Why do some people hate Barack Obama? Is it because he’s black?

Why do people try to climb Mt. Everest? Because they can.

There are literally over 7 billion people on this planet. If you asked (even just the English-speakers) what the answer to 2+2 is, you would get probably get multiple percentage points worth of people not saying 4.

If you ever get a job calling people on the phone and asking them about their opinions (which I did for about a year in college), I can virtually guarantee that you will be shocked at the number of people who say things that are completely ridiculous, dumb, and/or based on obvious factual inaccuracies.

I worked for a summer in a congressional office, and I didn’t answer the phones (luckily), but there was this one guy who just kept calling and asking ridiculous questions about President Obama’s positions, and the weird thing is that we were pretty sure he actually believed what he was saying.

So, yeah, there are a shockingly large number of people that are just unimaginably dumb, or downright crazy. But, there are a few more answers to your question:

1) Yes, some people hate Obama because he is black. Probably something like 5% of the population would actually admit that they hate him because of his race. Another 5%-10% of the country is likely influenced by a more subtle, but still substantial racist element. Perhaps they feel threatened in general or they are afraid of what he represents. Perhaps they are afraid that their kids or grandkids might someday NOT be on top of the world, and their natural instinct is to try to make sure that “someone” from some other demographic stays down.

a) NOTE: People’s satisfaction with their lives is largely relative, not absolute.If you ask people whether they are happy with their standard of living, people in first world countries who have running water, televisions, computers, cars, and savings will say “no” because they are comparing themselves to those around them. In that sense, then, being part of the “in” crowd, or the group that is on top is by definition a zero-sum game.

2) There is this psychological effect called “lens vision.” People CRAVE stability in their lives, and especially in their perspective of the world. Partisan identification starts to develop in childhood before most people are capable of seriously vetting issues. Then, later, when they are confronted with a statistic or an argument that undermines the supremacy of their choice, they subconsciously look for a way to justify retention of their partisan ideology. The result is that in a world where sociopolitical issues are complex, it is very difficult to change someone’s partisan identity. When people’s partisan identity DOES change, it is usually because it didn’t mesh well with that of the people around them.

In other words, partisan ideology is as at least as much about identity and social relationships as it is about actual issues.

In that context, it should not be hard to see how the story unfolds: In the information age, as it becomes increasingly possible for people to segregate into communities where they only live near people that are like them, where it is possible to only get news from news sources that don’t piss you off (news sources that match your ideology), people begin to experience an amplified “echo chamber” effect: The people around you, the news, and your own gut all tell you the same thing, and they all reflect and amplify eachother, reinforcing your partisan identity and your lens vision, and generating increasingly strong sentiments about political issues.

Due to your partisan tunnel vision, you don’t realize that you haven’t actually thoroughly vetted a lot of the things that you say. You aren’t particularly careful about how you say what you say, since you are already pretty sure that you are right.

HERE’S THE KICKER: People in the other party are going through the same process. They are certain that they are right. They are overly certain about the things that they say, and don’t adequately vet themselves.

Then, people from opposing partisan ideologies get into a conversation, and it quickly escalates. Over multiple conversations, dormant emotional memories arise irrationally to the surface and cause increasingly quick emotional escalation. The more emotions rise, the less the parties bother to vet themselves, and the less credence they give to the other party’s opinions and perceptions. In other words, they trust themselves MORE and the other party LESS. Since this process is occurring on both sides, it becomesincreasingly difficult to find compromise, because you are both demanding an extraordinary burden of proof from eachother both to prove one’s own point, AND to dissuade the other from his/her irrational position. You both rightly feel that the other party is being unfair, and you eventually give up and go back to your echo chamber to complain.

CONCLUSION

To a greater or lesser extent, this cycle of doom is responsible for the increasing partisan rancor in the United States. There are a lot of factors, but they all seem to feed on eachother. In the end, it is hardly surprising that you end up with a shockingly large percentage of Republicans who believe the most asinine things about President Obama, and have actual hatred for a man that they have never even met.

