rebootied

Has Japan suffered a diplomatic defeat? : National : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri):

"I was extremely shocked [by the U.S. decision to remove North Korea from the blacklist], as Japan would never agree to such a move," Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa said in Washington on Saturday.

Nakagawa's remark came during talks Saturday with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the sidelines of a meeting of the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank heads, who had convened to address the global financial market crisis.

According to Nakagawa's close aides who accompanied him on his U.S. trip, the minister was keen to voice strong unease over the decision on behalf of the Japanese families whose relatives were abducted by North Korea.

Takeo Hiranuma, an independent who previously served as economy, trade and industry minister and currently heads a suprapartisan Diet members league to seek a resolution to the abductions, said to reporters in Honjo, Saitama Prefecture, on Sunday, "[The government] must resolutely pass on its message [to the United States]."

I did NOT GIVE MY PERMISSION to remove North Korea from the list of terrorist nations. I especially did not give permission to take them off that list while they are mobilizing missiles for "testing" because they're pissed off that treaty negotiations aren't going they way they want. Using fear and violence or the fear of violence to make a government acquiesce to demands... ISN'T THAT THE VERY DEFINITION OF TERRORISM?

Reuters: North Korea said to be deploying missiles
VIENNA/SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea deployed more than 10 missiles on its west coast apparently for an imminent test launch, a South Korean newspaper said on Thursday, and Pyongyang halted U.N. monitoring of its nuclear complex.

The potentially destabilizing moves followed reports that the United States had offered to remove North Korea from its terrorism blacklist this month in an effort to keep a nuclear disarmament pact from falling apart.

It would be an unprecedented test if North Korea fired all 10 of the surface-to-ship and ship-to-ship missiles. Intelligence sources quoted by the Chosun Ilbo paper said they thought the North may launch five to seven of them.

North Korea has forbidden ships to sail in an area in the Yellow Sea until October 15 in preparation for the launch, an intelligence source told the paper.

A South Korean defense ministry official declined to comment on the report but said the government had no indication of unusual activity in the North. remainder of article at website

I really dislike Kim Jong Il; the little shit and his puffball hairdo seem really out of touch with reality. I mean, like CRAZY. He's either crazy, or wants to be perceived as crazy, which is in itself potentially worse than being crazy. If the world were a big neighborhood, USA would be the big, rich house with the loud jackass in charge of the local neighborhood association who always told everyone else how to keep their lawn straight, and when they needed to rake their leaves or repaint their porch -- but North Korea would be the lonely shack at the end of the block with the batshit guy who is rumored to have a shotgun, and may or may not have been killing the neighborhood pets.

Here, we really have something of a terrorist nation; a government which seeks to use fear as a means of being allowed to participate in the world theater, to shape other nations policies and plans.

They've test fired rockets toward Japan. Shit-howdy, wasn't The Bay of Pigs more or less about keeping a test firing from even being feasible?

Palin hits Obama for 'terrorist' connection - CNN.com:

ENGLEWOOD, Colorado (CNN) -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Saturday slammed Sen. Barack Obama's political relationship with a former anti-war radical, accusing him of associating "with terrorists who targeted their own country."

Palin made similar comments later at a rally in Carson, California.

Obama's Chicago, Illinois, home is in the same neighborhood as Bill Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground, which was involved in several bombings in the early 1970s, including the Pentagon and the Capitol, and the two have met several times since Obama's 1995 campaign for a state Senate seat.

Palin cited an article in Saturday's New York Times about Obama's relationship with Ayers, now 63. But that article concluded that "the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.' "

Copyright Czar's Fate in Bush's Hands; Veto Looms | Threat Level from Wired.com:

President Bush is opposing legislation creating a so-called copyright czar and might veto the measure.

The House on Sunday sent the president the "Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act," (.pdf) a measure the Senate approved Friday creating a cabinet-level copyright czar charged with implementing a nationwide plan to combat piracy and "report directly to the president and Congress regarding domestic international intellectual property enforcement programs."

The White House successfully lobbied the Senate to remove language tasking the Department of Justice with suing copyright and trademark infringers on behalf of Hollywood, (emphasis mine) ( remainder of article behind cut )

What, seriously, the congress approached the executive branch with a proposal that government money should be spent suing "pirates" instead of the copyright holders? This whole song-and-dance about how piracy is destroying Hollywood and the record companies doesn't stop them from making money, and the losses they report are about as realistic as Fantasy Football; it's all about "what IF all those college students actually BOUGHT the music on those hard drives...?! We'd be more richer!" And apparently they've managed to convince congress that the government needs to pursue their own constituents more fully on behalf of big media. Good christ.

http://www.thegreatschlep.com/site/index.html

Sarah Silverman. Very clever.

