Far East Cynic

My 401K is rapidly becoming a 200.5K.

So much for buying that bar in Phuket!

Really busy, but I have to admit I raised an eyebrow when I saw this little gem:

That whole “manage the nuclear weapons thing”? Not quite as hard as running a company into the ground I guess.

Of the landed gentry………….

Somehow it is probably fitting that the day I jump back into the debt pool, just happens to be the day the stock market drops by over 500 points.

Timing as they say is every thing. However today was an auspicious day for me-especially when you consider that just under 10 years ago, financially, I was flat on my back. Now I could buy a house and while it was a stretch to get it financed-at least I could.

Once was not always so.

They say its only a loss if you sell and the best thing for a saver to do at a time like this is not to panic. But to just hunker down and plow your way through. However its been a double whammy of sorts, since at the beginning of this month I began participating in a plan that bought shares of stock in my company. Nothing earth shaking, just a couple of shares each paycheck. I have never done any individual stock purchasing before. However I think it is important to have a stake in the future of the company-no matter how small that stake may be. I did the same thing in the Navy by buying savings bonds regularly. It was one of the few things that saved me when it was time to send the shrew packing. So the advice not to panic is probably the best.

Except the share price of my company is 10 dollars a share less than it was at the beginning of this little adventure.

I can’t help but think things are more than a little different with this particular financial collapse. I don’t agree with John McCain that the economy is fundamentally sound. I believe this the nation’s bar bill coming due. Even if markets can be stabilized this week, the market is not yet out of the woods. Worldwide credit-related losses by financial institutions “now top $500 billion, of which only $350 billion of equity has been replenished. This $150 billion gap, leveraged 14.5 times (the average gearing for the industry), translates to a $2 trillion reduction in liquidity. Hence the severe shortage of credit and predictions of worse to come“.

Furhtermore, there is another round of bad news coming on the job front, the dollar is getting weaker and gas prices shot up a dollar a gallon here in shopping mall over the weekend.  It is an old story-a nation cannot embark on a war without end based solely on its good credit. Most of the ones that did, usually hit a financial train wreck either during or after the war ends.

I’ve always believed that a balanced budget-even with war spending would have left the economy in better shape.

But we did not choose that path-so hang on to your hats.

Its going to be a sucky week.

No wonder I am depressed about being where I am, when I am . Someday I’ll have to explain all that-but for now, I’m just going to cry myself to sleep.

Big White Guy is back in Canada. He verbalizes what I have been feeling for the past 4 months:

This may sound strange, but seeing so many Caucasian people all in one place feels a little odd.

In other words, I’ve grown used to being the visible minority; I’m comfortable encountering 98 Chinese faces for every 100 people.

I wonder if Hong Kong immigrants to Canada feel like a fish out of water when they return to the Big Lychee for a visit.

The Army is-among itself. Andrew Bacevich chronicles it.

The chief participants in this debate—all Iraq War veterans—fixate on two large questions. First, why, after its promising start, did Operation Iraqi Freedom go so badly wrong? Second, how should the hard-earned lessons of Iraq inform future policy? Hovering in the background of this Iraq-centered debate is another war that none of the debaters experienced personally—namely, Vietnam.

The protagonists fall into two camps: Crusaders and Conservatives.

As Bacevich points out this is probably a really good thing. Especially when you contrast that with the Navy, which is doing nothing but getting smaller- and worrying about how many women it can promote ahead of when they should be. There are no arguments going on publicly within the Navy. Just in bars and blogs by people such as myself who are astounded at the rat hole our once great Navy has gone down. Vern Clark and his six years of oligarchy cured that.

Besides confirming the deification of Petreaus-at the expense of Colin Powell I might add, the argument  is about the proper role of the Army, and thus what kind of war it should train for:

Instability creates ungoverned spaces in which violent anti-American radicals thrive. Yet if instability anywhere poses a threat, then ensuring the existence of stability everywhere—denying terrorists sanctuary in rogue or failed states—becomes a national-security imperative. Define the problem in these terms, and winning battles becomes less urgent than pacifying populations and establishing effective governance.

War in this context implies not only coercion but also social engineering. As Nagl puts it, the security challenges of the 21st century will require the U.S. military “not just to dominate land operations, but to change entire societies.”

