Yearly Archives: 2009

Why Don’t Merchant Ships Carry Weapons?

In the 18th century, here’s how the British treated pirates: coat their bodies in tar, wrap them in chains, and publicly hang them from gallows at the harbor entrance. My guess: that wouldn’t be acceptable today. Unfortunately.

Most maritime organizations oppose arming merchant ships. While I cheered the recent events off Somalia, it does raise serious concerns in the maritime community. 

Why don’t merchant ships arm themselves? I did some googling, and here’s what I learned.

  • Most sailors aren’t trained to use weapons. “We’re sailors, not soldiers,” said one.
  • No matter how ships arm themselves, pirates will come back with bigger guns. If you escalate, pirates will escalate more. You can end up with pirates sitting far off and bombarding the ship or raking it with machine gun fire. 
  • Arming ships will increase insurance costs, since insurance must now cover a range of liability and death situations. 
  • Most ports won’t let an armed ship dock. Period. “Trust me, you aren’t sailing into San Francisco with mercenaries carrying RPGs on board.” Since a merchant ship may dock at many different ports, carrying weapons would be a problem. 
  • The cost of carrying armed private security forces would probably exceed the cost of a potential ransom.
  • Ships carrying chemicals or gas don’t want weapons aboard, and don’t want to provoke a firefight.
  • Shipping companies would rather pay ransom than risk crew members being killed. It’s all a matter of liability costs.
  • From a pirate’s standpoint: if the crew is a threat, why not just kill them?
  • If you’re going to give guns to your sailors, you must provide weapons training. That would be a huge expense, and increase liability costs. (You don’t just give handguns to pilots and think an airplane is safe.)
  • Do we want foreign merchant ships sailing into American ports with cannons and machine guns?
  • Pirates rarely kill commercial crews on large vessels (though yacht owners are frequently killed). Their goal is ransom (whereas on yachts, it’s just thievery). 
  • How many sailors are willing to die to protect a rich ship owner’s profit?
  • If ships carried weapons, it might make them a greater target, as pirates seek to steal the weapons, too.
  • Pirates have been a problem for many, many years, and merchant lines have learned to cope with the threat.
  • If a crew member smuggles a weapon into certain port and gets caught, he could spend 5-10 years in a foreign prison.
  • Military vessles are considered “sovereign territory” when visiting foreign harbors, but that courtesy is not extended to civilian vessles. So any weapons possession is subject to local laws.
  • Nervous sailors could accidentally shoot innocent fishermen, who often approach merchant ships offering to sell their catch. 
  • In an armed confrontation with pirates, the chance is great that a sailor will be injured or killed. This raises huge liability issues for ship owners.
  • Bringing weapons aboard ships is “strongly discouraged” by the United Nations International Maritime Organization. 
  • Many ship owners are less worried about piracy than they are that sailors will kill each other in personal disputes. 
  • A fight with pirates can create an international incident.

Ships now use non-lethal methods such as electric fences, water hoses, and long-range sound cannons, of which one person said, “It’s the most annoying sound you’ve ever heard in your life–you literally cannot operate. It makes you nauseous.”

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The Marvels of Toothpaste Tubes

Steve_toothpaste500.jpg

I have a theory about toothpaste tubes. Behold the Crest tube I hold in my hands above. It has looked just like this, flat, used-up, for nigh unto, oh, must be at least two months. During that time, I’ve continued, on a daily basis, squeezing out enough toothpaste to accomplish my dental care mission. Every morning I think, “Today, there will be no more. It’s empty.” And yet, just enough squeezes out onto the toothbrush to, for yet another day, fight tooth decay and impart minty breath.

For at least 90% of its life, a toothpaste tube looks just like this. Yet, amazingly, as a result of secret technological innovations in high-security Proctor & Gamble labs, it continues to function usefully week after week. Somehow, a high proportion of the toothpaste remains even when the tube appears to be spent. This may, in fact, be a conspiracy to prompt gullible buyers into springing for a new tube, not realizing that they have only begun to mine the depths of flavorful goo contained therein.

