A Superbowl Sunday Meditation On Sports Fandom.

The mere act of being a sports fan - until recent years this was the 2nd most geographically divisive topic in America, since the South is still pining over Sherman’s march to the sea.   I can scarcely doubt that had I been born anywhere near Boston, I would be [shudder] a Patriots fan.  But, thank whatever gods control these things, I hale from the otherwise benighted Midwest, specifically Toledo - that overgrown village nestled up against Ohio’s Michigan border, where the muddy Maumee slogs its torpid way into the western corner of algae-choked Lake Erie.

This is actually a great place to be a sports fan, if you’re in to divisiveness and controversy.  It’s close enough to Both Detroit and Cleveland to have fans of both city’s Major League teams: Lions vs Browns; Tigers vs Indians; Pistons vs Cavs.  And, of course, the biggest rivalry of all: Buckeyes vs Wolverines.  Then, there’s the occasional lovable odd ball who follows a Cincinnati team.  This occurs even in my own family.   I don’t recall ever meeting a fan of any Chicago team.

Still, it’s kind of easy to see what is the most powerful factor in making one a fan of some given sports team - mere geographic parochialism.

Perhaps a more interesting topic is what makes one hate a certain team.  Many people feel that if you love team A, then you must hate their biggest rival.  Frex, many Michigan fans want OSU to lose every game - simply because of the rivalry, and vice-versa.  I think that is petty.  My son-in-law - an avid Wolverine fan - wants OSU to win every preceding game, so that when the 2 teams meet in late November, everything will be on the line when the Wolverines [one would hope] triumph.  That’s the kind of camp I’m in.

So, who do I hate, and why?  There are a few reasons - hatred of a particular key player, the coach, or the owner seem to predominate.  This is often irrational, but that ends up not mattering very much.  However, there can be some more or less rational basis for it, often relating to bad behaviors.  I have hated the Fildelfia Phlyers because of their cheating ways back in the early 70’s.  It seemed as if they always scored the winning goal with a man in the crease, mugging the goalie - and getting away with it!  They were a genuinely great team, but everyone on it - even Bobby Clarke - was a damned goon. That, right there is a good, solid reason, seasoned with a heavy dollop of resentment for the hash realities of an unfair world.  Carrying it on for over 4 decades is way over the top, but there you have it.  When it comes to teams, I am a grudge holder.  But in this instance the passion has gone out of it for me - maybe through the passage of time, or the fact that they aren’t very good any more, or that my youngest grandson is a fan of theirs.   At any rate, the whining, cheating, cry-baby Crosby-Malkin edition of the Penguins is now in top spot.  Sad, because I liked them in the Lemieux years.

My next favorite hate is the Dallas Cowboys.  I have no particular animus toward any of their players - with only a couple of historical exceptions.  But their conceit of calling themselves “America’s Team” is an affront this mid-westerner refuses to tolerate.  Beyond that, it's the terminally loathsome, hyper-Republican, meddling owner Jerry Jones who inspires my everlasting enmity.  I never hated the Cowboys under coach Landry.

So, for me, it’s either blatant [and unfortunately successful] cheating, or a personal reaction to an obnoxious prominent face of the team.

What does it for you?

Anticipation

The other night watching the Tiger's game, I cited the fact that Max Scherzer gets the best run support of any pitcher in MLB, and within seconds the announcers repeated what I said - not word for word, but certainly the same thought.

Things like that happen once in a while, and it's always striking, at least until the moment passes.

Now it's happened with Krugman.  I've mentioned before that I love it when he agrees with me.  This time I anticipated a rather more complex thought.  In response to this post, on Wednesday one of my FB friends asked if I thought a deep recession or stock market crash was inevitable.

My response: "I don't think anything is inevitable. We could limp along like this, with gradually dimming expectations for 1000 years. It's happened before."

