loquacious

Easy things to do to help the environment

Lately been kinda of obsessing about power consumption of my electronics, which made me think about some of the other things I do to try and save energy/help the environment. Here are  a few of the things I do, almost all of them are pretty small and alone might be insignificant, but they seem to add up to something much larger.

I'm hoping this doesn't seem like a lecture, I mean this more to be helpful..maybe there are a few things here you haven't tried, and might work for you.

Electronics: I turn off (power down) electronics off when they aren't in use. This especially means computer monitors and speakers, which consume a lot of power even when not in use (but on). You can put your computer into sleep or hibernate mode whenever it's not in use or off. I turn my work computer completely OFF every night.

Power Adapters: a lot of things use power even when you aren't using them, largely because they have power adapters on them. Whenever possible, I try to unplug the power adapters (especially computer or phone battery charger adapters...don't just leave those plugged in, they are pulling and using power all the time). A trick you can use is to put all your adapters/power chargers into one power strip, then just turn off the power strip when none of the devices are still in use. If you want to be really thorough, unplug your computer too when not in use -- it also still draws power. You could extend this to items like your microwave and TV as well, but not even I am that ambitious.

Home heating: we do not use the heat at night. we do not leave the heat on when we are out of the house. [we live in a pretty temperate area, which make this easier.] we do not have any airconditioners.

Recycling: Seattle has mandatory recycling, but I have been pretty crazy about this for years. We also now have City pick-up composting, so basically nearly everything we have gets recycled. According to one carbon footprint calculator, recycling everything you can cuts your home-based carbon footprint by up to 50%.  I also only buy recycled paper products.

Packaging: I try to buy things with as little non-recyclable packaging as possible. So I'll intentionally buy things with less plastic wrap on them, or fewer layers of plastic. Reseable bags are also great.

Re-Use: Trying to get better about this. one thing we do is wash and re-use sandwich bags. I don't throw away any re-usable object - I either leave by the curb (if large) for someone to take if they want (always works within 24 hrs) or I take stuff to Goodwill and let them decide if it's reuseable or not.

Car: I keep the tires inflated and get it tuned up twice a year.  I've also made it a personal goal to never live more than 15 minutes from work. This keeps my total miles driven pretty small each year.

Stairs: I take the stairs at work for any trip of 3 flights or less (and freqeuntly for more...there are only 6 stories in our building).

Plastic bags: yes, we now take bags to the store, though I kind of feel like a freak for doing so. We're trying to find a cost effective alternative to plastic grocery bags for our kitty unmentionables.

Food: ok, here is where I'll probably lose a lot of people, but here is the truth: eating vegetarian consumes a lot less energy and fuels (and fewer pesticides to boot) than eating meet. A recent UN report says that twice as much greenhouse gases are consumed for a meat meal than a vegetarian meal (and 7 times more than a vegan meal). Think of all the transportation and refrigeration it takes to get meat around, how much more wrapping and handling it takes. Not to mention all that grain that needs to be produced just to fatten up the animals. So think about what would happen if you just cut your meat consumption in half. If you  eliminated half your meat eating (home and out), you'd be reducing your food related carbon footprint by 50%.  I don't think there is any single better thing you could do that would have that scale of change.

Except maybe giving up flying. Air travel is increadibly bad for the environment - on the carbon calculators air travel is my single largest contribution- larger than an entire year of driving my car or all of my household-related emissions for a year. I have't figured out this one yet. My in-laws live 4000 miles away on an island.

Cost-wise, I think we're coming out ahead. The reduction in the electric and/or heating bill and gas consumption is somewhat offset by some more expensive purchases (recylced paper towels...yikes!)  and the more frequent car tune ups.

Election 08 Prediction: will poll averaging work? Obama wins easily if so.

Hi. It's 7am here on the Pacific coast. I've analyzed the available polling for the past week in each of the swing states. If the method I developed works (for all the reasons it might or might not listed in this post), here's what it looks like the results will be:

Obama: 353 electoral votes
McCain: 185 electoral votes

My method actually isn't good at predicting ND (3 EV's, there weren't enough recent polls), so I could be off by 3.

Here is my breakdown on who wins which swing states:

Obama:
NC
FL
VA
PA
OH
NH
OH
IA
CO
NM
NV

McCain:
GA
IN
MO (this is the closest race)
MT

and like I said, ND has insufficient data.

