U.S. Navy Attacked By Pirates?!
Yes, that's right, pirates. I guess there are some places where the world isn't safe for civilized people. This happened off the coast of Somalia, where pirates are picking apart the U.N. effort to feed the people there, by stealing the food and then selling it on the black market, and they tried to hightail it out of sight before sunrise while a group of war ships that were on a Dutch-run maneuver were cruising nearby. Unfortunately, there are things at the U.S. Navy's disposal that pirates could only dream of having, like satalite surveilance and night vision, not to mention radar, which I'm sure the pirates do have, since it's readily available off the shelf, or some poor unfortunate's yacht or fishing boat that's been requisitioned, and the U.S. ships pursued the smaller fishing boat that was towing a bunch of smaller skiffs behind it. One of the alert American sailors noticed that some of the pirates were carrying RPGs, and when the pirates were ordered to heave to, they truly fucked up by opening fire. Needless to say, the Americans made short work of the pirates, killing one and wounding three, igniting a fire on the boat with fire from their ship-mounted machine guns.
Why are pirates still active today? I can understand how pirates were able to operate in those waters, since Somalia doesn't really have a government, so no navy, but with all the other nations in the region, which do have navies, why aren't they doing something to asuage the situation? Hell, if Liberia just sent a tenth of the ships flying its flag to patrol those waters, there wouldn't be room left for pirates. I can only imagine it's the old "NOT MY PROBLEM" that kind of invades the minds of people who aren't suffering themselves, or who might have a few too many other problems on their plates to handle one more.
Why aren't there any pop stars writing songs about piracy? Oh, yeah. They have enough problems with piracy at the moment to concern themselves with the violent type. The big problem is that when you see these people on TV wearing their designer clothes, (if you can call some of it being clothed), and their jewels, pimping out their mansions and Hummer limos, the COMMON people have no sympathy for them when they hear about people pirating their so-called intellectual property, but they do have sympathy for starving people who are being kept hungry by warring warlords.
Governments need to make a difference, not Bono. Nothing against Bono, but, let's face it, why's he meeting with world leaders begging for debt relief for poor nations? Why's it take a meeting with him before W realizes that there's a whole bunch of really poor people in the world? Talk about Out of Touch! Is it that most of these poor people are darker in skin color than the majority of people living in the creditor nations? I can't help but think that it might have something to do with it. After all, how do you attract really cheap labor if there aren't a whole lot of really poor people willing to work for a pittance?
Would someone please discover oil in Somalia, or Ethiopia, or Sudan? I'm serious! It's the only way anybody's going to notice the place exists! If there were oil there, the U.S. would become the chief benefactor to the people and there'd be hell to pay for anyone trying to slaughter them, (well, at least while we were watching). When Rwanda exploded into tribal genocide, the world sat back and sipped our lemon aides, trying to figure out how to pronounce the country's name. When the White House became engaged in a battle of semantics with the press corps over whether or not genocide, or simply acts of genocide were occuring, it became plain to anyone with half a brain, (W still hasn't figured it out), that it was because they were simply blacks, (I won't even dignify them by calling them niggers, because we didn't even care for them that much), killing each other off, thus making fewer of them to think about, as if we ever really did. Because we lost a couple of Black Hawk helecopters and some troops in Somalia, we basically pulled out of Africa like dogs that had been singed on the behind with a flaming newspaper. Oh, but let some white people start some genocidal war in the Balkins, and Whooooooaaa Nellieeeee! Can't have that! Let's bomb the crap out of them and have round the clock sorties flying over to keep the fighting down. There's a heck of a lot of people of eastern European background in the U.S., people who actually vote! We gotta keep them quiet and appeased. Of course, we did let the Christians rape and murder as much as they could before it got really loud, so there was some collusion on the part of the west.
We spend more on war than all the rest of the world combined! Yep. We're just so much better equiped and trained that there isn't another army in the world that can stand up to us, unless we're already hung up on the ropes and our legs are starting to give. That's what's going to happen soon if we don't start pulling back in Iraq. Our troops are stretched to the limit, our material is top heavy with crap we don't need. Excuse me, but $15,000 sixty inch plasma screen tv's in rec rooms! When I was serving in West Germany in the mid seventies, we were lucky to have a 19 inch color tv in our rec room. Hell, they could've spent that money on Two toilet seats! Or ten hammers, or some screws. Now I know why our troops didn't have adequate body armor. Couldn't we find better uses for our military budget? I'm not saying cut it in half or even by a third, but that money needs better stewardship over it, and somewhere in this bloated federal bureaucracy there's someone who's job it is to make sure that the supply sergeants aren't padding their requests. I know that there have been reports about misspending on the part of the military, but nothing gets done about it. When the troops have to buy their own armor and wear it while watching a government supplied plasma screen tv, there's something wrong.
