Limericks (WARNING: Potentially offensive to women)

[John Marchioro]

OK. Some netizens are predictably using the Trump-Kim summit as a
chance to show off their wit and charm:

https://twitter.com/limericking/status/1006672450187333633?s=12

I thought this was pretty lame.... So I dashed this one off in response:

There once was a man from Pyongyang
Who awoke when one day the phone rang
A voice said, “It’s me Trump!
I have a proposal, you hump!
Lets get together and play with our wangs!”

But it was not that great.... So I gave it some more thought, and came
up with this one. More scurrilous, more offensive, but more amusing I
think. I apologize in advance for any offense given, none intended, it
is all in good fun:


There once was a man from Pyongyang
Who was wont to give fearsome harangues
So Trump sent him a whore
And now he fulminates no more
A global crisis resolved by poontang!



Sorry. I do not know what came over me.


JM

[John Marchioro]

Another one:

There once was an entrepreneur
Who as president world peace did secure
He said “OK, you wise guys,
Now where’s my Nobel Prize?”
But his ejaculation seems premature.


Sorry, I cannot help myself.....

[John Marchioro]

What? No comment? Are you afraid that you might encourage me or something?

I know. You are just in awe of my poetic genius and sublime wit..... Sigh.

It is hard being so gifted at times.... Double sigh.

So few connoisseurs, so many Philistines.... Triple sigh.


JM

[David J. Littleboy]

>From: John Marchioro

>
>What? No comment? Are you afraid that you might encourage me or something?

Nah. Keep them coming. We need something to distract us from reality.

I had been wondering just how Trump would throw South Korea under the bus,
and now we know.

Now I'm wondering how long it'll take the Japanese to realize that no matter
how much money they give the US (currently 75% of the cost of US forces in
Japan), Trump'll call them moochers, and they might as well ignore the
constitution, stop paying the US a red cent, and build their own nuclear
equipped military. It'd certainly make Abe and his friends happy.

It's a brave new world.

>It is hard being so gifted at times.... Double sigh.

Like I said, distractions from reality are appreciated. Keep 'em coming.

--
David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

[John Marchioro]

Well.... SK opinion is divided. There are a lot of SKs who would like
the US to pack and leave.... There always have been. There are a lot
of SKs who would like the current deal with a much lower level of
tension between SoKo and NoKo. That is the likely outcome here.

The Korean peninsula is the place where the US staked out a piece of
the US version of the Greater East Copropsperity Sphere, at the cost
of 50,000 US lives and several million Korean lives, about 65 years
back. I doubt that this is going to be dismantled yet.... Though of
course both NoKo and China would love to see the US pack up and leave
SoKo, and then even better to push the US military back to Hawaii....
But that won't happen as a result of NoKo's nukes program and however
this whole negotiation turns out, nope.

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[Matthew Schlecht]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 10:49 AM, David J. Littleboy <dav...@gol.com> wrote:

I had been wondering just how Trump would throw South Korea under the bus, and now we know.

     Yeah, their problem is probably that the Trump organization has found South Korea's real estate network to be closed and uninviting, while Trump is already drooling over North Korea's coastlines as ripe for commercial development into condos and hotels.  He'll turn this Presidency thing into a business opportunity yet!

     Well, we had the child evangelist from the show Mary Hartmann Mary Hartmann, Jimmy Joe Jeeter, who wanted to build "Condos for Christ".

     Now we'll have "Condos for Communism".

 

Now I'm wondering how long it'll take the Japanese to realize that no matter how much money they give the US (currently 75% of the cost of US forces in Japan), Trump'll call them moochers, and they might as well ignore the constitution, stop paying the US a red cent, and build their own nuclear equipped military. It'd certainly make Abe and his friends happy.

     As some of the recent rumblings would indicate, I'm sure the preparatory discussions are already taking place.

     I thought ignoring the Constitution was strictly an American thing ;-)

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy Translation
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 11:16 AM, John Marchioro <jkmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well.... SK opinion is divided. There are a lot of SKs who would like
the US to pack and leave.... There always have been. There are a lot
of SKs who would like the current deal with a much lower level of
tension between SoKo and NoKo. That is the likely outcome here.

     As my better half explains, South Koreans have been on this roller coaster before, and find it hard to get excited until substantial, tangible progress is achieved.

     SK President Moon, who is seen by many outside Korea as a great statesman, is apparently no less corrupt that the previous President he replaced, and few if any South Koreans view him as a great statesman.  Different dog, same fleas.

     With the reunified Germanys as a model, what will quickly take place along with Korean renormalization is a rush of vulture capitalist development.  If Trump has got his eyes on coastlines, he'll be competing heavily against Russian oligarchs and their Chinese equivalents, to say nothing of the South Koreans themselves.