It's worth reiterating that this predictive model is only as good as the polling data (and the manipulation/weighting the pollsters do to adjust the data). It will actually be interesting if this method does not work this year, because it worked perfectly to predict the winner of each state in 2004 (though not the margin of win).

Given the problems that surfaced in the Democratic primaries (noted here and here), it's not at all clear that current polling methods are effective at getting to the entire electorate. Rural minorities seems to be especially undercounted.  And by now, I'm guessing everyone has heard about the cell-phone-user-only undercount, as well as the so-called "Bradley effect" - which many have recently discounted, but as we saw in the primaries, it was incontrovertible (I think) that certain white voters seemed to prefer Hillary Clinton to such a degree that you could not help but think that race had something to do with it. There was also recently the fascinatingly complex poll that estimated that Obama would likely lose 6% of his potential vote due to racial bias.

UPDATE: well, obviously, the system worked. Except for IN. Nobody got that right. Interesting to consider why....

Predictive power of polls (aka, who will win on Tuesday?)

So, in true nerd fashion, I wondered whether the 2004 presidential election polls actually had any accuracy in regards to who would win, on a state by state basis.

So, I downloaded all the non-partisan polls from 2004 from each of the 'swing states' in that election, from www.electoral-vote.com (a truly excellent polling site).

What did I learn? Well, my technique was to see what would happen if one averaged all the polls for a given state that were conducted in the 7 days prior to the election. I wanted to see if the average of these polls would accurately predict who would win that state.

I ran this analysis for all the 2004 swing states, and all those that ended up with a 5% or less spread between the candidates (CO, FL, IA, MI, MN, NV NH, NM, OH, OR, PA, WI). In 100% of cases, the averaged poll lead did go to the eventual winner of that state. I'm not saying the margin of win was correct, but the actual winner was accurately predicted by the average of all polls in the state.

What does this mean for the coming election? Well, with some caveats (which follow) it means we should be able to average all the results of polls available on Tuesday morning and predict the winner, state by state, and therefore the overall election.

The caveats here are: 1) this only works if the way polling is done has not changed substantively since the last election; 2) if voters are being as honest this year as 4 years ago about who they will vote for; 3) if there is not some other unaccounted for factor that has not been taken into account here (such as more young/first time voters this time around, or more cell phone users who weren't captured by the pollsters, etc).  Still, overall, given that this method worked 100% for the last election, it seems probable to me that it will work this time as well.

We'll see.

5th Gay Murder in Nassau, Bahamas

I don't think there has been any reporting yet confirming that a fifth gay man was brutally murdered in the Bahamas (fifth in the last year), but it unfortunately seems to be the case. It's not known whether this was a hate crime (really, it's not known whether any of them were hate crimes, due to what appears to be the world's slowest police work) but the murder of 5 gay men in a community the size of Nassau really should be considered remarkable by someone in authority you'd think.

This makes the murder rate for gay men in Nassau something like 1 in 1000, whereas the overall murder rate for heterosexuals in Nassau is about 1 in 2500 (which is already an astoundingly high rate). Why are gay men more than twice as likely to be murdered in Nassau than the general population?

See my post on the prior four murders here.

Seattle Vegetarian (and Vegan) Restaurants / Dining / Food

This is a list of some of my favorite places to eat. Most of them are not, in fact, exclusively vegetarian. If you've been searching for vegetarian-only places in Seattle, you've already probably found the (rather short) definitive list of them somewhere else on the web.  

Upon reflection, the places on this list are as much about the atmosphere there as the food...as there are actually approximately one million good restaurants in Seattle now.  I have been to all these places many times, and have found them consistently good (except where noted).

Vegetarian Only (vegan noted when I noticed)

Moonlight Cafe. just outside the International District, getting into the Central District near 20th and Jackson, this Vietnamese place has mastered the art of the faux-meat dish (and so, most everything is vegan as well). It's really pretty amazing. There are some amazing dishes here, the likes of which one could never make at home. Try the sesame beef, the fish hot pot, or the salmon.  About $7/entree.  Make sure you are ordering off the (extensive, must be 100 items) vegetarian menu. Actually, I've never seen anyone order off the real meat menu, I'm not even sure why they have it. In a strip mall, but again, it's the food. No atmosphere.  (206) 322-3378 http://www.lostinseattle.com/LIS/restaurant/moonlightcafe.html

