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.

“What makes illegal immigration hard to fix is not that it defies law, but that it defies the minimum wage regulations, health care regulations, safety & employment regulations & avoids the employment taxes that all hinder the job creators from growing the economy. The job creators try to get rid of, or reduce these job-killing regulations & taxes whenever they can, the legal way, but they are blocked by leftists who don’t believe in capitalism. So, not being stupid, the job creators found a way to prevent these socialist laws from destroying the economy. The result is that we now have a good, solid, tax-free, unregulated, cheap labor pool to drive the economy AND an “illegal” foreign racial group, that can’t vote, to motivate lower middle class & poor white voters who might otherwise support the socialists. The socialists can’t shame these whites for not being “politically correct” because the foreign workers are not “following the law.” They’re following the money, which is what anyone who wants to understand law & the politics that shapes the law it must do. Anonymous.

Michele and I watched the Republican Debate the other night and, as each contestant bad mouthed Barack Obama’s job as President, I was struck at how simple they viewed the problems and how easy the solutions sounded. Every problem could be solved by an almost casual wave of the hand. Trump says “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall.” and the immigration problem will be mostly solved. Ted Cruz tells us “We will carpet bomb [ISIS] into oblivion.” and problem over. But I was also very aware of the how persistent these problems have been and how they have gotten worse during the Obama Presidency.

I would not say the quote at the top in quite the same way but I completely agree. I couldn’t have said it any better (except for the socialist/job creater part). To me, the operative part of the quote is the implied complexity of the issue, the broad spread of the interested and entrenched players, and the difficulty of finding an agreed upon solution that really works. Immigration is not my issue but it probably would be if I were middle age and working in the trades and I suspect that it isn’t really Donald Trump’s issue either but it is obviously his supporters’ issue and it is a good issue to campaign on because the Obama Administration has been less effective than most of us would like. Global Climate Change and Income Disparity are two additional areas that are arguably worse than they were eight years ago. Of course, part of the reason for this is that the Republicans have made every effort to stop Obama from doing anything, but the bigger part of the lack of  solutions is that Immigration, Wealth Disparity, the Middle East, and Climate Change are unimaginably complex issues with entrenched, interrelated, and conflicting, vested interests.

The quote on Immigration, with a few minor changes could be about Wealth Disparity and the Middle East has many more players and is way more complex. The region is being polarized by the rivalry of the two local powerhouses, Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. This polarizing Middle East, in which order – mostly Western imposed order – is falling apart was not caused by Obama. It was starting to fall apart years before Obama, even before Bush the Younger was elected who, while he may have accelerated the Middle East’s fall into chaos, didn’t really create it either. I like to believe think that the problems in the Middle east aren’t entirely – or even primarily – the West’s fault, still we have been poking at this hornet’s nest for over a century.

The British and French drew lines – in the sand – defining states that were arbitrary. As an aside, although I’m cynical enough to think the Brits and French drew their lines defining borders to keep the local populations fractured and thereby easier to control, it is possible that it was just bad luck that a Sunni Ba’athist happened to rule a primarily Shiite state in Iraq and a Shiite Alawite happened to rule a largely Sunni population in Syria. End aside. The Eisenhower Administration engineered a coup d’état to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran because we didn’t like that the democratically elected Prime Minister and the democratically elected Parliament voted to nationalize their own oilfields. And the list goes sickingly on and on.

But we are not as pervasive and all-powerful as we think, the local interests run much deeper and stronger than we want to believe. There are old grudges to be settled. For seventy five years, those grudges were covered by a mutual hate of Israel but Israel’s closest neighbors, including the Saudis, have now made virtual peace with them. Religious fanaticism is blooming which I suspect is pretty normal when the Empire’s religion is different from the local religion and nobody can agree on the one true path. A prolonged drought is driving farmers from their fields into towns and cities, angry and rebellious. All this on top of the world’s biggest oil supply bringing incredible wealth to a few and displacement and poverty to most. The money from that oil is also providing a market for first class weapons because everybody wants swords to rattle.

These are not problems or conflicts that can be solved by carpet bombing. These are religious problems and political problems, aggravated by a changing climate. Everybody has their own version of what a solution would be or should be, and nobody, including us, is ready to give that up. As unAmerican as it is to even think this, there may not really be a solution. Change, uncontrolled change, change we probably don’t want, may be all that is going to happen here. The Middle East, of course, is simple compared to Climate Change.

Back at the Republican Debate, every time a candidate gave a simple answer, usually centered around Obama’s lack of success, the crowd cheered. In this atmosphere, admitting a problem is complicated seems weak. Thoughtful answers seem indecisive and actual experience is a handicap. It is sad and scary.

