Nuke Dubai

I don't often get onto tangents about human rights issues, but please lets nuke Dubai.

Because of this.

Too bad it's too late to impeach George W. Bush. Any President who stands by and allows an American citizen to be tortured by by a member of the Dubai royal family without lifting a finger for either of the men who were tortured - one of them being imprisoned and sexually assaulted by the UAE government regularly to get him to turn over this tape while Bush was President and made aware of the situation - ought to have been fired, locked in a room and forced to watch that video on repeat for 6 months.

I guess it would have been pretty hard for a guy who was running his own torture program to go throwing stones at the UAE last year. Brought to you by the party of 'family values.'

Yeah, I voted straight Democratic ticket in 2008. This reminds me of why.

No, Arming Merchant Vessels Will Not Really Stop Pirates

Arming merchant vessels as they pass through waters near Somalia is a nice idea and all, but it will not be much of a solution in the long run.

Here's what happened when this was done 300 years ago. A ship owner would decide to spend the money on arming his ship and he would have, say, 30 guns mounted on his 3 masted, ship-rigged merchant vessel. 15 guns per side. Pretty good teeth, in theory. But it would usually take a gun crew of at least 5 men per gun to operate each of those weapons. So that would be a minimum of about 75 men to fight one side of the ship. Plus around 25 men to actually sail the thing during the fight. That's a minimum of 100 healthy men on board required to put up a real fight against a pirate attack.

The problem was that unlike the purchase of the guns, manning the ship to man-o-war levels was an on-going expense that constantly ate away at the owner's profits. So they would buy the guns and then more often than not end up manning the ship with only around 45 men. Enough to sail the ship from port to port, but in the event of an actual battle they couldn't really use more than 3 or 4 of the guns.

Today the weapons and propulsion systems have changed, but I expect that the economics would remain the same. At best, shipping companies would buy some fancy guns and rocket launchers for their ships but pretty soon there would still only be 20 people aboard your typical container ship. The pirates will respond by attacking in larger numbers and those thin crews aboard the freighters will be overwhelmed.

Sure, a few of the more zealous and enterprising ship owners will man their vessels with numbers sufficient to repel pirates. But then their overhead will go up and more business will shift over to their cheaper competition that is perfectly prepared to risk the lives of their third world sailors in the interest of higher profits. Simple economics nearly guarantee that fully manned ships in pirate-infested waters will remain the exception rather than the rule.

I will say that if I was on board one of those ships, I would damned well want to be armed. But lets not kid ourselves into thinking that private shipping companies are going to be able to do the job of the Navy. The answer to the problem of Somali piracy is a combination of convoys with man-o-war escorts and a robust and nimble American navy willing to engage in creative tactics to seek, identify and destroy pirates at sea.

What Would Lord Cochrane Do?

Ok, here's what we need to do about the Somali pirates. Decoy vessels.

Put together an operation whereby dozens of container ships, freighters, fishing vessels and private yachts are outfitted with carefully hidden .50 machine guns and packed to the gills below decks with marines. Have them all cruise in known pirate-infested waters.

When they are attacked, one of 2 things could be done. Either allow them to board and discover that they are surrounded by heavily armed marines, or simply blow their boats out of the water. I suppose that in all fairness we would have to wait for the pirates to actually open fire before sinking their boats, unless they were attempting to board.

The key to making this work would be to have a whole lot of decoys out there at once, in order to attract and destroy as many pirates as possible. Once this is done a few times they will curtail their operations while they figure out how to avoid these traps. So we'd need to take as many of them out as possible before word gets around.

This is not far-fetched. This sort of ruse was part of the standard book of tricks used by the British Navy's frigate and corvette captains assigned to chasing pirates and corsairs during the age of sail. That brilliant master of frigate warfare, Lord Thomas Cochrane, did this with a regularity. It makes far more sense than trying to hunt down pirates on land in their bases. There's no telling them from civilians in that setting. But a boat full of armed men who are shooting at your ship are, beyond question, pirates. And blowing them into tiny pieces at that point is absolutely fair game.

Will we lose some people in the resulting battles? Yes, of course. We're talking about fighting pirates on the open sea. That does tend to involve some actual bloodshed.

American Mariners: 1, Pirates: 0

HELL YEAH!

Says the Washington Post a few minutes ago: "US Crew Members Retake Ship Siezed by Somali Pirates."

This problem with the Somali pirates has been going on for years now and they have captured probably over 100 foreign vessels. Some of them attempted to evade the enemy and occasionally fought against the initial boarding. But none of the crews of these merchant vessels ever succeeded in actually rebelling against their captors, defeating the pirates, re-taking the ship and getting away with a pirate as their prisoner.

Until today, when these guys made the mistake of attacking a merchant ship flying the American flag. This was a crew out of Norfolk, Virginia, incidentally. We still don't have all the details but this looks like one hell of a victory for the stars and stripes.

