I predicted - in Rebellion - the Obama win but not how quickly it would come. Thus, I recently scrambled for two weeks, dialing numbers of Republicans, hanging bags of flyers on mailboxes, and putting up signs for McCain/Palin...or more correctly, for Palin/McCain. I also predicted in this Forum the "inevitability of McCain" in a contest with Hillary. As it happened, a "more progressive" than McCain appeared, the economy crashed, and our invaders were fairly well behaved. Thus, 57 million of us moved into a swarm, a "behavioral sync," with a hypnotic scoundrel. Mark Steyn's observations describe the growth of emergent networks - "governments" - at the cost of other living forms. Whether a religion, a government, or a business, winner-take-all is a problems solved by collapse and recycling by invaders.

JimB

From National Review OnLine: Mark Steyn on "The Death of the American Idea"

"Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to "go left." Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter. Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It's pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. Doesn't make any difference who controls Congress, who's in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are "moderates" or "conservatives" (ie, the center and the right) and barely 20 per cent are "liberals." And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just resumes its inexorable growth."

More at http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...c4Y2FjNzI4MjA=

References
Brody J (2006) Life's Organized in a Tinker Toy Way. Poster presentation at the XVIII Congress, International Society for Human Ethology, Detroit, MI, July 31-August 3. 32 pp, approx 60 refs.
Brody J (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. (Especially chapters 3 & 4.)
Brody J (2008) Individualism and How Things Grow in Physics. Presentation to SpringFord Rotary Club, Royersford, PA., May 14.
Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer. Esp. pp 75-76.
Steyn, Mark (2008) The Death of an Idea: Americans Living High Off the Entitlement Bag. National Review on Line, November 8. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...c4Y2FjNzI4MjA=