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Climate Scientists Ask For Help Fighting Somali Pirates
thebchuckster writes "Scientists are seeking the help of the Australian and US navies to repel Somali pirates who are threatening one of the world's key climate monitoring programs. They hope to deploy about 20 robotic instruments in a no-go area north of Mauritius. The instruments, which record ocean heat and salinity patterns, are programmed to submerge and eventually resurface to upload their data to satellites."
But global warming is caused by a lack of pirates!
Because they learned a long time ago they could take the money ... then act immorally anyway and win on both sides.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Well, until the Vikings sue them over the patent violation on their business method. It's Danegeld, after all, not Somaligeld.
Give it to whom precisely? Somalia has been in a civil war for the last 20 years, there isn't anybody that can take the money and make it happen. Most folks there are more concerned with starving or being killed to do anything about this.
The real issue is in how the global security is executed. When these pirates are caught, it is up to the country of the vessel's home port to pay for extradition and prosecution. You may be surprised but in the majotrity of cases, the pirates are arrested and then days later released as the government of the vessels home country decides not to extradite as they don't want the expense of shipping tham, then housing them in prison. A solution? Well, go back to how we used to deal with pirates. Tried by a captain on ship and walk the plank into the water 300 miles off shore. Done. Problem solved.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Missed it by that much.
Why doesn't the govt give Somalis money for acting morally?
Which government? The Somali government? It sounds like calling that a government is being charitable. Warlords might even be charitable. They just started allowing aid into the country for the worst drought in 60 years with 11 million people starving.
The US? We're not really big on spending money overseas except if it's Israel or bombing someone. And, truth be told, we have a terrible record of giving money and aid to bad people only to have to kill them later on after they've killed a lot of innocent people. Though again, the situation is pretty bad already. If there were a way to make the situation worse, the US would be hard-pressed to find it.
Anyone else? Not interested in Somalia or incapable of doing anything. Somalia has been a failed state for a while now.
Or issue letters of mark so any old person who can go hunt em down for fun!
'Letter of Marque and Reprisal'.
Given that the pirates are using any old junk to mount their attacks, I'm guessing that there would be no economic incentive to hunt them down under the historical mechanism of condemnation and sale. Some sort of bounty-based alternative, in addition to the cost, would amount to offering to pay anybody who can come up with a few rusty Kalashnikovs and a boat full of dead Somalis. What could possibly go wrong?
Having a tough life ?
The problem isn't the instruments, the problem is pirates attacking the scientists as they go to place them. The area of interest is a no-go area of the Indian Ocean.
But with piracy in the western Indian Ocean making it too dangerous for commercial or research vessels to deploy the robotic devices, Australia's government research department, the CSIRO, hope naval forces will help them out.
any pirates who would attack scientific intstruments are committing property crime. the death penalty seems a little harsh.
as for the pirates that attack people, well, somalia doesn't really have a government to speak of.
and if you think you can 'solve the problem' by intimidating a few of them, you might want to read about what motivates them in the first place. i.e. there is a massive drought in the region right now, millions of people are starving... as i write this.
if i were in their shoes, and you asked me if i wanted to be a pirate, and maybe eat, i dont know what i would say. you see, i've never been starving to death and watched my whole family die.
in my humble opinion, instead of starting a nother never ending 'war on piracy', we could instead try to stop the corruption and malfeasance that prevent the somalis from engaging in ordinary business activity. i.e. start enforcing international laws regarding the fisheries off of their coasts.
(same AC as GP) Everyone knows the "bury the researchers in millions of bogus, frivolous FOIA requests" is simply a tactic of the oil-industry shills - about as intellectually honest as "teach the controversy" from the anti-evolution tards - or, more to the point, about the same as the tobacco industry's decades of stonewalling that no evidence existed for a link between smoking and cancer.
The US? We're not really big on spending money overseas except if it's Israel or bombing someone.
I'm guessing you're young. The US (under President Clinton) sent its military into Somalia in the early 1990s with the goal of stabilizing the situation enough to allow aid (both goverment-sponsored and that of private relief agencies) to help ameliorate an ongoing famine. Given the way it ended, I doubt the US government has much motivation to attempt helping Somalia again.
If you don't trust the slant of a military-published document, dig up some old newspaper archives. I think you'll learn why so many governments appear to be ignoring Somalia.
