Google translate 2010 - a marker

This is the Feb 2010 Google Translate output from a Chinese language original ...

天涯周立波

... Perpetual motion machine needs rotor, the rotor is Zhao Benshan and Guo Degang. Zhou Libo positioning themselves with the middle-class waiter, while a decorated themselves with the middle class, followed by a run did not forget about Zhao Benshan. Said Zhao Benshan services for farmers, location of China's rural areas. With that, make up an "In fact, I always have great respect for Old Zhao" and then express their hair a period of "cultural pluralism", the Old Zhao has also stepped on, their body position also climbed up. The results we all know that Old Zhao's fans will feel that "feelings were seriously damaged," the rotor to turn up...

Some of it can be understood, other bits read like receptive aphasia word salad. Amusing, but not terribly informative.

I'm keeping this example as a baseline for the translation results of 2011.

Update 3/21/2010: A NYT OpEd by a translator makes light of Google's efforts.

... Google Translate is a statistical machine translation system, which means that it doesn’t try to unpick or understand anything. Instead of taking a sentence to pieces and then rebuilding it in the “target” tongue as the older machine translators do, Google Translate looks for similar sentences in already translated texts somewhere out there on the Web. Having found the most likely existing match through an incredibly clever and speedy statistical reckoning device, Google Translate coughs it up, raw or, if necessary, lightly cooked....

The approach seems to work well for English/French, but it fails miserably for English/Chinese. The sentences translated from Chinese seem individually meaningful, but the paragraphs are nonsensical.

The critic sounds frightened to me -- and he should be. Google translator works quite well for similar languages. On the other hand, they have another great leap to take if they're going to bridge the Chinese to English gulf.

See also: Using Computing Might, Google Improves Translation Tool - NYTimes.com.
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Google car goes where angels fear to tread?

When I opened this image I thought Google's camera bearing street view car took a picture mid-way across the Hudson-Oka ice bridge over the Ottawa River above Montreal ...

Alas, I think the street view icon in the midst of the river is a UI artifact of viewing Panoramio images in Google maps.

It would be cool to include the ice bridge in a future street view however.

Climate change, trees and your sinking home

If the Earth were warming smoothly everywhere, then we would expect to see the gradual migration of ecosystems. Iowa would migrate into Minnesota, and the Arctic would migrate into outer space.

Of course the Earth is not warming smoothly everywhere. It's warming on the average, but on the human level things will be messy. If greenhouse gases, particulates and other side-effects of humanity stabilize (a big if, unfortunately) then we might eventually return to the relatively predictable weather cycles of recent millenia. During the next century, however, the weather-cycles are likely to be turbulent.

What does turbulence and year-to-year micro-climate unpredictability mean to ecosystems? I've not read anything on this topic, and a quick gSearch found only some 2009 conference proceedings on marine ecosystems. I'm guessing we'll start reading about this over the next year, so this is your prologue.

As an uninformed guess, I presume this weather/climate turbulence will favor organisms that adapt rapidly to change. That would normally include humans, but we saturate most every ecosystem and, given our weaponry and limited judgment, we're likely to react to turbulence with devastating warfare.

Humans and their canine parasites/symbiotes aside, one would expect organisms with high mutation rates and short life cycles to do well. So that would include insects, bacteria, grasses, fungi and so on - including many things we consider "pests". On the other hand, we might expect trees to do quite badly in the near term. They could do fine in the post-turbulent future, but they don't seem likely to respond well to unpredictability.

Which brings us to your soon to be sinking home. If you were to look down at my neighborhood in St Paul Minnesota in July of 1999 you would have had a hard time seeing the houses. All you'd have seen would be trees. That's not so now. Pests and fungi have devastated our canopy. (This is not entirely due to climate change -- the emerald ash borer's range extension was assisted by human transportation. So our treescape is a premonition of what climate change may bring, even though we have assumed Iowa's old climate.)

How does losing trees impact your home? Well, we ain't called the "land of 10,000 lakes" for nothing. Twin Cities water lies close to the top of our clay soils. In this setting losing trees can have unanticipated consequences (emphases mine) ...

Shifting Soil Is Threat to a House’s Foundation - NYTimes.com

... Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association indicates that since the 1990s there has been an accelerating trend nationwide toward more extended dry periods followed by downpours. Whether due to random climate patterns or global warming, the swings between hot and dry weather and severe rain or snow have profoundly affected soil underneath buildings.

