Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

theodp writes to mention a C|Net article about Chinese President Hu Jintao's historic first visit to the U.S.. The catch is that his first dinner won't be at the White House. It will be at Bill Gates' manse. From the article: "The approximately 100-person guest list is a who's who of the U.S. Pacific Northwest power elite, including Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz and Washington state Gov. Christine Gregoire, said event organizers. The guests will undergo strict security checks before entering Gates' lodge-style, 66,000-square-foot home overlooking Lake Washington with a reported seven bedrooms, six kitchens, 24 bathrooms, a domed library, a reception hall and an artificial estuary stocked with salmon and trout. Gates and Gregoire are expected to introduce and welcome Hu, who will then offer a toast in front of the gathering."

Comments

Animal Farm

[twitter]

It's hard to tell who should be more ashamed of this meeting, but a brief quote from Animal Farm is appropriate:

"Gentlemen," concluded Napoleon, "I will give you the same toast as before, but in a different form. Fill your glasses to the brim. Gentlemen, here is my toast: To the prosperity of The Manor Farm! "

There was the same hearty cheering as before, and the mugs were emptied to the dregs. But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? Clover's old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept silently away.

But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously.

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Forty years ago, Nixon invented the policy of engagement to balance the dangerous Soviet Union against an equal dangerous but hungry Communist China.

Ten years ago, with the Soviet menace defeated, Bill Clinton invented the complete sell out. Slave made goods have flowed into out country, jobs and money have flowed out. Parallel to this was born the myth of the "information economy" where the US would own ideas and the rest of the world would do our bidding because of it. Of course, for this ownership to be complete, it must apply to our own citizens. To enslave others, we must first prove our dedication to ruling by enslaving ourselves.

You can draw a straight line to today, with the DMCA, Patriot act and rampant domestic spying from a tremendously expanded federal government. As the rich and powerful gateher in Redmond, ask yourself where the rhetoric of freedom has gone and why your boss is dining with a Communist. What in the hell are we doing?

China isn't reall communist

[7of7]

If you'll look, after the mess in Tiananmen in 1989 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_prot ests_of_1989 the Chinese government basically said something to the effect of "ok, you know we'll kill you if you embarass us again like that" and that they were going to turn the country capitalist in the sense that foreign companies could do whatever they want and they decided to invest heavily in technology and modernization. Their bread and circuses decision has lead China to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world if not the fastest. There were sweeping reforms economically that took place while the political landscape remained as barren as before. True communists they are not in any sense.

A friendlier "Communism"

[Dis*abstraction]

Nowadays the government calls it "socialism with Chinese characteristics," not because they think they're fooling anyone, but as a pretense to legitimacy. Socialism is being redefined as something roughly along the lines of Nordic-style welfare capitalism. It's not even clear that the burgeoning urban bourgeoisie would care if the Party apparatus were to repudiate socialism once and for all.

Certainly we should petition for greater freedoms in mainland China and in particular for the rights of imprisoned journalists, political opponents, and religious leaders. Still, considering how terribly China's citizens suffered under previous incarnations (Mao) of the present post-Tiananmen regime, I'm optimistic for the future. I believe the Party will continue on its path of liberalization as a younger, more cosmopolitan generation of Oxford- and Columbia-educated Chinese accedes to power. Who needs revolution, after all, when you can build democracy from within?

Big business is evil

[Tablizer]

It is time for a good political rant. Big business is too powerful and interfering in international relations to a frightening extent.

Most innovation and growth comes from small and medium companies. Large companies exaggerate the power of economies of scale because being nimble is more important in a fast changing world. Big biz survives by bullying smaller companies, not by doing the job better or being more efficient. Anybody who has worked for a big company knows that they are inharently disfunctional.

American car companies didn't grow bloated and slow because of lack of foreign competition, but because of a lack of domestic competition, ei. smaller but more car companies. Japan's auto makers grew competitive because Japan had about 12 car companies before going overseas.

Big businesses should be split, or at least mergers above a certain size should curtailed. Most mergers result in a net loss of profits. The only reason they still happen is because of a select few who make big bucks off such deals and the ego power of being big.

The Indian prez and prime minister

[alphakappa]

The Indian prez (Dr. Abdul Kalam) is a rocket scientist while the prime minister (Dr Manmohan Singh) is a PhD in economics from Oxford.

Re:Who is better? President Bush or Gates?

[be-fan]

Gates, Harvard undergraduate dropout. GDub, Yale BA, Harvard MBA. Who is the intellectual?

MBA's aren't intellectuals. The intelligence required to get an MBA, even somewhere like Harvard, is a fraction of the intelligence required to get into Harvard as a technical major. Given that Gates has shown both far more intellectual capacity than Bush, technically, as well as having been orders of magnitude more successful as a businessman, I find your point to be positively silly.

If you call opposing the creation of a race of subhumans bread only for their stem cells to be anti-intellectual then I hope we have more of it. You are intellectually dishonest.

Who exactly is proposing creating a race of subhumans breed for their stem cells? Do you have a good grasp on how the technology works? The stem cells come from disposed fetuses (which are about as human as a piece of steak), and it is the cells that are cultured, not the fetuses.