 

The Korean peninsula is the place where the US staked out a piece of
the US  version of the Greater East Copropsperity Sphere, at the cost
of 50,000 US lives and several million Korean lives, about 65 years
back.

     One viewpoint, perhaps.  The analogy to the Greater East Co-prosperity Sphere doesn't really work from my perspective.  US strategic thinking was still dominated by the domino theory at that time, and continued so until grinding to a halt in Vietnam.

     Aside from post-Korean War reconstruction, I don't think there has been that much economic exploitation/integration.  Like the Japanese, Koreans were a captive market for awhile, but learned quickly so that the flow of electronics and to some extent cars is now rather one-sided.  I guess we sell them beef and export rap and pop - something to be proud of!

     The US military presence in Korean has always (IMO) been about having forward bases in the geopolitical oneupmanship game.

     Recall that MacArthur wasn't content to move the DMZ back to where it had been.  He wanted more, including adventures in China.

[John Marchioro]

Well..... to be contrarian.

I think the crude Marxist explanation of the Trump phenomenon or
movement or whatever you want to call it is deeply problematic. I
deeply doubt that Trump's or any Trump administration officials' view
of SoKo or NoKo is driven by real estate considerations.

Look. I have been to NoKo. One of the few who have. Four days, very
short, but I read a lot about the place and studied under one of the
Americans who best knows it for many years, Bruce Cumings.

I will say a couple of things:

1. The claim that we know nothing about NoKo is bullshit. No. We know
a lot about it. it is a poor backward lethargic sclerotic Stalinist
system imposed on a NE Asian peasant society about 65 years ago. It
has a deep hatred of the US because of not only the way that the US
thwarted NoKo's efforts to reunify the Korean Peninsula by force, but
also the hellish bombardment that we unleashed upon the country (which
may have included the use of chemical and biological weapons, though
the USG has always denied this... the evidence is fragmentary but
suggestive). As well as the threat to use nuclear weapons, made
repeatedly by the highest level US political and military leadership
of the day, from Truman on down.

Most Americans have forgotten all that long ago, if they ever even
knew it. The North Koreans remember it as if it happened yesterday.

2. The NoKo system actually worked fairly well until around 1970....
In fact there are CIA and other reports bemoaning the corruption and
ineptitude and the rest of SoKo, and contrasting it negatively with
NoKo's fairly positive achievements. That is not me saying this, it
was the CIA and the like. Then SoKo entered into its period of rapid
economic growth, and left NoKo in the dust.... The NoKo system proved
to be as sclerotic and incapable of adaptation as the one in other
Stalinist states. There has been about 40+ years of that at this
point.

3. I mentioned NE Asian peasant society. This is key. And it is not
just NE Asia. There are lots of poor peasant societies all over Asia
and Africa and Latin America. NoKo is no different. The vast majority
of the population is still in villages, scratching a living out from
the soil. Just like their ancestors did 100 or 1,000 or 2,000 years
ago. NoKo did fairly well in agriculture after 1953 primarily because
they had a great deal with the USSR that gave them cheap petrochemical
fertilizers. When that deal ended in the early 1990s, disaster ensued,
a massive famine. The regime was paralyzed, incapable of a
response.... At least 600,000 starved to death, perhaps far more, no
one really knows.

But does anyone seriously believe that NoKo is alone in this? When I
was boarding the plane back to Beijing in September 2008, after my
four days in Pyongyang, I got chatting with another guy on the tarmac.
He was a US agricultural expert who had just spent some time in rural
NoKo as part of an NGO effort. He said that actually NoKo's rural
problems were pretty typical of Asian rural poverty as a whole, that
actually places in Nepal and India and China were as bad or worse
based on his own experience.

4. The one thing the NoKo regime has, the one card it can play, is the
nuclear card. This is because there are uranium deposits in NoKo. No
need to go into this at length here other than to say that this is
NoKo's way of getting attention.... And it has worked, and it has tied
US diplomacy in the region up in knots for many decades now. How it
gets resolved, do not ask me. But I doubt NoKo will ever give up its
program at this point.... Why would they? It is the ultimate guarantee
against external regime change for the first thing. Perhaps a
compromise will be reached where NoKo is allowed 20 or so bombs as a
deterrent, who knows? But they are not going to piss away the only
thing that has gotten them to the bargaining table in the first place.

As I said to a friend of mine over dinner the other day, this whole
standoff is sort of like this. Imagine a town where there are two
families. One family is rich, has a huge arsenal of machine guns and
so on, has total control of the place. And another family is poor, and
feels afraid and isolated and the rest. So that poor family scrimps
and saves, and finally manages to buy one Uzi. So the rich family
says, "OK, let's negotiate. But first you have to give up your Uzi!"

The poor family is not going to give up its Uzi.

