matt.alvarado

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced on Tuesday that his government is loosening its official interpretation of the section of Japan's constitution that establishes pacifism as official policy. The Abe government's plan will allow the Japanese military to fight on behalf of its allies in certain circumstances, not just if Japan itself if attacked.

Abe's government worries that the United States won't defend Japan in a crisis with China

Abe's new interpretation is a sign of changing politics within Japan and the growing tension in East Asia — a development that should really concern the rest of the world, especially the United States.

Japan's constitution was written in 1947, shortly after the destruction of Imperial Japan had left many Japanese impoverished. The country was also still under US military occupation, and the constitution written under heavy American influence. Article 9 of the constitution is the legacy of Imperial Japan's collapse and of the US occupation. It bans both war and any kind of standing military. Here's the official English translation:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Japan has been skirting Article 9's letter for decades. For instance, the Japanese Self-Defense Force (JSDF) has been around since 1954. Today, the JSDF is a modern, well-equipped military. To comply with Article 9, it technically gets labelled a "police" force.

Prime Minister Abe's new Article 9 interpretation is an even more radical revision, though it won't bring back a fully rearmed Japanese military. Abe's government has decided that Article 9 doesn't apply to "collective self-defense:" that refers to defending any of Japan's allies if the attack on the ally could pose a "clear danger" to Japan. Right now, the only such ally is the United States, though Japan is in talks with Australia about expanding military ties.

Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images

Imagine, for instance, if the US and China started firing shots at each other in the East Asia Sea. Previously, Japan couldn't get involved unless Japan was directly attacked. Now it can.

The new provision is in part about China and the US. Abe's government worries that the United States wouldn't defend Japan in a crisis with China without a clear commitment from Japan that it can and will defend itself.

That's why the US is likely pretty happy about this: American officials have long complained that Japan's strict Article 9 interpretation complicated the US pledge to defend Japan, which is ingrained in a 1952 mutual defense treaty. So this Article 9 isn't about Japan asserting its military independence from the United States; it's about solidifying the US-Japan alliance. And, implicitly, that alliance now exists to defend against Chinese military aggression, and perhaps against North Korea.

It's now a question of how far Japan and other regional states will allow themselves to pushed

But in a deeper sense, it's about the interplay between Japanese self-identity and China's rise. There's been a long-running debate inside Japan over becoming a "normal nation." That means having a military, and the freedom to use it when necessary. "Normal nation" status is obviously incompatible with Article 9 and, while the normal nation partisans have won incremental victories, they still have yet to seriously alter the constitution.

But Japan's normal nation partisans are in an increasingly strong position — because of China. As China has gotten stronger, it's made increasingly aggressive territorial claims in places like the South and East China Seas. The more aggressive China becomes, the more the arguments for a more aggressive military response make sense to Japanese citizens.

Put differently, China's rise and aggressive actions are changing Japan's domestic politics. (Rising nationalism within Japan is also playing a role.) And that's true around the region: even Vietnam, which had recently been on quite friendly terms with Beijing, has started to build ties with the United States out of suspicion of China's intentions.

In broad terms, this means that China's rise is empowering hawks in Japan. The stronger China gets, the stronger that Japanese hawks become politically. Chinese leaders might see this and build up their own military force in the region to counter-balance — Imperial Japan's abuses in China are far from forgotten in Beijing. This is how a dangerous cycle of security competition could start.

Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images

But this cycle isn't inevitable. For one thing, the United States has a very strong interest in convincing both Japan and China to avoid taking dangerously escalatory steps. It also has a lot of influence with both countries — although far more so in Tokyo than in Beijing — so American management of the conflict could help steer its course.

For another, Japanese pacifism is still quite powerful as a political force. The reason Abe was forced to reinterpret Article 9, rather than altogether rewriting it, is that he couldn't get his coalition partners — a Buddhist, relatively pacifist party called New Komeito — to agree. Moreover, polling suggests that the Japanese public is still skeptical of major revisions to Article 9.

So Abe's new move is a big new step for the US-Japan alliance, and also suggests that China's rise is pushing its neighbors toward more aggressive military policies. It's now a question of how far Japan and other regional states will allow themselves to pushed.

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The latest from the Supreme Court:

Police may not search the smartphones of people who are put under arrest unless they have a warrant, the Supreme Court has ruled, a unanimous and surprising victory for privacy advocates.

The justices, ruling in cases from California and Massachusetts, said the 4th Amendment's ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures" prevents a police officer from examining a cellphone found on or near a person who is arrested.

See? I told you the Supreme Court was a remarkably agreeable place. And in this case, they were remarkably agreeable even though lower courts had split on this issue and it could easily have broken down along normal left (yay civil liberties!) and right (yay law enforcement!) lines. Instead, all nine of the justices did the right thing. For a brief moment, we can all celebrate.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Supreme Court in the case of Riley v California this morning established an important precedent about the need for law enforcement officers to secure a warrant before searching someone's cell phone.

