The situation with the pirates off the coast of Somalia must be one of the more bizarre stories floating around the world these days. Indeed, it can be hard to decide who the real pirates are; perhaps there are pirates and there are pirates.

An article by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times of Sep 30th, 2008, Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money is truly strange. Some highlights from this article:

- Somali fishermen turned to piracy when their nation collapsed and foreign fishing fleets started plundering their coasts.

- A bunch of Somali pirates stumbled on a shipment of arms, including Russian tanks and antiaircraft guns, destined for Kenya. These pirates are asking for a negotiable sum of USD$20 million to release the ship and say they just want the money, not the weapons. There may have been a gun fight between pirates on the ship. ("Dude. get your hands off my tank or I'll pop you like Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan! ... This is my tank, go get your own friggin' tank!")

The release from responsibility, "I was just following orders", is on target for further acceptance in the US. Members of US intelligence agencies have committed crimes, including torture of prisoners and kidnapping, under the current Bush administration. An AP article, Senators say no witch hunt aimed at spy agencies, by Pamela Hess of the AP on Jan 10th 2009, discusses the likelihood that Obama might actually uphold his oath of office (to defend the Constitution of the United States) and prosecute those who violated the law. The article implies that it is unlikely Obama will do anything about these crimes. Diane Feinstein told the AP "that there is a clear distinction between policymakers and those who execute the policy" (quote from article, not Feinstein). She punts responsibility to the administration and the director (presumably she means the several directors of the various intelligence agencies).

A guest at the guest house was watching the movie the core. Here, our rather unprofessional and somewhat manic heroes and pretty heroine must save the planet, or at least important cultural icons such as the Colliseum and Golden Gate Bridge from scary lightning bolts, by traveling to the core of the earth and "restarting" the core to get it spinning again. The tool of choice, as in most disaster movies of this ilk, is a bunch of scarily big nuclear bombs. As usual, having a computer and google handy makes movies much more interesting. Now, granted, the entire premise of getting a bunch of people into some special earth-penetrating "earth ship" and scooting down to where there's crazy heat and pressure and rather solid material to blast the center of the planet with a few puny nukes is rather absurd. Just to round things off, the acting and dialogue have no redeeming value. But, let's see what fun we can have with a little bit of physics.

headlines on google news today are an odd mix. the economy is tanking, obama is shaping into an environmentally-minded president, and class warfare is alive and well in the us.

Study: As Banks Failed, Top Executives Earned $1.6B, Fox News reports on an AP study. Incredible the amount of money these guys take. Some are reduced to their "base" salaries of only $600,000, since apparently the company still needs their "expertise". Exactly what expertise was that? Should they be sacked and replaced with people who make money instead of drive their banks into insolvency? Just a crazy thought there. these guys are siblings to those who put us in wars of choice. because, as far as i can figure out, the only effective benefit derived from such courses of action is from war profiteering, given that the soldiers sent to die generally derive little benefit and general civilian populations are placed at disadvantage (death, destruction, debt).

If I were a religious man, I might say the following to my fellow Jews on Yom Kippur, when Jews gather to pray and beg forgiveness, when they lament the wrongs that they have done.

On Yom Kippur, our prayers tell us that God will listen to our pleas and, we hope, will forgive us our transgressions against him. It is said, though, that God will not forgive our transgressions against our fellows—for this, we must make amends with those we have wronged. What if those we harm are all creatures, and the Earth, and those yet to be? We are causing the Earth to warm, and to change, and causing the deaths and the ends of many forms of the world. If we do not act to address this within the next few years, but instead allow atmospheric carbon concentrations to increase beyond a critical threshold, then the Earth will suffer massive changes. We may well ruin the Earth for the next 50 generations. Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, but not from the tree of life, and we were banished from Eden for their transgressions. If we do not now change our course, then for 50 generations the Earth may well be turned into a place of "hell and high water", with terrible droughts and heat waves, extreme storms, rising seas, massive extinctions, wars between people fighting for the remaining scraps, and refugees fleeing an ever-changing climate. The creatures we destroy will never be restored and it will take untold years for the vibrant richness we may observe in our everyday lives to flourish once again.

According to the NYT article Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China by John Markoff (1/10/2008), reporting on the discovery by Nart Villeneuve and published on Information Warfare Monitor, China monitors Skype text chats and archives the text and personal information of users whose chats contain various trigger words, such as "Falun Gong" or "milk powder". In the past, the appropriate American response would be something like "Those terrible Chinese! They violate their citizens' rights to free speech and communication! What dastardly dictators!", with the subtext that in America, and perhaps other nations of the so-called "free world", we are better because our governments uphold more noble rights. While such statements about China remain fairly accurate, the subtext has collapsed. The NSA illegally spies on American communications. European countries have taken to archiving, for several months or years, all email communications and record end points of phone conversations.

A little observation from the other side of the world. When I speak with folks back home (that being the USA) they sound like people observing a slowly-unfolding disaster, a train wreck. They can't turn away from the scene of carnage, the news of the latest financial mess, yet they are horrified by what they see. Here in Australia some people think the economy will tank down the road, others seem less concerned. Australia's economy is dependent on mining exports, mainly to Asia and China. When the Chinese economy slows, which it should if Americans stop buying as much Chinese goods, then the Australian economy should also slow, this excluding any other financial effects of the mortgage mess in the US. Everyone in the world seems to remember 9/11. In the US, this was the biggest blow to national perceptions that I can recall, and it was characterized in part by people staring at TVs, their images of carnage and pronouncement, iconic pictures of crowds filled with expressions of shock gathered around public televisions.