A very tall order. And not every one is buying it:

Gentile also takes issue with the triumphal depiction of the Petrae­us era, attributing security improvements achieved during Petrae­us’s tenure less to new techniques than to a “cash-for-cooperation” policy that put “nearly 100,000 Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, … on the U.S. government payroll.” According to Gentile, in Iraq as in Vietnam, tactics alone cannot explain the overall course of events.

All of this forms a backdrop to Gentile’s core concern: that an infatuation with stability operations will lead the Army to reinvent itself as “a constabulary,” adept perhaps at nation-building but shorn of adequate capacity for conventional war-fighting.

The concern is not idle. A recent article in Army magazine notes that the Army’s National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, long “renowned for its force-on-force conventional warfare maneuver training,” has now “switched gears,” focusing exclusively on counter­insurgency warfare. Rather than practicing how to attack the hill, its trainees now learn about “spending money instead of blood, and negotiating the cultural labyrinth through rapport and rapprochement.”

And this is change is not free-it comes at a high cost:

The officer corps itself recognizes that conventional-warfare capabilities are already eroding. In a widely circulated white paper, three former brigade commanders declare that the Army’s field-artillery branch—which plays a limited role in stability operations, but is crucial when there is serious fighting to be done—may soon be all but incapable of providing accurate and timely fire support. Field artillery, the authors write, has become a “dead branch walking.”

This is an important question, the answer to which will drive the Army’s spending priorities for years to come. I tend to side with the conservatives-simply styling the Army for Iraq style counter insurgencies ignores the issues with the Army’s role in the rest of the world and as a part of the overall US national security strategy. “Strategic choice—to include the choice of abandoning the Long War in favor of a different course—should remain a possibility.”

Especially if you think Al Queada has already been beaten. Where does one go from there?

The Army deserves credit for having this discussion. Meanwhile over in the Navy……the fleet just gets smaller and older. They are talking about who is a Shipmate though.

The SNL skit about Palin:

McCain’s not Saint Sarah’s…………………………………………………

It would seem the people at Fact Check.Org do like having their words distorted.

But McCain does not care one little bit-he’s going to do what ever it takes. He was a POW you know, that makes him invulnerable to character attacks:

Current campaign aides and other Republicans who’ve closely watched the race, however, have a very different response to the media elites and good-government scolds: We don’t care what you think.

McCain seems to have made a choice that many politicians succumb to but that he had always promised to avoid — he appears ready to do whatever it takes to win, even it if soils his reputation.

“We recognize it’s not going to be 2000 again,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, alluding to the media’s swooning coverage of McCain’s ill-fated crusade against then-Gov. George W. Bush and the GOP establishment. “But he lost then. We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

Rogers, who hung tough with McCain through the dark days of the primary and has lived through every high and low of this turbulent and unpredictable race, argues that they tried to run a high-ground campaign and sought to keep the candidate in front of the media in the fashion he enjoys. His point: No one paid any attention.

So, that being the case might as well jump on in the sewer………………..

Watch what happens about 15 seconds into the clip-

Pigs have needs too!

H/T to Japan Probe!

My Canadian counter part about Obama that is:

Yes, it’s happening again, if only because the party insists on nominating amateurs solely because they’re popular with people who don’t tend to vote in general elections. It’s happening again because the Democrats refuse to believe that empty platitudes can’t beat professional politicians who are determined to win. It’s happening again because liberals are so unjustifiably arrogant as to think that people will believe in them without bothering to convince them.

You’d think that losing seven of the last ten presidential elections would have taught them something. It obviously hasn’t. I agree that if President Bush was on the ballot, Obama would whip him like a retarded stepchild. But that overlooks that a retarded stepchild would whip President Bush like retarded stepchild at this point.

It also overlooks the fact that John McCain is on the ballot and John McCain, like right thinking people everywhere, hates President Bush personally. Yes, there are pictures of McCain hugging Bush, but most adults know that this is an example of McCain being a good soldier, a concept apparently unfamiliar with the community organizing circles. Any look at recent polling proves that nobody gives a shit about McCain’s perceived closeness to Bush.

Read the rest and then ask yourself the David Broder question.

From Indiana comes a not so startling revelation:

Women love Shoes more then they love men.

