View 699 Tuesday, November 01, 2011
The expected assault on Herman Cain continues. The Establishment media are afraid of him. They believe there is a substantial chance that Obama will lose the next election no matter who the Republican candidate may be, and that means that the Republican candidate must be someone who can ‘grow’ in office – i.e., can be co-opted by the liberal Establishment, and of the possible candidates Cain is one of the least likely to be seduced by the siren songs of the Establishment. They don’t have much that he wants, and he has been among them enough to know who and what they are; so they terrify him.
I am not privy to what the White House political operatives are learning from their polls, but it’s a pretty leaky outfit, and their inconsistencies are an increasing source of irritation to the technocrats in the staff. That’s always a problem with campaigns. Campaign management is one of the most stressful occupations one can have short of combat command, and competence and blind loyalty to a set of inconsistent principles adds greatly to that stress. From what I can gather, the internal White House polls are bad, and Cain’s growing popularity is seen as a real danger, because he cuts much of the ground out from under the chosen campaign strategy. Obama’s short 43 vehicle motorcade through Carolina and Virginia was a political test – although it was billed as “presidential” and thus paid for by the taxpayers rather than campaign funds – and they learned a lot. One thing they discovered is that even among the faithful an Obama speech doesn’t carry the magic it once did. Exhortations and perorations don’t generate the wild enthusiasm, and indeed, some voters are actually interested in some of the gory details of how we will get out of the hole we are in.
Cain says the way out of a hole is to stop digging. Scrap the complicated old tax code and start over. Limit the amount of spending. Determine what must be spent and raise the money to do that. Details can be worked out. Cain represents the old American “can do” spirit, and is a living embodiment of the once universal American dream. Work hard, apply yourself, and achieve; but don’t be full of yourself about it. Amazing grace saved a wretch like me. Go give it a try yourself.
Which is the exact opposite of the “trust us, and all will be well. Few remember Harry Golden’s book “You’re Entitle” but it expressed the notion perfectly: the essence of citizenship is entitlements, not freedom and opportunity. That works so long as there are enough people who don’t believe it and actually do the work, but as Margaret Thatcher told us, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. The US is about at the edge now: we’ll soon have more people living off the government and paying little to nothing in than those who work to pay for this. When that happens and is politically institutionalized, it’s pretty hard to displace by electoral means.
Back in the days of the myth of the General Strike and the various revolutionary movements, the revolt was of the workers who were weary of working for others. Those who grew the wheat and made the bread tired of feeding their aristocratic masters – or later the capitalists – and demanded that this stop. Today’s revolutionaries camp out in the public squares, and contribute to the society by organizing their communities and turning out the vote.
I recall a few years ago there was a movement to organize a “welfare recipients league.” I cheered it on: “Organize! Strike! Withhold your services!” Of course I wasn’t the only one to see the absurdity and the welfare recipient league went away. Now we have many organizations that are essentially the same outfit, but they have different names, and they organize to vote and pay lobbyists. Public employees unions pay dues which go to lobbyists to vote for the candidates who negotiate their salaries and pensions. Oddly enough, the salaries and pensions rise monotonically if not exponentially.
Much of the political management expertise I once had is obsolete, based on an America that no longer exists, but some principles don’t change. If you want less of something, tax it. If you want more, subsidize it. If you want people to stop saving money, tax interest they receive from money they already paid taxes on. And if you pay people for not working, you will get fewer people busting their chops to find work, or taking jobs that are beneath them, and more pressure to have ‘guest workers’ to pick apples and mow lawns and dig vegetable gardens or clean buildings or scrub hospitals – jobs that Americans don’t want to do. Meanwhile we pay government workers to do the jobs that used to define people’s lives. When I was a Scout leader, some of my assistants were people who washed cars for a living. Another was a janitor. They got part of their life definition by being involved in public service, with the Scouts, or with their schools, or through their churches.
When enough people are paid by the government not to work, and whose contributions to the society are their progeny and their vote, what happens next? Ayn Rand speculated on that once, but we really don’t need her dramatic hidden valley.
Somebody’s got to work. Who should it be, you?
I ramble. My point is that Herman Cain scares the establishment something awful. He’s not interested in handing out entitlements so that he can win a second term. He’d like to win, but there are things he won’t do. Such men are dangerous.
Department of disturbing new items:
The radio is announcing on the regular news – I have heard this twice – that in one restaurant in China you can visit a cage full of Koala bears, choose one, pay Twenty-two ($22.00), and have the animal served either broiled or braised. I know no more about it than that, but I would have thought that live Koala Bears cost more than that? More if I learn more.
(I added this to yesterday’s view, but it got posted late. Sorry for repetition.)
On the Procedure known as “Simple Western”: my thanks to all who sent me mail explaining it.
Simple Western
Hi Dr. Pournelle –
Long time reader, first-time caller. Regarding the egregious "Simple Western" ads in Science – your instinct is correct, there’s tremendous amounts of cash to be made by convincing molecular biologists that they need "integrated systems" to do biochemical assays they could just as easily whip up following instructions from the venerable Cold Spring Harbor manual (http://cshprotocols.cshlp.org/). In some instances (ie labs working with massive, parallel arrays of samples) this approach might be necessary, but I remain convinced of the virtues of DIY unless proven otherwise.
"Simple western" is nothing more than an automated "E-Z" western blot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_blot), a gel electrophoresis-based protein immunodetection assay (useful if you want to ID one particular protein, or even roughly quantitate the concentration of one particular protein in a sample extraction mix). The "western" in the name comes from a decades old joke – biochemist Edwin Southern invented a DNA hybridization detection technique that became known as the Southern Blot, then an RNA-detection technique jokingly got called a "Northern" blot and shortly thereafter the protein detection technique got called a "Western". The names have absolutely ZERO to do with cardinal directions and have been confusing students of biochemistry for decades. Just another example of how misused language can obfuscate and baffle all but the experts…
All the best and keep up the good work!
Sincerely,
Brett Alcott
Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Columbia University New York NY
And my thanks. One of the great benefits of being me is that I have readers like you. I have said since BIX days that I can probably get the answer to any question no matter how obscure, and within a few days at that.
Cocktail party theories.
Cocktail party theories are theories you would defend at a cocktail party or a home salon, but which you don’t publish in peer reviewed journals. I have many of them.
I was reminded of one recently. I have for decades – I think I first published it in Galaxy in the 70’s – had the cocktail party theory that humans and dogs coevolved. It goes like this: the same brain areas that needed for a sense of smell are also those needed for smarts. A long time ago humans made a deal with dogs. You keep the sense of smell. We’ll get smart. We’ll watch out for each other’s kids. Thrive.
Evolution goes more by villages and clans than individuals. Villages that have dogs tend to have more kids growing up to have children than villages that don’t. Dogs are an advantage.
What reminded me of this is the discovery, way back in one of the cave picture caves with the buffalo pictures of some 25,000 years ago, there are some footprints that turn out to be from that time. (How they were preserved and how we know how old they are isn’t obvious to me, but it seems to be accepted.) One is the footprint of what appears to be a ten year old human. The other is that of either a wolf or a dog. Since it’s unlikely that the cave painters would be allowing their children to wander back in there and then let a wolf in, I imagine that’s a boy and his dog. From 25,000 years ago. Now I’m going to go pet Sable.
