Moonraker comments

My understanding is the Wehrmacht didn't take kindly to idiots and cowards like Hitler even back then.

But, nonetheless, they went along. Perhaps you create a parallel organisation out of militias (brown shirts and SS) and either bully military figures into compliance, fire them or find sympathisers (of which there may be quite a lot in the US military; an ugly fact this article fails to develop.).

He has expressed a desire for military officers to be obedient to him and not the Constitution

This alone should bar him from office since his oath is to uphold the constitution, yet he is prepared to gut it with the backing of ignorant people who otherwise laud the constitution. This is how the USA goes down, folks. Let's hope it goes down quietly. But the parallels with 1934 are chilling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Oath

Looks like an appropriation of Kobe Tower. Or maybe it is the other way round.

pure LDP/Yomiuri/Sankei revisionism that unfortunately now gets uncritically repeated even by english-language media

Amazing, isn't it? I am not sure about AFP as foreign media these days. It seems totally embedded now and indistinguishable from Kyodo. No article is complete without "ancient" this or that, "resource-poor country" or "as the only country that suffered from an atomic bombing." I wonder how many of the downvoters are old enough to remember the last opposition government or are they also indoctrinated with this revisionism?

Five centuries later, the aristocrats are gone but leisure is as remote as ever.

They have just been replaced by blood-sucking capital. Most of the benefits of productivity increases have gone to it. In the 1970s we really imagined 5 hour days, or fewer, were our future. Why didn't it happen?

“The love in that room. It was breathtaking,” he said.

He sounds like an old hippie. But there is no love in Trump's world. He is only desperate for validation through self-aggrandisement - money and power - to fill the gaping hole in his self where love should be. And his minions will serve him this validation and nobody will learn anything. With him in power we move further from love.

Does it really, though? I mean to say, the bureaucrats are mostly in charge. Look at the place; it's a micro-managing bureaucrat's dream. Of course, they are also in cahoots with business. But, for the most part, the political sphere has mainly been a tool of both.

That is soooo shabby, petulant and arrogant by Real Madrid. But somehow to be expected.

not a week goes by without demands from residents to cut down trees (because of fear of insects, leaves blowing onto balconies, etc

A new one is apparently that the trees provide roosting places for gray starlings in winter and so too much noise when they gather in the evening and then fly off in the morning.

while memories of the last tumultuous period of opposition rule between 2009 and 2012 still linger, analysts say.

This sounds like revisionism, since promoted by the LDP itself. I don't remember it being any different to a normal LDP rule and it was not that tumultuous for anyone except the LDP, especially when they started questioning the costs of more public works projects, like dams. They actually had the opportunity, but failed to take it, to pin all the blame for problems in Japan on the LDP but when the LDP regained power they had the impudence to blame the problems on this brief interregnum.

Some obviously prefer to align their evidence with what they want to believe. The only question they need to ask themselves really is why they want to believe it.

That's how Witch Hunt works during dark ages

Well, I don't think our veneer of civilisation is really that thick. And Japan is probably closer than many others. Indeed, many agree to prosecution tampering with evidence and forcing confessions - they have showed it repeatedly on here - if it keeps things "safe", so they are not that far from justice by public opinion.

You should see the "highlights" they put together of Premier League football games. One will be a Japanese player coming onto the pitch, especially as a substitute, like it is gonna be game-changing and another will be his best play which might only be one pass. And that will take up a good part of the highlights. And it takes forever for them to put this together.

On the other hand, it is Man Utd. It's all a situation schadenfreude was created for.

Any manager would have to be insane to take the job. It's quite obvious there is a systemic problem at the club that can only make a manager look bad. Could be the blood-sucking owners who can keep on sucking in their darkened room now Ratcliffe has been installed as the lightning rod.

The best thing about Osaka is there are so many ways to get out of it.

I am a bit surprised that the combination of not-quite-straight cop and head-turning horror didn't produce moralising judgementalism when you were older.

Wasn't there someone on here the other day saying he is likely guilty because all the locals believed so?

Ah, the supposed sophistication of the whatabout argument surfaces.

I really want to believe that there is no such thing as global warming and that we can sail on releasing carbon from millions of year of accumulated stores put down millions of years ago with no adverse effect but I just can't. The evidence and the sheer unlikelihood of all that stored carbon, quickly released, not having any effect in seas and atmosphere forces me to challenge what I desperately want to believe.

You posted that a few days ago, socrateos, in response to something I posted then. I am not sure of you interpret it as there is no case to answer on the part of the 'developers' or as evidence that the justice system tends to support authority and capital by default.

I foresee civil war. They are right to fear violence.

Whatever action they do or don't do will have no effect on climate.

How about eradication of all humans? If that wouldn't work then maybe you have a point.

Probably as effective as their equipment. And depending on the battle that would be fought with it. But the days of daring sabre charges and fighting spirit are over.

I have known plenty of men in the west with no interest in Asian women too. They just can't see the attraction. And then there are others who might like Thai women but not Japanese or Chinese. I think it is Anna Sawai who might be doing the stereotyping. It may even be based on her own personal experience but that doesn't mean she should generalise about "overseas people". TBH it is practically racist. Hopefully the quote is taken out of context but, if not, she has diminished in my estimation.

And as others have said, the sexualisation of women is so ubiquitous in Japan that is the water we swim in (though it was worse 30 years ago). That, of course, doesn't make it right, whether of Japanese or any other women, anywhere else.

Oh, my arithmetic is impeccable; it's the very act of tipping I detest, often for bang ordinary service, just pouring a simple beer, or some insincere request about how my day was. Forget it.

Didn't the credit rating agencies (Moodys, Standard and Poor and Fitch) lose all their credibility forever after rating the mortgage-backed securities as AAA, thereby creating the subprime mortgage crisis and thence the crash of 2008? We all paid for their incompetence and yet, here they are. They must have enough benefit to capital to be resurrected, if not to the rest of us.

And of course, Data, there was Tucker Carlson and even the old lizard, Rupert Murdoch, saying he was an idiot but now have changed their tunes again. The conservative consistency of thought depends only on power: who exercises it and how they can get it or keep it.

Not surprising, is it? What with the continual drip, drip, drip of troublesome tourist news.

Paranoia is very often an early consequence of dementia. Of course, it fits in with his narcissism too, meaning that he can never be held responsible for anything he does: at the very least there are crafty enemies within trying to undermine whatever he does. This paranoid assertion inoculates the people's minds to his later failures before he makes them.