Not a lot of detail, but the intent is clear.  Then today Krugman said this:

But won’t there be an ever-growing demand from the public for action? Actually, that’s not at all clear. While there is growing “austerity fatigue” in Europe, and this might provoke a crisis, the overwhelming result from U.S. political studies is that the level of unemployment matters hardly at all for elections; all that matters is the rate of change in the months leading up to the election. In other words, high unemployment could become accepted as the new normal, politically as well as in economic analysis.

I guess what I’m saying is that I worry that a more or less permanent depression could end up simply becoming accepted as the way things are, that we could suffer endless, gratuitous suffering, yet the political and policy elite would feel no need to change its ways.

He's not quite predicting a lighting quick return to the dark ages, but I'd say we're on the same wave-length here.

JzB Smackdown with Some Thoughts on Trends and Context

[Substantially revised and updated, 6/5-6/13]

João Marcus Marinho Nunes is personally offended by my previous Angry Bear post.  

Personally I was ‘offended’ by being ‘accused’ of “using short-time series data”, ignoring “what is a valid context” and “cherry picking”.

 Which was odd, since I didn't accuse him of anything.  In fact, he wasn't even on my radar screen.  He then goes on to show a bunch of nice and interesting graphs that have nothing at all to do with my point, and concludes:

PS Maybe JazzBumpa thinks he´s a modern day Robespierre fighting against (in this case imaginary) absolutism!

Actually, I'm pretty close to agnostic on the subject of Market Monetarism, - as he identifies the subject of my (imaginary) absolutism in his comment at my post.   I thought I had made it pretty clear that what I was criticizing was the kind of confirmation bias that induces one to construct questionable data analyses that support pre-concieved conclusions.  The fact that the people doing this were market monetarists might be illustrative, but is not really central to my criticism.

I welcome disagreement, but it's more helpful and constructive if the points of disagreement have some relevance to the point I was trying to make.  I elaborated a bit in a comment at Nunez's blog, which you can read there, if you're interested.  What interested me was some piling on by Mark Sadowski, in comments both in my post and at Nunes'.  While I think Sadowski missed [or perhaps ignored] my point, he makes a couple of his own - one of which is actually Krugman's, whom he quotes.

“…To see what’s going on, you need to do two things. First, you should include state and local; second, you shouldn’t divide by GDP, because a depressed GDP can cause the spending/GDP ratio to rise even if spending falls. So it’s useful to look at the ratio of overall government expenditure to potential GDP — what the economy would be producing if it were at full employment; CBO provides standard estimates of this number. And here’s what we see:

Spending is down to what it was before the recession, and also significantly lower than it was under Reagan.

Krugman's Graph

I Am Become Infamous

My blogging reached a high-water mark this week.

A while ago I wrote a snarky rant here about some stupid Krugman bashing from Mish and others.

I reworked that post to make it suitable for a wider audience at Angry Bear.  It can be found here.

Krugman picked it up from AB and linked to it from his blog.

I'm a big Krugman fan, in case you haven't noticed.

Getting a call-out from him is tres cool.

My Angry Bear Posts for 2013

 Here is a running list of my 2013 posts at Angry Bear, newest at the top.


 More on Ineffective Fiscal Policy  5/31/2013

 More Right Wing Lies – Now As In The Roaring 20′s  3/13/2013

Middle Class Melt   3/06/2013

You Can Fool Most of the People Most of the Time   2/27/2013

Thus Spake the Rube   2/13/2013

How to Debate Paul Krugman   2/01/2013

Another look at Spending and Revenues   1/31/2013

Hagel for Defense Secretary    1/08/2013

Predictions and Results

Now that Florida is in - having been won by BHO by a resounding 0.6%, and it's all over, I can have a look at my predictions.

Obama carries FLA by a slim margin.  Actual was 0.6%  Check.  Determined voters overcame suppression.  Good on them!

Wins Ohio by at least +6.   Actual 1.9%   Not even close.  Way less than the '08 margin of 5%.  I am totally baffled by this result.

