Tag: japan

Nuclear Myths Continue To Fuel Neocon Fantasies

In a recent televised rant on the Fox News Channel, the neoconservative publicist Mark Levin made the eye-opening claim that the current US-Israeli War on Iran is “every bit as important as World War Two.” Still more, according to Levin, the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon (for which there is approximately zero evidence), requires us, as good citizens to rally around the President and the military. Not surprisingly, Levin also noted that President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan saved “a million men” by forestalling a US invasion of the Japanese Home Islands (the inference being: Trump should do likewise). Truman’s decision to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs remains a topic (among a number of others) with which we Americans largely deal in the counterfeit currency of myths.

Despite the conclusions of the US Bombing Survey, that “certainly prior to December 1, 1945, and in all probability prior to November 1, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” few myths are as entrenched in the psyche of America’a media and political elites as the claim that Truman’s decision (invariably valorized as “brave”) to incinerate a quarter of a million civilians – mainly women, children, and elderly – in Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war in the Pacific.

The claim that Truman’s decision saved countless American lives has grown to proportions that would have surprised, if not shocked, Truman’s own military high command. President George H.W. Bush, himself a veteran of the Pacific campaign, claimed that the atomic bombs saved the lives of half-a-million US servicemen.

The record, however, rebuts the myth.

Truman’s military advisers disagreed with Truman. Five-star Navy Admiral William Leahy, who served as Roosevelt and Truman’s chief of staff, felt that the bombs were “of no material assistance in our war against Japan.” The Japanese, said Leahy, “were already defeated and ready to surrender.” Leahy believed Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons had “adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Likewise, Admiral William F. Halsey, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, noted that, “the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers throughout Russia long before” Truman decided to drop the bombs. Two weeks after the nuclear attacks, General Curtis LeMay publicly criticized the decision, saying, “The war would have been over in two weeks. . . . The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

The myth that the bombs “saved” a million US servicemen who would have otherwise perished in the invasion of the Home Islands came from the pen and imagination of the man who would become among the most infamous strategists and apologists for the War in Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy.

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YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Claims Stealing a Wallet in Japan Makes You ‘Locally Owe Allegiance’ in Bizarre Birthright Citizenship Argument

Far-Left Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson left many Americans scratching their heads after offering a bizarre analogy involving… stealing a wallet in Japan.

During oral arguments in the landmark case tied to President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, Jackson attempted to redefine the concept of “allegiance” under the 14th Amendment, using a hypothetical crime committed abroad.

The exchange occurred during a discussion on the 14th Amendment and the definition of being “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States

In the warped world of the radical left, being subject to criminal prosecution is now the same thing as the “allegiance” required for birthright citizenship.

Jackson laid out a convoluted hypothetical involving a trip to Japan.

Her argument? If she steals a wallet in Tokyo and gets arrested, she is suddenly “owing allegiance” to the Japanese sovereign.

“If I steal someone’s wallet in Japan, the Japanese authorities can arrest me and prosecute me. It’s allegiance, meaning can they control you as a matter of law?” Jackson posited. “So there’s this relationship based on even though I’m a temporary traveler… I’m still locally owing allegiance in that sense.”

If the mere ability of a state to prosecute a crime constitutes “allegiance,” then the word has lost all meaning. Allegiance is a bond of loyalty to a nation; it is the commitment to defend its laws and its borders. It is not, as Jackson suggests, a “relationship” formed when a pickpocket gets caught in a Tokyo subway or here in America.

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Philippines Path to ASEAN’s Ukraine?

Last week, the Pentagon disclosed that the US-led military manufacturing partnership (PIPIR) is assessing funding for a major new ammunition assembly and production line in the Philippines.

Under its ultra-conservative PM Sanae Takaichi, Japan is taking the lead to set up a new program to produce propulsion systems used in many guided weapons, while the Philippines is tasked to host ⁠a large new weapons facility. The bilateral cooperation has intensified for half a decade.

Meanwhile, defense secretary Gilberto Teodoro has been negotiating stronger defense cooperation with the NATO leaders in Europe.

Following these reports, China’s foreign ministry warned the United States against bringing “conflict and the chaos of war” to the Asia-Pacific. In Beijing’s view, a potential ammunition facility would destabilize the region.

Toward major instability

The new military tasks of the Philippines were recently promoted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). This US thinktank played a role in legitimizing Biden administration’s engagement in Ukraine, Israel’s Gaza “war”, and Iran mobilization.

From an international military standpoint, the Philippines is transforming itself to serve as a forward staging area for US forces, air and naval logistics hub, missile deployment sites, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), sea lane control in South China Sea, and protection of Japanese/US military supply routes.

In some ASEAN countries, the concern is that these strategic moves could pave the way to major instability and possibly a major Asian war.

The following commentary draws only from public sources and discourses on EDCA locations, logistics plans, ammo sites, and targeting doctrines seen in Ukraine, Middle East, and NATO war-gaming.