Listening to the Republicans talking trash at the last debate made me wonder why countries do things to get a result that is a action they wouldn’t do. Wow, is that clumsy-ly said, what I mean is almost everybody wants to bomb ISIS in an effort to beat them and it’s not just the Republican either. Obama is bombing ISIS on the theory that it will, atleast, degrade them and Hillary wants more bombing. Why do they – we – think that bombing ISIS will get them to do anything except dig in? Is there anybody who thinks we would quit our attacks on ISIS if they blew up another World Trade Center? I doubt it, most Americans think it would make us more resolute. So why don’t we think the same thing will happen with ISIS?

A disclaimer here, I didn’t see the entire Republican debate and part of what I didn’t see is the Trump quote I am going to reference. I saw it, out of context on a MSNBC program. When asked about what he would do in Syria – or maybe the Middle East in general – Trump shook his head and said that it was a mess, saying something like “We shouldn’t have ever gone into Iraq and we shouldn’t there now. It’s just a mess. We’ve spent hundreds of millions that could have been used on infrastructure and schools.” That’s a much more sensible statement than anything I’ve heard out of Hillary.

And that brings up the second question, why are people, not just Republicans but Democrats and Liberals, so attached to ad hominem criticism. Why do we criticize an idea with the argument that it is bad because Trump, for instance, said it, rather than discussing the idea itself. People on the left, friends, columnists, anybody on the left sending a political email, are disdainful of something that Trump said, not because of the idea, the idea is never really considered, Trump said it, so it must be ridicules and bad. A big part of our collective won’t even listen to Berni’s ideas. He is a socialist, or a cranky old man, or not going to win anyway, so don’t listen to what he has to say.

If we don’t listen to their ideas, how do we know ours are better?

More Americans had their backgrounds checked while buying guns on Black Friday than on any other day on record, according to F.B.I. statistics, New york Times.

A week or so ago, right after the San Bernardino shooting, I started to do a post on guns and fear mongering but I kept getting distracted by Trump’s rhetoric escalations. Guns are a big problem in the United States, but I don’t think that guns are our biggest problem, maybe they are a distant third. Not counting Global Climate Change, our biggest problem is the growing toxic environment of fear. Increasingly, we are unable to see reality because our fear induced anger in clouding our vision. While I think the biggest offenders are on the right, it is not just the right that seems to be blind with rage.

In what seems like months ago, I couldn’t imagine how ISIS could be an existential threat to the United States. Now I am starting to think that I was wrong. Roosevelt famously said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”, I learned that in school, maybe in some Civics class, maybe in a High School History class, I don’t know, but I do know that I really didn’t understand the moral importance of that quote. I knew what the words meant intellectually, but not the emotional urgency. Now I am beginning to better understand the corrosiveness of fear as I am starting to see it play out in front of me.

For about six months, starting in late 1973, the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left wing terrorist organization, ran wild in California. They said the purpose of the mayhem was to get the police to over react turning the general population against what they saw as corrupt authority. The police did over react, in a way, with 400 police officers shooting about 9,000 bullets into a house where the SLA – as they were known, almost none of us knowing what symbionese meant – was holed up, but the populus never followed suit. To me at the time, getting the population to turn on the government, to, in effect, turn on itself seemed, fortunately, like an impossible goal. In the early seventies, the left was similar to the right of today except, of course, 180° out of sync. The SLA, however, was just too small a lever to move the country in any measurable way. I am worried that in our more polarized nation, a right wing terrorist organization, ISIS, may be a big enough lever.

When Trump says “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” it is not only an idiotic misstating of reality, it is bad for America because it excites fear. People are already afraid, for their jobs, for their kid’s job prospects, and I think, in the back of everybody’s mind is the spectre of Climate Change, so fanning that fear, finding and blaming scapegoats, as a way to get votes smacks of being ungentlemanly at the very least.

While it may seem unAmerican, in that way Trump is not any different than classic American fascists like the proNazi Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. The problem is that hate mongering breeds conviction and self-righteousness, not only in the gullible listener but the cynical liars become believers, believing their own vile bullshit, stoking their own fire. When somebody of Trump’s stature and fame says bigotry is OK, that it moves the bar of acceptable behavior, Jeb! seems benign when he suggests almost the same thing in a more acceptable way.

But when Trump says he wants “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and when a governor, like Bobby Jindal or John Kasich issues an unenforceable executive order preventing Syrian refugees from coming to their state, it is worse than unAmerican, it is antiAmerican.  It is aiding and abetting the enemy and I don’t say that lightly. Trump et al are are smart enough to know that what they say they want, would create the same segregated and isolated  conditions that are causing Europe so much trouble. What we do better than anybody, is assimilate our immigrants – although it is a low bar – and it is in our best interest to keep doing so. What Trump et al say they want are more the conditions that make jihadis in the first place. That hurts more than our liberal sensibilities, it makes our world more dangerous.