Clay soils, like those beneath the houses of Mr. Derse and Ms. Wilson, shrink during droughts and swell during floods, causing structures to bob. And because sandier soil loses its adhesive properties in dry conditions, it pulls away from foundations. Heavy rains cause it to shift or just collapse beneath structures. With both kinds of soil, such sinking, called subsidence, usually happens gradually, said Randall Orndorff, a geologist with the United States Geologic Survey. But, he said, “swinging from very wet to extremely dry weather like we’ve been seeing lately in many parts of the country may be accelerating the effect.”...

... Subsidence is not covered by most homeowners’ insurance policies in the United States, unlike in Britain, where the increasing number of homeowners’ claims due to foundation failure prompted the Charter Insurance Institute, an industry trade group, to issue a dire warning about the financial drain in its 2009 report, “Coping with Climate Change: Risks and Opportunities for Insurers.”

“The question we need to ask is, are we building to cope with the enhanced weather events related to climate change,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group advocating science-based solutions to environmental and health issues. “It’s obvious that we need to look at changing building codes worldwide to deal with this.”...

... Fixing a failed foundation usually involves hiring a foundation repair company to install cement or steel piers around the perimeter of the house’s slab or near its existing piers if it is a pier and beam foundation. Once in place, hydraulic jacks lift and level the house and transfer its weight to the new supports. The cost depends on the severity of the problem but generally runs about $1,000 to $2,000 per pier, which should include a lifetime transferable warranty.

“It’s amazing to watch your house get jacked up like that,” said Miguel Rivera, a designer of heating and air-conditioning systems, who had to pay $13,000 to have his 60-year-old house in West Orange, N.J., shored up in January. “It’s just immediate. You’re like, whoa, up it goes.”

His dining room began separating from the rest of his house about five years ago after repeated heavy rains shifted the earth beneath it. The problem was made worse when he removed a nearby tree, which was probably siphoning off excess water and providing structure to the soil beneath his house.

“It often happens that you upset the moisture and structural balance when you knock down or tear out trees,” said Mr. Lourie, the geotechnical engineer, adding that planting trees too close to the house can be harmful. “Plant them at least half their mature height away from the house.”

Landscaping should, as a rule, be installed so that water slopes away from the house and gutters should discharge at least five feet from the house to avoid oversaturating the soil. During droughts, experts recommend placing soaker hoses around the perimeter of the house and turning them on for 30 minutes a day. “The idea is to maintain a constant amount of moisture in the soil,” said Tom Witherspoon, a foundation engineer in Dallas. “If you can do that, your house will never move.”...

... Engineering and structural-repair professionals say it is relatively easy to spot foundation problems in structures that are more than 10 years old. If you are considering buying a house, look for patched-over cracks in brick or drywall and doors that have been planed. Also notice if there are cracks in sidewalks and streets in the neighborhood.

... problematic areas like the Southeast, Southwest, Midwest and coastal states...

I like the last sentence. Why don't they just tell us what state doesn't have a problem? New Mexico?

So what should those of living in "the Southeast, Southwest, Midwest and coastal states" do? Many will have to budget for serious foundation work, and foundation/soil assessments will change property values (and thus property taxes). I'm most interested in whether we can use tree planting to manage a high and fungible water table. What trees do best at pulling up moisture in wet times, yet are likely to be pest resistant (assuming we provide the water in dry summers -- in Minnesota this is feasible)? How well does this work in reality?

I expect we'll learn a lot more on this topic over the next two years.

Update 4/7/2010: Some real science to complement my tree speculations ...

Tree-mendous - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

... being a tree has challenges ... longevity itself creates difficulties. In the course of centuries, situations change: droughts and fires may come and go, soil may erode, water tables may rise and fall. Worse, other organisms — especially enemies — can evolve far faster, because they can go through hundreds of generations during the tree’s life. How can trees avoid succumbing to diseases? Especially as they don’t have an immune system like ours: you can graft tissue from one tree to that of another (think apples and olives) without the kind of rejection that a mammal would experience. Part of the answer may be that many trees have evolved associations with other, fast-evolving organisms, like fungi and ants, that can protect them to some extent.

Google's problem is their corporate philosophy

As a Google customer, I'm not happy with this approach ...

Two keys to Google’s success: “paranoia” and “relentless brutality” | Good Morning Silicon Valley

.... So how does Google maintain its pace and sense of urgency? Through a Shiva-like dance of constant creation and destruction performed with “relentless brutality and execution,” said Herlihy...

