Question authority

Amazon is now claiming that the ranking debacle was a "mistake." More like a bad policy gone viral, if you ask me. I wonder when the ratings on my book will be reinstated? As of now, they haven't been.

I've also noticed that when you search from the Amazon main page under my name or the title of my novel (For the May Queen), the Kindle version of the book appears, not the paperback version. It's hard to even find the paperback version when you search (unless you're searching under the "books" drop-down choice). It's very Orwellian--makes me feel we're vulnerable if someone at Amazon (or a hacker) decided to upload a censored or changed version of books.

And another censorship-related item:

Annie's in San Antonio, Texas. At the hotel, she tried to access my blog at a hotel computer. However, it was blocked for containing "inappropriate content." Okay, Texas, wtf?

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At lunch today, my friend Kelly asked me what I thought about the fact that there are Somali pirates but not, say, Kenyan pirates. I said I hadn't thought about it. She enlightened me, and here's a little bit about what I found out:

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas."