Sunday, November 21, 2010

Is HAARP Enabling WMDs of the 21st Century?

The next generation of US weapons development effort has been brought into sharp focus by the latest controversy over the US military funded HAARP research project in Alaska. This controversey started when a Pakistani scientist Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy sharply criticized the contents of a Dawn newspaper article by another Pakistani scientist Dr. Atta ur Rahman citing allegations that HAARP project is aimed at deliberately altering weather patttens adversely, and triggering earthquakes in different parts of the world by the US at will.

What has been forgotten in this debate is that the genesis of the US weapons research agenda that has been pursued for at least a decade lies in the following statement by former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former US Senator Sam Nunn:

"Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations...It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts.

Manipulating forces of nature is clearly a part of the current weapons research being pursued in America.

I think Dr. Ata is well within the realm of science in speculating about HAARP's ability to effect weather patterns and seismic activity.

Here are some of the arguments that support Dr. Ata's concerns:

1. Major seismic activity is often preceded by extreme weather phenomena induced by ionospheric disturbances - like thunderstorms with extensive lightning discharges. Before the release of tectonic stresses, there are large changes in ground potential, and these interact with the atmosphere and eventually with the ionosphere. It is conceivable that humans could manipulate the coupling in the reverse direction - from the ionosphere via the atmosphere to the lithosphere.

2. HAARP's transmitter's 3.6 MW is not a "puny" amount of power, especially when it is focused like a laser beam to trigger tectonic instability in specific spots, thereby releasing the energy already stored in tectonic plates.

I expect there to be a whole new generation of weapons coming out by mid-century from the research being done now at advanced US weapons labs in collaboration with the academia. Such weapons, including space-based weapons and cyber weapons which may now seem like the stuff of science fiction, will be very different in terms of their outer-space locations, the mechanisms they use to wreak havoc, and the kind of extraordinay but targeted damage they may cause without the "enemy" having any clue of what hit them and from where they got hit.

In 2008, the Center for Defense Information released their survey of the Pentagon’s 2009 budget, highlighting research that could lead to arms in space. By the absolute most conservative estimate, we’re talking $520 million dollars a year. The real number is likely several multiples of that, according to Noah Schactman of Wired.com.

The current military space projects mostly involve ways to disable potentially hostile satellites; many have other uses, as well. They include a giant laser, to help spot targets in orbit (and to improve space imaging, in the meantime); micro satellites, that could disable another country’s orbiters (or repair our own); a series of jammers, to block enemy satellite signals; and missile interceptors, based in space.

At first glance, an anti-missile might not seem like a space weapon project. But, as last year's satellite shoot-down showed, the same gear used to intercept a missile can also be repurposed to blast a satellite. Especially if the gear is already in space. Space provides line of sight and secure communications. It also povides clear tacking of hostile objects. Command and control is likely to move from earth to space. There will be space stations as command platfoms at various distances from the earth's surface that will command robotic and manned systems on land and sea as they evade enemy attacks and attack enemy platfoms.

The new generation of weapons will avoid the kind of widespread fall-out on "friendly" nations in the "enemy" neighborhood that results from the current generation of WMDs like the thermonuclear bombs.

Some analysts, like George Friedman of Stratfor (Next 100 Years), have explored the nature of high-tech warfare that will determine the outcome of WW III they anticipate to be fought in this century. Friedman refers to military bases in space that would be used to attack enemy bases in space and on the ground as part of the space warfare in this century. Here are two video clips of George Friedman talking about it:





Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Is America Young and Barbaric?

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Pakistani Drones in America

Foreign Origin of India's Agni Missiles

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New York Times

India's UAV Technology Center

NPR Radio

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Thursday, November 11, 2010

Rulers and Media Manufacturing Consent in India

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” ― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good 

A recent Pew Global Attitudes survey shows that 85% of Indians are satisfied with their government's performance, particularly its handling of the economy. Only the Chinese and Brazilians are more satisfied with their economic situation among the 22 countries included in the survey.

India, a nation which has the dubious distinction of being home to the world's largest population of poor, hungry, illiterate and sick people, and where 7000 people die of hunger every day, fully 81% say terrorism is the biggest problem India faces today.

The only way to explain these strange opinions from the Pew Poll in India is to seriously ponder over the following excerpts from MIT's Linguistics and Communications Professor Noam Chomsky's inteview recently published in Outlook India:

Q: You once said, “Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.” Do you mean that propaganda enables the elite to dull the will of people, depriving them of the capacity to make political choices?

