onomatopoeia comments

Are the Philippines a failed state at this point? Something like an overpopulated tropical Balkans or neo-Libya wearing a democracy disguise? I'm not a fan of colonialization by any means, but considering the never ending rogues gallery of leaders since independence, they might have fared much better by remaining a part of the US.

I guess that only leaves Betty White

You guessed wrong. Ed Asner is still very much alive.

FYI Geronimo - It's "Fore!" not "4". Apparently a huge golf handicap isn't your only one.

Had the pleasure to see Emerson Lake and Powell at the Syria Mosque back in 86. What a lucky man I was. Can still remember Greg playing his 8 string Alembic, Cozy's solo on one of the biggest kits in rock, and Keith stabbing the keyboards with his Nazi daggers. Now all three are gone.

RIP Greg Lake. That doubleneck Zemaitis of yours was the coolest guitar ever made.

I may be mistaken, but I don't see any Ainu nation flags in this crowd. In my opinion, without the involvement of the displaced indigenous people who have the only true claim to these islands, any protests about this situation are seriously lacking in credibility.

The rival burger restaurant in suburban Pittsburgh that gave him the idea was Big Boy. There are Big Boy restaurants here in Tohoku, but none of them have the famous Big Boy hamburger. Go figure?

There's an answer to this problem on the near horizon. It is called driver-less car technology. Hopefully, some sort of satisfactory compromise between the 'privilege' (not a right) to drive of elderly motorists and the safety of endangered pedestrians can be arrived at by legislative authorities through implementing driver-less car technology sometime soon.

Fantastic news. Had the pleasure to meet Michael several times back in the day when he was doing stand up at the Funny Bone in Station Square. Always great to see a fellow yinzer with his name up in lights again.

I don't get it either, although Mountain, Hendrix, and Nazareth did some decent remakes of his darker tunes.

Morning Wind - I agree with you entirely in that none of the lands you mentioned rightfully belong to the colonists who currently occupy them. This includes the Formosan situation in Taiwan, the Hawaiians who had their islands stolen, the Han pogrom against the Tibetans, and dozens of other similar situations around the world in our so-called modern era.

As one of the more devout Russian apologists on this forum, I was not surprised by your failure to mention the forced extirpation of the Ainu from Sakhalin and Kamchatka by the Soviets and their continued denial of political/cultural recognition under the current regime. Since the Ainu are now essentially extinct in their former Siberian homelands, their human rights issue is fairly moot for Putin at this point. His track record of polonium assassinations, jet-liner downings, and frozen conflict instigations have long left him devoid of any humanity or credibility to recover.

In regards to the Japanese and their Meiji era cultural genocide against the Ainu, I doubt the Kaigi puppet in office will make a genuine effort to atone for the right of the Yamato people to subjugate any of the peoples in east Asia to the will of their god-emperors. The word Ainu is actually a pejorative meaning 'human' because the Yamato people viewed themselves as divine.

Since neither Putin nor Abe made any mention of the Ainu's predicament during this 'business conference', I would ask if you also share their apparent lack of consideration for the indigenous people caught up in / left out of their peace-treaty farce?

They're Russian islands. Admitting it is the first stage in recovery, Japan.

These islands belong entirely to the indigenous Ainu. Admitting it is the first stage for both Abe, Putin, and their respective nations in recovering some of their lost humanity and credibility.

Not IF, but WHEN.

MH - I'm failing to see how an increase in the senior population contributes to an overall decline in population. Can you elaborate on your mathematical rationale? In addition, longer (not sure about the grammatical correctness of 'higher') life expectancy is not necessarily a good thing, whereas an increase in the quality of life at the end stage is. It seems a fair assumption that lower rates of debilitating illness like cancer and cardiovascular disease would contribute to an increase in the quality of life for seniors. The statistical increase mentioned is only 2 to 3 months more for one's overall lifespan. However, if those additional 3 months are relatively free of pain and suffering, I would say this is a good thing.

Suicide means willingly taking your own life. And 'blowing yourself up' is a proactive event with grammatical implications that the perpetrator is wholly responsible. If anyone for a moment believes that these children were willing participants in this atrocity, they are as delusional as the Boko Haram fanatics. These girls were tortured and extorted into performing this crime, they are not to blame as the title and and reflexive pronouns in the text would suggest.

