Bringrr is a simple little Bluetooth accessory that you leave in one of your car’s power outlets and forget about—until you try to leave your cellphone at home that is. The device will emit some sort of sound and flash red if it doesn’t detect the cellphone it’s paired with when you start your car. – Gizmodo

Abusive relationships are first entered into on the basis of wants and end up being dependency traps defined by needs. The slow, creeping entanglement of dependency marks the basis of all abuse human relationships – even if now they are relationships to machines. It’s not going to be nuclear fall out from Skynet in Terminator or Dr. Strangelove’s Doomsday Machine that marks the turning of the tables, but when you can’t even get out of one machine (your car) without being dependent upon yet another (your phone). And there’s a machine to make sure you don’t screw it up.

Disturbing insight from the New York Magazine’s Steve Fishman on Bernie Madoff’s new life in prison. The whole piece is worth reading, but I want to just highlight two parts that tell us not just about Bernie behind bars but the the the flaws of the human condition that made it possible.

Prisoners crowded Madoff seeking investment advice—missing the fact that Madoff, being a con man, hadn’t invested for years. Other convicts saw in him a fellow entrepreneur, ignoring the obvious fact that his scheme wasn’t a business at all, just smoke and mirrors. But Madoff had amassed the symbols of success, and for criminals, that counts.

The delusion required to solicit investment advice from Bernie is akin to asking a demolition expert how to build houses. But delusion is a form of blindness, and in this case, like most, it is brought on by the seduction of something sweet. In this case, it is the sweet smell of money. Despite having lost it all to spend his life behind bars, is a stench that never goes away. Once you’ve amassed it, perhaps you help others to do the same.

This is not just a blindness that fails to distinguish between between creation and destruction, but a greater ignorance of the financial world by virtually all of us who are forced into through – from student loans to retirement accounts, novices have to play the game, and it should be no surprise, they are beaten. This ignorance goes beyond the distinction between a 401K or CDO, but a psychological handicap where whenever the promise of money appears, the very logic required to grasp it, is the first thing to disappear.

It is not the only one:

“Bernie was telling a story about an old lady. She was bugging him for her money, so he said to her, ‘Here’s your money,’ and gave her a check. When she saw the amount she says, ‘That’s unbelievable,’ and she says, ‘Take it back.’ And urged her friends [to invest].” … “People just kept throwing money at me,” Madoff related to a prison consultant who advised him on how to endure prison life. “Some guy wanted to invest, and if I said no, the guy said, ‘What, I’m not good enough?’

It is one of the great ironies of the human condition that those people who understand how to manipulate people to carry out their will are precisely those who have no empathy for people at all. Sociopaths such as Madoff understood that people find it impossible to turn down something that’s two good to be true (“That’s unbelieveable” – it was) and will do almost anything to defend their ego (“What, I’m not good enough?” – no, too good), after all, what is wealth but the first crutch the ego leans against.

My favorite article from Time Magazine last year on the state of California (my new home) by Michael Grunwald has had me thinking all year.

California, you may have heard, is an apocalyptic mess of raging wildfires, soaring unemployment, mass foreclosures and political paralysis. It’s dysfunctional. It’s ungovernable. Its bond rating is barely above junk. It’s so broke, it had to hand out IOUs while its leaders debated how many prisoners to release and parks to close. Nevada aired ads mocking California’s business climate to lure its entrepreneurs. The media portray California as a noir fantasyland of overcrowded schools, perpetual droughts, celebrity breakdowns, illegal immigration, hellish congestion and general malaise, captured in headlines like “Meltdown on the Ocean” and “California’s Wipeout Economy” and “Will California Become America’s First Failed State?”

Actually, it won’t.

Ignore the California whinery. It’s still a dream state. In fact, the pioneering megastate that gave us microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success is still the cutting edge of the American future — economically, environmentally, demographically, culturally and maybe politically. It’s the greenest and most diverse state, the most globalized in general and most Asia-oriented in particular at a time when the world is heading in all those directions. It’s also an unparalleled engine of innovation, the mecca of high tech, biotech and now clean tech. In 2008, California’s wipeout economy attracted more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. Somehow its supposedly hostile business climate has nurtured Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Cisco, Intel, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, the Gap and countless other companies that drive the way we live.

What does this mean? It’s tempting to draw the Libertarian conclusion: the dysfunctional, absentee state has left the market to it’s own innovative devices and flourished as a consequence. If that hypothesis were true then we’d see innovation across all industries equally or in those industries the state has left alone the most (relative to others). Instead, we see the dominance in just two industries, technology and entertainment, both of which were there long before California’s budgetary collapse. And despite some industry specific laws (my favorite of which is the ‘confidential marriage’ that enables Hollywood starlets to get married without disappointing their fans) other states are more favorable, especially when it comes to tax-rebates for motion picture and television production.

Why California? The answer is largely luck. Industries concentrate in specific regions and tend to stay there – the geographic concentration allows for many economic advantages from economies of scale to dynamic local labor markets that bestow a comparative advantage. But why such geographic concentration arises in the first place is often down to sheer chance: who built there first. In the case of the entertainment industry it was to escape the copyright laws on motion picture production that were only stringently enforced in the North East. The South West let everyone rip off Edison’s technology for free. And there was amble room to build a mogul sized studio. Once the geographic concentration was established the competition advantage allowed them to stay there.