It is much like that widow in Sidon, told about in Judges, whose jar of flour and jug of oil never ran empty. Or like the loaves and fishes. Except those were actual miracles, whereas Crest merely uses some clever engineering ploy.

But know this: even though the tube looks empty, it’s cleansing action will yet remain with you for weeks or months as you continue on your daily oral hygiene rituals.

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Iran Comes to Huntington

iranians500.jpg

Parvis Dehghani, Ramez Abdul-Massih, Sammy el Sharayheh

When I came to Huntington College in 1975, we had three students from Iran. This was four years before the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah in February 1979 (the US embassy was seized in November 1979). I’ve wondered what happened to Parvis, Ramez, and Sammy. 

Parvis is the one I remember most vividly. He had an exuberant personality–fun-loving, big laugh, big smile. And smart, evidently, since he graduated with a degree in Philosophy. Everyone liked him. Soon after my freshman year started, he pledged with the Alpha Sigma Eta fraternity. He was a great sport throughout the two weeks of initiation.

I remember hearing Parvis talk once about Iran. He was very proud of his country. He mentioned how progressive, how modern, it was amidst the other Middle-Eastern countries. And he emphasized that Iran was very pro-American. He felt Iran was an important, strategic friend of the United States.

sammy_headdress200.jpgRamez, who graduated the same year with a Biology degree, was quiet and kept a low profile.  My only real memory of him involves the freshman slave auction: he bought me, Steve Barber, and Brad Carpenter, and took us out to do yardwork at the home of Dr. Fred Morgan, a biology professor.

As for Sammy (left)–I have no memories of interactions with him. He didn’t return the next year.

So what happened to these guys? Were they back in Iran in 1979 in time for the revolution? If so, which side did they take? Did they endure hardship for having attended a Christian college in the United States? Or, having experienced some American idealism, did they sympathize with Khomeini against the repressive Shah of Iran (a fairly decent dictator, as dictators go, but still a dictator who committed human rights abuses as he silenced dissent).

It’s quite possible they stuck around in the States for graduate work. Maybe they’re still here. Or maybe they went back long ago, and now only have distant memories of Huntington University. Maybe they fought, perhaps died, in the lengthy war with Iraq. Or maybe they are living normal lives in Iran, and, having lived among Americans,get questions about Abu Ghraib and George Bush’s defense of torture, and why the US views them as such an evil country. If so, how do they respond?

I don’t know. I just have questions, and wonder.

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The Biggest Bailout

Rick Pride, a United Brethren pastor in Columbia City, Ind., left the following as his Facebook status. I like it.

TODAY IN HISTORY, THE GREATEST BAILOUT IN HISTORY, 
WAS PAID, FOR YOU!
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Wise Words from the Sage of Omaha

AudacityofHope.jpegToday, dweebs and lawyers run the world. I’m a marginal dweeb. Put me in Medieval society, and I’d be very ordinary. Not strong. Can’t make stuff. If the Vikings attacked my town, I’d be one of the villagers killed while running toward the forest, an arrow in my back. I’d be one of the nameless millions starved under Stalin or Mao. But as it is, because of what our current society values, I have a good place, and Google knows my name.

I think of the minions toiling in construction, logging, and in steel factories–able-bodied men, big, rough-hewn. In centuries past, they would be the warriors, the hunters–important people. Mountain Men. They didn’t need to be smart or articulate. They just needed to be big and fit. I look at some of the people in my church struggling to find a job, and with no education to put on a resume. Some of them might have made excellent Vikings.

Warren Buffet made this point to Barack Obama several years ago. 

After becoming a senator, Barack Obama was summoned to Omaha by Buffet. The billionaire wanted to talk about tax policy–specifically, why Washington kept cutting his taxes. He told Obama, “If there’s class warfare going on in America, then my class is winning.”

Obama writes about the visit in The Audacity of Hope.

Buffet told him he’d done some calculations. “I’ll pay a lower effective tax rate this year than my receptionist….And if the President has his way, I’ll be paying even less.”

“Effective rate” has to do with deriving most of your income from dividends and capital gains, which Bush reduced in 2003 to a mere 15% rate. Meanwhile, the receptionist was taxed at nearly twice that rate.

Since Reagan, tax policy has increasingly favored the wealthy. It’s something Jesus would condemn, but most Christians seem okay with that, since it’s a Republican policy.

“It just makes sense that those of us who’ve benefited most from the market should pay a bigger share,” Buffet said.

And then came this wonderful insight:

I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner.

But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing–and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.

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Book: Pick-up

pickup.jpgThis book seemed so-so right up until the last two sentences, when it blew me away.

“Pick-up,” by Charles Willeford, was published in 1955. I have a Black Lizard edition. 

The book revolves around Harry, a hard-luck loser of sorts who bounces around aimlessly, and of the troubled gal he befriends and romances. We see him in all kinds of contexts–in bars, with friends, with criminals, with the police, at work, with the gal’s mother, in jail–some of everything. Nothing much really happens. There is no mystery to be solved. We just see Harry interacting with a lot of different people in a lot of different situations.

Frankly, it sporadically bored me. As I turned the last page, I was already thinking about the next book I would start. Then I got to the last couple lines:

I left the shelter of the awning and walked up the hill in the rain.
Just a tall, lonely Negro.
Walking in the rain.

Until that point, I didn’t realize Harry was black. Willeford gave no clues. So throughout the book, I had pictured a white guy interacting with people in all of these situations. And since it’s written in first-person, from Harry’s point of view, I thought I was seeing everything through a white man’s eyes.

But after learning that he was black, it changed the whole book. Now I had to insert a black man into all of those interactions in 1950s Los Angeles. And that made it a whole different story. I found myself retracing the various scenes of the book, replacing my white guy with a black guy. And I realized how brilliant the book was.

Imagine the extra impact this would have had when it was published in 1955. (Sorry I ruined the ending, but I figured this isn’t a book you would ever come across.)

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What to Make of Obama’s Trip

David Sanger, one of the best reporters out there, wrote an overview of President Obama’s recent overseas trip. It’s neither positive nor negative–just a fair look at what he did and didn’t accomplish, and how much of a “grand strategy” we’re beginning to see (and he warns against looking for a grand strategy, especially so soon). He quotes one Obama adviser as saying, “This trip was more about reattaching all the cars on the train and convincing the other leaders that we’re no longer headed for derailment.”

He also writes, “Tellingly, Mr. Obama talked about taking on terrorists but not tyrants. Al Qaeda had to be destroyed, he said, but Iran, North Korea and Cuba would all be engaged. Gone was Mr. Bush’s signature line that ‘freedom is on the march’ or the insistence that democracy was a God-given right.” So some foreign policy themes may be emerging.

I’ve also been hearing about Sanger’s book “The Inheritance,” which looks at the foreign policy world that Obama inherited from the Bush administration. People like Jim Lehrer, Bob Schieffer, and Michael Beschloss laud the book. It evidently gives all kinds of inside dope that hasn’t yet made the light of day, with some stories that sound like they come from a Le Carre novel. I may need to get this one.

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Go to the Source

Rudy Giuliani was on Morning Joe, criticizing President Obama for not talking tough with Iran. I thought his messages have set a good tone (but what do I know?), and that seems to be what most people think. But Rudy, of course, knows better.gaddafi.jpeg

Years ago, when Muamar Gaddafi of Libya was in the news regularly, you would see his name spelled all kinds of ways. His name contains sounds that lack any exact English equivalent (the initial sound is like a throaty k, like the German pronunciation of Bach, and the middle sound is similar to the English th, but with the tongue pulled back further behind the teeth). So, how to spell it? News sources used all kinds of variations, such as:

  • Gaddafi
  • Khaddafi
  • Gadhafi
  • Qaddhafi
  • Qaddafi
  • Kaddafi
  • Qadaffi
  • Kazzafi
  • Qathafi
  • al-Quadhafi
  • Quathafi
  • Gheddafi
  • Khadafy
  • Qudhafi

That’s the short list. So Americans, entrenched in their vacuum, debated back and forth on the proper pronunciation. Then someone asked, “How does the Libyan press, when publishing in English, spell his name?” Well, they aren’t in accord, either.

