Foreign Policy Debates and plumbing

View 701 Monday, November 14, 2011

· Newt, Herman, and Mitt

· High Tech and Commodities

I put up my perspective on the Republican foreign policy debates and some notes on the assassination in Dubai last night.

I have a medical appointment – class, not emergency—this afternoon, so this is likely to be brief. We will also have plumbers tearing my bathroom apart and rebuilding it to fix leaks. If you have been thinking about renewing or subscribing, this would be a marvelous time to do it.

The radio tells me that this afternoon at 2 PM – didn’t say whether California or Eastern time but I presume Eastern, meaning in about ten minutes – Gloria Allred, who isn’t suing anyone for anything, is bringing forth Ms. Bialek’s old boyfriend, who wasn’t in Washington D.C. when Herman Cain was President of the National Restaurant Association. The name of the former boyfriend is not given, but Allred made sure that everyone could spell her name properly.

Meanwhile, Cain’s wife has said she doesn’t believe any of this. And none of this would have much relevance to the Presidency of the United States except that Cain makes it so. It’s hard to blame him. After weeks of this we have precisely three named ‘accusers’, one of whom says she’s not a witness to anything of importance but had a weird feeling about a dinner in Cairo at which nothing inappropriate happened. Back in those days Egypt was a place that people would go to for conferences and dinners and being sent there was a reward, not a nightmare as it proved to be for Lara Logan; but that was a different era.

So long as the media will show up, we can be sure that Gloria Allred will have conferences. We will shortly know the name of the person she will introduce and why after fourteen years what he has to say is relevant to the Presidency of the United States. And all the media will flock to hear it.

Newt, Herman, and Mitt

The latest polls are now showing Newt Gingrich tied with Mitt Romney in the Republican polls. I don’t know how Gloria Allred will get into the Jump on Newt, It’s His Turn act that will presently begin, but I make no doubt that she’s trying.

Cain is now back to third place. That was likely in any case following a foreign policy debate: Cain is either the best or the least qualified candidate on those issues. Least qualified because he has no experience and he doesn’t really have a policy. He’s for a strong America and for winning any wars we get into. The how isn’t his show: he will assemble a group of experts and have each present his arguments, then choose a policy accordingly. This is pretty well how most US Presidents have operated, of course. Best qualified because he has not present agenda other than the principles that America must be strong and must not get into wars we can’t win, but we damned well ought to win any we get into: that is, he’s going to let the experts handle these matters, and he’ll pick experts who share his principles.

Recall that Harry Truman was Vice President for 82 days before he became President. He had no foreign policy experience, and his military service was as a junior officer in World War I. He made no claim to expertise in either military or foreign affairs. He had never heard of the Manhattan Project or the Atom Bomb. He kept Roosevelt’s cabinet, but made it clear to all, that he was now President, as he made it clear to Marshall and King that he was commander in chief. He was faced with a series of decisions that affected the fate of the world.

I am not a fan of Cain’s 9-9-9, which, I note, seems to have a smaller place in his campaign than it did a few weeks ago, but 9-9-9 is not going to pass any foreseeable Congress. The US needs a thorough tax reform and a thorough reassessment of tariff policies. All of the candidates know this. Cain’s proposals are the most radical barring Ron Paul, but everyone knows we can’t go on as we’re going.

I’m with Newt: anyone on that stage would be a better President than Barrack Hussein Obama. The latest polls show Obama well below the critical 43% approval rate that traditionally been the line drawn by political managers and consultants: no incumbent gets reelected with lower than 43% approval. The Washington establishment is beginning to feel that pressure – not that some liberal spokespeople are looking for Republicans with “growth” capability, and a few have suddenly developed doubts about Mitt Romney’s “flexibility.” Brooks is looking about for a new candidate to groom. The goal of course is to keep power within the establishment.

Meanwhile, as Iran’s first nuclear weapons test looms closer, foreign policy will become more prominent in the debates. It really is important, although not as much so as regaining economic prosperity. 

Commodities and Technology

It’s time for me to get off this political stuff and get back to technology and society. The whole world of publishing has been transformed. Amazon has taken over a lot of it.

There was a flurry of stories about how Amazon’s profits are down, due to major investments in technology. That’s the experts for you. I remember when the joke was that one day Amazon would make a profit at all: for the first few years of its existence Amazon was building a mechanism to sell goods on line. Bezos burned a lot of capital doing that. Slowly he built the structure, and one day there was a profit, then more profit. Next thing we knew, Amazon was a major competitor to Wal-Mart. Now it’s making tablets. Meanwhile the number of Amazon Prime subscribers grows exponentially.

There are other big trends. It used to be that the interesting stories were about new technology. There’s still new technology, but the really interesting trends are in the widespread use of technology in places that used to not be affected. Just as scientific pocket calculators went from really expensive – I remember Adrian Berry and I on an expedition from a AAAS meeting to find a scientific calculator that would not only do fractional exponents and algebraic series, but show the results as a graphic plot – to throwaways in supermarkets. Now pocket computers are becoming a commodity. Tablets aren’t there yet, but they will be. It’s exciting out there.

And now it’s time to get ready for my class. Kaiser really believes in preventive medicine. And the plumbers are here. It would be a nice time to get some new subscriptions. And yes, I know, I know, I am damnedly late in recording them. I guess I haven’t been dancing as fast as I can, but I’ll get at it. Thanks to all.