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Liverpool - Why, Oh, Why

Frankly-speaking, I'm only into my third year as a true blue Liverpool supporter. Yeah, every Reds fan know, last season (2008-2009) was one of our best in recent memory. Never mind that we finished runners-up to Manchester United by a few measly points, but the fact remains that Liverpool had not won the English Premiership for a long, long time. I do not know whether our faithful sponsors, Carlsberg, has anything to do with the failure, but deep down in every Liverpool fans' hearts, they would certainly love to see a change of fortunes with a change of jersey sponsors. Hmm, maybe The Standard Chartered Bank sponsorship starting next season will signal the start of good things to come. Again, my crystal ball fails me. Like many neutrals say, Liverpool should stop being over-reliant on Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres. And I tend to agree, but not 100%. Rafa Benitez has been known to tinker with the Reds line-up ALL the time and it is about time that he sticks to a proven first eleven. Well (sigh), he IS the boss and I am very sure he knows more in football tactics than I will ever learn in multiple life times. Okay, Liverpool has lost five times this season and almost everyone has written them off from winning the title. But, when Rafa said that he aims for Liverpool to attain a top four finish, some label him as arrogant. Nah, he is not that. He is being a realist and I bet many will be eating their socks if Liverpool does that eventually. Remember the "arrogant" Arsene Wenger of Arsenal? Well, both Rafa and Wenger share similarities between them, that is, strong passionate belief in what their teams can possibly do. I am no Rafa, nor no Wenger. But, I am an ardent Liverpool fan. Like supporters of other English Premiership clubs, we badly want to win the Championship, no matter what. One advice for Rafa, better persuade your boss to splash out some cash when the January transfer window opens. With better luck and less injuries, I just know that Liverpool can do it. A Champions League without the Reds is almost unheard of, but it can become a bleak reality come 2010-2011. Come on, Liverpool! You can, you must and you will! You'll Never Walk Alone.

Why Are Even Smart, Liberal Men Freaked Out by Abortion?

(Courtesy of Alternet.org)

Four weeks after my abortion, I was dating again.

It was my second night out with a wide-eyed, pretentious poetry MFAer. We were three whiskey sodas down when he suavely brought up his recent bout with testicular cancer. His woes -- the monthly check-up tests, the weirdness of post-surgery masturbation -- flowed from his tongue without any hint of doubt that such talk might be second-date TMI.

Reaching his hand across the table and playing with my fingers, he asked innocently enough, "Have you ever had surgery?"

Um ... yes. I was still spotting from the procedure; I was reminded of it every time I pulled down my pants. In a drunken split second I debated avoiding the A-word. My abortion had basically been the uterine equivalent of minor knee surgery, annoying and a bit painful, but not soul-destroying or existentially angsty. At the same time, I didn't want to draw needless attention to the fragile and somewhat bloody state of my uterus, especially with someone I might want to invite in there later on.

Still, lying reeked of shame and regret, so I decided to answer him casually and matter-of-factly. If he turned out to be a bible-thumping right-winger screaming "Murder!" I didn't care much anyhow. I'd realized we didn't have long-term potential around midnight when he made the suggestion we go drop acid in Fort Greene Park and read Whitman poems to each other ("Fort Greene Park was, like, Whitman's favorite writing spot").

As soon as "I had an abortion recently" left my lips, his hand withdrew clumsily and his eyes, seeking refuge, darted up to the 1950s pinup poster on the adjacent wall. But apparently all that breast display was too evocative of fertility. He jumped up from the booth. "More drinks?" he asked -- and then scurried off without waiting for my reply. As far as appropriate date conversation goes, it seems that a dude is allowed to passionately elegize his one removed ball, but I couldn't even make passing mention of a discarded bundle of cells.

***

I was twenty-five when I discovered I was a month pregnant. I wasn't dating the fetus-daddy anymore, and I was without health insurance, having been laid off from my crappy fact-checking job.

I was the living, breathing example of that small percentage of women who get knocked up for being careless with their pill intake. I had no doubt I was going to terminate the pregnancy. In fact, my certainty gave me odd satisfaction. I'd spent countless weekends in college escorting abortion patients through the obnoxious church groups outside Planned Parenthood. One elderly protester, Teresa, would debate me for hours, and every time the argument was losing steam, she would let out a knowing, self-satisfied laugh, reducing my pro-choice position to lack of experience: "Ah, honey, you've never been pregnant. When you get pregnant for the first time, you'll feel a connection instantly. You'll know your child loves you and you won't be able to harm it."

Lo and behold, when I looked down at the two plus signs, there was no instant connection. The invasion in my abdomen felt more like a cruel joke than a loving creature who would paw at my breasts and call me "Mommy." Afterwards, I considered calling Teresa to brag about my angst-less procedure and the sweet aftertaste of relief. But I didn't have her digits, let alone her last name.

Besides, I knew friendlier ears. I honed my improbable pregnancy and ensuing abortion into a kvetching monologue about life's little inequities -- I get pregnant on birth control, while teenagers in Utah practicing the pray-to-God-and-please-come-on-my-ass method remain distinctly un-knocked-up? It's not like I broadcasted my uterine news to co-workers, distant cousins, or Facebook cronies. It was simply something that happened to me, and I shared it with my friends like I would've shared any other story. It would have felt wrong not to. My female friends laughed when I laughed, commiserated when I needed it and treated the procedure as lightheartedly as I did. That's all I wanted. To be able to define my own experience, not the other way around.

But there was a palpable discomfort when I had the same conversation with men. For the guys I was dating, the idea of a vacuum-like apparatus being the last visitor in my vagina was more troubling than if it had been, say, Stalin's penis. Even die-hard liberals who would wax on about a woman's right to choose were downright uncomfortable when actually presented with a woman who chose.

Of course I knew that bringing up abortion was about as fascinating as listening to a nursing-home doctor detail Grandpa's incontinence problems. Medical procedures are decidedly not sexy. As far as dating went, I operated under a tit-for-tat divulgence basis: you talk ball cancer, I'll explain my thirty-day long period. If the dreary poet had never asked about surgery, he would have been none the wiser.

But even with platonic male friends, the conversation was awkward. The Monday after my Saturday abortion, my friend Mike and I were sitting outside during our lunch break, while he daintily picked at a homemade sandwich and boyishly enthused about an idea he had for a t-shirt. He asked me what I'd done over the weekend. I began: "So, uh, this is kinda crazy ... "

Mike's mouth fell open, and he set his sandwich down on his lap so slowly it felt like the eternal second right before a nuclear explosion. "Oh. My. God," he said, "Oh my God." As I started laughing, he caressed my back, and looking me meaningfully in the eye proclaimed, "You are the strongest. Person. I know," wrapping me into a full hug as I made weak, half-hearted protests.

To be fair, his reaction wasn't malicious, or demeaning; it was a compliment, I suppose, but it was far removed from what I actually said or felt. In Mike's mind the act of abortion had such powerful connotations. It was already defined as a Big Deal, and I was a hero, a survivor, a wounded victim. I wanted to be none of those. I felt like none of those. Sure, I wasn't too happy about dropping an unexpected $400, and my vagina was still sore like it had been repeatedly pounded. But this was like getting a Purple Heart for a masturbation-related wrist sprain.

My friend Allie was warned. When she'd had an abortion a year before me, she was treated by a sweet, tattooed, hippie nurse practitioner who provided her with some advice: "Do you have a boyfriend? Maybe don't tell boys. Sometimes boys don't know how to deal with this."

Allie's brief pregnancy -- the result of a job loss, a break-up and heavy drinking culminating in a one-night stand -- is not a topic she feels compelled to discuss with new people she's dating. "In the same way you don't want to tell someone how many people you've slept with," she says, "you can never predict when a guy's going to become a jerk. Abortion is just one of those hot-button issues for a dude to randomly be a jerk about."

But with the recent popularity of slapstick pregnancy comedies like "Knocked Up" and "Juno", you'd be surprised at how randomly "So have you ever been pregnant?" or "What would you do?" can invade a light conversation. And where anti-choice activists believe "confession" is a necessary step to absolve yourself of the "crime," and Christian sites like Care Net are full of essays about regretful women weeping about the mistakes of their youth to disapproving, divinely forgiving husbands, the pro-choice side isn't offering up any nifty guides titled So You're Eating a Cheeseburger With Your Man and Abortion Comes Up. That, at least for me, would've been more handy than all the safe-sex pamphlets stuffed in my hand when I exited the clinic. Between my desire to be honest and my fear of that honesty's ramifications, managing and packaging my abortion became more difficult than the act itself.

The first guy I dated seriously post-abortion found out inadvertently: blame exhaustion and too much booze and it being very, very early on New Year's Day 2008. He made a crack about a fetus, and I was too out-of-control wasted to get that he was joking. "Who told you about that?" I blurted. The conversation from there went smoothly enough, despite all the speech-slurring, until I said I'd felt no attachment or angst going into the clinic. He pounced: "How could you not have felt anything? I don't believe you! It's only natural to feel something."

