| Lenin Was Right It is not certain that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, actually said, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them," but if he didn't, he certainly thought it, and if still around would like to claim that prophesy as his own. IBM has announced plans "to help a little-known Chinese company [Teamsun] absorb and build upon key technologies" that IBM licenses, according to the NYT. The buyer knows what to do with that intellectual property: its advisor, Shen Changxiang, is the former supervisor of the cybersecurity of China's strategic missile arsenal, was in charge of computer security research for China's increasingly potent navy, and is a long-time critic of his nation's reliance on U.S. technology. Teamsun makes no secret of its goal: eliminating the need to buy American products. IBM wants access to China's market for its "rope", and the price it is willing to pay is teaching China how to make its own. Perhaps that technology will help the regime to improve its already formidable Great Firewall of China, the web-filtering infrastructure that blocks content the leadership prefers to make unavailable to the masses. There is more, and worse. Teamsun announced that it plans to "absorb" this intellectual property and technology from other companies such as Google [which should know better, given past dealing with the People's Republic, unenthusiastic about an open Internet], and Oracle, and replace those companies' products in world markets. And IBM will also be licensing advanced chip technology and other stuff to Chinese companies. The goal, according to IBM CEO, desperate to reduce the 10% slide in her shares in the three years of her reign, is to "create a new and vibrant system of Chinese companies producing homegrown computer systems for the local and international markets." Thanks. Whether that is Mr. Shen's sole interest is unclear, but it seems unwise to assume that he has no uses for this technology other than marketing computer systems. Cyberwarfare, his specialty, leaps to mind. Then, in an act of whatever the Chinese word is for chutzpah, Premier Li Keqiang informed a U.S. delegation led by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker that China's ability to cooperate with President Obama's battle against climate change, ranked by some in the administration as far more important than the battle against ISIL, would depend on the willingness of GE and others to turn over their cutting edge intellectual property to China. This, say the Chinese negotiators according to the FT, would be "part of richer countries' commitments to a climate change summit this year in Paris". Li Keqiang undoubtedly is a student of Lenin's handling of relations with the "richer countries", but student exceeds teacher when it comes to turning capitalists' quest for short-term profits to a communist regime's advantage. Not to be outdone in narrowness of vision and a desire to prove Lenin right, a group of business executives, members of the Young Presidents' Organization, visited Teheran in the guise of tourists (allowed under America's soon-to-be-gutted sanctions program), but with the intention of "getting involved here" as one "tourist" put it -- the quotation marks are those used by the Financial Times to describe these visitors. At the purely social dinners organized by the Iranian hosts, tables were labeled "real estate", "luxury", "information and communications technology" so that the Americans could be certain of sitting with Iranians eager to do business. "Everybody loves us here," exclaimed one American na?f. Well, not everyone. There is that nasty Ayatollah, calling for "Death to America." But not yet to the American businessmen who will certainly help him earn the cash with which to finance his nuclear ambitions. After, as one profit-hungry businessman put it, helping Obama to sell his deal by speaking about "what we saw." More precisely, "what we were allowed to see." A good time was had by all, to the tune of "Happy", a song to which some young Iranians danced last year, to the consternation of what have come to be called "the hardliners", who promptly clapped the kids in jail. Great Inventions And Their Enemies In one of his gag appearances, this one as a 2000-year old man, Mel Brooks was asked to name the greatest invention he had witnessed in his long life. "Saran wrap", he shot back. A useful product, surely, but if environmentalists had the power they now have, unlikely to have emerged from the lab into lunch boxes. And if the candle lobby were as powerful as the one that forced the repeal of Britain's candle tax in 1831, Joel Spira, who died last week, might never have become the successful entrepreneur-founder of Lutron Electronics, the company built around his first invention, the dimmer switch. No longer did hostesses have to rely on candles for the soft lighting appropriate to the day when dinner parties were formal affairs at which diners spoke with one another -- this being the time before checking one's e-mails and Facebook pages became standard activities at dinners, where people now gather to dine alone. We have these conveniences because they were developed before powerful affected groups found ways to hold back the tide of change. As Texas doctors, pledged to do their all for their patients, have done by making telehealthcare illegal. Opponents of Uber's urban transport revolution, masters of the art of stifling change and of protecting an obsolete business method threatened by disruption, have nothing on the healing profession. At least not the doctor/believers in Texas' free-market, red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism. The Texas Medical Board has decided it's a bad idea for the not-very sick -- sore throats, rashes and other minor (although not to the sufferers) ailments to be able to dial-a-doc or nurse instead of showing up at an emergency room or retail clinic, or trying to see a real live doctor during his office hours, which generally coincide with the hours at which they have to be at work. In Texas, doctors must establish a relationship with patients before diagnosing or prescribing for what ails them. Sounds reasonable. But according to the report in the NYT that relationship cannot be established via telephone, e-mail, electronic text or chat. Like all rules, there will be exceptions: a doctor may still treat patients by phone or video if the patient is at a hospital