#DeleteChrome
Bah - forgot the link.
#DeleteChrome
The "civil war" is largely a creation of foreign and now AFRICOM interference.
http://webarchive.ssrc.org/Somalia_Hoehne_v10.pdf
"Thanks to half a century of pouring US arms stockpiles into Africa, the price of an assault rifle in Africa has for some time been cheaper than anyplace else on the planet."
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/africom-americas-military-foot-africas-doorway
Somali "piracy" is the outcome of the illegal, exhaustive, industrialised over-fishing of Somali waters, by foreign fleets - leaving the coastal towns without any livelihood.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/14/analysis_somalia_piracy_began_in_response
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00.html
The US manufactures foreign wars and "terrorists" the same way it used to lead in the creation of Automobiles and heavy manufacturing. But remember your Gibbon: The decline of Rome was seeded from its very rise on world's stage.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They have made some upgrades; but not nearly to the point where condemning and selling off their used gear would make up for the cost of capturing it in the first place... Worse, from the perspective of powers interested in trade security and stability(rather than just getting some blood in the water and reveling in the righteous vengeance), history suggests that low-budget privateers are often little better than pirates themselves and 'respectable' mercenaries get really expensive.
Actually, it was Bush I who sent the military to Somalia to provide security so aid could be distributed. It was Clinton who decided to try "regime change"...........and that resulted in Black Hawk Down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Even if you have a sociopathic disregard for civilian casualties(after all, pirates are a pain to find and sometimes fight back, while you can obtain villagers by the villageful...) you'd be an idiot to make such a bounty offer: anything high enough to motivate sufficiently competent people to take on the risk and time commitment of doing some actual pirate hunting would be well above the cost to an unscrupulous operator of securing a few corpses, some cheap small arms, and a dinghy of some description. Heck, even the pirates might get into the game of bundling casualties and/or enemies with junked hardware and bounty-ing the package off for a tidy profit!
Asshats like you are the problem today. i wish there was a law to kill stupidity.
So you would like a law to silence people whose ideas you find offensive?
Wow, talk about loving big huge government. Where do you nutcases come from?
You need to look into things a bit more deeply than you apparently do. Please give me a quote from Phil Jones where he admits manipulating data for other than valid scientific reasons. Does one mistake (Himalayan glaciers) in the IPCC AR4 report invalidate the thousands of other points in the report? That's like getting a F on a final exam because you missed one question out of 100. The IPCC had nothing to do with the climate refugees statement. That was a think tank associated with the UN. And I believe their statement was "up to 50 million climate refugees". Did they put a minimum value on it? The sulfur in coal does cause a cooling effect as SO2 in the atmosphere but it doesn't last nearly as long as the CO2 does so in the long run coal burning unequivocally causes warming.
Please show me the science that shows increasing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere does not cause a warming effect. If you can give me some good science showing that then I'll join you. Until then you're just someone who puts economics and politics over reality.
Oh. And the whole "climate science" angle is just there to recruit the liberal/progressive sentiment into supporting more neo-colonial imperial adventure.
"Hey, no time or money to create jobs, you guys. We have to invade AFRICA and save THE PLANET!"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
You've got the wrong idea entirely, frankly. Mercenaries are expensive. Tourism, however, is profitable. So, you make it like a safari. You know, for the chance to go send some pirates to Davy Jones' locker. The 'fishing license' just absolves prospective pirate hunters from prosecution.
So, you restore and or build a few PT style boats, strap a few twin-fifties, miniguns and grenade launchers on pintle mounts, and let any sociopath with ten thousand bucks to spare have some fun. You'd have a waiting list a mile long.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
And your point is? Regardless of how the nation came to be in the state that it's in, there isn't any functioning government there at the moment.
It makes me laugh when I hear neo-cons say "government isn't the solution, it IS the problem". If you want to see what not having a functioning government looks like, go to Somalia. It even has religious extremism.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Asshole poster is asshole, what a surprise. What part of the US are you from? (The attitude of use violence first is most typically a US approach).
As Churchill said the Americans always do the right thing eventually. Your crap is an example of trying everything else first.
Grow the fuck up.
Que?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Thats great and everything, but the US, French, British, South Africans aren't the only destabilizing influence, following decolonization in Africa the Soviets dumped thousands of tanks, thousands of aircraft, tens of thousands of large caliber weapons and millions of guns into Africa from 1960 through 1989.
For the region
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etheopia#Mengistu_Era
"In 1977, there was the Ogaden War, when Somalia captured the part of the Ogaden region, but Ethiopia was able to recapture the Ogaden after receiving military aid from the USSR, Cuba, South Yemen, East Germany and North Korea, including around 15,000 Cuban combat troops."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia#Communist_rule
"By 1978, the Somali troops were ultimately pushed out of the Ogaden. This shift in support by the Soviet Union motivated the Barre government to seek allies elsewhere. It eventually settled on Russia's Cold War arch-rival, the United States, which had been courting the Somali government for some time. All in all, Somalia's initial friendship with the Soviet Union and later partnership with the United States enabled it to build the largest army in Africa."
So the Soviets backed Somalia and loaded them with weapons, then Somalia starts to lose, the Soviets dump weapons into Ethiopia and the US back the Somalis, but all you care to cite are sources blaming it on the US.
Now that the USA is winding down ops in Iraq and Afghanistan there'll be available drone operators who'll need to keep their skills sharp. What better use for Global Hawk and Predator drones and a few Hellfire missiles? Instead of blowing up wedding parties and funerals they could be doing something useful and take out Somali pirates. The unmanned drone optics are more than adequate quality to easily avoid mis-identifying their targets.
Uh, no. The primary rifle used by militias in Africa is going to be the Kalashnikov because it's cheap, rugged, any idiot can use it, and it's light enough for a child to carry. Which is useful, of course, if you want to arm children. As you might guess from the name, the Kalashnikov is a Russian assault rifle that was sold off in vast quantities by Warsaw Pact countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We know that, but the USPTO accepted the Viking patent for piracy - in fact the Vikings did very little piracy, most of their earning came from royalties.
There is not a single source that I have seen which would verify that someone from Europe would have dumped toxic waste near or to the coast of Somalia.
Lets think this rationally for a moment:
Multiple sources confirm that Italian mafia buys ships, fills them with toxic waste and sinks them in the middle of Mediterranean sea
Why would anyone who gets their toxic waste from Europe and are good at "losing" ships at Mediterranean sail through Suez? That and the sea voyage through Red Sea and the return would cause a lot of extra cost.
We are talking 200km vs 4000km here. It is much easier to dispose a junk ship at Mediterranean and come back with speed boats which have enough range for that. This "they poisoned our land, we have RIGHT to pirate" is another lie from greens and other similar people who want to "understand" Somalias plight by placing guilt to Europeans, or anybody else than Somalis themselves.
Ohhhh, you got so close and then WHOOSH ya missed it. The problem isn't "its da regulationz!" although I would argue that some of the regs are dumbshit. The problem is a lie that has been pushed for 20+ years, starting with a Dem by the name of Clinton. Ready for the revelation? here goes...THERE IS NO FREE TRADE!
To call treating as equals a country that literally lets corps use their storm drains as toxic waste dumps, where the air and water are so bad that 9 out of 10 highest cancer rates are all in a single area, and where children need masks to go outside to play as "free trade" is as asinine as saying a football game between your local HS and the Denver Broncos is a "fair test of athletic skill".
The hilarious part? It does NOT work both ways. India is sinking billions into Aerospace rather than buy from us, China buys one or two then reverse engineers or just steals, like digging up the F117 that crashed in Kosovo to steal our stealth tech.
But you see our "give us more MONIES nom nom nom" party (which is quickly becoming the ONLY party) just gets a sly grin and says "Oh they're nationalists" like that is just cute for them, but then go on to rail about how being nationalist or isolationist is "ZOMFG EVIL!" when it comes to us.
Well fuck them and fuck their bullshit. THERE IS NO FREE TRADE and the quicker we lock down the borders and tariff the living hell out of those that pollute the planet the better! Oh and those companies that move to China? Should have to take their headquarters with them. No more house in the Hamptons for you, hope you like the air in China. don't let the door hit you on the way out!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Cutting taxes will only boost the economy if the economy is being choked by the taxes. That's not even close to what's happening in the western world so tax cuts won't boost the economy, only empty the govt's coffers. Maybe in an extreme case it can turn you into a tax haven but that's not a terribly good idea either as Ireland's troubles show.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.