If nothing else, they hear infuriating things about him on a near-daily basis from their colleagues, friends, news sources, and (Republican) elected representatives. They can’t understand how he can believe such infuriating liberal nonsense, or they see him as the face of hypocrisy and greed (redistribution). Perhaps they see him as a threat (or a representation of a threat) to their lifestyle. Perhaps they believe that HE hates THEM.

I fancy myself as a fairly intelligent, even-tempered person, and an experienced debater. But even I have difficulty sometimes with keeping political discussions cool and focused. For people who are not experienced, or who are less intent on keeping the discussion under control, it is hardly surprising that emotions accelerate and leave ordinary americans spitting bile at one another.

President Obama SHOULD Make Death a Taxable Event

I recently stumbled across a Forbes article complaining that President Obama would like to make death a taxable event. The article was referencing a January 17th, 2015 press release that called for, among other things, a new realization event when appreciated property is received by gift or bequest.

Vocabulary

In tax law terminology, if you own property that increases in value (or “appreciates”), you have “income” because your net wealth has increased. But, the tax code doesn’t usually make you “realize” that income (and pay taxes on it) until you actually sell the property and “realize” the income.

Why? We are concerned that you won’t have money to pay the tax, or the value of the property might go back down before you sell it, or we didn’t have an easy way of accurately measuring its value in the first place. It just wouldn’t be feasible or enforceable.

The tax law has both “realization” events and “recognition” events. You have to both realize income and have the tax law recognize that you realized the income, otherwise you don’t have to pay tax — yet.

The amount of money you pay for a property is its “basis.” Basis gets adjusted by certain things, and so your “adjusted basis” is supposed to represent your investment in a property. The actual fair market value of the property minus the basis equals the amount of income/gain that is built into the property, and which can be realized/recognized at an appropriate event.

So what is the problem? 

Americans decided long ago that 1) people shouldn’t pay taxes at death; and 2) the heirs shouldn’t have to pay taxes on appreciation that occurred when they didn’t have control of the appreciated property. Hence, the “stepped-up basis” rule. When you die, the basis in the property is automatically “stepped up” to fair market value at the time of death.

Ordinarily, realization and recognition rules only ever delay taxation on income. But, the stepped-up basis rule means that if you can hold off on selling those stocks of Apple that you bought back in the 1980’s long enough, then neither you, nor anyone you know or love will EVER have to pay taxes on your gains.

Take, for example, a hypothetical guy named Larry. Larry decides to found a massive corporation and call it Moracal. Since he built it from the ground up, his basis in his personal Moracal shares is approximately $0. Decades later, Larry’s net worth is around $50 billion. But Larry is getting old. He knows that if he can just hold out for a few more decades, he will have built a massive empire to last his family through the next, say, 20 generations+, all without ever paying any income tax whatsoever.

Suppose Larry wants to buy an island. He locates one that costs about $1 billion. Larry would have to sell over $1.2 billion worth of shares in order to generate $1 billion in after-(capital gains) tax return. Then, he would have to fork over about $250 million to the government. Larry would rather have his kids inherit that $250 million. So, Larry decides to take out a loan from his friend, Bill, instead. Larry agrees to pay 5% interest (capitalized into the loan), with the full principle and any accumulated debt payable one year after Larry’s death. Larry puts up $1 billion of Oracle stock as security for the loan. Larry has successfully purchased his island and avoided paying any income taxes ever. In fact, if Larry wants to, Larry can set up shop and run a tourism business on his personal island to help defray the interest expense from his $1 billion loan.

So what is the solution?

There are a number of possible solutions.

1. We could put a cap on the amount of time that an asset could appreciate without being taxed (say ten years or five years).
2. We could simply tax all gain every year, and do away with these rules.
3. When we DO finally collect taxes, we could charge interest on any tax that might have been levied, but was instead deferred (this is actually the best solution, in my book, for reasons that I will explain in a later post; in particular, it would seriously undermine the current incentives to waste billions of dollars on clever tax-planning).
4. Or, we could get rid of the stepped-up basis rule and make billionaires who have deferred taxes their entire lives finally pay a tax on their estate when they die.

