Archive for the 'Self-correcting Systems' Category

On Any Human Sanitation Day

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

Your Web Content


From:
“Chris Devonshire Ellis”
To:
“rhodozeb@yahoo.com”
Cc:
“Andy Scott” (andy.scott@china-briefing.com), “Richard Hoffmann” (richard.Hoffmann@dezshira.com)


Dear Mr. Zeb;

I have noticed your comment on your website here:

http://www.gongshangfa.com/2009/03/20/chris-devonshire-ellis-fake-lawyer-fake-quitter-just-fake/http://www.gongshangfa.com/2009/03/20/chris-devonshire-ellis-fake-lawyer-fake-quitter-just-fake/

I would like to point out to you that the story you have run is inaccurate, was not clarified concerning content by you with me, and is libelous. Accordingly, I request that you kindly remove the content in its entirety. I regret that failure to do so within the next seven days will result in me taking the matter further, including with the following organizations:

Legal Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in China ;

Your pertinent bar association in the United States ;

Legal action for redress and financial compensation for damages as may be necessary, either in Shanghai or in the United States .

I have deployed a US based specialist internet abuse legal team in New York to track down the protagonists of the online campaign against me and to seek prosecution and closure of offending sites. This includes your commentary. I trust it will not be necessary for me to involve them in this matter and that we can put the issue behind us as a matter of enthusiastic, yet ill informed gossip. Your cooperation in removing your content would be appreciated.

Yours sincerely;

Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Founding Partner

Dezan Shira & Associates


I love it. “US based specialist internet abuse legal team”?? How many pints do you need to have in you before you write that? Let me see:


US-based, specialist, internet-abuse legal team? No.


US based specialist internet-abuse legal-team? No.


It just doesn’t scan. The gift that keeps on giving, this one. I bet he has put the New York Law Firm on retainer to handle this matter and close offending sites.


Anyway, this was sent five days ago. My posts on this fraud are staying up.


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What was Handed Down to Me

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Checks and Balances, the vaunted US system of distribution of power between the three branches of government, is fundamentally, at its heart, about oversight and about accountability.


The entire system is based on a simple theory: Men in position of power without effective oversight will abuse that power. That understanding may be couched in different terms or spun in different directions, but it comes down to two lines: Men with power sans accountability are likely to abuse their power, and accountability is the best remedy for such abuses, in order to limit the damage of the abuses, if not to prevent such abuses by the threat of effective oversight.


So we built a system with three branches, each with, you guessed it, oversight capabilities. And we built a Federal and State system with similar accountability and limitation on power features.


I wonder what those guys were trying to do? It all just seems so…haphazard, don’t you think?


Now we may say that human nature is good, or that it is bad, but this fundamental understanding of human nature is clear: Social environments have consequences, and environments filled with accountability are less oppressive and less unjust, because powerful figures are kept in check.


George W. Bush doesn’t believe in law, and he doesn’t believe in accountability for his friends. We all know about he and Cheney together, locked together by their common ideological flag, ushered in a period of utter lawlessness. This is why they will be punished, in the fullness of time, and it is why so many are viscerally angry about the crimes of that administration.


But, looking forward, what of the Obama Administration?


President Barrack Obama arrived in Shanghai just after an unusually-severe cold front descended upon the city. The entire week was bone-numbingly cold a good six weeks before anyone expected to see such temperatures.


The Administration fought for access to a group of people, and that’s good, I think, in that we are engaging at a high level directly with a wide audience, both at micro level within the echelons of government and the macro level through mass media.


But there is one thing that confuses me. You see, Obama apparently said this in Shanghai on a cold, rainy day in November:


I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can then hold their own governments accountable.



Because I thought the official policy of the Obama Administration was that the past is the past and accountability no longer matters.


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My Thoughts are a Gas

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

A ‘civilized’ government doesn’t imprison people without evidence or fair trials, and develops and follows clear guidelines to ensure fairness and justice.


A ‘civilized’ government doesn’t beat up reporters and then lie about the incident.


A ‘civilized’ government punishes government actors who violate the law, by, for instance, beating up on reporters or failing to stop a large-scale fight as soon as practicable.


A ‘civilized’ government understands that there will always be failings and wrong actions, and therefore creates tough oversight bodies to quickly right wrongs.


If only such a ‘civilized’ government existed in this world…


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Wow!

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

An entire block!

Honest inspections. Controlling corruption. These issues come to mind.


Shanghai has traditionally done pretty well, but this should scare apartment buyers. A lot.


Hope to see some firings based on this. Minxing? Where the heck is that?


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Bloodshed

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Shots fired at banned Mousavi rally, ’several dead’.


I am very worried this will get out of hand. Somebody else, is too, I would wager, as every proxy known to man is down right now.


[Update]
Oops, already too late. From the same report:


Overnight, police and hard-line militia stormed the campus at the city’s biggest university, ransacking dormitories and arresting dozens of students angry over what they say was mass election fraud.



Based on that provacation, it is going to get uglier still in the next couple days.


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Background and Food for Thought

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

From a comment on a humorous* blog, but I do believe the information contained herein to be accurate:


The Founding Fathers supported the view that (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) “Men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” They recognized that such rights should not be violated by an unrestrained majority any more than they should be violated by an unrestrained king or monarch. In fact, they recognized that majority rule would quickly degenerate into mobocracy and then into tyranny. They had studied the history of both the Greek democracies and the Roman republic. They had a clear understanding of the relative freedom and stability that had characterized the latter, and of the strife and turmoil — quickly followed by despotism — that had characterized the former. In drafting the Constitution, they created a government of law and not of men, a republic and not a democracy.

• Virginia’s Edmund Randolph participated in the 1787 convention. Demonstrating a clear grasp of democracy’s inherent dangers, he reminded his colleagues during the early weeks of the Constitutional Convention that the purpose for which they had gathered was “to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy….”

• Samuel Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, championed the new Constitution in his state precisely because it would not create a democracy. “Democracy never lasts long,” he noted. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.” He insisted, “There was never a democracy that ‘did not commit suicide.’”

• New York’s Alexander Hamilton, in a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in his state, thundered: “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” Earlier, at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton stated: “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.”

• James Madison, who is rightly known as the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote in The Federalist, No. 10: “… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.” The Federalist Papers, recall, were written during the time of the ratification debate to encourage the citizens of New York to support the new Constitution.

• George Washington, who had presided over the Constitutional Convention and later accepted the honor of being chosen as the first President of the United States under its new Constitution, indicated during his inaugural address on April 30, 1789, that he would dedicate himself to “the preservation … of the republican model of government.”



*Alleged as such by the well-known New York Law Firm.


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The Night is Long, and Cold as Ice

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Are we there yet? Oh. I see.


It has been a sober (metaphorically) time for many, I believe, although as we know, most of those around us have no idea what is going on. And I wonder whether it is even important to tell anyone.


If the system fails to take every source of real political power into consideration, then its just a matter of time, unless adjustments can be made.


Frankly, no one knows if this system is sufficiently self-correcting or not.


If you look at the numerous environmental disasters, you may well guess that there is no self-correction.


On the other hand, I do see some signs of improvement, in j peg format, which is originally from Scott Horton (sorry I should have put up the link earlier).


But I tend to be fairly optimistic in general. Maybe I will talk more of my optimism at a more appropriate time.


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