The Asia-Pacific region (especially the “South China Sea”) has become a minefield, with disputes escalating…
The military provocations do not stop in the Asia-Pacific region.
As U.S./NATO is pointing its weapons in all directions Russia has begun addressing vulnerabilities and the arms race is renewed with the militarization of space, with the U.S., Russia, France, Japan, China, and India as the major players.
This is the global military industrial complex profiting and expanding.
Be aware, all wars are bankers’ wars. (See Mike Rivero)
Capital moves when there is war or gross fiscal mismanagement, according to seasoned researchers. Follow the money is the mantra for investigators & researchers.
After the 2008 financial crisis we have witnessed massive capital flows and fiscal mismanagement…
The currency wars that are unfolding fits the plans for a economic reset to be finalized with another type of Bretton Woods agreement after a world war… to usher in another century of central bank controlled global economic mismanagement. ~Ron
Indian Satellite Launch Marks Big Success for New Rocket Engine
by Stephen Clark, Spaceflight Now January 14, 2014
See more at: http://www.space.com/24273-india-satellite-launch.html
NATO Is Pushing East And Russia Heeds The Warning
First Russian military spacecraft to be launched in March
CHINA
Despite having two monitoring stations in the country, there are still eight to ten hours a day during which China cannot track its deep space detectors, said Zhou Jianliang, chief engineer of the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, at a press conference.
“It is imperative to build a deep space monitoring station abroad in order to make up for blind measurements and realize round-the-clock monitoring for future deep space missions,” Zhou said.
Read More: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Deep_space_monitoring_station_abroad_imperative_999.html
Japanese defence minister’s Indian visit strengthens military ties
By Deepal Jayasekera 10 January 2014
A four-day visit by Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera to India this week underscored moves by Tokyo to integrate New Delhi into a US-led strategic alliance against China. Amid Japan’s territorial dispute and growing tensions with Beijing, Japan’s government is pushing for closer military ties with India, another country with unresolved border conflicts with China.
Read More: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/10/indi-j10.html
RELATED:
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/let-facts-speak-for-themselves-on-india-china-border
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/10/indi-j10.html
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/japan-wants-indias-support-on-disputes-with-china/article5557718.ece
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Want Worldwide PEACE and Prosperity. We are the solution we have been searching for... Free People on Earth will solve our crisis and create an era of Creativity. Be Aware; Be Creative; Be Active; Be Free; and then Share it. LOVE & Wholeness AMOR y Paz
Ronmamita's Blog 
Reblogged this on Spartan of Truth and commented:
Thanks Ron.
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Sorrowful game of deception by the governments as they marginalize the People on Earth by not revealing the military posturing and alliances for public discussion.
Oh no, they say, this must not be voted on by the public, yet when the officials decide to declare war or launch military campaigns the people on Earth are expected to obey orders to fight and die…
The next war can be prevented, with awareness.
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Echoes of 1914: are today’s conflicts a case of history repeating itself?
Historian Christopher Clark on drawing parallels with 1914
Supporting troops of the 1st Australian Division walking on a duckboard track near Hooge in Ypres. Photograph: Frank Hurley/Getty Images
In the spring of 2011, I was in the middle of writing a chapter about the Italo-Turkish war of 1911, which began when the Kingdom of Italy attacked and invaded the Ottoman territory known today as Libya. This war, now almost totally forgotten, was the first in which aircraft went up in reconnaissance to signal enemy positions to artillery batteries; it was also the first to see aerial bombardments, using bombs thrown from Italian aeroplanes and airships. Scarcely had I begun writing, but there was news once again of air strikes on Libya. Exactly 100 years later, bombs were falling on Libyan towns and the headlines were full of the same names – Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte, Derna, Tobruk, Zawiya, Misrata – as the newspapers of 1911.
The correspondences were uncanny, but what did they mean? The answer is anything but clear. The conflict of 2011 was fundamentally different from its predecessor. The Italo-Turkish war of 1911 triggered the chain of opportunist assaults on Ottoman south-eastern Europe known as the first Balkan war, sweeping away the geopolitical balances that had enabled local conflicts to be contained. It was a milestone (one of many) on the road to a war that would consume first Europe and then much of the world.