Thouart wayward - I think that you might find this interesting. The US had destroyed its germ warfare stockpile even before ratifying the Biological Weapons Convention in 1975. The US has destroyed over 90% of its chemical weapons as per the 1997 ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and is set to neutralize its remaining non-deployable 2400 tons of mustard. Although its dual-use facilities lack transparency, Russia was deemed in compliance with the BWC by the US State Dept as of 2011 with no known stockpiles. Russia is on track (with international assistance) to eliminate the remaining declared stockpiles of non-deployable chemical agents later this year. The artillery pieces used by the US and Russia for these munitions are no longer in service.

NK, on the other hand, is reported to have upwards of 5000 tons of deployed chemical weapons, which far exceeds the remaining non-deployed stockpiles of both the US and Russia combined. NK is not signatory to any chemical weapons treaty. These NGO websites also highlight the suspected biological weapons dilemma of NK which can not be verified due to the secretive nature of the current regime. These articles also point out the past history of NK in selling ChemBioWMD technology around the planet.

http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/countryprofiles

http://www.nti.org/country-profiles/north-korea/

http://jurist.org/forum/2015/03/morse-tan-nuclear-programs.php

http://38north.org/2015/04/rpeters041415/

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/testimonies/CT400/CT401/RAND_CT401.pdf

Can you provide some credible links to dispute what that Ultraman guy said instead of just asking us to Google?

Smouldering Hedge - did you bother to read the Newsweek article you linked? Do you know anything about the examples cited in that article? For example Severstal steel and its oligarch owner Mordashov? Or Rosneft, one of the main post-Yukos fronts for Putin's kleptocracy? The only people who are benefiting from your so-called booming Russian economy are the billionaire cronies of Vlad. And as for the real topic of this forum, Duda and his allies are even more anti-Russia and fearful of Putin than the current administration.

Flaming Shrub - your statement couldn't be farther from the truth. It was your beloved Putin who banned Polish imports. Russia's feeble attempt to bolster their own collapsing agriculture sector has nothing to do with the EU problem in Poland.

landworkersalliance.org.uk/2015/02/polish-farmers-blockade-motorways-across-country/

Curious that Aum Shinrikyo is not mentioned by name in this article and neither is their new alias Aleph. Most people in my town are oblivious to the fact that Aum has a 'yoga' center operating here under their new and improved Aleph moniker.

Mermaid in a Manhole

Hostel Trilogy

The Fly

Living in south Iwate, I guess I've become used to them at this point. Sort of like living next to the railroad tracks. After awhile, you don't notice when the train rumbles by. My kids sleep right through them anymore. Still, I try to be aware of emergency exits wherever I am, keep my gas tank full, cycle fresh cans through my food stockpile, etc... Other lessons I learned from the big one - solar cellphone recharger, spare laptop battery kept fully juiced, and a month's worth of TP.

Books are like vinyl records: analog remnants in our digital era. Not especially convenient to access, transport, or store when compared to the e-reader format, but the information contained within has its own undeniable intrinsic value. Nostalgic treasure is still treasure. And just as the hefty packaging of a double disc like Physical Graffiti or White Album can not be appreciated in an MP3 file, the weight of an 400 page tome like Moby Dick just has a certain magnanimity that can not be conveyed through a monitor screen.

I hope they'll make the Musashi a military grave to pay all honours to those who died for their country.

Japan and the Philippines are signatories to the 2001 UNESCO treaty on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Article 1(8) states - Warships and other vessels or aircraft owned and operated by a state at the time of sinking and not engaged in commercial operations meet the definition of underwater cultural heritage.

However, this only applies to warships that were sunk in combat over 100 years before the present day (now 2015). This means that Japan (the flag state) will have to wait until 2044 to claim it as sacrosanct under the terms of the treaty. It seems that the Musashi is currently under the jurisdiction of the Philippines. I am not aware of any other maritime treaty details between Japan and the Philippines concerning the disposition of Japanese naval grave sites in that country's waters. Considering the number of Japanese military grave sites in the Philippines, I would not be surprised if some additional agreements were previously made concerning newly discovered locations. Perhaps other posters can elaborate.

I had fugu in Yokohama about 5 years ago, and despite the 10000 yen per plate price, I found the flavour rather disappointing. Some lenten fry wrapped in a Page 3 with salt & vinegar chips is much better.