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What happens when you clone a mouse for 58 generations?

In 2005, a husband-and-wife team at Japan’s RIKEN institute ran an experiment with a mouse: clone it, then clone the clone, then clone that clone, and keep going. Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama and Dr. Sayaka Wakayama kept it up for 20 years — through lab moves, a 2011 earthquake, and the pandemic — requiring 30,947 individual cloning attempts to produce 58 successive generations, as summarized by Metacelsus.

Things went smoothly for a while. An interim report in 2013 showed 25 healthy generations with no decline in cloning efficiency or mouse health. But mutations were quietly accumulating. By generation 57, the mice carried over 3,400 single-base DNA changes compared to the original — a mutation rate 3.1 times higher than natural reproduction in the same mouse strain. Sexually reproducing animals can shake off harmful mutations through recombination, where chromosomes shuffle and bad copies get discarded. Clones have no such mechanism, so every error sticks.

The bigger problems were structural. Somewhere between generations 25 and 45, an entire X chromosome vanished and never came back. Chromosomal deletions, inversions, and translocations piled up alongside the point mutations. By generation 58, the cells simply wouldn’t produce viable clones anymore, and the project ended. The mice that were born at every stage lived normal lifespans — the process didn’t produce sickly animals, just increasingly fragile DNA that eventually couldn’t survive the cloning procedure itself.

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United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and Canada Will Now Join US to Keep the Strait of Hormuz Open

The leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and Canada have now signaled they will join the United States in a coalition to secure and keep open the critical Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil chokepoint the bloodthirsty Iranian regime has turned into a terrorist kill zone.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, the radical Islamic mullahs in Tehran launched a desperate campaign of economic terrorism after U.S. and Israeli strikes hammered their nuclear sites and terror infrastructure.

Iran mined the strait, attacked unarmed commercial vessels, targeted oil facilities, and effectively closed the waterway that carries nearly 20-25% of the world’s oil supply.

President Trump refused to let America shoulder the entire burden alone. He blasted the freeloading “allies,” took to Truth Social, and demanded that nations dependent on Middle Eastern oil step up and send warships.

“Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated,” Trump said.

He even threatened to “finish off” Iran and let NATO and Asia handle the mess if they wouldn’t get in gear. As we reported, the initial responses from Europe were weak and uninspiring, classic globalist foot-dragging.

Now, with Iran’s attacks growing more brazen and the Strait’s security directly tied to global oil flows, those same allies are signaling that they are prepared to stand with the United States.

That does not yet mean all seven countries have announced warship deployments.

The joint statement so far supports that they have formally backed efforts to keep passage open and are ready to contribute, while some governments are still working through what their exact role will be.

Britain, for example, has been publicly discussing possible deployments, including ships and mine-countermeasure assets, but final national commitments appear to remain in motion.

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Researchers Identify Chinese Influence Network That Targeted Trump, Japan Elections

Researchers have uncovered a network of more than 330 social media accounts linked to China that targeted U.S. President Donald Trump, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, human rights organizations, and other countries to push pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives, according to a Feb. 26 policy brief.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think tank based in Washington, discovered the network coordinating to push these narratives between December 2025 and February 2026 across X, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, and Quora.

The researchers identified six “clusters” of accounts that focused on different narratives, which were aimed at attacking political figures seen as acting against the CCP’s interests.

The largest nexus included 151 accounts that targeted audiences in the United States, including ones posing as American citizens and criticizing Trump’s policies, such as claiming that he had caused or worsened the fentanyl crisis. Notably, accounts with few or no followers made posts that generated thousands of replies, indicating the use of what researchers say is an “inauthentic amplification network.”

“This tactic is used to manipulate platform algorithms into pushing content into the feeds of real users,” the brief reads.

Another cluster attacked Takaichi before the Japanese election, portraying her as “corrupt and militaristic.”

A separate cluster of activity targeted Uyghur activists and promoted anti-Uyghur sentiments among Canadian and Japanese users. The CCP has persecuted the Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region for years, conducting mass surveillance and forcing them into slave labor. There is also emerging evidence of forced organ harvesting from the group. The United States has designated the Uyghur persecution as a genocide.

A fourth narrative accused U.S. organizations of “collusion” with Taiwan and payouts to undermine China while denying the CCP’s human rights abuses.

A fifth cluster accused the United States of interfering with Honduran elections, and a sixth amplified criticism of and supported protests against the Philippine president.

In some cases, the inauthentic accounts adopted names and images similar to those of official organizations, such as U.S. agencies.

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US secretly planning five-nation club including Russia to sideline G7 – media

The US is secretly planning to create a five-nation power bloc with Russia, China, India and Japan to sideline the Western-dominated G7, several media outlets have reported.

