Sunday, March 16, 2008

The Report: China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce by sticking with its successful strategies

McDonalds says Welcome in China The Report
China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce by sticking with its successful strategy of continued steady growth, coupled with continuing (the appearance of) a transparent society (where currently major decisions are made by top government and business officials behind closed doors) which manipulate and manage economies at large.

In order to be considered a great global leader China should maintain peace and respect for corporate property rights. They need to immediately focus on their serious environmental pollution problems to survive. Politically China needs to resolve the long-standing repression of the Tibetan people; it is too expensive in terms of public relations.

Caption: "The sign that says you're welcome in Shanghai" - Johnny Vulkan http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnyvulkan/1856903750/

The evidence is clear: China has McDonalds restaurants, and with extensive factories they make Dell and other computers. Bill Gates is eagerly pursuing business with China, and the Chinese government has given Microsoft the right to grant post-doctorial fellowships. Key companies invested in technology are willing to go to court to keep the most important Chinese corporate leaders. Kai-Fu Lee, once a vice-president at Microsoft is now Google's manager in China. Mr. Lee was the person at the center of twin lawsuits (suit and countersuit), a battle over which of the two companies would win him to work for them - he may be the ultimate in 'intellectual property.'

Caption ”On the Shanghai subway, rather than advertising computers for sale, Dell promotes job openings.” Danburg Murmur http://www.flickr.com/photos/danburgmurmur/247299162/

What is at issue are personably identifiable information (PII) and intellectual property rights (patents and copyrights) which are legislated and widely respected in the West.

Personal information is the feeder fish at the bottom of the information age food chain. China does not believe people have a right to privacy because of how communism is structured; this is true of members of their society until that person is wealthy and thus powerful enough to opt out of it, and even then the appearance of opting in must be kept.

Even in the West Intellectual property rights are eroding, which is as it should be, as it is not the same as owning a house, and can be damaging to others on a massive scale such as medical patents for aids, cancer, and other life saving drugs.

The Chinese style of governance comes with a 5 thousand year old administrative history of ordering a society consisting of large numbers of people. Because most people in American and the West do not speak their language nor write it, much of China remains a society closed to the English speaking countries. Due to communication barriers the West does not have the very healthy level of respect for China that it should.

The Chinese written language may give China advantages with online screens unknown in the West with their thousands of dense glyphs, pictographs, and phonetic parts. Currently it is estimated more than 1 billion people use some form of Chinese as their native language.

China Business Day street level announcements at Microsoft, spring 2008, Redmond, Washington, USAIt can be said that he who owns the resources wins; especially true when supply chains are consistent and reliable. This applies to personally identifiable information in the information age as it relates to sales, because personal information is a building block in the information supply chain. Creating mass marketing campaigns targeting not just individuals but large groups of people is based on creating desire, an example is Steve Jobs and the Apple iPod. This is in addition to knowing what people want, not just what they need.

Meeting the needs of all people in the world is still a goal some people are working towards, while many more others try to capture wealth only for themselves and their investors. From the point of view that in the long run we’re all dead, many investors do not view themselves as breaking any moral,ethical, or other rules, just trying to get ahead, or make a profit on their investment, which they want right now. This uninformed short sighted view is killing people, and eroding the middle class of nations. Any country that has a middle class will miss it when it is gone; most countries are trying to build their middle class.

Business to Business (B2B) resource supply chains control wealth. Only the wealthy have a reason to protect privacy of information, because the poor and the very poor have much more immediate concerns. Hopefully the Chinese will learn as other countries like Malaysia did, that including diverse ethnic types is not just a ethical ideal, it is a strategy for long term success.

This lesson continues to be a painful and costly lesson to the US, which in many ways is exclusionary. Viewing the poor as beggars while subsidizing production with huge remedies is one of the inadequacies that may be overturned as international growth is managed at a global level because it can not be justified as anything other than corrupt practices. By all accounts I read, generosity in international relationships is mythical and with the digital age has only grown worse . Does it matter what you wear while you ask for money or how well educated you are? Apparently it does.

One size fits all privacy will never suit everyone because it has a biological basis and the need increases with education, and its cousin, wealth. Increasingly to have the opt out choice in terms of privacy you need wealth. That too will change subtly because as ecommerce becomes pervasive, some system or sets of systems will always knows that someone is there in some detectable way.

The patent and copyright systems can be damaging to others on a global scale by shutting down creativity, and unfairly favoring their protection even against life, due to medical patents for aids, cancer, and other life saving drugs being so expensive to produce or purchase that people are allowed to die as a result. Calls to action for multinational drug companies to reduce these costs, have changed little or nothing in the developing world. This has been featured so well in the headlines and news stories lately that it can hardly be a surprise to anyone that it is a problem – youth know because Digital Rights Management (DRM) is dead.

Ecommerce is a tool and can be used in many ways. Trading is already a cold transaction and to remove it from human context makes it even more so. In accounting they discuss "arms length transactions" - with ecommerce those arms get pretty long.

So we can expect that the human repercussions of global ecommerce, driven by the integration of B2B procurement systems, could stabilize and destabilize entire populations unless the planning is very good. That means everyone must hold the keys in some way, and be open to transparency at some level which runs counter to special interest groups . Transparency in action does exactly what it need to do, but which, for example, is not a match for the existing Chinese culture.

Tibetans praying at the Boudha Stupa, one man wearing a 'China' shirt, Kathmandu, NepalReal transparency in global governance with a goal to meet the basic needs of all people living sounds like a science fiction plot, but that is what makes it exciting. Transparent governance may only become possible due to radically unexpected causes, like education, religious idealism, or a shared social solution of the young through organizations such as http://www.one.org/. Oddly enough one of the religions which may benefit China is Tibetan Buddhism.

Ecommerce will not cause peace in the world, educated people working with strong idealism in transparent cultures will. Still my conclusion remains that China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce. We should invest in China.

Readings:
Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman

The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman by Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Introduction to Geeksville

We are nerds. Welcome to the peculiar world of the generalized yet detailed global technologist.

Here we chat with our cohorts - who are coding television-on-demand security in Lisbon, attending class via video working on the open ocean in a research vessel while preparing to win an international martial arts competition in Tokyo, contemplating how to re-engineer a 100+ year old trucking company supply chain and communications system, traveling to Nepal to photograph and document a 1000 year old secret ritual and publish it on the Internet and in academia, establishing new standards for antiquated backwards thinking medical staff because we care.

Geeksville Trees

Where the words 'I want to get off the grid' are more shocking than anything about sex or drugs. Here we have different standards than most people, and when it comes to technology sometimes our expectations of ourselves and the tech - well they are very high.

Here you find us where the belief that technology can help make the world a better place is not just a dream, it is a shared goal.

It is not a gentle ride.

Friday, March 14, 2008

A Work In Progress

DSC_1920There is no such thing as 'underpar work' in school. There is just work in progress. When is anything really done? When we drop it or "finish" it and go on to something else.

For example Picasso said he never finished a work - when he did - it was dead. He always found a place to stop which perhaps nothing could be added or removed but he believed his work was always in progress, as a practicing fine artist.

In a student as weaknesses are identified one should educate and bring up to the standard, but one should not just rate the work 'underpar' - its an emotional chokehold, from a judgemental framework. Modern individuals, students and teachers, working with each other have innovated beyond it.

When working together or participating together with other people you don't turn to another person and say "This is underpar work" you work on it together until it is improved. Where did academia get the punitive idea that that was ok, and a standard to uphold?

It's an underpar way to communicate effectively, and it needs to change in my view of what educators may offer, working interactively with students to deliver motivation, and information.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce

Peace and Ecommerce, A Global Systems View
China likely Winner of the Information Age Ecommerce Supply Chain by Maintaining Peace and Corporate Property Rights

By Linda Lane, MSIM, 2008
Glenn Von Tersch, Policy, Law, and Ethics in Information Management, University of Washington

The Research Diary
Education justifies everything.
Attending a required Masters class “Policy, Law, and Ethics in Information Management” it was only ethical to admit that I worked three months drafting and publishing policy documents for Microsoft, which was our assignment, to research Web based privacy policies and other related documents such as terms of use, conditions of use, code of conduct and learn more about them, with a diary of examples in the wild, and related materials. The educational idea is that we would then be able to contribute meaningfully to creating policy statements, and understand their underlying implications to end users and companies.

The instructor of the class, Glenn Von Tersch is that valuable-to-me teacher because he is a rare working professional in the field in which he instructs, he’s an intellectual property lawyer working in California, teaching in person in Seattle, and in my lingo, a local boy made good. Von Tersch assigned me to present information on freedom of speech, a topic I fell in love with, and wanted to research more. But for my final research I needed something else.

One of my favorite things to discuss in job interviews, or with anyone in earshot, is that I believe that the networked spread of ecommerce over the Web, filtering into even the poorest nations will aid in understanding through communication; that ecommerce leads to peace. In effect I believed that ecommerce contributes in a direct way to peace because it provides the fuel to grow and maintain the Internet. Also it seemed obvious that people and countries that are invested in and perform transactions with each other are less likely to go war against their own interests. Von Tersch said, “These topics you are interested in have more research value than freedom of speech, because 1st amendment rights have been heavily legislated, written about, and researched.” He mentioned something called “The McDonald’s Effect”, how having a McDonald’s outlet or franchise appears to contribute to peace between countries. So peace and ecommerce became my topic.

What I did not expect to discover is in human society war is considered the norm and peace the exception. I did not expect to learn about how ugly the 3rd world poverty creating monster of WTO became according to one economist, even though I live in Seattle where the initial protests were. I was surprised to know how Reganomics theory hangs on, like an old B-grade movie on late night TV, because someone somewhere in the supply chain makes money. I did not expect to find that privacy and intellectual rights are so tightly interwoven, or how they relate to conflict, security, potential world dominance and growth.

I had no way to guess that I would enjoy the study of economics – statistical, yes, nicely so, but dull no; as a global topic it is juicy-rotten, full of international spies , botched security , with rogue pirate computer chips , and unintended consequences.

Who can accurately predict how patterns of global economics relate to peace, privacy, property rights, policies and their outcome in the one breath away from today, the next 20-40 years? Who would think that China - the nation, McDonalds - the corporation, and Chicago crack dealers and their foot soldiers share so much in common when you view their information through these fascinating multi-dimensional facets?

One must be educated to search effectively for information. My knowing about the nature of search is not just intellectual knowledge; this is conditionalized through my own experience of failure to produce relevant search results within massive library databases.

My education began with a simple query on the Web “peace + ecommerce” which returned from Google “Theses on the Balkan War,” by Mike Haynes, from the International Socialism Journal, “Capitalism is inherently a competitively expansionist and therefore conflict ridden system” , effectively laying the blame for war on the US and Western capitalist nations and on any one claiming to be fighting a war with good intentions. I read it, thinking I would not see this relate to my project – also surprising very similar material was presented in the global economic books I read later .

As mentioned the pursuit of ‘education justifies anything’, like looking at any results, so I also clicked on an article entitled “Dinosaur Extinction linked to change in Dinosaur Culture” I read it, and it made sense that something like author Daniel Quinn’s theory of “The Law of Limited Plastic cover of new monitor with Power Saving FeaturesCompetition” is an operant factor in global markets today, with war being genocide, and countries struggling to win economically laying waste to the very place they live. A notable example is Beijing, the air pollution capital of the world struggling to host the Olympic Games this year. I stored that URL for future reference. The theory and the reality imply that in the race to catch up and compete in global economics, the Chinese are killing themselves off before they arrive at their desired goal.

Then I queried in several of the University of Washington interconnected and extensive library databases on the same thing “peace + ecommerce” and found in all of them, zero returns, “0 Results”. My teacher was surprised and advised me to extrapolate and offer conjecture on what was likely, if few sources were available. I notified a friend studying economics who emailed related articles. Very frustrated I tried related queries and turned up articles on the economies of war . How perverse, I thought. I contacted a librarian through the online tool and chatted with her, explaining my quest. She suggested I query on “economics and public policy”. “How is public policy related to peace and ecommerce?” I asked. “Try Conflict Resolution” she replied.

Thus the reason I couldn't find 'peace' is because the term used, in educated facet writers’ metadata which is designed to expose information to search, is 'conflict resolution' or ‘conflict prevention’. Oddly the social implication is that war is the norm. Maybe peace doesn’t exist anywhere. A reason I used 'ecommerce' instead of 'global economics' is due to consulting in that field for technology firms. Searching again returned few meaningful results -- the user interface was strange, very slow, and clunky. I longed for Google .

McDonald's Wi-Fi HereThen I remembered the “McDonald's Effect” our teacher mentioned, and quickly I located a reference on the Web, but it was deeply nested in a staggering number of oddly worded articles. I stopped without uncovering where the concept originated. The next night I searched again, and found the author Thomas Friedman and his related books. I briefly scanned all the related Wikipedia articles. I realized quickly that to become educated enough on my two topics, I had to some understanding of economics. This is because even to scrape by enough to search among the many interrelated topics one needs to know the central facet . Very esoteric topics require specialized language and deep knowledge of the subject.

More searches turned up substantial evidence that China lags behind other nations in ecommerce.

For years I worked in ecommerce designing interfaces (for Microsoft 2003 and Amazon 2007-2008), and working with supply chain software (as a director of an ecommerce company). But because I didn't realize that one could understand it better, and that it is not as dull as computer science and its requisite cash register receipts , I never tried.

The "McDonald's Effect" is named after "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" created by the author Thomas Friedman's slightly in cheek comments and his book, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” (the update now titled "The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization").

Those books lead me to order Amazon ecommerce overnight book delivery, and I read, 'The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman', 'Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything' , 'Making Globalization Work' which reports that there is hope in the world for peace. The Nobel Prize winning author helps the reader extrapolate based on significant knowledge of statistics and global economic analysis through his personal, professional, and academic connections.

Common Name Academic Name Book Title
McDonalds Effect Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,
aka democratic peace theory Lexus and the Olive Tree

Dell Theory The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention The World is Flat, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

peace conflict prevention
ecommerce global economics

"In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman proposed The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, observing that no two countries with a McDonald's franchise had ever gone to war with one another, a version of the democratic peace theory."

"The Dell Theory stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."

China likely Winner of the Information Age Ecommerce Supply Chain by maintaining peace and corporate property rights






The Report


Thesis: China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce by sticking with its successful strategy of continued steady growth, coupled with continuing (the appearance of) a transparent society (where currently major decisions are made by top government and business officials behind closed doors) which manipulate and manage economies at large. In order to be considered a great global leader China should maintain peace and respect for corporate property rights. They need to immediately focus on their serious environment pollution problems to survive .

The evidence is clear: China has McDonalds restaurants, and with extensive factories they make Dell and other computers. Bill Gates is eagerly pursuing business with China, and the Chinese govenment has given Microsoft the right to grant post-docs. Key companies invested in technology are willing to go to court to keep the most important Chinese corporate leaders. Kai-Fu Lee, once a vice-president at Microsoft is now Google's manager in China. Mr. Lee was the person at the center of twin lawsuits (suit and countersuit), a battle over which of the two companies would win him to work for them - he may be the ultimate in 'intellectual property.'

What is at issue are personably identifable information (PII) and intellectual property rights (patents and copyrights) which are legislated and widely respected in the West. Personal information is the feeder fish at the bottom of the information age food chain. China does not believe people have a right to privacy because of how communism is structured; this is true of members of their society until that person is wealthy and thus powerful enough to opt out of it, and even then the appearance of opting in must be kept. Even in the West Intellectual property rights are eroding, which is as it should be, as it is not the same as owning a house, and can be damaging to others on a massive scale such as medical patents for aids, cancer, and other life saving drugs.

The Chinese style of governance comes with a 5 thousand year old administrative history of ordering a society consisting of large numbers of people. Because most people in American and the West do not speak their language nor write it, much of China remains a society closed to the English speaking countries. Due to communication barriers the West does not have the very healthy level of respect for China that it should. Even the Chinese written language may give China advantages with online screens unknown in the West with their thousands of dense glifts, pictographs, and phonetic parts. Currently more that 1 billion people use some form of Chinese as their native language.

It can be said that he who owns the resources wins; especially true when supply chains are consistent and reliable. This applies to personally identifiable information in the information age as it relates to sales, because personal information is a building block in the information supply chain. Creating mass marketing campaigns targeting not just individuals but large groups of people is based on creating desire , an example is Steve Jobs and the Apple iPod . This is in addition to knowing what people want, not just what they need.

Two programmers at Microsoft concentrate while coding in Redmond Washington USAMeeting the needs of all people in the world is still a goal some people are working towards, while many more others try to capture wealth only for themselves and their investors. From the point of view that in the long run we’re all dead, many investors do not view themselves as breaking any moral or other rules, just trying to get ahead, or make a profit on their investment, which they want right now. This uninformed short sighted view is killing people, and eroding the middle class of nations. Any country that has a middle class will miss it when it is gone; most countries are trying to build their middle class .

Business to Business (B2B) resource supply chains control wealth. Only the wealthy have a reason to protect privacy of information, because the poor and the very poor have much more immediate concerns. Hopefully the Chinese will learn as other countries like Malaysia did, that including diverse ethnic types is not just a ethical ideal, it is a strategy for long term success.

This lesson continues to be a painful and costly lesson to the US, which in many ways is exclusionary. Viewing the poor as beggars while subsidizing production with huge remedies is one of the inadequacies that may be overturned as international growth is managed at a global level because it can not be justified as anything other than corrupt practices. By all accounts I read, generosity in international relationships is mythical and with the digital age has only grown worse . Does it matter what you wear while you ask for money or how well educated you are? Apparently it does.

One size fits all privacy will never suit everyone because it is biological and the need increases with education, and its cousin, wealth. Increasingly to have the opt out choice in terms of privacy you need wealth. That too will change subtly because as ecommerce becomes pervasive, some system or sets of systems will always knows that someone is there in some detectable way.

The patent and copyright systems can be damaging to others on a global scale by shutting down creativity, and unfairly favoring their protection even against life, due to medical patents for aids, cancer, and other life saving drugs being so expensive to produce or purchase that people are allowed to die as a result. Calls to action for multinational drug companies to reduce these costs, have changed little or nothing in the developing world. This has been featured so well in the headlines and news stories lately that it can hardly be a surprise to anyone that it is a problem – youth know because Digital Rights Management (DRM) is dead.

Hardware unconnectedEcommerce is a tool and can be used in many ways. Trading is already a cold transaction and to remove it from human context makes it even more so. In accounting they discuss "arms length transactions" - with ecommerce those arms get pretty long .

So we can expect that the human repercussions of global ecommerce, driven by the integration of B2B procurement systems, could stabilize and destabilize entire populations unless the planning is very good. That means everyone must hold the keys in some way, and be open to transparency at some level which runs counter to special interest groups . Transparency in action does exactly what it need to do, but which, for example, is not a match for existing culture in China.

Real transparency in global governance with a goal to meet the basic needs of all people living sounds like a Star Trek episode, it may only become possible due to radically unexpected causes, like education, religious idealism, or a shared social solution of the young through organizations such as one.org.

Ecommerce will not cause peace in the world, educated people working with strong idealism in transparent cultures will. Still my conclusion remains that China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce.

Readings
The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman
Larry Page, Google Co-Founder quoted by Thomas Friedman, p. 179, entire paragraph. “The more global Google’s user base becomes, the more powerful a flattener it becomes…”

From Friedman’s conversation with Google’s director of operations in China, Kai-Fu Lee, p. 181 entire paragraph ”In time individuals will have the power to find anything in the world at any time on all kinds of devices – and that will be enormously empowering.”

The Quiet Crisis, entire pages 368, 369, chapter on research in China, beating out American innovation in research. “The Chinese government gave Microsoft the right to grant post-docs.” “They work through their holidays because their dream is to get to Microsoft.”
“What are those?” She said the researchers get them from Microsoft every time they invent something that gets patented. How do you say Ferrari in Chinese.”

p. 370 “… whether we are going to implement or China is going to beat us to our own plan.” Council on Creativeness, regarding the Innovate America report, comment to Friedman by Deborah Wince-Smith.

Introduction p. X, Thomas Friedman, “Of course the world is not flat. But it isn’t round anymore either. I have been using the simple notion of flatness to describe how more people can plug, play, compete, connect, and collaborate with more equal power than ever before – which is what is happening in the world. … the essencial impact of all the technological changes coming together in the world today. … My use of the word flat doesn’t mean equal (as in ‘equal incomes’) and never did. It means equalizing.”

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman

Forward to the Anchor Edition, Thomas Friedman, “… my Golden Arches Theory – that no two countries that both have McDonald’s have ever fought a war again each other since the each got their McDonald’s.”

p. 7 “When I say that globalization has replaced the Cold War as the defining international system, what exactly do I mean?”

p. 8 “The cold war system was symbolized by a single word, the wall … “You can’t handle the truth,” Says Nickleson. “Son we live in a world that has walls…”

p. 8 “This Globalization system is also characterized by a single word: the Web. … we have gone from a system built around divisions and walls to a system built around integration and webs.”

p. 19 “What is information arbitrage? Arbitrage is a market terms. Technically speaking, it refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of the same securities, commodities or foreign exchange in different markets to predict from unequal prices and unequal information. The successful arbitrageur is a trader that knows…”

Chapter 3, p. 29. The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Photo: Jerusalem, December 29, 1998: Simon Biton places his cellular phone up to the Western Wall so a relative in France can say a prayer at the holy site. (Photo: Menahem Kahana, Agence France-Presse) [caused my spontaneous tears]

p. 47 “advertising jingle “Let us put a bank in your home” … office … newspaper … bookstore … brokerage firm … factory … investment firm … school in our homes.”

The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman by Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Chapter 5 “Why do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?” p. 89 “So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most American businesses, actually, though perhaps none more so than McDonald’s. In fact, if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.”

p. 46 “There is a tale, “The ring of Gygnes,” … could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?”

p. 58 “Attendance at Klan meetings began to fall … of all the ideas Kennedy thought up to fight bigotry, this campaign was clearly the cleverest. … He turned the Klan’s secrecy against itself by making its private information public: he converted heretofore precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery.”

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz
My favorite – the entire book was used to write this paper.

Web Resources
Please view attached Appendix http://www.crito.uci.edu/pubs/2004/ChinaGECIII.pdf regarding the reasons one study concludes that hold China back in ecommerce.

[1] Waiting until the time is right, one is good at something, or has collected all the facts, without making any attempts isn’t effective. I had to begin someplace even if it is incomplete so I started with the World Wide Web. “If something is worth doing well, at all, it is also worth doing poorly.” I am not sure where that quote came from but I read it in an article where someone presented their reasoning.

[2] You never know where something will come from in free rights actions or what it will mean later. For example the person at the center of the Alaskan “Bong hits For Jesus” case, Frederick Morse, now teaches English to Chinese students in China. As an adult it appears he has his head on straight in his wish to help others communicate, more so that those he fought in court.

From the CNN news article, published June 26, 2007, “In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said, "This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message." He was backed by Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/25/free.speech/index.html/ downloaded March 13, 2008

[3] Pentagon attack last June stole an "amazing amount" of data” Joel Hruska Published: March 06, 2008 - 07:13PM CT http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080306-pentagon-attack-last-june-stole-an-amazing-amount-of-data.html from “blueton tips us to a brief story about recent revelations from the Pentagon which indicate that the attack on their computer network in June 2007 was more serious than they originally claimed. A DoD official recently remarked that the hackers were able to obtain an "amazing amount" of data.

We previously discussed rumors that the Chinese People's Liberation Army was behind the attack. “CNN has an article about Chinese hackers who claim to have successfully stolen information from the Pentagon.” Quoting Ars Technica: "The intrusion was first detected during an IT restructuring that was underway at the time. By the time it was detected, malicious code had been in the system for at least two months, and was propagating via a known Windows exploit. The bug spread itself by e-mailing malicious payloads from one system on the network to another." Via email from Jeremy Hansen on http://slashdot.org/

[4] “Chinese backdoors "hidden in router firmware" Matthew Sparkes, News [Security], Tuesday 4th March 2008 3:17PM, Tuesday 4th March 2008 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/173883/chinese-backdoors-hidden-in-router-firmware.html The UK's communication networks could be at risk from Chinese backdoors hidden in firmware, according to a security company.

SecureTest believes spyware could be easily built into Asian-manufactured devices such as switches and routers, providing a simple backdoor for companies or governments in the Far East to listen in on communications.

"Organisations should change their security policies and procedures immediately," says Ken Munro, managing director of SecureTest. "This is a very real loophole that needs closing. The government needs to act fast."

"Would they buy a missile from China, then deploy it untested into a Western missile silo and expect it to function when directed at the Far East? That's essentially what they're doing by installing network infrastructure produced in the Far East, such as switches and routers, untested into government and corporate networks."

Late last year MI5 sent a letter to 300 UK companies warning of the threat from Chinese hackers attempting to steal sensitive data. Reports at the time suggested that both Rolls Royce and Royal Dutch Shell had been subjected to "sustained spying assaults".

The issue has been debated by government for some time. In 2001, the then foreign secretary Robin Cook, warned that international computer espionage could pose a bigger threat to the UK than terrorism.

[5] Chip Piracy Might End With Public Key Cryptography. A Web Exclusive from Windows IT Pro Mark Joseph Edwards, Security News, InstantDoc #98491, Windows IT Pro “A group of researchers from two universities have proposed a way to prevent chip piracy. The technique uses public key cryptography to lock down circuitry.

In a whitepaper published this month, Jarrod A. Roy and Igor L. Markov (of the University of Michigan) and Farinaz Koushanfar (of Rice University) outline the problem and details of how their proposed technology will help solve it.

Chip designers sometimes outsource manufacturing and that opens the door to piracy, should someone copy the design plans. The copied plans are then used to created 'clone' chips for a wide range of devices, including computers, MP3 players, and more.

"Pirated chips are sometimes being sold for pennies, but they are exactly the same as normal chips," said Igor Markov, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. "They were designed in the United States and usually manufactured overseas, where intellectual property law is more lax. Someone copies the blueprints or manufactures the chips without authorization."

The groups propose the use of public key cryptography, which would be embedded into circuitry designs. Each chip would produce its own random identification number, which would be generated during an activation phase. Chips would not function until activated, and activation would take place in a manner somewhat similar to that seen with many applications in use today. Via email from Jeremy Hansen.Original source - EPIC: Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits Jarrod A. Roy, Farinaz Koushanfar‡ and Igor L. Markov, The University of Michigan, Department of EECS, 2260 Hayward Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121, Rice University, ECE and CS Departments, 6100 South Main, Houston, TX 77005 http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~imarkov/pubs/conf/date08-epic.pdf March 06, 2008

[6] Chapter 5 “Why do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?” p. 89 “So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most American businesses, actually, though perhaps none more so than McDonald’s. In fact, if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.”

[7] Mike Haynes, Theses on the Balkan War, “Capitalism is inherently a competitively expansionist and therefore conflict ridden system” Issue 83 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Summer 1999 Copyright © International Socialism, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj83/haynes.htm/ accessed March 3, 2008.

[8] Readings p.7 “When I say that globalization has replaced the Cold War as the defining international system, what exactly do I mean?” p. 8 “The cold war system was symbolized by a single word, the wall … “You can’t handle the truth,” Says Nicholson. “Son we live in a world that has walls…”p. 8 “This Globalization system is also characterized by a single word: the Web. … we have gone from a system built around divisions and walls to a system built around integration and webs.”

“What is information arbitrage? Arbitrage is a market term. Technically speaking, it refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of the same securities, commodities or foreign exchange in different markets to predict from unequal prices and unequal information. The successful arbitrageur is a trader that knows…”

[9] Shared by miles on Feb 13, 2006 3:39 pm that I located through a http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&realattid=f_fdn935gd&attid=0.1&disp=vah&view=att&th=118998918e57e2e4
[10] “As it gears up to host the 2008 Olympic Games Beijing has been awarded an unwelcome new accolade: the air pollution capital of the world.Satellite data has revealed that the city is one of the worst environmental victims of China's spectacular economic growth, which has brought with it air pollution levels that are blamed for more than 400,000 premature deaths a year” http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/oct/31/china.pollution

[11] “What we call ‘war’ is not all bad,” according to Virginia Johnson a former governmental planning consultant, who reminded me, “Without conflict there is no life. You don’t want 'perfect peace' there is no movement. The human standard is actually what we broadly call 'war'; because without conflict, change, motion, growth we would learn nothing, we would have nothing, we would be dead.” Personal conversation, March 14, 2008, Seattle, Washington

[12] Readings Larry Page, Google Co-Founder quoted by Thomas Friedman, p. 179, entire paragraph. “The more global Google’s user base becomes, the more powerful a flattener it becomes…”

[13] Ranganathan, faceted classification, Five Laws of Library Science, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._R._Ranganathan, http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ranganathan_for_ias Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time. (PMEST)
Personality—what the object is primarily “about.” This is considered the “main facet.”
Matter—the material of the object
Energy—the processes or activities that take place in relation to the object
Space—where the object happens or exists
Time—when the object occurs

[14] http://www.crito.uci.edu/pubs/2004/ChinaGECIII.pdf

[15] I learned about supply chain management mainly from the supply chain wizard Marc Lamonica, Regional Chief Financial Officer at Sutter Connect, http://www.sutterconnect.org/, and our mutual friend Web entrepreneur and ecommerce product engineer Adam Kalsey, and Sacramento State University teacher Stuart Williams, of Blitzkeigsoftware.net, http://blitzkriegsoftware.net/StuartWilliams/default.asp

[16] Introduction to Computer software classes in the 1970s consisted of FORTRAN cash register receipt programming, which is by implication is what ecommerce actually does.

[17] Freakonomics is a must read book of comedy and connections.

[18] Golden Arches, definition on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Arches, accessed March 13, 2008

[19] Readings “The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century” by Thomas Friedman, p. 421

[20] Readings p. 19 “What is information arbitrage? Arbitrage is a market term. Technically speaking, it refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of the same securities, commodities or foreign exchange in different markets to predict from unequal prices and unequal information. The successful arbitrageur is a trader that knows…”

[21] “Conservation groups say acid rain falls on a third of China's territory and 70% of rivers and lakes are so full of toxins they can no longer be used for drinking water.” Satellite data reveals Beijing as air pollution capital of world, Jonathan Watts in Beijing The Guardian, Monday October 31 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/oct/31/china.pollution

[22] “…After watching Jobs unveil the iPhone, Alan Kay, a personal computer pioneer who has worked with him, put it this way who has worked with him, put it this way: "Steve understands desire." ... Fortune CNN Magazine March 5, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/02/news/companies/elkind_jobs.fortune/index.htm
accessed March 5, 2008

[23] Mac Margolis, “How Brazil Reversed the Curse, Latin America used to suffer the deepest gap between rich and poor. Now it is the only region narrowing the divide. Upwardly Mobile: Middle-class Brazilians” http://www.newsweek.com/id/67850 NEWSWEEK Nov 12, 2007 Issue

[24] Mike Haynes, Theses on the Balkan War, “Capitalism is inherently a competitively expansionist and therefore conflict ridden system” Issue 83 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Summer 1999 Copyright © International Socialism, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj83/haynes.htm/ accessed March 3, 2008. “The optimism that the end of the Cold War might lead to a new world order has been shown to be false. The hope that it would release a peace dividend that would enable a new generosity in international relations has been belied by experience, as some of us sadly predicted it would.3 Though the arms burden has declined, there has been no outpouring of aid to Eastern Europe, no new 'Marshall Plan'. The result has been that the burden of change has fallen on the broad masses of the population, wrecking lives across the old Soviet bloc in general and in one of its poorest components in south eastern Europe in particular. According to the World Bank, the number of people living in poverty (defined as having less than $4 a day) in the former Soviet bloc has risen from 14 million in 1990 to 147 million in 1998.4 Worse still, the advanced countries have continued to reduce further the miserly sums they devote to aid to the even poorer areas of the world. The OECD countries are rhetorically committed to an aid target of 0.7 percent of their output. In 1990 they gave 0.35 percent, and by 1997 the figure had fallen to 0.22 percent, with the United States under this heading giving 0.09 percent of its output, a figure in startling contrast to the expenditure devoted to destruction.”5

[25] Readings p. 46 “There is a tale, “The ring of Gygnes,” … could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?”

[26] Readings p. 58 “Attendance at Klan meetings began to fall … of all the ideas Kennedy thought up to fight bigotry, this campaign was clearly the cleverest. … He turned the Klan’s secrecy against itself by making its private information public: he converted heretofore precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery.”

Some of the research in this paper on piracy, was provided by Jeremy Hansen of Seattle, Washington, USA. Mr. Hansen's email regarding economics served to inform me on this topic.

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Rant

--Sorry I was speaking in hyper dense terms expecting you have read what I have read etc. we havent exactly studied the same stuff. we don't think in the same way - transparency bias showing like an invisable slip, or a guiding hand that isnt there

it relates through intellectual property and what I am saying is that privacy does not have a one size fits all solution. Some choices are hard-wired and in some ways that will never go away while human beings exist unless you selectively breed it out of them

the joke about internet porn was in relation to a TV ad that is repeated frequently played bevause it catches our attention, I don't really go for internet porn, it doesn't interest me. but it was about how americans are attracted to it and probably many people as it relates to biology as in reproduction and seems to be something hard wired in humans, with social coverings and differing norms and is related to privacy. it is rediculous but there.

The french for example don't want anyone to know what they earn or pay in taxes on their real estate that information they consider private, in america real estate taxes are public information. the french dont mind showing off something that the publically prudish americans swear they have no interest in but are actually facinated by in private (hence the joke about internet porn) such as their breasts on public beaches, just like brazil or italians. (depends on what you look like in the buff for some?)

But in China what you read may not be private. the differences I have seen in China have more to do with gender preferencial treatment than what we would even consider giving up as private (our thoughts freedom of expression etc) People do not chat on the bus or the train in China, because they are afraid of their government. That is fear of their private thoughts being known - illustion of transparency, but for them its real ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_transparency

biologically privacy is shown even among animals, by its very nature humans need some forms of privacy. Since it costs a human mother a certain amount of calories to concieve, bear and raise children, she will want to do that in a private, controlled, SAFE, environment - this means controllling who has access to her, her family and any and all information about them

Why? Because she wants the protection afforded by the many levels of privacy, physical, ecomomic, social, informational etc what ever other kinds, because they related to safety and security. Privacy is a individual and group response to biological needs for safety and security even in communial cultures. The desire for an increase in privacy generally rises with the level of an increase in woman's education which is linked to increases in the stabiltiy of nations. there are also social norms related to physical privacy, just travel to India and you'll see someone washing their private parts in public, china and you can not walk down the street with out your body space being invaded - these are social norms.

as far as China - he who has the key to resources has wealth. Think about B 2 B supply chains and intellectual property is again a form of wealth in the information age. traditional economics holds that (resources) its like diamonds and gold and timber and potato(e thx mr bush)s and pork bellies. But as our world grows flatter and ecomomic competion increases globally knowing information to turn it into things like instant *buy*sell* investments is a form of wealth. Of these forms information about people, our private information which we now consider an opt in privilege for others to have may become more like an opt out privilege to pay others to obtain so we aren't bugged etc. we want to make choices as you said, and that includes about our private information. just like walled villas of the rich and wanna be rich.

Think about Matrix as Neo walks through ads. He never had privacy - that is not going to happen because he will be able to afford to turn it off - he kept it on so he would not appear so wealthy in public which would tend to draw attention to him
waterbox
think about the issues of choice modeling, a - b testing, cognitive biases,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases and all the biases in choices, the user is king, the more you know about your user the more power you have over them. All that Use case senario user testing marketing profiling stuff is about getting people the user to do what you want them to, in the guise of serving them at some level. user testing is about knowing what is in someone's mind, making tacit information into data/info/knowled/wisdom/=money.

Long term its been about class struggles but in contrast what do inventors and academics care about - not money but what their peers think - it's controllable. why work on designing new aids drugs if you know 3rd world folks will die anyway cause they can't afford the medicinal drugs regardless of emergency agreements?

private information is a form of wealth to seek sales or other goals. privacy issues will not go away even in the far flung future, because there will be differences in personal needs, different laws, coping strategies, biologically driven needs etc

as for a mothers strategy of complete transparency complete openness - it would fail because of the reason stated before - people do want to lean in at the table and learn some juicy gossip, the less spiritually and morally mature want to hate and hurt anyone they percieve as being a HAVE, talent money love what ever.

The children's naked bodies were examined by the police because the neighbours accused the mother of torchering them because the neighbours were just plain jealous of that artistic way of life, openness, joie d vive, etc this society is not ready for glasnost/transparency/openness as long as competition exists we will all search for something to cover whatever we percieve as our nakidness this side of Eden.


Outside the Gates of Eden - by Christopher Wilkinson

"There are no truths outside the gates of Eden. There none inside either. Truths tend to be defined. The domain of no definition is bliss. Bliss is orgasmic reality without center or boundary. On the outside of the gates, this is well conceived as the structure of a mandala. There are male and female aspects. The chip is material, and like the male principle, represents the structure of the mandala. The software -- particularly the OS, is basically female, and represents the intuitive power of consciousness -- the thing that gives it life.
...

Humanity is at constant war, whether it be war for good or war for conquest, or just to prove who is better or worse. The trials that determine who is right and who is wrong are only functional where the binary reality structure has been imposed on experiential truth -- at the level of total intermesh between OS and hardware -- life and earth -- yab and yum -- at this level all binaries are conventionalities at best. ..Information regarding the endlessness and painful condition of Samsara would tend to be depressing, as there is no real hope for consummate orgasmic awareness to override the dualistic binaries that dwell outside the gates of Eden."

Read:The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman by Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

improveverywhere.com

Friday, March 07, 2008

If you can not discipline yourself someone else will

IMGP0174

This is one of those known laws of the universe. If you can not discipline yourself someone else will.

Kids with candy 3019

everything down to Friday

DSC_1810

comes down to
when your eyes are so sensative
as an indoor office jockey
riding on that corporate nag
that you see halos around the lights
and people look crisp and thus holy
even the desk origami made by human hands
looks strangely organic and dirty
hey -- it doesn't speak English
or tick stately with the clock
or laugh on time
it doesn't lean slightly forward
like the gray steel towers
all right angles and perfection when
everything comes down to Friday

Straight up, Columbia Tower, Seattle, Washington

with your spine the exact shape
I mean EXACT shape of your office chair
and your hands are blue and kinda lacy
like you could see through them in all their glory
and then they rise if you hold a pencil
it looks real like the official steel
your hands feel like the origami, all spicked and earthy
then they're ticking
like the cold clock'd time that shows you
everything comes down to Friday

DSC_1880

like a great sporting event
where the players and spectators all hold their breath
for the running split second
and some how if thus enlightenment ensued --
or even eggs were fried with that potencial
we'd be famous not in the future, Jackson, but right now
and if I just keep saving myself
and my money
I won't be waiting with bated breath
for the exact moment when
everything came down past Friday

'More from Less, Christian Simplicity and the Abundant' poster below Columbia Tower Center, 5th Ave, Seattle, Washington, USA

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Beef, it's what's for dinner? or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Working and attending school, I miss much of the mainstream news, but anyone within hearing can not miss seeing the 'downer cow' harvest footage shot by a Humane Society worker undercover at a slaughterhouse in Chino, California. Kinda makes those "come to California" ads put on a different slant, just like knowing more about McDonald's makes it difficult to stomach eating a burger with that taste.

What is the taste of a sick cow? How dangerous, frighting and in-humane does our food supply have to become for us to stop doing and allowing these things.

I could not watch the entire thing all the way through - there are several related videos on the humane society's site. Today I was a vegetarian, even if I know that smaller animals died harvesting that food - it's got to be a whole lot better than this - repeated many times over.

Beef Recall - Humane Society Investigation Prompts Record Recall

Warning: Graphic video. An HSUS undercover investigation prompts the USDA to recall 143 million pounds of beef from a California slaughter plant; now HSUS urges Congress to take action.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

M. David Becton Design

Doesn't everyone love M. David Becton's little square tables with all that personality? Here we have an assortment... and David regarding his work, about which he is quite passionate:

"Details in Style" is drawn from a variety of historical and cultural sources which run through our lives. I have been designing and building the furniture that occupied my thoughts and my commissions for many years.

With this new idea I have combined a clean, yet dramatic, feel with the sources of our visual history of stylistic elements. They are the result of a history degree and a life influenced by art and the theater.

The traditional lines and details of each statement are jewels in the cultural and architectural pieces of the human puzzle and evidence of the terrible effect of what six years of higher education and a sheet of imitation parchment can do to innocent scraps of wood.

Each table is designed to dramatize some voice from the past or reinterpret a cultural idea that has struck my imagination with enough force to be knocked out and take on a life of its own. You could think of these tables as a present day "Contemporary furniture beverage with a historical twist," or simply a bit of personality to inspire an otherwise harmless room.

The bases are fabricated from a solid core medium density wood fiber product designed to resist the irregular shrinkage properties of newly cut trees. Whenever possible we use purified, recycled wood fiber. For the tops we use a special veneered board that is the standard for exterior art and signs.

Each exterior seam is reinforced to eliminate finish cracking common to jointery of any kind. Our craftsmen and artists apply a resistant gesso-like surface by hand to create the look and feel of antique stone or plastic with some of the same characteristics of durability.

After the background pigment is applied for hue it is glazed with various nuanced pigment to add depth and personality. The result is a table that, although new, has the feel and personality of an older and wiser table. All in all, each piece has a sense of depth and patina all its own.

A pool in an oriental garden could only hope to feel this serene."

See David's site at: http://www.bectonltd.com
M. David Becton

NEWS FLASH !!! ANCIENT AQUATIC MONSTER PHOTOGRAPHED LIVE FOR THE FIRSTTIME!!!

NEWS FLASH !!! ANCIENT AQUATIC MONSTER PHOTOGRAPHED LIVE FOR THE FIRST TIME!!!Lake monster caught on film, yes it is TRUE! The Loch Ness Monster Nessie's cousin Winnie, the Lake Washington Monster, is photographed! See the Amazing evidence for yourself!

Bellevue in the background, you can just see the outline of Winnie's head raised above the water line swimming in direct sunlight just outside the children's swimming area yellow ropes. Behind the white pole you can see her body as well.

Who could stop her from doing what ever she wants? Going wherever she pleases in the dark deep cool waters of Seattle and Bellevue's Lake Washington? Nobody, that's who!

How is it that this queen of the deep raises her head to look around here - is she hungry? Looking for a mate? Are there other of these ancient Plesiosaurs still in the wild from the Mesozoic era?

Saturday, March 01, 2008

iSchool University of Washington

Technology moves fast, just like information does. One of my own old technical prejudices I didn't notice until I visited Berkeley's iSchool - I asked how they re-wired the fabulous old South Hall, built in 1873. "Re-wire? We didn't need to," they told me, "It's all wireless."

From the Chronicle of Higher Education is an interesting article on the value of graduating: http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=wWwv6kBkcTbYktwbjrJkskjtdhknjqvf

Hmmm that article doesn't appear any more - perhaps it isn't recommended to be so critical of higher education putting people in unending debt to a loan they can never get out of - kind of like the buyout of collapsed financial institutions in progress now in the US.

Night crane in boomtown Seattle, the Paul Allen investment bloom

The rest of the United States may be entering a depression phase due to wartime over-spending but the truth is Seattle and Bellevue are booming. There are actually too many construction cranes to count. No kidding.

Paul Allen may be one of the larger reasons for this, his advocacy of building out the beautiful South Lake Union area is supporting growth. There are several cranes there now building Amazon's new buildings for example. The value of housing in that area is just going to bloom; a great investment.

It appears to me that Paul and his sister and their advisors understand community, even more after Seattle voters roundly rejected a bond / tax initiative for the Sport Palaces that they built any way. Why do I think this? Because of that little tram, the SLUT, South Lake Union Train. It's just like Seattle of yesteryear but it so makes sense for the community it is in. Except for bikes. It is very difficult and dangerous to navigate over those rails by bike.

I am thoroughly interested in what will happen in South Lake Union, and have high hopes for the community of the future right here in Nirvana, which is code for "S E A T T L E"

Don't believe Seattle is Nirvana? What other city in the United States universally worships a large version of a Japanese Buddhist Shrine updated for our space minded millenium? The Space Needle folks, that's a-what-I-am a-talking-a-bout Mr.BigBootay.

Note - I am not sure who owns this particular crane or what they are building, but the song remains the same. PS. Don't tell anyone, otay?

http://www.blinkbits.com/blinks/paul_allen

Sky Flowers

Free Tibet

Somehow, this image reminded me of what Tibet would feel like as a free place, with freedom of speech and religion, sort of floating up into the blue like a sky flower

What is less obvious is how China's invasion of Tibet has colored my life. 29 years of studying the extraordinary lamas' revered methods, seeing our world through their eyes a global view, within a completely universal framework. They love ruthlessly.

Do you know why His Holiness calls for peace? He understands cause and effect. When you can recall your last 13 lifetimes it will change your perspective too. That alone would give one a longer view.


You may ask - why don't the Tibetans still in Tibet just leave their ancient homeland, leave their farms and houses, and friends? They can not do so under fear of death. This fall far fewer Tibetans snuck across their southern borders to nations such as Nepal. There is real fear ... and as we now see it is justified.

Why don't the Tibetans come here? Why when they do come here posing as non-resident workers at factories why do they 'defect' en masse? The US does not recognize them as refugees, and therefore they can not obtain passports or visas in most cases except illegally, purchasing phoney documents in the 3rd world; it is easy but expensive.

China is trying to paint her face like an old lady to appear young, or in this case from brutal ruler to a forward thinking host of the Olympics. It appears the effort has backfired.

From the Tibetans living in Nepal, and foreign business people on my last trip there in Oct-Nov, if you travel just 30 KM outside of the Olympic Games area, you will find extreme poverty exists and is easy to see. One Tibetan refugee, a woman whose husband works as a trader, told me "In the Himalayan borders the soldiers shoot first, never ask questions."


I lucked out because the Chinese invaded Tibet. I benefited because China was power hungry. I am better off because of the highly placed Tibetans who landed here.

Among other things I was warned not to discuss religion - one lama told me that Americans have freedom of religion, but we don't believe in freedom of religion.

Long live HH The Dalai Lama, and anyone else who is a member of his "clique" hen hen he. I am completely in awe of him; I humbly and respectly bow as an American with a million billion visualized unique bodies to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

How I made this image
= at work a couple of weeks I've been waiting for my software to arrive. So I made this, in stages as I learned another graphics package. Easy.