ABC news is reporting that a Japanese news states that upwards of 88,000 people are missing.
The video footage is horrifying.
by John Cole| 98 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
ABC news is reporting that a Japanese news states that upwards of 88,000 people are missing.
The video footage is horrifying.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 122 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
The 7th largest earthquake in recorded history caused this tsunami in Japan. CNN is saying that Hawaii will be hit by a 6 foot wave any moment now, and that an evacuation has been ordered around one Japanese nuclear plant.
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Military, Republican Stupidity, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
That would be DFH’s like Assistant Secretary of Defense Sharon Burke.
Just to take a break from Wisconsin perfidy, consider Burke, whose brief is “operational energy plans and programs,” making the connection between death and dinosaur wine in a speech at Harvard last week:
Though the official price of a gallon of fuel within the military is set at $3.03, Burke said that the actual cost of fuel delivered, depending on the difficulty transporting it and protection needs, can be as high as $50 a gallon.
Burke told a story of tent usage in Iraq. One large tent used as a gymnasium required six generators to power the air conditioning, and even then the temperature was only lowered to 90 degrees. The problem, of course, was that a tent isn’t insulated well, so much of the cooling was lost to the desert.
“People were dying so we can vent our air conditioning to the desert,” Burke said.
Some key factoids from Burke’s speech:
The average U.S. soldier on a 72-hour patrol carries between 10 and 20 pounds of batteries.
There are seven kinds of batteries that power flashlights, GPS devices, night-vision gear, and other equipment considered essential for the modern soldier. Including spares, a soldier lugs 70 batteries, along with the devices themselves, weapons, food, water, and other necessities.
…
“We’re seeing pack weights of 130 pounds these days,” said Sharon Burke, assistant secretary of defense for operational energy plans and programs. “You can’t carry 130 pounds without turning up with injuries.”
The idea that our soldiers can’t fight (or can’t fight as easily and with as much stamina as they need) because of all the tools they must needs carry is a very scary one indeed — but that’s a topic for another day. In the meantime, back to that blood for oil problem:
The soldiers’ battery burden is just the tip of the military’s energy problem, Burke said. Heavily armored vehicles get just 4 miles per gallon. Air conditioners, computers, and other equipment at forward operating bases are powered by inefficient generators, at an enormous cost in fuel, requiring constant resupply. Delivering the fuel to where it is needed requires soldiers to protect the ferrying convoys, and costs both money and lives.
Hence Burke’s job: to find and support efforts like this one:
In Afghanistan, a company of soldiers is testing energy-saving technology in a frontline situation, relying on solar panels on tents, solar-powered lights, and stand-alone solar panels to recharge batteries — together cutting the company’s generator fuel consumption from 20 to 2.5 gallons a day. That drop means fewer fuel convoys which, in that part of Afghanistan, are almost certain to be attacked.
This, of course, runs directly counter to what Real Americans know about energy. Part of the GOP conspiracy to accelerate the decline and fall of the United States includes a state-by-state level assault on alternatives to fossil fuels.
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Against such purity of purpose, what is one to make of the reckless liberalism of that well-known hotbed of hippie fervor, the Pentagon’s inner rings? Well — our Galtian overlords know what dangers lurk in the heart of reality’s liberal bias:
The Senate confirmed Burke to the job in June, after she came under initial fire from Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe (R) for her apparent support of a 2007 law that bars federal agencies from buying alternative fuels that have higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels (ClimateWire, March 25).
Props to the Obama administration and to the DOD for taking action here…and, as always:
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Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est.
Image: Jacopo Tintoretto, Young man in a gold-decorated suit of armour, 1555-1556.
This post is in: War
Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.
I hear we are turning a corner and just need six more months, though.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 23 Comments
This post is in: War, DC Press Corpse
Glenn Greenwald has a good round-up of the media pushback against the latest Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings, which alleges that Lt. Gen. William Caldwell tried to use psy-ops against VIPs such as Senators and Congressmen. Most of what he finds is anonymously-sourced smears by the WSJ and MSNBC as the millitary fights back.
The New York Times, to its credit, limits its account to a named source, using an email sent to friends by a NATO spokesman. Reading that article, which is full of denials but devoid of smears, it’s clear that the intelligence team was used to gather information on visiting dignitaries, and that the dispute is over the degree to which they were used.
