If you happen to live in the Midwest you may eventually become a Canadian citizen after a civil war occurs. That's what Igor Panarin predicts. Mr. Panarin heads the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for diplomats. He is a former KGB analyst and is a key Russian expert on Russia-U.S. relations.
He argues that:
Economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war in the U.S. in 2010;
There is a 55-45% chance that the U.S. will disintegrate and split into six parts (see map below);
Each part will become affiliated with another country or part of the world--for example, Midwest and several other states will become affiliated with Canada.
Is he serious? Yes, at least that's what the official media in Russia would have us all believe.
Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama can work miracles, he has written, "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
Does anyone believe him? Well, he points out that French political scientist Emmanuel Todd rightly forecasted the demise of the Soviet Union 15 years before it happened. Few believed him but in the end he was right.
Quick Vue: Igor Penarin is interviewed below.
Sources for this post include The Wall Street Journal, article by Andrew Osborn.
May your holiday season be wonderful and may it enable you to create many fond memories!
I invite you to enjoy the accompanying video below. It is from a Christmas concert in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The choir and congregation sing three verses of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing accompanied by the organ and an orchestra. The music soars and the last note echoes off the walls of the cathedral.
During the second verse the camera pans the faces of the members of the boys choir. Check out their traditional collars as well as the facial expressions conveying enthusiasm.
In the third verse the choir sings a descant that is terrific. Be sure to play this when you can "blast" the sound.
There's a revolution brewing in Afghanistan. It is very silent. The revolutionary leaders are women--some 10,000 entrepreneurs who are using micro-loans to start beauty parlors, bakeries, handcraft shops and more. This in a country where women are more vulnerable than anywhere else.
Afghan women entrepreneurs meet with Laura Bush
in the city of Arzu in June 2008. (White House photo.)
Note these key points excerpted and condensed from The Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor:
Women entrepreneurs are emerging from the isolation of war and the Taliban to help build a more prosperous nation.
Per SurayaParlika, founder of the All Afghan Women's Union: Entrepreneurship has restorative powers not only for women but also the nation.
For many women, entrepreneurship skills are a gateway to greater sense of independence, allowing them to feel more entitled to their rights.
The benefits are more than symbolic. Women are earning enough to support themselves. Women-owned businesses now provide employment and marketable skills to other women.
Under the Taliban, millions of women were banned from working and going to school. Even today the idea of a woman owning a business is still taboo to many. SurayaParlika has been shot at twice in three years while training 500 women to become entrepreneurs. Yet, the revolution continues to build.
Per Paula Dobriansky, Undersecretary for Democracy and Global Affairs, U.S. Department of State: No country can be stable so long as only half of its population is free to succeed. And foreign stability through such things as women-owned businesses makes the U.S. safer.
Ms. Dobriansky recently remarked how the number of women entrepreneurs in Afghanistan is growing. She referred to meeting with women entrepreneurs on three separate occasions. The first time she met just two women who were setting up a micro-finance bank. The next meeting had to be held in the cafeteria of the U.S. embassy, a space large enough for 80 to 100 women, all owners of a business--from kites to a cement factory to furniture to rugs. The third time they met in the headquarters of a federation of women entrepreneurs.
"It was striking to us," Ms. Dobriansky said, "what a little targeted assistance could do to support this fundamental change from the time of the Taliban."
Some revolutions are loud and noisy. But in Afghanistan there is a revolution building quietly, led by women entrepreneurs. Stay tuned!
Its impact will hopefully reach you and me.
Quick Vue -- Women entrepreneurs in Afghanistan. (Approx. 3.5 minutes)
Quick Vue -- Five Afghan women business owners meet with women business owners in Oklahoma through a program called Peace Through Business. (Approx. 2 minutes)
Ever see this picture showing how much light our country produces at night? It's amazing and it shows how increasingly difficult it is to see the stars in all their glory. Last month National Geographic featured a cover story about light pollution--how our artificial light impacts nature.
Here is some information excerpted and condensed from that article:
Nighttime lighting upsets circadian rhythms (the oscillation of waking and sleeping essential to our biological welfare) causing effects just now being discovered. One study suggests a correlation between breast cancer and nighttime brightness.
Two-thirds of humanity lives under skies polluted with light. One-fifth can no longer see the Milky Way.
In the Eastern half of the U.S., one would be hard-pressed to find any dark sky area, meaning a place where you can avoid night glow.
Many cities, such as Flagstaff, Arizona, and countries, such as the Czech Republic, have committed to reducing unwanted glare.
Where to go for the best dark sky area anywhere? The Central African Republic.
The video below will give you a quick visual overview of the issue. Towards the end off the video you'll see what we're missing.
(Quick Vue hint: Advance the cursor slightly more than halfway to begin with a fascinating satellite view of the world at night.)
Click on second icon from lower right to enlarge to full screen.
Last month, NASA's Mars lander, Phoenix, radioed its last message back to Earth. The message was "Triumph," meaning that the lander had confirmed the existence of water on the planet Mars. How will history record the importance of this event, which came at the same time as Barack Obama was elected President of the United States?
Back here on Earth, we are reminded of how precious water has become. Fresh water accounts for just 3% of all Earth's water. By some estimates, water is a $500 billion industry.
Note these points excerpted and condensed from an article entitled "How to Quench the World's Thirst" by Alexandra Alter in the November 8-9 edition of the Wall Street Journal:
Geopolitical experts warn that water scarcity poses not just a public health risk but also a threat to global security.
Global water consumption is growing at unsustainable rates, doubling every 20 years.
International Alert, a London-based conflict resolution group, lists 46 countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion that have a high risk for violent conflict over water in the next two decades.
75-80% of surface water in India, China or Russia is too polluted to drink, bathe in or fish in.
The U.S. exports about a third of its water as "virtual water"--meaning the water used to produce goods like cars and computer chips.
Included above are several points from an interview with Maude Barlow, the United Nation's first senior adviser on water issues.
No wonder, then, that the eight states and two Canadian provinces bordering the Great Lakes, which contain nearly 20% of the world's fresh water, recently signed the Great Lakes compact. Almost 10 years in the making, the compact restricts diverting water from the five lakes, their connecting channels and the St. Lawrence River.
Consider yourself forewarned. Access to fresh water is going to become a BIG issue in our lives.
Quick Vue Spotlights Here are two videos which add perspective. The first is a cut from MSNBC's coverage of the discovery of water on Mars. (Hint: For quickest vue, advance the cursor halfway.)
The second video will tell you about efforts in Kazakhstan to revive the Aral Sea. The former Soviet Union diverted 75% of the water from the Aral Sea to grow cotton. The Sea shrank and split into two parts, leaving behind what the International Herald Tribune described as a "mineral stew that unleashed disease and poverty onto the hundreds of villages and cities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that once lived off its bounty." The World bank and the Kazakhstan government have completed a dam to revive one of the two smaller lakes. This video will give you a great overview of what it looks like when you deplete a sea--complete with haunting images of abandoned vessels sitting on land that was once under water--and then try to revive it. It's a hopeful sign.
In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Daniel Henninger, of the Wall Street Journal, mentioned this in his column today--"America Needs Its Frontier Spirit।" (See link at right.)
"Turner argued," Mr. Henninger wrote, "that the U.S. found its identity as it pushed away from the Eastern seaboard and crossed the frontier 'fall lines': the Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the plains, the Rocky Mountains and California."
Turner described the "traits of the frontier," things like "coarseness of strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness...nervous energy...and dominant individualism, working for good and evil."
"Individualism working for good is the story of America's entrepreneurs, the wonder of the world the past 100 years," wrote Mr. Henninger.
Entrepreneurs are risk takers and that's what has made our country grow. But then, risk takers also helped cause the current economic recession.
Mr. Henninger makes a very good point: We need risk takers to continue the long economic miracle we know as the U.S. In the current climate, however, many people are risk averse. That's fine to a point. Ultimately though, we need risk takers.
With that in mind I call your attention to Joseph W. Kittinger II, a highly decorated U.S. Air Force Colonel who spent 18 months during the Vietnam War as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton prison.
But my reason for mentioning Colonel Kittinger is not that particular experience. Rather, it is because he demonstrated frontier spirit in August 1960. That's when he made a volunteer parachute jump from more than 100,000 feet--literally from space. He jumped from a platform suspended from a helium balloon at 102,800 feet. He wore a pressurized suit and fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, reaching a speed of over 600 miles per hour.
It was actually his third high altitude jump. The first one almost killed him. He decided to try it again to get it right.
The jumps were part of Air Force Project Excelsior, which conducted research for the design of escape systems for high altitude flying and space travel.
Colonel Kittinger embodied the frontier spirit observed by Mr. Turner in 1893 and of which Mr. Henninger reminds us today. That spirit is what helped make our country great and will do so going forward--if we embrace it.
The clip below will tell you more about Colonel Kittinger's jump. He appears in the video.
(For Quick Vue advance the cursor halfway. Click on the second icon from the left in lower right corner to enlarge video to full screen.)
A friend has invited me to think more critically about corporations. Let's face it. Corporations sometimes do bad things. But they're not inherently evil. They are amoral, human organizations capable of doing both bad and good. They are reflections of the people who run and staff them.
This may be splitting hairs when facing an economic crisis brought on, at least in part, by corporations which did some really stupid things. Who is responsible if not corporations like Citigroup and Bear Stearns?
Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, put things into perspective for me when, in a recent column entitled "All Fall Down," he wrote:
"This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics. So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home...bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties as if they were AAA bonds...buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield."
"Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in that chain. And the bank's executives, including, sad to see, the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were clueless about the reckless financial instruments...or were so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank's risk managers and risk takers (and so bought off by their bonuses) that they had no interest in stopping it."
Doesn't it make you want to scream?
I'm reminded of a well known song, Father and Son, by Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens. The song is a conversation between a father and son. The father cautions his son not to react too severely when he finds that things in the world are amiss. The lyrics include these words of the father:
"I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy, To be calm when you've found something going on. But take your time, think a lot, Think of everything you've got. For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not."
But the son's righteous indignation persists. He feels compelled to leave and strike out on his own to a fate of which we can only guess. Perhaps years later the son becomes the father, cautioning his son to stay calm.
So, who is responsible for fixing the economy? Well,in many ways it's each of us. For the economy is really a compilation of financial and lifestyle decisions we all make. Perhaps each of us must determine which of the two people in the song we will most resemble--the father or the son?
Yusuf Islam performs Father and Son in a 2007 BBC telecast.
Have something interesting to say at your next business meeting or social event with less effort. World Vue Letter gets you ready by doing the information-gathering for you.
World Vue Letter consists mainly of content excerpted and condensed from media sources. Many posts feature Quick Vue--relevant videos from You Tube.
There is no cost for subscribing to World Vue Letter. Your comments are appreciated. Jim Pearce
Please Note
World Vue Letter is independent. The inclusion of videos does not constitute an endorsement of any political views which may be expressed therein.
Career in banking and consulting. Retired a few years ago from an account manager position. Experience taught me that client meetings were more effective when it was possible to share interesting stories and ideas of general interest. This blog is intended to help you do that.
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