There is of course a bigger thing to say here. There were no US forces
on South Korean soil before around August 15, 1945. There were no US
forces on Japanese soil before that time either. One day, like it or
not, those US forces that have been there for those many decades, they
will leave. They will leave because they have overstayed their
welcome, or they will leave because a financial crisis makes it
impossible to keep them there, or they will leave for some other
reason. But anyone who thinks that this is going to continue
indefinitely is living in fantasy land. Not when the US has a $21
trillion national debt and a $600 billion annual trade deficit and a
long list of other problems at home.

My own preference? The US should go back to being a democratic
republic, and stop playing "Empire". And that would mean that it
should stop using the US military as the world's policeman and stop
using the US dollar as the world's currency, and refocus its efforts
on its own citizens, and on making itself a better example for the
rest of the world. that is entirely compatible with being a good world
citizen as well. But there is a dominant class of people in the US
now, the people that Christopher Lasch rightly excoriated in his late
collection of essays "The Revolt of the Elites", who want the empire
to continue, who like the cheap goods and the cheap labor and the
rest, and whose response when people talk about the trade deficits and
the national debt and the like is "Apres moi le deluge".

Well, that is not terribly responsible now, is it? To bury your head
in the sand in the face of a $21 trillion national debt, massive trade
deficits, declining infrastructure, immense unfunded liabilities, most
of which will never be paid..... Not responsible at all. But look for
an honest discussion of any of that in the so-called objective media
and you will be disappointed. now the trade issue is getting a lot of
attention, but as someone who has followed this for decades I cannot
help but notice that the figures for bilateral deficits are NEVER
mentioned, nor are the figures for annual US deficits, nor is anything
said about what makes these deficits possible in the short to medium
run and what the longer term costs are..... It is a taboo, it cannot
be mentioned. And it is not because people do not know what the costs
and consequences are, it is because there is that elite stratum that
is benefitting from the current disposition, and they do not want the
longer term costs of this folly to be discussed and debated.

Nope. Apres moi, le deluge.

But Trump is a fascist and a xenophobe and the like, because he says
the US should have balanced trade and so on. Sure.

Well, it will all come crashing down soon enough. The time to avert
such a crisis, that would have been 2009, when BHO could have done
something to reassert central government control over Wall Street and
defuse the debt and unfunded liabilities bombs... And instead he did
the opposite, he tacked on massive new debt and instituted tepid Wall
Street reforms, did not reduce the size of the US military and
security apparatus, and on and on. Just kicked the can down the road
in a dozen ways. And Trump is no better, he has no clue about the
severity of the current problems and apparently thinks that the US can
grow itself out of them with a 4% per annum growth rate. Sorry, no,
and the likely outcome will be inflation, increased interest rates and
a crippling recession that will lead to the dominoes falling one after
another (which domino will fall first is an interesting question....
it could be student loan debt, could be something else).

When that day comes, the USG won't be worried about NoKo. It will be
worried about the things it should have been worried about for the
past 40 years, first and foremost its own citizens.

[John Marchioro]

Recall that MacArthur was fired by Truman when his fantasies ran into
1,000,000 Chinese "volunteers" at the Yalu.

Politely, I think you should read more about this topic. The US had a
military conception for East and Southeast Asia after WWII, but it was
fused with ideas about how to create viable national economies, and an
integrated regional economy, and also a conception of how that
regional economy would fit into a global economy. Things did not work
out according to the plan (Japan and then SK and Taiwan proved to be
far more dynamic than anyone in Washington DC or NYC or Cambridge MA
had thought even as late as 1965), but the basic point I would advance
is that to the extent that the USG formulated a Grand Strategy for
East and Southeast Asia, it was not simply a military strategy, it was
a strategy where the political, economic and military components were
integrated very closely with one another. It worked in Japan, SK and
Taiwan (the left was crushed, the capitalists, including some pretty
odious characters with unsavory pasts, rule). It failed in Vietnam,
for complicated reasons. But the idea that military and economic
conceptions of regional order are two separate things and one has to
choose between them.... Nope. Just look at postwar Europe. Same deal.
The Marshall Plan and the like, it was a combined security and
economic deal, all integrated into one package, and sure, it had its
bumpy road many times, but the original conception was an integrated
one. That is what Grand Strategy is all about.

On 6/14/18, Matthew Schlecht <matthew.f...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Roland Hechtenberg]

On 14-Jun-18 11:49 PM, David J. Littleboy wrote:

> I had been wondering just how Trump would throw South Korea under
> the bus, and now we know.

Today's New York Times showed the "real" reason why Trump wants
peace between North and South Korea.
Then they will no longer need the fortified border between them
and Trump can snap it up and install it at the border to Mexico.

