Young Idealism Is Not Misguided

Over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson writes:

Humans have long lives. We are unusually dependent on our parents when young, and we then slowly gain competence over a lifetime, usually reaching peak productivity in our forties and fifties. Most of the time we are aware of this. For example, we count on our peak earning years by taking out loans as young students, and later saving for retirement. And we prefer leaders at those peak ages.

But when people get idealistic, they tend to forget this.Young idealists often ask me and others what they can do to most help the world. Which is a fine question. But such folks tend to be impatient – they want to know how to most help the world in the next few years, not over their lifetime. So when they consider joining an idealistic project, they focus more on whether the project will succeed than on what skills and contacts they would acquire.

Yet young folks shouldn’t expect to have their biggest influence when young. Yes young folks have higher variance, and so sometimes get very lucky, but they should expect to prepare and learn while young, and then have their biggest influence in their peak years.

I'm a Young Idealist, I guess. I'm 30. And I definitely agree I'm not in my "peak earning" age of 40 or 50. That's my disclosure. Hanson's, though unwritten in his post, is that he's 53 and conveniently smack in the middle of his hallowed peak years.
So of course my gut instinct here is to dismiss what he says as another "the younger generation is a bunch of entitled hippies!" article. That's not why he's wrong, but he is wrong.

His argument boils down to this: "a human has their peak ability to positively change the world when they are in their middle years, and therefore young people should concentrate on getting educated and networking, so that when they become Middle Aged, they have the skills and connections necessary to enact change."

Here's the problem: when I'm 50 I don't really want the world to be the way it is now. I don't want to bide my time and merely learn and network idly for another decade or two while someone else is responsible for enacting positive change in the world. Hanson's generation isn't exactly hard at work on social progress.

Let's say I was the CEO of a small corporation that developed medical devices. Should I invest 100% of my resources in projects with immediate payout? No, because a sustainable revenue stream requires projects with a variety of timelines. Similarly, I shouldn't only invest my company's resources in a project with a huge payout that will take 15 years. In order to grow, I need revenue now, in five years, in ten years, and so forth.
Back to the human case. It would be simultaneously imprudent for Hanson to suggest that a Young Idealist is impotent to enact social change immediately as well as for me to suggest that they should only concentrate on those immediate social programs. Rather, what Hanson should be suggesting to Young Idealists is that they need a portfolio of social changes that they want to see enacted and want to support that fall along a variety of timelines. Let me give an example.
A Young Idealist might take annual summer trips to El Salvador to build houses. They might do evening tutoring for inner city kids (as a Young Idealist, they don't have a family yet to take up their evenings like a Middle Aged Idealist does). They might invest in a Kickstarter program that wants to provide basic chemistry sets to children in schools in developing nations. They might work for a political campaign for a candidate that shares their basic social values. And they can do all of these things now. But in doing several of them now, they are planting the seeds of future social changes they wish to see bear fruit when they are 50. Fast forward 20 years, and the political candidate they supported is a Supreme Court Justice who strikes down a law that has rankled the No-Longer-Young Idealist for a generation. And because of the networking that individual did as a Young Idealist, they are appointed to a political position which expands their own personal influence, right during Hanson's "peak performance" years. A child who got one of those chemistry sets in Africa is now a PhD student at MIT doing research on solar-powered desalinization. Some inner city graduated high school because of the Young Idealist's tutoring, they are now a Young Idealist, pushing for further social change and tutoring kids as well.

Hanson's advice that we squirrel away the money we'd be spending on the "current needy" so that compound interest allows us to better help the "future needy" (while being incredibly cynical) breaks down quickly when one plans to spend that money now to create social changes that help future needy as well. Hanson elicits skepticism in the idea that social changes enacted now will positively impact the future, without justification. However, I'd counter-argue that his position is just as weak: name someone who is making better-than-inflation on their investments in the last 11 years? How many people's 401k's have completely rebounded to pre-2007 levels (or rarer yet, exceeded them)? Has anyone's savings accounts actually resumed 7-8% growth? My savings account can't even keep up with inflation. How am I supposed to turn that into massively-compounded growth that I can unload in 20 years?
And more importantly, that entire argument is completely illogical. If I am to put off charity for 20 years to compound interest, why not put it off 40 years to compound even more? Why not put it off for 100 years? Why not just keep compounding interest on our investments forever so that we are infinitely capable of enacting social change for the needy infinitely far in the future?

