The Golden Gate

From the indispensible Cox & Forkum.

The Marmot has a post that links to an article he calls a MUST READ. It is in Wired Here.

Here is the sample he gives:

Even today, people talk about the “voluntary incineration” at Gumi. A drab factory town in south-central Korea, Gumi is home to one of Samsung’s biggest plants. A decade ago, the company was best known for budget air conditioners and low-end TVs. Its leader, Kun-hee Lee, had grander ambitions, but when he sent out Samsung’s new wireless phones as his 1995 New Year’s gift, word came back that they didn’t work. So that March he paid a visit to Gumi.

At Lee’s command, the factory’s 2,000 employees donned headbands labeled Quality First and assembled in a courtyard. There they found their entire inventory piled in a heap - cell phones, fax machines, nearly $50 million worth of equipment. A banner before them read Quality Is My Pride. Beneath it sat Lee and his board of directors. Ten workers took the products one by one, smashed them with hammers, and threw them into a bonfire. Before it was over, employees were weeping.

Ritual purification at the command of a heroic leader is an ancient and powerful tradition in this part of the world. With a few superficial changes, this whole scene could have played in a Zhang Yimou costume epic. Certainly it had the desired effect: After Lee’s visit to Gumi, shoddiness was not an option. Ki-tae Lee, then the Gumi factory manager and now head of Samsung’s mobile telecom division, personally tests new models by hurling them against a wall or dropping them from a second-story window. Once he even ran over a handset with his car. It still worked.

Kun-hee Lee’s ambition was straightforward: He wanted to transform his company into the world’s top consumer electronics brand - the place that makes the coolest stuff. A decade later, he’s just about done it. Samsung is ranked number 21 among the world’s top brands by the consulting outfit Interbrand, just one notch below Sony. In sales, Samsung has shot to number three behind Matsushita and Sony in consumer electronics and is fighting Motorola for the number two spot behind Nokia in cell phones. Samsung is also the world’s leading manufacturer of flash memory and flat-panel screens, two of the core technologies of the digital era. And it’s the most profitable tech enterprise on the planet, with a cool $10 billion in earnings last year - more even than Microsoft.

Read it all for it is good and inspiring.

By a Yale Historian here.

Do not click on their “speech” link at this blog or be confused by the “more” reference. The speech is right on that page below the fold. It is excellent.

via The Marmot

In the Australian: Henry Kissinger: Some atomic arm-twisting

IF George W. Bush’s first term was dominated by the war against terrorism, the second will be preoccupied with the effort to stem the spread of nuclear weapons.

This challenge is more complex than the first. Do we oppose proliferation because of the rogue quality of the two regimes - Iran and North Korea - furthest advanced on the road towards acquiring nuclear weapons? Or is our opposition generic; does it extend to fully democratic countries?

How far are we prepared to go in resisting proliferation? Is it possible for one country alone to become the sole custodian of the task of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons? And, if not alone, with what combination of powers should the US act?

It is a nicely written piece with well rounded, reasoned, yet plain-spoken advice for our talks and beyond with Iran. I especially liked this part:

One reason European negotiators have made the limited progress they have on the nuclear issue with Iran is the implied threat of actions the US may take in case of deadlock. The key issue between the US and Europe should not be over the necessity of pressure if diplomacy fails but the definition of it, the timing and precisely by what process that pressure is designed to lead to a non-nuclear Iran.

Indeed.

Let the Europeans tie specific rewards [non-nuke energy based] to specific positive actions taken by Iran AND consequences via the US tied to specific actions [or absence of them] from Iran. With timetables Short ones. And we do it now while they know crazy George is in office and has them surrounded.

Pat Buchanan has a heck of an opinion piece out. He went on Imus as well with this view.

Hubris chimes in appropriately.

And here is another response–with a different style.

Victor Davis Hanson takes on the whole lot of those engaging in revisionism, or “critiquing” like Pat, here. (via LGF)

Here is a taste:

There are two disturbing things about the current revisionism that transcend the human need to question orthodoxy. The first is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Whatever mistakes and lapses committed by the Allies, they pale in comparison to the savagery of the Axis or the Communists. Post-facto critics never tell us what they would have done instead — lay off the German cities and send more ground troops into a pristine Third Reich; don’t bomb, but invade, an untouched Japan in 1946; keep out of WWII entirely; or in its aftermath invade the Soviet Union?