BHO gets at least 303 EV; 330 looks attainable. Actual 303 with FLA hanging, 332 now that it's captured.  Nailed this one, but I can't take much credit.  All I had to do was believe the people who know what the hell they're talking about.   Note who did NOT do this.

Obama in the popular vote by +3.5%. Actual 2.5%.  Ack.  This really is distressingly close.  If demographics are going to make the Rethugs obsolete, they'd better get at it, PDQ.

Third party candidates collectively get under 1% nationwide.  Nope.  With BHO at 50.5% and  Randall Boggsomney at 48.0%, that leaves 1.5% to be distributed among the few, the hopeless, the turd party candidates.

About 100,000 deluded fanatics write in Ron Paul.  Who knows.  I don't know how to check this out, but I do feel pretty good about it in view of the 1.5% going to "other."

Sharrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren both win.   Check and Mate.  Brown by 50.3 to 45.1,  Warren by 56.7 to 46.3.  These are pretty comfortable wins, but not slam dunks.  In each case a lot of outside $$$$ were behind the Rethug. Who can say how much influence that had.  Thankfully, money did not rule the day.

There is some musical chairs in the Senate, but no net change.  Sometimes I'm happy to be wrong.  Dems pick up 2 seats.

Dems pick up 5 to 10 in the House.  Missed on this one.  Dems are currently up 2, with 6 seats still unconfirmed, but, alas, most of these are leaning R.  11/29 Update:  This just in.  Every race decided late went to the Democrats, who picked up 8 seats, right in the middle of my estimate.  How 'bout dat!

Tomorrow the recriminations begin - Republicans will claim Romney lost because he is either "not a true conservative" or "not conservative enough." Only one of these is correct.  Oh, yeah.  Check.  OK, this was too easy.  Really, could there have been any doubt?   But at this point, I'll take it.

 The lesson is not to be less conservative. The lesson is not to be found in purging social conservatives. The lesson is in taking a look at how the radicals won: Yes, there was the fear element. There was the devil-you-know element. But there is also the fact that all of what they say seems plausible and even not all that radical, because it has been in our cultural milk. Because while they may obscure some of the details and make it all sound mainstream, at the same time they are bold and confident about the extreme positions they believe in. That’s what we’ve got to be.
                                       - Kathryn Jean Lopez

I will continue to be amazed that any decent, intelligent, educated human being would vote for this lying odious unprincipled elitist chameleon.  Well, yeah, but predicting my own mental state is not really a huge challenge for me.

Most of the time.

Ye Olde Political Survey

Following Beale's lead I took the survey.

My prefered candidate, as it turns out, is Jill Stein of the Green Party.  Oh, well, I'm still going to vote for the foreign-born Commie Muslim Nazi Neegra.  He's not that far off.

Here is how I align with the various candidates.

Jill Stein, Green                 90%
B. Obama, Dem                 87%
Rocky Anderson, Justice     64%
Mitt Romney, Rethug           8%
Michigan Voters                63%
American Voters                64%

Like Beale, I have to  wonder how Romney's positions have been defined, since he is a schizophrenic chameleon drawn on an Etch-a-sketch by a three-year-old desperately in need of a nap.

If their assessment of American voters is anywhere near correct, then Romney can keep his position among the unemployed.

Party Affiliation
Democrat                           95%
Green                                92%
Libertarian                         18%
Repugnicant                        5%

I'm 18% Libertarian.  Actually, that seems about right.

Republicans - Michigan Style

By now, everyone should know about the actions of Michigan House Speaker James Bolger in silencing legislator Lisa Brown.

I received an e-mail from Brown today, inviting me to sign the petition that can be found here.

The petition emphasizes women's rights, which is reasonable under the circumstance.  However, it is the wrong focus.  I emphasized this in my comment on the petition form.

This is about much more than women's issues.  It's about the fundamental American value of real free speech - not money posing as speech - and the rights and duties of elected legislators to represent their constituents.