There was and is little reason to suppose that the air strikes of 2011 will bring such terrible consequences in their wake. History does not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain remarked, it does occasionally rhyme. What do these rhymes mean? They may merely be symptomatic of a culture obsessed with anniversaries and remembrance. But we should not exclude the possibility that such moments of historical deja vu reveal authentic affinities between two moments in time.
In recent years, the affinities have piled up. It is becoming a truism that the world increasingly resembles the world of 1914. Having left behind the bipolar stability of the cold war, we are struggling to make sense of a system that is increasingly multipolar, opaque and unpredictable. As in 1914, a rising power confronts a weary (though not necessarily declining) hegemon. Crises rage unchecked in strategically sensitive regions of the world – in some of these, like the current standoff over the Senkaku islands in the western Pacific, great power interests are engaged. No one who – from the standpoint of the early 21st century – follows the course of the summer crisis of 1914 can fail to be struck by the contemporary resonances. It began with a squad of suicide bombers and a cavalcade of automobiles. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an organisation with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge; but this organisation was scattered in cells across political borders; it was unaccountable, its links to any sovereign government were oblique, hidden.
Even the furore over WikiLeaks, espionage and Chinese cyber-attacks has its early 20th-century counterparts: French foreign policy was compromised in the previous pre-war years by targeted high-level intelligence leaks; the British worried about Russian espionage in central Asia and in early summer 1914 a spy at the Russian embassy in London kept Berlin apprised of the latest naval talks between Britain and Russia. The most scandalous case of all was that of Colonel Alfred Redl, who rose to head Austrian counter-intelligence but was himself an agent for the Russians and gave them high-quality military intelligence until he was arrested and allowed to kill himself in May 1913.
Is history trying to tell us something, and if so, what?
In summer 2008, after a brief war between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, the Russian ambassador to Nato, Dmitri Rogozin, claimed to discern in the drama unfolding in the Caucasus a replay of the July crisis of 1914. He even expressed the hope that Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president (whom he regarded as the aggressor in the quarrel), would not go down in history as “the new Gavrilo Princip” – a reference to the young Bosnian Serb who assassinated the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife on 28 June 1914. In the aftermath of those killings, Serbia’s conflict with Austria-Hungary had drawn in Russia, transforming a local conflict into a world war. If Georgia succeeded in securing the support of Nato, could the same happen?
These dark omens were never realised. Nato thought better of hitching its wagon to the star of the hot-headed Georgian president. After a limited US naval demonstration in the Black Sea, the crisis died away. Georgia was not early 20th-century Serbia, Nato was not tsarist Russia, and Saakashvili was not Gavrilo Princip. Rogozin’s attempt to bolt the present on to a lop-sided analogy with the past was not an honest attempt at historically grounded prognosis, but a warning to the west to stay out of the conflict. It was both historically imprecise and hermeneutically empty.
Even in better informed and less manipulative hands, historical analogies resist unequivocal interpretation.
Stretcher bearers carry a wounded man to safety near Boesinghe on 1 August 1917 during the third battle of Ypres.
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The problem is only partly that the fit between the past and the present is never perfect or even close. More fundamental is the problem that the meaning of past events is just as elusive – and just as susceptible to debate – as their meaning in the present. Take the case of China, for example. Is the China of today an analogue of the imperial Germany of 1914, as is often claimed?
Even if we decide that it is, what lessons should we draw from the parallel? If we take the view that German aggression above all else started the first world war, we may conclude the US should take a hard line against contemporary Chinese importuning. But if we see in the war of 1914-1918, as I do, the consequence of interactions between a plurality of powers, each of which was willing to resort to violence in support of its interests, then we might also infer we need to devise better ways of integrating new great powers into the international system. At the very least, 1914 remains (as it was for President John F Kennedy during the Cuba missile crisis of 1963) a cautionary tale about how very wrong international politics can go, and how fast, and with what terrible consequences.
