For a long time now the NHL has settled ties, after a suitable overtime period, with a shootout. The reason they went to this format is the typical American fan hates a tie result and they hate seeing games go on for hours with no result. At least they think the fans hate ties. For some reason soccer fans seem to be OK with ties, but then again soccer fans are not really sports fans. There’s also the television factor. The TV people want the games to last a predictable length of time in order to sell ads

Regardless, the motivation for adding the shootout was not due to some practical issue of accounting. The NHL managed just fine for decades without the shootout. It was an attempt to address what they thought was a concern of casual fans and it was a way to add some excitement. Shootouts are fun, even if you think they are stupid. It’s not hockey, but it is a competition, one with something at stake. That’s the appeal of sports, seeing men match wits, skill and strength with one winning and one losing.

The thinking way back when was that teams would seek to avoid the shootout and take risks in regulation and overtime in order to avoid the luck of the shootout. Hockey people think of the shootout as random chance. Elite scorers will beat elite goalies more often than not. It is really not a test of the goalie’s skill. It is more random chance. Even if that is not true and skill plays some role, the players and fans think it is chance. Therefore, the players should be desperate to avoid it. That’s was the thinking.

The trouble is it did not work out that way. At first it seemed to, but it has settled into the same old routine with the road team playing for a tie late in regulation and overtime, figuring the odds favor them. They get the point for the tie and a 50/50 chance of getting the shootout point. It is quite rational if you do the math. Playing for the tie means a 90% chance of getting one point. It also means a 50% of getting the additional point. A little math means that approach is worth 1.4 points.

Throwing caution to the wind and going for the win means the game ends in a loss 50% of the time (let’s assume). That’s one point – 50% of 2 points for a win. For the “go for the win” strategy to make sense, you would need a win chance of greater than 70%, which is unlikely, even for the top teams. Obviously, if you had such an advantage, you would not be headed into overtime often enough to care. You would win 70% of your games and the risk of losing in overtime would not matter very much.

Turns out hockey teams are not that dumb after all.

Now the NHL is thinking about changing the rules to get rid of the shootout. The main motivation is that it is stupid to decide games this way. After that, they are finding that NHL teams are doing the simple math I described above and responding to risk in a rational way. Modifying overtime by taking a skater off the ice will change the math. The teams with better skaters will have some new advantages. It’s an effort to add more risk to over time in order to encourage risk take by certain teams in regulation.

The other thing they could do is change the points. A win should be three points and the ties one point. Let’s do the math again. Playing for the win, assuming the same 50/50 probability, results in 1.5 points while the tie is just a point. Add back in the advantages and disadvantages of 4-on-4 hockey and you get a lot more teams either winning in OT or desperate to avoid OT, thus playing to win in regulation.  The result could lead to more exciting finishes and far fewer ties. The teams will figure it out and act accordingly.

Jim Geraghty has an interesting post over at National Review. I think a lot of people watching Obama stagger around from screw-up to screw-up  are revising their opinion of the man. Since he gave his first national speech at the democrat convention in 2004, his supporters have been telling us he is the smartest guy on the planet. They argued that he could manage the details as well as keep his eye on the big picture.

The PR machine of the Left we call the media amplified these claims to the point where even Obama antagonists bought into them. Steve Sailer has written that Obama probably had above average LSAT scores and therefore is above average IQ. That’s a far cry from genius, but it shows how widespread the belief in Obama’s intellect. It also shows that most people confuse above average with genius. Obama is no genius.

Generally speaking, we expect smart people to do smart things. At the minimum, we expect them to avoid obviously dumb things. When someone hailed as a combination of Jefferson, Lincoln, JFK and Einstein starts doing and saying stupid things, it comes as a shock to the believers. It’s that old saw about reality versus expectations. When Obama fails, it feels worse to his admirers because they expect perfection from him.

The missing piece, I think, is that Obama was not hired for his ideas. The party has been looking for their Reagan for three decades. They thought they had it with Clinton, but he was too much of a degenerate to make it work. Obama was “clean and articulate” without a “negro dialect.” In other words, he was black, but not that black. Like Reagan, he could read his lines with conviction. That was the lesson the Left drew from Reagan.