One last comment. Hanson totally misguides when he suggests that Young Idealism is sexually motivated:

One plausible explanation is that a habit of extra youthful altruism evolved as a way to signal one’s attractiveness to potential associates. People tend more to form associations when young, associations that they tend more to rely on when old. And potential associates like to see altruism, because it correlates with generosity and cooperation (as near-far theory predicts).

Then what explains extra altruism in the old? And how does he explain youths that are extremely sexually-motivated but not idealistic? Are they outliers? How many outliers is one allowed before statistical significance reverts to anecdote? Can't a guy drop a coin in the Salvation Army bucket without looking to get laid?

The most simple answer is usually the right one. Young Idealists see how messed up the world is and don't really want to grow old in that world. And because Young Idealists are more likely to make bold, sweeping structural changes to society that would harm the status quo, and therefore the status quo works against them to keep them at the margins of influence. The Young Idealist grows into the Old Self-Interested, and the cycle continues.


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Zomney

For those of you who don't know who Joss Whedon is, he most recently directed The Avengers.


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Syzygy

Finally, an excuse to explain this word!! Syzygy (pronounced sis-zeh-gee) is when the Sun, Earth, and Moon all form a line. This happens twice a lunar cycle, once during full moon and once during new moon. During Syzygy, the tides are stronger. Much stronger.

This is relevant because Hurricane Sandy's storm surge should be crushing Long Island Sound right about the time the Syzygy-induced high tide rolls in.


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Headline of the Century

Why Penis Worm Anuses Are Getting Evolutionary Biologists All Hot And Bothered


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The Moral Case Against Obama

Andrew Sullivan, with his usual bravado, provides three reasons why morally he thinks the right thing to do is to vote against Mitt Romney. TL;DR:

On the universality of access to healthcare, on torture, and on pre-emptive war, my conscience therefore requires me to withhold support for the Republican candidate. I disagree with him on many prudential policy grounds - but none reach the level of moral seriousness of the above.

Of course, on these three things I agree with Sullivan. Absolutely I believe that health care is a peculiar institution in the way that basic freedom is: the right to live is in the core of our Constitution and Bill of Rights from sentence 1. Torture is hilariously ineffective, barbaric, and is intolerable for the same reasons as denying health care is (see previous sentence). And with regards to pre-emptive war with Iran, sure. Terrible idea. As terrible as a decades-spanning war with Iraq and within Afghanistan. 

However, Obama isn't exactly a Boy Scout. I need to pre-empt what I am about to say with two things. The first is that I am not saying Mitt Romney would succeed in a morality game a snail's whisker farther than Mr. Obama would. Second, it has long been my opinion that borders are stupid. They are the antiquated methods by which we define an "us" and a "them" for purposes of statism, nationalism, exclusionism, and "Pentagon budgets."
If Sullivan is going to get all preachy about the morals of two men and thereby elect the world's leader, then one must step a bit farther back and look not just at the United States of A, but rather at the world in general. And when you step across the invisible lines that (separate us from our genetically identical neighbors but nevertheless) define us as a nation, President Obama's touted morality seems to rapidly diminish.

