With or without the slanted adjectives (you should be glad us men are "emotionally flat". Can you imagine how many fights we'd get into if we were emotionally excitable?).

You are talking about two different concepts here: (1) the relative balance of authority/responsibility and respect accorded the two genders in the family and the society and (2) the personal psychological characteristics of the people in those societies. There is no a priori reason to believe that the two are connected at all. I also seriously doubt that any current day research could shed much light on the question.

Most of the research that I'm aware of that observed the egalitarian nature of primitive societies was conducted long ago on truly primitive societies. Societies that no longer exist. The Bushmen of the Kalahari, the nomads of Central Asia and Siberia have all long since been infected by modern society and anthropologists have noted a decrease in equality as a result. However, those early studies (1800s - early 1900s) were anthropological studies, not psychological studies so nobody was trying to find out if women were emotional and men were rational (I prefer my slanted adjectives ... naturally). Unfortunately, the last untouched societies are some of the Indian societies of the Amazon basin and people aren't being let into those areas to study them. So I'm not sure how willing I am to believe that they actually were able to study egalitarian/primative societies.

And while I'm on the subject of egalitarian societies...

They were egalitarian because both men and women were equally important to the survival equation (and please don't confuse this with eking out an existence. Even though life and death survival was at issue, except for bad times, they mostly worked less, spent more time with their kids, and enjoyed life more than we do). As a result, both sexes were accorded the respect and authority as was their due as equal pillars in the support of the family and the group. This does not mean that there weren't gender roles, that bugaboo of the feministas. Men hunted; women gathered. It isn't until you get to modern society that gender roles are being used to enforce inequality between the sexes.

Finally, your psychological profiles of the sexes? Pfui. Kindly remember that what that represents is the number of data points within one standard deviation to the mean on a psychological test that (hopefully) measures each of those psychological characteristics. It says zero, zip, nada about the individual. People are people first and their gender is merely an attribute of their humanity.

And you didn't even note that Sarah Palin's percentage of the Alaska State budget is much larger than Barak Obama's percentage of the Federal budget.

I argued earlier that it was the value of the dollar that was driving the price of oil. Sure enough when the dollar started back up, oil started to go down. Now, I recognize that coincidence is not causality - and so should you. So the oil peculators have dumped 39 billion in positions... or about the value of a half day's worth of worldwide oil production. Yeah, so what?

Sorry, dude, it doesn't pass the scale test.

That Enron, that poster child for the amoral and unethical, had a 65 page long code of conduct. Apparently, all you have to do is write it down.

I'm not kidding. Let's look at some comparisons...

The USSR had a centrally planned economy. We don't have that quite yet but... the government is taking equity stakes in a number of major financial institutions. How long do you suppose it would be before they start directing them? Plus a good deal (but not all) of the regulation emanating from Washington has the effect of controlling output. That sort of thing didn't work for the USSR and it won't work for us.

The US has more of our population behind bars as a percentage of our population than any other country on the planet. The USSR once held that honor.

The USSR at one time fomented revolutions in various countries to spread communism around the world. We now skip the fomenting part and go straight to the invasion route to spread democracy. Theoretically, we fought in Korea and Vietnam to stop the godless, communist hordes from doing exactly what we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The old USSR had informants galore to ferret out "suspicious characters" and "anti-revolutionaries". Under the rubric of the GWOT, numerous groups are enjoined to do the same thing although they are theoretically looking only for "suspicious characters", whatever that means.

In the old USSR, you required travel papers to be able to travel. You certainly require travel papers to fly. Indeed, if you lack the appropriate approvals (by, say, being on the no-fly list), you can show up butt naked at the airport with no luggage and they still won't let you on the airplane.

I could go on. Authoritarianism, unequal treatment under the law and the list would go on. All in the name of security, financial and otherwise....