatively shy silence on that point that tells Godfrey Hodgson that the 2008 campaign is veiled in the premises of the conservative ascendancy. Meantime Geoffrey Hodgson wonders who could answer the question that drove John Gunther’s “Inside USA” books: John Gunther would send a researcher ahead, book a suite in the big hotel in town, invite all the movers and shakers, give them a cocktail or two and then say, “Who runs this place?” We can tick off the established powers of 40 years ago that aren’t there anymore. Sure, the city machines have gone. In 1972, I made film about the Democratic Convention and there, there were still residual smoke-filled rooms, residual bosses, I remember doing an interview with Pete Camille of Philadelphia, for example –a city boss, but that’s gone. Detroit is gone. The big three auto makers have just gone cap-in-hand to the administration asking them for, I think it’s, 25 billion bucks, because they’re broke. The banks are sliding around on the floor. Wall Street; the old foreign policy establishment. I wrote a biography of Colonel Henry L. Stimson; he and his friends, the Bundy brothers, have disappeared… If I may say so, the New York Times and the Washington Post are not the powers in the world that they were in 1968 … To my mind, Franklin Roosevelt… really was the person who figured out how to make the presidency work and I learned from a political scientist called Aaron Wildavsky one thing about how he did it. He had basically four levers or connections that he used. One of which was the Congress, one of which was the Democratic Party, one of which was the bureaucracy or the permanent government, and one of which was the media. I don’t think any of those connections are still in good working order… The political party has really been utterly transformed by the process that began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in which the old traditional Democratic party was destroyed and the Republican party became a conservative party. For the first time really you have a European style politics where you have a party of the left and a party of the right. The French say the party of movement and the party of order. It may be that the old political parties just can’t work that way. It certainly seems that the media cannot be managed in that way if only because of the internet, and the bloggers, and the multiplicity of people who have access to the bullhorn, as it were… Max Weber, who invented the concept of the charismatic leader, always assumed that the destined fate of the charismatic leader was to create a bureaucratic leadership, that there was an almost inevitable progression that you go from the charismatic leader to the organization. This was his example: you go from Jesus Christ to the Apostle Paul, the man who organized the church as a powerful, enduring and efficient institution. I think the Democratic Party is an intensely interesting organization, and if Barack Obama can really reshape, retool the Democratic Party as an instrument of benign political change, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt created the Roosevelt Coalition, which is now completely crumbled, then I think he will be a very great political leader, but it’s going to be tough. I don’t know whether it’s possible to imagine a President Obama recreating a presidency that is as effective as the Roosevelt presidency was. Godfrey Hodgson in conversation with Chris Lydon, August 27, 2008 Less

Welcome to Show #126! Kosholympics. Run with it. Summer clarifies the details behind her cryptic statements from a few weeks ago, dispelling the many rumors that she’s leaving the podcast (never!), or that we’re going to start making Babylon 5 Phase II independent/fan film productions (tempting!). All she did was help out with cleaning up [...] Less

In this episode of The Sci Phi Show Daniel and Princess Eve guest host a discussion of the movie Tron. Episode #53 (54 minutes 6 seconds) Music for the show was provided by Steward Flecknoe-Brown, who can be reached by email at stewart AT elevelup dot net. He is available on skype as well and takes international paymet via PayPal and his website can be found at http://elevelup.net/ Do you have an idea for a show or feedback ? Email thesciphishow@gmail.com Join us at the Sci Phi Show Forums Less

Join us this week as we talk about Wookies and games. During this slow news week, this show is mostly outtakes. Please enjoy. ++Sony and Microsoft agree ++Fable 2 info ++Mass hysteria Less

Join us this week as we talk about Wookies and games. During this slow news week, this show is mostly outtakes. Please enjoy. ++Sony and Microsoft agree ++Fable 2 info ++Mass hysteria Less

We bounced back nicely for episode 32 with a show about the Olympics and online sports coverage. Geoff is actually boycotting the Beijing games, the liberal pig. The larger issue was in regards to the live online coverage of NBCOlympics.com. Is online sports viewing the new black? Episode 32 - MP3 Less

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Cass Sunstein (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Cass Sunstein of the gentle Nudge Cass Sunstein gives us the half-hour short course here on “the most exciting intellectual movement of the last thirty years” — behavioral economics, that is, of which we had a taste recently with George Lakoff and Dan Ariely. Behavioral economics is the demonstration (by clinical psychology, affirmed by neuroscience) that the “rational man” of neo-classical economics is in fact, in Dan Ariely’s book title, Predictably Irrational — that we are eternally kidding ourselves in our choice of credit cards, or of diets and desserts; that we tend to lurch without much reflection from over-optimism to over-anxiety about terrorist threats, war risks, and environmental melt-downs. Cass Sunstein is himself a demonstration of the spread of the new thinking from psychology and economics to law and politics. From the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught alongside Barack Obama for a dozen years, he has just moved permanently to Harvard, where he and Obama seem still to be channeling each other. Sunstein’s new book Nudge , with the economist Richard Thaler, is an introduction to a variety of not-quite-coercive strategies for helping people get what they really want: 401k savings plans, for example, that would be automatic for all workers who didn’t choose to set some of their wages aside. The general trick, Sunstein says, is recognizing that there’s less Immanuel Kant, more Homer Simpson, in each and all us than we’ve been taught. This started with psychology. Two Israelis Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky did a bunch of amazing experiments in the 1970’s where they said people use some mental shortcuts in trying to think about risk. If a recent event, for example, is in your head, say it involves a crime or a misfortune or something wonderful happening, then you will think it’s really probable that the crime or the misfortune or the wonderful thing will happen. This way of thinking migrated first into economics. There has really been a revolution in economic thinking because economists are trying to do their work with a realistic rather than artificial sense of what human beings are like. The idea is that we can do economics with Homer Simpson as our types rather than doing economics with computers as our types. People just aren’t computers. When Homer, in one episode, went to buy a gun, the gun owner told him that him that there is a three day waiting period. And Homer responded: “What? Three Days? I’m angry now!” So that captures people’s passion and focus on the short term, and it also captures how law and policy can help a lot. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein in conversation with Chris Lydon, August 21, 2008. Less

