Here’s why I’m giving serious consideration to a move to China

I found this via HuffPo:

9 Signs of America in Decline

By

Image via WikipediaRick NewmanPosted: October 26, 2009

The sky isn’t falling, exactly. America isn’t on a fast track to irrelevance. Even in a state of total neglect, we could probably shamble along as a disheveled superpower for a few more decades.

But all empires end, and the warning signs of American decline seem to be blinking more consistently. In the latest annual “prosperity index” published by the Legatum Institute, a London-based research firm, the United States ranks as the ninth most prosperous country in the world. That’s five notches lower than last year, when America ranked No. 4. The drop might seem inconsequential, especially in the midst of a grueling recession—except that most of the world has endured the same recession, and other countries are bouncing back faster.

China and India have recovered smartly from the recession, for example. Brazil seems to be barreling ahead. Australia is growing faster than expected, prompting worry among government officials who fear they may have overstimulated the economy. The United States, meanwhile, is muddling through a weak, jobless recovery, and we have a lot of problems that could make prosperity feel elusive for a long time.

I still have the energy and interest to pursue business opportunities in China and I have had encouragement from my accountant and a respected business associate. My wife, who is Chinese from Dalian on the coast of the Yellow Sea, and I are having a good think about this.

We have lived there before and our financial fallback, my pension income paid in CDN $ looks pretty good at a conversion rate of $1 to 6.5 rmb, China’s currency. Rents for comfortable apts look ok, or about $700/month for a fully furnished 2 bedroom unit in a very good location in Dalian.

I am planning a move for next March or April.

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The debate about what Tom Friedman said or wanted to say about one party autocracy in China

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One thing about the Internet in China stands out more and more. And that is the evident transparency of quite a bit of ongoing debate about China, what Western journalists say about it and the CW emanating from the usual suspects in the US punditaucracy. It’s illuminating to consider this discussion about Tom Friedman’s contrasting of one party democracy in the US and its drawbacks VS. one party autocracy in China and its advantages, political and otherwise.

Of course one must never forget that however many times Tom Friedman visits China, he usually gets the limo to boardroom experience which doesn’t jibe very authentically with the ugly realities of ordinary life in China for the 700 million+ who live in relative poverty or even grim dis-enheartening brutish and nasty poverty.

Here’s an excerpt that leaves a taste of the discussion:

So why does stating something that is obvious attract so much American resentment and accusations of communist betrayal? Aside from the fact that it brings in pageviews, it’s — at least partially — due to the fact that some Americans and Westerners can be every bit as biased and insecure as the Chinese they ridicule. The mere suggestion by Friedman that there is something enviable about China, regardless of what it is explicitly limited to, brings out genuine disbelief and shock as people demand: “Yeah, but how dare you! What about…”

This is bias and insecurity. Unintelligent but for the shrill clicks it earns.

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Thomas Friedman has travelled and seen how the world (China) is advancing

while the US is stagnating because of the current paralysis of its governance, which he labels our one-party democracy. His column in today’s NY Times is a devastating commentary about this gawdawful situation and he sums it up this way:

The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.

“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

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A San Diegan is “depressed” by Vancouver

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Talk about irony used to make a point about his home town! Here’s what this guy said about Vancouver:

But the most depressing place in the world today is Vancouver , British Columbia.

More by Arthur Salm: Health care in Canada | Schoolbrary concept as dumb as its name

Ever been to Vancouver? Spectacularly beautiful place. Miles of waterfront, almost all of which is not only visible but accessible to the public; breathtaking and meticulously maintained parks; an efficient, affordable, and city-blanketing (above and below ground) public transit system; a magnificent, (fairly) new public library right in the heart of a sparkling downtown; clean streets; an enlightened program to shelter the city’s homeless; urban planning that places more and more emphasis on walkways and bike paths; an energetic, ethnically diverse population; health care for all its citizens (they’re Canadian, after all); young, progressive, can-do mayor Gregor Robertson. (Compare to the at best well-meaning Jerry Sanders, or to our imperious, aggressively ignorant County Board of Supervisors. Then sigh.)

And as if to rub our SoCal noses in it, Vancouver is mounting a gung-ho, popular effort to become the greenest city in the world, as chronicled by Allan Hunt Badiner in a July 30 AlterNet post. Cumulatively, Vancouver’s projects make our baby steps toward Going Solar, however commendable, look pitiful.

In short, Vancouver is what San Diego could have been. For anyone who loves San Diego, that’s … depressing.

Read more: http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-08-03/blog-forum/arthur-salm-the-most-depressing-place-in-the-world#ixzz0Nb3JsDO9

I live in Vancouver and I often think how I would feel if I was still living in Ottawa/Hull. I’m very happy to live in Vancouver, thank you very much! But it seems to me that this San Diegan has “drunk the Vancouver Kool-Aid“. Clean streets. I bike around Vancouver and I don’t see streets that are that clean! But maybe San Diego is different!

