Quotations from Chairman Patrick

Interesting day. News that on January 2, a whole factory force in China goes up to the rooftop of their factory and threatens mass suicide. The three hundred workers, who manufactured Xbox's for Microsoft, had asked for an increase in pay. The workers were employed at the Foxconn Technology Park in Wuhan in Hubei province. Foxconn is an independent, global manufacturing partner to companies including Apple, Microsoft and Sony. In 2010, Foxconn was plagued by a wave of suicides  at several of its Chinese sites. The company, which is controlled by Hon Hai Hai Precision Industry of Taiwan, has been accused of forcing workers to endure long hours and harsh working conditions for little pay.

The workers on the rooftop were told to either accept their crappy pay or that they could leave with compensation. They left and were never paid. They then evidently marched upstairs to do a collective swanee and the mayor of Wuhan had to talk them down off the roof.

The glories of capitalism, globalization and the free market! The audacity of these troublemakers and hooligans to try to pull off such a crazy stunt. Coming soon to a factory near you.

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My friend Jonathan Hill in Santa Fe sent me two of his new albums, an instrumental and an album with him singing. Jonathan plays anything, and exceedingly well. He plays guitar, sax and flute on the cd titled Nonsense1 or nonsensei, I'm not really sure. The other album is called "A cue stick?"

Jonathan is a dealer in ethnographic antiquities who I have known for many years. Can be found jamming with the better musicians in town if you look for him. Great chops, and always tasteful. Kind of light jazz with a message. I hadn't heard him sing before and he does a very nice job. I need to listen a few more times before I can deliver an honest critique and will do so. But hearty congratulations for a fine effort, Jonathan.

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My friend's Ron and Lena are on a three month trip to Asia. I helped them whip up a nice little blog called Rice is Sacred. They are in Myanmar this week. You might want to tune in.

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Pat Buchanan is in a little bit of hot water with his bosses at MSNBC for certain passages in his new book and for appearing on white supremacist radio stations. He has been in a hiatus/cooling off period. He blames militant gay rights groups among others. Some of his pearls from "Suicide of a Superpower":

"Look, for a long period of time the hard left, militant gay rights groups, militant -- they call themselves civil rights groups, but I'm not sure they're concerned about civil rights -- people of color, Van Jones, these folks and others have been out to get Pat Buchanan off TV," Buchanan continued. "This has been done for years and years and years and it's the usual suspects doing the same thing again."


“Those who believe the rise to power of an Obama rainbow coalition of peoples of color means the whites who helped to engineer it will steer it are deluding themselves. The whites may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.”


"When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization."


"Obama’s White House thus enlisted in the long and successful campaign to expel Christianity from the public square, diminish its presence in our public life, and reduce its role to that of just another religion." 


"Not until the 1960s did courts begin to use the Fourteenth Amendment to impose a concept of equality that the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, The Federalist Papers, and the Gettysburg Address never believed in. Before the 1960s, equality meant every citizen enjoyed the same constitutional rights and the equal protection of existing laws. Nothing in the Constitution or federal law mandated social, racial, or gender equality."


"If [conservative political commentator Heather] Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities. That might explain why black folks have trouble getting a cab. Every New York cabby must know the odds, should he pick up a man of color at night."


"What the above points to is a strategy from which Republicans will recoil, a strategy to increase the GOP share of the white Christian vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social, cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white minority. If the GOP is not the party of New Haven firefighter Frank Ricci and Cambridge cop James Crowley, it has no future. And although Howard Dean disparages the Republicans as the “white party,” why should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?"

And finally, this beauty, waxing for the good old days of segregation:

"Perhaps some of us misremember the past. But the racial, religious, cultural, social, political, and economic divides today seem greater than they seemed even in the segregation cities some of us grew up in.


Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans."

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