The West and Others~~Western Civilization, Global Continuity & The 'Third' World~~ Photo; the Turf... a little bit of Heaven, Abraka, Delta State, Nigeria
Saturday, February 05, 2011
Egypt burning; faces of defiance and oppression
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Of hybrid, the West and oil
Of hybrid, the West and oil
by Michael Dibiaezue
"Technology is now a terrorist tool that ensures concealment, weaponry, deployment and finance. Terrorism can only be a technological pollutant because what pollutants do is to kill with rampant abandon. What use are technological goodies in the face of today's nuclear, biological and chemical tendencies? The argument that technology's good points overrun the bad ones is unnatural against these propensities."
28-06-05 Fareed Zakaria, a Newsweek columnist, wrote and brought his impressions to bold relief by simulating a broadcast by President George W. Bush. It said "It is now possible to build cars that are powered by a combination of electricity and alcohol-based fuel with petroleum as only one element among many. My administration is going to put in place a series of policies that will ensure that in four years, the average new American car will get 300 miles per gallon of petroleum. This revolution in energy will reduce dramatically our dependence on foreign oil."The West is doing every thing in its power to achieve this and their intentions are not for altruistic reasons. The euphoria for hybrid technology hides a joyful wickedness to open up the oil wells of weaker nations for uses, industrial and technological, that put all of us at great risk.
There are no sustainable alternatives to oil and they know this, except cheap oil. There are no alternatives to the businesses, income and employment it generates and whereas substitutes can be found for oil, this will impose extreme economic dislocations.
From exploration, lifting, transportation, refining, distribution, manufacture and marketing, the profits and income from oil, and its accessories which include fraud, sabotage, theft, security, espionage, maintenance, are phenomenal and perhaps unknown. Oil sustains global economy, from shoe polish to paints, plastics to pipes, pesticides to fertilizers, carbon to optics fibres, automotive sustenance, computers, medicine, agriculture, chemicals, and even into space, it is all about hydrocarbon and technology. It is endless and its presence is like air. It is this fusion that feeds a new desperation to conserve oil.
Most transports, marine ventures, warfare and even long winters are considered a drain on industrial economies and their technological potential. They believe these consumptions burn up global reserves and are wasteful, making costs unbearable, in the face of applicable substitutes and incredible profits from technology. There is no doubt that modern technology has displaced petroleum products as the West's best seller. The concern for industrialized nations therefore, is that hydrocarbon, which now powers modern technology and their well-being, is still being burnt as petroleum products at alarming rates that would leave their new-found economic power in the lurch.
Societies are pampered into addiction by the luxuries and comfort oil maintain, severely reducing the quantum that should be globally available for generating income and profits through technology for the West, and at a hundred times the rate and distance at which petroleum products do. Reduction of global oil consumption in comfort zones, home, leisure, transport and luxury, converts into a huge availability that knocks the bottom off oil prices. The West's feeling is that unwanted consumption makes oil a seller's market and that its curtailment would reduce dependency and the desperation for it. These considerations now compel policies by leading industrialized nations, covertly, which support the high price of petroleum products and pump price, to discourage such tendencies and create interest in alternative sources.
High prices, for the West, are one way to recoup income from unwanted consumption and another way of making the cost of such use felt. It is the price we pay to burn fuel or for depriving them of its industrial and technological uses. Reduction in global oil consumption will bring these uses to frantic levels and above-surface reserves supplemented in continuance of supply. Oil blocks in producer-nations will be bought and left idle due to technology's slow intake, unemployment will rise and these governments will be cash-strapped and desperate as more oil, securing loans at cut-throat interest, are obtained.
The search for alternatives to fuel-driven cars is from this desperation to make oil more available for technology. The advent of modern technology and its exceptional profit has renewed Western dependence on hydrocarbon, and its profitability is next to none in all history. Technology's calibrated, slow and precise use of hydrocarbon to do this makes its industrial longevity irresistible. The real factor that excites the West about hybrid and electric cars, and this endeavour continues in several other areas, is the hope that it will cut global oil consumption unusually, to obtain cheap oil. Green effects of hybrid technology do not impress them but are strong arguments that facilitate this intent. If they did, the West would apply the same resources and more, devoted to hybrid technology, into containing industrial and technological pollutions. A comparative analysis of the impact of automotive traffic and emissions with modern technology on our environment mirrors an inverted priority.
The diversionary focus on fuel-dependent cars as global guzzlers and pollutants masks the frightful extent of Western industrial and technological pollutions. Technology can be many times more calamitous and unexpected than warfare. Nuclear tests, accidents and exposures, petrochemical combustion, emissions and flares, chlorofluorocarbon, halons, toxic and radio-active wastes and materials are the world's most potent pollutants that poison our planet and cause green house effects. There are other consequences, like technological “errors” that produce poison as multivitamins or cyanide for oxygen and today, it has reinvented terror as we live under nuclear, biological and chemical threats. Nuclear bombs transverse the globe as briefcases and a single drop of some chemical or lab-grown virus can poison or kill thousands of people.
These situations are made possible by technology, which enables the easy access of materials and formulas that evolve destructive passions, through the internet. Technology is now a terrorist tool that ensures concealment, weaponry, deployment and finance. Terrorism can only be a technological pollutant because what pollutants do is to kill with rampant abandon. What use are technological goodies in the face of today's nuclear, biological and chemical tendencies? The argument that technology's good points overrun the bad ones is unnatural against these propensities.
Nothing compares to industrial and technological pollutions that have left a ceiling of smog and uncertainty from Europe to the Americas and all over Asia. As the epidemic spreads, industries are moved to less developed nations, under various economic guises, reducing pollutants and risks in these developed countries and transferring them to such nations. Industrial and toxic wastes, such as the West produce, are most times irreversible and irreducible. Nuclear reactor accidents, detonations, toxic and radio-active exposure where they occur, are known to leave citizens stranded and cities uninhabitable for as long as fifty years!
More oil for industrialized nations mean increased pollutions, global degradation, industrial accidents, terrorism and blue-print theft by rogue states. Once technological information and pollutants are acquired, they cannot be switched off but remain intellectual property that can exert excusable extremes. Technology bears huge cost that kill profit to enslave us. We will pay for its use, proliferation, demands and excesses as even its speed and lack of borders impede or prolong detection of cyber-crimes. Its universality will fuse international jurisprudence and governments into a new world order and we will pay to police virtual reality. Privacy and liberty will wither as we slave for technology, but the force majeure may yet be sudden death with a big bang!
The very premise of begging for debt cancellation is wrong, especially for Nigeria. It is atrocious for any government or institution sustained by democratic fiat to provide funds that strengthen tyranny and dictatorship. The question these governments and institutions ought to answer is to whom did they give their money? What business did they have giving money and aid to military dictatorships and accepting their patronage? Surely, whatever business they had was with some military junta and not the Nigerian people. They paid out their coffers to what was clearly, and to the democratic world, an illegitimate regime that held us hostage with guns. They ought to have known better not to give such loans to pariah regimes, and the most ridiculous thing that can be added to this, is to pass such debt to a displacing democratic government, and as if there was nothing to be ashamed of.
To front multinational financial institutions as debt collectors is coercive fraud and to pay them is democratic political betrayal. The Nigerian people did not have a say in it and know nothing about such transactions, and the West should not expect that our cherished resources will pay for their indiscretions. It is perplexing that some Western governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars removing illegitimate governments all over the world and still, loan money to some, dubiously, because technology pressures them for a continual supply of these nations' vital resources. This conduct is the violent rape of a producer-nation and its people that directly assaults our being as this glue of financial entrapment sets and strengthens, holding down the progress of less fortunate nations.
Loans are taken and secured by recipient nations with their vital resources, as more loans are pursued to discharge interest due on them. It is a vicious cycle designed to make any nation prostrate, as precious resources are made easy picking for industrial nations. To argue that such loans were given to relieve pressures of sanction or keep us breathing while they figured out what to do, if not patronizing, is at best humanitarian. It crucifies to bait such profit from anyone's misfortune. The US National Intelligence Council report was found wanting on the impact of such entrapment for sub-Saharan African's future.
If freedom is truly on the march around the world and that indeed, African countries desire peace and prosperity then illegal governments along with the commitments they make must be forbidden and disowned. It is not about debt forgiveness or relief but its denial, and bad deals that exhibit poor judgment and the callous disregard for an oppressed people. The West cannot eat their cake and have it; it cannot claim to be the flagship of democracy and yet, disrupt its realization. Debt denial is about the essence and decency of community. Fairness, peace and the sense of justice that permit us to live as free citizens of one global democratic society.
All we are saying, is that the greater percentage of loans, presumed given to Nigeria, were given by Western democratic governments and institutions to rogue regimes that were not vested with any mandate whatsoever, from Nigerians, to preside over their affairs. And that it was given, not to us, but in the knowledge and furtherance of our oppression, by the West for its own benefit and progress. This cannibalizes democracy.
Hybrid technology is therefore, another way the West hopes to impose consequences that will cripple oil-producing nations. The severe and rampant economic dislocations this will cause may be beneficial to the West, as they instigate political upheavals or the violent overthrow of governments.
These pressures make illegitimate governments jittery and amenable to economic or political conditionality, or both. Here, illegitimacy may be condoned, through emergency laws and coups, to protect Western interests, as these societies degenerate into conflicts that showcase the wicked cost of technology. These methods specify crimes against humanity.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
As it is in Afghanistan, so be it with Africa?
As it is in Afghanistan, so be it with Africa?
Early in December the commander of U.S. Army Africa, Major General David Hogg, visited Algeria to meet with senior military and government officials to discuss “bilateral relations and regional issues,” including joint reconnaissance and training activities and “a future visit by Algerian soldiers to the United States to investigate how the Army integrates its lessons learned center into its training regime.”U.S. Army Africa is the Army’s newest service component command and is based in Vicenza, Italy, assigned to AFRICOM and tasked with “developing relationships with land forces in Africa and supporting U.S. Army efforts on the African continent.”