I’ve often mentioned that no one quotes an Obama speech. You never hear anyone reminisce about listening to one of his speeches. For a man allegedly a mix of Cicero and Patrick Henry, he has yet to coin a phrase or even capture a moment. Along the same lines, no one has ever talked about Obama’s ideas or his philosophy, other than when taking shots at him. He’s a guy who seems to leave no foot prints.

During his first campaign, commentators focused solely on his image. Clinton’s obvious frustration with his lack of specifics and the media’s willingness to skip over it was hilarious. They would hammer her over some minor detail about one of her schemes, while ignoring the fact Obama was spouting gibberish. In that one debate, she was about o throw a chair when no one challenged Obama’s vacuous answers to questions.

That’s thing. Obama was never hired to set policy or manage the party. His job was to be the right face in front of the public. He is the chief pitchman. Instead of selling mops or penis pills, he is pitching the party. The stimulus bill is a great example. He had zero input, as it was written by his party in Congress. His job was to not ask questions, sign the bill and read the copy from the teleprompter when selling it to the public.

The health care bill was similar, with the exception being he had to sell it before it was written. In that case, he sold the product brochure, since there was no product. If the insider reports are correct, Obama seems to get this and embrace it. He’s simply not that interested in the other stuff anyway. Instead, he can watch TV all day, then go out for a speech and cool reception some place. It’s an easy gig for him.

Obama, however, is not devoid of ego. At some level, he has to resent the hell out of the fact he is just a decoration for the white liberals who created him. There are some people happy to be puppets, so maybe he is one of them. We’ll know when he is out of office of he was happy as the organ grinder’s monkey. If he disappears into quiet retirement, then we’ll know he was fine with being a stooge. If does a Clinton, then we’ll know otherwise.

The title of this bit is from Stever Sailer. Unsurprisingly, he recognized long ago that the JFK narrative was just another instance of white on white crime. That is, northern whites (whites who identify with northern attitudes on race) against southern whites. The mythology is that northern whites are tolerant and open minded, while southern whites are uneducated bigots.

That means you can be southern white while growing up in New Hampshire, as long as you say bad things about non-whites and shop at WalMart. On the other hand, many whites in suburban Atlanta are preachy about race, loath southern culture and therefore qualify as northern white. It’s good white versus bad white. The JFK killing shows the divide quite clearly as we see in this insane NYTimes piece.

FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

It will miss yet another opportunity this year. On Nov. 22 the city, anticipating an international spotlight, will host an official commemoration ceremony. Dallas being Dallas, it will be quite the show: a jet flyover, a performance from the Naval Academy Men’s Glee Club and remarks from the historian David McCullough on Kennedy’s legacy.

But once again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called, just moments before his death, “nut country.”

In other words, bad whites killed the hero of good whites and they refuse to accept blame for it. Never mind that Kennedy hated black people and seemed to admire Hitler. His old man was a Nazi so the apple does not fall far from the tree. The fact is JFK was killed by a quintessentially good white named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a communist who tried to defect to Russia. Oswald would have fit in with Bernadine Dorn.

Then we have the fact that a bad white pushed through Civil Rights and was quite fond of black people, going back to the 1930’s. Johnson was a lot like Woodrow Wilson, in that he went against his inclinations and his native culture in order to fit it, but he was never accepted by the good whites. These inconvenient facts are airbrushed out of the narrative, as it inconsistent with the mythology of the good whites.

There’s another way to distinguish the tribal differences. LBJ was perfectly at home rubbing elbows with blacks. He got his start in politics by helping blacks get to the polls and actually voting. Granted, they were voting for him, but it shows his natural affinity for black people. Kennedy, on the other hand, despised blacks and made sure he was never around them. He thought MLK was a threat to the nation.

But, the truth is never important in mythology.

First, an old joke:

A young boy needs help with his grade school paper so he decides to ask his father. “Daddy, I have to do a paper on the difference between theory and reality. Can you help me?”

The father responds, “Well son, do you know what those words mean?”

“Yes, but I could use an example.”

The father thinks for a minute then tells his son to run upstairs and ask his sister if she would sleep with a complete stranger for 1 million dollars.