So what is wrong with this last solution, which Obama has proposed? 

Nothing. There’s not a damn thing wrong with it, unless you happen to be a billionaire looking for ways to avoid ever paying a fair tax on your income.

As previously mentioned, I have plenty of other ideas about how the tax code could be improved. But that simply isn’t and can never be a criticism of a completely rational, non-partisan, sensible, and obvious solution to a single, discrete problem in the tax code.

The Carrot Spatula

Have you ever found yourself cooking meat and onions and at the same time holding a raw carrot? If not, you should try it, because it’s fun.

Have you ever been slowly poisoned by something without really noticing? It’s generally something considered “inadvisable.”

Anyways, now you can COMBINE your desire to not be slowly poisoned to a cruel and painful death WITH your desire to hold and consume a raw carrot while cooking meat and onions.

I call it… The Carrot Spatula.

Here’s how it works: You take the fork out of your right hand and stab it partially into a piece of meat so that the sharp tines are muted. Then, you take the carrot, and you use its blunt, crisp, delicious end to stir the meat and onions. This allows you to consume your meal of meat and potatoes without risking the consumption of any toxic poisonous flakes of non-stick frying pan.

Plus, it makes your pictures look WAY better. First, check out this perfectly gorgeous-looking full-colored pan of food.

Now, compare this ugly, sepia-toned picture of THE SAME FOOD sans carrot.

Tragic.

AND BONUS —

Your carrot is likely to soak up freaking delicious meat and onion juices, fat, and spices, and thereby increase its flavor factor substantially WITHOUT ceasing to be an official health food.

Brought to you by your local carrot snapper (person from Utah).

 

On the LDS (Mormon) Church’s Decision to Disallow Baptisms from the Children of Gay Couples

Whatever.

The Church doesn’t want to sow confusion and contention in families, and doesn’t want to allow children to sign away their lives into a religion when they are far too young to understand the consequences. Good.

Kids shouldn’t be baptized at 8 anyways.

That is way too young. Mormons baptize at eight because it is the “age of accountability.” In oher words, you are old enough to understand the difference between right and wrong. But baptism isn’t about recognizing the difference between right and wrong; it is about recognizing the difference between Mormonism, Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, Atheism, and Deism, etc. I was a pretty smart cookie at 8, if I do say so myself. But I had no idea. Literally.

Kids can’t understand complex logical arguments. Most adults aren’t even capable of really understanding and expressing their religious beliefs in coherent English.

If baptism isn’t about picking a religion and coming to a determination about how you live your life, then what is it about? And if it is about those things, then why is the Mormon Church making silly assumptions that 8-year-olds are at the right age to do that? Eight-year-olds are in like 2nd grade. When I was in second grade, I think I peed my pants at school once. These are like, practically toddlers. They just barely learned to read. Some of them are still working on that!

The decision is still blatantly discriminatory. 

The LDS Church is not letting in the kids of gay couples. Basically, they are saying, “We love you, but your kids need to go through a cleansing process before we will touch them.”

The decision is contradictory.

The LDS Church makes a pretty big deal about all of the blessings that come with having the Holy Ghost in your life. After you get baptized, you are bestowed with “the Gift of the Holy Ghost” during your confirmation. The Holy Ghost can still visit you if you aren’t a member of the Church, but once you get the Gift, he is basically always there, helping you along your way.

The Mormon Church never really goes into much detail about who this Holy Ghost guy is, aside from the fact that he is a member of the Godhead (along with Jesus and God), so he is basically a God. But, leaving aside the fishy bit of non-doctrine, it doesn’t really make any sense for the Mormon Church to not want to extend those benefits to some kids.

