from the hip

As a kid, I used to love playing a pirate. There was something mysteriously romantic and exotic about pirates. When we played pirates, we all had pistols, some of the guys would also have swords or knives. And masks and eye patches, of course, was a part of it, as pirates, in our conception, were usually one eyed.

Later I admit to liking to read historical novels with fights with pirates, like for instance Dewey Lambdin’s books about the fictional naval hero Alan Lewrie or Steve Brennan’s The Gigantic Book of Pirate Stories. But until recently I have considered piracy something remote, something belonging to ancient times, even though I knew that the practice has persisted in the Malacca straits and a few other places.

However. I can’t say that I find the surge in piracy that we have witnessed recently very romantic. Piracy seems, oddly, to have become a booming business in some parts of the world. Sea borne piracy against transport vessels is a significant issue (with estimated worldwide losses of US $13 to $16 billion per year), particularly in the waters between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, off the Somali coast, and also in the Strait of Malacca and Singapore, which are used by over 50,000 commercial ships a year. You can see a list of the pirate prone areas at the ICC web site.

The business model employed by some of the modern pirates, most notably the pirates in Somalia, is fairly straight forward. They hijack ships, take over control, bring them into harbor some place along the coast, and then negotiate a price for freeing the ship, including, usually, its crew and cargo. The modern pirates favor small, fast boats and take advantage of the small number of crew members on modern cargo vessels. They also use large vessels to supply the smaller attack/boarding vessels.

Modern piracy thrive on conditions of political unrest. Thus, countries with limited territorial control provide good bases for modern piracy. You can see a movie of pirates taking a capture super tanker into a little fishing village in Somalia on Guardians web site! (See also New York Times on this).

It is to some extent odd that this practice can exist today. The Romans fought piracy, and at one point largely wiped it out in the Mediterranean. But today, with modern fighter planes, modern navies, efficient guns and rockets, as well as electronic surveillance, that fight should be much easier, even though the seas are still huge. As it is, we don’t really fight them, even though the West sometimes gets into the occasional little fight and some of them are killed or captured.

I think they survive because of leniency from the West. As long as they don’t expand their business too much, and don’t really do too much damage to international shipping, and especially the oil trade, they are more or less ignored - at least in the sense that the West is unwilling to use the level of force necessary to remove the problem completely. Also, who is to pay for it? The pirates to some extent get away with it because the patrols and military actions required to take them out is a collective good nobody at present is willing to pay for.

So, modern piracy is bad, but I think it is bad because we permit it to happen.

The international credit crisis is bad news, of course. And bad for a lot of people. Still, there are some amusing things taking place as well. Like the story about the HUGE bank robbery that took place on Monday in the US, in Washington DC. Quite possibly the biggest bank robbery ever!!

When I first read the story of exactly how the US injected 250 billion dollars into the biggest American banks, I was stunned. Then, when I reread the story I started to laugh. I found it hilarious! What a move by the government. From one perspective a much needed infusion of capital, yet from another a highway robbery!

So here is the story, simply to good not to be distributed, courtesy of The New York Times:

Drama Behind a $250 Billion Banking Deal

The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States trooped into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department at 3 p.m. Monday. To their astonishment, they were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government, then Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left.

The chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, was receptive, saying he thought the deal looked pretty good once he ran the numbers through his head. The chairman of Wells Fargo, Richard M. Kovacevich, protested strongly that, unlike his New York rivals, his bank was not in trouble because of investments in exotic mortgages, and did not need a bailout, according to people briefed on the meeting.

But by 6:30, all nine chief executives had signed — setting in motion the largest government intervention in the American banking system since the Depression and retreating from the rescue plan Mr. Paulson had fought so hard to get through Congress only two weeks earlier.

What happened during those three and a half hours is a story of high drama and brief conflict, followed by acquiescence by the bankers, who felt they had little choice but to go along with the Treasury plan to inject $250 billion of capital into thousands of banks — starting with theirs.

What a story! Has anything like this ever happened before? This must be the biggest tale in the modern history of banking!

Telegraph (newspaper, UK) reports that increasing numbers of middle-aged men are going off sex, according to relationship experts. They report it is an universal trend, but I suspect it may only be a British trend:

Counselling and sex therapy charity Relate says it has seen a 40 per cent increase in men who simply cannot be bothered to make love to their wives and partners.

The findings are a world away from just ten years ago, when hardly any men contacted them with a loss of libido. The main sufferers who call its helpline with the problem are generally aged between 30 and 50 and are married.

Peter Bell, Relate’s head of practice, said: “Men used to come to us with impotence – now known as erectile insufficiency – but Viagra has sorted some of that problem. What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the 1950s: ‘I can have sex but I do not want to. It’s not rewarding’.

An English professor thinks he has the explanation:

Professor Michael King, of the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London, has completed a study into mental illness across six countries which found that the rate of major depression and panic syndrome was highest among men in the UK.

I am not able to question his conclusion. But I do feel sorry for all those beautiful, attractive, suffering English ladies out there. And I feel confident that there must be men, somewhere within the common labor market of the EU, who may be convinced to move to the UK to help them out.

After all, there must be lots of fun to be had in the once Great Britain these days. And if the natives are not willing to do it, somebody has to…

Awaiting your mail, ladies!