The kid goes upstairs and comes running back down, “Daddy, daddy, she said she would!”

The father then tells the kid to go into the kitchen and ask his mother if she would sleep with a complete stranger for a million dollars.

The kid goes to the kitchen and comes back, “Daddy, daddy, she said she would too!”

The father says, “There you go son. Theoretically we are sitting on 2 million bucks but in reality we’re living with a couple of whores.”

This excellent blog post brought that old gag to mind. Anyone with experience bidding government IT projects knows exactly why ObamaCare is collapsing. Not just the website, which is a bit player in this story. The whole thing is collapsing.  This is a good insight:

This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem. The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.

Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.

Social democracies like ours take this approach with all projects. It is why government seems to be getting increasingly inept. Fifty years ago NASA could go from zero to moon landing in five years. Seventy years ago America went from no army and in depression to conquering the world while beating Hitler and Tojo within a decade. Today, they can’t build a website in five years. Here we are 12 years on and the World Trade Center is not completed. The Empire State building was built in a year, start to occupancy. Contra the blogger, it is not just technology. It is everything. Obama announced last week that he and his team were stunned to learn that insurance is complicated. How is it possible that an American could possibly have made it to adulthood not knowing this?

That’s the lesson here with ObamaCare. The people in charge only have a vague understanding of how our highly complex modern society works. They know America through polling, policy debates and campaigning. The political class is thoroughly insulated from the land over which they rule. In many respects, they are the English ruling France during the 100 Years War. The managerial class, public and private, is similarly insulated, but not completely. The public side is immune from the consequences of the rulers but they deal with the subjects enough to know a fair bit about reality in these lands. Their loyalties, however, are to the political class as evidenced by the Census and IRS scandals.

In that regard, ObamaCare is emblematic of what’s wrong and a good proxy for what we can expect going forward.

The argument for forcing Nixon out of office was that he was an imperial president, who violated the norms of democracy. That is, he had no respect for the law and as a result a lawless environment evolved in the White House. It was, of course, a justification intended to hide the truth. Nixon was hated by the Left because he was an aggressive anti-communist in the 1950’s. The Left could never forgive him for his attacks on the Left, so they could never accept him as a legitimate president. He had to go.

The charges against Nixon were always nonsense, even on the dubious moral grounds promoted by the Left. Woodrow Wilson was recklessly used his power to suppress the media. He jailed 10,000 Americans for opposing his war. FDR trampled all over the concept of republic, promoting a program that looked a like Italian fascism. Compared to those two, Nixon was a piker. Most of the stuff Nixon was doing was done under his predecessors. Kennedy and Johnson loved spying on people.

That said, a healthy self-governing society should have a fair amount of transparency and the political class should be deeply invested in the rules. Once the people in office lose respect for the rules, the road to authoritarianism opens, as the rules lose their moral power. In other words, adherence to the rules is purely practical, rather than a matter of status within the ruling class itself. People obey the rules if they benefit them and violate the rules if that works. No one is ashamed of breaking the rules.

We’re seeing this with Team Obama. They figured out how to use the IRS as a political weapon, stocking the upper ranks with their people who set about harassing the political enemies of Obama. Today brings word that the Census Bureau has come in for similar treatment. They faked the unemployment numbers leading up to the election. That naturally calls into question all of the other economic reports. It may also explain how the regional reports never seem to square with the national statistics.

This is very serious stuff. In a modern economy, information is currency. Like money, it can be debased. When people lose faith in the currency, they lose faith in the entity issuing it. Trust in government is near record lows and that’s with a national media out waving pom-poms for the ruling class. Imagine where things go if the press throws in the towel on these people. It may not matter as no one trusts the press anymore anyway.

Of course, that same poll shows that the people no longer trust the most democratic institution in the nation – Congress. Fifty years ago, the alleged culture of lawlessness in the Nixon White House was enough to force out the president. Here we have actual corruption, real violations of the basic trust. Yet, the political class cannot bring itself to even discuss it, much less act on it. The old line about silence being consent is overused, but it applies here. Lawlessness is now the law of the land.

