Piracy, continued

Thank you so much to Ron and Satish to weighing in on my piracy questions. Check here for their insights.

For further reading on piracy, I came across a nice list on Foreign Affairs.com.

Buddha's Birthday

This week Buddhist's are celebrating Buddha's birthday. Here are some great pictures. [foreignpolicy.com] In Korea and other places, lanterns play a large role in the festivities, representing illumination both internal and external. I love these fish.

Ideology gone wild

I came back from two weeks of vacation, away from news, away from politics, away from TV to find Bristol Palin advocating abstinence-only. What!?

Why does ideology have to trump common sense? She, of all people, should know that what she's talking about is rubbish. While he's not terribly articulate, I'm glad her baby-daddy is out there countering the nonsense.

3 Birds with One Stone

I love hearing about these ideas that solve several problems at the same time.

Kenya's huge and squalid slums don't have much of anything, except mountains of trash that fill rivers and muddy streets, breeding disease.

Now Kenyan designers have built a cooker that uses the trash as fuel to feed the poor, provide hot water and destroy toxic waste, as well as curbing the destruction of woodlands.

After nine years of development, the prototype "Community Cooker" is close to being rolled out in overcrowded refugee camps as well as slums around the country where the filth encourages diseases including cholera.

Great Quote

I found this in an op-ed from the San Jose Mercury News.

The legendary California Assembly speaker of the 1960s, Jesse Unruh, said it most succinctly: "Money is the mother's milk of politics."

Piracy - a military matter? or a commercial matter?

First of all, here's a link to a very interesting map of pirate attacks around the world. They certainly are clustered around Somalia, but there are some off the Americas as well.

My bigger question, raised when the US military got involved with the latest big act of piracy and hostage taking:
Is this a military matter, where commerce is part of the national interest and should be protected?

Or is it a commercial matter, where insurance against piracy is simply the cost of doing business? This seems to be the attitude, by and large, up to this point.

Here's my opinion: dealing with piracy should be a private, commercial matter. The consumers of the goods being shipped will pay the additional costs for the safety of transport. If the matter is taken over by the military then you and I, the taxpayers, are subsidizing the businesses that choose to use this shipping lane. Why should I do that? If I'm a purchaser of those goods, I'll make the decision whether or not I'm still going to purchase at a higher price and then the market sends a clear signal on whether that shipping lane should be used.

I haven't seen any media discussion of this. Has anyone?

No Shame!

From Salon.com....

At some point -- say, once the Illinois legislature has voted to kick you out of office and you're under federal indictment -- there comes a time where you really can't sink much lower. Fortunately, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich is a man of many talents, and he's found a way to do just that.

Blagojevich has reportedly signed on for the next season of the reality show "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!" which is set to be filmed in Costa Rica for NBC this June. There is one potential hitch: He'll need a judge's permission to travel out of the country. But come on, what judge would deny him the opportunity to compete for fame and money with Nancy Kerrigan?

Belligerent Ahmadinejad

Fascinating interview with Iran's Ahmadinejad. He clearly takes no responsibility for the state of the US-Iran relationship. It is all the fault of the US. Is he saying it to bolster his re-election bid? or does he really believe it? Given his pattern, I suppose he really does believe it.

President Obama, who has called your aggressive anti-Israeli remarks "disgusting," has nevertheless spoken of a new beginning in relations with Iran and extended his hand to you.

I haven't understood Obama's comments quite that way. I pay attention to what he says today. But that is precisely where I see a lack of something decisive. What leads you to talk about a new beginning? Have there been any changes in American policy? We welcome changes, but they have yet to occur.

You are constantly making demands. But the truth is: Your policies, Iran's disastrous relations with the United States, are a burden on the global community and a threat to world peace. Where is your contribution to the easing of tensions?

I have already explained this to you. We support talks on the basis of fairness and respect. That has always been our position. We are waiting for Obama to announce his plans, so that we can analyze them.

And that's all?

We have to wait and see what Obama wants to do.

The world sees this differently. Iran must act. Iran must now show goodwill.

Where is this world you are talking about? What do we have to do? You are aware that we are not the ones who severed relations with America. America cut off relations with us. What do you expect from Iran now?

Concrete steps, or at least a gesture on your part.

I have already answered that question. Washington cut off relations.

Are you saying that you would welcome a resumption of relations with the United States?

What do you think? What has to happen? Which approach is the right one?

The world expects answers from you, not from us.

