Huffy leaves bankruptcy

41 (WHO???) wrote:
Bill Sornson wrote:

For a while I was trying to decide if the president is evil. But
now I've come to the conclusion that being evil requires some
intent, and some smarts. He is not smart enough to be evil. He
just keeps screwing things up because he's too stooooopid to know
any better.

Yet he's so brilliant and all-powerful he can control hurricanes,
public (and political) opinion on international intelligence, etc.
etc. etc.

Nah, that was Rove's job. If nothing else, you can see that from the
fact that now that Rove is (a) saddled with part of the job of
hurricane reconstruction (yeah, things got so bad Bush put him in
charge of that for at least a while), and (b) crapping in his Depends
for fear of being indicted this week, the whole White House operation
has been falling apart. Could the Harriet Miers thing have been
handled any worse? What about the "spontaneous" exchange of views
with soldiers in Iraq which was accidentally exposed to be
choreographed right down to the last pause for breath? [Yeah, tell me
Bush didn't have a microphone in his ear during the debates.]
Obviously neither was a Rove job. If Rove gets sent up river, we will
see exactly how big his role used to be.

Or the utter ineptness of the Democrats.

Yes, it's quite clear that if you want to win American elections, you
have to have the chutzpah to break campaign finance laws (DeLay) and
to own the companies that manufacture the voting machines.

Drink some more Kool-aid, why doncha. (Hint: Delay's case will be thrown
out of court, UNLESS of course the judge who donated numerous times to Kerry
AND to MoveOn.org is allowed to preside.)

OK, back to your nutjob blogs.

Bill Sornson wrote:
41 (WHO???) wrote:

The father of the current president of the United States (43), that's
who. Watch out or I'll have you Gitmo-ized.

Yet he's so brilliant and all-powerful he can control hurricanes,
public (and political) opinion on international intelligen ce, etc.
etc. etc.

Nah, that was Rove's job. If nothing else, you can see that from the
fact that now that Rove is (a) saddled with part of the job of
hurricane reconstruction (yeah, things got so bad Bush put him in
charge of tha t for at least a while), and (b) crapping in his Depends
for fear of being indicted this week, the whole White House operation
has been falling apart. Could the Harriet Miers thing have been
handled any worse? What about the "spontaneous" exchange of views
with soldiers in Iraq which was accidentally exposed to be
choreographed right down to the last pause for breath? [Yeah, tell me
Bush didn't have a microphone in his ear during the debates.]
Obviously neither was a Rove job. If Rove gets sent up river, we will
see exactly how big his role used to be.

Or the utter ineptness of the Democrats.

Yes, it's quite clear that if you want to win American elections, you
have to have the chutzpah to break campaig n finance laws (DeLay) and
to own the companies that manufacture the voting machines.

Delay's case will be thrown
out of court, UNLESS of course the judge who donated numerous times to Kerry
AND to MoveOn.org is allowed to preside.

Well, since the judge who will decide whether to recuse the other judge
is in turn a heavy Republican donor, it will be an interesting
decision. But likely the first judge will stay, because otherwise what
validity would the second judge's decision have? Would prosecutors,
judges, and juries all have to be of the same party as the defendent?
Of the same family? What about detectives and crime scene
investigators? If your view holds, right or wrong, you can kiss the
justice system goodbye. But the first judge will stay, and even if he
doesn't, the next judge will send DeLay (what, a Frenchman?) to the
slammer too, even in Texas. The dude is going DOWN, and guess what,
nobody, not even his Republican "friends", will miss him.

41 wrote:
Bill Sornson wrote:
41 (WHO???) wrote:

The father of the current president of the United States (43), that's
who. Watch out or I'll have you Gitmo-ized.

Mmmmmmmmmm. Glazed chicken and a cookie! Sign me up.

41 wrote:
Ron Hardin wrote:
Jasper Janssen wrote:

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 15:19:38 GMT, Werehatrack
wrote:


Basic econ theories snipped


Folks, I think you're all missing here that the People's Republic Of
China IS NOT a capitalist system (although it's creeping closer to it
every day) and, as a state-ruled
central economic system, its monetary rules and international trade
rules are basically anything it wants it to be.

