EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:American warplanes were not updated to match the latest warplanes of Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. After World War II broke out, American soldiers stationed in the Philippines were fighting for their lives using rifles left over from the Spanish-American war, decades earlier. The hand grenades they threw at the Japanese invaders were so old that they often failed to explode. At the battle of Midway, of 82 Americans who flew into combat in obsolete torpedo planes, only 12 returned alive. In Europe, our best tanks were never as good as the Germans’ best tanks, which destroyed several times as many American tanks as the Germans lost in tank battles.
A nation’s choice between spending on military defense and spending on civilian goods has often been posed as “guns versus butter.” But understanding the choices of many nations’ political leaders might be helped by examining the contrast between their runaway spending on pensions while skimping on military defense.
Huge pensions for retired government workers can be found from small municipalities to national governments on both sides of the Atlantic. There is a reason. For elected officials, pensions are virtually the ideal thing to spend money on, politically speaking. Many kinds of spending of the taxpayers’ money win votes from the recipients. But raising taxes to pay for this spending loses votes from the taxpayers. Pensions offer a way out of this dilemma for politicians.
Creating pensions that offer generous retirement benefits wins votes in the present by promising spending in the future. Promises cost nothing in the short run — and elections are held in the short run, long before the pensions are due. (more…)
The U.N.’s anticarbon scheme didn’t work out as planned.
The Kyoto Protocol on climate change used to be a big deal. So big that the future of humanity was said to hinge on its implementation. Did you know it expired on New Year’s Day? We’re guessing you didn’t, but don’t worry. It’s no big deal.
Adopted in 1997 and in force since 2005, the U.N. compact was intended to lock its signatories into curbing or cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions relative to 1990 levels. It didn’t work out as planned.
Japan promised a 6% reduction relative to its 1990 levels, but instead saw a 7.4% increase, despite 20 years of economic stagnation. Australia, where growth has been more robust, pledged to let carbon increase by no more than 8%. Instead its 1990-2010 emissions rose 47.5%.
The Netherlands promised a 6% cut but wound up with 20% higher emissions by the end of 2010. Canada, one of the pact’s most enthusiastic early backers, committed to a 6% cut but saw a 24% emissions increase above 1990 levels. In 2011 Ottawa announced it was withdrawing from Kyoto to avoid the penalties it would have owed for missing its target.
On paper, the EU as a whole looks set to meet its overall 2012 emissions target. But that’s mainly thanks to economic stagnation and the closure of inefficient Soviet-era industries. Europe’s cap-and-trade system also encourages industry to move production abroad while pocketing payments in the form of “carbon credits.”
As for the U.S., it saw an emissions increase of only 10.3% between 1990 and 2010, despite economic and population growth that outpaced most of the industrialized world. Some of the thanks here go to the shale-gas revolution, which uses technology that still hasn’t gotten past most European regulators. This triumph of American ingenuity might never have happened if Al Gore had managed to drag the U.S. into Kyoto 15 years ago.
So is that it? Not precisely. In December, the U.N. announced a last-minute “extension” of the protocol until 2020, though this is life-support by press release. New Zealand, Russia and Japan have followed Canada’s lead and are now officially out of Kyoto’s carbon strictures, while the world’s largest emitters in China and the U.S. were never in. Now only Australia and the EU remain.
In its day, the Kyoto Protocol did its share of economic damage by distorting energy markets and encouraging job-killing legislation. Some of that damage will remain. Still, count this as another eco-cure that arrived with a bang and departed, as so many of them do, with a whimper.
The world is heading for demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe for 40 years, to the point where, today, Israel is the only First World country where women have enough babies to sustain their population. The developing world is heading in the same direction, fast. Only 3 percent of the world’s population live in a country where the fertility rate is not dropping.
As fertility falls, populations shrink. As populations shrink, economies will sputter. Western countries will struggle to support too many retirees without enough workers, and the rest of the world (particularly places such as China and Russia) will be challenged just to maintain order as societies change in unprecedented ways: Most people will have neither brothers, sisters, aunts, nor uncles, and there will be no such thing as an extended family.
