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Satellite Images Used to Monitor Burmese Junta
BurmesePython writes "Human rights groups are using high-resolution satellites images to reveal the activities of Burma's junta as it gets tough with pro-democracy protesters. Apparently 'it should be easy to spot groups of monks because of their distinctive maroon robes'. Like previous efforts to use satellites to monitor the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the hope is it will prod the UN and other international actors into putting pressure on the Burmese rulers."
Don't you just love it when technology developed for governments for their "reasons", whatever they may be, are then used to make the World a better place?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
It would be nice to see the satellite pictures in question.
But so far all the articles I've seen on this either have no pictures or other pictures (such as the smuggled cellphone images of the marching monks).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We choose to laugh
When people die
It feels better
To laugh than cry
- Burma Shave
Which is the closest thing to a koan that I could fit into the Burma Shave rhyme structure. The words won't fit through the door. (And thus, the Slashdotter was Moderated.)
Why is it that the Americans generally think that the UN is pointless? Because they heard it said on fox or cnn? What exactly is your rationale for thinking that the world would be better off and not worse off without the UN?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I'm sure it does all sorts of things, but when you watch it rendered impotent because a Security Council member is good friends with a pack of murderous military rulers, it's hard not to be just a tad cynical about its abilities.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How about we think the UN is useless because they haven't done a fucking thing to stop the genocide in Darfur, to name one of many world crises.
The UN to murdering governments, "Stop, or we'll stay 'stop' again."
-- Will program for bandwidth
Yes. And toothpaste doesn't cure cancer, so we should ditch it and teeth brushing altogether?
I feel sorry for anyone who thought that was a reasonable analogy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
UN does not have an army. It only has the power that the nations that make it up allow it to have, primarily the security council members. If the USA wanted to send the military into Sudan to stop the genocide nobody was stopping it. If the USA wanted to submit a resolution to the UN to form an international force to go in, nobody was stopping it either.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Dropping weapons is one thing. Just because they're armed doesn't mean they represent an effective fighting force to take on the Burmese Army. It's a nice thought, but one which would probably only produce far more casualties, mainly on the civilian side of things.
The real solution to this is for Beijing to get off its ass and threaten to pull its support for the Junta and to publicly announce that it will abstain from all Security Council votes regarding the country.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes that is exactly what should happen. We should say "Fuck russia and China's vetoes" and go in there and fuck up their regime Iraq style. Sorry about the swearing but how could you think the UN could do anything with all that in-fighting?!? Oppressors of the world unite it veto doing anything on Burma.
Then again why should we care right? They're not Muslim so it's ok.
Look at Thailand's ex prime minister there is an arrest warrant out on him for stealing hundreds of millions of tax payers money and he is suspected of funding multiple bombings in Bangkok. He is a terrorist but the UK welcomes him with open arms and lets him buy a football club with Thailand's tax payers money. DOUBLE STANDARDS.
I suppose China could dump all those American dollars, and you would have to call back your armies from everywhere because, well, the US would be broke and completely dipping into a major recession.
I think it's time that Americans started boning up on their history of 4th century Rome. There's some lessons there about overextension and debased currency that some might find educational.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When was the last time Europe refused to back military intervention? How's that working out for you?
Tomorrow, I may eat another house plant
I doubt I am alone in hoping for a revolution that reinstates the proper, democratically elected government in Burma.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I'm English not American and I don't want terrorists/murderers running around free in my country just because they're rich.
We should send all Burma's diplomats packing as they have no respect for human life.
Well, if the US isn't to blame for deaths in iraq, why is the UN to blame for deaths in Darfur?
It's ironic that the "UN is useless" meme is strongest in USA, which stops the UN (Security Council) from doing anything that would interfere with US economic interests when those interests involve murderous rulers friendly to those US economic interests.
Or ignores the UN when USA wants to take part in an illegal invasion. Then whines that the UN isn't doing enough to clean up the mess that USA has made of Iraq.