Lost also is any sense of small gratitude. A West German intellectual like Grass does not inform us that he was always free to migrate to East Germany to live in socialist splendor rather than remain unhappy in capitalist “subservience” in an American-protected West Germany — or that some readers of the New York Times who opposed Hitler might not enjoy lectures about their moral failings from someone who once fought for him. Such revisionists never ask whether they could have written so freely in the Third Reich, Tojo’s Japan, Mussolini’s Italy, Soviet Russia, Communist Eastern Europe — or today in such egalitarian utopias as China, Cuba, or Venezuela.

Second, revisionism requires knowledge of orthodoxy. One cannot dismiss Iwo Jima as an unnecessary sideshow or allege that Dresden was simple blood rage until one understands the tactical and strategic dilemmas of the age — the hope that wounded and lost B-29s might be saved by emergency fields on Iwo, or that the Russians wanted immediate help from the Allied air command to take the pressure off the eastern front in February 1945.

But again, most Americans never learned the standard narrative of War II — only what was wrong about it. Whereas it is salutary that an American 17-year-old knows something of the Japanese relocation ordered by liberals such as Earl Warren and FDR, or of the creation and the dropping of the atomic bomb by successive Democratic administrations, they might wish to examine what went on in Nanking, Baatan, Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Manila, or Manchuria — atrocities that their sensitive teachers are probably clueless about as well.

Ouch.

Read it all. For he brings a whole lotta perspective. Bound to trigger a few folks.

And just for fun, here is a cool site that is a historical atlas of the 20th century. It includes a table of top ranked atrocities. It helps us put different agents as well as our current conflicts into perspective.

The Marmot has a post with two blogger ideas for dealing with North Korea. They are both worth a read.

The first, Unilateral Magnanimity, is an interesting and creative idea. Of course you we would be relying on the Kim Jong-Il regime letting its people be aware of the fact that the goods were coming from the US. I am uncertain of this bearing out in reality. With complete state control of all media and communications [except for the occasional illegal cell phone near the Chinese border] this is doubtful. I am more inclined to believe he would somehow take credit for it as Another Example of How the DPRK has Shown Its Productive Might(tm). Take a look at some of the “news” they beam out over those state controlled airwaves here.

The second, North Korea Disarmament In Four Cold-Blooded Steps, is a little more realistic, but has at least two holes after a quick review. He overestimates both Kim Jong-Il’s rationality and balance and underestimates the Iranian national pride and the commitment of the Mullahs to get the bomb [especially with the Great Satan on three of their borders: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf. See map here.]

Though I absolutely agree with this point:

Right now, the United States’ policy toward North Korea isn’t “Big Carrot” like the Europeans’ policy has been toward Serbia or Turkey; it isn’t “Big Stick” like the United States’ current policy toward Syria. Our current North Korea policy is “No Carrot, No Stick, Lots of Whining.” North Korea’s never responded to whining.

Methinks there is only one way for us to deal with Krazy Kim: the Chinese. The Chinese can put pressure on him in numerous ways–from cutting off all trade/aid and watch the regime implode or collapse rapidly to setting a coup in motion from the inside. Either way, it would be a huge with for the world and a huge diplomatic/political win for the Chinese with the International Community. The question is: what deal do we have to cut for them to do it?

Frankly, I would love to see us closer to the Chinese. Would love to see more Chinese on peacekeeping missions. They want to be recognized as a global power? I say let ‘em–and let ‘em shoulder all the responsibilities that brings.

We are moving to a new hosting service and attempting to keep the DB of previous posts intact. Since we are not really geeks–we just play geeks on tv–this is slightly more challenging than walking and chewing gum simultaneously.

DB or no DB…either way, the migration should be complete by Monday and more frequent posting shall recommence.

Okay, remember back a couple of weeks ago, when I was talking about San Francisco’s seriously messed-up Public Employee system? Well, back then I wrote that San Francisco has 1 City Employee for every 29 City residents. That’s pretty amazing in its own right. But it’s not the sheer, massive SIZE of the City workforce that’s the core problem. Nor is it a lack of money — though money is the problem that all politicians and bureaucrats love to blame.

