It may be a matter of minutes or a matter of days. But it looks like Koizumi does indeed plan to visit the infernal shrine, the source of all the world’s evil.

China has warned Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi against visiting the controversial war-linked Yasukuni shrine. Speculation is rising that Mr Koizumi, who steps down in September, may visit Yasukuni around 15 August, the anniversary of Japan’s WWII surrender. Countries in the region say the shrine honours Japan’s militarist past.

Fourteen Class A war criminals are among the 2.5 million war dead commemorated there. China had always opposed the shrine visits, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“This position is clear and consistent. We hope that Japan’s leaders can be highly responsible towards history, the people and the future and change their erroneous ways.”

Mr Koizumi has visited the shrine five times since taking office in 2001, but never on the day of the anniversary.

Brace youself for the next onslaught of Japanophobia as Koizumi commits the great sin. As I’ve said countless times, Koizumi should stop going. And as I’ve also said countless times, those who are offended should focus on the stuff that really matters, and wake up to how the government is using them. China knows full well that in the face of demands like this, Koizumi must visit the shrine, if only to appear not to be giving in. Nothing scares the Chinese government more than the idea of Koizumi not going to the shrine.

No matter what happens, no matter how bad something in reality is for the GOP, it’s always presented as something positive, as something great, as proof that they are winning. Duncan explains.

You see, if we could tear ourselves free of the Wurlitzer’s deafening roar, there would be a whole different reality out there. But we’re slaves to it – we allow ourselves to be deluded into seeing Lamont’s victory as something bad, something calamitous. When Lamont wins, it’s great for the GOP. If he had lost, it would have been great for the GOP. Until we can block out the GOP talking point machine, none of us is safe from infection. Truth is falsehood, ignorance is strength, war is peace. (Where have I heard that before?)

Don’t you get it? Everything that happens is good for Bush, and bad for the Dems. Don’t you wonder about that? It will persist only as long as we allow it to. The surrender of your critical faculties is a choice. As Nancy Reagan would put it, Just say No. These Regimes of Truth exist only as long as we let them. Time to stop letting them. It’s now or never.

Where’s Charles Johnson when we need him? Let’s see how big a deal he makes of this.

Well, I know I just said I was on vacation, but there’s always time for one more post.

It seems China is making great strides in reducing the number of anti-government demonstrations, now down to a mere trickle at 39,000 in the first half of 2006.

The Chinese government, which has battled a surge of social unrest in recent years, reported Wednesday that there were 39,000 cases of “public order disruptions” in the first half of the year.

The Ministry of Public Security said that represented a 2.5% decrease in the number of protests from the same period in 2005, though it offered no explanation of how it had come up with the figures.

China is in the midst of dramatic social and economic transformations that have created a two-tier society separated by a widening gap in incomes. Social discontent has been on the rise in recent years, fueled by income disparities, land disputes, pollution problems and an inadequate legal system that is widely seen as failing to address people’s needs.

Beijing is normally reluctant to disclose negative information, especially about public disturbances that could tarnish China’s international reputation and undermine one-party control. But in recent years, the central government has grown increasingly concerned about the effect of unrest on economic development and social stability.

President Hu Jintao has made the promotion of a “harmonious society” the cornerstone of his administration, hoping to strike a tone of balance in a country grappling with lopsided growth and a rising sense of inequality.

I love the smell of propagandaprogress in the morning. Harmony is on the march, and protests against the magnanimous CCP are in their last throes.

Via CDT.

I noticed that in virtually every news clip here in the land of the free, all the pro-Lieberman people and even most of the newscasters (!) keep referring to Ned Lamont as a “millionaire” (suddenly the GOP hates millionaires). So I did some googling. Wow. How come I never hear “millionaire George Bush” or “millionaire John Kerry” or millionaire anyone? Only Lamont. (Nearly everyone in the Senate is a millionaire.) What a superb job of spoon-feeding a meme to the ever-willing-to-roll-over media. Well done. Would that the Dems could use propaganda in such a masterful fashion.

In case you’re wondering why this place is so relatively quiet. I arrive in Taipei on Monday at 5.30 a.m. and I’m guessing I won’t be in the mood for serious blogging for at least another couple of days. In the meantime, this post sure got me thinking about our terror threat du jour. Was it in response to Lieberman? I’d need a lot more evidence before saying that. But I’ve seen us go insane so many times now, furiously spinning our wheels in concert over the latest breaking threat, and then it all dissolves shortly afterward – after Gonzales or Ashcroft and Bush milk it dry, re-instilling the fear that keeps many convinced Bush must remain in power. (Hey, what else do they have to run on?) Maybe this time it’s different, and we always have to have our guard up. But I can’t help noticing how the game thus far has always been the same, from the dirty bombers and the Lackawana 9 (?-I forget the number) to that awful plot to bomb NYC’s tunnels – all a lot of hot air fueled by hysteria that can be sourced directly to Dick Cheney and the Gang. And the timing is always extraordinary. Meanwhile, I’ll have to leave the toothpaste in the checked baggage this trip, a reminder of how our Homeland Security titans are keeping all of us safe.