Kinda like USA sitting out years of WWI and also sitting on its collective hands for > 2 years of WWII. Hitler not a murderous enough bastard for Americans?
Excuse me whilst I gag on "Yer with us our yer with the terrrrrrrsts" as I think back on that.
Why is it that the Americans generally think that the UN is pointless?
Oh, maybe because of little things like Libya being on the UN human rights commission?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Whatever the americans have done it's not as bad as killing people in the street.
It's not as bad as raiding Monks at their sanctuaries shooting and beating them and taking them away in trucks. They're probably in a big death pit right now being covered with soil to hide the evidence, one can only guess.
at least there is a human rights commission
So what? There are elections in Cuba. Both are examples of form over substance.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
As another commenter points out, the UN in and of itself has zero power. It has no army, no police, no way of enforcing its will at all. The only power it gets is from member nations.
But if the only real power involved is the power of member nations, why don't the member nations just act and cut out the UN "middleman"? This is, after all, historically the way international action has been carried out. European governments trying to cope with Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler or (going further back) the Mongol or Ottoman invaders didn't feel a need to create a standing bureaucracy to validate by inscribing (in five official languages) on parchment what they'd already collectively decided to do. They just acted, forming governing councils and agreements as and where they were needed -- and not otherwise.
So why don't we do that nowadays? If Darfur (or Burma) is an international outrage, and most every reasonable person agrees on what should be done, what's to stop the four or five biggest countries from just forming an ad hoc Stop The Burma Slaughter task force, assigning it 25,000 troops and a naval task force, and punching the Go button?
Nothing, really. Except that this silly imaginary "world government" called the UN exists, and because it exists the major countries are off the hook. If you ask why doesn't somebody DO something, everyone can point to the UN as the agency that should be doing the doing.
In short, the UN pretty clearly now exists as a substitute for coordinated, effective international action. It's like how, in Congress or a university, if you want to just quietly kill a proposal for action, you refer it to a committee for a report. The UN exists so that big nations can ignore sticky problems by referring them to the UN for a report...or a vote on "sanctions"...whatever. You can look like you're doing something with actually, well, doing something.
Since Americans have always tended to favor action over talk, they tend to take a dim view of an institution which effectively and efficiently functions to replace action with talk. That's not what the UN is supposed to do, of course, but that's what it actually does. Yet another illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences: there'd be much more effective international humanitarian action if the UN did not exist.
That's where you're spot on though. All these fools who don't see how overextending ourselves in two expensive and unwinnable (militarily) conflicts isn't eroding our national security need to get off fox news and go read some history. Islamofascism (whatever that is) might be a threat, but hardly on the scale of cold-war USSR, modern-day china, north korea... or more importantly our domestic education, health-care, social security, and sundry economic problems, to say nothing of global climate change, which threatens to be a bigger threat than all of the above.
I think that too many people want to see us recapture our WW2 era success, but without any of the domestic sacrifice that that conflict required of the average citizen.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Just airdrop a couple hundred thousand AK-47s, ammo, and green robes and see just how long the junta lasts.
The US is trillions of dollars in debt. By any sensible measure it is already "broke". Personally I prefer the term "bankrupt".
How we know is more important than what we know.
thanks for the correction, memory is shot on 1980 united stated terror based activities in central america
all hail ollie north
back in the day we didnt have no old school
"We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, political, or military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there! None of our allies supported us; not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."
Robert McNamara, United States Secretary of Defense, 1961-1968.
The UN doesn't exist to stop massacres in Africa and Asia (or Europe/America/Australia), or to stop dictators from killing their people. It exists to try and stop the big powers from getting into another huge war, by providing a diplomatic channel which hopefully won't be closed in protest to whatever it was this week. The rest is just feel good crap that is just there for show.
It doesn't matter if the guys with the big guns mess with the little countries. Or the little countries mess with each other. As long the big guns don't get used on each other all is well. Of course as with all bureaucracies it does a whole lot more, but that's all unimportant side issues.
The world hasn't been turned into a nuclear wasteland so so far so good for the UN.
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind..." the rest is minor nuisance stuff (stuff like genocide in Africa, human rights abuses by everyone, etc) that simply doesn't matter in comparison with turning the planet into radioactive frozen ball.
No, they can't just dump all the dollars. Couple problems with that:
1) Most of those funds are in the form for treasury securities (T-Bills/T-notes/T-bonds). Those are promissory notes issued by the US government. Basically it says "We agree to pay you this much money by this date." Fair enough, but the value is only because the government honours that agreement. So far, US securities are one of the safest things you can buy. They have always made good and have plenty of systems in place to make sure that keeps happening. However, they could if they wanted just not honour the notes issued to China. All of a sudden that wealth is gone. China can't sell the notes if the US has made it clear they are worthless, they can't redeem them, the wealth just goes away. This would, of course, have severe consequences to the US government in terms of the ability to issue more note sin the future since people wouldn't trust them as much, but it can be done.
2) China's economy is very dependant on it continuing to grow and the money continuing to come in. A big part of that is that America continues to be willing to buy their goods. Well, if America's economy got fucked up, and if it was well known that the cause was the Chinese, that would all go away. Not only does a depression put people in to a mode where they spend little money especially on non-essentials (which is largely what China produces) but there would be extensive boycotts, and perhaps even governmental sanction, against Chinese products. That happens, all of a sudden China has factories without work, people without jobs, an upcoming middle class facing the return to what is quite literally peasantry. Revolutions have started over that, and they know it.
3) China's dollar is pegged to the US dollar. For the US dollar to rapidly change is for their dollar to rapidly change, unless they un peg it, in which case it will also rapidly change. Strong and weak currencies are relative things and there is no one that is better than the other, each has advantages and disadvantages. However rapid change is problematic as your economy isn't ready for the new dynamic. Rapidly changing the US dollar would not do them well, regardless of how they chose to manage the yuan.
The problem is you cannot look at international economies in the same way you look at something like a personal economy. China and the US dont' have a worker - boss relationship. It is a customer - distributor relationship at the closest, but still different since each controls their own currency, each has real military force such that nobody else can come in and force them to do something different and so on. It's not a case of them holding the stick and the US being in trouble, it is a case of something like economic mutually assured destruction. Yes, they have the theoretical potential to hurt the US economy, however doing so would have severe consequences to them and as such isn't a real possibility.
It is difficult to understand fully since the globalized economy we have today is very new, and since on that scale things don't follow the same rules as the small scales we personally work on. Many people fail to understand this and thus misunderstand the intricacies of the situation.
I suggest you brush up on France and other European colonial powers in Vietnam, and you might have a clue about their stance.
Yeah, making them effectively worthless, and dropping a lot of the value that is propping up the Yuan. Oh but they could make it all back on their industrial strength.... except as you pointed out, they just plunged their largest consumer market into recession.
They could simply peg the Yuan against the Euro and call it a day. It would hurt them badly, but they've been through worse in a recent era and they have a system in place to control the situation if an economic crisis did occur (Remember the Cultural Revolution?)
The US on the other hand would be left with little money or factories to restart their economy and due to the political corruption we face, I doubt we would be able recover as quickly.
That said... China has one thing the US doesn't have, and that is patience. Its current form of manifest destiny does itself as a world power and to have a military more powerful military (and more high tech) than the US plus a space program to boot. But they don't see a need to destroy their economy in an arms race and have planned to match it with their growth. For example by 2050 their goal is to have a bigger navy and more aircraft carriers than the US. As they have been all of history, they are very inward looking and don't see the need to expand except say the Taiwan issue so unless they are provoked they would never overtly do something against us.
However... Attacking Iran (which is one of their major foreign oil suppliers) would most likely be a catalyst for such a thing.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)