Kasey’s Stick

Kasey likes her sticks, but most of all she likes to pose like this until I try to pick up the stick at which point in prancing blur of grey she teleports across the yard.

kaseys-gotta-stickKasey likes her sticks, but most of all she likes to pose like this until I try to grab the stick at which point in a prancing blur of grey she teleports across the yard.

Chinese Sailors Repel Pirates; UN Authorizes Air and Land Attacks

A Chinese ship crew bravely fought off pirates yesterday by keeping the pirates out of the crew quarters until international help could arrive after the pirates boarded their ship, the Zhenhua 4.

A Chinese ship crew bravely fought off pirates yesterday by keeping the pirates out of the crew quarters until international help could arrive after the pirates boarded their ship, the Zhenhua 4.

From AFP:

“I’m actually very surprised that the crew managed to hold back the pirates. I don’t know how they did it, but they did it,” said Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau piracy reporting centre in Kuala Lumpur.

“Because of this action, the military helicopters came and they managed to chase the pirates away. The pirates on board eventually left the ship and the master is proceeding on his course,” he told AFP.

This comes just as the UN has authorized land and sea attacks on the Somali pirates from all military forces. There’s a bit of a problem here as the attacking military must seek permission from Somalia’s government first, but it should help matters in the shipping lanes off the gulf of Aden. See previous report here.

Pirate Update: Escalation

A quick update to my previous report on the Somali pirates, it appears that the escalation to sophisticated weapons that I mentioned as a probability is now underway, sponsored by Al Qaeda

A quick update to my previous report on the Somali pirates, it appears that the escalation to sophisticated weapons that I mentioned as a probability is now underway, sponsored by Al Qaeda. This comes from the Mindanao Examiner, who mentions the source as Lloyd’s of London:

This special reinforcement seems to come more than timely. Disturbing news had been reported from London by Lloyds, the biggest insurance fund and premier underwriter of maritime transportation. According to its information from Lloyds of London, Al-Qa’idah terrorist has formed its own flotilla of 20 ships and stationed them in small harbours and island shelters in the area of the Horn of Africa and among the numerous islands of the Indonesian archipelago.

Rapid-fire automatic guns and man-portable air-defence missile systems have been installed on the vessels. In terms of combat employment they are subdivided into assault boats and kamikaze ships: fast patrol craft capable of carrying up to three tons of explosives. Many experts observe that Al-Qa’idah terrorists could perfectly well borrow the tactics of the modern-day freebooters from Somalia, disguising their ships as a pirate fleet.

There have been several conferences in Dubai, Asia, and India recently to establish better protocols and protections using everything from faster speeds to armed crews, this is being driven by insurance agencies like Lloyd’s who are tired of paying the ransoms and who have raised the rates accordingly.
Some are debating whether it’s piracy or terrorism – I’ll continue to label it terror simply because some of the ransom monies paid are going to terror outfits.

The Way Out Fund: A Millennial Challenge

Governments tend to think at most in quarter centuries, and institutions think in quarters and years: truly long term initiatives and visions in human history are extremely rare.

eyeI love life and humanity with a deep passion and I value intelligent life highly, but at some point in the future Earth will become uninhabitable for life with close to 100 percent certainty. There are several potential ways that could happen, ranging from impact with a large planetoid or meteor to things we ourselves might mistakenly do. There are plenty of books on doomsday scenarios that explain things better than I could in the space here; and the how, why, or what of earth’s end isn’t the point of this millennial challenge.

I’m no doomsday crier – the end of times isn’t near IMHO, but some day it will come. The challenge is to figure a way out.

The way out fund is a long term endeavor to last 1,000 years; and this is the first millennial challenge I am proposing. It’s really not a question of  if but instead of when, and the  challenge isn’t to figure out how, what, or when; the challenge is to establish a way out for humanity. The way out is to have other options, and other options take both funding and technology – hence The Way Out Fund (TWOF.)

Governments tend to think at most in quarter centuries, and institutions think in quarters and years: truly long term initiatives and visions in human history are extremely rare.

The great wall of China comes to mind, and that took an Empire to complete. Since humanity generally muddles their way towards a freer, more prosperous future without much nudging, I don’t expect us to have a large scale multinational dictatorship in place in the future.

Instead I see varying flavors of democratic countries and multi-national  corporations that continue to muddle their way to a better future. We can’t expect any single one of them to have the resources or funding to immediately respond on the scale needed for an emergency that threatens all of humanity, no matter how highly we think of any individual government, company, or institution. We can’t expect immediate cooperation among these bodies either. We can’t expect that the favored “one world government” of secular humanism will work either for you have only to look at the UN now to see how that might go.

What humanity needs to escape from at some point in the future can’t be determined, and preparing for an eventuality that might not come seems silly, so presupposing a solution should not be the purpose of the fund.

We might need to burrow into the Earth to escape the heat of the sun, we might need to migrate off the Earth, we might need to live in the oceans. It can’t be predicted what will be needed until we can see the form that the end of the Earth will take.

At present our knowledge and capabilities aren’t able to do that yet, and trying to predict the future is notoriously rife with unintended silliness. You really can’t predict the future because it’s too multiplex, but you can prepare for it, just as you can’t predict disasters, but you can prepare for them in general.

You also can’t direct the future with an assured outcome, and past efforts towards that have resulted in some of the worst times in human history, as well as other strange bedfellows and general nuttiness. (I will refer you here to Virginia Postrel’s book, “The Future and its Enemies“.)

The Way Out Fund is an insurance policy for humanitie’s future, and it will need some very rich initial seed donors. TWOF should start with capital enough to make it a monumental fund within 150 years, for who can predict how soon it will be needed? It will also need some serious protections, and a legal incorporation instrument with checks and balances. The fund should fully eschew all politics, and should invest in safe to medium risk worldwide technology companies and safe securites using very conservative standard banking methods, not the unsafe banking investments we have today. It should be geographically diverse and multi-stratum, with the bulk of the fund funding diverse technology.

The fund should have a general purpose of insuring humanitie’s future in the face of a calamitous event. This method for actual fund use should be well defined, and proscribed. Once established it should grow for a half to full century until it achieves wealth beyond that of all nations.

So the Millenium challenge of  The Way Out Fund is the start of an idea, what are your thoughts on it?

Update: Looking at other long lasting purposeful bodies the oldest “corporations” tend to be Religious bodies, Banks, Insurance companies, and educational companies. Truly Long Lasting commercial and financial institutions are pretty rare.

Upgrade Done!

So far I am liking the new WP, poking around the new icons and dashboard, taking it for a spin. I’m blogging this direct from Dashboard.
Update: I am liking it, I rearranged my dashboard, loaded plugins directly, tried a few new themes. Kudos to the dev team for a job well done.

The Last Full Moon Before Christmas is Out

This is the last full moon of 2008, you can seen it now through the 15th or so when it starts to wane. One other note on this photo, if you click on the thumb to see the full enlarged size you will note two abberations in the lower left quadrant, that’s not something on the lens, it’s a couple of tree branch tips.