He also established a crucial cultural precedent by ruling, accurately, that iPhones and Androids and such aren't really phones at all (emphasis added):

Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be kept on an arrestee's person. The term "cell phone" is itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.

This makes the decision not just a win for privacy, but an important victory for those of us who hate phone calls but love our iPhones. Steve Jobs did many great things, but giving that particular device that particular name was a mistake.

From the annals of stories I'm afraid to read:

The age of cooking by smartphone is here. We test a Robo-Crock in the connected kitchen.

But I'm a professional, so I clicked the link:

For my first test, I made chili....But instead of reaching for any knobs or buttons on the front of the device, I launched an app on my phone to set temperature and time.

The machine fired up, eventually reaching a simmer. The app kept track of time and alerted me with a pop-up message when my three-hour stew was ready for mass consumption. If I had wanted to bump the temperature from High to Low or adjust the cook time, I could easily do that whether I was down the street or half a world away.

I am happy to report that the $130 Smart Crock-Pot works as billed....The chili came out great. It was at that point that the greater existential questions surrounding a Smart Crock-Pot began surfacing: When would I really need this? Is it worth the extra $50? And is it smart enough?

Indeed. Is it smart enough? I'd say no, because it still forces me to cut up all the meat and vegetables and then manually toss them in the crock pot. That doesn't sound nearly smart enough to me. Call me back when a robot version of Wolfgang Puck is available for $130.

Amazon's new Fire Phone has one huge problem — it's too good.

Which is to say it had better be good if it's going to sell for $649 dollars unsubsidized ($199 with a two-year contract) and thus be no cheaper than a new iPhone 5S or Samsung Galaxy 5S. The Amazon phone the world needed was a very different product. A cheap smartphone that tried to be good enough rather than the best.

a strategy built around a cheap, zero-margin phone

Jeff Bezos' company has a unique opportunity to come into the smartphone space with a strategy that's not symmetrical to what other people are doing. Amazon's phone is first and foremost a physical extension of Amazon-the-store. That argues for a strategy built around a cheap, zero-margin phone that aims to undercut the existing market leaders.

Instead, Amazon seems to be trying to beat the market leaders by adding a bunch of snazzy 3D features to what we've come to expect from a high-end smartphone. They've even gone out of their way to slightly exceed iPhone 5S specs as far as I can tell.

The only price edge Amazon is offering is one year's worth of Prime membership for free. But this, too, seems backwards.

The technology certainly keeps improving, it's just that not every technological advance is all that useful in practice

Rather than making Prime a benefit of phone ownership, why not make a cheap phone a benefit of Prime membership? After all, Prime members are already Amazon's core audience of frequent shoppers. You want to equip those specific people with the ultimate Amazon shopping device. By limiting the availability of the device to core Amazon customers, you could afford to take a small loss on each phone knowing that the only people who would have it are exactly the people likely to relentlessly shop with it.

So how would you make a cheap Fire phone?

Part of it is accepting low profit margins. But part of it is just making a phone that's not as good as the best phones in the world. The market leaders continue to race ahead trying to make phones with bigger screens and better cameras and faster processors, but it's far from clear that most consumers really need or want further improvements over the 2013-vintage state of the art. People sometimes express this idea by decrying a lack of "innovation" in the smartphone market or complaining that the technology is "stagnant." This is wrong. The technology certainly keeps improving, it's just that not every technological advance is all that useful in practice. At a certain point most of us would benefit more from falling smartphone prices than from advancing smartphone quality.

The existing market leaders can't go in that direction because it's too poisonous to its business model. Apple and Samsung derive enormous revenue from the assumption that loyal users will upgrade every two years, so they're focused relentlessly on building upgrade-worthy products.

That leaves a clear market opportunity for someone to make good-enough phones for people who aren't all that interested in upgrading. And various companies are trying to fill that niche, mostly by making cheap Android phones for the pre-paid market. But this market is too commoditized to be profitable, and too fragmented and confusing to be a good user experience.

It would be an ideal place for Amazon to step in.

Amazon has the scale and brand power to impose some clarity. Amazon has a business model that would let it benefit from a successful Fire phone even if sales weren't profitable. And a cheap phone with a powerful brand behind it could be just the thing America needs to break the power of the cell phone carriers — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile — whose subsidies and two-year contracts provide the financial fuel that keeps the current cell phone market. Instead we've got a product that will probably fail to gain traction in the already-crowded high-end phone market, and even if it does prove popular won't really change anything. It's a sad missed opportunity from a company that's been one of the most aggressive and visionary in America.

My second novel, Spell or High Water is available today!

