Mama T

I just found this great video Christopher Hitchens did about Mother Theresa. Fabulous stuff.



It's amazing how this chick was praised by just about every person who had ever heard about her, when all she did was herd a bunch of dying homeless people into some dumpy old ruin full of cots and proselytized to them until they kicked the bucket. I'll bet most people thought she actually did something to help the sick and dying like providing them with medical treatment, when in fact she did no such thing. Given the millions of dollars she was given by charities and wealthy individuals, she could have filled at least one of those nasty old shacks she "worked" at in the slums of Calcutta with doctors, but did she? No. She used the money to build convents.

Obama's Speech

It seemed to me (although others dispute this) that Obama made it pretty clear that he was still going for a public option. Which I think is good news. The only thing that did sound kind of scary is the part about health coverage being mandatory like car insurance. Now, this makes sense if there is a public option. It means more people paying into that program. Without a public option, that could mean trouble.

About the guy who shouted "liar" during the part when Obama said the program would not cover illegals, well, officially it will not cover illegals, so calling Obama a liar is pretty stupid. The trouble is that when applying for the program, some would like more rigorous steps to be taken to identify the immigration status of the applicant. Now, I don't know how easy it would be for an illegal immigrant to sneak through the application process, as it is currently formulated, but I doubt it's just that simple to sign up without showing some kind of citizenship or landed immigrant status. Even if it were that easy, how hard could this possibly be to fix?

Japanese Election

The Japanese have elected a new party to power for the first time in about 50 years and it looks like the most striking difference is their foreign policy. The New York Times says that the party sees a "need to reorient Japan toward Asia" and that they may even come to terms with Japanese history. A significant obstacle to closer relations with China is Japan's long-standing refusal to make any satisfactory apologies for war crimes committed during their occupation of mainland Asia during WWII. This new party "seeks to reverse Japan’s growing isolation in the region under decades of right-wing Liberal Democratic rule."

Another trend that has stood since the end of the war is Japan's near total reliance on the US for its security. At first this was because the Japanese constitution forbids them to have a military, but after a while the US realized that in order for Japan to be an effective ally, they needed to have some kind of defense forces at least, so that's all they've had (although they were deployed in the Iraq War for a time, pushing the concept of self-defense). This is supposedly a more left wing party, so it's hard to imagine that they would expand their military in order to be more self-reliant, so that may mean they have to get closer to China. The obvious advantage to this is there may be a significant thaw in Sino-Japanese relations. On the downside, this may come at price of further marginalization of Taiwan.