Politics

Finally somebody is willing to attack Obama's policies. Unfortunately, it's Hillary claiming he hasn't killed enough people.

"Most revealing was Brian Katulis, over at the decidedly Clintonian Center for American Progress. Politico reports he "dismissed the notion that progressives are well-organized around progressive foreign policy in the same way that they were at the height of the Iraq war."
Translation: When Democrats invade, the "progressive" antiwar movement goes AWOL."

At least he admitted it.

"What’s a little bombing between friends? And why not arm the Kurds – who claim a third of Turkey, half of Syria, a substantial sliver of Iran, and even demand a good chunk of Armenia? If Rand thinks arming the Syrian rebels was problematic, then wait until he sees the consequences of handing the big guns to the Kurds."

We can expect blowback from arming the Kurds too.

Prediction Hillary plans to take revenge on Obama. That would be fun to watch. Republicans are way too scared to challenge him.

Apparently Breitbart just found out about the study proving the US is an oligarchy. There is no such thing as public policy.

Study discovers primitive societies recognized the benefit of hierarchies, by definition unequal. I bet leftists are up in arms. I don't know why this had to be discovered. Families are hierarchical, and every society is organized like an extended family. It's perfectly natural for some individuals to obtain higher reputations and wealth based on productivity, wisdom, generosity or whatever. The problem comes when people obtain that by stealing from others and ordering others around at the point of spear or gun.

"When the researchers let the model run over several generations, they found that, in general, groups made up of leaders and followers were able to produce or gather more resources than those made up of egalitarian-minded individuals. That, in turn, enabled the hierarchical group to grow more quickly and to better eke out a living. According to the model, groups made up of leaders and followers eventually grew to about twice the size of societies solely composed of egalitarians. And even when leaders skimmed a large portion of a group’s resulting surplus for themselves and their families, their followers received, on average, more resources than they would have if they’d been part of a leaderless band, Powers and Lehmann report online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B."

Skimmed is an odd word choice. Did they earn it or did they steal it? I probably doesn't matter to the simulation, but it would in the real world.

"One nice aspect of the team’s simulation, Sterelny notes, is that dissatisfied individuals within a group can, in essence, vote with their feet and leave the group: “If dispersal is relatively low cost, leaders cannot afford to be greedy.” Yet the team’s model also helps explain how despots can rise to and retain power: When the costs of switching allegiance to another group or striking out on one’s own are unacceptably high, Powers says, individuals in the group are essentially stuck in the group, left to make the best of a bad situation."

True. In the modern world, it's impossible to strike out on one's own. The tax man with his gun is everywhere.

Nature exposes the trans-gender fraud as woman legally declared a man gives birth to three children.