Oh, and as long as we're talking about China...

Mao: The Unknown Story
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
832pp, Cape, £25
The author of Wild Swans and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, have
torn away the many masks and falsehoods with which Mao and the
Communist party of China to this day have hidden the true picture of
Mao the man and Mao the ruler. Mao now stands revealed as one of the
greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin.
Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers of deaths for which he responsible,
Mao, with some 70 million, exceeded both.

Far from being the first Chinese communist leader to stand up for the
Chinese peasantry and to respond to their needs and lead them out of
exploitation, Mao is exposed as a man who disdained the peasants,
despite his protestations to the contrary. He is shown during his
command of armed forces in the countryside in the late 1920s and early
30s to have lived off the produce of the local peasants to the extent
of leaving them destitute. He consciously used terror as a means to
enforce his will on the party and on the people who came under his
rule. In the course of the Long March, Mao is shown to have had no
qualms in sacrificing thousands of scarce fighting men in fruitless
diversions to serve no other purpose than to advance his bid for
leadership.
His callous disregard for the lives of comrades and fellow Chinese
became more evident once he commanded the larger stage of China itself.
Against the advice of his commanders on the ground, Mao persisted in
prolonging the Korean war in the expectation of tying down hundreds of
thousands of American troops, regardless of the disproportionate
sacrifice of far greater Chinese casualties. The livelihood of China's
peasants was tightly squeezed through most of Mao's rule, not simply to
meet the needs of industry and the urban population, but also to pay
the Soviet Union and the east Europeans for the development of advanced
weapons - especially for the development of nuclear weapons.

The suffering of the peasants plumbed new depths during Mao's
hare-brained scheme to overtake Britain and the United States in the
disaster known as the Great Leap Forward, which led to the starvation
and premature deaths of 30-40 million people. To the end of his life
Mao continued to sacrifice the Chinese people in his search for
superpower status.

Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode
in Mao's tumultuous life. Among the most significant of their
discoveries is that the myth of the Long March was a sham. Chiang
Kai-shek in effect made a safe passage for the Reds through particular
provinces where his rule was weak, so that his pursuing forces could
overcome the local warlords. Moreover, Chiang was constrained from
destroying the Reds because his son was held hostage in Moscow. Even
the fabled crossing of the Dadu chain bridge, when, according to Mao,
his heroic soldiers managed to cross the narrow bridge against heavy
machine-gun fire, is shown to be a complete invention. The
indefatigable authors consulted Nationalist sources, interviewed local
historians and even visited the scene.

Mao is shown to have been completely dependent on Soviet support and to
have taken the view that the Chinese communists would succeed only if
they were able to link up with the Soviet Union and receive massive
assistance. This eventually happened in Manchuria in 1946-47. The
American General Marshall, who had attempted to mediate in the civil
war, had unwittingly saved the communist armies by imposing a truce in
the summer of 1946 that lasted for four months. It was this truce that
prevented Chiang's armies from crushing the retreating Reds. The
ceasefire enabled the latter to be massively replenished by the Soviet
side and then reverse the tide to win in Manchuria and then gain the
rest of China.

Some of the distortions of history perpetrated by Mao and the Communist
party have already been exposed by western and Chinese scholars. They
have had access to writings and documents released by Chinese party
historians, and their studies have also been enriched by access to
archives from the former communist bloc, notably those in Moscow.

Chang and Halliday have not only made full use of this literature, but
judging from their notes, they have spent the past 11 years going
through the archives themselves, some of them in countries whose
records had not been examined for this purpose before. They have also
used their contacts in China to interview an extraordinary array of
people who were close to Mao and other leaders. These range from family
members to friends, colleagues, secretaries, witnesses and even a woman
who once washed Mao's underwear. Consequently, the authors are able to
shed new light on virtually every episode of Mao's life. For example,
it has been known for some time that one of the dirty secrets of Yenan
was that opium was produced and marketed from there. The authors show
how this enriched those at the top and built up the reserves of the
local government, and alleviated some the depredations made on the
peasantry - but they also show how the inflation caused by the opium
money made things worse, too.

Mao himself comes across as a uniquely self-centred man whose strength
was his utter disregard for others, his pitilessness, his
single-mindedness, his capacity for intrigue and his ability to exploit
weakness. He neglected his wives, whom he treated cruelly, and had no
time for his children. He loved food and reading and had an infinite
supply of young women. Mao lacked personal courage and had some 50
villas built for him in different parts of China, which were
constructed to withstand bombing and even nuclear attack.

Mao had none of the skills usually associated with a successful
revolutionary leader. He was no orator and he lacked either idealism or
a clear ideology. He was not even a particularly good organiser. But he
was driven by a personal lust for power. He came to dominate his
colleagues through a mixture of blackmail and terror. And he seems to
have enjoyed every minute of it. Indeed what he learned from his
witnessing of a peasant uprising in his home province of Hunan in 1927
was that he derived a sadistic pleasure from seeing people put to death
in horrible ways and generally being terrified. During the Cultural
Revolution he watched films of the violence and of colleagues being
tortured.

The use of terror typified Mao's rule. Although he had his equivalent
of the KGB, Mao's distinctive form of terror was to get people to use
it against each other. This was the model that he perfected in Yenan,
when everybody was coerced into the exercise of criticism and
self-criticism by which they were forced to confess and implicate each
other in terrible "wrongs". It was a method that was then extended to
the whole of China, as people were confined to their work units in the
cities and their villages in the countryside.

This magnificent book is not without its blemishes. There is no
discussion of the quality of the sources or how they were used. The
motives of people in general and of Mao in particular are asserted
rather than evaluated. There is no introduction or concluding chapter
to bring together the key themes of the book. Nevertheless it is a
stupendous work and one hopes that it will be brought before the
Chinese people, who still claim to venerate the man and who have yet to
come to terms with their own history, even as they require others to do
so.

· Michael Yahuda is professor emeritus at the London School of
Economics and visiting scholar, George Washington University

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/...ticle_continue

wrote:
41 wrote:

Ron Hardin wrote:

Jasper Janssen wrote:

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 15:19:38 GMT, Werehatrack
wrote:



Basic econ theories snipped


Folks, I think you're all missing here that the People's Republic Of
China IS NOT a capitalist system (although it's creeping closer to it
every day) and, as a state-ruled
central economic system, its monetary rules and international trade
rules are basically anything it wants it to be.


And this is different in what way? The United States also sets it's
monetary policies and trade rules to whatever it wants them to be, even
where it has trade deals that state differently. In fact even though
there is a North American free trade deal, trade between North American
countries is anything but free. Just look at the rules for exporting
Canadian goods to the United States, every US government department has
it's own rules....

W

Yet he's so brilliant and all-powerful he can control hurricanes, public
(and political) opinion on international intelligence, etc. etc. etc.

I am embarassed to be an american. It was bad enough when he was
elected the first time. Reelecting him demonstrated the stupidity of
the average american.

Or the utter ineptness of the Democrats. If they couldn't win with nearly
/all/ the factors in their favor, then it might just be hopeless. Give up.

This is the sort of thing that embarasses me. There are still people
who are oblivious to all the bull**** that Bush has done.

No, he can't control the weather, but he can put someone in FEMA who
knows what he's doing, instead of a horse show judge who used to tend
bar at his frat house.

International intelligence? He had his guys leak the name of a CIA
agent to get back at her husband for publicly announcing that the
international intelligence was dead wrong. Now we have almost 2000
dead americans and untold numbers of dead Iraqis (and others) as a
result.

Bush took whatever respect the US had left in a few places on earth
and flushed it down the toilet. Fer chrissakes, even the British are
on our side. That alone should tell you how bad things are.

Your religeous fervor has blinded you to the truth. Wake up. The
last time a theocracy ruled the western world it was called "the dark
ages".

On 23 Oct 2005 08:50:04 -0700, wrote:

Folks, I think you're all missing here that the People's Republic Of
China IS NOT a capitalist system (although it's creeping closer to it
every day) and, as a state-ruled
central economic system, its monetary rules and international trade
rules are basically anything it wants it to be.

External economic interaction is still capitalist.

Jasper

wrote:
Fer chrissakes, even the British are
on our side. That alone should tell you how bad things are.

Would that be worse than when the French were on your side?

Touche.

JimP