But I sent a message to the new U.S. president. It was a big step, a huge step. I congratulated him on his election victory, and I said a few things to him in my letter. This was done with care. We have been and continue to be interested in significant changes taking place. If we intend to resolve the problem between our two countries, it is important to recognize that Iran did not play a role in the development of this problem. The behavior of American administrations was the cause. If the behavior of the United States changes, we can expect to see important progress …

… that could lead to a resumption of diplomatic relations, perhaps even to the reopening of the U.S. embassy, which was occupied in 1979, the year of the revolution?

We have not received an official request in this regard yet. If this happens, we will take a position on the matter. This is not a question of form. Fundamental changes must take place, to the benefit of all parties. The American government must finally learn lessons from the past.

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But you should not?

Everyone must learn from the past.

Then please tell us which lessons you are learning.

We have been under pressure for the past 30 years, unfairly and without fault on our part. We have done nothing …

… according to you. Americans see things quite a bit differently. The 444-day hostage crisis during which 50 U.S. citizens were held from late 1979 until early 1981 in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran is still a collective American trauma today.

But think of the things that were done to Iranians! We were attacked by Iraq. Eight years of war. America and some European countries supported this aggression. We were even attacked with chemical weapons and [Western countries] aided and abetted those attacks. We did not inflict an injustice on anyone. We did not attack anyone, nor did we occupy other countries. We have no military presence in Europe and America. But troops from Europe and America are stationed along our borders.

Women protest in Afghanistan

I've read a few books touching on Afghanistan in the past few months. One especially, Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan, deals with the condition of women as the country emerged from under the Taliban. Outside of Kabul, illiteracy among women is almost universal, girls are married off at 12 or 14.

The NY Times article does not mention whether the 300 women marching were Shiite or a broader coalition. By the fact that some of them were wearing jeans, I'll assume they at least some of them were educated Kabulis, but nonetheless, it is pretty extraordinary that they had the power to protest in the face of opposition.

The women who protested Wednesday began their demonstration with what appeared to be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the Last Prophet, a madrassa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohsini, the country’s most powerful Shiite cleric. He and the scholars around him played an important role in the drafting the new law.

“We are here to campaign for our rights,” one woman said into a loudspeaker. Then the women held their banners aloft and began to chant.

The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrassa, most but not all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.

“Death to the enemies of Islam!” the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women. “We want Islamic law!”

The women stared ahead and kept walking.

A phalanx of police, some of them women, held the crowds apart.

Riverdance.... Cypriot Style

The Sound of Music was on TV last night

I'd forgotten how great it is.

Learning to fight irregular warfare

From Foreign Policy... Here's an issue I've wondered about from the beginning of the "War on Terror". W kept talking about killing the enemy, as if al Queda were an army whose soldiers could be counted and then eliminated. His whole vocabulary always sounded to me like he thought we were fighting another country. I wonder how much of this comes from the Beltway establishment having grown up during the cold war, when the enemy was a clearly defined nation with formal alliances defining their sphere of influence?

On Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed the Pentagon's budget plan for fiscal year 2010. Media attention focused on the many expensive weapons programs Gates cancelled. Gates gave a glimpse of his philosophical approach to the budget with this exchange during the question-and-answer session with the Pentagon press corps:

I mean, the reality is that -- and let me put this very crudely -- if you broke this budget out, it would probably be about 10 percent for irregular warfare, about 50 percent for traditional, strategic and conventional conflict, and about 40 percent dual-purpose capabilities.

So this is not about irregular warfare putting the conventional capabilities in the shade. Quite the contrary: this is just a matter -- for me, at least -- of having the irregular-war constituency have a -- have a seat at the table for the first time when it comes to the base budget.

Gates has felt himself battling against what he has seen as a Pentagon bureaucracy that has been more comfortable with preparing for "big wars," the traditional state-versus-state conventional conflicts. Most of the weapons programs the bureaucracy has promoted, and which Gates killed on Monday, were designed with such wars in mind.

Girl Effect in Economic Development

There's an article in BusinessWeek on the effects of providing girls with economic opportunities, both in terms of overall economic development of the country and improved quality of life for the girls themselves.... For more info, also check out girleffect.org.

There are 600 million adolescent girls in developing countries, but they are largely invisible to the world at large. Included among them are girls affected by armed conflict, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, and internal displacement, as well as girls in child-headed households or locked in early marriages. To ignore them is to miss the "girl effect," which could be an unexpected answer to the global economic crisis.

Here's why: When a girl benefits, so does everyone in society, including business. Girls as economic actors can bring about change for themselves, their families, and their countries. Conversely, ignoring the girl effect can cost societies billions in lost potential.

• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later, on average, and has 2.2 fewer children.

• An extra year in primary school statistically boosts girls' future wages by 10% to 20%, and every additional year a girl spends in secondary school lifts her income by 15% to 25%. The size of a country's economy is in no small part determined by the educational attainment and skill sets of its girls.

• Young women have a 90% probability of investing their earned income back into their families, while the likelihood of men doing the same is only 30% to 40%.

• A girl's school attainment is linked to her own health and well-being, as well as reduced death rates: For every additional year of schooling, a mother's mortality is significantly reduced, and the infant mortality rate of her children declines by 5% to 10%.

• If educated, girls can get loans, start businesses, employ other women, and reinvest in their families—when they're ready to have them. That means their children can also have an education.

Difficult Census

The quality of the US census may be undermined because of rising numbers of people living in garages, tents, basements and motels as the financial crisis deepens, key organisations working with the Census Bureau have warned.[FT]

Because the census is used to distribute both representation and federal funding, the under-counting of those most in need could seriously impact the ability to help people who have fallen off the radar screen. Apparently, the stimulus bill does increase funding for the more difficult counting that goes beyond the form sent through the mail.

Gandhi - the missing Peace Prize winner?

I came across an interesting article yesterday on the Nobel Prize website. Mahatma Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize. Why not? The lists of nominees and records of decision-making are sealed for 50 years and so the discussions of Gandhi's last nomination in 1948 have only recently come to light.

It seems that the committee had a tradition of selecting winners who were European or American and affiliated with some kind of peace-focused organization. They were also concerned about the very bloody outcome of the partition of India with the slaughter and relocation of millions along religious lines...

Up to 1960, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded almost exclusively to Europeans and Americans. In retrospect, the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee may seem too narrow. Gandhi was very different from earlier Laureates. He was no real politician or proponent of international law, not primarily a humanitarian relief worker and not an organiser of international peace congresses. He would have belonged to a new breed of Laureates.

There is no hint in the archives that the Norwegian Nobel Committee ever took into consideration the possibility of an adverse British reaction to an award to Gandhi. Thus it seems that the hypothesis that the Committee's omission of Gandhi was due to its members' not wanting to provoke British authorities, may be rejected.

In 1947 the conflict between India and Pakistan and Gandhi's prayer-meeting statement, which made people wonder whether he was about to abandon his consistent pacifism, seem to have been the primary reasons why he was not selected by the committee's majority. Unlike the situation today, there was no tradition for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to try to use the Peace Prize as a stimulus for peaceful settlement of regional conflicts.

During the last months of his life, Gandhi worked hard to end the violence between Hindus and Muslims which followed the partition of India. We know little about the Norwegian Nobel Committee's discussions on Gandhi's candidature in 1948 – other than the above quoted entry of November 18 in Gunnar Jahn's diary – but it seems clear that they seriously considered a posthumous award. When the committee, for formal reasons, ended up not making such an award, they decided to reserve the prize, and then, one year later, not to spend the prize money for 1948 at all. What many thought should have been Mahatma Gandhi's place on the list of Laureates was silently but respectfully left open.

Slightly morbid

Salon has a blog called Brand Graveyard for the brands that are dying in the economic turmoil. It's got eulogies for Saab, Mervyns and Virgin Megastore.

Spring = Artistic Urges?

Garrison Keillor has hit it on the nose once again:

In spring, a person's thoughts naturally turn toward what you would rather be doing than earning a living, and in America this usually means Being An Artist. This is the true American dream. Winning the lottery is a faint hope, becoming a sports hero is a daydream, but publishing poetry is the ambition of one-third of the American people and another third are thinking about writing a memoir.

And you thought you were the only one! Ha! You are part of a vast tide. One reason the economy is so sour is that nobody wants to tote barges or lift bales, they want to be edgy and multilayered and express their anguish in some colorful and inexplicable way. Your dental hygienist is a poet ("Into the ravenous maw flecked with food and decked with plaque, I descend, pick in hand"), and this does not make for better dental care. People who feel they have a Higher Calling may feel justified in slacking off on the Lower Calling even though it is the one that pays the light bill. Your mailman comes sweeping up the walk on the tips of his toes, arms extended, twirls, and hands you an invitation to his dance recital. Also a handful of your neighbor's mail. You attend the recital and it is not bad. Men and women barefoot in leotards tossing brown parcels back and forth and running from dogs and afterward you must go backstage and tell them how good it was.

