Even the paranoid have enemies

Dave already has a post on this up at the Galloping Beaver but I thought I might as well put it up here too, as this is a story that really deserves a lot more attention than it has been getting.

Remember back at the end of August when a bunch of nukes were "mistakenly" put on a B-52 and flown from one air base to another. Well, the USAF has now explained it was all a big whoops and punished a few people involved. So, there's nothing to see here, move along folks. Look, Britney Spears has a new album out!

Read this piece over at the Smirking Chimp and start demanding some answers.

The problem with this explanation for the first reported case of nukes being removed from a weapons bunker without authorization in 50 years of nuclear weapons, is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the US stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic antitheft systems--automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.

While the Air Force report doesn't mention any of this, what it means is that if weapons in a storage bunker are protected against unauthorized removal, someone--and actually at least two people, since it's long been a basic part of nuclear security that every action involving a nuclear weapon has to be done by two people working in tandem--had to deliberately and consciously disable those alarms.

Now, I'm not a conspiracy freak or anything of the sort. I believe we did land on the moon, that the World Trade Center was brought down by crashing jets, that the Bilderberg group is just a high level coffee klatch and that the Freemasons are just a social club that does some nice charity work. This bit definitely raises some eyebrows though:

* Why hasn't the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle "accidents" involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crewmembers at Minot and Barksdale? Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force "investigation" didn't even mention these incidents, and as I disclosed in my article, none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

Now I'm not willing to go the whole nine yard the author of the article does and attribute the whole thing to Dick Cheney planning to use the nukes to stage a false flag strike on the US to start a war with Iran, but if it wasn't him it had to be someone that has some pull, because you don't just check out nuclear warheads like they were the latest new release at Blockbuster Video. The whole thing is a little too Seven Days in May for my liking

Human Tetris
This one goes out to Dave from Jim Dandy Goodness, who loves to see the goofy side of Japan

For Post-Halloween Withdrawal
Oooooooh! scary stuff kids. Betcha didn't know Bergman made horror films, well neither did Count Floyd. All that existential angst and depression, wow, that's really scary!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dwWXr0qCC1M

Weekend blues
See that guy on the left doing the singing - that's "my caucasian" Mike Daley. Sure he's a big rock star now, but I knew him back in Burlington when his nickname was Beatle. Oh, and the guy sitting down? Jeff 'Freakin'' Healy, who obviously rocks, despite that whole "Roadhouse" thing.
Whipping Post!

Regrets, he's had a few
I missed this one last week as I was busy blowing out birthday candles before the kitchen caught fire, but apparently Conrad Black regrets giving up his Canadian citizenship.

Black, who might have faced a lighter sentence if he'd been tried in Canada, admitted to Men's Vogue that he wished he hadn't surrendered his Canadian citizenship -- after a public battle of wills with former prime minister Jean Chretien -- to take up a seat in the House of Lords.
"I do regret giving up my Canadian citizenship," he said, "but I always said I would
take it back."

Well, boo-frickin'-hoo yer lordship, I guess the House of Lords kind of regrets it too. I mean, really, when you get turfed from the Conservative side of the House of Lords for being an arrogant, autocratic robber baron and crook maybe its time to rein in the hubris just a smidgen. As for your Canadian citizenship, which you happily tossed aside to become a titled foreign aristocrat, you might be willing to "take it back" but I don't see the line forming to sign the petition to make you an offer.

Black is to be sentenced on Nov. 30. for obstruction of justice and three counts of mail fraud. He faces a maximum of 35 years in federal prison. Start chilling the champagne.

You can't tell the truth about me, I'll sue!

Many thanks to Zorpheous of the Wingnutterer for the graphic and to Impolitical for the story. What a bunch of pathetic crybabies.

hallelujah!

From Crackle: Mr. Deity and the Intel - Season 2, Ep 1

If you missed season on of this great Web series, you can find them on Youtube and on itunes

Things you should read

The Editors give you the skinny on the Pam Atlas Juggs vs. Chuckie "little green balls" Johnson blogging bun fight and mud-wrassle:

S,N!: Members of the not-insane community tell us that it really has been astonishing to see Oshry, Johnson and their assorted venal hangers-on attack each other with the rapacity they normally reserve for rational people.
DA: Well, it’s sort of like watching piranhas being ripped to shreds by locusts as they skeletonize a pack of hyenas who are polishing off the last few crumbs of the Manson Family. Terrifying, yet one can’t look away.