Have fun (in spite of Trump),

Roland
--
Roland Hechtenberg
Technical translator
Japanese > English <> German
rol...@ictv.ne.jp

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[Roland Hechtenberg]

On 15-Jun-18 7:11 AM, John Marchioro wrote:

> the hellish bombardment that we unleashed upon the country (which
> may have included the use of chemical and biological weapons, though
> the USG has always denied this... the evidence is fragmentary but
> suggestive).

What is "fragmentary" about the effects of Agent Orange?

Records from Agent Orange lawsuits indicate that both the
military and the chemical companies involved were well aware,
early on, of the dangers of dioxin, so much so that our
government terminated the program three years before the war’s end.

The government even is paying (at least some) veterans.

Have fun (if possible),

[John Marchioro]

There is a thought.... We can demilitarize NoKo by creating a jobs
program for their ex-soldiers in the US Border Patrol. Brilliant.

[John Marchioro]

You are talking about Vietnam, Roland. I am talking about the Korean
War. You are correct about Agent Orange. In the former US Embassy in
Saigon, now a revolutionary war victory museum, you can see a room
with deformed stillborn fetuses, the unambiguous result of Agent
Orange. It is one of the most unsettling things I have ever seen, and
I say that as someone who has visited Auschwitz and a number of
similar places.

Both the North Korean and Chinese governments have over the years
charged that biological weapons were used against North Korean and
Chinese forces during the Korean War. The US has denied this. The
evidence is fragmentary, but..... Well, we did everything in that war
but use nuclear weapons, so I tend to think such weapons were also
likely used.

This is one of the many ugly chapters of the Korean War that has not
been subject to the kind of scholarly and journalistic scrutiny that
it should have been. As for USG honesty, forget it, this is one of
those things the USG will never openly acknowledge having done. This
is like the Tuskegee experiments, it is not something that you are
going to be hearing an honest discussion of from the USG, not for a
long time to come anyway.

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

On 6/14/18, Roland Hechtenberg <rol...@ictv.ne.jp> wrote:

[Roland Hechtenberg]

On 15-Jun-18 5:17 PM, John Marchioro wrote:

> You are talking about Vietnam, Roland. I am talking about the
Korean
> War.

Sorry, my bad, but you are right that it stinks, just like My
Lai, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc.

In Germany, they are still dragging people into court for obeying
orders, who did not commit atrocities, and who probably would
have been shot for not obeying.

Have fun (in spite of all that),

Roland--

[John Marchioro]

I think the sad part is that a lot is known about Agent Orange (and
even sadder that the US has not done more to compensate for its
horrors)..... But very little is known about this stuff in the Korean
War. Another thing is that napalm was first used in the Korean War...
Almost no one knows it though. There are heartbreaking stories of its
use against civilians. It is hard for me even to talk about the things
I have read about it. But it is one more thing that people know about
Vietnam, but somehow it never is discussed in connection with the
Korean War.

I probably have told this story before, but my brother, who was a JAG
in the Marine Corps, was stationed at Yokosuka when I arrived in Tokyo
on September 2, 1990 (oddly enough, the day on which Edwin Reischauer
died, or at least the day on which his obit was in the paper... I
remember reading the obit in the International Herald Tribune on the
flight from Seoul to Tokyo). I stayed with him for a while after
reaching Tokyo, and one evening we had dinner and went over to his
office and he showed me a big bookshelf full of precedents, cases
adjudicated by military law. For some reason or other, the only cases
compiled in those volumes were cases appealed (that is, if a grunt was
found guilty of some heinous crime and sentenced and did his time,
without any appeal, that sort of the case, the majority of cases of
course, was not in these volumes). My brother randomly picked up one
of these huge books and randomly turned to a particular case. I
remember it vividly. Two US servicemen were fleeing southward in the
spring of 1951 as part of the massive US retreat after the Chinese PLA
entered the conflict. They were by themselves. They passed through a
small abandoned village. They found a 56 year old Korean grandmother
in one hutch,. They raped and murdered her.

I am not sure what the basis for an appeal was, I was so sick
listening to it. What I do remember was the sentence. Six years in
military prison.

Multiply that by about 10,000 times, and you get an idea of what
happened in both Korea and Vietnam, and what happened before that in
the Philippines. By comparison, US forces were relatively well behaved
in Afghanistan and Iraq, hard to believe but true. Korea was one of
the ugliest conflicts ever.... And I have read more about it all than
I care to relate her. Not as bad as what the Axis powers did in WWII,
no, but it was a horrible bloodbath with countless atrocities against
Korean civilians. It just amazes me how there is still no proper
accounting for it all today.... But the same applies to SE Asia, which
the US also pulverized in a similar fashion.

If the US wants to be a good world citizen, this is where it could
start. Be honest about the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and do more to
help rebuild NoKo and Vietnam, and Cambodia and Laos as well.



JM