Carmelita. In the Phinney Ridge neighborhood, an exclusively vegetarian place, with quite a few vegan entree options. I've eaten here many times, and to be honest, it's really hit and miss. I'm not sure what to point you towards. The pizzas are actually pretty good, and the humus plate is the only substantive meal, order that if you are hungry. Or it would make a great appetizer to share for the whole table.  Entrees: about $15 as I recall. Nice atmosphere. (206) 706-7703. http://www.carmelita.net/

Cafe Flora. Probably the largest vegetarian institution in Seattle. Does a great breakfast. Southwest influenced cuisine. It's a little bland for my taste, but some people swear by it. If you are only in Seattle for one or two days, I'd try other places first.  Nice atmosphere. http://www.cafeflora.com/

Hillside Quickie. In the U Disrict and also on Capitol Hill/15th. Really, amazingly good sloppy sandwiches and other dishes. Sort of down home/souther kind of a feel. Perfect for lunch, not bad for dinner. No atmosphere, but really great food -- again, not the kind of thing I'd ever even think of making at home.  Despite the name, not quicker than a regular restaurant.  I believe the vegan options are numerous. http://www.hillsidequickie.com/

Not Vegetarian Exclusively.

A note on the criteria here: as above, there are a ton of good restaurants in Seattle. I find a lot of them to have one or two bland vegetarian options. And they tend toward a corporate blandness in their style and service that I also don't find that appealing. The list below is mainly slightly quirkier places with friendly staffs that have a bit of character and really good, flavorful food.  Except for Marco's, they are not convenient to downtown. But they are worth the trip.

Nice Dinner Spots: (ie. a nice evening out/nice atmosphere)

Marco's Supper Club. Italian joint in the near-downtown Belltown neighborhood. Not a ton of veggie variety on the menu, but everything I've ever had there has been superb. And the service has always been impeccable. Also, it really is a superclub, in that the table is yours for the evening, they are not going to try and rush you out. Courses are served slowly, one at a time. So take your time, get some wine, and spend 3 hours here.  With wine, about $50 each if  you do 3 courses and desert. Stand alone entree: about $15.  Well worth it if you have $50 to spend in one place on on one evening.  Reservations recommended, and they even have a small outside area for eating in the summer.  Great ambiance. (206) 441-7801 http://www.marcossupperclub.com/

Tamarind Tree. Theoretically Vietnamese, but it seems more pan-Asian at times. A few vegetarian items, but the thrill here is those that there are, are terrific. Start with Tamarind Tree roles. Yummy. Also recommended are the mango salad (with lemongrass tofu....to die for), and the Bahn tray: basially, you make your own salad roles. Fun and yummy. Also not very expensive for such a nice place, $8 entrees.  It's always busy after 7, any day of the week. Make reservations if you can.  On 12th and Jackson, just outside the International District. http://www.tamarindtreerestaurant.com/index.php

Kingfish Cafe. On Capitol Hill/19th, but not near much of anything. Southern cuisine, which as we know is not very vegetarian compliant. Once again, only one or two entrees are veggie, but the salads and desserts and sides are SO good, worth the trip. On the downside: no reservations, and there is often a very long wait on a weekend evening, sometimes even on weekdays.  Entrees run about $15.  The coconut cake is to die for. (206) 320-8757.http://www.thekingfishcafe.com/

Swingside Cafe. An Italian place in Fremont, though you'd never know it from the name. Very homey, cosy, converted house that seats not many at all. It's been a while since I was here, but they have a couple of signature dishes that are vegetarian -- try the aglio olio. (206) 633-4057. http://seattle.citysearch.com/profile/10774466/#

Slightly less expensive Dinner, more downscale, also good for Lunch:

Seattle has great Thai food. Here are some of my favorites, most have the $8-$10 entree.  Ayutthaya (206) 324-8833 (Pike/Pine neighborhood; Harvard and Pike); Noodle Ranch (206) 728-0463 (Belltown, actually more pan-asian, the thai salad is great).