What California has benefited from is an Internet sized earthquake in the creative industries. The topic deserves many more posts that this one so let me just say here that it has punished those industries based in New York: independent film, magazines and publishing are having to re-think their very existence. Northern Cali is the origin of the chaos and so it is riding the wave, while major studios and networks are weathering the story, for now, as demand for quality, visual entertainment remains strong.

But perhaps the Libertarian argument has a point: the crisis of the state government has not impacted this shift, markets have operated despite the absence of government, if not because of it. This weaker version of the argument perceives state governments as just a sideshow to global, technological forces that they are no match to deal with. Or perhaps this is the wrong comparison: we should not be looking within the United States, or even between free-market economies, but between the free-market economies and the state-based ones, a distinction at the heart of Ian Bremmer’s new book, The End of the Free Market, which I’ll be reviewing later.

Following politics is like going to the cinema – only in every movie the character you root for either turns out to be a super-villain or dies in some grotesque and unwelcomed manner. If every movie was like that, you’d just stop going to the movies. So I’ve stopped going to politics as each episode has become as predictable as a CBS police procedural except the bad guys always win – and never in a glamorous, sexy way we can secretly admire. As the “no-we can’t” presidency completes its first year in America, and the “it can only get worse” government ascends to power in Britain, it’s time for me to tune into another station on the national zeitgeist.

I got into politics because I was into ideas. And it’s back to ideas that I’m going to return. Often these ideas will be political ideas but these have happier story lines that the individuals in office who abuse them. So from now on I’ll be using this blog to start digging into the renaissance of the ‘idea’ in American popular culture and using my background in sociology to poke at these ideas and see which ones push back or pop.

This has to be Britain’s weirdest election. The Prime Minister is irrelevant, the “third” party is in second place, and presidential politics has been embraced without a presidency. What strikes me as most peculiar is taking place on the British left: the refusal to defend the policies of the parties they plan to vote for.

All of the Labour-leaning papers have abandoned their party, pretending they’ve never had anything to do with it. The Prime Minister’s refrain of “defend the recovery” is ignored universally by all. After all: what recovery? In in the final quarter of 2009 ‘growth’ stood at a weak 0.4%, compared to the American rate of 5.6%. The long-term of failure of Labour to grow the economy beyond the finance industry concentrated in the South East is, like Greece’s off-the-books borrowing, coming into public view. Labour and the Liberal Democrats focus on a populist bag of tricks, a tax credit here or an efficiency saving there, without tackling the issue of a bloated public sector, a shrinking tax base, and uncontrolled legal immigration from an expanded, emboldened, and massively indebted EU.

Jobs, the economy, immigration and Europe are totally ignored by the editorial endorsements for Labour and the Liberal Democrats. How could they defend such amateurishness from the Liberal Democrats and the disasterous record of Labour? Instead, their defenders focus exclusively upon the issue of electoral reform, specifically the introduction of proportional representation. How constitutional reform will bring back one more job, stop one foreclosure or prevent a single bankruptcy remains to be explained. In fact, one would never have guessed that Britain’s growth is trailing significantly those of the USA or Germany from reading The Guardian or The Independent.

Rather, the rhetoric of proportional representation is coached exclusively in the language of democracy and fairness. As The Guardian editorial argued:

Proportional representation – while not a panacea – would at last give this country what it has lacked for so long: a parliament that is a true mirror of this pluralist nation, not an increasingly unrepresentative two-party distortion of it. The Guardian has supported proportional representation for more than a century. In all that time there has never been a better opportunity than now to put this subject firmly among the nation’s priorities. Only the Liberal Democrats grasp this fully, and only they can be trusted to keep up the pressure to deliver, though others in all parties, large and small, do and should support the cause. That has been true in past elections too, of course. But this time is different. The conjuncture in 2010 of a Labour party that has lost so much public confidence and a Conservative party that has not yet won it has enabled Mr Clegg to take his party close to the threshold of real influence for the first time in nearly 90 years.

This was taken ever further by The Independent, which endorsed tactical voting to ensure a hung-parliament with no party in overall control.

True, a system that could give a party with 36% of the vote an outright majority in parliament does appear unfair. But the Labour-supporting Guardian did not protest when Labour achieved precisely such a result merely five years ago. So much for their century-long commitment to PR. Their motivation is purely partisan, driven by a deep-rooted anti-Tory sentiment that wants to not only stop Cameron from forming a government but the possibility of any conservative government in the future.

The British Left considers itself to have the well-being of the poor and the work-class at it heart. Yet in none of the papers editorials or the established pundits have explained how Labour, the Liberal Democrats or a hung-parliament is going to help them. There is no mention of historic unemployment, the halting of social mobility or the challenge to the low-wage labour market posed by unchecked legal immigration from Europe. When one actual representative of the working-class raised these issues with the Labour Prime-Minister she was dismissed as a “bigot”. This wasn’t a simple gaffe by a “psychologically flawed” individual, but endemic of the elite London-based Left that has equal disdain for the actual needs of working Britons they don’t know and their Conservative, debate-club rivals that they do.

This is not a defense of the Conservatives, but a diagnosis of how the establishment Left went from political domination to complete irrelevance in less than a political heart-beat. There has been no introspection by Britian’s left as to what went wrong, why everyone was lost their jobs, and why the Americans and the Germans are getting back to work, but they are not. They can’t blame it on the Tories this time, this one economic disaster they are going to have to take ownership of, and until they do, they deserve to remain irrelevant. Over this election, they’ve just drafted the world’s second-longest suicide note.