Forget pirates for a second.

London’s marine insurance market has notched Libya into their knife handles as the king of delusion continues to kill off his own people with Russian arms.

Lloyds is part of a committee that sits deciding who’s deadly and who’s not is called the Joint War Committee.

Sounds ominous.  Bit like 1943.

We take a look at shipping regularly (ok, very regularly) but the latest is just another warning about just how bad Libya has become – and just how quickly this situation is developing.  It took the Joint War Committee almost two years to decide that Somalia was actually a problem.  It took them less than two weeks to add Libya to the list.

Lloyds announced this afternoon that the Med around Libya was unsafe – meaning that if ships enter this region they face a higher than average chance of experiencing violence.

Malacca is off the list  but Iran, Pakistan, Ivory Coast, Somalia and Yemen remain firmly unsafe according to the Joint War Committee.

But Lloyds merely cranks up the insurance premium based on their own warnings.    As previously stated,  could it be that underwriters secretly hope for conflict as this drives up their earnings?

Been watching the denizens of Twit-land over the past week and doing a media analysis.  No,  I didn’t need a government tender to do this.  Just some constant attention to detail.

Here goes.

The yanks are blowing their chances of doing anything in Libya as the people there suffer the equivalent of the Brits bombing Boston.

Rather than tweeting about real issues  Americans are all talking about Miracle Whip’s facebook page,  or toddlers and tiaras today.

That’s as a bloody carnage rages in a region of the world that will affect Americans through the price of oil.  Libyans are telling twitter and facebook about blood on the streets and their own airforce gunning them down by the hundreds and overnight the trends on social networking inexorably turn to canned cream and puff pieces.

Americas advanced thoughts today ...

A quick sequeway.

I’ve heard that recently some South African local government communication officials removed their leaders’ facebook profiles after comments from really unhappy citizens.   They were posting nasty comments, say the government pr-types,  all nervous and eyeing their jobs.  So they terminated the social network id instead of answering the comments.

Now doesn’t that tell you something?  Rather than face the music and then organize the orchestra,  these PR ja-baas men and women would rather remove the offending Facebook page ENTIRELY.

We all agreed that all this did was open up the space for these angry commentators to form their own interest groups - and eventually – their own activities.

And these activities,  instead of being deflated by monitoring the nasty comments and acting on them,  will eventually lead the very same commentators to the front doors of the government officials.   Crazy that officialdom has the opportunity to properly monitor levels of frustration by using digital products – instead when the going gets tough,  they run away from the problems.

The herd is not far behind and in SA they won’t be twittering about miracle whip, they’ll be carrying whips.

Gaddafi is trending on Twitter.   As Gadafi.  Anyway, the last dictator who trended on Twitter was forced out of office within 48 hours.

Isn’t that fascinating?  While the latest dictator trending commentary is being  driven by external twits  - Libyans inside that North African enclave of heinous misdeads appear to want the semi-nomadic lunatic Gadafi OUT.

TODAY.

Some say he has sought asylum in Venezuela.  However,  that’s presumed to be an almost sarcastic suggestion – he may as well go seek asylum in Italy through his other chommie,  Silvio Berlusconi.  There are an aweful lot of Italians commenting on the Gadafi/Gaddafi tweet at the moment..

Egypt’s’ Mubarak trended on Twitter and was gone within 2 days of hitting that social networking milestone.

There’s a distinct  possibility that Libya could experience a real live civil war.    Watch out for Benghazi today.  Reports from intelligence sources suggest that the western AND eastern regions of Libya are exploding today.

Gaddafi is going to do what dictators’ do.  He’s going to try and have the opponents killed off.  He’s already murdered 200 protestors – but that’s just enraged them further.

Hold in both hands and apply spittle ...

Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi will fight a popular revolt to “the last man standing”, one of his sons said on Monday after protests broke out in the capital for the first time following days of unrest in the city of Benghazi.