The way I see it, you have two choices: Either 1) things are predetermined and bad people do no good by trying to be good, or 2) things are not predetermined, and you can potentially be instrumental in someone else getting into the Celestial Kingdom by being a great example and by welcoming them into your church and your social circle. The Mormon Church’s decision is practical in a temporal, non-religious sense (they aren’t sowing contention within families). But, from the standpoint of “Let’s get everyone to accept the one, true gospel as quickly as possible and get them to come to the church because it really will make God’s plan come true,” it really makes absolutely no sense at all to exclude those people from the church that you fear are most likely to fall away from its teachings. Something I learned when I was young is that we learn by example from the people around us. If the Mormon Church is denying kids the ability to be around other people who would set precisely the example that the Mormon Church thinks that they would need, then the Mormon church is not really looking out for their best interest, consistent with its hypotheses that it is the one true church, etc.

Conclusion

Whatever. The Mormon Church has been anti-gay since its inception. They used to conduct electro-shock therapy, and do other inhumane stuff. The church isn’t true. It is convenient. It plays on people’s evolutionarily-driven tendencies to believe in God and morality, and their desire to wrap their perception of the world up into a neat package. But morality is just collective action (If you don’t know what that means, then feel free to ask in the comments, and we can have a conversation.). The world is a beautiful thing of order, but the order is perfectly explainable in terms of a bunch of stuff following a small set of inflexible rules over a long period of time. The world is a creature of random chance, not convenient human fantasies. The fact that the Mormon Church is willing to twist itself into knots like this just adds another straw to the argument that they don’t, at heart, even fully believe in themselves.

To all my Mormon relatives and friends out there, you know deep inside that you don’t have an irrefutable reason to believe what you believe. You believe it because you can, because it gives you a sense of stability and order. You believe it because you have always believed it. You believe it because the Cruel Truism (again feel free to ask in the comments section) makes you believe it. It’s BS. But, if it makes you happy, then whatever. ;P

About the Author

Some of you may be aware that I was raised Mormon, and identify as such no more. Some of you may also be aware that I am in a long-term relationship with my boyfriend, Trevor. If not, you are now.

Thought of the Day: 100 cheeses that start with “A”

I love cheese sooooooo much. So, here are 92 cheeses that start with “A,” courtesy of cheese.com!

Enjoy!

Abbaye de Belloc

Abbaye de Belval

Abbaye de Citeaux

Abbaye du Mont des Cats

Abbot’s Gold

Abertam

Abondance

Acapella

Accasciato

Ackawi

Acorn

Adelost

ADL Brick Cheese

ADL Mild Cheddar

Affidelice au Chablis

Affineur Walo Le Gruyère AOC Extra Mature

Affineur Walo Rotwein Sennechäs

Afuega’l Pitu

Aged British Cheddar

Aged Cashew & Blue Green Algae Cheese

Aged Cashew & Brazil Nut Cheese

Aged Cashew & Dulse Cheese

Aged Cashew & Hemp Seed Cheese

Aged Cashew Nut Cheese

Aged Cashew Nut & Kale Cheese

Aged Chelsea

Aged Gouda

Aggiano

Ailsa Craig

Airag

Airedale

Aisy Cendre

Allgauer Emmentaler

Allium Piper

Alma Vorarlberger Alpkäse (3-5 months)

Alma Vorarlberger Alpkäse (6-9 months)

Alma Vorarlberger Bergkäse (10 months)

Alma Vorarlberger Bergkäse (12 months)

Alma Vorarlberger Bergkäse (6 months)