Jamjuree (206) 323-4255 (on 15th Ave/Capitol Hill), I will single out for special mention in the Thai category. Food always good here. There's at least one vegetarian special each week, I usually just get that and am never disappointed. http://www.jamjuree.com/

Agua Verde: cafeteria-esque Mexican, probably my favorite Mexican place in Seattle, in the University District on the ship canal. You can rent a kayak here as well. If you go for lunch, arrive before noon or after 1:30 as it is packed at noon. Evenings (especially weekends) can be bad too.  This is because there is absolutely no other place of any merit in the U District. (206) 545-8570; www.aguaverde.com

Lunch:

Venus Cafe: in a nameless neighborhood (S. Lake Union?) north of downtown, this little joint, attached to the Mars Bar, has a bunch of great salads and sandwiches and a nice waitstaff. (206) 624-4516. http://www.cafevenus.com/

Than  Bros. Pho: the lunch deal of the century, they have a great veggie pho (a vietnamese noodle soup) for $3.85. Which I should warn you is the sole vegetarian option. On Broadway on Capital Hill. Good for a cheap dinner as well, but completely lacking in atmosphere. (206) 568-7218

 

Breakfast:

And by breakfast, I mean weekend breakfast/brunch.

Hi-Spot Cafe.  In Madrona, at the end of Union street. Great little cafe, with a great staff. Sometimes a wait, especially around 9 or 10am. Everything you might want for breakfast. (206) 325-7905. http://www.hispotcafe.com/

Portage Bay Cafe.  In the University District on Roosevelt Ave (also now in South Lake Union), a great place to go for breakfast/brunch. I love the 'pancake bar:' all the pancake toppings you could ever want, all laid our for you to help yourself.   They've changed their menu now, there are more veggie items on the lunch and dinner menu, but I haven't had them so can't vouch for them. (206) 547-8230 http://www.portagebaycafe.com/Home.html

The Brain Science Dot: hidden forces in human thinking

I'm not quite sure what to call this dot, nor really sure what it means, yet.  But I think it does fit somewhere into the world of the major dots I'm trying to connect, under the assumption that there are some key interacting forces in our culture (and maybe the world) that are driving current affairs and might provide some kind of hints as to what direction things are headed in, or conflicts that may await us.

If I'm moving toward something here, it's that we're not really all that much in control of ourselves and our perceptions of the world. According to many books I've been reading, there are unseen battles going on in our heads, which we are largely unaware of. These battles impact our ability to think and the actions we take.  Without doubt, these have always been around, and as a believer in evolution, they no doubt at one time served an important evolutionary purpose (or at least they did not have an evolutionary downside). I think what I'm starting to wonder is if there now might be some serious downsides to how our brains work, given the world we now live in.

Just a few thoughts here, I'm sure it's not all adding up to anything yet (damn my brain...maybe it's purposely trying to thwart me?).

• Randomness: our brains are hardwired to see patterns and meaning where there is none. Randomness may actually be threatening to our brains, so we actively ignore it, causing us to misinterpret the world.
• Evil is Easy to Get Used To: based on Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect, shows how easily it is we can accept 'evil' things that would otherwise shock us, based largely on whether we think that authorities have approved such actions. Calls into doubt whether any of us have any real moral compass of our own, when other pressures come into play.
• More than One Brain: it's not even clear that we're in charge of our own brains. They make up some of their own shit part of the time. Our brains are particularly bad at managing times when they are receiving contradictory information.
• We can't trust our own Perceptions: and finally, even the inputs we think we are getting are not very trustworthy. Of what does get in, the brain is editing and/or filling in the missing parts, sometimes to disasterous results. 
• We're completely unaware of our biases: check out this great website, which can tell you more about your unconscious biases than you really ever wanted to know. They are beyond our control. How can we be just if we are unaware of the reasons for the judgments we make?
• Lakoff has written extensively about the (invisible to most of us) frames that guide our lives, opinions and decisions.

So, are we in control of ourselves? Can we shape our own futures -- and especially, can we change our perceptions/how we are?  I think it's the idea that all of this is invisible to us, that we're unaware of it, that I find so interesting. It makes working logically through problems much more difficult if there are forces at play that logic has no bearing on.

When I was working as an artist, I was always most fascinated with unsurfacing ideas or notions that lay beneath the surface of the human psyche, to get people to be willing to question ideas or assumptions which they found so apparently obvious that they had never thought to question them. I guess that interest continues still.

Book: The Drunkard's Walk: how randomness rules our lives

Leonard Mlodinow
2008
272 pp
Rating: 4 out of 5

Quite a fascinating book, which I am sure I will not do credit to here, at least partially because the discussion of some mathematical concepts got a little beyond me at times. But mostly very readable, I would not want to frighten anyone away from reading the book because of some challenging math/logic problems.