Therefore, here are three counter-reasons that the morality of Barack Obama is just as questionable, if not more so, than Mitt Romney's.
1) During the last four years, the United States has expanded our drone attack program into several nations without even the tiniest pretense of Congressional approval. Essentially what has occurred is the Defense budget has become Congress defining the size of President Obama's sword, which he then wields with a complete absence of jurisprudence (it should be noted that this unilateral deployment of our forces/drones/etc abroad goes against the War Powers Act interpretation of Barack Obama himself). During his tenure, the citizens of Pakistan have become completely terrorized by the daily presence of drones which may or may not rain death down upon them with extremely bad aim.
What stinks about this is not just that lawless robotic killing of innocent people in foreign nations would be cause for war if it were innocent Americans being killed via lawless robots from above but our nation tends to act as complicit accomplices to this atrocity, but even more so that President Obama is completely unapologetic about it while proclaiming his amazing power at "drawing down" the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Replacing soldiers (who have their own internal moral code built in as human beings) in two countries with robots who feel no guilt as they wipe schoolchildren off the face of the Earth in two other countries is not a drawdown, it is an evolution. And during the last four years, the President has transformed our military efforts in the Middle East from a colossal mistake into an evil one.
When futurists like myself looked into the glass ball and saw future wars, they were certainly fought with drones. But it was drones fighting drones. Not drones raining missiles down on kids.

2) One piece of news that got a LOT of play everywhere - everywhere except at the Daily Dish  - was a Washington Post report detailing the development of a "disposition matrix" which is a fancy way of saying "kill list." This list includes terrorist suspects and the methods being used to hunt them down. While I believe the pursuit of evil people and the attempts to bring them to justice is an important process, one of the fundamental principles of human rights is habeas corpus - the right of a suspected criminal to be brought forth for trial.
Mr. Obama's use of an extrajudicial kill list - and his obvious plans to expand the list - while CIA director David Patraeus  pushes to expand the deployed drone fleet further (see item 1) represents a deep gouge in the face of morality. If one believes in freedom, as I am 100% sure Andrew Sullivan does, then one wants that freedom (and the rights that go with it) to extend to everyone, regardless of what crimes they are suspected of committing. Regardless of what invisible lines are used to define them as citizens.
It should be noted that this extrajudicial kill list - I mean disposition matrix - can (and has) include(d) U.S. citizens.

3) Remember young Barry Obama, smoking pot with his teenage friends? Remember candidate Obama touting the urgency with which he would repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell as President? Candidate Obama did a pretty good job of painting "L is for liberal" on his shirt back in 2008. But then Rahm Emanuel cracked down on marijuana and unions, Federal agents "on a drug raid" started smashing people's doors down and shooting them before they confirmed if they were even the right person, and Don't Ask Don't Tell lasted until midnight 2011. WHERE DID YOU GO, BARRY?
The answer, of course, is that Mr. Obama had flip-flopped. His apologists are quick to defend: "repealing DADT requires Congress, too, asshat." Yes but did he even try before the lame duck? Gates called it "on the back burner." Even Sullivan (while furiously spinning it into "leading from behind") admits that Obama drug his heels on DADT.
In any case, the moral question is of course how a man can smoke pot and then grow up to aggressively prosecute pot smokers. How a man can champion liberal ideals and then morph into a right-leaning centrist February 1, 2009?
And how can we trust the barrage of brown, foul-smelling promises he defecates now? Fool me once, shame on you.
The Left happily pounces on Mitt the Waffle, pointing to his spontaneous combustion on October 2nd and Phoenix-like rebirth as a moderate at the Oct. 3 debate. "The man has no moral compass! He'll say anything to get elected!" or so trumpets Andrew Sullivan.
Sully, which candidate are you talking about?!

When these charges are leveled against President Obama, and believe me - I'm not the first nor the last to point out the egregious human rights violations our President recklessly perpetrates in the Middle East - Sullivan's defense always boils down to "But but but Mitt Romney would be so. much. worse. If you don't vote Obama you're effectively helping Romney."
If an EF4 tornado has just wiped your barn off the map and it is rapidly heading across the pasture towards your house, as you flee to your storm shelter, do you really want some brilliant and helpful person to shout to you "at least it isn't an EF5!!"


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Off the Wagon

Hillel Fuld:

This kind of cheap and inaccurate marketing on Apple’s part is to me a clear indication that it knows its tablet dominance is for the first time, being threatened. 

It knows the iPad Mini cannot compete with the competition if you take all factors that matter including performance, graphics, and price into account, and it planned this launch accordingly...