… We seek ubiquity and then pray for luck. We learn from bad decisions. If something is wrong, we kill it as soon as possible, take everybody out and move onto a different project as soon as possible.” And the process of regular and rigorous reviews extends to people as well as projects. “We measure people every 90 days,” Herlihy said. “We get 360-degree feedback on people every 180 days and that feedback is published to the whole company. People want reality. Ninety percent of the rewards end up going to 10 percent of the people...

Since 90% of the rewards go to 10% of the people and non-hit products "die" (or are abandoned) young, engineers leading products that are not quickly successful must leave the company, or abandon a slow project as quickly as possible, or stay and become demoralized.

The result I see is a profusion of half-build services that start well, then stall then are abandoned, and, years later, are killed. As someone who's used most of what Google has built, I'm not happy with their management style. Of course I'm not a typical user, but I can say that many of the companies I've disliked are dead now - or are living dead.

Fire Eric Schmidt. Now.

Google Video Chat: getting to the new world slowly

It's been a year since I wrote about Video Chat for elder parents over OS X and 17 months since I started using Google Video Chat. It's been a mixed experience since due to poor reliability and spectacularly poor usability.

Google has updated the video engine recently, and we've updated our home machines, so during a visit to my parents I retested a link between my mother and I in Montreal and Emily and Ben in St Paul.

I used the superb Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro at both ends -- it's a vast improvement over the built-in iSight cameras on my MacBook and our home i5 iMac.

My mother's home has only a 128 kpbs uplink and a 1 mbps downlink (videotron basic - it tests out near the marketed rates). I suspect our image was pretty degraded by the slow uplink, but the quality of Emily and Ben's image and voice was superb. It was a promise of things to come.

The usability remains execrably bad. Either Google is intentionally slowing adoption or they should start randomly selecting San Francisco tourists to do their user interface design. We'll know Google is serious, or has found a good tourist, when a user can save a named shortcut to their desktop, click on it, and connect to a remote client.

We're getting to the new world of high quality realtime video/voice connectivity, but it's darned slow. At the current rate we'll be there around 2012.

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Reflections on my personal bacterial companions

I stopped a puck the other day.

With my leg. That's what comes with playing against these dad-gum college kids. They don't know their own strength.

The hematoma became infected, and since antibiotics aren't what they used to be my personal physician/spouse recommended diligent attention. So now the infection is mostly better.

This gave me the opportunity to wonder about three things:

1. Who creates the tough sealant (scab) atop the wound? I used to think my body did that, but, really, it's a stupid response. I need the sucker to drain, not seal. Maybe the scab is built by the bacteria?
2. Why don't infected wounds hurt more? I whack my finger and it sure hurts, but my body doesn't complain much about infections. Seems illogical ... unless the bacteria are turning off pain signals.
3. We know Toxoplasma makes rats dumb and happy - the better for cats to munch 'em and spread the infection. We think it does something similar to humans. So shouldn't bacterial infections make us feel kind of laissez-faire, less prone to aggressively treat the infection?

That was yesterday. I was inspired in part by a gruesome science fiction story of some years back about emergent sentience in bacteria (can't remember author, but I don't think it was Greg Bear).

I don't think these are original ideas, but I didn't expect to see a Carl Zimmer essay on the topic today!

I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords | The Loom | Carl Zimmer | Discover Magazine

.... Very often, the parasites cause hosts to do things that help the parasites, instead of themselves. For example, a protozoan called Toxoplasma needs to get from rats to cats, and to help the process along, it makes rats lose their fear of cats. Parasites can also change the diet of their host as well as the way in which their hosts digest their food....

I was reminded of this sinister manipulation by a paper that was published in Science today by Rob Knight and his colleagues. They built on previous research that revealed that mice genetically engineered to be obese have different kinds of microbial diversity in their guts than normal mice...

... Knight and his colleagues discovered a different–and more disturbing–way that microbes can make mice fat....

... Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on.

When I first learned of this work, I asked Knight–with a mix of dread and delight–whether the microbes were manipulating their hosts, driving them to change their diet for the benefit of the microbes. He said he thinks the answer is yes...

If gut bacteria can change diet, then skin bacteria could make people with chronic skin infections apathetic -- the better to discourage treatment of the thriving bacterial colonies ...