It remains important that we challenge manipulative or reductive readings of the past when these are mobilised in support of present-day political objectives. The recourse to history is most enlightening when we understand our conversations about the past are as open-ended as our reflections on the present should be. History is still “the great instructor of public life”, as Cicero said. Being blind to the future, we have no other. But it is an eccentric educator.
History’s wisdom comes to us not in the form of pre-packaged lessons but of oracles, whose relevance to our current predicaments has to be puzzled over.
Christopher Clark is professor of modern European history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine’s College. He is the author of The Sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914
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Hmm… This appears to be more empty rhetoric or due to fall on deaf ears and remain unheeded by central planners and officials
http://www.theonion.com/articles/historians-politely-remind-nation-to-check-whats-h,26183/?ref=auto
Sep 28, 2011
Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What’s Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions
Trying to avoid repeating bad things we did in the past is a good idea, historians say.
WASHINGTON—With the United States facing a daunting array of problems at home and abroad, leading historians courteously reminded the nation Thursday that when making tough choices, it never hurts to stop a moment, take a look at similar situations from the past, and then think about whether the decisions people made back then were good or bad.
According to the historians, by looking at things that have already happened, Americans can learn a lot about which actions made things better versus which actions made things worse, and can then plan their own actions accordingly.
“In the coming weeks and months, people will have to make some really important decisions about some really important issues,” Columbia University historian Douglas R. Collins said during a press conference, speaking very slowly and clearly so the nation could follow his words. “And one thing we can do, before making a choice that has permanent consequences for our entire civilization, is check real quick first to see if human beings have ever done anything like it previously, and see if turned out to be a good idea or not.”
“It’s actually pretty simple: We just have to ask ourselves if people doing the same thing in the past caused something bad to happen,” Collins continued. “Did the thing we’re thinking of doing make people upset? Did it start a war? If it did, then we might want to think about not doing it.”
In addition, Collins carefully explained that if a past decision proved to be favorable—if, for example, it led to increased employment, caused fewer deaths, or made lots of people feel good inside— then the nation should consider following through with the same decision now.
While the new strategy, known as “Look Back Before You Act,” has raised concerns among people worried they will have to remember lots of events from long ago, the historians have assured Americans they won’t be required to read all the way through thick books or memorize anything.
Instead, citizens have been told they can just find a large-print, illustrated timeline of historical events, place their finger on an important moment, and then look to the right of that point to see what happened afterward, paying especially close attention to whether things got worse or better.
“You know how the economy is not doing so well right now?” Professor Elizabeth Schuller of the University of North Carolina said. “Well, in the 1930s, financial markets—no, wait, I’m sorry. Here: A long, long time ago, way far in the past, certain things happened that were a lot like things now, and they made people hungry and sad.”
“How do you feel when you’re hungry? Doesn’t feel good, does it?” Schuller added. “So, maybe we should avoid doing those things that caused people to feel that way, don’t you think?”
Concluding their address, the panel of scholars provided a number of guidelines to help implement the strategy, reminding the nation that the biggest decisions required the most looking back, and stressing the importance of checking the past before one makes a decision, not afterward, when the decision has already been made.
While many citizens have expressed skepticism of the historians’ assertions, the majority of Americans have reportedly grasped the concept of noticing bad things from earlier times and trying not to repeat them.
“I get it. If we do something bad that happened before, then the same bad thing could happen again,” said Barb Ennis, 48, of Pawtucket, RI. “We don’t want history to happen again, unless the thing that happened was good.”
“When you think about it, a lot of things have happened already,” Ennis added. “That’s what history is.”
In Washington, several elected officials praised the looking-back-first strategy as a helpful, practical tool with the potential to revolutionize government.
“The things the historians were saying seemed complicated at first, but now it makes sense to me,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who reversed his opposition to oil-drilling safety regulations after checking past events and finding a number of “very, very sad things [he] didn’t like.” “I just wished they’d told us about this trick before.”
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