Almnäs Tegel

Alpha Tolman

Alpine Gold

Alpine-Style

Alps Rebel

Alverca

Ambert

Ameribella

American Cheese

Ami du Chambertin

Amish Frolic

Amul Cheese Spread

Amul Emmental

Amul Gouda

Amul Pizza Mozzarella Cheese

Amul Processed Cheese

Anari

Anejo Enchilado

Anneau du Vic-Bilh

Anniversary Ale Cheddar

Anster

Anthotyro

Anthotyro Fresco

Aphrodite Haloumi

Appalachian

Appenzeller

Appleby’s Double Gloucester

Apple Walnut Smoked

Applewood

Applewood Smoked Chevre

Arådalen

Aragon

Ardi Gasna

Ardrahan

Ardsallagh Hard Goat’s Cheese

Ardsallagh Smoked Cheese

Ardsallagh Soft Goat’s Cheese

Armenian String Cheese

Aromes au Gene de Marc

Ascutney Mountain

Asher Blue

Ashley

Asiago

Asiago d’Allevo

Asiago Pressato

Aspen Ash

Assa

Aubisque Pyrenees

Aura

Autun

Avaxtskyr

Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar

Azeitao

The #1 Way Donald Trump is Helping Hillary Clinton

There are a lot of ways that The Donald is helping The Hillary in her quest to become the first female POTUS. For starters, he makes the GOP look pretty gawdawful to low information moderate and democratic voters who see only “current Republican frontrunner” coupled with “lots of crazy positions and offensive comments.” But, the thing about low information voters is that they don’t pay very much attention to politics, or the news in general. Consequently, they tend to have short memories, and they are ultimately unlikely to punish Jeb Bush or Scott Walker on election day for what Donald Trump said more than a year earlier. No, The Donald does something far worse for the GOP’s electoral prospects than to be a Republican saying all the wrong things — he gets other people to say them too.

Donald Trump is Making Republican Candidates Take Hardline Stances on Immigration That Will Haunt Them in the General Election

1) Deport the undocumented en masse. 2) Seize the money they try to send home. 3) Deny citizenship to their U.S.-born children. These are some of the policy positions that Donald Trump has now embraced in his new policy paper. Jeb Bush has thus far resisted Trump’s ideas, calling them impractical and unrealistic. But in Iowa, Scott Walker has now started to call for a wall along the southern border. He has also started to question the wisdom of the Constitutional provision for “birthright citizenship.”

In order to win the primary, you have to appeal to the base of the party. The base of the Republican party currently disagrees vehemently with mainstream America on a handful of issues, most saliently for present purposes, immigration. Donald Trump, in riding a wave of anti-immigrant fervor in the base of the Republican party, has brought the issue into the spotlight of the Republican primary issue sphere, and now all of the candidates are being forced to talk about it, and to take hardline conservative stances on the issue — that is, if they want to have a shot at getting the nomination. For someone who wants to see Barack Obama replaced by a Republican, this is a nightmare scenario.

Recall early 2012, when Mitt Romney took hardline stances on immigration, and started talking about self-deportation in order to pull in stubborn conservative voters. This year, the Republican establishment wanted desperately to avoid the topic. When it comes up, Republican primary candidates are forced to take hardline stances that please primary voters, knowing that those stances will make it difficult to win the general election.

Mitt Romney performed worse amongst latino voters than any other Republican candidate since 1980 not named Bob Dole. 

 Conclusion

The biggest present Trump has ever handed to Hillary Clinton has been this: sucking up all of the media coverage with an all-out assault on immigration, an thereby forcing mainstream and establishment Republican candidates to talk about the issue and take stances that will come back to haunt them.

8/6/15 Thought of the Day

The plural of faux pas (foe paw) is actually still faux pas. The only difference is that you pronounce the final s (foe pawz).

The word was imported from French, and that is the pluralization rule for the rare words that already end in “s.” Interestingly, English incorporated a large number of grammatical constructions from French, including most of our silent letters and our standard pluralization rules. So, why didn’t we incorporate this particular pluralization rule along with the rest? We don’t have any native words that end in silent “s”es. When we end a word with an “s,” it is pronounced, so, in order to differentiate the plural, we have to add “es.” Hence the interesting constructions that later occur when we import more words directly from the French language.

Isn’t this all so fascinating?

How to Tie Every Tie Knot

Triangle. Over and through. Voila. 

Now you know how to tie a tie.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Triangle.

Every tie knot is triangular. Some slant off to one side. Some are smaller, or larger. But every tie knot forms some kind of triangle. The first step to tying a tie is to figure out what you want your tie knot to look like. If you want it bigger, or more even, then give yourself a little more slack to add a few loops to your knot.