Update 3/24/2010 - See also a 2006 post on viruses changing dietary behaviors ... Why would a virus fatten an animal?

The disappearing signature

I've never had a very consistent signature, but today Emily noted that it's become a genuine scrawl.

Of course this could be a sign of early Parkinsons disease, but there's a more benign explanation.

I very rarely sign my name.

Forty years ago we signed our names a lot. We wrote checks, we deposited things, some of us did it as a part of our work. In the modern world we enter passwords instead. I haven't written a check in over a year.

Signatures are going the way of the wrist watch. My children may never develop a signature.

YouTube needs a pay-per-view solution

I've not had much use for YouTube, but I do have a son who does better with video than with text. I figured I'd collect selected educational videos for him to study from, using a family video learning blog.

That was when I began to learn that YouTube sucks.

Yes, there's lots of stuff there, and some of it is well done. There's Monty Python, for example. When it comes to education in general, and science in particular, however, it's really lousy. Most of the material is both very poor quality and very old.

The problem isn't a lack of good material. There's an enormous quantity of instructional science material owned by the BBC and by the television networks. That material could be sliced, diced and repackaged to create thousands of high quality educational videos from brief demonstrations to longer expositions.

The problem is money, or lack thereof. We need a way for people who own high quality material, or who are able to create it, to get paid.

I'd like to see YouTube offer up this material with a 10 cent/min 1 day rental fee. A five minute concept demonstration would cost 50 cents to rent until midnight. A 60 minute show would cost $6.

Maybe that wouldn't be enough to unlock the vaults of the BBC. It might be too easy to steal for example. It would, however, be enough to support independent production of short format well catalogued educational video material.

Stop being free YouTube, and start being valuable.

Update 3/5/2010: Per Janek Mann, in comments, YouTube debuted YouTube Rentals in beta about 7 weeks ago:

... Introducing the beta of YouTube Rentals, a pay-to-view model on YouTube. Providing content owners a new way to generate revenue on the site, YouTube Rentals allows partners greater flexibility to monetize a variety of videos, provides full control over their content, and allows content owners to tap into the world's largest online video community.

The YouTube Rentals beta is currently available only to content owners in the U.S.

Evidently they thought it was a good idea too, though, barring time travel, they've probably been planning this for years. Obviously I'm a fan!

We need translation on Google Reader for Mobile!

After a hiatus when Google Reader social was broken, I'm back to following shares and blogs that alternate English with Chinese and other languages.

This would be a killer feature for Google Reader desktop, except that GR desktop has already killed all the feed reader competition. On a bigger scale though, embedded translation is one of the reasons that Google will (sadly) crush Apple and, over the next 20 years, machine translation will transform human civilization.

Yeah, I meant that. I've even added a new GR "label" (post tag) today called "translation".

Problem is Google Reader for Mobile doesn't do translation! Argghh. My non-English feed items (blogs, shares, etc) are unreadable on my iPhone. It's been over a year since GR desktop added translation services, and Mobile is still unilingual.

Sigh. I am 95% sure Google work on this will include the iPhone, and 5% worried it won't. If they do omit the iPhone, I may have to move to the gPhone sooner than I'd expected. That's how big this feature is. The GR Mobile translation story is just one more telling illustration of why Apple will lose its war with Google.

So, Google, for your user's sake and to encourage Apple to sue for peace sooner, please do get on this.

See also:

• 2009 will be the year of machine translation
• Google reader: now with translation services (Nov 2008!)
• Reading my writing translated
• Joy of the global web -- what's 101 mean?
• Do I make more sense in Greek?
• Gordon's stuff, now in 35 languages

Why Apple will lose the Google-Apple war

The were rumbles about Latitude, but the battle of Google Voice made the Google-Apple war public. Now it's a cliche ...

How Apple and Google's Romance Turned To Hate - Apple - Gizmodo

.. They happily worked in the iPhone's 2007 launch. Google gave Apple their maps, their search, and their mail, and Apple gave Google the best spot in their new shiny device. Apple put YouTube into the iPhone and Google made YouTube to work nicely with QuickTime, moving all videos to the h.264 standard (so Apple could avoid that nasty Flash kid). Google even optimized their web apps for the iPhone, and Apple smiled....

I like the prospect of Google-Apple competition, but this is too much. It won't end well for Apple.

Apple has brought me some very good things over the past few years, but Google makes me smarter. There is a major economic and productivity advantage for working with Google. In the medium term, on a global scale, this means Google will win.

