Antibodies are produced by the immune system in response to the presence of an antigen. …Any substance capable of triggering an immune response is called an antigen. PDL BioPharma website
“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices, we must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.” Nikki Haley talking about Donald Trump rather than Obama in the Republican answer to Obama’s State of the Union speech.
“Let Syria and ISIS fight. Why do we care? Let ISIS and Syria fight. And let Russia, they’re in Syria already, let them fight ISIS.Look, I don’t want ISIS. ISIS is bad. They are evil. When they start doing with a head chopping… these are really bad dudes… Let Russia take care of ISIS. How many places can we be?… Russia likes Assad seemingly a lot. Let them worry about ISIS. Let them fight it out.” Donald Trump.
A couple of days ago, I was listening to a radio program in which they were talking about the culture of Silicon Valley and how much cash it has brought into this part of California. Among other things, they talked about how various politicians and businesspeople have tried to get a part of that cash by replicating Silicon Valleys in other parts of the world. The speakers agreed that it doesn’t work because the local antibodies come up. One guy used a liver transplant as an example and how the body tries to reject the foreign liver. I had never thought about it in that way and it explains something I’ve always – in a low grade way – wondered about.
Back when we were building houses in Blackhawk, we sold a house to the new manager of NUMMI, a joint manufacturing partnership between GM and Toyota. When I congratulated the new manager on his new job, he said something to the effect that “nobody ever gets promoted from NUMMI, this has pretty much tanked my career.” I was shocked and we talked for a few minutes during which he told me that nobody, back at the Mothership in Detroit, would want to have him working for them when he rotated back in four years. GM had paid big money to learn Toyota’s superior manufacturing and logistic processes techniques ways culture, but the host body, the entrenched culture of GM in this case, was rejecting it.
It seems to me that the both the Republican and Democratic Parties are doing the same thing. And they are doing it in almost diametrically opposite ways. The Democrats are ignoring Bernie and the Republicans are attacking Trump.
When I say Democrats, I mean the Democratic Establishment. And when I say Democratic Establishment, I mean important Democrats; influential politicians, big donors, newspaper columnists and owners. I am sure that there are hundreds of exceptions, but, generally, the Democratic establishment does not like Bernie and they have dealt with that dislike by trying to make Bernie as invisible as possible. They scheduled the few debates on Sunday nights – one in the middle of the MLK holiday, no less – to give him the least amount of exposure and Bernie get almost no daily press. A couple of weeks ago, the Sander’s Campaign complained that Trump had 59 minutes of national TV on a given day and Bernie got 1 minute; the New York Times, among others, didn’t cover it. When he is mentioned by an Important Democrat, it is always to subtly, but affectionately, point out that Bernie is a cranky old man way out of the mainstream and can never get elected. His platform, or details thereof, are rarely mentioned. This is classic passive-aggressive behavior and it works best when the aggressor is the mainstream press.
Conversely, the Republicans, and when I say Republicans, blah, blah….attack Trump. In my opinion, attacking is almost a knee-jerk reaction for the Republicans; from Bush the Younger’s Shock and Awe to Ted Cruz’s Carpetbombing; attacking is usually the preferred Republican solution to a problem. But, in this case, they also attack Trump because he is impossible to ignore. The Republican Establishment, despite Fox News, have less control of the press than the Democratic Establishment and The Donald is a first-class self-promoter. There is nothing passive-aggressive about the Republican Establishment and, in this case, it wouldn’t work anyway, so the Establishment sent Governor Nikki Haley to go after Trump, in broad daylight, allowed Governor John Kasich to break the Eleventh Amendment of not attacking fellow Republicans by saying that trump is “dangerous and bad for America, ” and Jeb! even called him Unhinged (which, as an aside, is a word I love).
Interestingly, in this new Internet world where the candidates can bypass the Establishment and contact the voters directly, even while being ignored or attacked, both antigens keep doing better, this should be a fascinating primary.