This evening, we welcomed Chris Baskind to the show. We discussed the pros and cons of various alternative forms of energy for cars, homes, businesses and even servers. Chris is a compelling guest that has a lot to say about conservation, in particular. We really didn’t get into conservation until the very end, but it may be the one way we can get through the next 10-15 years while the market figures out what to do about rising energy costs. Thanks again, Chris, for joining the show. I enjoyed it. Listen now to episode 7. Less

Episode 31 was a tough show. We had technical issues right from the start as Geoff was disconnected and never reconnected. For my part, I was driving to Boston and had to pull off a monologue on the fly. So the show was 15 minutes, as opposed to 30. We’re always trying to buy you more time in your day. In this episode I expounded on the ideas laid out in my article on gap marketing. A brand can buy up advertising and target key demographics, but at the end of the day there are little things that can be done to assure a wide range of marketing efforts that don’t take a lot to do. Listen now to Episode 31. Less

Welcome to Show #125! Summer really need to schedule a time to rummage through Jeffrey’s B5 archives. I see a Los Angeles Road Trip in the near future. Keep your eyes open for a Jeffrey eBay sale… and possibly a live feed only eBay sale? Deep Geeking: This week, Tim and Summer talk about “Epiphanies”, [...] Less

In this week’s episode, we discuss Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Be sure to let us know if there are any movies we should add to the List o’ Movies. And while we won’t announce this on the show for a few weeks, make sure you visit our page at Myxer.com. www.myxer.com/backseat We’ve got cell phone wall paper, ringtones, and you can join our fanlist and get text messages when we post new episodes, have breaking news, or drunk dial our fans after a night of partying at Adam’s house. Less

In this week’s episode, we discuss Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Be sure to let us know if there are any movies we should add to the List o’ Movies. And while we won’t announce this on the show for a few weeks, make sure you visit our page at Myxer.com. www.myxer.com/backseat We’ve got cell phone wall paper, ringtones, and you can join our fanlist and get text messages when we post new episodes, have breaking news, or drunk dial our fans after a night of partying at Adam’s house. Less

Hosts: and Guests: *NOTE: This was my first time hosting and editing the show, so just keep hat in mind when you are listening. There may be a few errors here and there, and I apologize for that in advance, I did the best I could, with some help from my GF (Seachelle86)* Topics Include:  Fable 2 Pub Games- Keman finds an addiction. Bionic Commando Rearmed- Is it as good as Infected says it is? Madden NFL 09- Enough of an upgrade to make it worth purchasing? Achievement points being sold on Ebay, is this just another scam? Yay or Nay with Too Human and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 All this and more! Thanks for listening, Please leave us a comment on the show or send us an e-mail at: xblradio@platformnation.com Direct Download (right click, save as) Less

First of all, thank you to Jimmy Gardner for filling in for me while I was in San Francisco and to Ben Yoskovitz for joining the show and being an absolute pro through technical difficulties. What the guys don’t know is that I called in and listened to 10 minutes of the show on my phone while I was sitting in a session at WordCamp. These guys are great. The show was multi-faceted in an interesting way. Ben described StandoutJobs, a B2B HR tool that allows hiring companies to put destination portals online for job seekers. At taking the poll that is open. Until next week. Listen to Episode 6 Less

Welcome to Show #124! Kosh. Rastaman. I got nothin’. Feedbackapalooza Part Deux!! Chris Lester from Metamor City Podcast and C.A. Sizemore are still in on the Feedback Fun. Colin doesn’t appreciate the tone of JMS’ announcement; Freehold South chimes in on the JMS announcement, and feels blindsided by it; Bethany from OK comments on “Into the [...] Less

Aaron joined the District of Corruption from Dearborn, MI at Ford HQ. The NY Times wrote a big article on troll culture online. We discussed the phenomena of the troll – bad people on the Internet. Shocking, there are bad people online, just like there are in real life. Shocking! The nuances and motives of trolls are interesting. We talked about our personal trolls, Geoff discussed Loren Feldman and Amanda Chapel. The key is to ignore that person, because they either go away or look foolish. Aaron validates with his own unnamed troll experience one year ago. He then says if you achieve any kind of Internet fame, you will attract this kind of attention. Thick skin is mandatory, especially if you end up on Valleywag. We discussed a few more troll stories. Then we bridged into fatigue, blogger exhaustion. You get sick of the blogs you are reading, you see nothing new, it’s time to shake it up. We talked about Corvida’s blogger burn-out. When you are getting indirect or direct business benefit you have to plow through it. Aaron and Geoff use different methods of shaking it up to keep it fresh. We use different sources, themes, etc. If you get tired of the blogosphere it’s because you are sick of the people you are reading. We talked about looking at NY Times blog engine, Technorati, Ice Rocket, and Google as places to look for new content. Download Episode 30 Today! Less

I welcomed Jesse Newburn to the show tonight to get her perspective on the generational cycles. Jessie explained her philosophy on generational cycles, prophet, nomad, hero and artist - and what history tells us our future holds. It was a fascinating conversation and quite controversial witht he chat exploding about outrageous claims. For my part, the show was great. Although very philosophical, the trends are historical fact making Jessie’s insight something more than conjecture. Listen now. Update: Jessie followed the show by posting a list of resources for your perusal. Less