The regional issues deliberated on by the American general and his Algerian counterparts relate to Algeria’s military campaign against Salafist insurgents and similar counterinsurgency operations throughout the Sahel, which consists of parts of Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan.
At the end of last month U.S. military personnel assigned to Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti participated in a combat casualty course in Burundi as part of a U.S. State Department-sponsored program. According to James Cobb, State Department program country manager in Burundi, “The course is part of a U.S. Department of State initiative to provide African armies an opportunity to partner with American defense forces to develop their peacekeeping skills for operations throughout Africa.”
In December the defense chief of Djibouti, Major General Fathi Ahmed Houssein, met with AFRICOM commander General William Ward at AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart to discuss “joint security cooperation activities and potential areas of further cooperation…in East Africa and throughout the continent.”
As the AFRICOM website puts it:
“Djibouti hosts approximately 3,000 U.S. and allied personnel at Camp Lemonnier, which is the only major U.S. military facility in Africa, though small teams of U.S. personnel work across the continent on short-term assignments. The main military organization at Camp Lemonnier is the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). A component of U.S. AFRICOM, CJTF-HOA sends teams throughout the East Africa region [to] protect U.S. and coalition interests.”
Among several joint programs, the generals elaborated plans for “Support to Djiboutian armed forces in the Eastern African Standby Brigade (EASBRIG) field training exercise, aimed to assess the readiness and capability of EASBRIG, a component of the African Union’s Africa Standby Force….”
And expansion of the “International Military Education and Training, a program that invites foreign military officers to attend military schools in the United States, and provides funding for trainers to provide specific, localized training in African countries.”
As well as the continuation of the “Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program, designed to improve African militaries’ capabilities by providing selected training and equipment required to execute multinational…operations.”
Ward and Houssein also discussed “other ways to increase support in building partner capacity in the Horn of Africa through the U.S. Defense Department’s 1206 program [to train and equip foreign militaries for "counterterrorism or stability operations"] and the U.S. State Department’s Partnership Regional East African Counter-Terrorism program,” especially in regard to Ugandan-Burundian AMISOM operations in Somalia.
Last month the defense chiefs of the twelve members of EASBRIG (presumably Eritrea was absent) met in the capital of Burundi to discuss “the Policy Framework for the Establishment of the Eastern Africa Standby Force [EASF] and the Memorandum of Understanding for Cooperation between the Eastern Africa Standby Force Coordination Mechanism [EASBRICOM] and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development [IGAD] that aims to harmonise the relations of both institutions….”
NATO, which has been training African Standby Force staff officers at its training center in Oberammergau, Germany, has designated the NATO Joint Command Lisbon to implement the bloc’s military cooperation with Africa. Joint Command Lisbon has what it identifies as a Senior Military Liaison Officer at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (The territory of every nation in Africa except for Liberia, founded by the American Colonization Society in 1821-1822, was formerly ruled by nations that joined NATO: Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey.)
On September 5, 2007 “the North Atlantic Council – NATO’s top political decision making body – agreed to provide assistance to the African Union with a study on the assessment of the operational readiness of the African Standby Force brigades,” according to the NATO website.
In the west of Africa, the Economic Community of West African States Standby Force brigade is being readied to intervene in Ivory Coast to depose President Laurent Gbagbo as the Dutch Defense Ministry announced last week that one of its ships was “heading for the coast of Cote d’Ivoire to provide supplies for French warships stationed there.”
U.S. Naval Forces Europe – U.S. Naval Forces Africa, which is headquartered in Naples, Italy and directs its operations through the U.S. Sixth Fleet, also headquartered in Italy, launched the Africa Partnership Station in 2007 as a naval component of AFRICOM. Warships assigned to it have visited several African nations on the east, west and south ends of the continent, among them Angola, Cameroon, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Reunion, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Togo.
Last month the Pentagon’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Africa Vicki Huddleston and the State Department’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Donald Yamamoto (who was ambassador to Ethiopia when it invaded Somalia in 2006) visited U.S. Africa Command headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. While there the Defense Department’s Huddleston asserted that “East Africa becomes extremely high for DOD [the Department of Defense] in terms of priority. So the highest priority for DOD, and therefore AFRICOM, becomes East Africa because of Somalia and then West (Africa), North Africa….”
Air strikes, drone and cruise missile attacks, special forces operations, helicopter gunship raids, counterinsurgency campaigns, multinational armed interventions, cluster bomb and depleted uranium weapons use, and the entire panoply of military actions associated with the Afghanistan-Pakistan war are already being conducted in Africa and will only be increased.
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Quotable Israeli Quotes
Quotable Israeli Quotes
“You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel…”~~Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache
Related reading; Six Jewish Companies Own 96% of the World’s Media
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