Author: GIKorea

Cutting “woke” may make for good politics in Republican right, but it is going to little to save money in the Defense budget:

A variety of social issues can fall under the “woke” umbrella, including diversity, equity and inclusion training, funding for women’s reproductive health and support for gender identity initiatives. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., Jordan and other Republicans have argued the military’s attention to “the left’s social agenda” has hurt readiness.

“If we’d focus on getting rid of all the ‘woke’ in our military, we’d have the money we need to make sure our troops get the pay raise they deserve, we’d have the weapons systems and training that needs to be done so that we’re ready to deal with our adversaries around the planet,” Jordan said Sunday on Fox News.

Rep. Stephanie Bice, R-Okla., insinuated last month that transgender service members were taking financial advantage of the Pentagon’s policy to provide hormone therapy, mental health care and surgeries for troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria. She said a cadet at Fort Sill, Okla., had told her that he enlisted in the military because he wanted the government to pay for gender reassignment surgery.

“It was shocking that he would actually verbalize that in front of all those officers and other cadets standing there,” Bice said in December during a House Armed Services committee hearing. “This is an issue, and I do think we should be looking at it.”

The cost of transgender care is minuscule when compared to the overall size of the defense budget. The Pentagon spent $15 million treating transgender troops from 2016 to 2021, including about $3 million for surgery, according to the Defense Health Agency. The parts of the spending plan dealing with personnel are so vast and expensive that carving out items targeting “woke” culture will have a negligible impact, said Michael Herson, president of the lobbying firm American Defense International and a former Defense Department official.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but if Congress wants to save money than look at wasteful military acquisitions programs which they probably won’t because they produce jobs in influential voting districts.

This seems like one of these incidents where Trump says something outlandish to be funny or elicit a reaction and the media runs with it like he is seriously going to do it:

Behind closed doors in 2017, President Donald Trump discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea and suggested he could blame a U.S. strike against the communist regime on another country, according to a new section of a book that details key events of his administration.

Trump’s alleged comments, reported for the first time in a new afterword to a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt, came as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un escalated, alarming then-White House chief of staff John Kelly.

NBC News

You can read more at the link.

It is looking like some challenging driving conditions currently in Gangwon-do:

Around 10 vehicles were stranded for over a hour on a snow-covered road, with an estimated 100 traffic accidents reported, in the eastern mountainous province of Gangwon on Sunday, officials said.

Many parts of Gangwon Province had heavy snow from Saturday to Sunday, including 55.9 centimeters of snowfall in the Misiryeong mountain ridge and 52.3 cm of snow in the Hyangrobong hill. 

Heavy snow blanketed a section of highway in the coastal county of Goseong around noon, stranding about 10 vehicles in the area.

Drivers had struggled to steer their cars out of accumulated snow for about 1 1/2 hours before police, fire and military authorities removed snow. 

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section on this Friday the 13th.

This is definitely a major issue for DOD employees working overseas that need routine medical care:

Many civilians were caught off guard in October when DHA announced they should make plans to find health care in the surrounding Japanese communities. Limited access to care has created a crisis that puts individuals, their coworkers and their families at risk, according to the post.

The DHA Indo-Pacific region director, Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Heck, said in October the agency is mandated by law to prioritize health care for active-duty service members and their families. 

As of Jan. 1, DOD employees like schoolteachers, commissary workers and contractors are limited to urgent or acute care and some specialty clinics at base hospitals. Some U.S. civilian employees of Stars and Stripes fall into this category.

For routine health maintenance and ongoing care for chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease or cancer, they are encouraged to seek Japanese health care providers. The alternative is to rely on space-available appointments after the military hospitals schedule service members and their families.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link. I have used doctors off post while stationed overseas before and the biggest issue is understanding what you are being told because English translation may not be that great depending on the hospital. The other issue is how far some of the hospitals are from the U.S. military base causing increased travel times away from work.

The Korean government is trying to resolved the forced labor issue the same way the comfort women issue was resolved before it wasn’t:

The South Korean government is considering a method to compensate victims of Japan’s wartime forced labor through a public foundation fund rather than direct payment from responsible Japanese firms, officials here confirmed during a public hearing Thursday.

Victims and supporting civic groups, however, strongly protested the move, saying that the issue is not about money but that of addressing past human rights violations of Japan.

The government’s controversial plan was announced during the event held at the National Assembly in Seoul on ways to resolve the thorny issue of compensating victims in line with the Supreme Court’s back-to-back landmark rulings in 2018 against Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Nippon Steel Corp., respectively. 

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but expect the Korean left to do everything they can to sink this proposal like they did with the comfort women fund. Like the comfort women issue, the forced labor issue is too politically useful for the Korean left to let it get resolved.

The Korean right wants to resolve this issue in order to expand cooperation with Japan in other areas. Japan wants the issue resolved, but only through a private entity as proposed because their official position is that all financial claims were resolved with the 1965 normalization treaty where they paid a $800 million reparation fee to the Korean government who invested that money into the Korean economy and infrastructure instead of individual victim payments.