“The Chinese Embassy in North Korea has advised Korean-Chinese residents to return home”
That headline actually made me sit up and take notice. Well, it just got serious.
A Rather Troubling Headline
by coldwarrior ( 159 Comments › )Filed under Open thread at May 3rd, 2017 - 10:48 am
Seize The Power? (Of a Dead Revolution)
by coldwarrior ( 166 Comments › )Filed under History, Marxism, Open thread at May 2nd, 2017 - 7:18 am
Don’t worry, I shant bore yinz with the hideous racist and flat out psychotic quotes from the coward Che Guevara. Yinz can duckduckgo them yourselves.
As a fun aside (and some background), I let an uniformed Che T-shirt wearing undergraduate have both barrels when I taught 20th Century America. The young man was ignorant of Che’s real past. The student was made, how shall I say, aware. I did tell him that he could feel free to wear that shirt in my lecture hall if he would be so kind as to defend some quotes that I had selected from his man Che in writing. He was allowed to do this for some extra credit but did not have to present it. The student declined to accept the challenge and I didn’t see the shirt for the rest of the semester or the semester after that in macro-econ. Was he wrong to wear the shirt or, perhaps, was he ahead of the curve? It is far easier to put an image on a t-shirt than it is to launch a product that can buy real advertising…or is this the natural progression?
So, imagine my sudden shock, realization, and then out-loud guffawed amusement as I was watching stages 1-3 of the WRC Championship in Argentina, when I saw the major sponsor of these legs was this:
.
Well! VIVA CAPITALISMO!!!! Can we now please have some Ramírez Sánchez estate grown whole roasted coffee beans? Mahmoud Abbas organic cous cous? Ulrike Meinhof Rheinheitsgebot lager? Mario Moretti bespoke footwear? Fusako Shigenobu hand-made yakisoba?
Che is reduced to an image on an energy drink can pushing taurine, sugar, and b-complex…Perhaps Chris Hitchens was right:
He belongs more to the romantic tradition than the revolutionary one. To endure as a romantic icon, one must not just die young, but die hopelessly. Che fulfills both criteria. When one thinks of Che as a hero, it is more in terms of Byron than Marx.
The image of Che sold T-shirts and now he sells energy drinks and sponsors WRC races. The revolution is truly dead and replaced, sadly. Sadly because now the post-Cold War lid is off of the retrospectively quaint regional revolutionaries and is replaced by muslim terror and endless war; this is far worse in scale, blood, and treasure than the occasional murder of an industrialist, bombing of a pub, or taking hostage of OPEC ministers.
Am I allowed to say that I miss the Red Army Faction?
May Day 2017
by coldwarrior ( 50 Comments › )Filed under Open thread at May 1st, 2017 - 8:00 am
Oh Glorious Day of Worker’s Revolution!
Long Live The Struggle!
I wonder what Trump is gonna do to piss off the Uni-Party Bastards today?
Cuts at DoS
by coldwarrior ( 90 Comments › )Filed under Economy, Open thread at April 28th, 2017 - 7:39 am
It’s a great start!
The State Department plans to cut 2,300 U.S. diplomats and civil servants — about 9 percent of the Americans in its workforce worldwide — as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson presses ahead with his task of slashing the agency’s budget, according to people familiar with the matter.
The majority of the job cuts, about 1,700, will come through attrition, while the remaining 600 will be done via buyouts, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the decision hasn’t been publicly announced. William Inglee, a former Lockheed Martin Corp. official and policy adviser in Congress, was hired to help oversee the budget cuts and briefed senior managers on the plan Wednesday, the people said.
The personnel cuts, which may be phased in over two years, represent the most concrete step taken by Tillerson as he seeks to reverse the expansion the department saw under former President Barack Obama’s administration and meet President Donald Trump’s demand — outlined in an executive order signed last month — to cut spending across federal agencies. A draft budget outline released in March for the year that begins Oct. 1 seeks a 28.5 percent reduction in State Department spending from fiscal 2016…
Policy is being determined by a relatively small group that includes Tillerson, policy planning chief Brian Hook, chief of staff Margaret Peterlin and a few acting assistant secretaries of state at regional bureaus.
But the lack of clarity has damaged morale among the department’s rank and file, according to the people. Departments are supposed to be in the thick of planning for the 2018 and even the 2019 budgets, and many of those conversations have been frozen by a lack of clarity.
“They’re behind the curve, but they’re not totally off base,” said Richard Boucher, a former assistant secretary of state under secretaries from both parties. “Generally I’d say people don’t have a sense of direction, and the rumors of what the reorganization is going to look like are just rampant and nobody knows if jobs are going to be there and what’s going to happen.”
WAHHHH!!!! There is no clarity! Cry me a river, cupcakes. Welcome to the reality that non-govt employees face every day.
