The Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis

As a company, we don't work for political candidates, but we do track political trends as part of our larger database. Given all the grief, rage, and blame-placing I'm seeing on my personal FB page, I thought I'd post this. And in case you want to know my personal bias: I was raised properly - if you weren't Irish Catholic Democrat, you didn't get in my grandmother's house. You’ve probably seen the figure that 90 million eligible voters stayed home from this Presidential elec...tion. I’m sure you though this was terrible. This is what it means. Eligible voters are different from registered voters. According to the United States Elections Project, there were 231,556,622 Americans eligible to vote citizens of voting age. Of that number, there were 200 million registered voters, which is 59 million more than in 2008, which would indicate that people were motivated to vote at the time they registered. Of those two hundred million registered voters, 131,741,000 actually voted, meaning over 68 million people who had taken the time to register didn't vote on election day. So who were these people who didn’t vote? I haven't been able to find a breakdown of eligible voters by Dem/Rep/Independent/Third party (this stuff is not all in one place, you have to dig for it) but among registered voters the only ones who can actually cast a ballot - there is another way of figuring out who failed to vote and the result is crystal-clear. It was the Democrats. If you compare the results of this election with the 2012 Presidential election, Romney got just shy of 61 million votes. In this election Trump pulled 59 million, down 1.9 million from Romney but still in the same ballpark as the usual Republican turnout. In 2012 Obama got a bit less than 66 million votes, this election Clinton got just over 59 million. That's 6.8 million fewer votes than Obama. The core message of Hillary's campaign was that you had to vote for her to stop Trump - you had no other real choice. Turned out that people did have another choice - Republicans turned out in their usual numbers. Democrats and Independents stayed home. So, fellow Democrats, stop whining about how third party candidates lost Hillary the election. A confirmed 6.8 million of our own people didn’t come out to vote. Hillary Clinton simply didn’t motivate enough Democrats to vote for her. Call it complacency, hubris, false confidence, poor political planning, whatever you can parse the reasons later but that ball is firmly in Hillary’s court. So stop blaming racism, misogyny, Russians, homophobia, Evangelicals, space aliens, and the third party candidates. The numbers are clear. Hillary Clinton lost because not enough Democrats came out to vote for her.

Great news for those of you who can't get enough of our going on and on and on about this stuff! Margaret and I will be live on the Joy Cardin Show on Wisconsin Public Radio tomorrow morning, Thursday, August 25th, from 9AM -10AM (Eastern), 8AM - 9AM (Central), and Way Too Early (Pacific) talking and answering caller's questions about the culture of thrill-seeking and its influence on modern-day society. You can also catch it at http://www.wpr.org/listen-live.... And you can also read our comments on the same subject in The Science of the Thrill in this month's Atlantic online at: http://www.theatlantic.com//the-science-of-the-thrill/1010/

We have a research collection of toys, picture postcards, posters, and other ephemera that show the evolution of what previous generations thought was mainstream-normal. Just picked up this guy who I call Smoking Joe - a Korean War-era toy solider smoking a cigarette. Not something that you are likely to find in Toys R Us today. It looks like he's caught the eye of the Space Woman in the background - and why not? She may be a woman of the future but it's a 1950s future where smoking cigarettes automatically makes you cool.

Guess who were invited as the Vellios Speakers to the grad students at the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship. These guys. At the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University.

The Latest from my Hidden Systems blog.

It's been one damned thing after another for a while now. Finally carved out a schedule that allows me to get back to posting on my blog. Thanks for sticking with me.

Childhood habits form emotional ties that can last a lifetime. Once you pick a breakfast cereal or a soft drink, odds are high that it is likely to be the one that you choose for the rest of your life. Take my previous post on the ubiquity of pocket knives in the Baby Boom Generation. Today at brunch with friends. "So does anyone here still carry a pocket knife?"

