The 81 kg earth observation satellite is equipped with a 6-band spectral imager capable of sampling data from a 45km x 45km swathe at an impressive resolution of 6.25 m, enough to fill up its 24Gb internal storage with up to 10 highly-detailed images (using all 6 bands) before it has to download its data to the CSIR’s Satellite Applications Centre at Hartebeesthoek, which will be responsible for operating the satellite. Having this level of dedicated earth observation capability available to the South African government and other institutions should vastly increase our understanding of vegetation, deforestation, land use, water quality and agriculture in this country. And with sufficient propellant onboard to remain operational for 3 to 4 years I think it’s fair to say that the R26 million the government invested in the satellite’s development and launching was quite a bargain.

This is also excellent news for SunSpace, the satellite’s manufacturer. The company was spun off from Stellenbosch University, following the successful creation and launch of a smaller and lighter micro-satellite, SunSat, in 1999. and has swiftly proven itself as a competent and innovative manufacturer of affordable micro-satellites. I hope they’ll be able to use this launch to get some exposure and begin making serious inroads into what is looking like it may become quite a lucrative market.

So congratulations to the SumbandilaSat team.

And luckily so too. I was in a car accident several weeks ago. I’m fully recovered and was informed I was lucky to not have any spinal, bone or nerve damage although the concussion and whiplash wasn’t any fun in itself. Alas I’m still waiting for my car to be repaired and am highly disappointed with the poor service of a Sandton panelbeater used by a prominent insurance company. I also have to rather wearily admit that Honda’s local spare parts dealer network is extremely poor. Their cars are great, and I think their new Accord is especially awesome but I won’t be buying another one after the poor local support I’ve received. Nor will I allow a relative to buy a Honda Jazz as a result. Sorry Honda, but you need more forward thinking staff members locally and less empty promises in future.

I can’t admit to feeling much love for BMW drivers now either and especially after their SUV Hummer rip off aka X5 rammed me while I was stationery, and more so given how the woman driver responsible for the accident has been, shall we say, somewhat less than willing to engage and help after sending me to hospital for two spinal examinations and CT scans among others. It’s also made worse by the fact that she bizarrely also works for the same company as I do, and sadly wields a lot of influence with powerful figures I gather from co-workers. So much for any potential for a fair outcome there.

So I can’t help but feel a degree of irritation when looking at BMW’s and SUV’s alike and just the sight of X5’s and X6’s really encourages me to drive slowly in front of them now. Hey! I’m just trying to prevent being in another accident with the brutes y’know! After all, their drivers are much more likely to be in motor accidents than normal vehicles per a Top Gear study in the UK. Given too how an impatient Porsche SUV driver on the wrong side of the road nearly ploughed head-on into my parents car when I was being driven home from the hospital from the first accident and all I could do was think ‘Not again!’ at the time just reinforced the notion in my own, perhaps rather concussed, head at the time.

I guess the editor was asleep on the job for this one.

Update: It was fixed fairly quickly though.

The tournament itself was a fantastic success, hosted by Wits and sponsored by Standard Bank. It proved to be – by a long stretch – the single largest, grandest and most successful debating tournament I’ve ever attended, and I suspect Laurence would concur.

What’s been truly annoying me today, however, has been the radio world’s reaction to this. On 5FM the entire day has seen DJ’s paying solemn respect to music-Jesus with tributes, ernest commentary on the man’s achievement, and disgust at the mass of MJ death jokes. But the truly disturbing thing is how blithely ignorant they appear to be of the man they demand the utmost respect for. I mean, for crying out loud, the man molested little children! He does not deserve to be placed on the altar of godlike benevolence. He was an accomplished musician, sure. But he fiddled kiddies and was a perpetual freakshow. That’s not something we should be praising.

But then, perhaps I’m just old-fashioned. The most profound effect MJ had on me was some old 8-bit nintendo game where you threw a hat and grabbed your groin a lot. For others, the impact Jackson had on their lives seems to outweigh the grossly-inappropriate lifestyle the man had. We don’t praise R.Kelly for being a hero, nor Joseph Fritzl. But perhaps if they became slightly more popular 5FM would see fit to prostrate themselves on air before them too.

Innocent or not, one has to think about the consequences of what is effectively incentivising Jihad against the evil infidel America. Send them to Kazakhstan, Turkey or anywhere but a tropical paradise for crying out loud! How many down and out jihadists will consider being sent to Bermuda as punishment a bad thing? This is not, as Conor puts it, a “win-win” situation. Innocent or not (which as never really being established in any sufficient clarity), sending non-Americans off to a luxurious exile with all the civilian rights afforded to actual citizens, and then some, is very much a foolish, short-sighted policy. Sure, it might ‘rehabilitate’ a small minority, but what signals does this send to the thousands of Jihadis who aren’t in Bermuda… yet?

Once again, Day by Day hits the nail right on the head:

Frankly, I think this is insane. What the boys did was wrong, I don’t think anybody disputes that, but I don’t believe it was sufficiently wrong to warrant being criminally charged with assault, nor do I believe this is fair after they have already been through a disciplinary process that satisfied the Department of Education.

But let me offer some background for those who might be new to the story. Late at night on February 2nd, twelve Matric students roused fourteen Standard 9s from their beds in the hostel and sneaked them out to a quiet part of the school where they carried out a traditional initiation practice to supposedly welcome them as boarding seniors. During this, the Standard 9s had to strip naked and apply Deep Heat to their genitalia. They also had to run a gauntlet made up of the twelve Matric students, each one wielding a bat or hockey stick, who hit them one by one on the rear as they passed. Once through this gauntlet, the Std. 9s were considered to have ‘graduated’ as seniors of the boarding house and were permitted the privileges that seniors enjoy such as having their own toasters and kettles in their rooms.

Needless to say, the whole thing was unnecessary and stupid, and falling back on the excuse that it’s a tradition that has always been done this way is insufficient justification. Times have changed and what used to be acceptable is no longer so. But does it meet the severity of assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, the crime for which the boys have been charged? I don’t think so. There was clearly no intent to cause lasting harm, with all the Matrics having been through the same process in their Std. 9 year and evidently believing they had suffered no adverse side-effects. And from what I’ve heard from those involved, the process was voluntary with an option to sit it out. By all indications, this was not some malicious attempt to bully younger students, but rather the sort of silly over-the-top taken-too-far after-hours nonsense that pretty much all boys-only boarding schools get up to. Trust me I know; I went to one. This seems to be borne out by the fact that the rest of the Std. 9s who were initiated have refused to testify against the Matric students and are all apparently overwhelmingly supportive of them.

But the key thing to remember here is that once the school found out what had happened, through a parent informing the deputy headmaster, it did the right thing. The Headmaster ordered an immediate investigation and disciplinary process to uncover what had happened and punish those responsible, as the school has long had a formal ban on initiations. They discovered that no teachers had been involved, but the twelve Matrics readily admitted culpability and went through a round of disciplinary proceedings, many losing privileges in the process and were sent through rehabilitation programs. The Department of Education was involved too at some point, unfortunately placing a gag order on the Parktown Headmaster in the process, but evidently waking away happy that justice had been served and that sufficient steps had been taken to prevent a re-occurrence of the event. The first of these steps occurred before Pene Kimber, the mother of the boy who complained, took her story to the press and caused a media uproar.

It was after this stage that this should have ended. Justice had been served, the school had forcefully re-iterated its policy against initiation and done what it could to prevent it from happening again. To take this further, and charge these boys with a severe crime in a move that seems motivated entirely out of a desire for revenge seems to me to be a step too far and distinctly unfair on those involved. Not only are they a week from their prelims and a mere couple of months from writing their finals, but the consequences of this for their future lives and careers could be disastrous. Even if their sentences are relatively light, the criminal record would disallow them from being able to pursue certain careers in law and accounting, would count against them in any other employment scenario and would prevent them from being able to apply for visas to travel to countries like the US and UK. Further, even if they are acquitted of all charges, their names and faces will almost certainly be printed on Friday and will forever come up in Google searches by future employers. These are enormously serious charges, and I honestly wonder if Pene Kimber is fully aware of the harm she is causing here.

I’m glad the initiation practices have come to an end, but I can’t support what these twelve young men are now being put through. I hope they are acquitted of all charges.

On the home front, Darren, Wayne and myself are still around, and while I’ve slowed my writing down considerably due to studies taking most of my academic juices, we have some potentially awesome things lined up for this site later on this year. So keep that bookmark for us! We’re coming back!

Sadly it does raise questions about the calibre of future ANC leaders. At least they mean what they say and say what they mean but then maybe we all need to grow up.

There are two overarching obstacles to actually eliminating piracy in the GOA. Firstly, the above-mentioned chaos in Somalia has ensured that piracy will always be a viable alternative to crippling poverty on land, or trying to compete with the hordes of illegal European and Chinese poachers exploiting the coastline. Being a failed state means that there is precious little preventative action which the exiled government can take to overcome the warlords (I suppose now ‘pirate lords’), nor can the international community realistically mount land operations in any major capacity without a far greater commitment to eliminating a problem which ultimately only affects some 1% of international shipping transiting through the GOA.

Secondly, state navies operating and in the GOA providing essentially defensive operations such as escort duties and response actions are crippled by both a lack of clear and defined international laws on naval combat or counter-piracy operations as well as the inevitable and condemning pressure of international human rights organizations who might foam at the mouth at the mere suggestion that offensive and proactive operations be taken lest innocent fishermen become collateral damage. Defensive operations generally don’t offend anyone but the most rabid of pacifists, but it’s a wholly unrealistic approach to meaningful containment or disincentivisation of piracy, let alone a decent contribution to eliminating piracy at all in the long run. Gone are the days of yore where pirates were killed or captured on site, their ships burned, and the culprits hanged at the nearest friendly port. Pirates nowadays are often dropped off in Kenya and tried for minor offenses such as kidnapping, hijacking and so on, spending a fraction of the time in jail than justice would perhaps demand. The converse of that, of course, is that trying pirates like the days of Barbary would have human rights organizations squealing like stuck pigs, and is admittedly archaic by most legal norms these days. Thus the vacuum is made quite clear; the status quo is ineffective, the precedent too harsh, and the necessary measures of progress are currently lacking both in terms of political will and legal clarity. Pirates often quite literally get away with murder.

This is of course discounting the problems of expensive operational costs of navies engaging in what is effectively asymmetrical naval warfare with one’s hands tied behind one’s back due to a legal vacuum. That’s right folks, for once, a lack of international law on piracy in the GOA has resulted in strategic meekness amongst a fragmented and leaderless naval environment.

Using navy SEAL snipers to shoot pirates holding hostages only works in very specific cases under very clear mandates and guidelines, but will not prove as consistently successful as a SOP. The GOA is thus a basket of legal an strategic obstacles which need to be overcome, together with some manner of development portfolio for Somalia that is both feasible and upheld. Containment can work, to a degree, but a long-term solution is far off.