"April 12, 2009"
http://www.spaceweather.com/
"Daily Sun: 12 Apr 09 The sun is blank--no sunspot. Sunspot number: 0"
"Far side of the Sun: This holographic image reveals no sunspots on the far
side of the sun."

The face of the Sun is without blemish:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images20...st5j0rfa 7kk7

Please visit:
http://blog.nj.com/southjersey_impac...SolarCycle.jpg

The right panel shows the face of the Sun as it looked on a good day during
the late Modern Warm Period. Sunspots are the apparent size of craters on
the moon. The left panel shows a Sun as it appears today. Please write to Al
Gore so that Al knows that the Sun is not living up to his religious
expectations. Al Gore is a divinity school dropout. George Carlin had a
better grasp of the true nature of God's creation, than does Al Gore.

Please visit:
http://www.co-intelligence.org/newsl...es/sun-etc.jpg
which shows the relative sizes of the Sun and planets. Compared to the Sun,
Jupiter is the size of a pea, earth is the size of a grain of sand.

Anarchy on Land Means Piracy at Sea
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Published: April 11, 2009
Stockbridge, Mass.

PIRACY is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a failed
state and has the longest coastline in mainland Africa, so piracy flourishes
nearby. The 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel called piracy a
“secondary form of war,” that, like insurgencies on land, tends to increase
in the lulls between conflicts among great states or empires. With the
Soviet Union and its client states in Africa no longer in existence, and
American influence in the third world at an ebb, irregular warfare both on
land and at sea has erupted, and will probably be with us until the rise of
new empires or their equivalents.

Somali pirates are usually unemployed young men who have grown up in an
atmosphere of anarchic violence, and have been dispatched by a local warlord
to bring back loot for his coffers. It is organized crime carried out by
roving gangs. The million-square-miles of the Indian Ocean where pirates
roam might as well be an alley in Mogadishu. These pirates are fearless
because they have grown up in a culture where nobody expects to live long.
Pirate cells often consist of 10 men with several ratty, roach-infested
skiffs. They bring along drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine
outboards, grappling hooks, ladders, knives, assault rifles,
rocket-propelled grenades and the mild narcotic qat to chew. They live on
raw fish.

The skiffs are generally used to launch attacks on slightly larger crafts,
often a fishing dhow operated by South Koreans, Indians or Taiwanese, taking
the crews prisoner. In turn, they use the new ship to take a larger vessel,
and then another, working up the food chain. Eventually, they let the
smaller boats and crews go free. In this way, over the years, Somali pirates
have graduated to attacking oil tankers and container ships; the bigger the
vessel, the higher the ransoms, which the pirate confederations can then
invest in more sophisticated equipment.

As Braudel suggested, there is nothing new here. Piracy has been endemic to
the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to the Strait of Malacca, and
particularly so after the Western intrusion into these waters, beginning
with the Portuguese in the 16th century. Pirate groups, sometimes known as
“sea gypsies,” tended to escalate in number and audacity as trade increased,
so that piracy itself has often been a sign of prosperity. The Moroccan
traveler Ibn Battuta, who was the victim of pirates off western India in the
14th century, informed us that commercial ships in the Indian Ocean of his
day traveled in armed convoys as a defense. Slightly earlier, Marco Polo
described many dozens of pirate vessels off Gujarat, India, where the
pirates would spend the whole summer at sea with their women and children,
even as they plundered merchant vessels.

The big danger in our day is that piracy can potentially serve as a platform
for terrorists. Using pirate techniques, vessels can be hijacked and blown
up in the middle of a crowded strait, or a cruise ship seized and the
passengers of certain nationalities thrown overboard. You can see how Al
Qaeda would be studying this latest episode at sea, in which Somali pirates
attacked a Maersk Line container ship and were fought off by the American
crew, even as they have managed to take the captain hostage in one of the
lifeboats.

So we end up with the spectacle of an American destroyer, the Bainbridge,
with enough Tomahawk missiles and other weaponry to destroy a small city,
facing off against a handful of Somali pirates in a tiny lifeboat. This is
not an efficient use of American resources. It indicates how pirates, like
terrorists, can attack us asymmetrically. The challenge ahead for the United
States is not only dealing with the rise of Chinese naval power, but also in
handling more unconventional risks that will require a more scrappy,
street-fighting Navy.

In a sense, America needs three navies; yet, as this pirate crisis reveals,
it may have only two. It has a blue-water force for patrolling the major sea
lines, thus guarding the global commons. It packs enough precision weaponry
on its warships to project power on land against adversaries like North
Korea and Iran. But it still does not have enough of a sea-based,
counterinsurgency component to deal with adversaries like Somali pirates and
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy. (The latter’s force features
speedboats loaded with explosives hidden in the many coves of Iran’s
coastline, which could ram ships on suicide missions.)

The Navy has plans to build 55 new Littoral Combat Ships to deal with this
deficiency. Yes, these fast, maneuverable ships have low drafts and are thus
suited for many different kinds of unorthodox missions close to shore. But
the oceans are vast, and ships cannot be in two places at once. Without
sufficient numbers of them, it’s hard to believe that they will make much of
a difference. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in his recent budget
statement, indicated that only a few of these ships will be built at first,
even as he endorsed the whole program.

In recent years the American public has been humbled by the limits of our
military power in dirty land wars. But navies have historically been a
military indicator of great power. That a relatively small number of pirates
from a semi-starving nation can constitute enough of a menace to disrupt
major sea routes is another sign of the anarchy that will be characteristic
of a multipolar world, in which a great navy like America’s — with a falling
number of overall ships — will be in relative, elegant decline, while others
will either lack the stomach or the capacity to adequately guard the seas.

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior
fellow at the Center for a New American Security.