The small end of the tie does not move. Pull it down to the desired length minus the expected slack (At the end, the small end will be as long as it is now, plus the distance between the knot and the neck). Then craft the desired knot with the big end of the tie.

Over and through.

The final step in every tie knot is over and through. Take the large end and loop it over the knot you have crafted and then pull it up behind the knot and through the loop you just made. The simplest tie knot actually consists exclusively of this step.

Voila.

This is the part where you pull the knot magically up to your neck, tighten, adjust, and straighten.

Thought of the day: humans are fundamentally creatures of the present.

Reality is not reducible to words.

Reality carries with it a dynamic background and a set of subconscious invisible factors. We are influenced in a myriad of ways that our senses do not detect. Even our very perception of self is merely a lazy shortcut that bypasses an extraordinarily complex issue. The reality that is encoded in our neural networks and later retrieved is, indeed, comparable in its incompleteness and inaccuracy to our similarly flawed comprehension of the future.

Humans are fundamentally creatures of the present.

We do not know the past, and more than we know the future. We guess at the contents of the past in much the same way that we guess the contents of the future: we search for signs in the present. Yes, signs of the past can be encoded in our very neural networks as memories. But the single largest chunk of our existence consists of our own actions. Our future actions are not known to ourselves any more than they are known to anyone else. But, they can be guessed at based on our present indicators of our past actions and our present indicators of the patterns of behavior that we exhibit which are likely to continue into the future. In other words, we look inside our minds to determine what actions we are predisposed to take in response to various possible alternate futures. We determine the likelihood of those future circumstances and actions based on signs that we perceive in the present, just as we determine the circumstances that we were once in in the past based on present perceptions of signs. For example, although we might have some strong independent memories of pieces of important events we once experienced, the vast majority of these memories serve supplemental functions only, giving access to certain details of a memory that is initially sparked by the perception of something similar in the present. Even then, the memories are extraordinarily susceptible to tampering from later experiences, and they gradually accumulate random errors to boot.

Why is human memory so terrible, and why are we so disinclined to recognize how terrible it truly is?

Humans are fundamentally creatures of the present. We don’t need videotape-style memories. All we need is to survive and reproduce, in order to serve the whims of our one true master, the Cruel Truism. Survival and reproduction depend primarily on recognizing and averting danger. You recognize and avert danger by spotting patterns, remembering them, and by engaging in logical thought.

So, it makes sense that we would remember semantically where we went to school, the names of the people who were mean or nice to us, and the formula for our successful social interactions with others while forgetting the precise shade of green of a beautiful tree in the forest.

Implications

My question, going out of this is: what about clones? A clone could exist at the same moment in time as the original. Identical twins are essentially genetic clones. To a lesser extent, our kids are our clones. But, they are different people. They presumably have their own distinct consciousnesses. Some identical twins report having extraordinarily close connections, but there is no clear evidence that they have more than a relatively high chance of guessing what the other is thinking based on optimized facial expression recognition and common past circumstances/physiology. If a clone doesn’t have the same consciousness as the original, then doesn’t that imply that maybe the original doesn’t have the same consciousness as itself at different moments in time? The present consciousness would have no way of knowing whether it in fact experienced all of the things that memories would suggest.

What if humanity isn’t entirely sentient? We assume that everyone is sentient because we are sentient. But, what if we weren’t always sentient, or aren’t always sentient? What if we popped in and out of sentience? Are we really sentient when we are asleep? I remember dreams sometimes, but we only dream for a short period of our sleep. The rest of our sleep-time, it is like we didn’t even exist. We have regular chunks of our memory that are completely missing. What does it really mean to be sentient?

For those readers who are not new to the philosophy wing of my blog, I am referencing the “Invisible Gods” idea, the idea that humans are non-living shells (super high-tech cameras, kindof) that provide windows through which supernatural beings can peer into reality. If sentience were a supernatural being peering into reality, then it would be entirely plausible to think that we were not always or all sentient. Perhaps only some of us are sentient, and only sometimes. Our bodies make perfect sense as non-living creatures of the evolutionary biology branch of physics, necessary non-living, but complex results of the big bang. The body would still behave in exactly the same way as a non-sentient non-living swirl in the pool of reality. It would still talk and breathe and think and store memories. Then, when the supernatural being peered through the window, all prior memories would yield the illusion of continuity.

