General Hamid Gul, former chief of the Pakistani intelligence service–11:50 tour of the horizon from death of Bin Laden to future of Afghanistan to what World War III might look like if US military-industrial complex is allowed to open a Pakistani front.
Phi Beta Iota: Worth listening to every second. BBC (itself a virtual subsidiary of CIA under the US-UK “special relationship”) is rapidly being over-shadowed by Russian TV, Al-Jazeera, and Ha'aretz as sourced of useful open information in English.
I first blogged about GeoTime exactly two years ago in a blog post entitled “GeoTime: Crisis Mapping in 3D.” The rationale for visualizing geospatial data in 3D very much resonates with me and in my opinion becomes particularly compelling when analyzing crisis mapping data.
This is why I invited my GeoTime colleague Adeel Khamisa to present their platform at the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2009). Adeel used the Ushahidi-Haiti data to demonstrate the added value of using a 3D approach, which you can watch in the short video below.
Earlier this year, I asked Adeel whether he might be interested in analyzing the Libya Crisis Map data using GeoTime. He was indeed curious and kindly produced the short video below on his preliminary findings.
The above visual overview of the Libya data is really worth watching. I hope that fellow Crisis Mappers will consider making more use of GeoTime in their projects. The platform really is ideal for Crisis Mapping Analysis.
These are discouraging times, but once in a blue moon a bit of hope appears. I am pleased to report on the bit of hope delivered in March of 2011 by Michael Spence, a Nobel prize-winning economist, assisted by Sandile Hlatshwayo, a researcher at New York University. The two economists have taken a careful empirical look at jobs offshoring and concluded that it has ruined the income and employment prospects for most Americans.
To add to the amazement, their research report, “The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge,” was published by the very establishment Council on Foreign Relations.
For a decade I have warned that US corporations, pressed by Wall Street and large retailers such as Wal-Mart, to move offshore their production for US consumer markets, were simultaneously moving offshore US GDP, US tax base, US consumer income, and irreplaceable career opportunities for American citizens.
Among the serious consequences of offshoring are
the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an “opportunity society,”
an extraordinary worsening of the income distribution, and
large trade and federal budget deficits that cannot be closed by normal means. These deficits now threaten the US dollar’s role as world reserve currency.
Phi Beta Iota: Everything killing the USA today was properly briefed to the Senate and the White House in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's. The missing ingredient was INTEGRITY on the part of the listeners. Intelligence without integrity is irrelevant; integrity without intelligence is dangerously uninformed.
President Obama could be impeached for violating U.S. Constitution and law by going into Libya without congressional consent, but Rep. Dennis Kucinich says he doesn't want to cause that kind of havoc on the Republic, he just wants the United States to get out of Libya's civil war. While many lawmakers in general support the U.S. role in Libya, even if they want the final say on approving military action, Kucinich, D-Ohio, will introduce a joint resolution when Congress returns this week that he says “hopefully will lead us out of this mess that we've waded into in Libya.”
. . . . . . .
Kucinich said the U.S. has no business intervening in Libya because it's a civil war. He added that the rebel forces the U.S. and NATO appear to be backing are demonstrating some disturbing behaviors, including “committing some of the same practices that they accused Colonel Qaddafi of.” Beyond that, he added, the whole operation stinks of a bid for the oil fields of Benghazi, where the rebels have set up their stronghold.
Nuclear Pakistan, we are often told, is the Islamic-state equivalent of a Wall Street firm: In geostrategic terms, it is too big to fail. That explains why, even as the Obama administration begins preparing for modest troop withdrawals from Afghanistan this July, it dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Islamabad last week to smooth over bilateral relations with Pakistan's paranoid regime, which were strained even before the killing of Osama bin Laden. But Clinton's trip and the Obama administration's instinctive embrace of Islamabad is a fool's errand, doomed by history, geography and globalization itself.
In fact, the U.S. should drop the entire Afghanistan-Pakistan mess in China's lap now, while the getting is good, and here are the reasons why: …
Phi Beta Iota: World Politics Review has not figured out the new world of information quite yet, and we have no desire to copy their entire article. Suffice to say that Barnett, who has gotten much more coherent since his first book, is on target here, but add to that that the US Government's foreign policy is both ideological and idiotic — apart from the huge error by Zbigniew Brzezinski giving Pakistan the nuclear bomb in the first place, the US has no business in Central Asia that is of benefit to the American people, only to the American carpet-baggers that feed at the public treasury (now much depleted and greatly in debt) while looting foreign countries.
Photo: Libyan postcard artwork representing the Great Man-Made River project. (Photo: sludgegulper)
Cairo – Libya’s enormous aquatic reserves could potentially become a new weapon of choice if government forces opt to starve coastal cities that heavily rely on free flowing freshwater.
Phi Beta Iota: Absolutely worth a full read. NATO is not stupid–the illegal attacks on Libya's capital are about oil, water, gold, and “control” of the region. We condemn those attacks.
Phi Beta Iota: Immediately obvious are the immediate focus on Iraq, Iran, Somalia, and Yemen. No big picture focus on preventive peace from the sea here. The emergent focus is on Central Asia (far from the sea) and the Indian Ocean area. One wonders if the time has come to tell the Navy to focus on defending the USA, not trying to intervene everywhere. Finally, the enduring languages are the usual suspects, but (we do not make this stuff up) we observe that there is no such thing as a Saigon Vietnamese dialect/language. Could they mean Ho Chi Minh (VS/QNS)?