A. That clearly is its goal, in fact its stated goal. Back in the 1920s, it used to be frankly called propaganda. But the word acquired a bad flavour with Nazism in the 1930s. So now, it’s not called propaganda any more. But they were right in the 1920s. The huge public relations industry, for example, has its goal to control attitudes and beliefs. Liberal commentators, like Walter Lippmann, said we have to manufacture consent and keep the rabble away from the decision-making. We are the responsible men, we have to make decisions and we have to be protected—and I quote Lippmann—“from the trampling under the rage of the bewildered herd—the public”. In the democratic process, we are the participants, they watch. And the task of intellectuals, media and so on is to make sure that they are quiet, subdued and obedient. That is the view from the liberal end of the spectrum. Yes, I don’t doubt that the media is liberal in that sense.


Professor Noam Chomsky, co-author with Ed Herman of Manufacturing Consent, also told Outlook India that “media subdues the public. It’s so in India, certainly".

Here are some more excerpts from Chomsky's Outlook inteview:

"I spent three weeks in India and a week in Pakistan. A friend of mine here, Iqbal Ahmed, told me that I would be surprised to find that the media in Pakistan is more open, free and vibrant than that in India.

In Pakistan, I read the English language media which go to a tiny part of the population. Apparently, the government, no matter how repressive it is, is willing to say to them that you have your fun, we are not going to bother you. So they don’t interfere with it.

The media in India is free, the government doesn’t have the power to control it. But what I saw was that it was pretty restricted, very narrow and provincial and not very informative, leaving out lots of things. What I saw was a small sample. There are very good things in the Indian media, specially the Hindu and a couple of others. But this picture (in India) doesn’t surprise me. In fact, the media situation is not very different in many other countries. The Mexican situation is unusual. La Jornada is the only independent newspaper in the whole hemisphere."

"As soon as the plan to invade Iraq was announced, the media began serving as a propaganda agency for the government. The same was true for Vietnam, for state violence generally. The media is called liberal because it is liberal in the sense that Obama is. For example, he’s considered as the principled critic of the Iraq war. Why? Because, right at the beginning, he said it was a strategic blunder. That’s the extent of his liberalism. You could read such comments in Pravda in 1985. The people said that the invasion of Afghanistan was a strategic blunder. Even the German general staff said that Stalingrad was a strategic blunder. But we don’t call that principled criticism."

"Perhaps the period of greatest real press freedom was in the more free societies of Britain and the US in the late 19th century. There was a great variety of newspapers, most often run by the factory workers, ethnic communities and others. There was a lot of popular involvement. These papers reflected a wide variety of opinions, were widely read too. It was the period of greatest vibrancy in the US. There were efforts, especially in England, to control and censor it. These didn’t work. But two things pretty much eliminated them. One, it was possible for the corporate sector to simply put so much capital into their own newspapers that others couldn’t compete. The other factor was advertising; advertiser-reliance. Advertisers are businesses. When newspapers become dependent on advertisers for their income, they are naturally going to bend to the interest of advertisers.

If you look at the New York Times, maybe the world’s greatest newspaper, they have the concept of news hole. What that means is that in the afternoon when they plan for the following day’s newspaper, the first thing they do is to layout where the advertising is going to be, because that’s an important part of a newspaper. You then put the news in the gaps between advertisements. In television there is a concept called content and fill. The content is the advertising, the fill is car chase, the sexy or whatever you put in to try to keep the viewer watching in between the ads. That’s a natural outcome when you have advertiser-reliance."


Chomsky is not alone in his assessment of the Indian media. Here are a few other examples:

1. Alice Albinia in the preface to her book "Empires of the Indus":

"It was April, 2000, almost a year since the war between Pakistan and India over Kargil in Kashmir had ended, and the newspapers which the delivery man threw on to my terace every morning still portrayed Pakistan as a rogue state, governed by military cowboys, inhabited by murderous fundamentalists: the rhetoric had the patina of hysteria."

2. John Briscoe, Harvard Professor and water expert on coverage of India-Pakistan water dispute:

Living in Delhi and working in both India and Pakistan, I was struck by a paradox. One country was a vigorous democracy, the other a military regime. But whereas an important part of the Pakistani press regularly reported India's views on the water issue in an objective way, the Indian press never did the same. I never saw a report which gave Indian readers a factual description of the enormous vulnerability of Pakistan, of the way in which India had socked it to Pakistan when filling Baglihar. How could this be, I asked? Because, a journalist colleague in Delhi told me, "when it comes to Kashmir – and the Indus Treaty is considered an integral part of Kashmir -- the ministry of external affairs instructs newspapers on what they can and cannot say, and often tells them explicitly what it is they are to say."

3. Shekhar Gupta in Indian Express:

Can we deny the fact that every new terror attack on the Pakistani establishment, every development that marks a further decline in the authority of its government is greeted with an utterly unconcealed sense of delight? This is not just the mood of the mobs here. Even the “intelligentsia”, the TV talking heads, opinion page columnists, government spokespersons, all have the same smug air of “I-told-you-so” and “so-what-else-did-they-expect” satisfaction. And they ask the same patronising question: hell, can Pakistan be saved?