These ideas also make it much easier to conceive of time as a fourth dimension, equivalent to the three physical dimensions we perceive.

Conclusion

It would be really nice to see and understand how reality really operated. Unfortunately, none of us will ever be likely to do so, if it is even possible from a human perspective. But, we can at least poke holes in our current understanding of reality and then enjoy the sight as the less mentally deft among us scramble to fill them in. The truth is that reality DOESN’T make sense as we currently understand it. I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of existence (including all of the ones including some version of God).

So, just be happy, and hit that subscribe button on the right to keep reading my blog if you want to stay up to date with the tiny inklings that my brain occasionally processes.

Humans are not even CLOSE to the top of the food chain!

In science fiction and fantasy movies, we have long considered the possibility of terrifyingly advanced alien species that prey on humans, or perhaps even creatures that already hide among us, look like us, and are specially adapted to prey exclusively on us (see, e.g., the vampires in the Twilight series). But fantasy is reality.

In order to find a sneaky creature that is specially adapted to prey on humans without their knowledge, we more and more frequently need look no farther away than our own beds.

I am referring, of course, to the common bed bug. Back in the 1940s, with the introduction of DDT, bed bugs were virtually eradicated from the developed world. Yet, over the past decade or so, they have started to come back with a vengeance, having evolved resistance to some of our weapons.

Bed Bugs

The term “bed bug” refers to bugs in the genus Cimex.

All Cimex feed on the blood of mammals and birds, but the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, specializes exclusively on human blood. 

C. lectularius hides itself away in a crack or crevice of your bed, where you are unlikely to discover it. If there is a rip or a tear, it will crawl inside and slowly establish a colony. During the day, it hides away and sleeps. Then, after you lay down for sleep, it senses your body heat and the carbon dioxide from your breathing, and it wakes from its slumber. It creeps up and finds an area of exposed skin, where it starts to saw away with specially adapted mouth instruments, until it reaches a blood source. It injects saliva containing anti-coagulants (to stop your blood from clotting!) and anesthetics (painkillers, so that you don’t wake up and protect yourself!). Then, it utilizes the body’s natural blood pressure to engorge itself with a meal over the course of 5-10 minutes. Once it has had its fill, it retreats back to its hiding place, having only been in contact with its sleeping host for perhaps 20 minutes!

Bed bugs have evolved numerous traits specifically for the purpose of facilitating their predation of humans.

Besides the previously mentioned anti-coagulants and anesthetics in their saliva, and specialized mouth parts, C. lectularius senses minute changes in heat, and connects that heat with a warm body by detecting CO2 in the air. C. lectularius walks very slowly, so it travels by hiding in our accessories. But, they don’t stay in our clothing, because it is too hot. C. lectularius has evolved to stay a safe distance away from human body heat except when it is feeding because that way it is less likely to get smashed accidentally, and it is less likely to be discovered. C. lectularius doesn’t just hide in beds, it hides in sofas, chairs, and anywhere else that it can hide where it might have access to a human blood meal. C. lectularius grows by molting (6 times before it becomes a reproductive adult), and it only molts after it has a meal. It doesn’t waste energy wandering around when it doesn’t detect humans. It can survive for months without food (longer in colder climates), if, for example, you go on vacation, or visit a friend. If it is hungry, it will come out for food any time it senses your presence, even if it is not night-time.

C. lectularius is not known to transmit any diseases to humans, even though it is known to carry 28 human pathogens. Perhaps that is itself an evolved trait. After all, a dead human is hardly valuable as a food source. 

C. lectularius is adapted to prey on nothing but humans, and for all of our technological advancement, it has managed to continually evolve alongside us as a predator. It lives where we live. It sleeps where we sleep. It senses our presence, and incapacitates us as it carefully feeds on us as we sleep.

