Chuck Spinney: Evolution in the USA, Israel as Leech

Below is a very interesting essay analyzing the evolution of culture, economics, and politics in United States.  Other authors have done similar types of analyses, but this one has some interesting twists.  It is a synopsis of a book just written by the author that blends together aspects of cultural, geographic and even religious anthropology, with history, politics, and political economy in a way that illustrates obvious synthetic potential of using GIS (computerized Geographic Information Systems) in efforts to evolve our understanding of history, political economy, anthropology and patterns of cultural evolution in general.  The author ends on a shallow political note, laying out a counter-Tea Party strategy, but don’t let that crassness turn you off from the larger intellectual possibilities implicit in this kind of work.