The book's thesis is that humans are not very adept at understanding randomness. We seem to be built to recognize patterns, and so randomness is a little hard for us to recognize when it happens. The author points this out in several ways, but the two that stick with me are:

1. Things that are actually random can sometimes appear to have a pattern. Think about it, if random things happen enough times, at some point they will appear to be happening in a patterned way. It's built into the definition of randomness!  But we are easily (and gladly, it would seem) fooled into thinking there is an actual pattern.
2. We just really want to see patterns where there are none. Mlodinow points out many experiments that have pretty much proven this. We especially want (and try to) see patterns that confirm our existing biases when confronted with absolutely randomized series of events.

The book starts with a rather brilliant examination of why people tend to fixate on what are really pure coincidences as somehow meaningful or part of a pattern, or even worse yet, having some kind of direct causal link when there absolutely is none. I've always thought that of course, in an infinite universe, anything can occur, so of course 'miraculous' seeming coincidences are going to naturally (if you will) occur all the time. I find that most people are not very appreciative when one brings this up. Mlodinow explains that too.... as beings that tend to excel (again, proven in experiments) when we feel more in control of any situation, randomness is seen as tremendously disempowering.... and therefore threatening.

I think this is giving me an idea for a new dot... one that has to do wtih limitations of our own brains/perceptions, and how they interfere with us accurately understanding the world around us.

Gay Olympians

There were over 10,000 athletes competing in the Olympics. Exactly 10 of them were out gays and lesbians (9 lesbians, one gay man). Statistically, if you assume 5% of the population is gay or lesbian, there should be 500 gay and lesbian athletes at the games. So where are the other 490? Two possibilities: 1. They are there, they just aren't out. 2. Gay and Lesbians are still not welcome in athletics, so they are never given a chance to excel in this area.

Lesbians may well have had a different experience with their female PE teachers and coaches (which might also partly explain why 9 out of 10 out Olympic athletes are women), but for gay men, male athletic mentors are extremely hetero-normative. There isn't much space in male sports, from a very early age, to exhibit even androgynous qualities.

My guess is that both reasons are true. I happened (accidentally, if you can believe it) to be in Barcelona when the summer games were there in 92. Believe me, the gay clubs were full of athletes. Well, I presumed some of them were athletes, the weren't wearing numbers at the time.

What Straight People Think (thoughts on 'gay panic defense')

Do you ever read the comments after a newspaper article? It's a great way to find out what people really think. Because they can post their opinions there anonymously, I think they tend to tell the truth. I don't have any illusions that commenters on blog or article posts represent the mainstream of opinion, but I do think it exposes deeply and commonly held beliefs.

I tend to always look through the comments on mainstream sites (non-gay media sites) where the article has been about a gay-related issue. Recently, I came across this one from a newspaper with an update on the Lawrence King murder (this is the 15 year old student who was murdered by a classmate in a CA high school. King was bullied by McInerney, and his response was to turn it on his bully and so he pretended to flirt with him.). The tone of the comments is pretty civil compared to some I've seen, yet still exposes a bias towards LGBT people that I think the commenters don't even perceive as a bias. For example:

The King child was wrong by sexually harassing McInerney. He did not deserve to be killed, but sometimes people get pushed over the line. This is the schools responsibility to keep bully's from distracting students. The school was extremely lenient on King, allowing him to dress like a drag queen, allowing him to make sexual advances towards other students. I am so tired of Gays getting away with conduct that others would not get away with, because the authority is afraid of discrimination whiplash. The Gay community has used King as there political trophy child, maybe this is why he was guided by his Gay peers to be self expressive, which ultimately lead to his death.

This is one of the more blunt versions of this comment, but it appears throughout the comment section. Even people who seem to have a genuine 'tolerance' for gay people often have that tolerance disappear if gay people make their sexuality known. This is especially true if a gay man exhibits any kind of unwanted attention towards a straight man. Then the gloves are off, often literally. In these cases, most straight people seem to think that abusive retaliation is justified, or at least the situation is a mitigating factor that should be taken into account when determining a punishment. In fact, this line of reasoning has been upheld in many court cases. It's called the 'gay panic defense', and it argues that it's natural for men receiving unwanted gay advances to react violently. In fact, this type of defense has been used in many cases similar to the King case, quite successfully. Read the wikipedia entry for examples.

