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If you guess Iraq then you’d be right. Iraq is No. 5 on Foreign Policy’s Failed State Index. But Afghanistan is No. 7. Right at No. 1 is Somalia. Remember that country?

Interestingly, all three of these countries rank the highest (a 10) for the category of External Intervention. Can you guess who that external intervention power is? Yep. The U.S. of A.

Somalia was a huge disaster for the U.S. in the early 1990s. After pulling out of Somalia due to the disaster that led the international embarrassment of the United States as the one superpower in the world, the U.S. decided to put its monetary power into the Ethiopian army. The results haven’t been any better.

And of course, we know what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, two more U.S. failures.

America was founded on the principle of peace and befriending every nation on earth. Now we are the most despised nation due to our overbearing policies that bully weaker states into submission and our so-called “humanitarian” efforts to save them from themselves. This is not the America that Thomas Jefferson, et. al. would be proud to. Can’t we get back to doing what it is we do best, namely, protecting our citizens’ freedoms?

United Business Media, the specialist publishing and events group, is abandoning the UK after 90 years to take advantage of the more favourable tax regime in Ireland.

The move by the company is the second snub to the UK’s tax regime in a month following the decision of drugs group Shire said to move its parent company to Ireland. Other companies including GlaxoSmithKline have also warned that the UK’s business environment may not be conducive to their staying registered here.

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Photo Courtesy of NDTV.com

Apparently, according to Chinese officials, the rest of the world has it all wrong. Chinese officials have stated that the western media has been misleading the public about the Tibetan Protests that took place in March.

Really?

”The incident to a large degree has not been accurately covered or reported in the media,” Weilin Kuang, deputy consul-general of the Chinese consulate in New York, told reporters at a press conference.

”There have been some misleading reports and comments, some distorted facts, wrong conclusions and wrong judgments,” Kuang added.

The “western media” has been providing what details that have been allowed. Foreign media has been banned from Tibet and the surrounding area (except for one brief, tightly secured government tour) because China has been keeping foreign media out and restricting freedom of the press inside the country.

Funny how we have it wrong when they won’t give us or even allow us to get the correct story.

Democracies struggle to come into their own in the middle east as we know all too well. It is good to see that citizens and journalists are being allowed to protest in Pakistan over freedom of the press.

Journalists condemn curbs on media

They gathered in front of the Rawalpindi-Islamabad Press Club on the call of the Rawalpindi-Islamabad Union of Journalists (RIUJ). The journalists shouted anti-government slogans and criticised media gags. Students and members of civil society also joined the protest to express solidarity with journalists.

The protestors held placards inscribed with slogans ‘free press’, ‘stop violation against journalists’, ‘freedom of expression is people’s right’. They said the government could not prevent them from performing their professional duties and that they were committed to factual reporting, through which the government was held accountable to the public. The journalists said the government’s claims of freedom of press were false since it had targeted journalists because they were exposing its misdeeds and anti-public policies. Free media, they said, was an important pillar of the state.

Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) General Secretary Mazhar Abbass said journalists were a peaceful community and they were only performing their duties.

Civil disobedience is the path to freedom and democracy. It has been for the US and it is now in countries like Pakistan. The news media and citizens of countries in the middle east are the ones that have to stand up and fight for their freedoms and for democracy if they want it.

George Bush believes he can force these countries to become democratic. It is an uninformed and uneducated opinion some others in the republican party share. This country got it’s freedom and became a democracy because citizens stood up to tyranny. Because they wanted freedom and democracy.

They risked their lives for it. They knew that english soldiers would kill dissenters for speaking out against the crown, but they did it anyway. Many lost their lives doing so. Many soldiers have died defending our freedom since then.

In Iraq, the people did not stand up against saddam hussein, against tyranny. A few obviously did and died but their was no mass rebellion to say the least. So bush took it upon himself to stand up for them even without being asked to do so. He told us they would welcome us with open arms. They did, but they also had bombs strapped to their waists.

You cannot tell people they should be free. You cannot force people to be free or to stand up for their rights. They have to want it so bad they are willing to risk their lives for it just as our forefathers did.

If the people of a country cannot stand up and fight for their own freedoms and to have a democracy, then they will never be able to keep it, defend it, or maintain it. You cannot give people freedom. They have to earn it.

Will the future of search include government sponsored and funded search engines? If the European Union gets its way, Google could very well be history.

Of course, Theseus is just one leg on the mannequin. Japan wants in on the act as well.

The French have Quaero:

The six projects include the multimedia search engine “Quaero”, which means “I search for” in Latin, which is intended to compete with the ubiquitous Google. The “Quaero” project aims at developing multimedia search software for the general public that would be used on both computers and mobile phones.

All of this is simply due to envy. Google is popular and successful. They are also global - and American. People in other countries don’t want America owning the Internet. After all, we practically own everything else. And if we owned the global communications network that ties international commerce together, who knows what kind of bullying we could accomplish? Except that Google isn’t owned by the U.S. government. But does that matter?

European nations have been all over Google in the last couple of years. If the governments in Europe grow more powerful, ban together in the right way for the right cause, and are successful in creating a welcome rival, Google could be banned in those countries. I wonder what that would do for geopolitical relations between two of the West’s largest and most populous continents?

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A new kind of warfare is on the horizon. It’s called cyberwarfare. The 21st century’s first cyberwar has kicked off and I believe there are some important implications to the industrialized nations as well.