It is time therefore to stop jubilating at the unfolding tragedy in Pakistan. India has to think of becoming a part of the solution. And that solution lies in not merely saving Pakistan — Pakistan will survive. It has evolved a strong nationalism that does bind its people even if that does not reflect in its current internal dissensions. It is slowly building a democratic system, howsoever imperfect. But it has a very robust media and a functional higher judiciary. Also, in its army, it has at least one national institution that provides stability and continuity. The question for us is, what kind of Pakistan do we want to see emerging from this bloodshed? What if fundamentalists of some kind, either religious or military or a combination of both, were to take control of Islamabad? The Americans will always have the option of cutting their losses and leaving. They have a long history of doing that successfully, from Vietnam to Iraq and maybe Afghanistan next. What will be our Plan-B then?


Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Disease Burdens in South Asia

Pakistan's Media Boom

Manufacturing Consent: Political Economy of the Mass Media

India 63 Years After Independence

Pew Poll in India

Media Subdues The Public. It’s So In India, Certainly

Empires of the Indus

Friday, November 5, 2010

Pakistan Ahead of India on Key Human Development Indices

Although Pakistan at 125 ranks 6 places below India at 119 on UNDP's 2010 human development index, Pakistanis fare much better than their Indian counterparts on several sub-indices including life expectancy, years of schooling and gender parity.

India lags behind its neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, on human development indices like life expectancy at birth and mean or average years of schooling and gender parity, a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report released Thursday said.

On gender parity, Pakistan ranks 112, ten places ahead of India at 122.

Titled "Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development", the report had a global launch and was released at the UN in New York by UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, according to media reports.

According to the report, life expectancy at birth in India is 64.4 years, while in Pakistan it is 67.2 years. In Bangladesh, life expectancy is 66.9 years.

Similarly, mean years of schooling in India is 4.4 years while in Pakistan and Bangladesh it is 4.9 and 4.8 years respectively.

Sri Lanka, which is ranked above India on HDI at 91, also fares better than India on the two indices. Its life expectancy at birth is 74.4 years and mean years of schooling is 8.2 years.

Reproductive health is the largest contributor to the inequality index. The other indicators, based on which it is calculated, include women's participation in the labor force, their level of empowerment based on educational attainment and parliamentary representation.

For maternal mortality, the figure for Pakistan is 320 deaths per 100,000 live births. In India, the corresponding figure stands at 450. The country also falters on adolescent fertility rate, another indicator of reproductive health.

According to the HDR 2010, the adolescent fertility rate in India is 68 births per 1,000 live births as compared to 45 births per 1,000 live births in Pakistan. The figures illustrate that Pakistan has fewer younger mothers.

Overall, both India and Pakistan are near the bottom of the list of medium human development countries while Bangladesh shows up among low human development nations. This report is just another reminder that the governments and the peoples of the entire South Asian region have a lot of work to do in terms of poverty reduction and education and health improvements to catch up with the rest of the world.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

BRI C, Chindia and the "Indian Miracle"

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Multi-dimensional Poverty Index Finds Indians Poorer than Africans

South Asia Slipping in Human Development

OPHI Country Briefing: Pakistan

OPHI Country Briefing: India

Slumdog Inspires India's "Big Switch"

Do Urban Slums Offer Hope?

Pakistan Most Urbanized in South Asia

Sub-replacement Fertility Rates

Female Genocide Unfolding in India

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Thursday, November 4, 2010

Indian Economic Miracle is Deceptive!

Some urban middle class Indians often leave comments on this blog citing their country's ranking relative to Pakistan's on a contrived index called "Prosperity Index". This index is published by Legatum and reported by Forbes magazine, a publication of the rich for the rich and by the rich that focuses exclusively on the world's multi-millionaires and billionaires as its key audience.

The producers of this "prosperity index" are part of the elaborate deception being perpetrated about India that is hurting its largest population of poor and hungry who are faring worse than the poorest of the poor in Africa.



Here's a recent report titled "India: Economic Power House or Poor House?" by The Star's reporter Mary Albino that talks about how deceptive "India's Miracle" is:

India’s economic miracle is a perfect example of how appearances can be deceiving.

The dominant narrative on the country goes like this: as the fourth largest economy in the world, with a steady annual growth rate of close to 9 per cent, India is a rising economic superstar. Bangalore is the new Silicon Valley. Magazines such as Forbes and Vogue have launched Indian editions. The Mumbai skyline is decorated with posh hotels and international banks.

There are numbers to back up this narrative. The average Indian takes home $1,017 (U.S.) a year. Not much, but that’s nearly double the average five years ago and triple the annual income at independence, in 1947. The business and technology sector has grown tenfold in the past decade. Manufacturing and agriculture are expanding, and trade levels are way up.