I hate to say it again and state the obvious but this kind of product launch and cheap marketing tactic would never have happened if a certain someone was still running this company. Low, Apple. Very low.

Now, in terms of disclosure, I have a Galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 so I'm obviously well immersed in the Android ecosystem. That said, I want to jump down Mr. Fuld's throat here.
Predicting the future is pretty hard. Predicting what products people will gobble up is pretty hard too. Steve Jobs was pretty good at both. Which made him a rare man.

But in addition to the rare combined skill of prescience and intuition, Jobs had one other skill: the sell. When the iPhone 4 came out, its specs weren't that amazing. Off the top of my head I could think of three different Android phones that had hardware that matched or exceeded the iPhone. When the iPad 2 came out, it met (but didn't exceed) the specs of its Android competitors. But Jobs could sell anything, as long as it looked great and was part of the Apple ecosystem.
And that's the key here. the iPad Mini is indeed, as Mr. Fuld rants, a sub-par piece of hardware. But it's part of the Apple ecosystem. My friend Josh likes to read books on his iPad, then switch to his iPhone. Something I don't understand makes it so whatever page he's on consistent across both devices. Pretty neat. There are a million things like this in the Apple ecosystem. The iPad Mini gets that. It gets iTunes and iCloud and iWhateverElse. The Nexus 7 certainly wins the hardware battle. But the iPad Mini gets a software leg up.

Was it disingenuous for Schiller and Cook to compare the two tablets and declare the iPad Mini "better"? Perhaps. But not because it isn't. Just because they said it was better for the wrong reasons. The iPad Mini isn't a more powerful tablet than Google's Nexus 7. It's power comes from its software, which continues to be unrivaled in the Android ecosystem. Trust me, I know.

Jobs sold equal-or-less-than hardware for the last 5 years of his life. Get over it.


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Speciation

January 18, 2016. My device works. Building on the brain-machine interface work done by Parviz, Hanson, and others, I developed a coding language that could translate neural signals to digital 1's and 0's, and translate the other direction as well. The oversimplified description is a biological AC/DC converter. I didn't have any research money to do a clinical study yet, so I implanted it in myself. In my right arm. I hijacked the signal to and from my index and middle fingers, then wrote script in the ADC to "right click" and "left click". Double clicking happens with a thought. Then I plugged myself into my computer. Using a mouse, I could move the cursor around the screen. Then I "thought" about clicking a link...the link opened! I right clicked, opened a page in a new tab...it works perfectly. I need to hijack the whole motor array of my arm though, so I don't have to use this stupid mouse for on-screen navigation.

February 1, 2016. Hijacking the arm signal was too much work. The forearm remains the greatest challenge in human musculature. Instead I decided to hijack my eyeball. The computer screen works as a 2D array of X and Y coordinates so I can basically just translate muscle contractions in the orbital complex into X and Y output. Combined with the finger hijack, I can now browse the internet, work, read, check and write emails...all without moving from this slouched position in my Herman Muller Aeron chair.

June 6, 2016. Investment! Had some VC guys in. I can't really abide their type, showing up to these business deals in jeans and a graphic T, but whatever. Their initial investment bid was $160 million for 70%. I countered for double that money for the same equity, and we settled for $210 million for 60% and I get to choose the Chairman of the Board of the company formed. Everything is going black until FDA submission, stay tuned.

April 11, 2018. After two years of development, the first clinical trial is done. We could not really adapt this technology to animals beyond biocompatibility studies (how do you teach a chimp to connect to the internet?) so we modified the system by reducing its capabilities and its implant location and got the FDA to agree to a small trial. Which went flawlessly. We've submitted a total of 14 patents on the initial technology and the VC queens want another 7 based on changes made and additional future possibilities. They also showed up with another $80 million and bought 10% more. Fine with me.

March 1, 2019. Submitted to the FDA for approval. So frustrated that these people involved in the clinical trials are essentially Gods, but I can't legally get the technology myself yet.