We fought for an hour in bed before drifting to sleep during an impasse. It's upsetting when someone tells you that you couldn't possibly feel the way you feel. Or that what you felt -- relief -- is not a "natural" emotion. In the morning he apologized and said he hadn't articulated himself well. We went to brunch and took a walk. But some part of me still suspected that enough alcohol had brought out the sort of prejudices smart liberals know to be embarrassed by when sober.

Before my abortion I never would have imagined that seemingly antiquated ideas about gender -- that women need to be taken care of, that women always have binding ties to motherhood, that female body processes are somehow alien or scary -- would ever surface in the New Yorker-toting media men I was dating, even if just for a moment, even if just when drunk.

None of these men had faced abortion in any but the most abstract terms.

Then they did, more than once, and it was more than a bit depressing to realize that a fair number of liberal men still possess confining notions about women, and while they would argue wholeheartedly for reproductive rights in the political abstract, they might personally judge me in bed at night.

I still can't figure out why. Hell, the dreary poet graduated from Sarah Lawrence; I would bet money that he marched in at least one women's-rights protest. But then, none of these men had faced abortion in any but the most abstract terms; the hyperbolic political and cultural conceptions of the act were all they had. Or maybe my abortion just brought out some standard-issue male anxieties about pregnancy, fertility, the vagina in general. What I do know is that now, a year and a half later, I'm more terrified of abortion coming up on dates than I was a week after my operation. That's not to say I would lie. But I'll do whatever I can to avoid the question in the first place.

For what it's worth, one man took the news well right from the get-go: the fetus-daddy. By "well," I mean he based his reaction on the words coming out of my mouth and neither victimized me nor questioned my essential womanity. Of course, he also had the benefit of learning he wasn't going to be a twenty-four-year-old father in the same conversation. And over time, the boyfriend I told on New Year's eventually stopped looking constipated when I wisecracked about pregnancy, fetuses and abortions, though he never wanted to stop using condoms. Even though we were "in love." Even though it had been eight months. Even though I was taking my birth control with the timeliness of a church bell.

And weeks after my friend Mike held me on the park bench, he emailed an apology, explaining that he hadn't meant to treat me like a member of the wounded. But he went on to write that it must have been an "emotionally wrenching experience and full of heretofore unknown feelings that only a strong, self-possessed person could endure."

Months later, though, Mike and I were at a bar talking about stupid Facebook applications. I mentioned that on the Compare People question "Who would make a better mother?" I'd been voted against twenty-seven times. There was a pause and then I riffed, "Maybe I told too many people about my abortion?" He laughed, genuinely. Which was exactly what I was looking for.

This article originally appeared on Nerve.com.

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Soleha And The UPSR

Well, the results of the Ujian Penilaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) or the Primary School Evaluation Test were out last week on Thursday, 19th November 2009. My daughter, Shahidatul Soleha, had been one of the many, many thousands of candidates who sat for the UPSR in September 2009. Her results? She achieved one A, two Cs and two Ds. Thank God, she passed all her subjects that she had taken! Although I had high hopes for her, I knew it would not be forthcoming this first time around. You see, she had quite a slow start to her primary school learning and for several months before the UPSR, I was getting nervous and quite worried with her performance in school tests. I am just too pleased that she scored at least an A in one of her subjects. In my opinion, the teaching of core subjects in English must have had something to do with my daughter's "poor" performance. Malaysian students will do better if the core subjects are being taught in Malay and I fail to understand why the past government of Malaysia changed the medium of instruction to English. We are Malaysians, for God's sake! Now the government has the cheek to change back the medium of instruction back to Malay. I would not be surprised that in the future, it would be changed back again to English. Malaysian politicians are well known to be very inconsistent in their policies that they preach. Common lah, guys! You should know better! Now, I need to send my daughter to remedial English classes as her grasp of this language is not what it should be for a student that will enter secondary school next year. I deeply regret that she had to study in English for the past six years as her teachers are proven to be not that good in imparting lessons in this language. Or else, my daughter's results could be much, much better. Period.

A Planet On The Brink: Economic Crash Will Fuel Social Unrest

By: Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books)

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations -- none as yet in the United States -- your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman, it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.