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New Comic: Spectral Cat

Gabe: If today’s comic feels a little “real” that’s because it is. Tycho and I were talking about the special sort of Dad rage that comes over a father determined to make his family have fun. “we’re going to have a good time God Damnit!” I was relating to him the story of my recent Zoo visit and it was just too universal not to put into comic form. What we didn’t include in the comic strip was the food court experience I had while at said zoo. even though we arrived well before noon it was nearly 1:00 by the time I found a parking place. This meant that before I even saw an…

A letter home from an 8-year-old at summer camp. It’s funnier than most network sitcoms.

Read the rest here.

May 28th, 2014: Birds are singing, the sun is shining, and there’s a Kickstarter campaign to bring Reading Rainbow back. Its new incarnation won’t be the same as it was before Satan reached up from Hell and cancelled it in 2009. Instead of a half-hour TV show, it’ll be a series of video field trips and interactive kids books better suited to today’s digitally connected world. LeVar Burton explains it all in the vid above, but here are some highlights: Part of the money raised will go toward making the new Reading Rainbow free for cash-strapped schools. That Star Trek pun. A completely accurate representation of what it would be like to meet Burton IRL. And the a special cameo at the end. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Watch the whole thing yourself.

After all, you don’t want to disappoint LeVar Burton, do you? Because we know from Community that that’s the worst feeling in the world.

(via: Geekosystem)

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New Comic: Harvest

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April 24th, 2014: Guys, The Midas Flesh #5 is out now! AHHH. It's the comic I'm writing about oh I don't know KING MIDAS IN SPACE WITH DINOSAURS and this issue is a big one. You can read a preview here! And you can pick the book up at your local comic book shop, or download a digital version instead (/ ALSO??) Check it out! – Ryan

Sarah Kliff says today's teenagers are "the best-behaved generation on record":

The Centers for Disease Control released a monster report last week on the state of Americans' health. The 511-page report makes one thing abundantly clear: teens are behaving better right now than pretty much any other time since the federal government began collecting data.

The teen birth rate is at an all-time low....High school seniors are drinking less, smoking less, and barely using cocaine....

And, of course, the rate of violent crime has plummeted among teenagers, as Dick Mendel documents here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'd suggest that all of this is at least partially the result of the end of leaded gasoline in America.

What's happening today isn't an aberration. Teenagers from the mid-60s through the mid-90s were the aberration. We managed to convince ourselves during that era that something had gone permanently wrong, but it wasn't so. The ultra-violent gangs and reckless behavior that became so widespread simply wasn't normal, any more than expecting teenagers to sit around in kumbaya circles would be normal. Nor had anything gone fundamentally wrong with our culture. It was the result of defective brain development caused by early exposure to lead.

I'll never be able to prove this. No one ever will. The data is simply not rich enough, and it never will be. Nevertheless, what evidence we do have sure points in this direction. And here's why it's important. Even if we never clean up another microgram of lead, we've nonetheless cleaned up most of the lead that we poisoned our atmosphere with in the postwar years. So if the lead hypothesis is true, it means that our default fear of teenagers—beaten into us during the scary lead years—is no longer accurate. They simply aren't as dangerous or as reckless as they used to be, and that isn't going to change. We don't need to be as frightened of them as we used to be. In the same way that we have to get over economic fears rooted in the 70s or the Great Depression that are no longer meaningful, we need to get over our widespread fear of teenagers that's no longer meaningful either.

Today's teenagers have grown up with more or less normal brain development. Some will be nice kids, some will become gang leaders. That's always the case. But speaking generally, if you meet a group of teenagers today, they're no more likely to be especially scary than they were in the 40s or 50s. They're just teenagers. It's probably going to take a while for everyone to adjust to this, but the time to start is now. Decently behaved teenagers are here to stay.

The Boston public school system is eliminating history and social science departments, merging them with other departments that don’t matter because they aren’t on the standardized tests.

No doubt this is paving the way for the same thing to happen on the university level to the non-STEM departments.

Ryan Cooper is annoyed by coins. They're too much trouble, and they just pile up in the penny jar at home. I used to feel that way, but now that my local supermarket has a Coinstar machine, I don't care anymore. I throw my coins into the machine every few months, and within a minute I get an Amazon gift card or something for the full value of the change. No muss, no fuss, no more rolling up coins.

Still, Cooper thinks we could do better if we not only got rid of the penny, but got rid of all our other small change too:

Here's my solution: multiply the face value of every U.S. coin by 10. A penny will be worth 10 cents, a nickel 50 cents, a dime one dollar, a quarter $2.50, and a dollar coin 10 bucks. (We could also reinvent the half-dollar, which is barely produced now, as a nice $5 coin.)

This will have several beneficial effects: first, it will make change real money again....Second, it will be easy to accomplish. We won't have to have a big fight with the zinc lobby or Abraham Lincoln fans over whether to stop production of a particular coin, or rebuild all the vending machines around differently-shaped coins.