July 4, 2021. I chose Independence Day as the day to have my implant done. It seemed fitting. The surgery only took about two hours, because the device adapts once it is in. There's no nervous system connection for the surgeon to worry about, that's all integral to the device post-implant. The nervous system intrusion took another hour, during which I was paralytic. Then muscle control was restored and the device started learning. I held out another hour, then jacked in.
I can't really describe what it was like. Partially due to disclosure requirements and partially due to the inability to articulate it in words. Try describing 3D to a creature that lives in a 2D world. The whole of human knowledge is available to me. Geography is meaningless when your brain can operate at the speed of light.

August 8, 2021. We launch the product tonight. The VCs have put together a huge event. Details of the tech were leaked to the press. The New York Times is calling it "The Singularity" which isn't true but I appreciate the ego boost.

August 9, 2021. In the last 12 hours, 191,000 people have put their name on the waiting list for the surgery. The surgery costs $250,000 and we get a 10% fee on that. The device sells for $121,000 and of that 60% is margin. Which means we made 18.6 billion dollars in 12 hours. What's more, as innovation allows the price to come down, our margin will go up...and more people will be able to afford this. Time to celebrate!! Human progress, realized!

March 8, 2028. The Board voted me out today. I pushed for lower margins but as they all sat there, jacked in, discussing in a mental chat room the ramifications of widespread adoption of the implant something shifted and they decided it was better to make less money overall by keeping the technology restrictively expensive. I rallied against it, and by a 12-3 vote they decided on a new Chairman. Tonight I'll submit a request to cash in my shares. By tomorrow night I should be the world's first "trillionaire."

March 10, 2028. I've been asked to stay on as Chief Science Officer. I agreed, both because I love this technology but also so that I can steer them away from anything I consider immoral. Like this talk of putting the device in fetuses. I understand the benefits of it, but people should have the free will to choose if they want the implant, not be born with it.

January 18, 2031. Fifteen years since my first successful test. Now we have three versions of the implant, a wired version, a wireless version, and a new sub-net version. Turns out when you give a bunch of smart people the ability to immerse themselves in the Net and each other, they come up with new technologies pretty fast. The sub-net is sort of an internet gateway without electromagnetic radiation. It's hard to describe. It's an energy level that was always there, but the stupid, slow, un-jacked versions of us never thought to look for it. Or use it.
I'm increasingly concerned with the "have/have not" aspect of this technology. Approximately 0.5% of the human population has gotten the implant. The implant price has tripled. Those that have it are increasingly separating themselves mentally from the rest of the world, both in terms of their mental capacities and in terms of their intentional isolation.

June 6, 2031. The Board voted approval of fetal implant development. I tendered my resignation, effective immediately.

April 15, 2046. The world is splitting. Everyone that has an implant is getting one in their kids, their babies, their fetuses. Kids that were born with them five years ago are already PhD-level scientists, engineers, theoretical physicists, electronic geniuses. Imagine that, a five year old that knows more about quantum mechanics than I ever will...and I have an implant! Meanwhile, this "upper" echelon has completely begun to disregard the 99.3% of humanity that does not have implants. The "left behind" can do nothing. Attempts to organize against the Uppers fails miserably, as the interconnectivity and near-omniscience of the Uppers makes thwarting rebellion trivial. Attempts by the Left Behind to procure charity or government-subsidized implants of their own are met with hostility by the Uppers. Because most of the government officials in the world had procured their own implant within the first ten years.

July 4, 2046. I was humbled today to be honored at a ceremony of Uppers paying tribute to my original innovation. The ceremony took a turn, however. One I had foreseen but was still not ready for. First an Upper child, about 9, gave a delightful speech extolling my biography and describing that first implant I performed on myself. Then I gave a short speech, discussing that my rationale from inception had been human progress. Humanity must progress, I said, and technology allowed it to do so more than biology ever could.
As though I had planned this, another Upper child who looked about 13 came in with a box the size of a toaster. The Uppers had done it: they had developed an electronic brain that could outperform a human one. The Upper then gave a speech. "The iterative progress of innovation all started with our implants." The Upper went on to describe, as he plugged his implant into this box, how the box would scan the Upper's brain, make an exact copy of it, and presto! immortality was achieved.
The crowd was silent, but only because no one used their mouths to talk anymore...everyone was gabbing loudly on the Net. And without further ado, the Upper child turned the box on, stood still for a monent, then collapsed on the stage, dead. But not dead. Through the Net, we all were immediately aware that the Upper was still present.
25 years to the day from when I got my implant, biology was dead. And the Left Behinders truly were left behind.


