Roots of the irrational in American politics: pre-dementia and religion

I've written recently about the role of religion in the reasoning of the GOP base. This is an elephant in the room; pundits will discuss the role of American's exceptional fundamentalism in the context of abortion politics, but not in the context of debt politics. The mainstream media is missing an important ingredient in our political paralysis.

There's another elephant out there, and it will grow over the next ten years. The average American voter will become increasingly demented. Demented people rarely vote of course, but most dementia is the end stage of a very long process. Before a voter is disabled, they will lose the ability to process information, recall all but the most recent events, and adjust their beliefs based on evidence. They will, in other words, become less rational.

How big a factor is this?

We can make some estimates by starting with the end-stage state of clinical demential ...

Prevalence of Dementia in the United States: The Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study

... The prevalence of dementia among individuals aged 71 and older was 13.9%, comprising about 3.4 million individuals in the USA in 2002. The corresponding values for AD were 9.7% and 2.4 million individuals. Dementia prevalence increased with age, from 5.0% of those aged 71–79 years to 37.4% of those aged 90 and older...

... The elderly population (those aged 65 years or older) in the USA is expected to double from approximately 35 million today to more than 70 million by 2030...

Of course these numbers are only a start. What we really want are numbers expressed in percentages of voters, and we want the average disease duration from judgment impairment to disability. Personally I suspect that's about 20 years, but the best data I could find was on a relatively rare and aggressive form of early dementia ...

Pre-dementia clinical stages in presenilin 1 E280A... [Lancet Neurol. 2011] - PubMed result

... Pre-dementia cognitive impairment was defined by a score 2 SD away from normal values in objective cognitive tests, and was subdivided as follows: asymptomatic pre-MCI was defined by an absence of memory complaints and no effect on activities of daily living; symptomatic pre-MCI was defined by a score on the subjective memory complaints checklist higher than the mean and no effect on activities of daily living; and MCI was defined by a score on the subjective memory complaints checklist higher than the mean, with no effect on basic activities of daily living and little or no effect on complex daily activities. De

... Median age at onset was 35 years (95% CI 30-36) for asymptomatic pre-MCI, 38 years (37-40) for symptomatic pre-MCI, 44 years (43-45) for MCI, and 49 years (49-50) for dementia. The median age at death was 59 years (95% CI 58-61). The median time of progression from asymptomatic to symptomatic pre-MCI was 4 years (95% CI 2-8), from symptomatic pre-MCI to MCI was 6 years (4-7), from MCI to dementia was 5 years (4-6), and from dementia to death was 10 years (9-12). The cognitive profile was predominantly amnestic and was associated with multiple domains. Affected domains showed variability in initial stages, with some transient recovery in symptomatic pre-MCI followed by continuous decline.

In this disorder asymptomatic pre-MCI started at age 35, and disability (dementia) at age 50. So the aggressive form has a 15 year course. I would expect less aggressive forms have a longer course, so I'll go with 20 years.

So by these very rough guesstimates about 15% of 50 year old voters will be impacted by "asymptomatic pre-MCI", an early form of cognitive disorder that will impact their judgment. That prevalence will go up with age. Since GOP voters are much older than Dem voters, this, like religious fundamentalism, will be concentrated in the GOP base and it will strongly impact GOP politics.

If you don't understand the two factors of religious fundamentalism and pre-dementia cognitive impairment you will have a hard time understanding the future of the GOP.

Jon Udell on G+'s distracting chatter

Jon Udell has been testing G+. He nails it in two words ...

Distracting chatter is useful. But thanks to RSS (remember that?) it’s optional. « Jon Udell

... I came to accept a lot of distracting chatter as the price of discovering things to read. But Google+ seems to be the camel’s-back-breaking straw. The price has gone too high. So I’m rediscovering what made the blog network so thrilling to me a decade ago: unmediated access to people writing for the love of it in their own online spaces. Distracting chatter has its uses. But it’s optional.

G+ reminds Jon, and me, of why feeds aren't dead yet ...