....Third — and this might be the most contentious part of this proposal — changing coins could be a nice piece of badly-needed economic stimulus. Effectively, we'd be printing up a bunch of new money and handing it to whoever has coins on hand. We'd have to think carefully about the details, but the idea would be to allow people who have old coins to hand them in for fresh new versions worth 10 times as much....How much money are we talking about? According to the Federal Reserve, as of 2010 there was about $40 billion worth of coins in circulation, which constituted 4.3 percent of the U.S. currency stock. We'd be increasing that by $360 billion at a stroke, which would actually be a pretty powerful economic stimulus.

I like this kind of out-of-the-box thinking! Unfortunately, I suspect the biggest beneficiaries wouldn't be coin hoarders, but banks, which probably own about 90 percent of all circulating coins. (I'm just guessing about that.) Plus, you'd better do this in secret. If you don't, you're going to have the damnedest run on Sacagawea dollars ever. You can sign me up for a ton or two right now.

 You can still enter to win a signed copy of the new edition of Off to Be the Wizard (Magic 2.0). In addition to that book, the prize package will also include the Basic Instructions 2014 Box Calendar, and a signed copy of a book by a different author. This week, the bonus book is The 27th Mile, By Ray Charbonneau, and in this case I'll point out that if you chose to go to Ray's site and purchase a copy, all of the proceeds will go to help victems of the Boston Marathon bombings.

You can enter below by friending Off to Be the Wizard on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or by answering a question.

Sadly, the offer is only open to people in the United States. Shipping costs, what can I say? The contest closes on, April 19th at 12am, then a new give away with a different bonus book will begin. Thanks, and good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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By Chris Bucholz  Published: April 15th, 2014  So a few months ago, I became a dad for the first time (I had already been an aunt for several years by that point). And within days of this momentous event, I began detecting a new welling of activity in my head. No, it wasn't love, nor was it empat

New Comic: Crosswords

Gabe: Kara decided that Frozen was her favorite Disney movie. This was not a decision she took lightly. My wife has called the Little Mermaid her favorite Disney movie for 24 years. Switching to Frozen was done only after seeing the movie many times and hours upon hours of quiet deliberation. She sent me a text message this afternoon: My wife ladies and gentlemen. -Gabe out

A Massachusetts candidate for governor passed a kidney stone during a debate.

Guess what? Joe Biden now has a dwarf planet named after him:

The new planetoid, estimated about to be about 250 miles wide, is now 7.7 billion miles from the sun. That is about the closest it gets. At the other end of its orbit, the planetoid, which for now carries the unwieldy designation of 2012 VP113, loops out to a distance of 42 billion miles....For convenience, the scientists shorten the 2012 VP113 designation to VP, which in turn inspired their nickname for planetoid: Biden, after Vice President Joseph R. Biden.

Appropriately, the actions of the Biden dwarf suggest the presence of something more powerful in the neighborhood:

Intriguingly, the astronomers said that details of the orbits hint at perhaps an unseen planet several times the size of Earth at the solar system’s distant outskirts....Trujillo and Dr. Sheppard point out that Sedna and 2012 VP113 have similar values for one orbital parameter known as the argument of perhelion, as do several other bodies at the edge of the Kuiper Belt. That could be a sign of the gravitational influence of an unseen planet.

Computer simulations showed that the data could be explained by a planet with a mass five times that of Earth at a distance of 23 billion miles from the sun, too dim to show up in current sky surveys.

The bad news is that if this turns out to be true, it "could reopen the debate over the definition of 'planet.'" Please. Not that. Haven't we done enough damage to the solar system already?

Sunday March 23, 2014

By Christina H  Published: February 27th, 2014  Everyone knows that having a newborn baby is a hellish, sleep-deprived ordeal that is quickly forgotten when your baby grows into a "TV newborn" who smiles and laughs and melts your heart every time he does something, also known in the real world as

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Comfort Zone" - originally published 3/10/2014 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

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When you're ballsy and stupid enough to accuse a prominent African-American lawyer with a history of Civil Rights activism (Eric Holder) of "standing in the school house door" like George Wallace (perhaps the most iconic defense of racial segregation in American history), you always run the risk that that guy's sister-in-law might actually have been the young woman Wallace was blocking on that famous day in 1963.

Neal McDonough's pitch for treating yourself with an awesome car is also proof of how far electric hybrid vehicles have come in the public imagination.

The post That Cadillac Commercial Everyone’s Talking About Is Actually Proof Of How Far Electric Cars Have Come appeared first on ThinkProgress.

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All the powers of a book and a living person in one package. Easily transportable, infinitely cloneable, way more waterproof, and still capable of drinking a beer with you and chatting about life. Of course both of them have the same weakness: fire.

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