Courtesy of AFP:

US President Barack Obama’s offer to talk to Iran shows that America’s policy of “domination” has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday.

“This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed,” Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

“Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change,” he added.

After nearly three decades of severed ties, Obama said shortly after taking office this month that he is willing to extend a diplomatic hand to Tehran if the Islamic republic is ready to “unclench its fist”.

In response, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a fresh tirade against the United States, demanding an apology for its “crimes” against Iran and saying he expected “deep and fundamental” change from Obama.

Ahhh, yes, echos of the Jimmah Cahtahr administration ring in my head.

Thanks, President Obama. 

If you get tired of being treated like a little b-hotch by the Iranians, and Venezualans, and Russians, and Canadians (etc…), call Rush Limbaugh.  I’m sure he’ll be happy to give you some pointers on dealing with these guys.

In the name of bi-partisanship, of course….

Tags: Obambi

Back in October, I made the observation that:

Do I really think that Obama is trying to form a new Hitler Youth type movement?  Probably not.

But if I had to pick between Obama and McCain, as to which one was more likely to do exactly that – there is no question that it would be Obama.

Fast forward to the present, and we find out about this (courtesy of the LA Times):

The organization, known internally as “Barack Obama 2.0,” is being designed to sustain a grass-roots network of millions that was mobilized last year to elect Obama and now is widely considered the country’s most potent political machine.

Organizers and even Republicans say the scope of this permanent campaign structure is unprecedented for a president. People familiar with the plan say Obama’s team would use the network in part to pressure lawmakers — particularly wavering Democrats — to help him pass complex legislation on the economy, healthcare and energy.

Though the plan still is emerging, one source with knowledge of the internal discussion said the organization could have an annual budget of $75 million in privately raised funds. Another said it would deploy hundreds of paid staff members — possibly one for every congressional district in certain politically important states and even more in larger battlegrounds such as Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina.

The full-time staff is likely to consist primarily of the presidential campaign workers, many in their 20s, who served as the local points of contact for the campaign’s vast network of neighborhood volunteers. As part of the new organization, these workers probably would focus on similar campaign-style tasks, such as arranging phone banks, distributing signs, recruiting more helpers, buying coffee and doughnuts for house meetings and reporting voter contact data to senior officials.

“The only way to keep this thing going is to have boots on the ground,” said a strategist familiar with the plan who spoke on condition of anonymity because campaign officials have not granted permission to talk about it.

In what would be another unprecedented step, Obama’s political staff is deciding whether to create a service organization that would use the vast corps of its grass-roots campaign supporters. As described by one source knowledgeable with the discussions, this nonprofit arm would be used to help victims of natural disasters, but would do so under the Obama umbrella while continuing to build the overall network’s massive e-mail database.

The prospect of a president being able to guide a service or relief agency outside the framework of his government is a unique development.

So we now see that the Obama is not only planning to run a perpetual campaign, but to build his own organization separate from the Democrat Party.  Think ACORN, but dedicated to Obama and his administration. 

If John McCain had won the election, and made the same move, there would have been wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Media.  The Left would have been screaming about Brownshirts and Nazis.

So, let me do the media a favor, and point out that there is a modern equivelant to what Obama wants to build:

It is called Hamas.

From Wikipedia:

Since its formation in 1987, Hamas has conducted numerous social,
political, and military actions. Its popularity stems in part from its welfare and social services to Palestinians in the occupied territories,
including school and hospital construction. The group devotes much of
its estimated $70 million annual budget to an extensive social services
network, running many relief and education programs, and funds schools,
orphanages, mosques, healthcare clinics, soup kitchens, and sports
leagues. According to the Israeli scholar Reuven Paz “approximately 90 percent of the organization’s work is in social, welfare, cultural, and educational activities”

The only difference I can see is that Hamas has a fully fledged Military wing.

Of course, that may just be a matter of time.

Tags: Obama

The Seattle Post Intelligencer is up for sale.  And if there is no buyer, the print edition will be shut down in 60 days.

Personally, I am not all broken up about this.  I have little respect for most of the left wing shills (they like to be called “journalists”, but I think they and their fellow travellers are the only ones they are fooling) at this Democrat/Left Wing propoganda rag, and I am not sad to see them go, victims of their own political leanings.

What do I mean by that?

Well, as a former subscriber to the PI, when I lived in King County, it was obvious that their goal was to cater to the left wing portion of the market.  Unfortunately for them, that portion of the market does NOT cater to the advertisers that a large metro publication needs to survive.