Speaker Bolger's actions are tyrannical and dictatorial.  Not only do they have no place in representative government, they are an assault on it.

Sunday Music Blogging - Live Jazz Edition, Part 2

Last week I posted  a couple tunes from our Up Jumped Spring Concert.  Here are a couple more.




Blue Samuel is a great Sammy Nestico tune, based on Blue Daniel, an original composition by the Motor City's own tragic trombone genius, Frank Rosolino.  Solos by Vince on guitar,  Marion on alto, Patrick on tenor,  Mike on trombone, and Ryan on piano.  Kodos to Tim for his soaring trumpet lead.  I'm really happy with the way this turned out





Howdiz Songo? is by Gordon Goodwin.  It's more tricky than difficult, but the layered complexity, especially in the ensemble section following Ryan's piano montuno, makes it quite a challenge.  I'm pleased with the ensemble performance here.  Solos by Joe on alto, me on trombone, Vince on guitar and Marion on soprano.

Sunday Music Blogging - Live Jazz Edition

From our Up Jumped Spring Concert, April 23, 2012.


Just Friends, featuring Tim on trumpet




Things Aint What They Used To Be; solos by Kristin on tenor, Patrick on tenor, me on trombone then Fred's alto brings us home on the high road.

Maybe I Should Be Flattered

Business Insider republished my latest Angry Bear post.  (Cross-posted here, of course.) Shame they got just the text and missed the graphs.  Also, they don't link back to the original post.  Odd way of doing things.  Plus, they only credit Angry Bear blog, not me as author.

Mixed feelings on my part - sort of a WTH?!? - and it's only Wednesday.

Some Thoughts on Writing

 Here's Sarah Vaughan with the Basie band doing a great old song, Just Friends.




Funny sometimes, how one thing will play into another.  After rehearsal last night we were talking about the horrible job the publisher did with the parts for a terrific Tommy Newsome arrangement of Just Friends, written for Don Severenson and the Tonight Show Orchestra.  It's nothing like the rendition by Sarah Vaughan with the Basie band above, which I included because I like it, and I can't find Newsome's on YouTube.  However, you can listen to a sample here.

The trombone parts are 6 pages long and every page turn but 1 is impossible.  Playing the trombone requires two hands at all times.  Ditto the bass, and the bass player showed me how his part had impossible turns - leading into the most important bass passages.  This type of scoring is lazy, thoughtless, and disrespectful of the musicians who have to deal with it.

The thought the bass player left me with, after some conversation, is that when you write something, you should make it impossible for your reader to misunderstand or misinterpret.  This applies to prose as well as music.   I try to write clearly, but I've never thought about it in quite this way.  The idea applies not only to the mechanics of writing, but also to organizing and presenting your thoughts and maintaining focus in your presentation.

Which reminds me of this criticism I wrote of Tim Worstall's Forbes piece.   There was a lot of commentary at the cross-post at AB, and Worstill had a lot to say there, including, "I am getting really rather mystified at all the people who seem to be so deliberately missing the point I was making," and finally, "To repeat, I am critiquing the use of the insurance model to provide such desired health care: not determining how such desired health care should be provided nor even venturing into the question of whether such health care is desirable or not."  You can read it all over at AB.

Maybe I was too impetuous, and should have read the article I was critiquing more carefully.  Now that I know his point, I can't go back, re-read, and figure out if I would have gleaned more with more care.  But Worstall did not make it impossible for me to misunderstand or misinterpret.

Even before rehearsal, I wrote a comment back to him, containing what I think is some pretty good advice..

 So we learn that, contra the title and the extended quote from Sandra Fluke near the beginning, your article really has nothing to do with either her or Limbaugh, and is only marginally related to contraception.  The real topic, if I understand it correctly now, isn't even the subtleties of insurance vs assurance, but rather idealized health care funding.  So, yeah - I will now freely admit that I missed your point - totally - but it was not deliberate, as you asserted in your first comment.

