Does Obama have the guts to lead a change in our global military strategy? Are Iraq and Afghanistan merely giant pimples on a much greater obscenity that seems too big to focus on?
Per Al-Jazeera, as part of new defense strategy, the United States is currently spending billions of dollars to turn Guam into the new Okinawa.Two thirds of the estimated cost of $15 billion will be to relocate 8,000 soldiers from Okinawa. But it's the hardware that has the locals worried.
On the apron, old but still operational B-52 bombers... were standing by....The US outpost will see a whole array of the latest military hardware including nuclear-powered Trident submarines which can fire Tomahawk cruise missiles and unmanned Global Hawk spy aircraft.....By next year, the base will receive the latest state-of-the-art F-22 fighter jets, reflecting Guam’s strategic defence position in a volatile part of the world.
Once upon a time there was a f****d up Connecticut trust fund kid who was so f****d up that he could even f**k up getting f****d up. In fact he got so f****d up he had to stop getting f****d up, although that did not stop him from continuing to be a massive, world-class f**k up in all other respects.
Afterwards daddy’s firm got him various jobs, like it had before, but now they let him out in public, first in Texas and then in Washington. Eventually he had the Preznitcy stolen on his behalf under the cover of the robes of the Supreme Court. Good thing his handlers didn’t let him try to do it himself. He’d have f****d it up.
My daughter was brought into the world this morning at 8:26am Japan Standard Time. It was a full day of rushing, managing, emoting, empathizing, and celebrating. My daughter was carefully and compassionately delivered here in northern Japan by the same team that delivered my son a year and a half ago.
This diary is about two things. First, it's about the hopes I have for my daughter on this special day. Second, it's a thank you to Japan for embracing social medicine and affording my family the opportunity to benefit from the prosperity of great nation.
Tomorrow the G8 leaders will begin 3 days of meetings in Toyako Japan. Climaticide is one of the topics on the agenda, although analysts are holding out few prospects of any substantive agreements.
The indefatigable and ever optimistic James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has written a letter to Japanese Prime MinisterYasuo Fukuda, who is under pressure at home to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, stressing the urgent need to cut CO2 emissions and eventuallyroll them back to 350 ppm or less. The key element in Hansen's analysis is that to do this we must quickly phase out coal emissions.
humans, "Flyboys", Iwo Jima, dismemberment of Poland, the White Angel, Auschwitz/Belsen/Buchenwald death camps(Our Motto: Work Will Set You Free), unrestricted submarine warfare, the London Blitz, Warsaw Ghetto ...
Have I got your attention? A lot of healthy discussion is proceeding in the United States about the future appropriate use of our armed forces. After seven years of secretive unilateralism and military adventures, this is a welcome change. It will help the next president to govern, and to preserve protect and defend the Constitution- another idea whose time has come back.
I am an amateur historian. I like to think that I take the long view. When I survey the costs of war between 1933 and 1945, ongoing efforts to encourage the Japanese and Germans to deploy farther from home seem like tempting fate. The Japanese are debating the amendment of their constitution, which forbids -- for good historical reason -- armed foreign adventuring. The Germans, now united, are being encouraged to contribute soldiers to coalitions active in the NATO neighborhood and beyond.
I realize that DKos is not exactly the best forum in which to post announcements. If any of the developers are reading, it sure would be nice to have a calendar on which Kossaks could post event information :-)
Progressives in Japan have a couple of events coming up that are open to anyone who happens to be in the Tokyo area.
Drinking Liberally Tokyo, tomorrow! Please feel free to drop by the Clubhouse sports bar in Shinjuku for our monthly Drinking Liberally event. It's a fun group of people and I can help you request your ballot for the '08 election, if you haven't already requested it (you can request it at the link in my signature).
I am located in Tokyo, and we just felt a long duration earthquake of average intensity starting at 8:43 a.m. local time Saturday morning, June 14, 2008. (Not enough to cause damage here.) However, the Japan Meteorological Agency reports that in the northern part of the main Japanese island the earthquake is of a very significant intensity.
BBC News has this breaking story on their front page, as do all the other major news sources. Sadly, at least three people are reported dead, at least seven missing, and at least 110 injured, some badly. Reports continue to pour in, and it is very likely there will be significantly more casualties.
A couple of days ago, I wrote a diary about a view from South Asia. Since then, I've come to realise that the roughly 4 billion people in Asia don't seem to matter much as the roughly 300 million people in America. (Hold on there, before opening fire on me.) I mean, quite reasonably, that a) they are further away, b) they are treated as large bunches of people (e.g. 'the Japanese'), and c) they are often seen as blocs of economic competitors who want US jobs and money and don't do anything to help Americans anyway.
The People's Republic of China isn't a monolithic state, much as it would like to be. Japan and the Koreas are like a giant atoll stuck like a barnacle on China's NE corner. And there's Taiwan, referred to as the Republic of China on occasion, and at other times treated as China's family black sheep.
