Just suppose that, from some distant foreign country closely allied with the United States, we were all to learn one day -- suddenly and as an intrusion on our own domestic concerns -- that the country's (elected) President had ordered into existence a system of martial law, and pursuant to that order that he had prohibited meetings of his country's elected legislature until further notice. Suppose his happens not now, but sometime soon after Jan. 20, 2025. It might easily spiral into a serious matter affecting the interests of the US. Consider, for example, that there might be US military bases there -- there might continuously have been military bases there since a war in the early '50s. Perhaps the situation becomes violent, and the violence spreads out beyond the capital city. A couple of nearby foreign countries, which had been enemies of this country, and of the US, in this earlier war, are watching closely to see how far this disruption goes. The Pr...
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As I've mentioned here before, I wrote for a little more than a year, (ending in April 2022) on a steady basis, for a small operation that hoped to explain public affairs to young people -- pre-teens and early teens. This operation created a small income stream for me ($400 a month) which nonetheless sometimes came in very useful when it arrived. I lost this stream of income when the project closed down operations. Their site went down in the aftermath of the cessation of operations, but someone brought it back. With one cryptic exception there is nothing on it posted subsequent to early May of this year, when they ran out of the inventory of my work. The site disappeared from its URL before May was done. Then it came back into existence briefly in August. I provided you in an earlier post with three samples of my work for it during that resurgence. Then the site disappeared again in early September. Now, as we get into October, it is back again. And again, I will use this brief op...
It was 1952. It was a tense conflict of wills between father and son. The father, a firm supporter of Robert Taft who still hoped Taft could could manage to take the Republican nomination away from that interloper Ike, had discovered forbidden literature in his home. Pamphlets expounding on the wonderful qualities of ... Adlai Stevenson! Gasp. The son, who owned up to having acquired those materials non-accidentally, was expressing the usual adolescent boy's rebellion against Dad, and a belief acquired somehow as a fairly typical high school student, that the New Deal has started something great 19 years before and that the great work ought to be continued, not derailed because people like his father were grouchy. The father, a graduate of Notre Dame University, decided that a drastic measure was necessary. His boy would graduate from Nyack High in May. He must be told sternly that he would then attend Notre Dane, where the perfectly reliable faculty would straighten o...
A few days back, after Trump removed an Inspector General for the State Department, it became public knowledge that (1) the Secretary of State had been giving a 23 year old aide personal tasks -- i.e. had him walking his dog and arranging dinner reservations (2) the inspector general had been looking at this, and (3) that august official, Mike Pompeo, told the President that he should fire the IG. It is of course temping to connect these dots....President Trump has not even bothered to discourage the connection. He has said that he would rather have the S of S working to resolve outstanding issues between the two Koreas rather than walking his dog. In how many ways is that wrong? I'll try to keep this short. First, I have no confidence that anybody involved in this administration has been or is likely to do any good with regard to Korea. I think it more likely that any time the S of S devotes to that purpose does harm than good. So, yes, I'd rather have him walking his...
The Coronavirus has gotten its largest boost from an apocalyptic cult in South Korea. I am religious in my own manner, and I'm live-and-let-live to my bones. But I have to admit, I find these eschatological sectarians a damned nuisance, a bit like the dangerous asteroid-bound monkeys in AD ASTRA. Here's a link to the story in The Daily Beast on the cult/coronavirus connection. https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-south-korea-coronavirus-meets-the-second-coming BTW, I'm curious about the term COVID-19 for this virus. Does COVID stand for "COrona VIrus Disorder" or something similar? And if so, it this somehow the 19th member of that class? Why did we all miss the other 18?
North Korea has been lobbing missiles in the direction of Japan, as a deliberate act of provocation and bravado. Commentators on television can't mention this fact without at once saying "Japan is the country's former colonial overlord." And so it is, but I don't think the pertinent history has anything to do with the choice of missile-test target, or whatever 'this' is. Just so no one will say I ignored it, though, let's say a few words about that history, even though we're just taking this stuff from wikipedia. Korea was never colonized by one of the usual suspects, one of the western European powers one thinks of when the subject comes up. The Russo-Japanese War was fought at the start of the 20th century largely over the issue of in whose sphere of influence did Korea fall. The Japanese won. Not long thereafter, in 1910, the Japanese forced on the Koreans a Treaty of Annexation. This begins the period referenced when the news talkin...