Of course, you have to wonder what else they are doing. if they are willing to abuse the IRS, are they willing to abuse the FBI or the CIA? They corrupted the FBI by installing true believers into the leadership layer. What happens if they do the same with the FBI? What are the chances the media would look into it? If they are willing to excuse the abuse of the IRS, why would they raise an alarm over other abuse? This sounds far-fetched, but ten years ago the IRA stuff seemed far-fetched, but here we are anyway.

Growing up when and where I did, I’m familiar with racism. I never experienced it or witnessed anyone cause harm to another because of their race, but I grew up hearing stories about it, mostly in school. In my home, my parents took the view that treating people of different races poorly was rude. In public, you never aired your opinions about race or other races. It was just rude and we were instructed to never do it.

My first real exposure to a real honest to goodness racist was through a black schoolmate. His father or uncle, I no longer remember, refused to speak with or do business with white people. This was most likely just a boast, as I don’t think it would be possible, even today. My friend told it to me because he thought it was funny and assumed I would think it was funny, which I did. At that age, it was ridiculous.

But, in adulthood I learned like everyone else that race is a thorny subject. All the school lectures remained mythical for someone my age or younger. Only old people now recall when discrimination was permitted. Anyone under the age of fifty grew up watching integrated sports and entertainment, went to integrated schools and worked in jobs with people of other races. Still, race hovers over everything. Jim Crow has been talked to death, but other race issues have been forbidden for so long people no longer know how to discuss them.

One such example is black racism. In America it is OK for a black person to be a public bigot. Al Sharpton has made a career out of being a public bigot. Blacks gladly embrace their racism and think nothing of it. In fact, the people in charge encourage blacks and now the other non-whites groups, to root for their own team and root against whites.  This story buried in the news is a perfect example. Black voters elected a white guy because they thought he was black.

What’s left unsaid, but everyone knows, is he would have had no shot running as a white guy. Despite the fact the voters agreed with him, they would never have voted for him over a black guy. The old white guy obviously knew this and acted accordingly. There’s some attempt to say other factors decided the election, but the fact that the winner actively concealed the fact he is white says he knew what he was doing. He rightly figured out that the incumbent was unpopular, but blacks would never vote against one of their own.

My own view is we would be wise to decouple official racism from personal opinion. Times change and opinions change. Young people today don’t think the word “nigger” has any more emotional value than any other word. I hear young people, white and black, use it amongst themselves. In my day that was a sign of poor upbringing. Whites and black avoided the term out of self-respect. Young people are probably right to devalue it. Some things should be left in the past and archaic racial terms are a good candidate for the memory hole.

At the same time, rooting for your own side or wanting to be around your own kind is perfectly normal. Private discrimination is just a fact of life. Lecturing people about just creates this weird sense of terror. If your private words or private actions are revealed, your life can be destroyed, because you will be condemned as a racist. Unless you’re black or Hispanic or whatever else is washing up in American. Peaceful separation should be the norm and not condemned.

Official racism, however, is not something we should tolerate because it is incompatible with a free society. Even if you think the free society stuff is just nonsense, official racism is unworkable and always fails. As a white guy, I don’t want my government discriminating on racial lines, because it makes my government unnecessarily expensive. That and it gives them an excuse to play favorites within my tribe, not just for my tribe.

That said, I know this will never happen.

Here is the text of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

This gave women the right to vote anywhere it had been denied up to that point. It is worth noting that many states had extended the franchise to women to some degree. Most sensible people, men and women, knew this was a mistake and kept fighting the idea long after the Amendment passed. The story of female suffrage has been rewritten to fit the modern feminist narrative, but people at the time, including many women, knew this was a bad idea.

For over 4,000 years, people understood the foolishness of allowing women to directly participate in governance. The play, Lysistrata, was written in 411 BC. Fast forward 2300 years and women’s suffrage in America gave us, to quote Judge Roy Bean, “and everything went to hell. While our boys was overseas fighting the Kaiser, the women got Prohibition put in. Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.”

A recent example is the election in Virginia. The Republican lost narrowly to former Clinton bag man, Terry McAuliffe. Most sensible people clearly viewed McAuliffe as a sociopathic maniac, who should never have access to government power. Blacks voted for McAuliffe 98-2. Anyone familiar with the history of sub-Saharan Africa or Detroit knows the story here. That was predictable.

The difference maker was single women. They allegedly went for the lunatic by 42%! In contrast, the Republican won married women by 9 points. Anyone having spent a small amount of time on earth knows that married white women are vastly more sensible than single white women. Married women will share their husband’s suspicion of the state, as a natural threat to family life. Single women see the state as their sugar daddy. The gap between the two groups with regards to voting is stunning.

This is nothing new. The democrats have based their rise to power on the vote of barren spinsters and college sluts. In the 2012 election, they ran a campaign based on the argument that Mitt Romney wanted to rape single white women. It worked. It was not just single white women in that case. Many married white women fell for the argument that Romney wanted sew their legs shut. Women, it turns out get less stupid once married, but a large number remain fools even after landing a man.

Democracy is a terrible way to run a society, but if you are going to have it, you have to limit the vote to people capable of thinking beyond their narrow interests. Girls are too hormonal to make rational choices, so they should be spared the burden of voting. It may even make sense to bar single men up to a certain age, like 25. Regardless, taking the vote from single women is the only way forward that can maintain this fragile democracy.

It’s increasingly difficult to be a normal man and engage in the general culture. One reason is the people in the content business, especially the news business, seem like they are from another planet. They say things that are so at odds with daily reality you wonder if they ever go outside. Of course, most of what they write and say is propaganda. They don’t think of it that way. They are just enthusiastically repeating the articles of faith of their class. The news is just a hallelujah chorus for the cult of modern liberalism.

A good example is the brouhaha over the Miami Dolphins drama. The sports press, despite not knowing any details, has crafted this elaborate narrative into which they are going to force the participants. The “culture in the locker room” is one element. All of those terrible alpha males, you see. Of course, the white guy is pure evil because he used the magic word, despite doing in front of black guys who were laughing and egging him on while everyone is partying. The semi-black guy is the victim, despite no one on his team coming to his defense.

One reason for this weird disconnect is that the sporting press is dominated by beta males who find traditional male behavior threatening and distasteful. There’s a class element too. Football players may have gone to college, but football is decidedly working class. You don’t excel in the sport without being a physically tough man. To be a physically tough man means rejecting a central part of modern liberal culture. Like cops, football players accept the human condition at face value, which means accepting the biological diversity.

Another reason for this is Progressive culture is feminine. Women can be ruthless, but they don’t have the same hierarchical view of social organization as males. Men compete to establish the pecking order in the group. Women compete for the attention of males. That’s how the general culture operates now. George Bush once said, something along the lines that if one person hurts, government must act. That’s the general view of the over class. It is not winners and losers, it is just losers. As long as there are losers, no one can be a winner.

That’s why sports reporting is so weird. Normal men look at this story and just assume the one guys is a pussy and the other guys are assholes. Every normal man knows the world is divided into predators, victims and the men who make the world run. At the fringes, like a locker-room or a prison, the predators attack the weak.  So many of the people in the sports media grew up as victims of the playground bullies, they can’t understand what they are covering.

Technological leaps change how humans relate to the natural world and to one another, but they can also change people. The reason is the technological leap changes the environment of people in ways that change selection pressure. The move from hunter gatherer to agriculture is a good example. The sorts of traits that are favored by the former is not the same that is favored by the latter. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending made this case in the book The 10,000 Year Explosion.

The thing is though, the changes are slow. There’s never been a technological change that has killed off a portion of the population carrying some mutation deemed deleterious in the new technological environment. The changes described by Cochran and Harpending happened over many generations. A person living in the 5th century was not all that different from a person living in the same place during the 10th century. People got a little smarter, a little more peaceful, but people remained essentially the same.

We could be on the cusp of the first great biological revolution introduced by human technological advance. If this is true, and it is most likely is true, the next great technological advance will change humans. If we can alter the DNA of human embryos, we will alter the DNA of human embryos. All the blather about bioethics is just that, as we have seen in every other human endeavor. If people can do it, and see an advantage in doing it, then people will do it, no matter the ethical implications.

Since most of the limits on our life spans are genetic, the most logical use of such technology is to extend our lives. This could be something done on fully formed humans at some point. This would not require changing our DNA, but changing how certain genes express. Of course, “fixing” genetic defects in the embryo could eliminate a wide ranges of diseases. The result of that is a new generation of humans capable of living much longer and living a much healthier than all previous humans.

There may be a hard coded upper limit to life span that is beyond genetics, but curing the diseases of old age would be well within the realm of possible. Aldus Huxley probably got it exactly right when he described a future where humans lived in their prime years right up until death. Since every human culture is based around the inevitability of death, big chunks of it become useless. Why bother developing a relationship with God, for example, if you will never meet him. Immortality redefines mortality.

Of course, another logical step is to improve off-spring. As soon as parents can pay to increase the good traits in their children, they will do it. If we can change our DNA to increase IQ, we will. Getting faster, bigger, stronger, better looking and whatever else we want could be possible if science can alter the DNA. How long before the Chinese create a class of nine foot guys with sprinter speed and near perfect coordination so they can dominate the Olympics? The bet is a week after they figure out how to do it.

Of course, this is still science fiction. The amount we know about the human genome is a drop in the ocean of what can be known. Having a general understanding of genes and gene mutation is a long way from making super men. Still, technology has a habit of moving quickly. It’s also possible we don’t have to know a whole lot in order to make better people or cure some diseases. As agriculture showed, small changes can have enormous downstream consequences of human beings.

Ken Cuccinelli, the failed gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, is a bit of mystery, unless you live in Virginia or you are a political junkie. He was the attorney general and he is conservative on social issues. No one claims he wants to stone gays in public or horse whip adulterers, so he is probably conventional in his politics. He appears to be the standard issue socially conservative Republican that has been around for years.

Terry McAuliffe, in contrast, is a well-known quantity. He is a sociopath, who spent most of the 1990’s defending the indefensible on cable chat shows.  Political flaks are notorious liars, much like attorneys and boxing promoters, but this guy was unusually slimy. The aging shock jock, Don Imus, told him to his face that he makes him want to bleach his eyeballs after seeing him. The guy’s post-Clinton career was one shady business deal after another, all involving ripping off taxpayers. He’s now the governor of Virginia.

This is why democracies murder themselves, or at least why we say it. There is a large number of adults in every population incapable of participating in public decisions. They are stupid, lazy or criminal. They lack the ability to put aside their narrow immediate interests in favor of the long-term interests of society. In the case of Virginia, a large number of voters live in NoVa and work in do-nothing jobs for the government or for do-nothing government contractors.

In the Tidewater area and around Richmond, you have large numbers of blacks who look at the government as their sugar daddy. Anyone promising more hand-outs gets their vote and the democrat is always the one promising more handouts.  Added to that are South American peasants, who are allowed to vote. That reason is they will gladly vote for the Democrat. In fact, they will let someone vote for them, so they don’t have to show up at the polls. Election fraud and immigration are almost synonymous now.

McAuliffe went around the state promising these folks he would rob the taxpayers and property holders and give some of it to these various welfare cases. Of course, they voted for him. It is a microcosm of what is going in in the country. The number of people in favor of robbing the productive class has grown to a point where you must get some of that vote in order to win. The deadbeats are oddly motivated to vote.The taxpayer is often so discouraged, they don’t bother. 

Then there is the morality angle. The Democrats turn every race into a referendum on the bad whites, those people who oppose immigration, want tom live free of blacks and and think local autonomy is a good thing. They are the bad guys, because they are the bad whites who are not ashamed to be white. That means your choice in an election is often between two good whites or between a good white and bad white. Publicly supporting the bad white is to go against public morality and no one relishes that.

This is nothing new. The Greeks eventually voted themselves to death. Alcibiades was the Bill Clinton of his day. He had no real accomplishments to his name, but he was able to charm the average Greek. In fact, he charmed them into invading Sicily, which brought Greek democracy to a bad end. The Romans eventually abandoned democracy for a dictator, leading to such wonderful guys as Caligula, but even a degenerate lunatic is often viewed as an upgrade of a champion of democracy like Terry McAuliffe.