If the iPhone doesn't have full access to Google's productivity boosting powers it will lose. No, web apps are not the answer -- the Google Voice web app is pathetic (partly this is because Google is only marginally competent at building client software -- they need to buy Palm for the engineers).

Maybe Jobs will step down. Certainly Eric Schmidt needs to go. One way or another, I hope this war ends soon.

Update 3/13/10: The NYT coverage makes it seem personal - particularly between Schmidt and Jobs. Both have enormous egos, but Schmidt is completely and trivially replaceable. The world would be better off if Schmidt were to retire.
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Calvin, free will and me

I've had only a nodding acquaintance with Calvinism (TULIP, via Garrison Keillor), though I picked up a bit more thanks to George W Bush and his fellow Marketarian social Darwinists.

It wasn't until I listened to In Our Time on Calvinism, though, that I realized Calvin and I had something fundamental in common. Neither Calvin nor I believe in the myth of free will, or the myth of responsibility. (Though I do treat both as a useful fiction - especially with the kids.)

If you're a Christian, and you don't believe in free will, then you have to believe that either nobody is saved, or everyone is saved, or that God is capricious.

The first two options are simpler, but the first makes Christ seem rather pointless and the second can't create a successful social movement. Only the third option, that God is capricious, will produce the right mixture of fear, pride, power and scorn - particularly when coupled with the Marketarian principle that God rewards the righteous with worldly power. The principles of natural selection ensure that, absent free will, the theology of a capricious God will win.

I've never liked Calvin, but at least now I understand his logic. Of course, were I a Christian, I'd follow Occam and choose the simpler assumption that everyone is saved. Calvin didn't let his logic get in the way of a good power base, so he made a different choice.

See also:

• Bad genes, bad people and a crisis of punishment?
• Addiction and disease: My comments on the TIME Science blog
• Changing attitudes about mind and responsibility: Patricia Hearst
• Diminished responsibility: the next cultural battleground
• Free Will RIP - The Economist on preemptive punishment
• Marketarianism (Label)

Update 3/9/10: This meme is circulating. I've added a "meme watch" tag to this post.

Update 4/7/10: Sci Am article - no free will. One more sign of social acceptance.

How I discover people to follow - on Google Reader

Buzz has been a great disappointment.

It's not all bad though. Google built a lot of Buzz on the Google Reader Shared Item experiments, and as a side-effect they fixed the long broken social bits of Google Reader.

So now I'm enjoying enlisting new unpaid specialists to sort and manage the world's information flow for me. It's like having my own team of incredibly expensive super-smart uber-analysts -- except I don't pay them anything.

Mwaahh-ha-ha-ha!

Ok, so maybe the evil laughter is a bit much. After all, they're free to follow what I share, and we're all feeding the hivemind. It who laughs last is Skynet, as the saying goes.

How do I use Google reader to enlist my witting info-drones?

I look for the "like" link on posts that I like a lot, but that don't have many other "likes". I then click the "like" link and scan the names and associated metadata, looking for people who are different from me -- different nationality, age, gender, profession, etc. Then I look at their shared items. If they've shared interesting things that are new to me, I follow them. I also add them to my special "x-reader" group which allows them to comment on anything I share (should they decide to follow me, though most will not).

None of this worked reliably a month ago, but it works now.

My "People you follow" section is now becoming my strongest information source. I'm able to follow fewer feeds directly, as I now outsource the processing chore to my fellow minions.

Quite nice, really.

Update 3/2/2010: I'm also again trying Google Readers "show in my language" feature to start following non-English "likes". I believe Google's Translation feature is extremely disruptive and amusingly under appreciated. This is how the really big things often come - quietly in the night. Note that the latest betas of Chrome for Windows now incorporate translation services into the browser. I'm looking forward to an English-Chinese-English view of my posts that will allow me to optimize my English writing for English-Chinese automated translation.
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Tea is the gateway drug to Militia movement

The Sepoy mutiny (IOT) is traditionally said to have begun with a rumor that new rifle cartridges, which soldiers had to bite to use, were greased with pig and cow fat.

The rumor spread quickly, and enraged many. It sounds plausible to me, but Melvyn Bragg's 3 guests all agreed that the truth was irrelevant. The rumor was a spark on dry kindling. It didn't have to be true, and refutation was irrelevant.

When a people are prepared to believe, beliefs are powerful and fungible.