... Last night’s 17-course meal was a selection of recent essays by Gardner Campbell, Brian Dear,Lorianne DiSabato .... Paul Ford, Cliff Gerrish, Ned Gulley, Eugene Eric Kim,Adina Levin, Hugh McGuire, Cameron Neylon, John Quimby, Antonio Rodriguez, Scott Rosenberg, Doc Searls, Ed Vielmetti, and Ethan Zuckerman... [2]

G+ needs to become useful. If iG+ were integrated into Google Reader, so Google Reader Shares became G+ shares, I'd go back to using it. To do that though, Google would have to support topic stream subscription as well as access controls (circles). Likewise, if G+ replaced Blogger Comments I'd definitely use it.

At the moment however, G+ is an inferior version of Facebook (no group/org Pages) without the (shrinking) number of my friends and family who post on FB [1].

[1] My experience of FB is changing. At first friends and family were sharing and it was useful for that. Most have stopped though. On the other hand, "Pages" for clubs and schools and local kid teams are more important. It's moving away from being a social network to a pub/sub group sharing network -- which starts to look like a simplified version of the web with much less anonymity. Rather a lot like late 1980s AOL and CompuServe.
[2] Great list of new names. I'm exploring each of them.

God's Will and the debt limit

Theocratic states are, by definition, not rational. Stalinist Russia, Fascist Germany, Mao's China, Kim's Korea, Revolutionary Iran -- they all believed God or History would preserve them against all odds.

Israel and America aren't theocratic states, but both nations have a strong strain of theocracy. In the US that strain is concentrated in the GOP. A belief that God is on your side can lead to some otherwise inexplicable and irrationally self-destructive behaviors.

I don't think the US will default - but we are rather close to the edge. We need to understand not only how the GOP got to crazy, but why. Why does a significant portion of the GOP believe that America should do this?

For many Republicans it's their version of Mao, Marx and Mohamed. They are American Marketarians, believers in a peculiar 21st century American fusion of Christian fundamentalism, evangelical capitalism, and calvinism. They believe they are doing God's will, that progressive taxation is the greatest sin -- opposing God's will and justice. They believe that God will save America -- if America follows the true course. Even if they don't personally believe that Obama is the anti-christ, they know he is not a Believer.

They can't make a deal, because they'd be denying God.

That's why we're in trouble.

I went to Hogwarts

Many ages after graduation, it occurred to me that I went to Hogwarts.

It went something like this:

• Gryffindor: Page/Fleming
• Hufflepuff: Ruddock
• Ravenclaw: Blacker
• Slyterin; Dabney/Lloyd

It's not exact of course. Even during my tenure Lloyd was changing character, and Dabney wasn't so much evil as geek-goth.

Still, it is remarkable.

Incidentally, in writing this I was surprised to learn that my Corona still exists ...

In the 1980s, Lloyd had two off-campus alleys, one named "The Place" and one named "Corona" (in reference to the corona of the sun as a metaphor for the outer reaches of Lloyd). The Place used to exist on the corner of Michigan Ave and Lura St; it was removed around 1988 and is now a parking lot. Corona used to be on the east side of Holliston Ave; it was removed in 1992 and the location is now the new parking structure. Because of Pasadena preservation laws, both houses were moved to other places in Pasadena. The Corona house was donated to a minister (for free) who restored it at 1792 Newport Ave, Pasadena, CA. The house is no longer owned by the minister, but it still exists.

I had no idea, when I last visited I saw only the parking log.

Checkmate.

The GOP has been playing voter poker with the debt limit. Obama has been playing a different game: Obama Campaign/DNC Raise $86 Million in Second Quarter.

The American voter has a 3 month memory. Tea Party voters in particular remember what they're told to remember.

Donors though, they think ahead. Corporations can see Obama has given them almost everything they could hope for, while the GOP promises global economic ruin.

GOP leaders know this. That's why McConnell caved. There are still moves to be made, but the game is over.

The GOP collapses

McConnell Proposes Giving Obama Authority To Raise Debt Limit Alone. This will be retracted and denied and stuffed down the memory hole.

Doesn't matter though, the GOP has collapsed.

