The event that may have bottlenecked our gene pool was a global disaster probably caused by a super-eruption of Mt Toba in Sumatra which caused a 6-year winter. I mentioned that in my story about Mitochondrial Eve:

https://medium.com/predict/dating-eve-with-mitochondrial-dna-77c94e6c0860

The specific paper I cited in my story was by Stanley Ambrose here:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b783/b6fe453a9879fc3193d22efdde5d7629337e.pdf

The population of humans at the time was tiny and widely scattered and probably composed of a wide range of diverse sub-species including us modern humans.

The political situation today could be analogous to that super-eruption — but I wouldn’t credit any of the political figures at the top today of having the efficiency or brilliance of a super-eruption.

Although, as you can tell from my diatribe, I’m also not so enamored of our general American population’s ability to think its way through this political bottleneck. Despite my pessimism we seem to muddle through nonetheless — which is a credit to the system — and reluctantly a credit to the people.

In any case, I’ve remained a long-term buy-n-hold like you, and yet I’m nervous, but I have no inclination to change my investing system because of the idiocy at the top and the damage he’s wrought. I think that discipline and basic optimism in the robustness of the system is worth more than a short-term panic over this current idiocy. That’s the theory, at least…

;)