Not to make light of ongoing troubles in the Horn of Africa and beyond, but... well.If you want to go beyond the five A's, click here.
Luck and a Fair “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” To You!
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Not to make light of ongoing troubles in the Horn of Africa and beyond, but... well.If you want to go beyond the five A's, click here.
A hypothesis: Pirates, hackers, and terrorists are perennial actors in international relations. They will never be permanently defeated; the frontier will never be permanently settled.The underlying...
1) A small puppy, if walked real hard first, will sit quietly outside long enough for a decent taping with no unseemly background noise. (I had worried about that.)2) It's important to spell out...
In addition to being Rosh Hashanah, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. In case any of you needs pointers, I strongly recommend The Pirate Primer by George Choundas, who has culled...
The dramatic conclusion of the Maersk Alabama Pirate encounter is now a wrap, and this screams for a movie. My only question is who will buy the rights to Capt. Phillip's story? NBC? Lifetime? I happen to think its bigger than a made-for-tv production, worthy of like Michael Bay or John Woo. Staring Bruce Willis as Captain Richard Phillips, Mark Wahlberg as first officer Shane Murphy, Keifer Sutherland as Special Operations commander Jack Bauer, and of course Johnny Depp as a Pirate.Updated: It looks like SPIKE has made the first move, green-lighting the docu-series "Pirate Hunters: USN."H/T...
I have a mental queue of about 3 or 5 post that I've been meaning to get up in the past couple of days, but the demands of a new baby in the house are leaving me sleep deprived and somehow unable to find time to construct the posts I want to write (go figure...). So, in lieu of that, a couple of scribbles from my mental notebook that merit your attention and our discussion.--SecDef Gates unveiled his defense budget. This could be one the most significant policy undertakings of the Obama administration and lead to some real, meaningful reforms with profound consequences on both domestic and...
Finally, a resolution to the four-month-old stand-off with the hijackers of the Faina off the coast of Somalia. NY Times reported today that the pirate crew will disembark from the Faina after some sum of money, paid by the ship owners, was air-dropped onboard: "According to one of the pirates, the owners of the ship had paid the ransom; the pirates had counted the money; and now they were just waiting for nightfall to slip away from the ship.The hijacking of the Ukrainian ship, called the Faina, stirred up fears of a new epoch of piracy and helped precipitate a rash of similar attacks off...
In a Reuters op-ed yesterday, Bernd Debusmann makes "the business case for high seas piracy":As far as illicit businesses with low risk and high rewards go, it doesn't get much better than piracy on the high seas. The profit margins can easily surpass those of the cocaine trade. The risks? "There is no reason not to be a pirate," according to U.S. Vice Admiral William Gortney, who commands the U.S. navy's Fifth Fleet. "The vessel I'm trying to pirate, they won't shoot at me. I'm going to get my money." Even pirates who are intercepted have little to fear. "They won't arrest me because...
Daniel Sekulitch provides an update on the pirate "mothership" sunk by India last week in a much-trumpeted police action on the high seas:"It has now been confirmed by the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre that the vessel sunk last week by an Indian warship was not a pirate mothership but, rather, a fishing boat that had been hijacked by pirates. The Thai-owned fishing boat, Ekawat Nava 5, had been commandeered early on November 18 and the crew had been tied up by their captors, according to the shipowner. Later that same day, the Indian Navy Ship Tabar encountered the Ekawat Nava 5 and ordered...
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10cThe Buccaneer Stops HereBarack Obama InterviewJohn McCain InterviewSarah Palin VideoFunny Election VideoWhy is it so hard to deal with the Pirate problem? The Daily Show is onto something here....
This post began as a response to the comments on Peter's recent post on pirates, but they got to be so long, and required hyperlinks, I decided to start a new thread. In his comment to that post, T. Greer asks what the pirates who hijacked the oiltanker Sirius Star were thinking, since they can't deal with the logistics involved in selling the cargo and were certainly likely to provoke the great powers (further) by targeting such a prize. Somali pirates want two things, as far as I can tell: 1) Money, which is why their strategies have been based on ransom demands - they don't care about...
Just when you thought that the Pirates couldn't get any more ambitious than seizing a freighter full of Ukrainian weapons...Somali Pirates seized a Saudi supertanker Tuesday. The tanker, one of the largest ships on the ocean, is the size of a US Aircraft carrier and three times a heavy when full. It has a crew of 25 (by comparison, an air craft carrier has a crew of over 5000). It carries over a quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily crude output.It is, perhaps, one of the most valuable targets that the Pirates could have seized. Its contents are estimated to be worth over $100 million. Of course,...