On the bright side, we will probably avoid the greatest failure of American governance since the Civil War. We may avoid turning the Lesser Depression into a Greater Depression.

On the dimmer side, the GOP will survive this. If they had forced the nation into default they might have done themselves in. We desperately need a somewhat sane party to oppose the worst tendencies of my team, we need a replacement for the GOP. Their retreat puts that day off.

Dimmer still, it appears I was right. Seven months ago I assumed that the GOP, in the end, would not risk the wrath of their corporate masters. They know the pre-demented boomers of the Tea Party will forget this affair within months, but corporate paymasters will not forgive economic ruin.

Like Jared Bernstein, I felt we were just now crossing over into panic time. I began to think emergent orporate entities were not as powerful as I'd imagined.

It seems they are.

Ebert on Murdoch and The Guardian

Roger Ebert pays some debts to Murdoch. Debts of vengeance that is.

Murdoch has made many enemies. He was particularly good at making enemies of intelligent and wise people who buy electrons by the gigabyte. Now they will speak.

Ebert also gives due honor to the Guardian, which must be clearing shelf space for its Pulitzer prize.

For my part, I'm adding the Guardian feed to Google Reader. I had it a while ago, but it seemed too leftie even for me. Clearly, I was wrong.

I'm back now.

Criminals lacking competence ... boiler room spoofers

For the last week or so I have been getting mobile calls between 1am and 6am from 408-555-1212. Fortunately my iPhone charges downstairs, so nobody was awoken by the calls.

This is, of course, the directory information number for Silicon Valley. It's traditional to "spoof" this Caller ID when cold calling victims.

But why between 1am and 6am? Where's the money in that?

Today they called at 6pm. Naturally I picked up. There as a longish pause while the dialing device transferred the call to a boiler room operator. Alas, I couldn't make out what she was saying. Her accent was thick (east asian?) and the VOIP call was breaking up. She seemed to be trying to pronounce the names of people I might know (Bob someone?). Perhaps she was trying to read a script about their hospitalizations, etc.

Alas, she gave up very quickly.

This is not a very competent ring of criminals. How do they stay in business?

People you may known on G+ ...

Circles - suggested I know this guy on G+:

Really?

Dyer on Murdoch

Gwynne Dyer, a journalist once blacklisted by convict Conrad Black (Canada's mini-Murdoch), has reviewed Rupert Murdoch's latest set of challenges. He suggests ...

• Murdoch's empire paid for the silence of convicts Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire
• British police were slow to investigate Murdoch's minions because they'd leaked stories for pay. Some officers have a lot to lose. Dyer doesn't point out that some of them may now be powerful.
• James Murdoch was moved from London to New York to escape the British legal system
• Murdoch will use Rebekah Brooks to draw fire until the British government approves News Corps bid for control of British Sky Broadcasting. Then she will be sacrificed.

Dyer doesn't say this won't work. A Michael Wolff story from 9/2010 quotes British politicians who felt Andy Coulson was safe. Murdoch's control of the UK media rivaled Berlusconi's control of Italy and Murdoch's own control of Australia.

Except, Wolff pointed out, the New York Times was involved. The story had gone global.

Even so, perhaps Murdoch would have taken it down, but for the unpredictable outrage of the restless masses -- and for the media he doesn't quite control.

I googled Murdoch's Wall Street Journal for editorials on one of the biggest media stories of the decade. I found a few short articles. The New York Times, not yet a Murdoch property, has much more.

Funny that.

I wonder what Murdoch's Fox News is saying.

It could happen here. It probably has happened here.

Age of miracles - our Kia Sedona doors and Google

Before he was intimidated by AI-can't-hurt Stross [1], Brad DeLong used to say that "the singularity is in our past".

I think Brad was right and Charlie is working for the "transgalactic-AIs-tired-of-waiting-for-a-decent-conversation-from-Sol-3".

For example, how, before the Singularity, could humans have solved this mystery?