While I would agree that homophobia is becoming less acceptable in the US, I'm not sure how deeply held those beliefs are. This comes to the surface in a case like the King case. Did he somehow 'ask for it,' or did he 'bring it on himself'? Was McInerney's crime less so because King might have made him uncomfortalbe or through his actions questioned his manhood? Unfortunately, I think a majority of Americans would see credence in thes arguments. For me, it just shows how far we have to go still.

I really encourage you to read through all the comments on teh referenced article. You really start to get a sense of what Americans really think of LGBT people, in a way that (especially if you are gay or very gay supportive) you never hear in some of the gay-supportive envirionments many of us live in.

Fundamentalism Dot [The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism]

Karen Armstrong
2000
370 pp.

I haven't been blogging the books I've been reading lately (wow, for a year and a half!), but this one, The Battle for God, intersects with so many other books I've read, I had to put some notes down on paper screen.

The Battle for God, briefly, is the story of fundamentalist movements of the major monotheisms -- Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Her thesis, which I will not do justice to here, is that fundamentalism arose as a reaction to the Enlightenment. She traces the history since then (as well as events leading up to the Enlightenment) with a special concentration on the emergence of fundamentalism as a political force in the 20th century. Basically, she argues that for the first 1000 years of all these religions, no one would have dreamed to try and take the holy books literally. That ancient people's knew the difference between mythos (metaphor) and logos (reason/science), and that they were comfortable using them side by side. Only as reason came to dominate life in Europe did some religious believers start to confuse mythos and logos. She follows how that has played out over the centuries, eventually getting us to where we are in terms of Christian fundamentalists in the US, religious Zionists in Israel, and the Muslim jihadists seen in some Arab countries.

One of my long-term projects, and a major reason for this blog, is to try and connect the dots out there. There are a lot of complex, interacting forces at play in the world, which makes it very difficult to understand the reasons why things are as they are, and why things play out the way they do. I keep thinking there must be a way to isolate and define a few key drivers. Hence, the dots. I think that fundamentalism, as explained by Armstrong, probably ranks as one of the dots. [Other dots covered so far are Globalization and Framing/Linguistics. A dot that I still need to work on is Masculinity, mainly based on Susan Faludi's brilliant book Stiffed.]

The rise of fundamentalism pretty neatly fits into these other cultural happenings. Fundamentalism and Globalization are deeply intertwined, and by globalization in this case I mean exploration/colonization that started hundreds of years ago. Presumably, fundamentalism wouldn't be the force it is if Europeans hadn't both come to the Americas as well as done the Crusades, as well as economically controlled/colonized the Middle East in the 20th Century. The kind of literalist backlash that is fundamentalism is of course exactly what Lakoff is describing in Don't Think of an Elephant . . . a kind of thinking that some find basically impossible to understand. Armstrong's book goes a long way to explaining the (religiously) conservative mind set: it's a fundamental focus on the past as the best possible time, which therefore needs to be recreated. Liberal thinkers (or Enlightenment-thinkers/believers in science/technology) focus on the best times being ahead in the future. If you are focused on recreating the past, of course more change is bad... especially unknown change.

As Armstrong explains it, fundamentalism is basically a by-product of the speedy progress that started happening with the Enlightenment. It might have been inevitable, but it was definitely hastened (and deepened?) by people feeling very threatened by the new world that was envisioned by the elite few at the time that could see the power of science. Basically, science did a really bad job of bringing people along, and we're still feeling the backlash. [Also explained much more eloquently than I have here.]

Armstrong doesn't write about this, but of course it's pretty much all men both pushing the enlightenment side, as well as leading the reactionary fundamentalist side. I haven't really thought through the why of this -- there could be many causal or non-causal relationships in there -- I'm just saying. There's some kind of drive for power/control that's very male... or maybe as Faludi would put it, there's some male reaction to loss of power/control that's very dangerous for our society.

Anyway, I think the book goes a long ways to explaining why things are as screwed up today as they are. Why there are fundamental splits within societies (ie. 50/50 split elections) as well as between societies (US hegemony vs. Muslim self-rule, for eg). Why people 'vote against their own interests' (they aren't!). How it is that the balance of power can be held by a small, radical few in the world we've built.