If you want to have your readers get your point, then, instead of glibly riffing on a current hot topic, I'll suggest that you actually write about whatever it is you are writing about, and not require your readers to either do a click-through to discover the actual topic in a different article, or have a close familiarity with your publication history.  When you put something out in the public sphere, you lose control of what readers are going to make of it, and you can't expect them to know your implied context.  So you need to help them along if you have a specific agenda.  An article that is intended to make some point really needs to not only stand alone, but also explicitly make its central point, without a lot of distracting digressions.

I'll also suggest that you use links to show source data, to corroborate assertions, or provide further reading for whoever might be interested in digging a little deeper, not to illustrate the implied point of the current article.   I had to read your comments here to discover what I think you might have been talking about there.  And my next thought was that your point was the difference between insurance and assurance, though I guess that isn't it, either.

That is not communicating effectively.  When you find yourself mystified by the problem of people misunderstanding what you say, then I'll further suggest that blaming your readers will not move you very far toward a solution.   

Is that harsh?  I can't decide.  I don't know if Worstall read these words.  But I'm going to take them to heart.  I've noticed that people will sometimes ignore the main content of my post, and go down a side track due to a flip comment or marginally relevant value judgment I made.  So - there is a lesson here for me as well.

I hope I'm wise enough to take my own advice.

Still More on Republicans

Three years and 10 days ago, I posted this on my old, obscure Tumbler blog.  Rereading it now, I find nothing to disagree with, other than my wistful self-identification as a conservative.  It explains why I have so much hostility toward the Republican party.

American history for well over a hundred years has been following a great arc of expanionistic imperialism - irrespective of who is in Congress or the White House.  The main drivers for imperialism are ego and the desire to take other people’s stuff: wealth, goods, trade routes, natural resources. The beneficiaries of American Imperialism have been corporations - formerly American, now International.  Repugnicants and Damorats are two branches of the same Corporatocracy.  The Repugnicants are worse, and the only thing the Damorats have going for them is that they are not Repugnicants.

Back in 1963 my father told me that every once in a while, if a crumb falls off the plate, the Dems might let you keep it.  The Reps won’t even do that.  At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about; but it stayed with me, and, by God, he was right.   I loath the Damorats, but dammit, they’re all we have.

More On The Republicans

In comment responses both at Retirement Blues and at Angry Bear, I said this:

I'm not hoping for one party rule.  I'm hoping for a political process that has participants who believe in science, engage in honest debate, are genuinely interested in the well-being of he American people, and which focuses on issues of real importance to society.  
 
The Republicans fail each of these tests.  I would hope that a new party would emerge.
 
Over the last 40 years, the Republicans have abandoned conservatism and become regressive reactionaries with no valid political philosophy.   Their pandering to the religious right has dragged the discourse far off center. Political dialog for many years now has been between the right and the far right.  
 
If there is valid conservatism in U.S. politics today, it exists in the Democratic party.
 
In my dream, the new party arises from the left.  There is lots of room there. 

I guess my anti-Republican editorializing mislead people into thinking that I am some sort of  Democratic party partisan.  The reality is, I've been driven to the Democrats as the only existing alternative to the Republicans.  In fact, I've said many times, the only thing the Democrats have going for them is that they are NOT Republicans.

Even shallow-thinking pseudo-centrists like David Brooks are now catching on.  Brooks says:

 All across the nation, there are mainstream Republicans lamenting how the party has grown more and more insular, more and more rigid. This year, they have an excellent chance to defeat President Obama, yet the wingers have trashed the party’s reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.

 But where have these party leaders been over the past five years, when all the forces that distort the G.O.P. were metastasizing? Where were they during the rise of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck? Where were they when Arizona passed its beyond-the-fringe immigration law? Where were they in the summer of 2011 when the House Republicans rejected even the possibility of budget compromise? They were lying low, hoping the unpleasantness would pass. 

 

.   .   .   

 Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity. Two kinds of candidates emerge from this process: first, those who are forceful but outside the mainstream; second, those who started out mainstream but look weak and unprincipled because they have spent so much time genuflecting before those who despise them. 

 Brad Delong responds to Brooks (emphasis added):

As I have written in the past: You know, I went to Washington in 1993 to work for what we called Lloyd Bentsen's Treasury as part of the sane technocratic bipartisan center. And it took me only two months--two months!--to conclude that America's best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination of the Republican Party from our political system as rapidly as possible. Dole and Gingrich's "We really don't care that these policies are good for the country--are a lot like policies we would enthusiastically support if proposed by a Republican president--but we are going to try to block them because that will weaken Clinton" was a real eye-opener. Nothing since has led me to question or change that belief--only to strengthen it. We really need a very different opposition party to the Democrats: a less dishonorable one.

Now David Brooks--who has spent the last nineteen years carrying water and making excuses for today's Republican Party--finally says what I have been saying since 1993. Where have you been, David?

Here is the simple truth.  The Republican party leadership has no concern for the vast majority of the American people.  They are not patriotic in any conceivable meaning of the word.  They are motivated exclusively by greed and power, and are bent to the will of their overlords in the elite American financial aristocracy.   Republican politicians, ex Ron Paul, are of two types: those who are on board with that program, and tea-party nut jobs.

The Republican party, as now constructed, is a clear and present danger to everything we believe America is supposed to stand for.  Their ideas of freedom are directed at corporations, not people.  Their alleged free-market principles are welfare for the rich and a finger in the eye to everyone else.

Unfortunately, the Democratic party leadership is bent in the same direction - thus has it ever been with money and power.  But there are still some politicians, like independent Bernie Sanders, and a few in the Democratic party who are willing to fulfill their missions as public servants. 

If we have any hope, it lies in these Pols.

Notorious

Seeking Alpha picked up my Drive post from AB. 

AB gets 7 to 10 thousand views per day, compared to the 50 to 100 I get here.*

SA is in the tens of thousands per day, at least.

Drive 2 was linked by Calculated Risk, a prominent econ blog.

I am become Notorious.

___________________________________
 * A distressing number of whom are from foreigners looking for naked pictures of Sienna Miller.

Elliott and Me

Earlier this evening, just before Bill Maher's program came on, while Pavel Datsuyk was slipping the puck past Predator's goalie Pekka Rinne to secure a 2-1 Wings victory 5.8 seconds before the final buzzer, I left this comment at Johnathon Bernstein's blog.

I see the current Republican party as an unholy alliance that has to come unzipped. What natural allegiance is there between Santorum-style social regressives and Romney-style big-business conservatives? The latter can line up with the Libertarians on a lot economic issues, but not on isolationism and the gold standard. The former and Libertatians should logically hold each other in contempt.

How the tea-party slices across this is anybody's guess, since they make no sense, even in their own context.

The Santorum surge shows how deeply the party establishment is out of touch with its base.

I think the country really needs a rational conservative element - which we have not had in decades.  It's really tragic that what we have is a clown parade.

Cheers!
JzB

I was quite pleased to see Bill's guest Elliott Spizer make pretty much this same point (except for my final paragraph) early in the panel discussion.

I Am Not Rational

At least by this assessment:

If the theories of economists are harmful to the general welfare, why doesn’t someone try to persuade the public that these theories are mistaken? 

Collective action in this sense is infeasible. If we instead consider the efforts of a single individual, the cost in terms of time and effort of discrediting an economic theory is substantial, while the benefits are dispersed over many people and so are comparatively small. In any case, the efforts of one person are unlikely to be decisive in swinging the consensus of economists away from a given erroneous theory. It follows logically that the rational decision for an intellectual consumer is to be inactive on this front, and even to be ignorant of the flaws in economic theory.

New Writing Gig

I'm delighted to report that I have been invited to write for Angry Bear - an assignment which I eagerly accepted.

I have several posts in place in this obscure blog that I intend to polish up and republish at AB.