For the most part, such upheavals, even when violent, are likely to remain localized in nature, and disorganized enough that government forces will be able to bring them under control within days or weeks, even if -- as with Athens for six days last December -- urban paralysis sets in due to rioting, tear gas, and police cordons. That, at least, has been the case so far. It is entirely possible, however, that, as the economic crisis worsens, some of these incidents will metastasize into far more intense and long-lasting events: armed rebellions, military takeovers, civil conflicts, even economically fueled wars between states.

Every outbreak of violence has its own distinctive origins and characteristics. All, however, are driven by a similar combination of anxiety about the future and lack of confidence in the ability of established institutions to deal with the problems at hand. And just as the economic crisis has proven global in ways not seen before, so local incidents -- especially given the almost instantaneous nature of modern communications -- have a potential to spark others in far-off places, linked only in a virtual sense.

A Global Pandemic of Economically Driven Violence

The riots that erupted in the spring of 2008 in response to rising food prices suggested the speed with which economically-related violence can spread. It is unlikely that Western news sources captured all such incidents, but among those recorded in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were riots in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.

In Haiti, for example, thousands of protesters stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince and demanded food handouts, only to be repelled by government troops and UN peacekeepers. Other countries, including Pakistan and Thailand, quickly sought to deter such assaults by deploying troops at farms and warehouses throughout the country.

The riots only abated at summer's end when falling energy costs brought food prices crashing down as well. (The cost of food is now closely tied to the price of oil and natural gas because petrochemicals are so widely and heavily used in the cultivation of grains.) Ominously, however, this is sure to prove but a temporary respite, given the epic droughts now gripping breadbasket regions of the United States, Argentina, Australia, China, the Middle East, and Africa. Look for the prices of wheat, soybeans, and possibly rice to rise in the coming months -- just when billions of people in the developing world are sure to see their already marginal incomes plunging due to the global economic collapse.

Food riots were but one form of economic violence that made its bloody appearance in 2008. As economic conditions worsened, protests against rising unemployment, government ineptitude, and the unaddressed needs of the poor erupted as well. In India, for example, violent protests threatened stability in many key areas. Although usually described as ethnic, religious, or caste disputes, these outbursts were typically driven by economic anxiety and a pervasive feeling that someone else's group was faring better than yours -- and at your expense.

In April, for example, six days of intense rioting in Indian-controlled Kashmir were largely blamed on religious animosity between the majority Muslim population and the Hindu-dominated Indian government; equally important, however, was a deep resentment over what many Kashmiri Muslims experienced as discrimination in jobs, housing, and land use. Then, in May, thousands of nomadic shepherds known as Gujjars shut down roads and trains leading to the city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, in a drive to be awarded special economic rights; more than 30 people were killed when the police fired into crowds. In October, economically-related violence erupted in Assam in the country's far northeast, where impoverished locals are resisting an influx of even poorer, mostly illegal immigrants from nearby Bangladesh.

Economically-driven clashes also erupted across much of eastern China in 2008. Such events, labeled "mass incidents" by Chinese authorities, usually involve protests by workers over sudden plant shutdowns, lost pay, or illegal land seizures. More often than not, protestors demanded compensation from company managers or government authorities, only to be greeted by club-wielding police.

Needless to say, the leaders of China's Communist Party have been reluctant to acknowledge such incidents. This January, however, the magazine Liaowang (Outlook Weekly) reported that layoffs and wage disputes had triggered a sharp increase in such "mass incidents," particularly along the country's eastern seaboard, where much of its manufacturing capacity is located.

By December, the epicenter of such sporadic incidents of violence had moved from the developing world to Western Europe and the former Soviet Union. Here, the protests have largely been driven by fears of prolonged unemployment, disgust at government malfeasance and ineptitude, and a sense that "the system," however defined, is incapable of satisfying the future aspirations of large groups of citizens.

One of the earliest of this new wave of upheavals occurred in Athens, Greece, on December 6, 2008, after police shot and killed a 15-year-old schoolboy during an altercation in a crowded downtown neighborhood. As news of the killing spread throughout the city, hundreds of students and young people surged into the city center and engaged in pitched battles with riot police, throwing stones and firebombs. Although government officials later apologized for the killing and charged the police officer involved with manslaughter, riots broke outestimate, the six days of riots caused $1.3 billion in damage to businesses at the height of the Christmas shopping season. repeatedly in the following days in Athens and other Greek cities. Angry youths attacked the police -- widely viewed as agents of the establishment -- as well as luxury shops and hotels, some of which were set on fire.