C. lectularius is the quintessential human predator. 

But, bed bugs are not the only human predator.

We are also preyed on by ticks, mosquitoes, gnats, other insects, rodents, tigers, leopards, bears, Komodo dragons, hyenas, cougars, crocodilians, dingos, coyotes, pigs, boa constrictors, piranhas, catfish and sharks. Tiny baby tapeworms crawl into our blood stream when we walk outside with an exposed cut on our feet, then they establish themselves in our intestines, where they proceed to grow to vast sizes. Numerous viruses and bacteria survive by consuming us.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is another perfect example of a human predator that has successfully evolved to evade our defenses. 

Millions of creatures depend on us for their sustenance, each in its own way. In 2012, scientists unveiled the first ever catalog of the bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that populate every nook and cranny of the human body. For every human gene in your body, there are 360 microbial genes.

9 out of every 10 cells in the human body are NOT EVEN HUMAN. 

When you map out the food chain, giving photosynthesizers a score of 1, and creatures eating photosynthesizers a score of 2, etc., it turns out that humans are only ranked 2.21. Top predators, meanwhile, rank over 5. In other words, they are the predators that eat predators that eat the predators of the herbivores that eat the plants.

Far from being at the top of the food chain, humans are barely more than herbivores. 

So, what IS at the top of the food chain? Bed bugs?

No. Bed bugs are just bugs. They can be eaten by anything that likes to eat bugs. A frog or a spider, for example, probably wouldn’t turn one down. All domestic cockroaches are known to eat bed bugs (turns out they ARE good for something!). Ants, mites, and centipedes are also bed bug predators.

There is actually an insect called the “masked bed bug hunter.”

All of those creatures are themselves generally considered fairly low on the totem pole, and are eaten by zillions of other creatures, which are eaten by other creatures, in a complicated mesh of loops and swirls. We aren’t at the top of the food chain. We aren’t even close. We are just one little piece of the food chain. 

OK, so other creatures live on us, attack us, and eat us occasionally. But, we are smart and we can kill them if we want to, and we can eat almost anything if we want to, so is it really fair to classify other animals as higher than us on the food chain?

By the most fundamental measure of evolutionary success, that is continued existence, replication and proliferation (expected to continue into the future), there are probably billions, if not trillions of other creatures on this earth that are just as, or more “successful” than us.

In a nuclear apocalypse, or a major asteroid collision, there is a long list of creatures far more likely to survive extinction than us. 

Other creatures communicate in subtle but effective ways. They send out chemicals, or make sounds. They can sense infrared radiation, or extraordinarily minute changes in the instance of specific chemicals or trace gases. They use pheromones. They have complex societal structures. They bond, and they mate, and they evolve and change and grow and survive. They eat and are eaten. They feel pain. They work together. They value their own lives, and those of their families above the lives of creatures like us that are not in their species (unless, of course, they happen to be dependent on us as a food source). Some creatures dedicate their entire lives to keeping us alive because we unwittingly provide food and shelter to them.

The real world is a far more complex place than we imagine. Physically, almost every cell in our bodies has been replaced within ten years of our lives. Memories are nothing more than electrical signals and chemical impressions on the neural cells in our brain.

Conclusion

Far from being distinct beings independent/separable from our environments which threatens the very existence of life on this planet with our reckless disregard for our own power, we are actually a nest of trillions of organisms enacting complicated and porous relationships beyond the purview of our ordinary senses with our environment, and with an incomprehensible number of its inhabitants. We are actually, probably, powerless to destroy life on this planet (although we could certainly set its complexity back a few hundred million years). We are actually constantly evolving alongside those creatures with whom we enjoy symbiotic relationships.

Maybe the resurging bed bugs can puncture the bubble of hot air that has been filling our heads, and remind us that we truly are inextricably a part of this world, co-equal and codependent on trillions of other organisms. 

Do you think humans should take a closer look in the mirror? Sound off in the comments below.

 

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