Every time I hear the latest fear-inducing hype, my mind keeps going back to that report, Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US, and how Bush went on vacation. The one time we had advance notice of a threat that we really could have prevented, and the president made a snide remark and ignored it.

Okay, now back to my own vacation. There’s a lot of brush I’ve gotta clear.

Update: Oy. Here we go, with accusations the French-like Democrats want to run away while the masculine Republicans will keep us all safe:

US President George W. Bush seized on a foiled London airline bomb plot to hammer unnamed critics he accused of having all but forgotten the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections.

The London conspiracy is “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,” the president said on a day trip to Wisconsin.

“It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America,” he said. “We’ve taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we still aren’t completely safe.”

His remarks came a day after the White House orchestrated an exceptionally aggressive campaign to tar opposition Democrats as weak on terrorism, knowing what Democrats didn’t: News of the plot could soon break.

Vice President Dick Cheney and White House spokesman Tony Snow had argued that Democrats wanted to raise what Snow called “a white flag in the war on terror,” citing as evidence the defeat of a three-term Democratic senator who backed the Iraq war in his effort to win renomination.

Yes, we know how things will be in the months ahead. The Wurlitzer has kicked into motion, and the decibel level will be eardrum-splitting as the Bushies stick to their winning formula and the only hope they have: smear the Democrats as weak, cheese-eating hippies who hate America and want to see us give in to terrorism. Only Dick Cheney can save us, just as he did in Iraq, where “the insurgency is in its last throes.”

Final update: For all the dry wit, I really do hate the bastards.

Funny

Via Lisa’s blog.

I used to admire and respect Joe Lieberman, but I no longer can. I gave up on him as I watched the televised Abu Ghraib hearings two years ago and saw him bend over backwards to write off the abuse and torture at American hands as no big deal. Well, it was a big deal. And those who complain that the Iraq War is “the only reason” Lieberman’s party abandonded him today had better understand that the Iraq War is the defining event of our times, right up there with September 11, only far more awful in terms of lives lost and long-term costs for our nation.

I’ve never seen anything quite like the beating “liberal bloggers” took this week from voices in the mainstream media for attacking Lieberman. I’m sorry, but Lieberman let us down and cozied up to the worst president ever. This was his choice. I had no patience for some of the sillier expressions of our disgust with Lieberman – the blackface, the unflattering PhotoShopping, the merciless taunting, the unnecessarily vulgar comments on some of the liberal blogs (though God knows these pale beside what LGF commenters wrote about John Kerry in 2004). But if ever there was a reason or a time to lose one’s temper and blast a politician, this was it. Staying the course in Iraq equals death. This is now a mainstream position. Lieberman was not a centrist on this issue, he was right alongside the worst of the neo-cons. Just look at those who are most indignant at the way poor Joe is being treated – Michelle and Charles and Captain Ed. Not to mention Bill O’Reilly. This should tell us something, when the most die-hard warmongers embrace Joe and decry the way he’s being treated. You needn’t be a genius to know something is amiss.

In all of their arguments, the pro-war side commits the same sin as Lieberman: they equate the war with Iraq with America’s national security. To be against Lieberman is to be for a weak and effette America. You can only prove your commitment to a strong and safe America if you endorse Bush’s reckless and tragic war. This is so maddening, such a shameless contortion of basic logic one barely knows what to say. And when we see intelligent, socially liberal men like Marshall Whitman make this argument (for which I recently removed him from my blogroll) I can only wonder how Bush pulled it off, how, in the wake of 911, he managed to convince normally reasonable people that invading iraq was essential to our national security. At a time when we needed to focus all our might on the true enemy, Bin Laden and his cohorts.

I expect the chattering keyboarders on the right to go wild over the coming days, arguing that today’s primary in Connecticut shows the Democrats are the cut and run party, a party of traitors – all because we stand with the majority of the American people in recognizing this war is malignant, a catastrophe in every conceivable way and far more detrimental in the long term than Vietnam ever was. We all have to brace ourselves for the new wave of Rovian allegations of effeminacy, of weakness, of snail-eating Democrats selling out their country and leaving it helpless and vulnerable. (Being home this week and seeing how the primary is being covered on Fox News, I can state as a fact that this new meme is already in full swing, and it’s just getting started).