Russia also experienced a spate of violent protests in December, triggered by the imposition of high tariffs on imported automobiles. Instituted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to protect an endangered domestic auto industry (whose sales were expected to shrink by up to 50% in 2009), the tariffs were a blow to merchants in the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok who benefited from a nationwide commerce in used Japanese vehicles. When local police refused to crack down on anti-tariff protests, the authorities were evidently worried enough to fly in units of special forces from Moscow, 3,700 miles away.

In January, incidents of this sort seemed to be spreading through Eastern Europe. Between January 13th and 16th, anti-government protests involving violent clashes with the police erupted in the Latvian capital of Riga, the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, and the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. It is already essentially impossible to keep track of all such episodes, suggesting that we are on the verge of a global pandemic of economically driven violence.

A Perfect Recipe for Instability

While most such incidents are triggered by an immediate event -- a tariff, the closure of local factory, the announcement of government austerity measures -- there are systemic factors at work as well. While economists now agree that we are in the midst of a recession deeper than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s, they generally assume that this downturn -- like all others since World War II -- will be followed in a year, or two, or three, by the beginning of a typical recovery.

There are good reasons to suspect that this might not be the case -- that poorer countries (along with many people in the richer countries) will have to wait far longer for such a recovery, or may see none at all. Even in the United States, 54% of Americans now believe that "the worst" is "yet to come" and only 7% that the economy has "turned the corner," according to a recent Ipsos/McClatchy poll; fully a quarter think the crisis will last more than four years. Whether in the U.S., Russia, China, or Bangladesh, it is this underlying anxiety -- this suspicion that things are far worse than just about anyone is saying -- which is helping to fuel the global epidemic of violence.

The World Bank's most recent status report, Global Economic Prospects 2009, fulfills those anxieties in two ways. It refuses to state the worst, even while managing to hint, in terms too clear to be ignored, at the prospect of a long-term, or even permanent, decline in economic conditions for many in the world. Nominally upbeat -- as are so many media pundits -- regarding the likelihood of an economic recovery in the not-too-distant future, the report remains full of warnings about the potential for lasting damage in the developing world if things don't go exactly right.

Two worries, in particular, dominate Global Economic Prospects 2009: that banks and corporations in the wealthier countries will cease making investments in the developing world, choking off whatever growth possibilities remain; and that food costs will rise uncomfortably, while the use of farmlands for increased biofuels production will result in diminished food availability to hundreds of millions.

Despite its Pollyanna-ish passages on an economic rebound, the report does not mince words when discussing what the almost certain coming decline in First World investment in Third World countries would mean:

"Should credit markets fail to respond to the robust policy interventions taken so far, the consequences for developing countries could be very serious. Such a scenario would be characterized by... substantial disruption and turmoil, including bank failures and currency crises, in a wide range of developing countries. Sharply negative growth in a number of developing countries and all of the attendant repercussions, including increased poverty and unemployment, would be inevitable."

In the fall of 2008, when the report was written, this was considered a "worst-case scenario." Since then, the situation has obviously worsened radically, with financial analysts reporting a virtual freeze in worldwide investment. Equally troubling, newly industrialized countries that rely on exporting manufactured goods to richer countries for much of their national income have reported stomach-wrenching plunges in sales, producing massive plant closings and layoffs.

The World Bank's 2008 survey also contains troubling data about the future availability of food. Although insisting that the planet is capable of producing enough foodstuffs to meet the needs of a growing world population, its analysts were far less confident that sufficient food would be available at prices people could afford, especially once hydrocarbon prices begin to rise again. With ever more farmland being set aside for biofuels production and efforts to increase crop yields through the use of "miracle seeds" losing steam, the Bank's analysts balanced their generally hopeful outlook with a caveat: "If biofuels-related demand for crops is much stronger or productivity performance disappoints, future food supplies may be much more expensive than in the past."

Combine these two World Bank findings -- zero economic growth in the developing world and rising food prices -- and you have a perfect recipe for unrelenting civil unrest and violence. The eruptions seen in 2008 and early 2009 will then be mere harbingers of a grim future in which, in a given week, any number of cities reel from riots and civil disturbances which could spread like multiple brushfires in a drought.

Mapping a World at the Brink

Survey the present world, and it's all too easy to spot a plethora of potential sites for such multiple eruptions -- or far worse. Take China. So far, the authorities have managed to control individual "mass incidents," preventing them from coalescing into something larger. But in a country with a more than two-thousand-year history of vast millenarian uprisings, the risk of such escalation has to be on the minds of every Chinese leader.