Reuters: U.S. to announce $1 billion aid for Georgia: official : I'm so US-centric that at first I thought, Did the state of Georgia get hit by a hurricane?! Or is this to address the report that they rank 41st out of 50 for "smartest state"? Then I remembered it's not the only Georgia in the world, and I felt like a clod.

Then again, it's also a brand of canned coffee here in Japan, so I could have done worse, and assumed that the US is trying to get itself really high on caffeine and sugar.

And just to maintain the rambling tone: During my trip to the USA, I found a copy of Max Max WITH The Road Warrior new for 10 bucks, American greenbacks. I have been sour on Mel Since he started made that romantic comedy with Helen Hunt, and she'd hinted in the PR tour that Mel's an abhorrent human being, and then much later he did that "sugartits/jew" thing in Los Angeles, confirming that he's bad... BUT IT WAS THE ROAD WARRIOR! I bought it, watched it while making tonight's dinner (before going to work), and it turns out to be 1 DVD, two-sided, and pan-and-scan 4:3, and a miserable transfer to boot.

Epic. Fail. I gave Mel Gibson 10 dollars, and didn't even get what I want.

Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat by Louise Richardson, reviewed by Christian Science Monitor:

The United States can't win a war on terrorism, any more than it could win a war against armed robbery or tornadoes. What it can do is contain the threat to the nation caused by a specific group of terrorists: Islamist radicals.

To do so, it must strive to understand Al Qaeda and its ilk, and try to isolate them from communities which now give them tacit support. And it needs to have patience: Terrorist groups, even damaged ones, don't wither away quickly.

In brief, these are among the main conclusions of Louise Richardson's concise and illuminating new book What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat. If you think the application of academic terrorism research to today's policy problems sounds interesting, this volume could be for you.

Not that Richardson is dispassionate. The Bush administration might even call her partisan. She considers both the overt declaration of war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq to be disasters in the context of fighting Osama bin Laden.

"Governments are invariably placed under enormous pressure to react forcibly and fast in the wake of a terrorist attack," she writes. "This response is not likely to be most conducive to long-term success against terrorists."

Richardson is one of the relative handful of experts who have been studying the history and practice of terrorism since the cold war.

Born in Ireland to Catholic parents, she experienced the seductive nature of terrorist groups at an early age. From the society she grew up in, she learned a remembered history of Ireland's long struggle with England that was full of heroes and villains, and was oversimplified to motivate the next generation. The facts didn't seem to matter so much.

After the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, in which 26 Irish protesters were shot by British troops in Derry, Northern Ireland, Richardson would have joined the IRA "in a heartbeat," she writes.

But she was only 14, and as she attended university and learned the real story behind some of her childhood myths, she became more interested in understanding terrorism than in joining it.

I may have to pick this up.

Is Dobson's Obama Hit Backfiring? - TIME - (via Radio Free Mike):

Earlier this week, Dobson used his popular Christian radio program to denounce a 2006 speech the [Obama] gave about the place of religion in public life. He took personal offense at the fact that Obama had referred to him by name in the same breath as Al Sharpton, using the two to illustrate the range of differences that exist within Christianity. But he also expressed outrage at Obama's assertion that individuals can be moral without being religious. "He oughta read the Bible," said Dobson. Obama, he charged, was "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview."

But less than 24 hours after Dobson's radio broadcast, www.jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com was up and running on the Web. The site displays both Dobson's charges against Obama and Obama's own quotes from the 2006 speech. It also features a statement condemning Dobson that reads in part: "James Dobson doesn't speak for me when he uses religion as a wedge to divide; he doesn't speak for me when he speaks as the final arbiter on the meaning of the Bible."

Go get 'im, Wil!

your republican authoritarian bullshit of the day - Vox
"I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do." -- Sen. Kit Bond (R-Missouri), explaining why his fellows had to lock arms with him and grant telecom immunity.
(via boingboing)

Also, Senator Bond? Fuck you. Fuck you right in your fucking face, you asshole. Try reading that Constitution you swore an oath to defend, you son of a bitch.