And now Joe says he plans to run as an independent, as though he hasn’t caused enough misery for his party as it is. A shame, that someone who could have been remembered as a great Democrat, a proponent of liberal causes like civil rights and a clean environment, decided to hitch his star to the ill-conceived and hideously executed war in Iraq. I don’t rejoice in his defeat. In a way, I feel for him – it seems he scarcely knew what hit him. Yet I am thrilled that Lamont won because it is a sign that sanity is setting in, and that the great moment I have been waiting for for six years may finally be at hand, when Americans recognize Bush for the calamity he is. I firmly believe that despite the crescendo from the raging right, Americans are smart enough to finally see through the lies, the bullshit, the soundbites. Once-rousing phrases (“As Iraq stands up, we shall stand down”) now ring hollow, and we are seeing the Bush administratrion for what it is: an empty, thoughtless, pathetic pseudo-government more fixated on photo-ops than the welfare of its citizens. And we have Iraq, a 21st century Titanic going down before our very eyes, slowly, painfully, pulling down the American way of life with it, as proof positive. Although there is no way at this point to rescue the sinking ship, tonight’s primary is still the first glimmer of light to be seen at the end of a very dark and very long tunnel. So for a moment, let’s place aside the agony of our unwinnable war and think about what will follow, a government purged of toxins like the Bush people, a government that is truly accountable for its actions and that doesn’t snarl “Bring ’em on” at the expense of American lives and ideals.

I remember reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in college, and its melodramatic but evocative closing line has always stayed with me. (This is from memory, so if I’m off here and there, please be forgiving).

Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, could it not be that Love one day shall mount?”

I want to believe tonight that Love is mounting, and that the cheap props that have held up the desperate and vacuous Bush government are about to collapse and crumble under their own weight. The victory today of Ned Lamont is an important first step, and we must now prepare for the wave of propaganda and hatred that will inevitably follow. For the first time in years, I feel we can overcome this wall of hatred, and that the qualities that made America, for all its faults, such a great and wonderful nation will prevail and triumph.

In the aftermath of the SARS tragedy we were assued China was about to embark on a new course of Glasnost – openness and transparency. The scandal was unveiled in April of 2003, when we were all treated to the monumental press conference announcing the firing of the Beijing mayor and minister of health. It was the dawn of a new age.

Except for the fact that even then, as China aired its dirtiest linen in public in a scene of unprecedented frankness, there were still health risks that the state took pains to conceal, despite the potential harm such silence might pose to its citizens.

China revealed today that its first human death from bird flu was a soldier who died of the H5N1 strain in 2003, two years before the country first publicly acknowledged a human infection.

The confirmation showed that the virus was present in China before the outbreak of the virus was disclosed elsewhere in Asia and raised questions about Beijing’s ability to detect emerging diseases, as well as its transparency.

China’s Ministry of Health began tests on samples from the People’s Liberation Army private only after Chinese researchers published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine in June saying that a 24-year-old soldier, who was admitted to hospital in November 2003 for respiratory distress and pneumonia and later died, had been infected with H5N1.

The man, identified only by his surname, Shi, was initially thought to have severe acute respiratory syndrome, but recent tests performed with the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed the cause as bird flu.

The UN health agency called on Beijing to re-examine other pneumonia cases of unknown origin to ensure better transparency. But a Health Ministry spokesman said the 2003 case was not evidence of an outbreak then and said the Government had no plans to review other cases.

China publicly announced its first human case of bird flu last November, when the virus was sweeping through Vietnam and Thailand. China has reported 20 infections of humans, of whom 12 have died – not including the 2003 case.

Of course, Beijing is saying there’s nothing to see here, and we all should just move along.

Mao Qun’an, a spokesman for the Health Ministry, said there was no need for alarm. ‘People shouldn’t panic. The country’s bird flu surveillance capability is much stronger now than it was two years ago.’

Just one simple question: Why should I believe him? Why should I believe anything he says?

Via the great CDT.

Buffett and Hezbollah
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: August 9, 2006

Warren Buffett. The most important thing you need to know about Israel today and how it has performed so far in the war with Hezbollah is Warren Buffett.

Say what? Well, the most talked-about story in Israel, before Hezbollah started this war, was the fact that on May 5, Mr. Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman and the world’s most successful investor, bought an 80 percent stake in the privately held Israeli precision tools company, Iscar Metalworking, for $4 billion – Mr. Buffett’s first purchase of a company outside America. According to BusinessWeek, as a result of the deal, Iscar’s owners were ‘likely to pay about $1 billion in capital gains taxes into the Israeli government’s coffers – an unexpected windfall. With the Israeli budget already running a $2 billion surplus, the government is considering slashing value-added tax by one percentage point to 15 percent.’

(more…)