Reflections From a Murky Pond

Butterflies and bullets – There’s not much in common between the two in most people’s minds. Most people, however, are quite wrong because butterflies are a lot like bullets. Much like you’ll never hear the bullet that kills you, you’ll never see the butterfly that takes you and/or your carefully crafted predictions and plans out either.

That’s life, folks.

Chaos is life, life is chaos – or a deeper order that we cannot fully perceive. Either way, it’s a deterministic nonlinear system with a sensitive dependency upon far too many and too diverse and separated initial conditions for us to come even close to predicting what will happen with any certainty at all.

Microsoft fired up it’s Bing Pulse tool for the second year in order to record real-time audience sentiment during Obama’s fifth SOTU speech. The online voting tool allowed viewers to share their opinions about the speech using a smartphone, PC or tablet.

This year, Microsoft is added some new functions to the tool, including an annotated graph feature that allowed viewers to click on spikes and/or dips in the real-time graphs to see the issues being addressed during the speech that have prompted major reactions.

Last years SOTU Bing Pulse registered 12.9 million votes, according to Microsoft, and this year’s should have been at least as popular so these are the broadest political polls in existence at this time. The re results are also quite interesting.

Speechcrafting

Firstly, I have to give credit where credit is due. Whatever team of writers developed Obama’s 2014 SOTU speech did a very credible job.  The Overall Intensity Graph show a solid curve of interest that builds well, peaks, and drops off at the end, indicating a good denouement. The pacing of the peaks and valleys of engagement also shows a good pace to the speech.

A Telling Response

The listeners’ responses, broken out by political beliefs, is very telling indeed. There’s a huge and stark disparity between how Democrats viewed Obama’s speech and how both Republicans and Independents did so. It’s quite a dramatic difference.

Democrats held largely uniformly positive views of each of Obama’s talking points, only dipping below the 50% mark on the issues of the War on Terror and continuing to support Israel.  They’ve approval didn’t waver much throughout the speech either, showing far less mean difference in approval rating and engagement from one talking to point to the next than either Republicans or Independents. For the most part, however, while differing in amplitude, Democrats showed the same peaks and valleys of approval as both Republicans and Independents.

Republicans and Independents conversely were, by and large, quite disapproving  of Obama’s talking points during his speech, rising above 50% only when it came to the War on Terror and providing medical benefits to veterans. They were, in fact, both more disapproving of it than the Democrats were approving of it.

One point to make specific note of is that Republicans and Independents responded to the talking points in Obama’s 2014 SOTU speech almost identically. There was almost no statistical variation between them, whereas both differed greatly from the Democrats’ responses.

Women’s Needs

Interestingly, despite the constant contention that women have different needs and priorities than men, the responses and engagement of the respective genders was, talking point by talking point, almost identical. This largely held true even on those parts of Obama’s speech which would normally be considered “women’s issues.”

The current cause célèbre or, at least, shouted slogan of America’s domestic enemies is “income inequality.” Right now they’re appearing as if they are really incensed that the poor in America, who are now a permanent portion of the population, haven’t had their average incomes increase as much as the wealthier have.

That’s right; they’re complaining that the poor aren’t improving their lot as much as the wealthier are, not that the poor are poorer.

And so, of course, they’re yammering for the government to force those who’ve made more money to pay that money out to the poorer people through taxes and various and sundry laws and regulations designed to to give the poor a bigger slice of the mythical pie.

Do not bother to lie to others or yourself; these plans and proposals are all governmental confiscation of private property in order for redistribution. Yet what crimes have the successful committed to deserve having their property confiscated? Have they stolen this wealth from the poor? Have they committed some heinous act beyond being more successful than some of the other residents of the nations?

The simple answer is no, the wealthy have done nothing wrong nor have they stolen their wealth from the less successful fractions of the American population. They have simply adapted to- and succeeded in navigating the shifts in wealth generation in these modern, global times.

Hey! Firefox is a good and very popular browser but they still need to work to maintain and hopefully increase their market share. One of the best ways of doing that is to provide it with cool add-ons already installed…
 

And wasn’t it awesome of Marie-Claude Bourbonnais aka Marry Bardot to develop the most delightful add-ons?

We can all expect Obama to talk rather extensively about the economy and the “success” of the recovery that he, of course, brought about. We can also expect him to wax pontifical about just who is to blame for any perceived weakness in that recovery.

Obama’s 2014 Economic Blamecast

In other words, Obama could just crib his SOTU speech from any of the many other times he’s made excuses for his utter and abject failure as a POTUS. We’re not going here anything tonight that we haven’t heard time and time again.

And really! Why shouldn’t Obama reiterate his mantra? It’s worked well for him professionally so far. Remember folks, if you think or worse say that it’s even partially Obama’s fault, you’re RACIST!