  • Libyan Embassy in Washington DC: Col/Muammar Elkaddfi
  • Libya Online: Muammar Al-Qathafi  
  • Libyan American Chamber of Commerce: Muammar Gadafi 

Then the Big Man himself settled it. Turns out said Big Man responded to a letter from some American second-graders, and he signed his name this way: Moammar El-Gadhafi. I would say that’s somewhat definitive. Though if you check Wikipedia, you’ll find that they insist on al-Gaddafi. Whatever.

My point, in a tediously roundabout way, is: how do Arabs feel about Barack Obama’s approach? Forget Rudy–he’s not the target audience (nor is anyone in America the target audience). Nor are any of the professional pundits infesting TV news. How do Obama’s messages come across to Arabs?

queennoor.jpegQueen Noor of Jordan, one of the classiest persons on the planet, came on Morning Joe after Rudy. She was asked about the same issue. Her response: it is not diplomacy to talk with aggression and confrontation. That, she said, does not work. She thought Obama’s speeches, from the inauguration on, have struck the right tone.

This is one of the problems with American news: we just have a bunch of pundits (usually WASPs) sitting around spouting semi-informed or totally uninformed opinions (but faking it well). They go from show to show discussing the Topic of the Day, as if they are authorities on everything. They aren’t. And we shouldn’t take their pronouncements so seriously.

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More of the Same

On the way home from work yesterday, I switched the radio to WOWO, and these are the first words I heard: “Obama is just a sack of manure.” That may not be an exact quote, but it’s close. 

I, of course, had stumbled onto the Rush Limbaugh World of Hate show. I listened for a few more minutes as he ranted on about Barack Obama, hateful stuff. I imagine this is what he does for hours on end, day after day. Spewing hatred for all things Obama. A few minutes of Garbage In is all I could take.

Rush likes to throw out stories that “you won’t hear this from the liberal mainstream media.” Fox does that, too. I occasionally look up things like this. There’s bountiful info available, and a discriminating mind (that would be me) can sort through what is and isn’t credible. Often, the reason the “liberal mainstream media” doesn’t report these gossipy tidbits is because they are unverified, unverifiable, or just plain boloney. 

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Michael Jordan and Audie Murphy

On the way to work, I listened on ESPN to yesterday’s press conference announcing the nominees for the NBA Hall of Fame. Michael Jordan seemed none to anxious for it, joking about putting his uniform back on and heading out onto the court. Going into the Hall of Fame, to him, meant officially admitting, “I’m done. I don’t have it anymore.”

Mike&Mike mused about what it must be like to have been the best in the world at something, but not the best anymore. A writer, painter, sculptor, composer can remain the best until he dies. But not an athlete. Can anything fill the void once filled with extreme adrenaline rushes, glory, and triumph?

audiemurphy.jpgFor some reason, I thought of Audie Murphy, America’s most famous soldier of World War 2. I read a superb article about him years ago in Esquire. Murphy enlisted at age 16, weighing 110 pounds and standing 5’5″. The Army tried to turn him into a cook, but he insisted on combat.

You see, Murphy was a natural warrior. He fought in numerous campaigns from Sicily to Italy to France, and won every medal available to an American soldier, some of them several times. Many men rise to the occasion in combat, but not many are natural warriors. 

After the war, Murphy received national acclaim for his heroics, and became a movie star, making 44 movies. But in the article, written during those Hollywood years, he talked about the emptiness, the dullness, of his post-war life. Nothing, for him, could match the adrenaline rush of combat, with every sense heightened, your life on the line, reaching your limit and still pushing forward, being wounded (three times!) yet battling on. He was the best; he was made for battle. To fill the void, Murphy turned to alcohol. He finally died in a plane crash in 1971. 

Michael Jordan seems to be doing just fine in filling the void. And yet, I’m sure he looks back over his playing career and thinks, “I was made for Game Seven, made for the last-second shot. Nothing I’ve done since, or will ever do, can equal that.”

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