Why are pirates still active today? I can understand how pirates were able to operate in those waters, since Somalia doesn't really have a government, so no navy, but with all the other nations in the region, which do have navies, why aren't they doing something to asuage the situation? Hell, if Liberia just sent a tenth of the ships flying its flag to patrol those waters, there wouldn't be room left for pirates. I can only imagine it's the old "NOT MY PROBLEM" that kind of invades the minds of people who aren't suffering themselves, or who might have a few too many other problems on their plates to handle one more.
Why aren't there any pop stars writing songs about piracy? Oh, yeah. They have enough problems with piracy at the moment to concern themselves with the violent type. The big problem is that when you see these people on TV wearing their designer clothes, (if you can call some of it being clothed), and their jewels, pimping out their mansions and Hummer limos, the COMMON people have no sympathy for them when they hear about people pirating their so-called intellectual property, but they do have sympathy for starving people who are being kept hungry by warring warlords.
Governments need to make a difference, not Bono. Nothing against Bono, but, let's face it, why's he meeting with world leaders begging for debt relief for poor nations? Why's it take a meeting with him before W realizes that there's a whole bunch of really poor people in the world? Talk about Out of Touch! Is it that most of these poor people are darker in skin color than the majority of people living in the creditor nations? I can't help but think that it might have something to do with it. After all, how do you attract really cheap labor if there aren't a whole lot of really poor people willing to work for a pittance?
Would someone please discover oil in Somalia, or Ethiopia, or Sudan? I'm serious! It's the only way anybody's going to notice the place exists! If there were oil there, the U.S. would become the chief benefactor to the people and there'd be hell to pay for anyone trying to slaughter them, (well, at least while we were watching). When Rwanda exploded into tribal genocide, the world sat back and sipped our lemon aides, trying to figure out how to pronounce the country's name. When the White House became engaged in a battle of semantics with the press corps over whether or not genocide, or simply acts of genocide were occuring, it became plain to anyone with half a brain, (W still hasn't figured it out), that it was because they were simply blacks, (I won't even dignify them by calling them niggers, because we didn't even care for them that much), killing each other off, thus making fewer of them to think about, as if we ever really did. Because we lost a couple of Black Hawk helecopters and some troops in Somalia, we basically pulled out of Africa like dogs that had been singed on the behind with a flaming newspaper. Oh, but let some white people start some genocidal war in the Balkins, and Whooooooaaa Nellieeeee! Can't have that! Let's bomb the crap out of them and have round the clock sorties flying over to keep the fighting down. There's a heck of a lot of people of eastern European background in the U.S., people who actually vote! We gotta keep them quiet and appeased. Of course, we did let the Christians rape and murder as much as they could before it got really loud, so there was some collusion on the part of the west.
We spend more on war than all the rest of the world combined! Yep. We're just so much better equiped and trained that there isn't another army in the world that can stand up to us, unless we're already hung up on the ropes and our legs are starting to give. That's what's going to happen soon if we don't start pulling back in Iraq. Our troops are stretched to the limit, our material is top heavy with crap we don't need. Excuse me, but $15,000 sixty inch plasma screen tv's in rec rooms! When I was serving in West Germany in the mid seventies, we were lucky to have a 19 inch color tv in our rec room. Hell, they could've spent that money on Two toilet seats! Or ten hammers, or some screws. Now I know why our troops didn't have adequate body armor. Couldn't we find better uses for our military budget? I'm not saying cut it in half or even by a third, but that money needs better stewardship over it, and somewhere in this bloated federal bureaucracy there's someone who's job it is to make sure that the supply sergeants aren't padding their requests. I know that there have been reports about misspending on the part of the military, but nothing gets done about it. When the troops have to buy their own armor and wear it while watching a government supplied plasma screen tv, there's something wrong.
posted by Bob at 2:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home