Dave Neiwert at Orcinus is one of those blogs everyone should read every day and send money to regularly. Lately, he's been slapping TV and radio muttonhead Glen Beck around over his comments on the fires in California. He's on the blogroll, check him out.

Meanwhile, back in The County

Apparently things have changed in Picton since I lived there. I can't believe these folks managed to get a business licence out of the greybeards that used to run The County. Not that there weren't plenty of uh..."hemp" fans around. As I recall it was a major local cash crop...I wonder how much of the product they source locally? Operation County indeed.

Ding, Dong the Wicked Witch Pink Bunny is Dead

Well, it has finally happened - the crooked, exploitive, madhouse I spent my first four years in Japan working at has finally come crashing down.

The place has been run like a mob-owned whorehouse pretty much since day one, but karma finally caught up with them this spring when a bunch of students complained to the government that the company was not living up to its promise that they could book lesson "anytime" and that when they tried to get a refund for their prepaid lessons, the company refused to give them a full refund. The trade ministry made them offer full refunds and forbid them to sell certain types of lesson contracts for a period. Since the company - the McDonalds of the language school industry in Japan - has been trying to triple its number of school over the last couple of years and has been spending money as fast as it came in the door on a variety of ill-advised projects and company jets for the president, this basically buggered the company's cash flow. Salaries were late in July, August and September for teachers and there was no pay in October. Many of the Japanese staff haven't been paid since mid summer.

The founder has been involved in a number of very dodgy stock deals to try to drum up enough cash to keep the wheels turning and aside from a bunch of really stupid faxes, has dropped out of sight since August. As more and more teachers stopped coming to work since they weren't getting paid, it became harder for students to book lessons and more and more asked for refunds.

Not that most of them have seen a single yen in refunds yet. Nova quit paying its bills months ago. Many of the teachers rent apartments from Nova, which sublets the units from landlords. The company has been deducting the rent from teachers paycheques, but hasn't been paying the landlords and as a result several hundred teachers have been turfed out of their homes in the last two months.

Nova employees glad to be off hot seat

The Yomiuri Shimbun

In the wake of Nova Corp.'s filing for court protection Friday, employees said that although they were anxious over their livelihoods, they were relieved to no longer have to cope with a barrage of complaints from students and teachers.

Nova, the nation's largest English-language school chain, applied for protection under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law with the Osaka District Court with debt of about 50 billion yen and suspended operations of all its schools.

Employees, mainly in their 20s, remained at their workplaces until the last moment, while many teachers had already stopped reporting to work over delays in salary payments. Lesson fees were also refunded to students who canceled their contracts with Nova. An employee in her 20s, who was manager of a branch in an office district in the Tokyo metropolitan area, said she began working for Nova after graduating from university as she wished to help people who wanted to learn English.

But she soon became dissatisfied with her position when she was instructed by the headquarters to try to get prospective students to sign lesson contracts.

As the number of branches increased around 2004 to 2005, more emphasis was placed on getting prospective students to sign contracts. In one case, one of the woman's colleagues was reprimanded for opposing a superior over the policy.

In June, when Nova was punished by the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry over lesson contracts and cancellation problems, she believed that Nova would recover.

She heard that the police had to be called to another branch because a student had become angry to the point of violence, apparently over a lesson contract dispute, but the headquarters offered no assistance in the matter. "I still told myself that I should hang on as long as I was getting paid," she said.

Foreign teachers started not showing up for lessons in mid-September when their salary payments were delayed. Consequently, dozens of complaints poured in, creating chaos for the company's inexperienced receptionists. One staff member complained of not being able to afford food, while another had been reduced to tears every day before she finally collapsed and stopped coming to the office.

===

Stock speculators involved

OSAKA--A group of stock speculators charged by the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office on suspicion of violating the Securities and Exchange Law, had been involved in a Nova capital expansion plan, the Yomiuri has learned.

The plan had been promoted by former Nova President Nozomu Sahashi, who was dismissed Thursday. Sahashi's financial problems may have led him to contact the group, as such groups control stock prices to gain illegal profits. Nova's court-appointed administrators stated that the move was grounds for Sahashi's dismissal.

According to sources, Sahashi had contacted the group led by Haruo Nishida, 57, an investment adviser who was arrested by the prosecutors on Oct. 12 on suspicion of manipulating the price of a construction company stock.

Nova announced on Oct. 9 it would issue stock warrants facilitating the purchase of 200 million new stocks, nearly three times the stock that had been issued, to two investment funds, with a view to securing about 6.4 billion yen. The funds are located in the Virgin Islands.

