Business

To make sure every woman in the New York City area who is interested in new media and technology comes to She's Geeky, we're offering not one but two offers :

• Our fearless leader is offering a discount. Just enter "shesgeeky".
• If you've been burned by any of the Wall Street bailouts (or lack thereof), just tell us who and when you got downsized, bring a friend and, Presto! You've got a two-for-one deal.

Register and joins us at the Microsoft NYC Headqaurters on December 5th to 7th at 1290 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Floor). The schedule is as follows : December 5th:
Cocktail party begins at 5pm, unpanel at 6m, networking continues 7pm+

December 6th:
Doors Open at 8:30, Agenda Making at 9:30 (please be there for this) the day ends with a closing between 5-5:30pm (please plan to stay for this)

December 7th:
Doors open at 9:30, Agenda Making at 10:30, closing by 3pm.

So let me get this straight : The US had 750 billion dollars to bail out Wall Street; a sector of the US economy which has been historically controlled by "white" or US Americans of European ascendancy. The US Congress found 750 billion dollars for them and their European and Asian investors. A bailout, by the way, that now said banks are pooh-poohing, lest the US Treasury and tax-payers find out the depths of their accounting infamies. Yet there's no money to pay back reparations to African Americans for the evils of slavery and Jim Crow laws?

Discuss.

[A scene from the movie Birth of a Nation (1915). Image found in Wikipedia under "Lynching in America")

And allegedly, out of spite, voted against the bail out. Of course, Barney Frank offers them a hug and a kiss :

Give me those twelve people's names, and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them, and tell them what wonderful people they are, and maybe they'll think about the country.

LOL!

That said, I still think this bill was a crock of horse effleurage. We the people of the United States deserve to be better informed about this fiasco. George Bush's 14 minutes on TV didn't do it. Paulson's screaming "the markets are falling" didn't do it. Certainly the non-answers I got from my Senators and US Congresswoman didn't help either --they seem to have been characteristic of most of Congress communication skills.

The Chinese government didn't want the world to know about the melamine-tainted milk that has poisoned 50,000 babies in their country and killed at least 4. Nope. They stonewalled foreign media and clamped down on their local outlets until they couldn't contain the outcries of parents with ill or dead children.

If not, it would have been, you know, bad for China's image:

JIAN Guangzhou of the Oriental Morning Post in Shanghai has received widespread applause for being the journalist who first named famous Chinese dairy brand Sanlu as being responsible for the nationwide milk powder poisonings of thousands of babies.

But it is a sorry triumph, because the reporting of China's worst food disaster of recent years -- with at least 53,000 babies suffering from kidney problems and four dying -- has remained constrained by party controls.

The first local media reports on the disaster were published and broadcast in July, but were not followed up. That was because a blackout was imposed.

The central party propaganda department delivered a 21-part instruction to all Chinese media before the Beijing Olympics, preventing any critical reporting to ensure a positive mood during the Games. The eighth clause stated that "all food safety issues are off limits".

So the milk poison stories were not to be reported until after the Games. By then, the crisis was so widespread it was impossible to suppress entirely.

But in the meantime, immense additional damage was done to babies' kidneys. For even though Sanlu's board was told about the disaster shortly before the Olympics, the poisonous products were not recalled until afterwards -- ensuring the Games remained a period of harmony and national pride.

Yet the problem is bigger than the Sanlu baby-milk scandal. Kraft, Mars, Cadbury are now recalling millions of chocolate bars, cookies and snacks made with milk produced in China and sold in Asia.

Not so in Indonesia who are finding melamine even in products not produced with milk :

My (imaginary) boyfriend has a few things to say about the craziness on Wall Street :

Steal from the poor and give to the rich: this is the policy that we have in recent days seen the U.S. Government unhesitatingly and irresponsibly sanction by bailing out the big gamblers and law-breakers with tax-payer money. At least now this short-sighted and destructive approach to governance is undeniably out in the open.

We saw this happen in the 1980s with the savings and loan scandal and bail-outs, and we are seeing now, as we saw then, people like John McCain, Phil Gramm and the usual assortment of corporate pirates get off scot-free and continue on their paths of self-advancement and cronyism. The mismanagement and plundering of our nation's wealth and the cavalier drive to burden future generations of its citizens with crushing debt have been hallmarks of U.S. government practice for quite some time, but never to the unprecedented degree that we have experienced during the eight years that the Bush Administration has plundered the treasury for the benefit of a tiny, very wealthy minority.

Hopefully voters will keep this in mind when deciding whether they wish to continue in the same vein with McCain, or give change a chance to happen with an Obama administration.

Perhaps, too, the mainstream media outlets, in response to the now undeniable financial and moral crises we face, will get back to allowing issues more pressing and significant than the personal and ethical foibles of Ms Palin to take precedence in their daily election "coverage".

I have my doubts about their willingness to do so, but there is always hope.

It's so HAWT when he pokes his nose in my b'ness and does that weird pseudo-blogging thing he does at this publishing company's site.

Le sigh.

He's given me the perfect reason to post about McCain's involvement in the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s. I give you John McCain's Keating Five Problem In 97 Seconds :

When Bill Krystol, Bush's #1 water-carrier says no to the bailout, you know the United States are in for a world of pain. This from his Op/Ed A Fine Mess:

It’s not that I don’t believe the situation is dire. It’s not that I want to insist on some sort of ideological purity or free-market fastidiousness. I will stipulate that this is an emergency, and is a time for pragmatic problem-solving, perhaps even for violating some cherished economic or political principles. (What are cherished principles for but to be violated in emergencies?) And I acknowledge that there are serious people who think the situation too urgent and the day too late to allow for a real public and Congressional debate on what should be done. But — based on conversations with economists, Wall Street types, businessmen and public officials — I’m doubtful that the only thing standing between us and a financial panic is for Congress to sign this week, on behalf of the American taxpayer, a $700 billion check over to the Treasury.

Denying due process to people without US citizenship, residency papers, green cards or a visa is becoming a business racket for private prisons and private security (aka paramilitary) companies.

The more people are thrown into those jails, the more money the concentration camps make.

Welcome to the new American economy.

h/t American Humanity

I don't even want to think about the consequences of this.

Today the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved a measure to alow anybody with $50,000 or $100,000 to create whatever Top Level Domain (TLD) they want. Although this may spell doom for URL speculators, for small new media owners like myself (aka, bloggers), this may spell trouble.

Imagine a big media company buying up ".culturekitchen" to peddle international cookbooks. Now I have to not only take them to court, but hope to win and have them surrender to me my trademarked URL.

As a small media company (culturekitchen is incorporated), we're screwed. Who has the money to buy their blog's trademarked name or for that matter, to sue a richer company that, may buy up your blog's trademarked name knowing you won't be able to take them to court and fight for your rights?

For small new media entrepreneurs like bloggers, this could spell disaster.

On a more positive note, domains in Asian and Arabic languages have been approved. What I am wondering about it is whether they are also going to recognize Romance language spellings with characters with special notation such as ñ, ü or é.