GM Chief ousted by Obama

Is this micro-management?

The cold and grey in snowy Detroit is an accurate reflection of the mood here as people wake up to the idea that their industrial landscape has changed again. President Obama has swept aside one of the pillars of the car industry here.

Mr Wagoner was a GM veteran, so on local talk shows his resignation was met with some incredulity that he could be forced out by Washington, with one caller insisting he was the victim of and not the creator of the global recession.

Both in urban Detroit and surrounding rural Michigan there is a deep set conservatism that instinctively dislikes this level of government intervention.

But there is mounting nervousness too. Mr Wagoner had already pledged to cut a fifth of GM's global workforce and close 14 factories. By forcing him to go, President Obama is clearly saying is, that's not enough.

Pictures from our trip to California

Sobbing for Saab

As a long-time owner and fan of Saabs, it saddens me to think that they're on the brink. Now the Swedish government has said no to helping.

This helps me to understand my reaction to people wanting to save the Detroit auto makers. Perhaps I was harsh in my opinion on saving Detroit because I have no affection for US made cars and because it would be MY tax dollars. But truth be told, I really wouldn't mind if Swedish tax dollars would go toward saving my nice little Saabs.

Buy Local? Buy Black?

I've seen a few articles recently about towns where people are buying "local bucks" which they then can only use locally, as a way to bolster local business in hard times. Overall, "buy local" is becoming a common mantra.

Here's a new one that I just came across: People patronizing only African-American owned businesses.

I suppose it all comes down to putting your money where your mouth is and using your purchasing power for what is important to you, even in a recession.

Immigration fun

There's an interactive map in the NY Times today that is really cool and interesting. It show immigration patterns in the US from 1880 to 2000.
For example, did you realize Maine has had a steady influx of Canadians for more than 100 years? The south only became a major destination for immigrants in the 1960s, attracting people from Latin America. The major immigration pattern before then was Eastern and Western Europeans arriving on the East Coast across the Upper Midwest.

Alexander McCall Smith's On-line Novel

For you fellow fans out there, did you know he has an on-line 100 episode novel? It's called Corduroy Mansions.

I haven't read or listened to it yet, but I'm looking forward to it! It's read by the actor who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers!

Hat tip: Dad

Copenhagen drug wars

Copenhagen is the place with free bicycle programs where you leave your car at the edge of the city and borrow a bike for the day. Now they're having open drug warfare!

And you'll note how things have changed - the 2008 Quality of Living ranking that they quote has Iceland as the most peaceful country. I wonder how it will stack up this year after riots and economic upheaval.

A turf war between drug gangs is turning one of Europe’s safest cities into a shooting gallery.

Denmark’s worst-ever bout of violence between criminals intensified last week with three shootings that left two dead in Copenhagen, the capital. That prompted the government on March 4 to propose some of the most sweeping laws in the country’s legal history by lengthening jail terms and giving police more surveillance powers, including wiretaps.

Copenhagen places third among European capitals in Mercer Investment Consulting’s 2008 Quality of Living rankings, which assesses crime rates and personal safety. Vienna and Bern, the Swiss capital, were ahead. Denmark is the world’s second-most peaceful country behind Iceland, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, which ranks 140 countries.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 36 years serving the Copenhagen police force,” said Henrik Svindt, who heads an anti-gang unit formed last week. “The worst thing is that some of the people killed or injured are innocent bystanders.”

Spraying Bullets

In 2008, there were 60 shootings in Copenhagen, three times the number in the previous year. The latest round of conflict pits about 100 bikers against an estimated 300 gang members in the city, police say.

On March 2, two masked gangsters sprayed a Copenhagen bar frequented by Hells Angels members with at least 10 bullets. The shooters, who haven’t been caught, killed one and wounded three people who weren’t linked to bikers.

“This is not the city I know,” said Bjarke Lungholt, 35, a medical intern who lives with his young family in the Noerrebro district, where the majority of the attacks have taken place. “It’s bizarre that it happens so openly and frequently.” [Bloomberg.com]

Engagement with Iran

Wow, Hilary Clinton has announced that Iran will be invited to an international conference on the future of Afghanistan and Iran has indicated they will accept. This is such an enormous move forward and break with the junior high school "I'm not going to talk to you" mentality of the Bush administration.

I suppose that any conversations on how we can work together or come to agreement on Iraq will come as a second step.