and a health care provider is there to "assist". In short, Texas doctors have no intention of competing with a service that is instantly available, at a charge of $40 in cases in which the patient's employer or insurer doesn't cover this sort of thing. Teledoc, which employs 700 board-certified physicians specially trained in how to conduct these consultations, claims that health care in Texas has been set back by "more than a decade." That's what successful cartels do to impertinent disrupters who threaten their members' livelihoods. Another Reason To Raise The Minimum Wage Every liberal knows that poverty breeds crime, although data are unable to show such a correlation, much less causation. This understanding of what is called the root cause of crime was best expressed in one of those Woody Allen flashbacks in which his father is defending the family maid against his mother's charges that she is a thief, "Of course she steals, she's poor," a truism and in this case a call to ignore the maid's appropriation of the property of a family struggling to remain above the poverty line. So when six men worked through two nights to drill into safe-deposit boxes in London, each putting in some 20 hours of hard labor, we can only conclude they were reacting to the lack of honest work at decent wages. And, even if such work were available, the minimum wage of about ?7 per hour, or about $10, would have given each of them about $200, hardly a living wage with which to support a family in the coming week, unless more opportunities to appropriate other people's property presented themselves. And grueling work it was -- drilling, throwing up all that dust because the work place was unregulated by the UK equivalent of OSHA, working night shifts and on a holiday Sunday to haul away tens of millions of pounds worth of cash and jewelry. Even if the haul came to only ?30 million, the low estimate, or $50 million, each worker would net hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, far above both the statutory minimum and what the average guy on the shop floor makes. Now no sensible policy wonk would propose that the minimum wage be raised to that level. But surely something well in excess of the current minimum, or even the $10 per hour that Wal-Mart, McDonald's and other firms are offering to some of their workers, is warranted if we are to prevent other members of the poor from being tempted into lives of crime. -- August 4, 1961: In The Year 1 AO The day President Obama believes relevant history began. Rather like the French revolutionaries who decreed that the establishment of their Republic be dated Year I of the French Republic. August 4, 1961 was the day on which Barack Hussein Obama arrived on this earth in Honolulu, Hawaii. Anything occurring before the world received this blessing is irrelevant, the President told the gathering of heads of state at The Summit of the Americas. Not directly, but in effect. "The Cold War has been over for a very long time. And I am not interested in having battles that frankly started before I was born." So because these battles pre-dated, he has no interest in either the Great War or WWII, much less the Civil War and the war that established this nation he is so determined to "transform." In any event, we are in the here and now, approaching the end of 53 AO. Relations with Cuba are to be normalized to provide "more opportunities and resources for the Cuban people." Obama has the Castro Brothers' word for that, although architects have not yet filed plans to convert the islands' prisons into hotels for visiting America tourists, whose cash will enable the Cuban government to open the Internet to all, allow free travel from Cuba, and otherwise retire the guardians of the omnipresent state. Vladimir Putin was not invited to the Summit of the Americas despite his country's expanding interests in the region -- hardly the "near abroad" he covets, allegedly only to ensure Russia' security. Putin has always believed that the Cold War was merely on hold between the death of Stalin and his own rise to power, and that the era BO contained battles in which he, at least, is interested in re-fighting. A view shared by literate Americans of all stripes in our own War of Independence, Civil War, the World Wars, even though of no interest to our current president. And by NATO commanders who increasingly liken current provocations to those practiced by Russia in the Cold War, which having started before the President was born, are of no interest to him. And, by extension, of no interest to "my cabinet", "my State Department", "my national security team", or other institutions like the cabinet, the State Department, and the national security team that have been, well, privatized in a funny kind of way. The Guardians of our Freedom To Emit Never Sleep Every true conservative, or at least every Republican conservative, knows that our freedoms are under continuing threat from the Obama administration, which has already seized control of the health care and energy sectors, and is circling the education sector with the threat of a core curriculum. Worry not. Our Republican guardians are on the alert. At least in Wisconsin. To avoid having voters strong-armed by Presidential executive actions into taking all sorts of steps to prevent the climate change he argues is about to unleash droughts (or is it floods, or is it both), Republican members of an obscure state commission charged with managing hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land have ordered workers not to discuss the issue of climate change while at work. The State Treasurer says chat "by the water cooler", in the manner in which Wisconsin teams' victories and losses (in the case of the NCAA finals it is a loss) are fine, but anything beyond that is simply inappropriate. To protect your freedom to burn coal and drive big SUVs, Republicans in Wisconsin feel they must impinge on your freedom of speech lest you come to an agreement that the climate is indeed changing. So far, not a word of indignation from libertarian Rand Paul, defender of all sorts of freedoms nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, which sports as its very First Amendment a guarantee that surely covers a workers' right to have his say, even if at greater length than his views on some basketball game. And not necessarily only when a water cooler is handy.
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