There will also be fresh material from time to time, which I will likely cross-post here, when it happens.

Wish me luck on this new adventure.

Say's Law and Ricardian Equivalence

I'll admit I get a bit confused thinking about Say's Law and Ricardian Equivalence - which I never do, unless actually reading about them somewhere.  But the kerfuffle between Krugman and Lucas has been pretty hard to ignore.  (Each of them is confused as well - or not - depending on whom you chose to believe.)  You can read about it in many places.

What Lucas said.

What Krugman said.

Econospeak

Macromania

Noahpinion

At Noah's place I launched into a reality based critique of Say's Law.  Though it turns out not to have been quite Say's Law, after all.  Like I said, this kind of B.S confuses me.  Still, I think I've given a valid criticism of some aspect of conservative economic thought. 

you can't get around Say's Law by taxing people in the future instead of today, because people are forward-looking and have rational expectations

If Say's Law were not invalidated for other reasons, it would absolutely fall apart here.

Have you ever heard anybody ponder what they would be doing with their money 5 or 10 years down the road if they didn't buy a big screen TV today?

Does anyone ponder relative poverty in their old age vs taking a vacation now?

To the extent that most people think about money at all, it's implicitly in terms of cash flow. Can I make the finance payments on this purchase and still afford to feed my cat? This is the real wold, which is apparently terra incognita to economists.

Plus, rational expectations is the silliest idea to be taken seriously since chemists gave up on phlogiston. People act from the cerebral cortex at least as often as they act from the neocortex. This gives us wars and the herding instinct, makes bubbles and Ponzi schemes so exciting, and enables all sorts of wildly irrational behavior, like voting for Republicans or believing in Ricardian equivalence.

Hale "Bonddad" Stewart also weighs in a Noah's place, with a link to a post where he dismembers Ricardian equivalence with empirical data.  My kind of guy.

Update:  Brad Delong chides Noah, and in the process of clarification, confuses me further.

The Republican Brain

The Republican Brain is characterized as follows.

This brain controls body functions required for sustaining life, such as heart rate, breathing, balance and body temperature.

It is reliable, but tends to be cold, rigid and compulsive.

Behaviour relating to survival of the species, such as sexual behaviour, is instinctive and responses are automatic.

One of these instinctive reactions is to handle survival via the flight or fight response.

It is responsible for species-typical instinctual behaviors involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays. 

It is hierarchical, obsessive, authoritarian and aggressive, with paranoid tendencies.

When acting from these instincts, action is informed by neither though nor feeling.

Territory is acquired by force and defended. Might is right.

It does not learn from mistakes.

This, of course, is a description of the functions of the cerebral cortex, also known as the reptile brain.  This is the most primitive region of the human brain.  As evolution progressed, the limbic region, common to all mammals, was added. It enables learning, emotion, and the ability to make value judgments.  Higher on the evolutionary scale, primates, including humans, have another added region, the cerebral  neocortex.  It enables language, abstract thought, imagination and consciousness.

It is not that Rethugs are totally devoid of limbic and  neocortex functions; they are, after all, more or less human.  Rather, it is the utter dominance of the cerebral cortex over the other two brain segments - in situations that matter the most - that impels me to refer to them as LIZARD PEOPLE.

And I do this based simply on empirical observation, without in any way invoking ancient Sumerian mythology, weird conspiracy theories, or, most emphatically, any combination of the two.

This post was inspired by my comment at Johnathon Bernstein's Blog, and results from a total inability this day to do anything even remotely constructive.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Couves, commenting before and after me at Bernstein's, we learn that Donald Rumsfeld had a point-blank opportunity under direct questioning to deny that he is a lizard, and he wouldn't do it.  This is around the 3 minute mark at the link.  Make of it what you will.  Of course, my mind was made up before I received this new gem of knowledge.

References:

Reptilian vs Mamillian Brain

THE EVOLUTIONARY LAYERS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN

Triune Brain.