The Austrain Incest Case

Father Confesses to Horrific Crime. He held his daughter prisoner and abused her for decades. In the most spectacular kidnapping and incest case in Austrian history, a man has confessed to having held his daughter hostage for 24 years and siring seven children with her. (Der Spiegel)

Austria Stunned by Case of Imprisoned Woman. With his Mercedes-Benz and his fine clothes, Josef Fritzl looked every inch a property owner, neighbors in this tidy Austrian town said Monday. Even when running errands, they said, he wore a natty jacket, crisp shirt and tie. (New York Times)

The Family Man of Amstetten: Double life of a pillar of Austrian society. How did the perpetrator of one of modern Europe’s most horrific crimes convince his neighbours he was a respectable man? (The Independent)

Josef Fritzl: a shrewd liar and an obsessive tyrant. Casual acquaintances knew Josef Fritzl as a jovial fellow who liked to drink beer and enjoyed a bawdy joke.

But former neighbors say the man accused of imprisoning his daughter and fathering her seven children ran his household like a dictator. Piece by piece, a picture is emerging of a shrewd liar and an obsessive tyrant. (International Herald Tribune/AP)
(more…)

Or so they claim. The Danish newspaper BT writes that more than every second Dane, 54%, have had sex in the kitchen according to a representative survey. And sex in the kitchen is even more frequent among the people living in Copenhagen than in the rest of the country - six out of every ten in Copenhagen.

According to the Danish newspaper, this almost makes them the world champions of kitchen sex. However, they are not quite on the top, the Japanese and the Swedes both beat them by a narrow margin. But the Danes also proudly announce that they are way ahead of the British - only 40% in the UK have ever done it in the kitchen!

I trust the Danes will strive to improve their position in the future.

I have always admired the fact that Americans devote so much time, energy, effort and money to charities. To me, this is one of many great things about American society.

However, I have often found myself to be pretty naive, too. And I may have been just that in this case as well.

While it is true that Americans do give, and some quite heavily, to charities, American charities may not be any better than charities in other parts of the world. I’ve seen many analyses of charities where 80 per cent, 90 per cent of the money, and in some cases even more, never reach the targeted group or purpose.

Lavish spending, bad subcontracting, high salaries, lawyers fees, and lots of other things have, in the bad cases, explained how the money have simply disappeared.

In a report by four professors who specialize in nonprofit accounting, the amount of loss as a result of fraud in non-profit organizations was estimated to be 40 billion dollars.

the typical theft from a charity was committed by a female employee with no criminal record who earned less than $50,000 a year and had worked for the nonprofit at least three years. The amount she stole was less than $40,000.

The most costly cases, the study found, involved male executives earning $100,000 to $149,000 a year. The thieves in such cases had typically been with the organization the longest.

..

If the $40 billion figure is accurate, then the money lost to fraud equaled the combined giving by corporations and foundations in 2006, said Diana Aviv, president and chief executive of the Independent Sector, which represents nonprofit groups.

But Ms. Aviv expressed skepticism about the report, noting that it relied on the fraud examiners association’s estimate of overall fraud across all sectors, including government and corporate.

“They’re lumping all those sectors together, and it could be that the for-profit sector experiences a higher level of fraud, while the nonprofit sector and government experience lower levels,” Ms. Aviv said.

Nonetheless, she said, “even if the figure is $20 billion, that’s still a huge amount and needs to be addressed.”

Now, 40 billion USD is approximately 13% of the money given to charities in 2006. That means, that on the average, 13 cents of every dollar you give disappears. That’s pretty bad!

So for the future, study your charity closely before you give. You may be paying for somebody’s retirement fund in a Swiss bank!

We all know that Norway is an expensive place to visit. However, it may well be that some of the prices are even higher than you may think. I would even so far as to say pretty wild.

A Norwegian blogger yesterday published the fines local police authorities in Norway issues for minor offenses like urinating in public (or in the snow, as the case may be), drinking in public, or starting a fight.

The fine for peeing in the snow in the small city of Trysil, according to the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, cited by the blogger, is NOK 10.000. That’s approximately USD 2.000 or GBP 900!

Here is the headline from Dagbladet:

10 000 i bot for å tisse ute

Politiet i Trysil har egne påskepriser for dobesøk ute i naturen.

It says: “10.000 for peeing outdoors. The police in Trysil have their own prices for using nature as a toilet”.

Here is the list of prices compiled by the blogger:

• Trysil: Peeing in the snow - USD 2.000-3.000
• Trysil: Drinking in a public place - same
• Voss: Public fighting - USD 1.000
• Voss: Peeing - USD 400
• Beitostolen/Kvitfjell: Peeing USD 600-1.000

The official term, of course, is not peeing, but urinating in a public place. I’m just abbreviating a little.

Many people ask themselves, quite understandable, what to do when they are out skiing and need to pee? One commentator on the Norwegian blog suggested breaking into a cabin and peeing there. The fine for breaking and entry when in distress is lower than that for peeing, was his argument.

While imposing fines on foreigners and people from the cities seems to be a favorite activity for the Norwegian police, and no doubt brings money into the coffers of the Government and the police departments, crime is rising rapidly in Norway. Many Norwegians, therefore, feel that the focus of the police may be slightly misdirected.