Which is why every woman owns a pair of these:

They are not just to be carried on the walk of shame anymore:

Of the George Washington arriving in Yokosuka.

Two explosions were heard in a residential area in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture late Friday in what is believed to be a guerrilla attack against the U.S. naval base in the port city, police said.

No one was hurt in the incident, which took place in a hilly area of the city at around 10:30 p.m., the police said.

The police said there were the traces of two rocket bombs being launched. Metal pipes, batteries and lead wires were found on the scene, they added.

Same thing happened when I was up at Atsugi. The golf course got in the way of them hitting anything though. Another reason to have them.

From either Georgia.

However that statement that was made last month by Sen John McCain was made on August 12, 2008.

“He knows that the thoughts and the prayers and support of the American people are with that brave little nation as they struggle today for their freedom and independence. And he wanted me to say thank you to you, to give you his heartfelt thanks for the support of the American people for this tiny little democracy far away from the United States of America. And I told him that I know I speak for every American when I say to him, ‘ Today, we are all Georgians,’ ” McCain declared.

Um…….no. You are not speaking for me.

Because I would have told Georgia to wake up and smell the coffee -and remember where you live. And because not every little sliver of land gets to be an independent nation. And if they do- I better be willing to back up my talk of joining NATO with some resources.

We don’t encourage Taiwan to be stupid. What makes Georgia different?

Georgia’s Lessons for Taiwan

by Jeffrey Bader and and Douglas Paal

Posted September 2, 2008

The Russian attack on Georgia sent ripples of alarm through Europe and the
United States. Irrespective of arguments over who started the conflict and
who is responsible, the West got the message: Russia expects to dominate the
states of the former Soviet Union, and we can expect years of jockeying for
influence in those states, with attendant tensions.

Americans and Europeans are not the only ones who have been watching with
interest. In Asia-particularly Taiwan-people are wondering what events in
the Caucasus may portend about their own security.

Like Georgia, Taiwan lies on the periphery of a major power, in this case
China, growing in strength in recent years. Russia’s designs for Georgia are
not absolutely clear, but with regard to Taiwan, China is unambiguous in its
assertion of sovereignty and its intention to absorb it in the long-run.

In both cases, the policy of the United States is central to the
calculations of all the players. The United States leads plans to bring
Georgia into NATO. With respect to Taiwan, U.S. security interests are of
much longer standing, and the assumption of a U.S. commitment to defend
Taiwan in case of attack is one of the foundations of security and stability
in Asia. It is no wonder that many Taiwanese watched the events in Georgia
with deep concern about their own future, and what these events say about
the reliability of U.S. defense assurances.

What are the lessons of the Russia-Georgia crisis for Taiwan, and for U.S.
policy toward Taiwan? We would point to six:

 Continue Reading »

For Republicans:

James Fallows has some questions about Saint Sarah and her supposed hatred of pork barrel spending:

In Governor Palin’s case, the more often she has repeated the story, the more abashed the press has seemed about pointing out its falsity. The accurate version would be more like: “I said ‘Yes, please!’ until the Congress said ‘Sorry, no.’” As best I can tell (from my distance in China), the right-wing press has played no part in this truth-squadding. The mainstream press has seemed to treat it as a “controversy” rather than a falsehood. And there is no evidence of Palin hesitating to use the story again and again.

There can’t be any difference in gender or race bias in treatment of these two cases: they both both involve successful, married white female politicians. There is no essential difference in the falseness of their claims, though there was a greater comic potential in the film footage of Sen. Clinton’s “harrowing” arrival. The major remaining difference is that one case involves a Democrat (though the more conservative of the primary-campaign finalists) and one a Republican.

So here are the controlled-experiment questions:

1) At any point will the right-wing press join the effort to hold Palin accountable for her false claim, as all of the press held Clinton responsible?

2)  If Palin keeps making the claim, will press critics redouble their debunking, as they did with Clinton, or taper off for fear of seeming biased or boring?

3) At any point will Palin herself — or, far more significant, McCain — acknowledge that there are such things as fact and fantasy, and stop making a demonstrably false claim?

I pose it as a set of questions rather than an assumed conclusion. For now.

Now tell me again, about how the the governor is just getting slimed by the liberal press.