Voter registration & voting in Canada and the US

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My wife, a Chinese citizen and legal immigrant living in Canada, is firmly convinced that most things are better and much cheaper in the US than Canada. Some of what she believes may be true but voter registration and voting is manifestly much better and fairer in Canada than in the US.

I went to vote yesterday in our federal election here in Vancouver. The lineups for voting were completely non-existent. Using conventional hard copy voting slips we have no lineups and our vote counting is completed within hours of vote closure times.

Every time I read or see a video about voter registration and voting in the US, I hear about registration irregularities. On most if not all videos, I see long and I mean super long lineups to vote. There are seemingly never ending legal procedures related to registration, voter list purging et al.

What the F… is going in the US, that world super power. More and more it seems they can’t even organize the most basic democratic process in their own country!

I firmly believe that ideological issues are the fundamental difference between the US and Canada. And that is the main reason I will never live in the US. Ideology trumps most basic political issues in the US. Ideology is destructive and disruptive. I pray that will never be the case here in Canada.

We are so close and yet so far from the US in this very basic way as well as in other important social values. Let’s keep it that way!

UPDATE: Michael Moore thinks the Canadian electoral system is clean, clear, cheap and great quite unlike the frenetic and sometimes fatally unreliable US electoral system. He talked about it on Democracy Now and on Countdown with Keith O.

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“The push to “otherize” Obama”

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That’s the heading of Nick Kristof’s column in the NY Times this morning. Meanwhile Frank Rich writes about that special technique attributable to GWB and his dark political amenuensis, Karl Rove, TRUTHINESS. But invented by that renowned satirist of weird US political language, Steve Colbert.

Not truth, truthiness or the smallest whiff of truth possible.

A Wordle to McBush and truthiness

I have just read four columns in the NYT (Kristof, Rich, Dowd, and Friedman) that discuss the worst aspects of political discourse conducted by negative campaigning flacks posing as political advisers, who have either worked under Karl Rove or been paid lobbysts for questionable corporate or foreign interests. Whatta despicable scene.

I understand why Obama from time to time says “ENOUGH, it’s enough!”

I learned this morning that according to Pew 10%+ of the US population, who accept that weird creed of the “Rapture” apparently accept that Obama is the Anti-Christ that Revelation (the black part of the Bible) prophesizes must appear before God-Christ returns to take the priviledged “believers” into Heaven directly.

Sounds like the same kind of message that fanatic Islamists use to persuade suicide bombers and terrorists to do their revolting deeds against “innocent” co-religionists and the Satanic non-Muslims. Sounds and is weird!

It seems to me that it’s time to wake up to the perils of “otherizing” and “truthiness”. We need truth and discussion of the authentic instead of the imagined!

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And here is the real riposte from the Americans

They couldn’t and can’t do much more than say and write and bunch of words about Georgia’s dire straits. But here is there recent riposte to Russia’s aggressive actions in Georgia and harsh words about its neighbour states and their connection with NATO.

Amid rising tensions with Russia over the situation in Georgia, Rice also said Thursday she would travel to Poland soon, possibly next week, to sign a missile defense agreement that Moscow vehemently opposes.

U.S. and Polish negotiators reached a deal on Thursday to deploy American interceptors in Poland as part of a European missile shield the United States plans. Under another agreement, a radar tracking station will be located in the Czech Republic.

Russia fiercely objects to the system and the agreement with Poland is bound to infuriate the Kremlin.

Rice was all smiles as she talked about it on Thursday. “I look forward to going to Poland to sign that agreement soon,” she said. “It’s important for the peace and security of the region, it’s important for peace and security internationally.”

Per Time Magazine

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The slide into slime politics, again!

The image says it all, but the source is hardly believable and very troubling.

Today I have been introduced to John Pilger’s harsh opinions

Image by tsevis via Flickr

about many aspects of our Western political and economic worlds. Here is a link to a  wordle created with the words in a recent essay comparing the politics of Robt Kennedy and Barack O

rfkobama

Wait a few seconds for the image to be rendered!

Juan Cole & his Napoleon connection

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Juan Cole has been and is recognized for the quality of his blogging about Iraq and the Middle East. Today I discovered that unsurprisingly he has a Napoleon connection. This is not surprising to me because Napoleon led an exceptional expedition to Egypt in the late 1790s.

A post of mine about a year ago still gets most daily views of any of my posts. So for all those Napoleon viewers here is another Internet connection which is clearly high quality for its content and suggested links to other Napoleon sites.

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