I thought of that story when I read David Barstow's epic study of the all-white Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement is rife with fear and rumor, and it is ready to believe.

The Tea Party had its roots in the GOP, but now it's largely lead by Glenn Beck. Wildly popular with a part of the GOP base the Tea Party is a threat to the corporate heart of the GOP - and Beck's Mormonism is an issue for GOP evangelicals.

So the Tea Party is mixed blessing for the GOP. That's a problem, but it's not the big problem.

The real problem is that the Tea Party is proving to be a "gateway drug" to the pro-terrorist Militia movement and a wide range of the far right fringe parties. Timothy McVeigh wannabes are warming up, just as they did for Clinton.

Challenging times.

See also:

• Glenn Beck's white nationalist fans - Glenn Beck - Salon.com
• The fears of the GOP base - last defenders of America
• The roots of Klan 2.0 and 912 – A justified fear of change
• Palin, Noonan, and the fears of euro America
• Historian wanted: The American Liberty League and 1930s Fascism
• Frank Rich - The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged - NYTimes.com

Snitty Apple Console message

I've been having OS X issues lately, so I've spent time in the Console (yes, the days of full function OSs are limited).

I liked this particular message:

2/28/10 10:32:19 AM [0x0-0x294294].com.microsoft.Excel[6407] Sun Feb 28 10:32:19 Stanford-MacBook-2.local Microsoft Excel[6407] : The function `CGPDFDocumentGetMediaBox' is obsolete and will be removed in an upcoming update. Unfortunately, this application, or a library it uses, is using this obsolete function, and is thereby contributing to an overall degradation of system performance. Please use `CGPDFPageGetBoxRect' instead.

Reflections on friends who vote GOP

I have not been a fan of the modern GOP. I see today's GOP as the party of torture, corruption, thoughtless bellicosity, cynical manipulation of American fears and hatreds, bad policy, anti-science, anti-reason, and so on. I also disagree with most GOP values, though my support for abortion rights is unenthusiastic.

And so, when a good person and a friend writes asking when I might join the "sane" party, I am taken aback. My Dems are often (mostly?) corrupt, pompous and venal - but I do think of them as the saner party. How can good people feel the GOP is the sane alternative? It is suspiciously convenient to say these people are delusional. Instead I'll try to examine their beliefs along four chasms - Facts, Values, Faith and Tribe. I think I can understand their beliefs best in those terms.

Facts

Not everyone obsessively follows hundreds of blogs and uses selected super-readers as fact filters. More reasonably, but unfortunately, not everyone reads factcheck.org. If you live in some parts of the country, and if you don't read online news or the New York Times, you will be told many things that are not true. More perniciously, you won't hear of anything that might change your perceptions.

If you believe the chain letters, or the WSJ OpEd page, or Murdoch's newspapers, you may well believe the Democrats are insane.

This seems like the easiest canyon to bridge. Facts, after all, can be tested. Predictions can be falsified. In reality, however, Vulcans are few. People may be attracted false facts because they support three other chasms.

Values and culture

What do the strong owe the weak? When do the ends justify the means? What are the limits to tolerance? What far can Americans move from a cultural mean?

These are fundamental differences. A good and generous person may feel they owe nothing to the weak save what they choose to give. That person is a natural supporter of the GOP. These are legitimate distinctions

Faith

We usually think of Faith in terms of Deities, but there can also be a Faith in Markets. Faith, by definition, is not amenable to discussion. If you believe the true duty of all men is to serve a particular deity, then your first political choice must be to support the Party closest to your deity. If you believe that Markets are infallible, then you must support a Party that shares your belief.

The chasm of Faith is a legitimate distinction between the GOP and the Democrats. Even religious Democrats tend to accept theological tolerance -- even when that tolerance is theologically inconsistent. The GOP has a much stronger claim to the Christian fundamentalist vote.

Tribe

Humans support their Tribe. It is especially hard for a member of a powerful Tribe to see its time is passing. The GOP is the Party of the White Tribe, and in particular of the White Male Tribe. The Democratic Party has a much blurrier Tribal identity, but if you're non-White or Gay or Lesbian it's a natural home.

The GOP and Dems are separated by chasms of Fact, Faith, Values and Tribe. The chasm of Fact seems easiest to cross, but often choices of Fact serve needs of Faith, Values and Tribe. Good persons, by reasons especially of Faith, Values and Tribe, may feel my party is less than sane.