Here's an AP story for some of our above posting Putinophiles who consistently deny objective reality.

http://news.yahoo.com/russian-conscripts-tell-fears-being-sent-ukraine-122703194.html

Lito - I think you are somewhat misinformed. Japan has a rich tradition of allowing the disabled a means to both support themselves and contribute to society. Since medieval times, the blind were instructed in music and the deaf were apprenticed in the visual arts. Some of Japan's greatest koto and biwa players were blind and some of Japan's greatest kimono and calligraphy masterpieces were made by the deaf. And Okuma Shigenobu, an amputee resulting from an assassination attempt, was prime minister and later president of Waseda University - well over a century ago.

Well, let's drop the gloves and get down to semantics if that's the level you're at. Never said hiragana were devised in the Edo period, only that is was developed from kanji by women who were deprived of education throughout most of Japan's history. Shikibu Murasaki, who wrote Genji Monogatari, was an upper echelon noblewoman with secret access to an education within the imperial household that ordinary females could neither envision nor make use of. As for breaking rules of gender and rank with amazing results, I once worked with an amazing lady in the art department who had a penchant for using boku and ore at faculty nomikais. She was, of course, amazingly denied tenure. Most of my current translation needs are from Sanskrit or Tibetan, let me know how much you charge. By the way, glad those asps and praetorians have left you alone as of late.

And for my other detractors - what makes you think I'm from America? (I'm from Nebula M78) or that I don't like living in Japan and need to move to Spain? or that I don't relish the challenge of kanji and all the other idiosyncrasies that the Japanese language and culture present? It's just a debate about a magazine article substantially lacking in substance. I am merely providing more substance for the deliberation.

To anyone who thinks that Japanese is not profoundly illogical, just try translating it with a typical software program. What do you get? Gibberish. Because even fundamentally logical machines such as computers are unable to accurately decipher it. The English version of 'one plus one equals two' is easily understood by even the simplest of code. But the Japanese version 'ichi to ichi wa, ni desu' is incomprehensible to machines. I do know a little something about language - I speak and read 4 of them, but I never said that Japanese is inferior. However, many of my fellow professors in the language department at my university (I'm in the Japanese religious studies dept.) say that it is inferior. And Japanese do have a difficult time communicating with each other. Since spoken Japanese has a limited number of phonemes due to a lack of final consonants, it has become the most homonymic language in modern and (somewhat) widespread usage. Additionally, Japanese is an inherently implicit and vague language whereas European languages (other than Slavic) are explicit and precise. Yes, kanji have meaning, sometimes too many meanings. Just try finding which on or kun rendering of the kanji for 'life' is the one the writer means when working with minimal context. And kanji do not have logic. That is a basic concept of hieroglyphics, abstract representation of something enigmatic or not obvious from its radical parts. And kanji are a static mechanism which is why the Japanese needed to invent katakana. I could go on and on about the limitations of the Japanese language, but I never said in my post that I didn't like it.

Not sure who the 'we' is that you are referring to, but in actuality, methamphetamine was first invented here in Japan and used most extensively by the Kamikaze and Nazi troops during WW2.

http://www.drugfreeworld.org/drugfacts/crystalmeth/history-of-methamphetamine.html

http://science.howstuffworks.com/meth2.htm

But I do agree with you that the hard stance/sanctions are not working. The Kim clique is perpetrating genocide against its own people. War on the Korean peninsula is inevitable.

The tragedy of North Korea's drug cartel and methademic is mainstream news worldwide. Pick up a newspaper now and then, whydon'tya?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100208346/north-korea-is-running-a-drug-ring-and-kim-jong-un-is-its-bond-style-mr-big/

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23767363

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/21/how-north-korea-got-itself-hooked-on-meth/

http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/27/world/la-fg-north-korea-meth-20140127

http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/crystal-meth-north-koreas-state-secret/

Why no mention here that North Korea is the main manufacturer and trafficker of illegal synthetic drugs in Asia? Now that they already have the world's largest arsenal of chemical weapons, many of those laboratories and factories are being converted to drug cooking. The population of North Korea is reputed to also have the biggest abuse epidemic for these drugs as well. Not sure why the reporter chose to leave out this important information.