Our (cheap) Kia Sedona sliding van doors used to latch open properly. Then, a month or so ago, they'd sometimes slide back, periodically amputating digits. Emily took the van to the dealer and they told her they'd "fixed" it (under warrantee, so no charge). Of course it came back.

Really, it's a pain. Sometimes I have to brace the door with one leg. Today Emily mentioned she was taking the van back to the dealer. Then she took the kids in for DQ. While I waited with Kateva I did a voice search on my iPhone's Google.app. I got this ...

Kia Sedona Doors and Exterior - Car Forums - Edmunds:

... This works fine, unless and until you decide to (2) LOWER EITHER OF THE BACK WINDOWS 'TOO' LOW. It seems there is a point where the window is too low and they've put a safety feature into play and it won't allow you to latch open the door. I found a round red reflector-like sticker on the side of the door (back side) of the driver's side rear. It is the same point at which you can lower the window and still open the door and it latches open....

Yeah, that's it. With the window down the latch doesn't work. With the window completely up it works. It made a good demo when Emily returned with the treats.

Some imagine this is a child safety feature of sorts, but I think they're suffering from cognitive dissonance. My (see update!) best guess is that it's a misguided security feature; pull the door back to let kids out and it slides down crushing them. As you tend to the wounded you notice that the window is down. We bought the car in Minnesota's winter, so we only ran into this when the weather warmed.

Whacky design, but that's not the point. The point is the dealership mechanics were completely clueless. (Must have taken them ages to "fix" it.) Google solved the problem in seconds. I didn't even have to tap type. All I had to do was ask my freakin' phone.

Definitely in our past.

These stories must bore the young. They can't imagine what life was like before the all-seeing G.

[1] Charlie claims he's mostly inciting site traffic to promote Rule 34, I've ordered my copy.

Update 7/10/11: On reflection my original guess doesn't make sense either. Now I think this is a power door safety feature. I suspect a powered door won't open unless the window is shut, to prevent injury to a child's head and neck. Cheapskates like us buy the lower margin non-powered doors, and on this door the interlock can't prevent opening. Instead it only prevents latching. I think, therefore, the latch failure is a bug arising from power door infrastructure that wasn't removed for non-powered doors. This isn't documented because it's a genuine bug, and companies hate to document their bugs - especially when it exposes foolish penny pinching. Kia saved money by not redoing the latch feature to work properly for non-powered doors.

Shimano, New Balance and Apple - how brands live and die

My Shimano bike shoes weren't clipping out. For the first time in over 10 years I took the cleats off and cleaned out some cement-like gunk.

Which meant I looked at the shoes. Damn, they look as good as new. All the years of strain and road slime and salt and they're still fine.

Not like my New Balance shoes. They used to make quality gear, but the last two high end NB runners of mine died young. They simply fell apart. Most recently I bought some dirt cheap NB's that came with a manufacturing defect. Why spend money if they won't last anyway?

The NB brand is dying. The Shimano brand, at least in bicycling, is very strong. They make beautiful stuff, they make regular stuff. They've done it consistently for forty years. From what little I can find, their share price hasn't done too badly either.

How have they done it? We think we know why Apple's brand is strong -- because Jobs is a freakin' Picasso-like unpleasant genius with a freakish hold on a publicly traded company. We all assume that when he goes Apple will emulate post-Gates Microsoft.

Shimano though -- they don't have a Steve Jobs. They're as corporate as can be.

How'd they do it?

I'm tempted to buy this $7 2006 HBR Review ....

Professional cycling teams use road bikes made up of several parts or components: frames, forks, wheels and tires, saddles, seat posts, handlebars, and pedals. Pedals hold a cyclist's special shoes in place so they can "clip in" for greater control and power, and several companies make different models of pedals. Lance Armstrong, seven-time winner of the Tour de France, uses Shimano pedals. Shimano, founded and based in Sakai City, Japan, makes many of the key components of a bike. The fact that each of the different components to a high-end road bike are manufactured by different companies makes for a complicated bike industry supply chain.