So, the most damning charge against Lt. Gen. Caldwell — that he was more interested in PR for the American public than his mission training Afghan troops — hasn’t been refuted, and it’s hard to see how he survives this:
At a minimum, the use of the IO team against U.S. senators was a misuse of vital resources designed to combat the enemy; it cost American taxpayers roughly $6 million to deploy Holmes and his team in Afghanistan for a year. But Caldwell seemed more eager to advance his own career than to defeat the Taliban. “We called it Operation Fourth Star,” says Holmes. “Caldwell seemed far more focused on the Americans and the funding stream than he was on the Afghans. We were there to teach and train the Afghans. But for the first four months it was all about the U.S. Later he even started talking about targeting the NATO populations.” At one point, according to Holmes, Caldwell wanted to break up the IO team and give each general on his staff their own personal spokesperson with psy-ops training.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs
Fascinating piece from one of James Fallows’ guest bloggers at the Atlantic. Eamonn Fingleton discusses “The Myth of Japan’s ‘Lost Decades‘”:
Question 1: Given that Japan’s current account surplus (the widest and most meaningful measure of its trade) totaled $36 billion in 1990, what was it in 2010: (a) $18 billion; (b) $41 billion; or ( c ) $194 billion?
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Question 2: How has the yen fared on balance against the dollar in the 20 years up to 2010: (a) fallen 11 percent; (b) risen 24 percent; ( c ) risen 65 percent?
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The answer in each case is ( c ). Yes, all talk about “stagnation” and “malaise” to the contrary, Japan’s surplus is up more than five-fold since 1990. And, yes, far from falling against the dollar, the Japanese yen has actually boasted the strongest rise of any major currency in the last two decades.
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How can such facts be reconciled with the “two lost decades” story? I don’t think they can. There is clearly a contradiction here, and after studying the facts on the ground in Tokyo for decades I find it hard to avoid the implausible-sounding conclusion that the story of Japan’s stagnation is a media myth.
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Certainly anyone who visits Japan these days is struck by the obvious affluence even among average citizens. The cars on the roads, for instance, are generally much larger and better equipped than in the 1980s (indeed state of the art navigation devices, for instance, are more or less standard on many models). Overseas vacation travel has more than doubled since the 1980s. The Japanese boast the world’s most advanced cell phones, and the biggest and best high-definition television screens. Japan’s already long life expectancy has increased by nearly two years. Its Internet connections are some of the world’s fastest — something like ten times faster on average than American speeds.
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True, not all of Japan’s indicators are equally impressive. The Tokyo stock market, for instance, has never recovered from its 1990s slump. Neither has the real estate market. (In the latter case, however, there is a silver lining in a major boost living standards, in that young home buyers now get far more space for their money. In any case the implosion since 1991 has merely restored some sanity to valuations that had previously become — very temporarily — outlandish).
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On the negative side, there is also the fact that Japan’s economic growth rate, as least as calculated officially, has averaged little more than 1 percent a year in the last two decades. For those who propound the “stagnation” story, this is their strongest card. But it does not accord with the common observation — undeniable to those who have known the country since the 1980s — that the Japanese people have enjoyed one of the biggest improvements in living standards of any major First World nation in the interim…
Go read the whole story; as far as my economically unsophisticated mind can parse Fingleton’s argument, he’s saying that Japan has spent the three decades since the early 1980s carefully hiding its increasing economic might, based on government support for sophisticated high-value production manufacturing… and as a result (corollary?), the average Japanese voter-consumer has enjoyed a better life even as the country’s ‘global image’ has suffered. Which, you know, kinda sounds like the inverse of a certain nation dear to many of our hearts. Given my choice, I’d certainly have preferred to spend my most productive earning years in an environment where the average citizen’s economic life was gradually improving, even if it meant we birthed fewer Masters of the Universe privileged to demonstrate their massive statesmanship with grinding global wars both actual and figurative…
Perhaps it is not surprising that on his own blog Fingleton concludes his argument:
I have never wavered from my view, expressed among other places in Blindside in 1995, that thanks to the almost incredible, if unnoticed, speed with which Japan has been building its lead in advanced manufacturing, the United States has been losing economic position faster than any Big Power since the implosion of the Ottoman empire a century ago. Nothing indeed has shaken my conviction that already by 2000, the United States had become an economic Potemkin village — a largely hollowed-out hulk whose eroding competitiveness was overlooked at the time merely because so many commentators, not least the ten highly influential observers on this invitation list, were busy proclaiming the myth of Japan’s economic oblivion.
by Tim F| 20 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Assholes
As expected, the Swiss will hold onto the Libyan dictator’s buried acorns for a while.
Meanwhile, he still has a sizable army but it’s backed into the Tripoli area and he’s hemorrhaging friends at an unsustainable rate. Qaddafi’s regime is tracing an obvious death spiral. It is all the more tragic that so many decent Libyans had to die first.