Nicaragua invades Costa Rica, Acts Like a Jerk, then Blames Google Maps

Going around the geography blogosphere including sites like Geography@About.com, the Map Room, and Basement Geographer is the story of a brief invasion of Costa Rica by Nicaragua.  This was not a harmless "Switzerland invades Liechtenstein" story as Nicaraguan forces took down a Costa Rican flag and took sediment from a river and dumped it onto Costa Rican soil.  The troops then returned to Nicaragua.  However, a diplomatic row has begun with Costa Rica's president urging calm and vowing "justice" will be done.

What makes this story of interest to the geography blogosphere is that the commander of the Nicaraguan troops blamed his actions on Google Maps and it misplacing the border.

Border comparison in the location where Nicaragua invaded Costa Rica.  Google has it wrong while Bing has it right.  Image from: Search Engine Land.

Google in turn is blaming the error on receiving bad map data from the United States State Department.  The State Department has not released any statement as of the early morning of November 6, 2010.  Meanwhile Google says it is working with the State Department to fix the border.

Such a shame I warned about bad maps being more than simple mistakes but things that could negatively impact diplomatic and military operations.

However, the Nicaraguans are not in the clear.  Their own geographic organization recognizes the disputed area as part of Costa Rica.

Costaricangauzette sent me this map with the red circle showing Nicaragua knows the area of action is Costa Rican.

So what happened?  The fact that the Nicaraguans quickly blamed Google Maps implies they probably did plan the mission with Google Maps and not their own.  I suspect that the Nicaraguans wanted to flex some muscle and thought Google's error showed that they area was disputed and gave them an excuse to be jerks (seriously, do Central Americans militaries need to concern themselves with anything but counter-narcotic and counter-insurgency operations?).

Is it also possible that they thought Google Maps was correct and innocently failed to do any further research?  Yes.  In Iraq I was shown a presentation by an Iraqi geographer who used Google Maps and Microsoft Paint to make his maps.  Sometimes it is amateur hour for those who have the guns.

Note from Afghanistan Training: GPS versus Paper Map

Instructor:  (Holds up a GPS)  What's this?
Class:  A GPS unit.
Instructor:  (Slams GPS unit on the ground causing it to break) What is it now?
Student:  (After a moments pause) A piece of junk.
Instructor:  A piece of junk.  (Holds up a map) What's this?
Class:  A map.
Instructor:  (Polks a hole with his finger through the map) What is it now?
Class:  (Silence)
Instructor:  A map with a hole through it.  Can you still use it?
Class:  Yes.
Instructor:  Can you still use the GPS?
Class:  No.
Instructor:  Any questions?

Catholic Geographers and the Global War on Terrorism

As I prepare for Afghanistan I will sometimes be asked how can I justify helping out the military (even indirectly through development work) with my Catholic faith.  I usually answer with stating it would be uncharitable for me not to use my geography skills to help my neighbor. 

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver recently gave a speech but how Catholicism and a moral military knighthood co-exist.  From his speech:

I want to offer you just four quick points tonight. Here's the first. Military service is a vocation, not simply a profession.  

 

The word “vocation” comes from the Latin word vocare, which means to call. In Christian belief, God created each of us for a purpose. He calls each of us by name to some form of service. No higher purpose exists than protecting other people, especially the weak and defenseless. This is why the Church, despite her historic resistance to war and armed violence, has held for many centuries that military service is not just “acceptable.” It can also be much more than that. When lived with a spirit of integrity, restraint and justice, military service is virtuous. It's ennobling because – at its best – military service expresses the greatest of all virtues: charity; a sacrificial love for people and things outside and more important than oneself. It flows from something unique in the human heart: a willingness to place one's own life in harm's way for the sake of others. 

 

The great Russian Christian writer Vladimir Solovyov once said that to defend peaceful men, “the guardian angels of humanity mixed the clay [of the earth] with copper and iron and created the soldier.”    And until the spirit of malice brought into the world by Cain disappears from human hearts, the soldier “will be a good and not an evil.” (i) He expressed in a poetic way what the Church teaches and believes. And you should strive to embody this vision in your own service.

The archbishop further discusses how the solider needs to be moral.  As I did in Iraq, I will make sure that every action I do and cause will be morally good.

Finally, I feel the war itself is currently morally justifiable when one considers the actions of the whole al Qaeda-network and similar groups including the Pakistani-funded terrorist armies.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church states the following on the only possible justification of war:

2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of success;
- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.  The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

 So I will go to Afghanistan to do geography in order to build a better Afghanistan and hopefully entice most of the enemy to lay down their arms in order to build a better world for everyone.

Map of Anglican Churches in the United States Joining the Catholic Ordinariate

It has been a year since Pope Benedict XVI offered the chance for Anglicans to join the Catholic Church.  This offer has enticed some Anglo-Catholics, both inside and outside of the Anglican Communion, to request membership in the Anglican Ordinariates.

Shane Schaetzel of the St Augustine of Canterbury Anglican Use Society in Springfield, Missouri has created and is updating a map of Anglican churches in the United States that are joining the ordinariate. (Hat Tip: The Anglo-Catholic) 


View Emerging U.S. Anglican Catholic Ordinariate in a larger map

The map shows how the various Anglican parishes are entering the ordinariate.  Most are joining the already established, but previously limited, Anglican Use and will therefore be grandfathered into the ordinariate.  The second group is part of the Anglican Church in America, which is a branch of the Traditional Anglican Communion.  The ACC and TAC have long been trying to be incorporated into the Catholic Church.

The final category is currently limited to Mount Calvary Church of Baltimore, Maryland.  This parish is leaving the Episcopal Church USA  (TEC is official branch of the Anglican Communion in the United States).  Currently TEC is fighting tooth-and-nail against evangelical parishes that have left it for other branches of Anglicanism in lawsuits over church buildings.  In these cases the wealth of TEC has only had to contend with parishes that manage to merely stay afloat financially.  It will be interesting to see if TEC will sue Mount Calvary Church and the Catholic Church over the church building.  That could turn into a lawyer war with both sides being well funded.

November 2010 Travel Photo: Saudi Bedouin Chairs

In what can only be described as a Pink Floyd album cover, this was the sight I encountered out in the desert of Saudi Arabia this past spring.  Two Bedouin shepherds had Lazy-E-Boys to watch their flock.

These Bedouin own their own goats.  The goats provide diary products and meat.  The camels; however, do not belong to the Bedouin who care for them.  In the area outside of Riyadh, most Bedouin take care of camel herds that belong to the urban rich.

Coming next month: A non-Middle East photograph!

Halloween 2010: Past Posts and Chupacabras: All Hispanic Cultures Are the Same?

Previous geographic-ish Halloween Posts:

• Why British/American Catholic priests are the only thing standing between you and evil
• How changes in geographic outlook have impacted the development of monsters
• How the Irish brought Halloween to America (Short post)
• Historical geography of vampires
• New England pneumonia vampires - The oldest case of vampirism in American mythology
• Quick cultural geography notes for Halloween movies
• Werewolves - Fear of Animal Competition

Chupacabra means "goat sucker."  In the mid-1990s stories of a weird bipedal creature in Puerto Rico draining the blood of livestock started making news.  The strange creature could best be described as a "grey alien" with a mohawk.  Incidents of this creature's alleged attacks peaked near 2000 and have slowly lowered in amount since then.

In the mid-2000s there was another peak of "chupacabras" attacks occurred in Texas and other parts of the American Southwest.  These attacks were done by dog-like creatures.  In fact, CNN acquired video of the southwestern chupacabra.  The animal really does look like a dog.



Now it turns out that the southwestern chupacabra is in fact a Canis animal.  According to scientific studies done on the bodies of shot Southwestern chupacabras (if you want to prove a cryptid exists there is no better way then shooting it), these creatures are really coyotes with the mite called sarcoptes scabiei.  These mites traditionally attack humans and domesticated dogs and only recently (biological time scale) jumped to coyotes.  The mites' infection causes these coyotes to lose their hair and become so weak that they are forced to hunt domesticated animals.

There is an oddity though.  These coyotes look nothing like the Puerto Rican chupacabras.  They also are known to leave full mouth bite marks unlike the vampire-like marks known in Puerto Rico.  So why is the term used for both creatures?  After doing side research the only conclusion I can reach is that Southwestern ranchers and media were unable to describe the creature and therefore looked for something equivalent.  The American Southwest has a strong Mexican-based Hispanic cultural heritage so the media picked up on the Puerto Rican monster because Puerto Rico has a Hispanic-based culture.  Basically, it was thought that Mexican and Puerto Rican cultures were close enough.  So these two different types of creatures, one a coyote and one possibly made up, are combined into one legend.

How to Lie with Maps and Imagery: Glenn Beck versus Jon Stewart

Political rallies tend to create controversy.  Sizing up rallies and other geographic equations can become just as controversial as a rally's message.  The size estimates for the Million Man March (PDF) and Google's shadiness with the Lincoln Memorial's location before Glenn Beck's 2010 rally are prime examples of that.

The first image below is making its away around the conservative blogosphere and e-mail lists.  It claims to be a size comparison of Glenn Beck's rally to that of the "Rally to Restore Sanity" hosted by Jon Stewart.

Seems like Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally was bigger than Jon Stewart's.  But let us examine the geography and image interpretation used for the image.  For Beck's rally look how the oval starts to the left of the Lincoln Memorial, where the speaker's were and roads prevented people from being behind, and goes away past the World War II Memorial at the end of the reflecting pool, where the image ends.  Now for Stewart's rally look how the at the right side of the photo, there is an oval building.  The bulk of the rally ends at the street coming right after the circular building..  The building is the Hirshhorn Museum yet the oval in the image for Stewart's rally ends well before the museum.

Take a look at the mini-map below now with my modifications (a red block for Beck and yellow for Stewart).  Size-wise Beck's rally is slightly bigger but Beck's rally had a reflecting pool in the middle of it.

This is not meant to be a political post.  I do not even like getting involved in the beast known as population/crowd estimates.  This post merely is to show how a map is being used to distort a current event.