Filed under: Africa, Environment, Global Warming, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Climate Change, Climate Gate, Vice President Al Gore
Netherlands newspapers and news sites broke the story today about the findings of a research team led by Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damste — a leading molecular paleontologist at Utrecht University — about the icecap on Mount Kilimanjaro, which has become a symbol of anthropogenic global warming.
Their research shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was never the result of cold air, but rather of large amounts of precipitation which fell about 11.000 years ago, at the beginning of the Holocene period. The melting and freezing of moisture on top of the mountain appears to be part of “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The current melting is not the result of manmade environmental damage.
In the dry period between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago, Kilimanjaro was ice-free. At the end of this period, a dramatic climate change from dry to very wet took place — driven by changes in solar radiation — which resulted in the creation of an icecap.
The website of Elsevier magazine, the most widely circulated Dutch political weekly carried the headline “Dutchman discredits Al Gore’s climate evidence.”
Filed under: Africa, Cool Site of the Day, Developing Nations, Foreign Policy, Freedom, The Elephant's Child
Uncommon Knowledge is back this week as host Peter Robinson interviews Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid; Why Aid Is Not working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. Dambisa Moyo grew up in Zambia. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard,an MBA from American University, and a doctorate from Oxford, and has worked for the World Bank and Goldman Sachs.
$1 trillion in aid to Africa over the last 50 years, she says, has done positive harm. Ten percent of Africans in the 1970s lived in dire circumstances. Today 70 percent of Africans live on less than $2 a day. Life expectancy is declining and poverty is endemic. The “glamor aid” business, so beloved by celebrities, is malignant. The Chinese, on the other hand, are there to do business and create jobs.
Fascinating discussion, and well worth your time. Each segment (of 5) is only about 7 minutes. I recommend them highly. You will find all sorts of interesting people in previous interviews: Former Prime Minister of Australia John Howard, Thomas Sowell, John Bolton, Andrew Klavan are just a few.
Filed under: Africa, Science/Technology, The Elephant's Child | Tags: African Discovery, Amazing Science, New Worlds to Explore
Scientists explore an abandoned ant city to see what is below the hill that appears on the ground. This is absolutely amazing. I would never have dreamed of this. You never know what you will find on YouTube!
Filed under: Africa, Developing Nations, Foreign Policy, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Oil Supertankers, Piracy on the High Seas, Ransom, Somali Pirates
In earlier days, first you did the former, then the latter. Today the problem is more difficult. There are ships and crews held for ransom for months. The 25-man crew of the Sirius Star had been held for two months. The U.S. Navy released a film of a canister of cash — supposedly $3 million — being parachuted onto the deck of the oil supertanker.
The pirates originally wanted $16 million, but settled for 3. Then the story gets a little fuzzy. One account says they squabbled over the loot, then a wave washed over their getaway boat and drowned five of them. The picture, however shows a placid sea with no storm on the horizon.
Now it is reported that one pirate washed ashore with $153,000. Another account says the other three swam to shore. A third claims that Somalis traveling along the shore have slowly collected dollars floating in on the tide.
The U.S. Navy is in charge of a task-force designed to prevent such piracy. Some ships have contracted with Blackwater to protect them. Because there is essentially no government in Somalia, there is no law to deal with them. Pirate movies are all very well, but this is not a story of adventure or heroics, and possibly not even truth. But there you are.
Filed under: Africa, Developing Nations, Foreign Policy, News, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child
The Sirius Star, the oil-laden Saudi supertanker which was captured by Somali pirates last November 15, has been ransomed. Its cargo of crude oil was valued at U.S . $100 million at the time. It has been held ever since with its 25-member crew for ransom.
The U.S. Navy released photos Friday showing a parachute, carrying what was described as “an apparent payment” floating toward the tanker. Five of the Somali pirates who released the hijacked oil supertanker, drowned while trying to make their escape with their share of the loot.
Pirate Daud Nure said the boat with eight people on board overturned in a storm after dozens of pirates left the ship following a two-month standoff in the Gulf of Aden. Three people reached shore after swimming for several hours.
More than a dozen ships with about 300 crew members are still being held by pirates, including the weapons-laden Ukranian cargo ship MV Faina, which was seized in September.
The AP notes that “the multimillion dollar ransoms are one of the few ways to earn a living in the impoverished, war ravaged country. Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991 and nearly half of its population depends on aid.” Of course AP, as usual, portrays the bad guys as victims.