By 2006, Shimano had grown from a family-based business (founded by Shozoburo Shimano in 1920) that focused on freewheels, to a $1.6 billion global company (with net income of $186 million) that not only manufactured mid- to high-end bike components (and low-end components as well), but also made fishing tackle. Eighty percent of the company's sales were from high-end bike components and 20 % from mid-range bicycle components. Seventy-five percent of the company's earnings could be attributed to components. Shimano led the bike component industry, owning over 80 % of the high-end component market. But growth did not come overnight. Shimano's leaders reflected on the company and its growth trajectory. They were particularly proud of Shimano's market domination, largely attributable to the company's commitment to research and technology, as well as to the amount of value the company had been able to leverage from the industry's supply chain. As new technologies and new companies began to enter the market, and the longer term sales trend of a mature road bike industry remained relatively flat--despite the "Armstrong effect"--Shimano's leaders and their team wondered how to continue their growth in the mid- to high-end components market and achieve growth on an even greater global scale.

Personally, I want to know who makes Shimano's shoes, and whether that supplier makes any other kind of shoe.

Apple's board though, they might want to visit Shimano.

Google+ Circles: agonizingly close

My son's baseball team has lost every game they've played this year. Until today. Barely. It was agonizing to watch them teeter on the edge.

That's how I feel about Google+. It's agonizingly close - especially the "Circles" that define subscribers. They just ... need ... to ... get over the edge.

They could easily go wrong. The default naming of circles is worrying. They're called "friends" and "family" and "acquaintances". That's wrong.

It's not wrong as a starting point, but it's dangerously misleading. They need circles like "politics" and "kids news" and "personal news" and "woodworking" and "professional" and "language" [1]. At least they need two of those in addition to "friends".

Not every friend or family member wants to see pictures of my kids -- but some acquaintances do. Some strongly prefer pictures of the dog. If I shared my political opinions with my friends and family some would stop talking to me. Sharing them with my corporate customers would be even worse. Economists (sorry Brad) rarely want to read my amateur economics.

There's a reason Gordon's Notes appeals to only a few. My readers have to endure all my interests; they don't get to pick and choose.

We need circles that define interests shared between us and our readers, not the happenstance of their relationships to us. Even my beloved Emily doesn't want to read my OS X posts.

We need circles that support the geeky (but right) vision of Yahoo Pipes! and blogger label-specific feeds.  (Think on that one. Adding Boolean logic to circles (kids AND family AND german) is geeky enough, but think what Pipes! did to feeds. Yeah, you don't want to expose that to civilians, but think about it ...)

When Google moves "Google Blogs" (formerly Blogger) into G+, they need to think beyond replacing Blogger's failed Comment infrastructure with Plus comments. They need to think about the connection of Labels to Circles.

Get this right, and G+ replaces LinkedIn and Facebook and Google Reader Shares and unites the worlds of medium-form (Blog) and short-form (Tweet) pub/sub. Get this right and G+ has a Pipes! like option for the infovores (and perhaps for a generation that is born into streams and sub/pub).

Get this wrong and Buzz will have company.

[1] Language is the one attribute that should probably be a filter based on properties of the post and the subscriber. We desperately need Translation for G+, unlike FB it easily transcends nation.

Why is the modern GOP crazy?

The GOP wasn't always this crazy. Minnesota's Arne Carlson, for example, wasn't a bad governor. Schwarzenegger had his moments.

Ok, so the modern GOP has never been all that impressive. Still, it wasn't 97% insane until the mid-90s.

So what happened?

I don't think it's the rise of corporate America or the amazing concentration of American wealth. The former impacts both parties, and not all the ultra-wealthy are crazy. These trends make the GOP dully malign, but the craziness of Koch brothers ought to be mitigated by better informed greed.

That leaves voters. So why have a substantial fraction, maybe 20%, of Americans shifted to the delusional side of the sanity spectrum? It's not just 9/11 -- this started before that, though it's easy to underestimate how badly bin Laden hurt the US. It can't be just economic distress -- Gingrich and GWB rose to power in relatively good times.

What's changed for the GOP's core of north-euro Americans (aka non-Hispanic "white" or NEA)?