Nishida is said to have known people related to the investment funds and invited investors to Nova's plan before it was announced.

(Oct. 28, 2007)

The story above is very much the sanitized version of NOVA's flat out evil nature. Imagine the Bush administration running a chain of language schools in which people like Mike "Heckuva Job Brownie" Brown were the branch managers and Dick Cheney was in charge of the education department. Only with more evil, incompetence and general skullduggery and staffed by a lot of semi-literate Australians on working holidays.



For the real skinny on the whole sordid tale, the best "teachers gone wild" and "Freaky Student Stories" the best place to look is the forums at Lets Japan. Which is where I found all this art.

Ten steps
Yeah, its been posted elsewhere and its been around for six months but to paraphrase Atrios: Naomi speak, you listen

John Cleese gets political



A bit dated and UK specific toward the end, but I like his bit on extremism

New Zealand's gift to the world



If I had to choose between Flight of the ConChords,the All-Blacks and Steinlager, it would be a close race. Do yourself a favor and check out their other videos on YouTube.

I am no longer the whitest guitar player in the known universe
There's nothing wrong with this lesson, but I have to wonder how useful Hendrix chords are to someone who seems like he should be providing backing licks to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

But would he meet with the new Premier of French Columbia, Heywood Jablomi?

So Fred Thompson finally took part in a Republican Canadiates debate and it didn't make much a difference It was all very ho-hum, though Mitt Romney and Rudy Gulliani took a few shots at each other. But what caught my eye was this bit from the CNN story on the debate:

"The former Tennessee senator survived a gotcha question, correctly identifying the prime minister of Canada as Stephen Harper."

A gotcha question? He wants to be president and asking him the name of the leader of one of the G-8 nations, the U.S. partner in Norad and NATO, the country's northern neighbour is a gotcha question? Talk about lowering the bar. What's next? Will they ask John McCain to name the three branches of government? or Gulliani how many states there are? May they'll ask Mitt Romney if he can find Utah on a map.

And another thing: This is typical of the double standard of the So-Called Liberal Media. Hillary Clinton is expected to put forth a universal health care system that will ensure absolute and total coverage for any and all ailments for every single American without it costing more than a couple of Big Macs a year and the plan must be handed in to the media in triplicate, double spaced and footnoted or she's failed to live up to expectations and is considered unworthy to lead. Barrack Obama, by virtue of the fact that he is half-African, is expected to solve or at least explain any and all issues connected to race in the United States or he is dodging the issue - oh and he has to be "black enough" to win over African-American voters without being "too black" and scaring off white suburbanites. John Edwards has mentioned poverty, but he's a wealthy self made man, so unless he has a ironclad plan approved by a panel of Republican economists to make everyone millionaires by the Thursday after election day, he's just a pretty boy who pays too much for haircuts. And since they all oppose the war in Iraq, they better all have a surefire plan to win the war, bring peace and prosperity to Baghdad and release terrorist-eating unicorns that shit gold bars throughout the Middle East otherwise they are siding with Osama Bin Laden.

Fred Thompson on the other hand drives a shiny red truck, can talk tough as a crime-fightin' lawyer on TV, knows the name of the country's next door neighbor and looks like every Middle American's dad. Now that's presidential!

On the other hand...life is good
Given the tenor of the previous post, you might think I'm depressed, pissed off, and annoyed with life in general. Nothing could be further from the truth, because I have finally realized my life-long goals of:

A) playing hockey (at least fictionally) for Team Canada

B)Being immortalized as a superhero in a comic book.

One of teachers at my son's after-school day care center has created a series of short comics featuring my kids and their friends. My son Nicholas has been portrayed as every hero from Spiderman to Zorro, but the latest edition features me.


More as soon as I get a chance to scan the whole thing in and get it translated, but the main title reads: "Nicholas's Family Battle" (sic) with the smaller text panels reading : "Canadian Ice Hockey" and "Whoops!!!"

Stay tuned!

Why we drink
This purpose of this post is partly to vent (isn't it always?) partly to inform, partly to show off my behind the scenes knowledge of big media, and partly to provide Dave (no, not that Dave, the other Dave) of photographic evidence of the fact that if it is drinkable (and sometimes even if it isn't) you can buy it in a can in Japan.