Here's the lesson, folks. Whether its flight 93 over Pennsylvania, a tower in Austin or a container ship off the coast of Somalia, do not start a fight with Americans. If there is an American flag flying, just get the hell away from that ship. Doesn't matter if it's a yacht, a container ship or a frigate. You are going to get your ass kicked if you attack something with an American flag flying over it.

Buying Lion Meat: Why It's OK

Through its 'iReporter' feature (I cannot respect any institution or product that places a capital letter in the middle of a non-hyphenated word) CNN brings us outrage over the fact that someone is selling lion meat online. The meat comes from lions that were captive-raised, legally, on farms.

The outrage seems to be based on this statement: "Lions are a threatened species with wild populations falling to just around an estimated 30,000."

Indeed there are far fewer lions in the wild than most people not forced to live surrounded by them would hope for. But what impact on the survival and success of the species does farming and eating them really have?

Zero. Because lions are not endangered due to difficulty with reproducing. They are endangered because of habitat loss. Looking first at the various African subspecies, as we continue to try to improve the human situation in Africa, more and more savannah and forest is cleared and used for agriculture. If you take 100 acres and put a fence around it and plant millet on it, you must necessarily deny the various native antelope access to that land or else they will eat up all of your crop. That's 100 acres of native plants that is no longer being converted into the dozen wildebeest and band of impala and a half dozen or so warthogs that would otherwise have been making a living there. Those animals and their offspring will no longer serve as prey for the local lions. As this farmland creeps farther and farther out, there is less prey for the lions to eat. Resulting in increased cub mortality, as well as more frequent (and sometimes deadly) territorial clashes between prides and lone males.

That is the main reason why African lions are in trouble. It's a question of habitat. The available habitat in most areas is already carrying the maximum number of lions that nature will allow or that the locals will put up with. If you released 10,000 captive-raised lions into the wild in Africa, roughly 10,000 lions (or possibly more, because cubs would be disproportionately impacted) would be dead of starvation or battle wounds by the end of the year. The only way that this equation changes is if new habitat is first obtained and made available to the lions. And even then it would often be better to allow lions in nearby habitat to colonize the new preserve on their own, since so many captive lions are actually hybrids of various subspecies that would tend to 'pollute' the local gene pool and have the effect of eventually rendering that local subspecies defunct.

With the exception of a few subspecies that are entirely or very nearly extinct in the wild (such as the Barbary and Asiatic lions), captive breeding of lions is completely useless for the preservation of the species. Lions that are farmed for whatever strange reasons people seem to come up with are totally out of the picture in terms of conservation -- and I include zoos in this statement. If you want to get into the question of cruelty or ethics, that is a whole other can of worms. I'm talking solely about conservation of threatened species here.

As far as conservation is concerned, go ahead and order up some captive-raised lion meat. Enjoy. It has no bearing whatsoever on the survival of the species.

To touch just briefly on the question of ethics in farming, lets see what a lion farm looks like. Here are some photos from a South African blog. While I can't imagine that the lions are thrilled to be there, it compares very favorably to the vast majority of facilities where pigs are 'farmed.' This here is a farrowing cage, which this pig will probably spend months or years in. Not even enough room to turn around in, but she will be trapped in this tiny cage 24/7, producing piglets for the rest of her miserable life. That is the story behind every piece of bacon and every ham sandwich that most western people have eaten. Compare this standard practice to the conditions in which we find the farmed lions and suddenly lion meat sounds comparatively ethical.

Photo courtesy of Arno & Louise under Creative Commons.

The New Cigarette Tax is Morally Wrong

Sorry I've been out of action for a while In the first place I'm working on a book, which takes up time that formerly went towards blogging. In the second place, I've been itching all this time to write about the AIG thing but I legally can't on account of technically being a licensed agent. Well, I could write about it but I can't legally say anything negative or disparaging about an insurance company, which pretty well means I can't say anything at all right now.

I've come out of my cave to point out one thing about this newly hiked federal cigarette tax. I do not smoke and have never been a smoker. But the idea that increasing the cost of an addictive drug will result in people quitting that drug is absurd. Cocaine costs more per gram than gold does. So does heroin. Does that stop cocaine addicts from snorting cocaine? Of course not. If they can't afford the cocaine anymore then they stop paying their mortgage. Or they sell their furniture. Or steal your car stereo. News flash: they're addicted.

Everybody knows about the health hazards of smoking lots of tobacco. Those who can easily quit have already done so. This tax isn't going to significantly reduce smoking. It's going to pick on people who have a medical condition of addiction, taking money away from groceries and gas and bills. The single mother with a 3 pack a day habit will be spending that much less money on her kids. It's not that she wants to spend less money feeding her kids - she has a medical condition of being physically and psychologically addicted to nicotine. Taking food out of their mouths is not a 'natural consequence' of the addiction. It's an engineered consequence deliberately created by Congress.

The new cigarette tax is morally wrong, reflecting everything that was already backwards about our society's approach to addiction and drug policy in general.