Jun 14 2006

Left to Right: the American way

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 6:02 pm

Conversion from life in the real world of the CEO of Whole Foods Market: “Excerpt Of The Day: Business Is Not A Zero-Sum Game”

‘At the time I started my business, the Left had taught me that business and capitalism were based on exploitation: exploitation of consumers, workers, society, and the environment. I believed that ‘profit’ was a necessary evil at best, and certainly not a desirable goal for society as a whole. However, becoming an entrepreneur completely changed my life. Everything I believed about business was proven to be wrong.

The most important thing I learned about business in my first year was that business wasn’t based on exploitation or coercion at all. Instead I realized that business is based on voluntary cooperation. No one is forced to trade with a business; customers have competitive alternatives in the market place; employees have competitive alternatives for their labor; investors have different alternatives and places to invest their capital. Investors, labor, management, suppliers, they all need to cooperate to create value for their customers. If they do, then any realized profit can be divided amongst the creators of the value through competitive market dynamics.

In other words, business is not a zero-sum game with a winner and loser. It is a win, win, win, win game, and I really like that. However, I discovered despite my idealism that our customers thought our prices were too high, our employees thought they were underpaid, the vendors would not give us large discounts, the community was forever clamoring for donations, and the government was slapping us with endless fees, licenses, fines, and taxes.

Were we profitable? Not at first. Safer Way managed to lose half of its capital in the first year, $23,000. Despite the loss, we were still accused of exploiting our customers with high prices and our employees with low wages. The investors weren’t making a profit and we had no money to donate. Plus, with our losses, we paid no taxes. I had somehow joined the ‘dark side’, I was now one of the bad guys. According to the perspective of the Left, I had become a greedy and selfish businessman. At this point, I rationally chose to abandon the leftist philosophy of my youth, because it no longer adequately explained how the world really worked.’ — John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market”

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Jun 05 2006

Reuters roots for Islamic militia in Somalia?

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 8:53 pm

Experts say US funding Somali warlords – Yahoo! News: “(Reuters) – The United States has been funneling more than $100,000 a month to warlords battling Islamist militia in Somalia, according to a Somalia expert who has conferred with the groups in the country.”

Reuters’ leftist slip is showing, as usual. The USA is funding “warlords”, but the Islamists are “militia”… how noble of them!

Reuters names only one source, John Prendergast, a Senior Adviser at the (non-profit) “International Crisis Group.” Prendergast worked in the White House and the State Department in the Clinton administration from 1996-2001, a bit of information Reuters omits, but which bears on the objectivity of Prendergast as the only named source. All the other sources are “anonymous”.

Reuters seems to think it’s bad for the US to fund anti-Islamist groups in Somalia, and implies the UN is investigating US provision of arms to Somalia “warlords”. Outside of the hilarity of the UN investigating anything at all, the obvious point is simple.

Shouldn’t the US do what it can to prevent an Islamist takeover of Somalia, with all the potential for Taliban-style rule that would be a certainty?

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May 28 2006

The Left and the Right

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 6:19 pm

Here are some quotes from the online presence of the Communist Party and the NAZI Party in the USA:

Communist Party USA Online –: “A Call to Action: Defend Democracy, Change Congress in the 2006 Elections!
by CPUSA National Committee, 03/10/2006 15:11
The Bush-Cheney Administration has plunged our nation into the worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War. The abuses of power they have committed are legion: an illegal pre-emptive war, lying to Congress and the people, warrant-less spying, mass incarceration of innocent people here and around the world, torture, corrupt no-bid contracts with crony corporations like Halliburton, criminal negligence in abandoning the victims of Hurricane Katrina…”

The American Nazi Party: “The year is 2025, White people HAVE become a MINORITY in America. On our streets hang Aryan men who refused to accept the ‘New Way,’ or perhaps they just looked too White. Perhaps they never thought MUD RULE would really come.
White girls who refuse the advances of Negroids, are publicly gang-raped so as to serve as examples to other shuddering Aryan females. Children are now taken from their houses, by force, to be brought up in a ‘Multi-Cultural’ home of Negroids, Arabs, Muslims and Gooks, all in the name of ‘brotherhood and love’…

And yet, some fight back! Alone or in small cells, Aryans…men and boys…but most of all women who stand the most to lose, since the decline of real men among the White Folk, strike back…at night and with any weapon near at hand.”

Aryan Attack (a publication of the National Socialist Movement, a NAZI organization):
“A nation’s economy dramatically influences the daily lives of all of its citizens. Today we suffer under a greed based Jewish economy. From the Jew Alan Greenspan, who heads the nation’s financial decision making body, the Federal Reserve, to the average sheeple who’ve bought into the Jew lie of Wall Street swindler and Jew Ivan Boesky that “greed is healthy,” altruism and the good of the whole is a dead thought. What’s important in today’s society is greed and its accompanying individualism. “It’s all about me” is the prevailing attitude.

In sharp contrast to this self-centered destructive worldview is National Socialism. National Socialism offers the only long term workable economic system. And it’s proven. When the world was suffering through a terrible economic depression, National Socialist Germany was not! What made the Nazi economy work, while the Jew based economies of the rest of the world failed?”

It’s pretty common to talk about the Democratic Party in the USA as “the left” and the Republican Party as “the right”.

From where I sit, it looks like the Democratic Party is attuned to the very, very far left, the Republican Party sits in the center, and their is no mainstream party on the “right” at all.

Click the links above. Read the sites. Notice how much Democratic rhetoric closely follows the Communist Party, and how distinct Republican rhetoric is from the NAZI Party.

Draw your own conclusions…

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Jul 04 2005

Air America: Air Ball?

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 12:27 am

 

I listened to Air America all day today. I know, I know… but sometimes I just need to know what the chattering class on the lefty side is saying.

Here is what I learned:

There’s no point in impeaching Bush (still laughing at that one), since then Cheney would be president… and if he was impeached, it would be that creepy Speaker of the House, Haffert (no kidding, that’s what the hosts said, and no one called in to correct them). So congratulating themselves on their hardheaded realism, both pundits and callers bravely moved on to more practical affairs… after discussing it for two hours. Good decision.

Cowboys were probably often gay in the old west, since women were in short supply. Further, those cowboys had a gal inside, just trying to get out. Some guy who styles himself a scholar (scholars rarely claim it for themselves….) even sang a song about it, while complaining that the FCC wouldn’t let him air the true lyrical triumph in the song, the F-word. Too bad… it would have been the highlight of the song.

Now that Bush will appoint at least one new supreme court justice, personal liberty in America is under great threat, and the rights of minority groups and poor people will be trampled, with a probable reversal of the all the gains of the last 40 years… what paltry few have been made, of course.

Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, …. well, you get the idea.

Black people who choose not to carry “Black Power” signs (or Al Sharpton for president signs) in lefty protests outside black churches are “house negroes”… according to the two black hosts, of course. Clarence Thomas would be the worst possible Chief Justice.

The is no source of compassion, love, justice, etc., in the universe, except in so far as people “act” that way. Todays Unitarian Universalist clergy member/talk show host informed us that good only exists when people do it.

Bush gave his recent foreign policy speech about the Iraq war to the Fort Bragg special forces troops because they would applaud out of fear of reprisal. What can you expect from the worst president in history?

Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, ….

War is evil….. all war is evil…. of course, evil can’t actually be defined, just as good can’t be defined….. but all war is evil. Why DO those wascally tewwowists hate us so much? Well, mainly because Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, ….

The United States is an imperialist power with a history of doing evil around the world and to its own people, and most especially to all minorities. The United States is bent on seeking world domination, through a conspiracy of evil corporate giants, the military, and political insiders.

The newly refurbished, kinder, gentler left no longer hates the troops… just those nasty higher ups who manipulate them into serving on foreign shores.

40,000 troops (!!!!) have come back from Iraq with disabling physical injuries, mental illness and emotional distress.

Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar, Bush is a liar,

Well, some commentary on all of this:

It was truly thrilling to hear the left put up its best, if indeed that’s what I heard today. These talk hosts make no attempt at all to educate their audiences with specifics. (I think some of them might excel at re-education… but that’s another topic.) I must have heard the Bush-is-a-liar mantra hundreds of times in a few hours… with no specifics except that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (making liars of the entire world, of course).

There was not a single disagreeing caller, or maybe an actual conservative, on any of the shows I heard today. Not one. Does that mean we fascist types just don’t listen? Or just can’t get through? I don’t know… but the contrast with center-right talk radio, which positively courts disagreeing callers, is huge. There is an enormous sense of preaching to the choir, and not working at making a case for the unconverted.

It seems to be enough to call names at the other side, repeat a few talking points, face no actual disagreement (reasoned or otherwise), take a few cheerleading calls, and call it a day.

No wonder Air America is going under, subsidized as it is. Perhaps center-right successful talk hosts should consider some discrete anonymous donations to keep it on the air…. since the comparison to the pros on the right is so much in their favor that Air America boils down to free adversting for the right.

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Jan 30 2005

The Bear Dances and Sings

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 2:41 am

CNN and FOX are covering the election in Iraq.

I can only stand in awe of the courage of these determined voters. Their sheer guts and commitment to show up at all should be a lesson to nay-sayers everywhere about what people in this part of the world really want. How many voters would show up in, say, Chicago, in a similar situation? I don’t know… but these Iraqi voters deserve our very highest respect.

CNN’s current online headline is “Iraqis vote amid scattered attacks”. Roughly half the TV coverage from CNN seems to be about the attacks today, but a solid half is about the vote itself.

FOX’s headline is “Iraq’s Historic Vote Begins”. The first paragragh tells of attacks, but also provides context: lots of voters, and many foiled attacks, as well as some successful ones. FOX’s TV coverage is stressing the protection provided by Iraqi forces, police and military, directly around the polling places. FOX has shown many entire families, from elderly to young children (presumably not voting yet…), walking together to polling places… in some cases carrying Iraqi flags, showing thumbs up to the camera, etc.

Both cable networks have provided reasonable coverage on how many Iraqi women are voting, although it seems to have been inadvertent in one CNN report, where the reporter could not be heard over all the women talking in the polling place.

ABCNEWS is carrying a story stressing the attacks, predicting lack of Sunni turnout, stressing how bad the result of a low Sunni turnout will be, etc. Big shock. Little mention of who is providing the election security… mostly Iraqis around the polling places. All attacks listed in GREAT detail.

Another ABC article, IRAQI HISTORY MAY COLOR VIEWS OF ELECTION tries to downplay the importance of a successful election. I consider this to be evidence that the election must be going well in the eyes of the editors.

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