But Estonia—”e-Stonia” to its fans—practices forms of e-government advanced even by Western European standards. Estonians pay taxes online, vote online, bank online. Their national ID cards contain electronic chips. When the country’s Cabinet meets, everyone brings their laptop. When denial-of-service attacks start taking down Estonian Web sites, it matters.

Unlike classic terrorism, the essence of modern cyberwarfare is its anonymity. Though some of the attacks did appear to come from PCs belonging to the Russian presidential administration, others came from as far afield as Brazil and Vietnam.

Estonia’s entire government was shut down because it runs in cyberspace. This is very advanced, even for Western nations like the U.S., whose citizens are generally more afraid of the Internet (or at least leery) more than embracing it. That is, voting hasn’t gone online yet nor do most people make purchases online. This is partly due to the fact that there is a fear of cybercrime in general.

Cyberwar, however, doesn’t kill. It doesn’t even maim. It only inconviences. However, if the cyberattack had been followed by a large scale military attack then that would have had more far reaching implications. I believe some day we may see such a thing.

As more and more nations go online and put their governments online, I think we’ll see more e-savvy governments like Estonia who migrate to a completely digital world. They will be vulnerable. In this case, the conflict arose over Cold War era disputes. It is possible that members of Russia’s government or leadership was behind it. Though it is difficult to say because with some technology, like cloaking, an attacker can be anonymous. This creates a demand for digital defense systems that detect the source of attacks made by cloakers. If such defense systems did exist and Estonia had them, what would become of the situation if they could tell that attacks in Vietnam, for instance, actually originated in Russian parliament? All hell could break loose.

Conclusion: The Internet has made it probable that a one-world government will be established this century. Organizations like NATO are obsolete. There will be a growing perception among world leaders that cyberspace will need to be policed and right now there is no one qualified or in a position to do that policing. An organization will have to be created across international lines to do this. It will not be ICANN. It will have to be an organization that is empowered by the nations of the world to establish laws and enforce those laws across international lines regarding the protection of human rights, tracking down cyberthieves, and committing resources to the pursuit of justice should cybercriminals get caught. It will just be one more opportunity for some people to overreach their legitimate authority.

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Paul Wolfowitz resigned as president of the World Bank last night, ending weeks of turmoil over the lavish pay rise he arranged for his girlfriend that triggered the worst crisis in the institution’s history.

Finally, justice has been served. The biggest asshole on the international scene is history. And aren’t we ever so glad.

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But the World Bank is not the Justice Department, or the Defense Department, or any of the other branches of government where the administration could employ CIA-approved non-torture techniques to get employees to go along with embattled Bush appointees. There’s a new report out to highlight Wolfowitz’s ethical lapses, and it’s turning out to be a lot harder to lean on the World Bank’s international crew than it was on Rumsfeld’s military. The Bush administration can tell the World Bank employees to sit down and shut up, but those employees — and the governments who sent them — don’t have to listen. However, they are prepared to be generous.

How delightful! The World Bank is offering the U.S. a deal. Take Wolfowitz back and give us somebody else we’ll like better.

I’ve got a better idea. Let them keep Wolfowitz and do whatever they want with him and when they’re done we’ll pull out of the World Bank and every other international organization and let them choose their own crooked leaders. Then we’ll pull our troops stationed overseas back home, line them up on our borders with orders to shoot anybody who attempts to enter illegally. We’ll vow never to interfere in any other nation’s affairs again and warn them not to interfere in ours. If any nation is stupid enough to attack us or wants to take us on then all bets are off. We’ll just lock and load and ransack every town, village, or city in their nation until the whole damn country is levelled flat and sell what’s left to the neighboring countries, using the proceeds to beef up our military strength. Any foreign leader who can’t live with that solution will go on our shit list and the only way off of that list is to solve their own problems without our assistance (yes, this includes Israel).

If they want our help in establishing a free market economy then we’ll send our best businessmen to help them do that (without the military escort). Any U.S. businessman without the balls to make the trip will just have to settle for doing business within U.S. borders. These efforts can be lead by the Vice President of the U.S., who will be the first U.S. representative on foreign soil when we offer such free enterprise assistance. If a sitting Veep has a problem with that job then he should resign and any Veep who refuses to go will be immediately removed from office and replaced. It’s time to cut the bullshit and act like we really believe in the values that say we believe in.

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Istanbul was Constantinople. Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. But it’s still Islamic unless its secular military wins the next democratic slugfest.

A recent rally drew 500,000 protesters of the pro-Islamic Recep Yayyip Erdogan, the nation’s prime minister. Many of the secular and military protesters, along with their civilian counterparts, accused the religionists of wanting to drag the country through the dark ages.

A recent vote was challenged on Constitutional grounds and the battle over the nation’s direction continues to ensue. Who wins out in the this nation, situated just north of Iraq, could have some effect on Middle East politics, the aims of Al Qaida and other grassroots operatives hell bent on creating a pan-Islamic superpower, and the Western war on terror. It should be interesting to watch.

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Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president in Russian history, died yesterday of heart failure, ending a spectacular political career that spanned the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and a decade of chaos and liberty in Russia, halted and reversed by his successor, Vladimir Putin.

They’ve called him a hero, a villain, and a buffoon. All three are compliments. At least he was a man who stood for what believed in - in a country that isn’t well known for allowing that kind of patriotism. Yeltsin was a man for his times. He took the high road when there weren’t many options and fought hard to do the right thing for himself and his country. Such courage is rare, especially among politicians. It’s a shame he didn’t stick around longer. His successor hasn’t proven to be as much a character.

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