This forecast may sound apocalyptic, but it’s nearly conventional wisdom among the demographers and economists who study such things. However, the conventional wisdom also sees a silver lining to the world’s demographic decline: a “geriatric peace.” As fertility rates decline, and babies become relatively scarce, the average age of societies increases. In many countries the median age is already over 40, with geezers outnumbering children. And once the entire world looks like Florida, the thinking goes, we’ll all be more peaceable, because countries full of old men don’t go to war. (more…)
Today’s defense cuts are recreating conditions that led to Pearl Harbor
By Adm. James A. Lyons Retired Adm. James A. Lyons was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations
The Washington Times
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
associated press The battleship USS Arizona belches smoke as it topples over into the sea during a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The political correctness imposed on our commanders leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, regretfully, resonates in today’s military, including the war on terrorism and our efforts to defend ourselves from China
As we mark the 70th anniversary of Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor of Dec. 7, 1941, America is on the verge of committing the same mistakes that helped plunge our nation into its most grievous war.
The first mistake then was to impose the strategic restraints of “political correctness” on our Hawaiian military commanders. Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was ordered by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Harold R. Stark to prepare the fleet for deployment but not do anything provocative that might offend the super-sensibilities of the Japanese. Lt. Gen. Walter G. Short, commanding general of the U.S. Army Force in Hawaii, who was responsible for the air defense of the Hawaiian Island including Pearl Harbor, was ordered not to take any offensive action until the Japanese had committed an “act of war.” Does it sound familiar? (more…)
Seventy years after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. finds itself in much the same situation that it was in prior to World War II. There is a great effort to cut military spending, bring troops home from abroad, and scale back our international exposure. The country’s critical financial situation is one reason. Yet a nuclear-obsessed Iran, an emerging China and Russia, along with smaller rogue actors are enough of a threat to justify a vigilant and even aggressive guard. Add to this the weariness of two prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the comparison is complete
On Dec. 7, 1941 the United States suffered the worst intelligence failure in its history—before or since—when Japanese planes destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The most astounding aspect of the Pearl Harbor attack was that the U.S. had already broken the Japanese code and was listening to its communications. The U.S. had hundreds of cryptologists and linguists, mostly from the Navy, listening to Japanese wireless communications. But it wasn’t enough.
“We knew something was going to happen on Sunday, December 7th at around noon Washington time,” Henry Kissinger said at a speech I attended two years ago in New York City. “The problem is that nobody knew that when it’s noon in Washington, it’s around 7 a.m. in Hawaii.”
In other words, despite being on a war footing with Japan and knowing from intercepted communications that the Japanese were planning for a significant event to affect Japanese-U.S. relations that Sunday, our government couldn’t conceive of—and didn’t defend against—an attack on its largest Pacific naval facility, Pearl Harbor. (more…)
Grand ahistorical apologies for others can obscure one’s own actual sins.
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:
But such distancing is tricky. It opens a Pandora’s box of flawed assumptions. Is any nation free of sin? Apologizing for both ancient American sins and George W. Bush’s more recent ones while in Turkey — perpetrator of mass killings of Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds — is surreal. The Arab world, to which Obama offered contrition, since World War II has systematically ethnically cleansed Jews and Christians from the Middle East. When an American apologizes for something in the 19th century to those who commit horrific acts in the 20th and 21st centuries, the message is not necessarily strength and confidence, but either uncertainty about one’s own history, or an insecure need to win affection from the far more culpable.
At any time in the 2,500-year history of Western diplomacy, has a head of state been advised by his host not to apologize for a long-ago act? I cannot think offhand of any instance until, apparently, two years ago.
According to a controversial leak provided by WikiLeaks — and picked up in stories by news outlets from AP to NPR — Barack Obama’s administration was politely advised by the Japanese in September 2009 that there would be no need for the presidential entourage to go to Hiroshima, apparently to apologize for the dropping of the atomic bomb 64 years earlier.
If the story is true, Obama seemed intent on showing the world that his predecessors had long ago done wrong. The intended gesture was of a piece with his bowing to the Japanese emperor and his novel dispatching of a delegation to the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing the following year.
The Japanese, if we can believe the leaked cables, called the proposed apology “a nonstarter” and stated that they feared blowback, in the form of encouragement for anti-nuclear and anti-American domestic forces — especially at a time when Japan is sensitive about its geostrategic vulnerability in a neighborhood that includes China, Russia, and North Korea. (Perhaps the Japanese would have preferred from Obama instead a stronger reiteration that they still reside safely beneath the U.S. defense umbrella.)
We can assume as well that the last thing the Japanese wanted was a sort of tit-for-tat cycle of apologies — given things like Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Bataan, the 20 million Chinese dead, the Korean “comfort women” corps, and Unit 731.
A PATTERN HERE? Unfortunately, Obama’s presidency has been characterized by a habit of apologizing for his country. Indeed, in his first year in office alone, he offered regrets to Europe for past U.S. “arrogance,” to the Muslim world for not being “perfect” in our prior relations, to Latin America for trying to “dictate our terms,” to Turkey for America’s slavery, segregation, and, apparently, genocide of the Native Americans, and, indirectly, to Iran for the Mossadegh coup (“the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,” and thus, presto, there has been “a tumultuous history between us”). (more…)
Apologies Not Accepted Posted 10/11/2011 06:29 PM ET
In November 2009, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to bow to Japan’s emperor. View Enlarged Image
Leadership: Leaked cables show Japan nixed a presidential apology to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for using nukes to end the overseas contingency operation known as World War II. Will the next president apologize for the current one?
The obsessive need of this president to apologize for American exceptionalism and our defense of freedom continued recently when Barack Obama’s State Department (run by Hillary Clinton) contacted the family of al-Qaida propagandist and recruiter Samir Khan to “express its condolences” to his family.
Khan, a right-hand man to Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed along with Awlaki in an airstrike in Yemen on Sept. 30. We apologized for killing a terrorist before he could help kill any more of us. (more…)
Japan’s government is untruthful, as the radation levels continue to present a threat to the future of the people and possibly the west coast of the US and Canada!
Mainstream Censors Radiation Threat
August 19, 2011 admin
By Frank Whalen.
For several months, there has been a news blackout in the United States concerning the devastation and human suffering caused by a 9.0 earthquake that rocked the east coast of Japan on March 11. The resulting tsunami claimed nearly 16,000 lives andmade hundreds of thousands homeless.
On the island of Honshu, three reactors at the Daiichi nuclear power facility in Fukushima went into full meltdown. Explosions and fires caused additional damage to other reactors and released vast quantities of poisonous radioactive materials into the environment. Livestock, crops and drinking water within a 75-mile radius of the accident were immediately contaminated. Now, reports of lethal doses of radiation as far as 200 miles away are starting to become more commonplace.
In the United States, a recent report by Janette Sherman, M.D. and epidemiologist JosephMangano indicate a 35-percent spike in infantmortality throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Meanwhile, the true extent of the damage and radioactive contamination caused by the Fukushima disaster continues to be downplayed or ignored entirely by the mainstream media. Getting to the truth has been difficult.
“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” says Arnold Gunderson, a nuclear power expert who served as an expert witness in the investigation of the Three Mile Island accident. In an exclusive interview with AFP, Gunderson gives a timely assessment of the ongoing crisis in Japan and aprises us of what he expects to unfold in the future.(more…)
Stocks spiraled downward Thursday as investors buckled under the strain of the global economic slowdown and the failure of policy makers to stabilize financial markets.
The selling began in Europe and continued in the U.S., where stocks plunged from the opening bell. The Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its worst point drop since the financial crisis in December 2008, falling 512.76 points, or 4.31%, to 11383.68. Oil and other commodities were also hammered. Even gold was a safe haven no more as prices fell. Asian markets slid on Friday morning, with benchmark indexes in Tokyo, Australia, South Korea and Hong Kong all falling more than 3% by midday.
Stocks plunged, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 500 points, as investors worried about the global economy and Europe’s debt crisis. Paul Vigna has details.
associated press The battleship USS Arizona belches smoke as it topples over into the sea during a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.
By Frank Whalen.