The idea was reportedly outlined in a longer unpublished draft of the US National Security Strategy released by the administration of President Donald Trump last week. According to the Defense One news portal, that version circulated before the White House published the unclassified document and reportedly proposed a new group, dubbed the ‘Core 5’, as a forum for dialogue among major powers outside the G7 framework.

Under the reported plan, the five-nation format would hold regular summits, similar to the G7, each focused on a specific theme, with Middle East security – and the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia in particular – said to be first on the agenda.

The unpublished version reportedly lays out plans to downgrade Washington’s role in Europe’s defense, push NATO toward a tougher “burden-sharing” model and focus instead on bilateral ties with EU governments seen as closer to the US outlook, such as Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland.

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Tokyo Court Ruling Against Cloudflare Sets “Dangerous Precedent” for Internet Infrastructure Liability

Cloudflare has been ordered by a Tokyo District Court to pay 500 million yen, about 3.2 million US dollars, after judges ruled the company liable for aiding copyright infringement.

The decision, as reported by TorrentFreak, brought by a coalition of Japan’s largest manga publishers, challenges the long-held understanding that network infrastructure providers are not responsible for what passes through their systems.

It also signals a growing international push to make companies like Cloudflare police online content, an approach that could redefine how the open internet operates.

The publishers, Shueisha, Kodansha, Kadokawa, and Shogakukan, argued that Cloudflare’s global network, which caches and accelerates websites, helped pirate manga sites distribute illegal copies of their work. They said Cloudflare’s failure to verify customer identities allowed those sites to hide “under circumstances where strong anonymity was secured,” a factor the court said contributed to its finding of liability.

Cloudflare said it will appeal, calling the ruling a threat to fairness and due process and warning that it could have broad implications for the future of internet infrastructure. The company argues that its conduct complies with global norms and that it has no direct control over the content its clients publish or distribute.

The legal fight between Cloudflare and Japan’s major publishers began in 2018. The publishers asked the Tokyo District Court to intervene, claiming Cloudflare’s technology enabled piracy sites to thrive. They wanted the company to sever ties with the offending domains.

In 2019, a partial settlement was reached. The deal, later disclosed, required Cloudflare to stop replicating content from sites only after Japanese courts officially declared them illegal.

That agreement quieted the conflict for a time, but it did not resolve the larger question of whether a network service should be required to decide which content is lawful.

By early 2022, the same publishers returned to court, alleging that Cloudflare had failed to take “necessary measures” against known infringing sites.

They filed a new claim targeting four specific works and sought around four million dollars in damages. They also asked for an order that would compel Cloudflare to terminate service for illegal sites.

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Japanese Riot Police Authorized To Use Rifles To Cull Out-of-Control Bear Populations After Record Number of Attacks on Humans

It’s open season on dangerous bears.

We have reported on how Japan was forced to mobilize police and military forces to tackle dangerous bear populations that caused over 70 attacks on human beings in the last month.

Initially, all reports were mentioning the work to ‘capture’ the beasts – but yesterday (5), the National Police Agency announced that they’ve ‘revised the rules’ to allow riot officers ‘to cull wild bears with rifles’.

The Japan Times reported:

“The police are set to cull bears in Akita and Iwate prefectures, which have seen an increase in attacks on residents, with operations scheduled to begin on Nov. 13 when the revisions take effect.

The NPA will dispatch riot police officers to the two prefectures on Thursday to begin training.

Police have previously focused on ensuring the safety of residents and providing information about bear sightings. Due to a shortage of hunters, however, the NPA decided to take part in direct culling after receiving requests for support from the two prefectures.”

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Hemp Shows Strong Antiviral Activity Against Japanese Encephalitis Virus

The research, published by Arch Virol and conducted by scientists from Chung-Ang University, The Catholic University of Korea, Kyungpook National University and Gyeongkuk National University, analyzed whether extracts from hemp roots and stems could limit viral activity in cell models.

The team prepared ethanol extracts and organic solvent fractions from hemp material, first identifying non-toxic concentration ranges through standard cytotoxicity assays. Several of these fractions showed strong virucidal effects, but the hexane and chloroform fractions stood out for producing the most pronounced suppression of viral activity.

When these highly active fractions were applied after cells had already been infected, researchers observed a sharp reduction in viral replication. Both JEV mRNA and the viral E protein dropped substantially, indicating that the post-treatment approach directly interfered with the virus’s ability to grow. By contrast, applying the fractions before viral exposure—or at the same time as exposure—did not offer meaningful protection, suggesting the compounds work most effectively once infection is underway.

Further chemical analysis identified several known hemp-derived molecules within the active fractions, and one compound in particular, stigmasterol, emerged as a key antiviral candidate. In follow-up tests, stigmasterol demonstrated both virucidal action and direct antiviral activity. It disrupted viral entry during infection and suppressed viral growth afterward, again reducing JEV mRNA and E protein expression to significant levels.

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