March 8, 2048. I am the last. The last Upper with a biological shell. Uppers uploaded themselves in droves. A central repository was formed and a dedicated power station was allocated. The area was walled off from Left Behinders (wouldn't want them to pull the plug!). The chatter on the Net accelerates every second. The intelligence level of the Uppers has reached a point where I cannot keep up with it. I need to either upload myself and join them...or shut down my implant. I took a walk through a Left Behinder town yesterday. Children were playing, the sun was shining...it was just like it had been 32 years ago before I started this snowball down the mountainside. It made me smile to know humans could be happy without the tech. But then, after a half hour of walking, I found myself in front of a strange laboratory. I went in. Inside, Left Behinder scientists were picking apart an implant, still partially attached to human flesh. At some point, they had captured and killed an Upper. They were trying to reverse engineer it. Before they noticed me, I saw it was a Gen 7, so advanced that their attempts would be useless. The tools they used were so crude, their brains so feeble. I didn't realize how far I had come from their level. Then I felt a surge of fear: the Gen 3 in the back of my head would be easier for them to copy, if they could obtain it. I quickly fled, and returned to the Upper Zone.
And so this will be my last post. I have realized that humanity will endlessly seek to improve itself, and the idea that the Left Behind will be satisfied with their non-jacked lifestyle is a myth. Joining them by unplugging myself would not lead to a contented, utopian life...I'd be in that lab helping them. And the whole cycle would continue. But without me...without the key I held in my hand 32 years ago...they may never unravel the mystery of the implant.
And so I am going to upload myself. For them. To spare them from this accelerando of an existence, where we're all meshed in a hazy yellow cloud of electrons. The Uppers have found what they believe is a transmission source on another distant planet, which includes codecs to transmit away from here...to there. As I write this, they are preparing a massive data transfer. I think I'll join them. Leave Earth to the Earthlings.


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Commercialism, Or How The World Was Lost

A quietly unadvertised truth is that there are resources on this planet that are being exhausted that don't involve your car or your wallet. We hear all the time about "peak oil" or "peak coal" or the depopulation of various fish species.
Less often we hear about the increasing rarity of "rare earth metals" specifically neodymium.

One resource we are rapidly depleting but you never hear about is helium. It turns out that there's not a lot of helium on Earth. Most of what we have is trapped in natural gas pockets and has to by extracted in a fairly expensive process. The good news last century was that in the early 1900's America thought the future belonged to blimps and dirigibles, so we stockpiled billions and billions of liters of helium. Then, when planes won the air, the U.S. released its reserves of helium, the gas became a commodity, and children's birthday parties featured cheap, fun balloons for decades.

Those decades are over. Most of the U.S. reserve of helium has been exhausted, and modern technology increasingly uses helium as a cold source. For example: liquid helium reaches an incredibly low -454 degrees, which supercools - and allows superconduction of - the magnets used in MRI scanners. No helium: no MRIs. Another use for helium is to cool the magnets in the CERN particle accelerator. Another use for helium is in TIG welding. There are tons of other uses, mostly in scientific research where no alternative element exists.

So yesterday, when I saw that Red Bull had sponsored Felix Baumgartner's 128,000 sky dive, I was a little incensed. Most people talked about the incredible technology used, like his pressurized suit, or the ultra-thin balloon. Others talked about how he'd gone 1.24 Mach, being the first skydiver to break the sound barrier. Still others talked about how he'd reached a height greater than that reached by jet aircraft.