Well, the interacting rise of the BRIC and the ongoing IT revolution did hit the GOP-voting NEA very hard, perhaps particularly among "swing" voters. That's a factor.

Demographics is probably a bigger factor. I can't find any good references (help?) but given overall population data I am pretty sure this population is aging quickly. A good fraction of the core of the GOP is experiencing the joys of entropic brains (here I speak from personal white-north-euro-middle-age experience). More importantly, as Talking Points describes, this group is feeling the beginning of the end of its tribal power. My son's junior high graduating class wasn't merely minority NEA, it was small minority NEA.

This is going to get worse before it gets better. The GOP is going to explore new realms of crazy before it finds a new power base; either as a rebuilt GOP or a new party.

It's a whitewater world.

Update 7/8/11: Coincidentally, 538 provides some data on GOP craziness ....

Behind the Republican Resistance to Compromise - NYTimes.com

... Until fairly recently, about half of the people who voted Republican for Congress (not all of whom are registered Republicans) identified themselves as conservative, and the other half as moderate or, less commonly, liberal. But lately the ratio has been skewing: in last year’s elections, 67 percent of those who voted Republican said they were conservative, up from 58 percent two years earlier and 48 percent ten years ago.

This might seem counterintuitive. Didn’t the Republicans win a sweeping victory last year? They did, but it had mostly to do with changes in turnout. Whereas in 2008, conservatives made up 34 percent of those who cast ballots, that number shot up to 42 percent last year...

... the enthusiasm gap did not so much divide Republicans from Democrats; rather, it divided conservative Republicans from everyone else. According to the Pew data, while 64 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents identify as conservative, the figure rises to 73 percent for those who actually voted in 2010...

G+ impressions mine

With the help of a few friends, I somehow slipped through this narrow window into Google Plus (my G+ profile, which has lost its vanity URL for the moment) ...

Google+ For Businesses Coming Later This Year -- InformationWeek

... Google+, the company's recently introduced set of social communication services, briefly opened to new participants last night, between about 7pm PDT and 9:40pm PDT. Google engineering director David Besbris, in a Google+ post, said that the Google+ field trial is going well and that Google is seeking to double the undisclosed size of the field trial...

It's good. After Wave and Buzz failed, and Google Reader Share succeeded but got no love, G+ works. So far Streams is a smarter, better, version of Facebook personal Pages (no corporate/org/group equivalents, however). I don't think it's more complex that Facebook; FB at best is only transiently comprehensible. As soon as I figure it out, the rules change.

FB's constant attempts to hack their own customers has pissed off so many users, including my wife, that G+ has a pretty good chance to compete. At the very least, it should own the Android demographic. Whether iG+ gets the iPhone crowd or not depends on the shaky state of the Apple-Google detente. At the very least, G+ strengthens Apple's hand with both FB and Twitter.

Some quick impressions of my own ...

• I'm looking forward to the day when Google moves Google Reader Shares/Notes into the Streams framework, closes Buzz, and makes Streams/Sparks the "comment" framework for Google Blogs. Until then G+ will be fun to play with, after that I'll be spending a lot of time with it.
• Safari is showing page errors with G+. Unsurprisingly Chrome works best.
• It will be interesting to see how I manage the John Gordon/John F identity clash in G+. I think I should be able to make it work.
• Google Data Liberation has its own home on my post G+ Accounts page. It includes all Picasa web albums, my profile, my stream, by Buzz data and all circles and contacts. Very impressive.
• Profile settings says I can control which circles see parts of my Profile, but that's not working for me yet.
• The Privacy page is excellent.
• My Google Profile vanity URL now redirects to a G+ Profile with my old 1138 .... Google ID showing.

Of the coverage I've read, I like these best ...

• Google Plus: Why Facebook and Quora Should Worry by @ScepticGeek
• 10 Questions for Google’s “Head of Social” by @ScepticGeek (May 2010, interesting to reread now. Remember OpenSocial?)
• Google+ vs. Facebook: the Trust Factor - James Fallows
• Post by Yonatan Zunger - explains circles - bit head-spinning really. He's the engineering director for G+.
• Google+ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia