The ongoing debate on the plans to raise the debt ceiling in Washington has stimulated interesting ideas on how this can be resolved. One of the more innovative ideas comes from watching rogue elephants- yes indeed!
In the animal world, it seems that male elephants, to achieve their mating goals, will sometimes play games of chicken, with one individual essentially giving the impression that he is crazy and has become an irrational player in a game premised on shared rationality and predictability.
According to Barash, this is " a tactic that works surprisingly well, because male elephants can in fact become temporarily “crazy.” One of the most terrifying sights in the animal world is an elephant in a state of must : huge bulls, oozing a weird, foul-smelling, greenish glop from glands near their eyes, behave with violent abandon, taking risks and defying the basic rules of pachyderm propriety. " If they remind you of the tea party fanatics in the Republican party today, it is merely a coincidence !
Normally facing an elephant in must, other elephants — not to mention people — are well advised to get out of the way. But what you really need to do: stop playing the game. In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” an errant military supercomputer has a final moment of lucidity in which it notes, “The only winning move is not to play.”
The president is best advised to do the same: declare that the other side has foregone all pretense at rational legitimacy, and simply proceed to govern as best he can for the good of the country.
In the animal world, it seems that male elephants, to achieve their mating goals, will sometimes play games of chicken, with one individual essentially giving the impression that he is crazy and has become an irrational player in a game premised on shared rationality and predictability.
According to Barash, this is " a tactic that works surprisingly well, because male elephants can in fact become temporarily “crazy.” One of the most terrifying sights in the animal world is an elephant in a state of must : huge bulls, oozing a weird, foul-smelling, greenish glop from glands near their eyes, behave with violent abandon, taking risks and defying the basic rules of pachyderm propriety. " If they remind you of the tea party fanatics in the Republican party today, it is merely a coincidence !
Normally facing an elephant in must, other elephants — not to mention people — are well advised to get out of the way. But what you really need to do: stop playing the game. In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” an errant military supercomputer has a final moment of lucidity in which it notes, “The only winning move is not to play.”
The president is best advised to do the same: declare that the other side has foregone all pretense at rational legitimacy, and simply proceed to govern as best he can for the good of the country.
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