India is also on the up and up in terms of human well-being. Life expectancy and literacy are steadily rising, while child mortality continues to decline. The poverty rate is down to 42 per cent from 60 per cent in 1981. While 42 per cent still leaves a long way to go, India’s situation seems rosy compared with that of, say, Malawi and Tanzania, which have poverty rates of 74 per cent and 88 per cent, respectively.

If we examine these statistics in real numbers, however, a different narrative emerges, one the Indian government likes less.

With a population as big as India’s, 42 per cent means there are some 475 million Indians living on less than $1.25 per day. That’s 10 times as many facing dire poverty as Malawi and Tanzania combined.

It means India is home to more poor people than any other country in the world.

To put it another way, one of every three people in the world living without basic necessities is an Indian national.


The real number is probably even larger. The recently launched M ultidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a more comprehensive measure of deprivation than the current “poverty line” of $1.25 per day, uses 10 markers of well-being, including education, health and standard of living. The MPI, developed by the Poverty & Human Development Initiative at Oxford University, puts the Indian poverty rate at 55 per cent. That’s 645 million people — double the population of the United States and nearly 20 times the population of Canada.

By this measure, India’s eight poorest states have more people living in poverty than Africa’s 26 poorest nations.

A 10-year-old living in the slums of Calcutta, raising her 5-year-old brother on garbage and scraps, and dealing with tapeworms and the threat of cholera, suffers neither more nor less than a 10-year-old living in the same conditions in the slums of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. But because the Indian girl lives in an “emerging economy,” slated to battle it out with China for the position of global economic superpower, and her counterpart in Lilongwe lives in a country with few resources and a bleak future, the Indian child's predicament is perceived with relatively less urgency.

One is “poor” while the other represents a “declining poverty rate.”

What’s more, in India there are huge discrepancies in poverty from one state to the next. Madhya Pradesh, for example, is comparable in population and incidence of poverty to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. But the misery of the DRC is much better known than the misery of Madhya Pradesh, because sub-national regions do not appear on “poorest country” lists. If Madhya Pradesh were to seek independence from India, its dire situation would become more visible immediately.

As India demonstrates, having the largest number of poor people is not the same as being the poorest country. That’s unfortunate, because being the poorest country has advantages. In the same way a tsunami or earthquake garners an intense outpouring of aid and support, being labelled “worst off” or “most poor” tends to draw a bigger share of international attention — and dollars.

When Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan in 1971, it was the poorest country in the world, so poor most economists were skeptical it would ever succeed on its own. But being labelled “dead last” worked in its favour: billions of dollars in aid money flooded in, and NGO and charity groups arrived in droves. The dominant narrative of Bangladesh at the time was of a war-ravaged, cyclone-battered and fledgling country on the brink of famine. That seemed to help rally the troops.

No doubt India’s government wants the world to perceive the nation in terms of its potential and not its shortcomings. But because it’s home to 1.1 billion people, India is more able than most to conceal the bad news behind the good, making its impressive growth rates the lead story rather than the fact that it is home to more of the world’s poor than any other country.

Still, at least part of the blame should be placed on the way poverty is presented on the international stage. If the unit of deprivation is a human being, then the prevalence of poverty should be presented in numbers of lives. If we know precisely how many billionaires India has — 49 in 2010, double last year’s number — than we should also know precisely how many people live without basic necessities.


A much better measure of the average Indians' situation is the multi-dimensional poverty index recently published by Oxford University researchers.

OPHI 2010 country briefings on India and Pakistan contain the following comparisons of multi-dimensional (MPI) and income poverty figures:

India
MPI= 55%,Under$1.25=42%,Under$2=76%,India_BPL=29%

Pakistan
MPI= 51%,Under$1.25=23%,Under$2=60%,Pakistan_BPL=33%

Lesotho MPI=48%,Under$1.25=43%,Under$2=62%,Lesotho_BPL=68%

Haiti MPI=57%,Under$1.25=55%,Under@2=72%,Haiti_BPL=NA

China
MPI=12%,Under$1.25=16%,Under$2=36%,China_BPL=3%

Among other South Asian nations, MPI index measures poverty in Bangladesh at 58 per cent and 65 per cent in Nepal.

While OPHI's MPI is a significant improvement over the simplistic income level criterion for assessing poverty, it appears that the MPI index gives nearly three quarters of the weight to child mortality and school enrollment, and just over a quarter of the weight to a combination of critical factors such as access to electricity, sanitation and clean drinking water which are essential for proper learning environment, increased human productivity and healthy living.

Here's a video of Jawaharlal Nehru University's economic professor Dr. Jayati Ghosh's debunking "The Indian Miracle":



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OPHI Country Briefing: India

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Food, Clothing and Shelter in India and Pakistan