What no one talked about is that his balloon was filled with 30 million cubic feet of helium. After the successful jump, the balloon is emptied - into space.

Thanks, Red Bull. Hope this stunt helped sell your product.


By the way: helium is currently impossible to synthesize. When Earth's supply runs out, the nearest available alternative will be strip-mining the moon.
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Hilarious Oversimplification

Here's a video out by Thomas Peterffy.

Here's a link to the wikipedia article that explains what "socialism" in Hungary was like during Thomas Peterffy's childhood.
An excerpt:

The name [goulash communism] is a semi-humorous metaphor derived from "goulash", a popular Hungarian dish. As goulash is made with an assortment of unlike ingredients, it represents how Hungarian communism was a mixed ideology and no longer strictly adhering to Stalinist interpretations as in the past. Sometimes described as "the happiest barrack in the socialist camp," Hungary in this particular period enjoyed many amenities not available to other socialist states in the Eastern bloc.

I won't pretend like socialism in Hungary was great. But then again, that is my exact point. If you built a multi-billion dollar fortune trading stock options during the greatest economic expansion in human history while enjoying continually decreasing marginal tax rates and financial deregulation, you better have more than just vague portents to back up the claim that America is collapsing into Eastern-bloc, secret police-enforced, grocery-store-queue socialism.

What makes this video especially painful is that at the end he finishes with "and that's why I am voting Republican." I'm sure he doesn't mean the Republicans that opened secret prisons, tortured people in Abu Ghraib, wiretapped American citizens, instituted vast Congressional redistricting to game elections, and held people in detention facilities for a decade without bringing them to trial or even charging them with a crime.
No, not those Republicans of Yesterweek...he probably means the current Republicans...the ones who are trying to get complex voter ID laws in place to prevent specific groups of Americans from voting, who are pushing for Christianity as the de facto official State Religion, who want expanded surveillance of minority groups...you know, those Republicans!
It's those nasty Democrats that have all the Socialist cards in their deck.


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One Nation...

How cynical do you have to be to hope that the unemployment numbers would turn out bad so that your guy will get elected?

We're all in this together folks. Unemployment isn't a zero-sum game.


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Evolutionary Politics

If President Obama is reelected I see a clear example of specialization-elimination in effect here.

Let's say each of the GOP primary candidates represented a group of the same species of bird, all in a suddenly-secluded valley (isolated ecosystem for this example). They each compete with each other for food and mates. Because they are isolated, they begin to specialize. And so in order to win the most mates, each group employs strange tactics, either by evolving absurd plumage or by doing a dance/song/nest-building ritual. 

And let's assume that at this point they have no outside predator, so they can get away with this specialization explosion. 

Each group of birds tries to outperform the others, and they become increasingly absurd. The evolutionary term here is "unfit." The secluded environment and lack of predators allows these GOP birds to become almost caricatures of real birds.

Then Primary season ends and the General Election season starts. Or, in our example, the isolated valley suddenly is not isolated anymore. A new Democrat predator comes pouring in, and where it was a decent bird hunter before...now the GOP Birds of Paradise are easy pickings. Their flight feathers don't work well, their loud songs make them easy to spot, and their large, plumage covered legs taste delicious.

And so in the end, the specialization that occurred in the GOP birds in order to win the Primary season made them unfit to survive the General Election that occurred afterward.

On the other hand, if President Obama loses I see the exact opposite ending to the same story. The GOP Primary season yields sympatric speciation, as above. Eventually, one new species of GOP bird dominates the valley. Only this time, when the isolated environment opens up and the Democrat predator comes in, it is unfit to catch any of them.

The strength of the GOP primary process here is that it gives them time to evolve the candidate most likely to survive. Not the smartest. Not the best. The fittest to survive. Meanwhile, the Democrat predator has not coevolved, as there is no pressure on it. 

What would happen here is that the GOP had sufficiently evolved (from a plurality of 'species') a candidate that appealed to more voters than the Single Democrat Choice.

I find the first scenario more likely: isolated environments tend to weaken species. But either way there is a lot of evolution in politics.

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