I am amazed that telecom executives are not alarmed by the facts surrounding Huawei Technologies and ZTE Inc. These two Chinese companies manufacture and install critical infrastructure hardware and software for telecommunications. The need for security that prevents private phone calls and data streams from being intercepted and used by others is critical and essential. The manufacturer is the one point in the chain where something can be installed and not easily findable. Can U.S. telecom users afford the risk that the Chinese are intercepting streams of information?
The short answer is no. And Huawei is suspect. It is a private company owned by its employees and conducts no disclosure that would be reflective of an open company. And what kind of company in China is owned by its employees? A socialist one? A State owned one? There is no concept of ESOP in China. What benevolence on the part of the initial capital providers would have prompted giving away massive amounts of wealth to workers? There is no evidence of such wealth amongst the workers and certainly there would be at least anecdotal evidence of the workers attaining wealth by working at Huawei.
My conclusion is that the Chinese government or the Army owns Huawei and we cannot trust them to provide US buyers with clean equipment and software. I don't understand why Telecom executives in Kentucky would want to save money and install suspect equipment.
And I do understand why the U.S. Congressman are concerned about this. I am concerned about this.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Someone can explain President's Debate Failure
I know no one is perfect, but this does explain President's lack of salesmanship on the Affordable Health Care Act and Simpson Bowles.
Link
If Obama losses this election, it will be truly ironic when history looks back and sees that the two President's who promoted women's rights most actively, Clinton and Obama, generated a Supreme Court that took away a woman's right to choose by conducting themselves in such a manner that two Republican Presidents were elected. Clinton with the Lewinsky Affair that cost Gore the election and Obama by not explaining to the electorate the positive reasons to vote for him.
So Bush II got to appoint Alito and Roberts, and Romney may get to appoint who knows who, but we know whoever they are will vote to overturn Roe v Wade.
Link
If Obama losses this election, it will be truly ironic when history looks back and sees that the two President's who promoted women's rights most actively, Clinton and Obama, generated a Supreme Court that took away a woman's right to choose by conducting themselves in such a manner that two Republican Presidents were elected. Clinton with the Lewinsky Affair that cost Gore the election and Obama by not explaining to the electorate the positive reasons to vote for him.
So Bush II got to appoint Alito and Roberts, and Romney may get to appoint who knows who, but we know whoever they are will vote to overturn Roe v Wade.
Islam needs to show outrage
I know I have no Islamic readers so this is just me spinning words into the digital world.
It is truly outrageous that the Taliban would shoot a 14 year old girl for advocating education for girls and some decent level of rights for women. And since this occurred in Pakistan which has had numerous women in senior roles of government, you would expect this to be an accepted fact of life at the policy level.
But there is no outrage directed at the Taliban by the Pakistani government for this shooting. There is no outrage in any other part of the Islamic world. While I might understand the lack of such outrage in the Gulf States where women have no rights, I expect more from Muslims in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. They need to show they disapprove of such actions and the scorn in brings down on the Muslim Religion by people who have other faiths.
It is truly outrageous that the Taliban would shoot a 14 year old girl for advocating education for girls and some decent level of rights for women. And since this occurred in Pakistan which has had numerous women in senior roles of government, you would expect this to be an accepted fact of life at the policy level.
But there is no outrage directed at the Taliban by the Pakistani government for this shooting. There is no outrage in any other part of the Islamic world. While I might understand the lack of such outrage in the Gulf States where women have no rights, I expect more from Muslims in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. They need to show they disapprove of such actions and the scorn in brings down on the Muslim Religion by people who have other faiths.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Romney 1 Obama 0
Of course, a campaign is more than one debate, but even I thought Romney came across better in tone and content. The problem with the content was that he turned his back on what he has been campaigning on. He sounded moderate so he sounded reasonable and came across well.
However, Romney promised not to cut defense spending, restore $749 bn to Medicare, not raise taxes on the middle class while cutting tax rates on the wealthy, not change Medicare for anyone over 60 (I am 59 and now find myself where the 54 year olds used to be when 55 was the magic age for such changes) and a few other promises. All-in-all, if you added up what he proposed for the budget, he is not going to balance the budget any better than he portrays that Obama would. You can't do all this things and lower the deficit. So we don't know what Romney stands for and my mind is not changed.
I will admit I missed the 1st 25 minutes because we were watching a Netflix disc with a BBC show called The Hour. I highly recommend this show. It is only 2 discs with 3 hours on each one. Very interesting plot with decent acting. I also channel surfed to keep up with the Yankees Red Sox so I may have missed President Obama make a compelling counterpoint, but that is what I thought he missed doing and why I think most people feel he lost the debate.
However, Romney promised not to cut defense spending, restore $749 bn to Medicare, not raise taxes on the middle class while cutting tax rates on the wealthy, not change Medicare for anyone over 60 (I am 59 and now find myself where the 54 year olds used to be when 55 was the magic age for such changes) and a few other promises. All-in-all, if you added up what he proposed for the budget, he is not going to balance the budget any better than he portrays that Obama would. You can't do all this things and lower the deficit. So we don't know what Romney stands for and my mind is not changed.
I will admit I missed the 1st 25 minutes because we were watching a Netflix disc with a BBC show called The Hour. I highly recommend this show. It is only 2 discs with 3 hours on each one. Very interesting plot with decent acting. I also channel surfed to keep up with the Yankees Red Sox so I may have missed President Obama make a compelling counterpoint, but that is what I thought he missed doing and why I think most people feel he lost the debate.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
71% of Republicans Believe Polling is Biased Against Them
This is what makes me so angry toward the GOP today. Remember, I used to be a Republican and this anger is what made me start this blog and why I cannot entertain voting for a Republican today.
As if it were not enough to claim the media is biased against the GOP (notwithstanding Fox News, and syndicated radio shows), now Republicans believe the polling organizations steer the results in favor of the Democrats somehow. While I will admit that some organizations are clearly biased (Fox News, MSNBC), there are many that are not (CNN, the major newspapers away from their editorial pages, the news magazines).
Why can't Republicans accept the fact that somewhere between 50% & 55% of the voters are rejecting their policies in a significant enough way to vote for the Democrats and the GOP needs to compromise their policies with Democratic policies to get this fiscal picture stabilized and on a path to lower deficits?
Of course, none of this should surprise me because 31% of Republicans believe President Obama is a member of the Muslim faith. When ignorance is so widespread in a political party, one cannot expect rationality to be at the forefront.
Politics is the art of the possible and that is reality. Republicans apparently do not believe that and it makes me very angry.
As if it were not enough to claim the media is biased against the GOP (notwithstanding Fox News, and syndicated radio shows), now Republicans believe the polling organizations steer the results in favor of the Democrats somehow. While I will admit that some organizations are clearly biased (Fox News, MSNBC), there are many that are not (CNN, the major newspapers away from their editorial pages, the news magazines).
Why can't Republicans accept the fact that somewhere between 50% & 55% of the voters are rejecting their policies in a significant enough way to vote for the Democrats and the GOP needs to compromise their policies with Democratic policies to get this fiscal picture stabilized and on a path to lower deficits?
Of course, none of this should surprise me because 31% of Republicans believe President Obama is a member of the Muslim faith. When ignorance is so widespread in a political party, one cannot expect rationality to be at the forefront.
Politics is the art of the possible and that is reality. Republicans apparently do not believe that and it makes me very angry.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Musings with 5 weeks to go
The irrationality of current GOP views is becoming clear, but also we are starting to get some perspective on where Conservative hatred of President Obama comes from. Skip to the bottom if you want to read only that.
Obamacare would be a conservative's dream solution for health care, if only it had been implemented by a GOP President rather than Obama. Obamacare was developed by the Heritage Foundation as a way to control costs by getting the uninsured into the system. It uses the principles of Transparency, Mobility and Choice. It does so by preserving the private health insurance sector and empowering individual choice once you are past the requirement that every individual be in the health insurance system. In fact, Representative Ryan's plans for Medicare are built on the principles of Obamacare. Some form of Obamacare is the base path to controlling healthcare expense which is a necessity for a stable fiscal picture.
The Conservative ire toward Obamacare is built on enmity toward anything the Obama Administration does and the base desire of the Conservative elite to oppose anything that provides use of public funding for women's reproductive health or even empowers a woman to have control over her reproductive health.
Source article for the above
On foreign policy, you would think Conservatives would have some balance in their thought as two wars without any revenue increases has certainly not been conservative from a fiscal policy standpoint. Yet, the GOP cannot change their policies to reflect the new world order. We cannot order a country to do things in a manner that fits our liking exactly. A democratic Egypt (or a democratic any other Arab country) cannot ignore its people when it comes to Israel's failure to allow the Palestinian's a state of their own. Reacting in a neocon manner to the killing of the American Ambassador to Libya would have provoked outrage and more violence against Americans instead of the Libyan people's peaceful disarming of the militias that provoked the violence that provided the cover for the Al-Qaeda attack. And how would we have known who to bomb in such a reaction that neocons would have approved of? The world is a complicated place and it takes thought, analysis and time to find a solution that meets the approval of the world.
Thomas Friedman today
So why are conservative's so angry with President Obama? For that, we read a book review of I AM THE CHANGE by Charles Kesler. The book review was written by Mark Lilla and here is the link.
Link
"Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers’ health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realized. His name was Richard Nixon."
Nothing President Obama has proposed is quite as radical as what Nixon opposed. What conservatives are really angry about has nothing to do with President Obama exactly. They want to turn the country back into a society where the individual acknowledges and acts upon a personal responsibility to take care of themselves and the government provides no individual safety net. They see what is now a 90 year trend toward statism (having started under Woodrow Wilson) and they want to reverse it. They are angry that Republican Presidents like Reagan, Bush I and Bush II did not do more to reverse the trend. They are angry that their strategy of starving the beast by not raising taxes has only resulted in an inadequately funded government that now has a debt burden that they find scary and they worry that they are about to lose an election that will reverse that starving of the beast. They are angry about virtually anything that incubates the demise of the role for white males.
Now to go back to their philosophy of personal responsibility, I have no disagreement with it. People are responsible for taking care of their economics and health. But if that worked so well, why did the country have to develop social security and medicare, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and welfare? The answer is a modern industrial economy is a complicated place and complete self reliance didn't work.
In a capitalist society, companies do what is best for the shareholders. Workers are the respected until they are not needed and then they are cast off into society. Their value and self respect take a beating in such a process. They need a safety net to provide them the means to look for that next job in a proper frame of mind. Not every person is as tough as nails in their mental makeup.
As for why retirement entitlements are necessary, the answer is that no person can control the timing of their retirement to match when the markets will be doing well. Many less educated people are not good at saving or managing investments. They need a societal safety net that forces them to contribute from their earnings to that safety net. Those contributions fund a properly constructed retirement that smooths out the investment risk and allows individuals to benefit from the law of large numbers.
You would think after 90 years of losing, conservatives would adapt, but I guess there is always a philosophical battle to wage and things to modify around the margin, like the design of healthcare financing where conservatives won, but they cannot acknowledge that because then they would not have a shot at winning the election since even conservative white males don't want their health care changed and health care is all that they are angry about. They do not want to separate health care from employment and that is a necessity that is not in Obamacare.
Obamacare would be a conservative's dream solution for health care, if only it had been implemented by a GOP President rather than Obama. Obamacare was developed by the Heritage Foundation as a way to control costs by getting the uninsured into the system. It uses the principles of Transparency, Mobility and Choice. It does so by preserving the private health insurance sector and empowering individual choice once you are past the requirement that every individual be in the health insurance system. In fact, Representative Ryan's plans for Medicare are built on the principles of Obamacare. Some form of Obamacare is the base path to controlling healthcare expense which is a necessity for a stable fiscal picture.
The Conservative ire toward Obamacare is built on enmity toward anything the Obama Administration does and the base desire of the Conservative elite to oppose anything that provides use of public funding for women's reproductive health or even empowers a woman to have control over her reproductive health.
Source article for the above
On foreign policy, you would think Conservatives would have some balance in their thought as two wars without any revenue increases has certainly not been conservative from a fiscal policy standpoint. Yet, the GOP cannot change their policies to reflect the new world order. We cannot order a country to do things in a manner that fits our liking exactly. A democratic Egypt (or a democratic any other Arab country) cannot ignore its people when it comes to Israel's failure to allow the Palestinian's a state of their own. Reacting in a neocon manner to the killing of the American Ambassador to Libya would have provoked outrage and more violence against Americans instead of the Libyan people's peaceful disarming of the militias that provoked the violence that provided the cover for the Al-Qaeda attack. And how would we have known who to bomb in such a reaction that neocons would have approved of? The world is a complicated place and it takes thought, analysis and time to find a solution that meets the approval of the world.
Thomas Friedman today
So why are conservative's so angry with President Obama? For that, we read a book review of I AM THE CHANGE by Charles Kesler. The book review was written by Mark Lilla and here is the link.
Link
"Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers’ health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realized. His name was Richard Nixon."
Nothing President Obama has proposed is quite as radical as what Nixon opposed. What conservatives are really angry about has nothing to do with President Obama exactly. They want to turn the country back into a society where the individual acknowledges and acts upon a personal responsibility to take care of themselves and the government provides no individual safety net. They see what is now a 90 year trend toward statism (having started under Woodrow Wilson) and they want to reverse it. They are angry that Republican Presidents like Reagan, Bush I and Bush II did not do more to reverse the trend. They are angry that their strategy of starving the beast by not raising taxes has only resulted in an inadequately funded government that now has a debt burden that they find scary and they worry that they are about to lose an election that will reverse that starving of the beast. They are angry about virtually anything that incubates the demise of the role for white males.
Now to go back to their philosophy of personal responsibility, I have no disagreement with it. People are responsible for taking care of their economics and health. But if that worked so well, why did the country have to develop social security and medicare, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and welfare? The answer is a modern industrial economy is a complicated place and complete self reliance didn't work.
In a capitalist society, companies do what is best for the shareholders. Workers are the respected until they are not needed and then they are cast off into society. Their value and self respect take a beating in such a process. They need a safety net to provide them the means to look for that next job in a proper frame of mind. Not every person is as tough as nails in their mental makeup.
As for why retirement entitlements are necessary, the answer is that no person can control the timing of their retirement to match when the markets will be doing well. Many less educated people are not good at saving or managing investments. They need a societal safety net that forces them to contribute from their earnings to that safety net. Those contributions fund a properly constructed retirement that smooths out the investment risk and allows individuals to benefit from the law of large numbers.
You would think after 90 years of losing, conservatives would adapt, but I guess there is always a philosophical battle to wage and things to modify around the margin, like the design of healthcare financing where conservatives won, but they cannot acknowledge that because then they would not have a shot at winning the election since even conservative white males don't want their health care changed and health care is all that they are angry about. They do not want to separate health care from employment and that is a necessity that is not in Obamacare.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
This is really funny at the 2:45 mark
It was getting tedious even for a passionate political person like myself, but then it had me in stitches.
The disaster that awaits us if Mitt wins
The disaster that awaits us if Mitt wins
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