I had one of those "What the fuck am I doing here?" kind of days at the office today. What it comes down to is that I'm just plain getting tired of watching reality and the truth get slapped around the office like a pair of red-headed stepchildren who went on to become cheap crack whores. (oh yeah, one more purpose -- to see if my boss is spying on me)

We had a lengthy piece in the paper about the activities of the Japanese Navy, I mean the Maritime Self Defense Force (article 9 of the constitution says Japan can't have a navy, so all those AEGIS destroyers and the new pocket carrier are part of the Self Defense Forces, NOT the navy). Concerns are being raised by various peacenik NPOs and other "obvious troublemakers" intent on disturbing the national wa, that the MSDF may have broken the law that authorizes them to take part in Operation Enduring Freedom.

This is kind of a big deal in Japan, because despite their military alliance with the U.S. the government's interpretation of Article 9 is that while Japan has the right to collective self-defense (as all nations do under the UN charter) the constitution forbids the nation to exercise that right, just as it forbids the nation from maintaining armed forces.


let look at that pesky section of Japan's basic law:

ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
第九条　日本国民は、正義と秩序を基調とする国際平和を誠実に希求し、国権の発動た 戦争と、武力による威嚇又は武力の行使は、国際紛争を解決する手段としては、永久にこ を放棄する。
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
二　前項の目的を達するため、陸海空軍その他の戦力は、これを保持しない。国の交戦権 、これを認めない。

Here's the short version: Japan's Anti-Terrorism Law, passed in the wake of 9/11, empowers the SDF to provide logistical non-combatant support to Operation Enduring Freedom AKA the anti-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan. They are doing so by providing fuel to the multi-national naval flotilla that is engaged in an interdiction mission near the landlocked nation to ensure that Osama Bin Laden doesn't sneak out of the subcontinent in a zodiac or something like that.

The MSDF has pumped a lot of gas, much of it into supply ships belonging to other nations, which then went on to refuel combat ships belonging to those other nations. Japan is so scrupulous in observing the constitution that it will not permit the fighting ships of other nation to guard its tanker while it refuels other ships, which is why Japan has also sent a destroyer as part of the flotilla, which is only allowed to guard the other Japanese ships from the non-existent naval threat from landlocked Afghanistan. The thing is, one of the US supply ships "may have" gone on to refuel the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk which then went on to engage in the early stages of the War in Iraq.

Ooops.

Forget for a moment that Japan sent non-combat troops to Iraq for a couple of years to show its loyalty to the United States to provide reconstruction aid in Southern Iraq under the (one-way) protection of the Dutch and later Australians and British. Apparently pumping gas for war is a no-no.

Now, I know what you are saying to yourself: "Aren't the MSDF pumpng gas for war in Afghanistan?" After all, Canada is part of that multinational naval flotilla in addition to having ground troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan--isn't there a war on there? Isn't Operation Enduring Freedom the Pentagon's name for the the War on Terror in Afghanistan? Isn't the civilized world at war with Al-Qaida and the Taliban?

Not according to the people I work for. As it was explained to me, the MSDF cannot take part in a war and since the MSDF is taking part in the international action against terrorism in Afghanistan, it cannot be a war.

Which bring us back to our title and the reason for my two little travelling companions on the train ride home.

It takes a noble man to win a Nobel Prize
Al Gore and Canada's own Sheila Watt-Cloutier are being touted as possible winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, but if it were up to me, it would go to Pete Seeger. Click here to sign the petition.

Ontario poised to embrace lack of democracy
According to the latest polling, the effort to improve Ontario's electoral system by adding proportional representation appears doomed:
The most recent SES/Sun Media poll indicates that the support to change Ontario's electoral system to MMP is unlikely to pass the 60% threshold needed for change.

Asked about their intentions related to the upcoming referendum, Ontarians generally preferred to keep the current system (47%), followed by voting for MMP (26%) and finally not casting a vote in the referendum (5%). Twenty-one percent were unsure.

At the same time, Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty appears to be headed to a slim majority with 43% of the vote as compared to 33% for the Conservatives, 17% for the NDP and 6% for the Greeens. So for all you Tories out that who intend to vote against MMP just remember you had your chance to fix the system so that when the Liberals don't get the majority of votes, they don't get to form a majority government.The next time the government does something you don't like, you are not allowed to complain that almost 60% of people voted against the government, because if you had used your head and voted for MMP, such a situation would be impossible.

Pass the salt...and the fire extinguisher
I can see the advertising campaign now "Our food is so spicy, they had to call out the fire brigade and evacuate the building." or "Our peppers are for eating, not spraying". I guess some in the land of bangers and mash just aren't ready for spicy Thai food. I've cooked some spicy chili over the years, but I've never had anyone call out the firefighters - the health department maybe, but not the fire department.