What do these people think of the US and of the coming presidential elections?
This article introduces Japan and delivers one set of perspectives out of roughly 1.7 billion.
Australian military members began their exit from Iraq last Sunday--could a US withdrawal be far behind?
As one of President Bush's staunchest allies in the 'global war on terror', Australia have stood shoulder to shoulder with the US and other coalition partners since the planning for the Iraq invasion in 2003. From January of that year, elements of that country's military have been involved in one form or another in the pre-deployment, invasion and occupation phases inside Iraq but, as of June 1st, that support has come to an end. This shift is due to the recent defeat of conservative Australian prime minister John Howard and the installation of his long-time anti-war Labour opponent Kevin Rudd. One of his campaign pledges was to extract all of his nation's combat troops from Iraq after he won his election (that happened last November) and he has fulfilled that promise less than 6 months after being installed into his leadership position.
I'd like to start by stating something which should be obvious - no group, be it Jews, Baptists, Blacks, Asians, Martians, etc., votes in a true "block." Well, actually, I just heard that the Mars Phoenix Lander discovered that Martians are all voting for Bob Barr. But anyhow. The New York Times today has an article that makes me pretty miserable: Baghdad Jews Have Become a Fearful Few.
Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.
Calling Guam a Pacific Paradise is perhaps a bit over-blown. This island, at the southern end of the Mariana chain, is reported to have lost much of its native fauna to the predations of the brown snake and one third of its territory is already under the jurisdiction of the United States military. But it could be a paradise, especially if future military activity is more protective of the environment than it has been in the past. We surely don't want to see a repetition of what's happened to Tarawa, one of the 24 small islands that make up the Republic of Kiribati.
Here is a challenge to consider: tonight - for just one night - go without dinner; go to bed hungry. This act of conviction serves to remind each of us of the global emergency that is currently being described by the World Food Program as the "silent tsunami."
Imagine having to go without food for days on end as roughly a billion people do on a regular basis. Imagine having to put your kids to sleep at night hungry. How did we get to this point and what did the various governments in the world do to alleviate the hunger and the suffering? Not much, as most States still spend a large portion of their GDP, doggedly, in defense, shoring up armies and armament as if there's no tomorrow, still drawing invisible battle lines on the earth, water and space.
However, there is movement at the station, to paraphrase Banjo Paterson.
Putin, under constitutional obligation, is stepping aside to let his hand-picked colleague take over as caretaker until Putin can legally return to office. But where is Russia headed in this interregnum?
We just had a rather substantial shake here in the metropolitan Tokyo area which woke me up. Time was about 1:48AM local. The Japan Meteorological Agency has details here:
Update #1: No tsunami warning issued. The JMA can issue one instantly if merited -- there's one heck of an early warning system here.
Update #2: There was one station on the mainland that clocked in in the lower 5s (on the 7.0 Japanese earthquake scale). That must have been a bit frightening, but I expect people are going to be OK. My section of Tokyo was in the 3s. Books on the shelves were rocking back and forth, slapping against the sides of the bookshelf. The buildings are engineered to sway like that.
Kyoko Mori was born and raised in Japan but she has lived her adult life in America. On her first return to Japan she visits the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. She wonders, are the horrors in the pictures of the atomic bomb aftermath really making an anti-war argument?
Mori thinks about her stepmother. "To her, the war was like some natural disaster that inconvenienced her family; it had no other implications."
Did anyone watch the PBS Frontline special on health care in England, Japan, Taiwan and Germany? Do you have any opinions? I will start with the comment that the Japanese personally maintain a much lower standard of living than what is considered as "middle class" in the US, but their higher tax contributions give them health care, public transportation and access to higher education. Yet Japan is a very capitalistic nation. The Japanese set priorities and consider health care a high priority. The Japanese are willing to pay taxes and ride public transportation, which is excellent there, while families in the US try to maintain three cars (or even more), and then the money for health care isn't there. A comment on Germany: I think they do a better job at prevention. People in Germany eat meat for breakfast, whereas we eat eggs, which have six times the cholesterol as in meat. So their costs for heart disease could be lower. The American diet, of eggs, sugar in everything, and wheat, and carbs carbs carbs is driving up the cost of health care.
There is a considerable exaggeration in the press concerning China and the Olympic Games. Gideon Rachman's comments in the Financial Times this week about the Olympic threat to China comparing the German games in 1936 with those of China today is off base for a number of reasons, but typifies those elsewhere. Perhaps the most significant falsifications is that Germany was not under international criticism at the time for its internal politics. It had many admirers and was seen by many in the West as a bulwark against communism, especially Communist Russia. The international threat at that time (1936) was Japan and that was the fear of the "Yellow Peril."