On February 2nd, a top Chinese Party official, Chen Xiwen, announced that, in the last few months of 2008 alone, a staggering 20 million migrant workers, who left rural areas for the country's booming cities in recent years, had lost their jobs. Worse yet, they had little prospect of regaining them in 2009. If many of these workers return to the countryside, they may find nothing there either, not even land to work.

Under such circumstances, and with further millions likely to be shut out of coastal factories in the coming year, the prospect of mass unrest is high. No wonder the government announced a $585 billion stimulus plan aimed at generating rural employment and, at the same time, called on security forces to exercise discipline and restraint when dealing with protesters. Many analysts now believe that, as exports continue to dry up, rising unemployment could lead to nationwide strikes and protests that might overwhelm ordinary police capabilities and require full-scale intervention by the military (as occurred in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989).

Or take many of the Third World petro-states that experienced heady boosts in income when oil prices were high, allowing governments to buy off dissident groups or finance powerful internal security forces. With oil prices plunging from $147 per barrel of crude oil to less than $40 dollars, such countries, from Angola to shaky Iraq, now face severe instability.

Nigeria is a typical case in point: When oil prices were high, the central government in Abuja raked in billions every year, enough to enrich elites in key parts of the country and subsidize a large military establishment; now that prices are low, the government will have a hard time satisfying all these previously well-fed competing obligations, which means the risk of internal disequilibrium will escalate. An insurgency in the oil-producing Niger Delta region, fueled by popular discontent with the failure of oil wealth to trickle down from the capital, is already gaining momentum and is likely to grow stronger as government revenues shrivel; other regions, equally disadvantaged by national revenue-sharing policies, will be open to disruptions of all sorts, including heightened levels of internecine warfare.

Bolivia is another energy producer that seems poised at the brink of an escalation in economic violence. One of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it harbors substantial oil and natural gas reserves in its eastern, lowland regions. A majority of the population -- many of Indian descent -- supports President Evo Morales, who seeks to exercise strong state control over the reserves and use the proceeds to uplift the nation's poor. But a majority of those in the eastern part of the country, largely controlled by a European-descended elite, resent central government interference and seek to control the reserves themselves. Their efforts to achieve greater autonomy have led to repeated clashes with government troops and, in deteriorating times, could set the stage for a full-scale civil war.

Given a global situation in which one startling, often unexpected development follows another, prediction is perilous. At a popular level, however, the basic picture is clear enough: continued economic decline combined with a pervasive sense that existing systems and institutions are incapable of setting things right is already producing a potentially lethal brew of anxiety, fear, and rage. Popular explosions of one sort or another are inevitable.

Some sense of this new reality appears to have percolated up to the highest reaches of the U.S. intelligence community. In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 12th, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, declared, "The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications... Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period" -- certain to be the case in the present situation.

Blair did not specify which countries he had in mind when he spoke of "regime-threatening instability" -- a new term in the American intelligence lexicon, at least when associated with economic crises -- but it is clear from his testimony that U.S. officials are closely watching dozens of shaky nations in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia.

Now go back to that map on your wall with all those red and orange pins in it and proceed to color in appropriate countries in various shades of red and orange to indicate recent striking declines in gross national product and rises in unemployment rates. Without 16 intelligence agencies under you, you'll still have a pretty good idea of the places that Blair and his associates are eyeing in terms of instability as the future darkens on a planet at the brink.

I Got Paid From An Online Survey Company!

Yeah! It sounds too good to be true. But last week, I got paid US$31.00 from a Malaysian online survey company. Registration is free and you do not need to pay anything at all. Period. What the online company will do, after you have fully completed your registration and profiling, is that, they will email a link to you to complete a specific survey. Do click on the link (or copy and paste in your browser, if it does not work after clicking) and answer the survey as soon as possible. Please do not delay in answering the survey, as once the quota of respondents have been reached, the survey will be closed! Answering surveys can last from as short as 5 minutes to as long as 30 minutes. And I have earned US$5.00 for a simple 30 minutes survey. That is really good money! Generally-speaking, online survey companies send emails as and when it is required. The period varies. Do not worry. You would not be bombarded with emails everyday.

The US$31.00 payment came from an online survey company called Planet Pulse. Click HERE to join FREE today. I am also expecting another payment worth US$53+ from a US online survey company with a similar concept to Planet Pulse. The online survey company is called Global Test Market. Click HERE to join FREE today. You might need to open a Paypal account at http://www.paypal.com and it is free also. All the best and have fun earning easy money!