In addition, print publications cannot provide rock solid evidence of value to an advertiser, in the way that On Line sites can (like click through data).

I think this can be proven by comparing the Tacoma News Tribune, who is financially stable.  While they lean to the left, the reporting, on the whole, is far more balanced than the PI.  They appeal to a wider demographic, and people shop with their advertisers, so the advertisers stay with them.

Having said that, just this morning my wife asked me why, if I get most of my news from Fox News and the Internet, do I still subscribe to the TNT?

The only real answer I have to that is 1) portability, and 2) the kids like the comics.  Though most of the comics aren’t even mildly entertaining.  But that’s another post.

I guess, at some point, I need to ask myself if the $10+ dollars a month I spend on the paper balances out.  For that same $10, I could get a major regional or national newspaper delivered daily to my Kindle e-reader, thus solving the portability issue.  I know that my kindle payed for itself in 6 months, by changing from paper and hard cover books to eBooks.  Maybe I should think more about changing my newspaper over as well.  With the added bonus of receiving the paper ANYWHERE in the US I happen to be that day.

But I digress.

I wish the PI luck in converting to an on-line only operation (as in this environment, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to throw away $14M a year on the PI).  But I won’t be reading it there, either.

Tags: Seattle PI

I have been, for a number of reasons, silent for the last several weeks.

One issue was technical – I found that my Hosting company was not practicing basic security measures, and had allowed my sites to become vulnerable to various threats.  So, it became necessary to move the site to a new hosting company, with a much better reputation.  As a plus, the new firm is very supporting of Word Press blogs, and it is making my life a LOT easier from a site maintenance perspective.

On the personal front, I have been in the final stages of starting up a new company, and tying up things with my former employer.  Amazing how much time that can take up.

And finally – I decided to sit back and watch the Political situation for awhile, and see what developed.

I will be interested to see what changes of perspective and insight I gain as an entrepreneur, versus a cog of a of a large, soulless, corporate machine.

———-

I would like to note, however, that I was very unpleasantly surprised during the last election cycle at just how low the level of discourse has fallen.

While at an informal function (no-host bar, everyone somewhat lubricated)  just before the election, I allowed myself to be pulled into a political discussion.

People that I have known, and done business with for years, were actually SHOUTING at me, for daring to admit that I was voting for someone other than Obama.  This ran the spectrum from 20 somethings to one gentlemen that is in his 60s.

As I tried in vain to have a rational discussion of basic political theory, it quickly degenerated to loud voices from some, to exclusion from others.

This has event has weighed on my mind heavily for the last month or two.  I have finally decided that I must be extremely careful, going forward, to refrain from any political discussions in public – at least with people that I must work with and around.  Not for personal safety reasons; but because so many people are unable to have any sense of perspective and proportion.

It’s just an election, people.  We survived Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon.  We can survive Obama’s warmed over New Deal and Clinton era Retreads.

After all, I am an American first, and a Conservative Libertarian second.  If Obama succeeds, Hip Hip Hooray.  If he fails utterly, there is another election in 2010, where we can take back the Senate (and maybe the House, if its bad enough); and another Presidential election in 2012.

After the disaster that was the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow”, you might have thought that preachy, anti-human, pro-gaia, people-are-a-blight-on-the-planet feature films would have gone the way of the dodo bird.

But it is not to be so.  Witness the pending release of the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still”.

My favorite line from the Trailer (and therefore, probably the best line in the movie), is (as I recall) “If the Earth dies, you die.  If you die, the Earth lives”.

So, Klatu, the alien sent to warn mankind about playing with Nuclear Weapons in the original movie, is now some kind of green Terminator (or exterminator), sent to save mother Earth from the nasty, despoiling humans, blah blah blah.

Imagine an Al Gore speech, with $millions of Special Effects CGI.

Of course, this kind of thinking isn’t limited to the big screen, in this new age of Hope & Change in America…

Foxnews has a piece on a group called Rising Tide, that Klatu would certainly support.

Rising Tide isn’t protesting the causes of global warming as much as the solutions.

It is against clean coal, nuclear power and capping carbon pollution while letting polluters buy and sell rights to pollute under the cap — the very fixes under discussion in Washington.

It disdains the compromise and collaboration between the Big 10 environmental groups and elite corporations, as well as the view that technology can save the environment.

Rising Tide originated in the Netherlands in 2000. It came to the U.S. in 2006.

That’s when a group of activists involved in Earth First!, one of the earliest groups to use in-your-face tactics such as tree-sitting and blocking roads with human chains, decided that more attention needed to be paid to global warming.

“There was a huge need for a climate-focused group that wasn’t going to compromise … not do what is conducive to business,
but what we actually need for ecosystems on this planet to survive,” said Abigail Singer, who was in those early discussions and is one of roughly 20 people who lead Rising Tide nationally.

Rising Tide’s targets include other environmentalists.

A quick trip to the groups website gives us more insight on their ideals:

Rising Tide North America’s strategy is based on a no-compromise approach of stopping the extraction of more fossil fuels and preventing the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. Equally important, we must phase out our current fossil fuel use and make a just transition to sustainable ways of living. What this means in terms of local organizing depends on the specific conditions unique to each town and bioregion. Rising Tide’s tactics are diverse and creative, taking a
bottom-up approach to connecting the dots between oil, war, capitalism, coal, and the destabilization of the global climate.

Practical solutions exist; it’s time we start using them and making them more widely accessible. We must dismantle the systems of oppression that permeate our culture and ourselves, and work toward real solidarity across lines of race, class, gender and sexual
orientation. When we begin to build a culture of mutual aid and community autonomy, we demonstrate that we don’t need the government, and certainly not giant corporations, to survive. We just need a
livable planet.

I have a new favorite phrase from their statement:  Environmental Racism.

We also reject nuclear energy and dams; these unsustainable mega-projects often result in the devastation of local bioregions and the displacement of both their natural and human communities. Rather, we advocate a drastic increase in energy conservation and support a transition to clean energy sources such as wind, solar, and micro-hydro power.

Ecosystem preservation, recovery and restoration is essential to sequestering carbon and curbing the exponential rate of species extinction. Our agricultural systems also must be made to work more in
harmony with the Earth’s systems; it’s time to abandon industrial agriculture in favor of small-scale, local food sources.

Of course, if these folks spent any time researching the things they talk about, they would know that solar and wind power, on a scale that can provide the energy needed to support the worlds population, would affect the environment at least as much as fossil fuels do today.  And the idea that 6 billion people can be fed by “small scale local food sources” is completely unworkable. 

What I am afraid of is that they DO understand the limitations on population of the goals the espouse.  That the human population would be necessarily reduced to the point that micro-hydro, windmills, and solar cells could provide enough energy to support a greatly reduced population that could be supported by the agricultural model the champion.

Who suffers the most from this?  Why, the “brown” peoples of the world.  The very people they claim are oppressed by our current society, will, to fit their world view, need to be culled in huge numbers, to achieve a sustainable population that can live in “harmony” with mother Earth.

Who is the environmental racist now?

I will give Rising Tide this cudo:  Their politcal structure is what they preach.  From all evidence, they are a collective group of “cells” with no clear overall governance.  This, itself, seperates them from other far Left organizations, that tend to be personal aggrandizement vehicles for a few personalities at the top of the pyramid.

The question I am left with, when considering script writers (and thereby actors and movie studios) that consider Man to be a blight on the face of the Earth; and groups like Rising Tide, who posit that Man must be forced to live in harmony with nature (though they don’t seems to admit anywhere that I can see that this will require population reduction on a truly massive scale), is just why the Left hates Mankind to such a deep abiding level.

Are people perfect?  No, of course not.  If people were perfect, Anarchism would be the rule, as we would not need a government to protect citizens rights from those that do not honor them.  We would spend every evening joining hands around a fire, singing cumbaya…

For anyone living in the real world, we need realistic solutions to the worlds needs;  Energy, Food, and Water.  Solutions that do not require mass reductions in population, or actually create more problems than they solve.

Industrial Agriculture is more than capable of feeding the world’s population, on far less land, using far less resources, than small scale agriculture.  Nuclear energy is, relatively, cheap and plentiful.  Hyrdo Electric power can be done in an environmentally safe manner.   Solar and Wind can be effectively utilized on a local scale, without causing more problems than they solve.

We can feed and provide energy to Earth population, without throwing ourselves back to the stone age, or embarking on a massive reduction in population.  And we can do it while preserving, and even expanding, the “natural” and set aside regions of our planet.

I guess there is a difference between what I believe, and what the human loathers on the left believe.

I see Man as the ultimate expression of the Earth, and a vehicle by which our planet can spread life beyond the confines of this one planet.  Man can be the ultimate triumph of life, moving beyond the home of our birth, and spreading life to all the places will travel to.

The radical/environmental left see us as a virus, and a threat to the “body” as a whole, which must be controlled, or extinguished, to save the Earth.

Of course, I have not yet heard a coherent thought from any of them as what the purpose of life on Earth is, beyond sheer existance.

Tags: Environmentalism

China has been playing a dangerous game since the end of the Mao Dynasty, and the advent of the reformers.

Not that they had a choice.  The stark reality of China today, like all nations, is a culmination of Geography, Climate, and Politics.

China has been trying to limit population growth, while transforming a largely agrarian society into a modern technological one.

The problem is that they have many decades of work left ahead of them, and time is running short due to the aging of the population, and the costs that will incur to society.

China had 153 million people aged 60 or over by the end of last year, accounting for 11.6 percent of the country’s 1.3 billion population, said Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu at a plenary meeting of the China National Committee on Aging (CNCA) Friday.

While Industrialization has been beneficial for some regions, the workforce is shrinking, with many workers leaving rural provinces to work in Special Economic Zones.  These workers typically leave the parents behind – though they send money back home to support the elders.  This is leading to “aging villages”, where most of the inhabitants subsist off of remittances sent back from their children, and government benefits.

Many smaller factories have moved inland as the government, aiming to spread development more evenly, uses tax breaks and looser pollution
controls to lure enterprises to poorer central provinces from the traditional manufacturing heartland near Hong Kong.

This, in turn, is creating a nascent labor shortage, and increasing the cost of labor for manufacturers.  And while China still enjoys a wage advantage over Mexico, and Latin America in general, that will evaporate over the next few years.

But even as China tries to spread Industry, the shortcuts that made them a manufacturing giant are coming Ho-ome, as Rev. Wright says, To Roost!

Two years of disastrous quality-control breakdowns, from foul fish and lead-tainted toys to poisoned drugs and dairy products, are taking their toll on China’s allure as a manufacturing platform. A new study by supply-chain consulting firm AMR Research found that quality concerns are among the chief reasons U.S. manufacturers are scaling back plans to source more goods from China.

Instead, U.S. companies are looking harder at Mexico and other locales closer to home when exploring where to put new capacity.

China was an attractive place to manufacture because of the tax advantages of the Special Economic Zones, coupled with a low wage work force, and inexpensive transportation costs. 

Today, though, with Transport costs fluctuating wildly, and a steady rise in wages, other issues are accumulating to lessen China’s desirability as a manufacturing locale.

Now, the biggest concerns over China are quality and theft of intellectual property (BusinessWeek.com, 4/27/06). Half of respondents to the survey cited China as the biggest source of “risk” for product quality failure. Fifty-seven percent rated China as the biggest risk of
intellectual-property infringement.

“China is in a league of its own in terms of risks associated with intellectual property and quality,” says Kevin O’Marah, AMR’s chief strategist.

In fact, China ranked highest in 9 of the 15 risk factors. Rising labor costs are still an important factor for businesses, with 35% citing China as the leading source of concern. Other risk categories where China ranked highest included regulatory compliance, commodity price volatility, supply-chain security breaches.

And china has not effectively dealt with issues that are damaging to the image of companies manufacturing there:

Quality problems, rampant piracy (BusinessWeek, 10/2/08), allegations of sweatshop abuses, worker protests, and other factors not only drive up costs but also harm the value of brands and corporate reputations. “Companies are realizing that the fully loaded costs of importing from China are a lot higher than they imagined,” says O’Marah.

But China is running out of time, and skilled manpower to get a handle on these problems.  By encouraging unchecked growth with a near total lack of oversight, they have been left with a nation of factory workers, and a rapidly aging agricultural workforce.  They have serious environmental pollution issues to deal with, and a serious lack of quality controls on food production, piracy, and a myriad of other ills that other societies, with longer transition periods, have dealt with.

Now, with the prospect of a dwindling foreign investment, the question becomes whether China can build up a Middle Class (read: Consumer Class), to support the existing Manufacturing base; while converting from family/village based agriculture to large scale automated agriculture (to feed that middle class); while caring for the increasing number of aged (and no longer productive) citizens.  If not, they are looking at more than just an economic crisis…  The chance that the Communist Party that still runs the country can solve these problems in time is slim to non-existent.

Tags: China

And if you’ve never read Tundra before, you should take a few minutes to smile.

Tags: Tundra