No, it’s the archaic, byzantine rules that govern how those City employees are hired, promoted and fired that makes it so hard to do anything substantial to improve the performance of San Francisco’s public services. This is the single biggest factor that makes it so hard to adapt personnel to the various tasks, and above all, what makes it so difficult to hold people accountable for performing properly.

The latest stark example that things are out of whack comes from a report in the San Francisco Sentinel — an online local news and commentary site. The Sentinel reports that Mayor Gavin Newsom couldn’t even do something as simple as to re-hire a SINGLE PARK GARDENER, without setting off a ridiculous cascade of consequences. It turns out that this straightforward act would have cost the City more than $900,000!

Newsom recalled his learning experience with civil service regulations.

Newsom told of attending a Richmond District community meeting, with speakers adamant to save a Recreations and Parks Department gardener, and finally agreeing to keep that employee in current position.

“So I went back and told Ben (Rosenfield, city budget director) I wanted that man back in his position.

“Ben looked at me, and smiled, and asked, ‘Do you know how much that will cost?’

” ‘No, how much can it cost, $40,000 to $60,000?’ I asked.

Rosenfield retired to compute costs, the mayor continued, returning 45 minutes later.

“Ben came back, and said it would cost more than $900,000.”

Under current civil service rules, employees acquire “bumping rights,” which permit employees laid off for budgetary reasons to take another city employee’s position who holds lesser seniority — the bumped employee sometimes having acquired bumping rights, too.

In this case, bumping rights cascaded to the point that to reinstate the gardener position, “eight others” would have to be returned to previous jobs and pay levels.

“We’re not opposed to bumping. We just want to put some rationality into it,” Newsom said.

Let’s hope so. As I reported before, there is a relatively quiet effort underway to overhaul the Civil Service Rules in San Francisco — the rules that make it so hard to make improvements to the how the City performs.

To my mind, Civil Service Reform is one of the “Big Three” — the three factors which could greatly improve our day-to-day lives in San Francisco. The other two are: 1) making substantial headway on Homelessness (and, as I reported on Tuesday, we have been seeing a great deal of meaningful progress on Homelessness in the first year of Newsom’s Care Not Cash initiative) and 2) giving a voice to the citizens who can loosely be characterized as believers in “quality of life/smaller government/individual liberty” issues. Personally, I think there are many, many citizens with whom the “quality of life/less government” philosophy resonates — many more than conventional wisdom perceives. Yes, it’s certainly true the “social interventionist/large government” (so-called “progressive”) crowd and more organized and louder right now. But that can change.

Change, however, depends on good leadership and increased communications. And it will take time.

Still, with Homeless Policy Reform and Civil Service Reform efforts underway, we’re seeing some progress on TWO of the “big three.” And that’s a reason to be optimistic. The development and growth of the “Quality of Life” constitutency — which was really galvanized by the “Care Not Cash” campaign — is probably the piece that will require the most patience.

Stay tuned to the Golden Gate — we’ll keep tabs on how things are going with the “Big Three” and other issues of Liberty and Public Policy in San Francisco and worldwide. You betcha we will.

Yet another story in todays Chronicle that “Care Not Cash” — San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s reform measure that replaced $400 cash handouts to homeless people with services and housing — is working.

It’s sadly predictable that the Regressive elements of San Francisco’s Left will be protesting the 1-year anniversary of the implementation of Care Not Cash.

The Coalition on Homelessness plans a rally at City Hall at noon Tuesday to protest the one-year anniversary of Care Not Cash, and to call on Newsom to involve homeless service providers more closely in any decisions about cutting services. Their complaint echoes those voiced at a tense April 18 City Hall hearing, when Supervisor Chris Daly and dozens of speakers confronted city officials about the direction of homeless policy.

It would be marvelous if there were a counter-protest at City Hall today by those of us who believe that the successful Care Not Cash program — versions of which have worked very well in other large US Cities — has made a really great beginning and ought to be applauded and continued.

If you can’t counter-protest, well, consider letting these important folks know that you support the continuation of Care Not Cash.