Filed under: Africa, Foreign Policy, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Crime/Law Enforcement, Failed States, Piracy, Terrorism
In the news today, a cruise line disembarked its passengers in Yemen, and flew them farther down the African coast to avoid encountering Somali pirates. Last week pirates fired on a US cruise ship carrying hundreds of passengers as it steamed across the Gulf of Aden on a 32 day cruise from Rome to Singapore. This is serious trouble.
The International Maritime Bureau has estimated that more than 100 ships have been attacked off Somalia by seagoing pirates since January. At least 14 ships and 250 crew members are still being held for ransom. I wrote about the attack on the Saudi oil tanker on November 18, here. There was another attack the next day, on another ship.
So why are we letting them get away with it? How can we allow them to hold 250 crew members prisoner, for ransom? Bret Stephens explained in the Wall Street Journal, in a splendid essay called “Why Don’t We Hang Pirates Anymore?“Mr. Stephens explains how we got to the point where there is, as senior U.S. military officials indicate “no controlling legal authority”. We have, evolved perhaps, beyond the 18th century when we could just hang them from the yardarm. And this is not entirely a positive development. It is a lot more complicated to be “humane warriors”, as we are, and it makes the world less secure.
Max Boot takes up the problem of pirates and terrorism and failed states, also in the Wall Street Journal. How do we bring the rule of law to lawless states with no real governance? There is a vast difference between a war on another state, if it comes to that, and a war against a terrorist enemy that minds no rules of engagement, no international conventions, and is just a menace to international security.
The African Union peacekeepers have been ineffective in dealing with the genocide in Darfur, nor has NATO been effective in trying to get member states to live up to their commitments in Afghanistan. As Mr. Boot says “If NATO won’t do enough to win the war in Afghanistan, its highest priority, there is scant chance that it will commit troops to police Pakistan’s tribal areas or Somalia’s coast. And if NATO members won’t act, who will?”
These latter two essays address the essence of some of our problems in the Middle East that are poorly understood here at home. The alert attention that we paid to international terrorism has faded as news from the Middle East has tapered off, and we have been safe for the past seven years in America. We forget that our safety has been the result of a lot of hard work by our security forces, as other portions of the world come under attack. We ignore the threat, which is real, and pick at the niggling details of the security that protects us.
In the absence of other solutions, shipping companies are turning to security firms like Blackwater to cope with the Somali pirates. Blackwater said that their 183-foot ship McArthur stands ready to assist the shipping industry as it struggles with the problem of piracy. The ship has state-of-the-art navigation systems, full Global Maritime Distress and Safety System communications, command and control battlefield air support, helicopter decks, a hospital, multiple support vessel capabilities, and a crew of 45 highly trained professionals.
Bret Stephens said in his article: “All this legal exquisiteness stands in contrast to what was once a more robust attitude.” That sums up the situation nicely. We need to think seriously about what it means.
Filed under: Africa, Developing Nations, Terrorism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Indian Navy, Piracy on the High Seas, Task Force 150
A Hong Kong-registered ship named Delight is the latest to fall into the hands of pirates off the northern coast of Africa. It is now steaming toward Somalia, where it will undoubtedly be held for ransom as was the Sirius Star pictured below.
The Somali government, such as it is, lacks basic law-enforcement agencies to disrupt pirates. It also has a very long coastline along the Gulf of Aden. The neighboring countries of Yemen and Djibouti are a little more stable, but have no more capabilities than Somalia.
There have been 90 attacks on ships by Somalian pirates this year. Commercial vessels in this high-tech era have small, mostly unarmed crews. The International Maritime Bureau says that pirates are currently holding 15 ships and more than 250 sailors. The pirates are well equipped with modern weapons, satellite phones, GPS trackers and fast attack boats.
It’s left to the modern word to police them. The Bush Administration set up a global effort called Combined Task Force 150 under the watch of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The current commander is a Commodore of the Danish Royal Navy.
Tuesday, a Somali pirate mother -ship aimed grenade launchers at an Indian naval frigate and tried to ram it. The Indian ship Tabar returned fire, set the pirate ship on fire and sunk it. India’s action has probably saved many other ships. At the moment force is the only way to raise the cost of piracy.
The costs of dysfunctional countries can be severe. The Combined Task Force has 2.5 million square miles to patrol. That is a lot of ocean.
Diplomacy, and even talks without preconditions, aren’t going to be the answer.
Filed under: Africa, Conservatism, Developing Nations, Economy, Election 2008, Foreign Policy, History, Liberalism, News, Politics, The Elephant's Child, Uncategorized | Tags: Africa, Democrat Demagogues, Economics, James Shikwati, Liberal lies, Socialism, United Nations, World Poverty
Here is someone you should know. James Shikwati , a Kenyan libertarian economist, is director of a Kenyan Think Tank, Inter-Region Economic Network (IREN). He burst upon world attention in 2005, with an interview in Spiegel Online, entitled “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”
SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.
Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?
Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound, development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.
SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them.
Shikwati: But is has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. When there’s a drought in a region of Kenya, our corrupt politicians reflexively cry out for more help. This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program — which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated…and before long, several thousand tons of corn are shipped to Africa…and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.
It’s a stunning interview, and do read the whole thing, by clicking on the link above. In another essay, Mr. Shikwati emphasizes that what the developing world needs is trade, not aid, to help the poor.
This is pertinent, not only because of the failure to pass the Free Trade Agreement with Columbia, but because of the Democrat Congress’s reasons for voting against the bill. American Unions have been losing membership and influence in recent years, and they have been ardent supporters of the Democrat Party. They are now calling in the debt. The unions want to force other countries throughout the world to adopt their union rules and environmental rules, and to refuse any trade agreements that do not contain those requirements.
Over the past several decades, in contrast to the claims of Democrats, remarkable progress has been made against poverty around the globe. According to data from the World Bank, the number of extremely poor people has shrunk to fewer than a billion in 2004 from about one and one half billion in 1981. Most of this has been accomplished through increased free trade.
Mr. Shikwati’s comments are also pertinent because the developed world’s rush to put farm crops into their fuel tanks has disrupted the world food supply, and rising energy prices are also harming poor countries. There is both a short-term and a long-term problem. Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank points out that food prices have risen 83 percent since 2005 “threatening to drive over 100 million people into extreme poverty”. Such a move, he added, would “reverse the gains made in overcoming poverty in the last seven years”. Yet we must make sure that we are enacting policy changes that assure that emergency relief will not be required next year and thereafter.
Senator Barack Obama has sponsored a “Global Poverty Act” that would require the United States to increase foreign aid by approximately $65 billion per year. If the Senate passes the bill, it would be Mr. Obama’s first significant legislative accomplishment. Derived directly from the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, the idea has been for donor countries to devote 0.7% of their GNP to aid.
The idea of making the goal of international development aid by rich countries 0.7% of their national income, rather than of any demonstrated need by developing countries or evidence that any such aid could be used effectively is illogical. Nowhere in the world can we point to a country that has escaped poverty through foreign aid, in spite of more than $2 trillion of foreign aid spending so far. The correct question is: How do countries develop economically? What actually works?
The answer is foreign investment and increased trade. If rich countries would open their markets to developing countries, those poorer countries could work their way out of poverty and wouldn’t require foreign aid.
The latest report from the United Nations indicates that the goal, of cutting in half the proportion of people worldwide who live on less than $1 per day between 1990 and 2015, was already 80 percent achieved by 2004, 11 years before the deadline. As The Heritage Foundation reports:
US contributions to this goal are substantial. The U.S. is the largest source of foreign direct investment in developing countries, the largest recipient of developing country exports, and the largest provider of development and humanitarian assistance to developing countries. In a world economy that is increasingly market-oriented and globalized, unprecedent levels of resources are flowing to developing countries. The share of these resources coming from the private sector, primarily through the mechanisms of trade, investment and remittances, dwarfs official aid flows.
Democrats are always anxious to solve problems by taking money from taxpayers to give to those with the problem. But problems are most often not so simplistic that they can be solved by simply throwing money at them. The socialist idea that “redistribution” is the answer and the problem is “rich people” doesn’t meet the most elementary logic test. If we have already met 80 percent of the goal eleven years ahead of time, maybe we should keep on with what we have been doing: Increasing trade, increasing investment, and sharing knowledge.
But that requires looking into what is actually being done, and what the results have been; rather than attempting to grandstand with a bill to solve world poverty to enhance one’s resume.