WHY THE HELL AM I NOT DEAD?, PART II: "MISTER STABBY" I can’t believe my generation lived through childhood. I can’t believe that I did. Don’t run with scissors! was one of those rules of my childhood that didn’t make sense to me. I mean I understood the internal logic behind it. It’s just that I couldn’t do it because my mother would never allow me to even touch her scissors, let alone run with them. The scissors were off-limits, no exceptions. They were a No Go Area f...Continue reading

We are constantly seeing research that claims to document "why we buy." There was even a best-selling book of that name. Inevitably it is not about buying. It's about shopping. Shopping and buying are TOTALLY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES. ... Sorry about the shouting but I can't believe I have to tell you these things. You can read Margaret's King's analysis of the shopping vs buying experience here: http://mjkcultureblog.blogspot.com/

Going through my archives of artifacts from the 1950s - my childhood years - inspired me to start a new series of posts on a theme that I call: WHY THE HELL AREN'T I DEAD? This will be the first of a series. Bear with me.... Growing up in the 1950s was a teeny bit different than today. The chief differences being that we were free-range children. Be back in time for dinner was the closest we came to being supervised. The other big difference was that the odds of being home for dinner weren't as good as you might imagine because EVERYTHING IN OUR ENVIRONMENT WAS TRYING TO KILL US! We had sweet-tasting lead paint flaking off the radiators in our homes. We had asbestos dust in our school cafeterias. The nice people who made your breakfast cereal would send you Polonium if you sent them 15 cents and a boxtop. You read that right. Polonium. The highly dangerous radioactive material discovered by Marie Curie, who died of radiation poisoning for her efforts. It was also the poison used by the KGB to assassinate defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Meet the Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring. Back in those days you got toys as premiums in your cereal boxes or coupons that you could send off for the really cool stuff. Don’t ask me what the connection was between the Lone Ranger and the Atomic Bomb. I have no idea. All I knew was that I WANTED ONE! I wanted one so badly that I ACTUALLY ATE KIX CEREAL which I hated worse than vegetables to get the ring. For my geek readers, basically the bomb it was a miniature spinthariscope, an instrument that shows the incidence of alpha particles by flashes of light on a fluorescent screen. You went into a dark room, waited for your eyes to adjust, then took off the red tail fins and looked through the ring to see tiny flashes of light as the polonium-alpha particles hit the screen. OK. It was a lot cooler in 1952. So cool that this was the most desired cereal premium EVER. One MILLION kids including me were running around schoolyards wearing these things. You’d think that between that and the Radium-coated glow-in-the-dark hands on my Mickey Mouse watch I should have died in agony a long time ago, but here I am. It defies all reason.

Being a cultural analyst, a lot of people send me photos of stuff like this unfortunate store name. This one came from Frank Crean along with the comment: "Wasn't there one person, one friend, who pulled the owner aside and said, "Hey, yeah, about the store's name...." The little of what I can see of the signage is also in English, so I figured Australia or some English-speaking country where that word has a different meaning. Sure enough, it's a store in Sydney, so it's cult...ural and not simply a coincidental foreign language things like "Barf." For those who are unfamiliar with the product,Barf is a best-selling laundry detergent in the Gulf Region. The word Barf is from theTajiki Persian word for snow. The same logic as Ivory Snow in the U.S. So if an Arab says there are 12 centimeters of barf on the ground, he means there are about 5 inches of snow on the ground. If an American says there are 12 centimeters of barf on the ground, it means he is in Boston on Saint Patrick’s Day.

People always get this wrong. When they see animals doing what they interpret as human-like behaviors they say, "They're like us" when what they should say is "We're like them." We share cognitive biases with some other primates because these biases existed more than 35 million years ago when we first split from a common ape ancestor. Those are ape behaviors that we share.... Capuchin monkeys, for example are as spiteful as any human. It turns out that the also make the same mistakes we do when we are dealing with money. You don't think monkeys use money? Here's the wonderful Yale psychologist Laurie Santos to explain it better than I ever could. http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos