I think it's funny that we can spare 25 billion dollars for a no strings attached Citicorp bailout (with another 300 billion in loan guarantees) but not 25 billion for the auto industry. Yeah, flying in on their Gulfstreams was not a great p.r. move but frankly we may need a domestic auto industry someday and they really managed to help the country in World War II when they retooled and started building defense equipment. I read a good local letter by a longtime Ford designer yesterday. He pointed out that they didn't create the demand for big gas guzzlers, they were responding to the insatiable desires of the soccer moms and compensating short men for large SUV style machinery.
I have heard that the 75 dollar an hour average wage figure for the auto worker is a load of hooey as well, it's more like 28 dollars but will need to, as Reagan put it, verify. But I wonder if this resistance to a bailout isn't a way for the right to stick it to the unions as a final parting death blow? I personally hate Citicorp, they held a long time mortgage on my home and were simply detestable. Where are all the cries of socialism from the right now, with the government buying stakes in all these financial concerns?
I drove through the tony burg of Rancho Santa Fe all week on the way to the show and found myself wondering how many of these folks are cowering right now in some corner of their castles. I imagine a lot of people thought that they had impenetrable teflon covers. And they've now discovered that the hard rain has fallen. I don't care how cush you think you've got it, we're all about 20 seconds and a well timed disaster from becoming utterly destitute and unmasked.
It looks like Obama turns out to be a real pragmatist after all, while Bush II became unmasked as the true ideologue. Gates, Scowcroft, Hagel, Leach, Geithner - the Republican names that are surfacing as potential cabinet members resonate as centrist professionals. He seems to be really rolling his sleeves up for the long fight ahead to bring our country back to solvency.
I really admire the Dalai Lama. This week he once again preached the middle way and hoped openly for a path of conciliation with China. I studied Mahayana Buddhism with a Tibetan Rinpoche, Kalu, for a short period in the seventies. The Dalai Lama is consistent in his message of peace and integrity through the end. The Han Chinese look more and more brutal and repressive in their attempts to vanquish this beautiful culture.
I ended up kicking a little ass this weekend at the Antique Show I exhibited at. I took the advice that I myself doled out to a friend last week. I danced with the ones that got me here and gave great deals to loyal clients - made a fair profit and moved on, cutting my sticker prices but delivering a lot of value. There is certainly a shakedown in my business and yours right now but if you treat people well they will remember and just might keep you alive someday.
I may not have mentioned this on the blog before but I am a long time cancer survivor. I started peeing blood one day in 1985 and ended up having the majority of my left kidney removed due to a hellacious tumor. Then we found a multitude of tumors in my bladder and ureter. I had at least four successive operations to remove them from what my urologist termed my "angry" bladder. I was sign painting at the time and was exposed to a lot of toxic chemicals. They called my type of bladder cancer "painter's cancer" and I have endeavored to limit my exposure to toxins in the last couple decades since.
I eventually became part of one of the first BCG study groups at UCSD. I met Dr. Sheldon Hendler and started an experimental regimen. I went to the Bio Med library at the University and researched every arcane study in the world. Next stop was West Germany for Thymusin from 14 week old cows but we luckily found the right combinations. I went to Mexico and smuggled in a still banned drug I heard about, whose name somehow escapes me but something like isoprinosine. I started getting regular lymphocyte enumeration panels from Specialty Labs so that I could chart my own T-cell progress. My counts went from the low hundreds to the thousands in a matter of months and I recovered.
Bacillus Calmette-Guérin is an inoculated tuberculin vaccine that has proven to awake the bodies immune system and fight cancer and it worked for me. It seemed to do the trick and I have had no further problems these many years. I try to talk to cancer patients when I can and give them the benefits of my little wisdom and experience. One thing that I learned is that a cancer patient (or anyone seriously ill for that matter) makes up two lists, the people that should have been there and weren't and the wonderful people who showed up out of nowhere for you. And I had to fire some people from my life.
And as most of you know, I had heart valve problems that required surgery two years ago as well atril fibrillation problems and fun things like Amorosos Fujax and a little pesky heart attack this year. Things have been going along ok.
Until Saturday, when in the midst of the show, I started pissing buckets of blood. Not just blood but thick obstructive clots and dried blood. All day and all night. Literally gallons, like I was shedding an organ or something. Didn't, couldn't sleep. I called my urologist and he thinks I may have some coumadin toxicity from the drug that's regulating my coagulation. I have had occipital swelling and headaches all week, have an attractive green pallor and now a major pain in my left side. I will be going in for a cystoscopy next week and have chosen to back off both the rat poison and the aspirin. It is possible that long term coumadin use can affect the bladder lining - I have my fingers crossed.
So this is more info than anyone needs but that's what I did on my weekend, made major ducats and pissed blood. Hope that yours was swell as well.
Robert
6 comments:
Robert... I am wishing you the very best with your med probs!! Take good care of yourself and keep us posted!!!
I also agree with your thoughts on the auto industry... under normal circumstances I would say "let them go"... but circumstances today are anything but normal. I hope the auto guys can come up with a decent plan so that Congress can justify the loan
.
Again... take really good care and keep us posted!!
Mike
Pissing Blood Buckets, I saw them at the Winterland a couple of years ago. They were opening for Bjork. One hit wonders.....
Robert, i'm really sorry to hear about your latest health scare, if there's anything i can do for you, please let me know, in the meantime i'm keeping you in my prayers.
Please don't intercede for me with the Almighty - I'd feel a little dirty and don't want to break my streak. But thanks.
...i'd intercede with Lucifer on your behalf if i thought it would help, i know he's real because three years ago at this time i was in the depths of hell...
Britain sells out Tibet - New York Times
By ROBERT BARNETT
Published: November 24, 2008
THE financial crisis is going to do more than increase unemployment, bankruptcy and homelessness. It is also likely to reshape international alignments, sometimes in ways that we would not expect.
As Western powers struggle with the huge scale of the measures needed to revive their economies, they have turned increasingly to China. Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing would expect an increase in its voting share.
Now there is speculation that a trade-off for this arrangement involved a major shift in the British position on Tibet, whose leading representatives in exile this weekend called on their leader, the Dalai Lama, to stop sending envoys to Beijing — bringing the faltering talks between China and the exiles to a standstill.
The exiles’ decision followed an announcement on Oct. 29 by David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, that after almost a century of recognizing Tibet as an autonomous entity, Britain had changed its mind. Mr. Miliband said that Britain had decided to recognize Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. He even apologized that Britain had not done so earlier.
Until that day, the British had described Tibet as autonomous, with China having a “special position” there. This formula did not endorse the Tibetan claim to independence. But it meant that in the British view China’s control over Tibet was limited to a condition once known as suzerainty, somewhat similar to administering a protectorate. Britain, alone among major powers, had exchanged official agreements with the Tibetan government before the Chinese takeover in 1951, so it could scarcely have said otherwise unless it was to vitiate those agreements.
After the People’s Republic of China joined the United Nations in 1971, British politicians refrained from referring to their country’s recognition of Tibet’s autonomy to avoid embarrassing Beijing. But that didn’t make it less significant. It remained the silent but enduring legal basis for 30 years of talks between the Dalai Lama and Beijing, in which the Tibetans have called only for autonomy and not independence — a position that a conference of Tibetan exiles in India reaffirmed on Saturday.
Mr. Miliband described the British position as an anachronism and a colonial legacy. It certainly emerged out of a shabby episode in colonial history, Francis Younghusband’s cavalier invasion of Tibet in 1903. But the British description of Tibet’s status in the era before the modern nation-state was more finely tuned than the versions claimed by Beijing or many exiles, and it was close to the findings of most historians.
Britain’s change of heart risks tearing up a historical record that frames the international order and could provide the basis for resolving China’s dispute with Tibet. The British government may have thought the issue of no significance to Britain’s current national interests and so did not submit it to public debate. But the decision has wider implications. India’s claim to a part of its northeast territories, for example, is largely based on the same agreements — notes exchanged during the Simla convention of 1914, which set the boundary between India and Tibet — that the British appear to have just discarded. That may seem minor to London, but it was over those same documents that a major war between India and China was fought in 1962, as well as a smaller conflict in 1987.
The British concession to China last month was buried within a public statement calling on Beijing to grant autonomy in Tibet, leading some to accuse the British government of hypocrisy. It is more worrying if it was a miscalculation. The statement was released two days before the Dalai Lama’s envoys began the eighth round of talks with Beijing on their longstanding request for greater autonomy, apparently because the British believed — or had been told — that their giveaway to Beijing would relax the atmosphere and so encourage China to make concessions to the Dalai Lama.
The result was the opposite. On Nov. 10, China issued a damning attack on the exile leader, saying his autonomy plan amounted to ethnic cleansing, disguised independence and the reintroduction of serfdom and theocracy. The only thing that China will henceforth discuss with the exiles is the Dalai Lama’s personal status, meaning roughly which luxury residence he can retire to in Beijing.
The official press in China has gleefully attributed European concessions on Tibet to the financial crisis. “Of course these European countries are at this time not collectively changing their tune because their conscience has gotten the better of them,” announced The International Herald Leader, a government-owned paper in Beijing, on Nov. 7. It added that the financial crisis “has made it impossible for them not to consider the ‘cost problem’ in continuing to ‘aid Tibetan independence’ and anger China. After all, compared to the Dalai, to as quickly as possible pull China onto Europe’s rescue boat is even more important and urgent.”
Britain’s concession could be China’s most significant achievement on Tibet since American support for Tibetan guerillas was ended before Nixon’s visit to Beijing. Including China in global decision-making is welcome, but Western powers should not rewrite history to get support in the financial crisis. It may be more than banks and failed mortgages that are sold off cheap in the rush to shore up ailing economies.
Robert Barnett, the director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia, is the author of “Lhasa: Streets With Memories.”
Post a Comment