The way I see it, there are two very distinct spheres of Islam in the world. The barrier between the two is India. The one that we read about the most is what I will call the "Western Sphere". It stretches from Pakistan westward to Morocco. The other, "Eastern Sphere", we read about much less. It is quite different in character from the other sphere and encompasses southeast Asia, including the world's most populous Moslem country, Indonesia.

Communism in China has supposedly replaced the series of one dynasty after another that has been going on for thousands of years. But one day the thought occurred to me that Communism in China fits into it's history as yet another dynasty, the Communist Dynasty.

One strange thing about very powerful leaders that I notice is that the strongest of them are often not from the country that they are leading. As surprising as it seems, Napoleon wasn't French, Hitler was not German and, Stalin wasn't Russian. (Napoleon was Corsican of Italian background, Hitler was Austrian and, Stalin was Georgian.) Another example of this "Foreign Leader Phenomenon", as I will call it is the student leader known as "Danny the Red", who radicalized French students during the demonstrations of 1968. He was actually German and barely spoke French. This opens up real possibilities for current French president Nicolas Sarkozy. His father was Hungarian and his mother Greek and Jewish. He does not emphasize his ancestry, when asked about his Hungarian heritage, he simply told a reporter "I am not Hungarian". But it does leave him without any actual French blood.

I pointed out in my book "The End of the World" that an important step in the development of a democracy is what I termed the "strong leader binding phase". It is vital that a country or social order be bound together by a strong leader for a sufficient period of time before it is possible for the country to be a functional democracy. The United States went through this phase under English kings before gaining independence. Yugoslavia and Iraq were both artificial countries that were cobbled together by fiat. Yugoslavia came apart as soon as Communism disintegrated. In order to become a united, democratic country, it would have required at least another generation or so under a leader like Tito. What happened in Iraq is that the 2003 invasion interrupted it's strong leader binding phase under Saddam, only to discover that it required such a strong leader to hold the country together.

In the book "The End of the World", I pointed out that we tend to put too much faith in democracy when it is far from a cure-all solution. There is probably no better example of this than Russia. In the 1990s, it was a democracy practicing very free capitalism under Boris Yeltsin. Things did not go well except for a few people who got extremely rich. In the new millennium, the country has moved back to a more authoritarian style, although not Communist, under Vladimir Putin. Russia is now doing far better and is back to being a great world power.

One thing that Saddam Hussein never got credit for from Americans is the end of the 1979-81 Iran Hostage Crisis. Saddam was no ally of America but he was the newly installed leader of next-door Iraq. He wanted to expand his power and noticed how Iran was undergoing revolutionary turmoil and had few allies now that it's ties with America were broken and it was holding Americans as hostage. Saddam decided to reverse a 1975 agreement concerning sovereignty over the Shatt-al-Arab River between the two countries that he felt the former Shah of Iran had pressured Iraq to sign. It led to first border clashes and then outright war between the two countries and caused the Iranians to lose interest in the hostages. Many of those Iranians seen guarding the hostages were killed at the battlefront with Iraq. Who would have ever thought that when America later fought two wars in the region, it would be with Iraq instead of Iran?

The globalization of the world will take a giant step forward if Turkey joins the European Union. I see this as a linchpin of globalization. There is no turning back from it anyway but whether or not Turkey joins the EU will be an indication of whether globalization will move along at a fairly moderate pace or on fast forward.

The basic culture clash in the world is that in some places, being rude and pushy is the way to get what you want and in other places, being rude and pushy is the way to get nowhere.

Manned space exploration actually makes less and less sense as technology improves. When the moon landings were taking place, the future seemed to hold colonies there and on other planets. But a computer that was the size of a car then can now be made the size of a mouse. The robots and computers that can now explore space have tremendous advantages over human astronauts in that they don't need food, don't become ill and if they "die" in space, so what, they are just a bunch of circuits.

One thing that the world does not seem to realize is that very tall buildings are actually wasteful. It may seem that an eighty-story building is twice as space-efficient as a forty-story building but this is not true at all. Tall buildings must have elevator shafts which run the entire height of the building and take up floor space. In order to provide the same elevator service, the eighty-story building would require twice the number of elevators as the forty-story building. Thus, an eighty-story building will have significantly less usable floor space per story than two forty-story buildings.

The decade in which globalization really began was the sixties. We can see this in the exchange of patterns across the world. Has anyone ever thought about the amazing pattern resemblence between the hajj, the journey taken by Moslems to Mecca, and the 1969 musical festival at Woodstock? Ten years later, the pattern imitation seemed to move in the other direction. Has anyone else noticed the similarity between American students protesting the Vietnam War in the sixties and Iranian students chanting "Death to America" during the 1979-81 hostage crisis. Bell-bottom pants were even in style in Iran at the time. It was as if all that had changed is the image of Jim Morrison had metamorphosed into Ayatollah Knomeini and the drugs and rock music had been replaced by Islamic fervor. As far as architecture goes, there seems to be a sixties movement to round or cylindrical buildings that produced Toronto's City Hall, the Rotunda in Birmingham, England and the Post Office Tower (now British Telecom Tower) in London. I believe this could have been the influence of the turrets in French architecture The movement seems to be mainly a produce of the Sixties but Detroit's Renaissance Center was built in the seventies.

The international movement of patterns can also operate in reverse. If Red Square in Moscow could have been considered as the center of Communism, it could have prompted western countries to oppose it with what I will call "blue squares". Piccadilly Circus in London and Times Square in New York may bear some resemblence to Red Square except that the visitor is bombarded by brilliant business advertisements. These places could be described as the polar opposites of Communism or Red Square. The area around the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Streets in Toronto is another such blue square as is the Clifton Hill area of Niagara Falls, Canada.

One man who does not deserve to be forgotten is Mikhail Gorbachev. He was never greatly popular at home but he did his best to make this world a better place. All kinds of people get credit for ending the Cold War but without him, it would not have happened.

When there is turmoil in Pakistan, it is important to remember one thing. The country is a very new social order. The neighbors of Pakistan: Iran, India and, Afghanistan are all social orders that are thousands of years old. Pakistan itself is all of sixty years old. When the USA was the same age that Pakistan is now, it was still practicing slavery, warring against Indians and had the Civil War in it's future.

While on the subject of Pakistan, one thing that I wonder about is why it would not like to get in on the business of call centers handling all kinds of outsourcing for western countries like next-door India does. Pakistan has about the same proportion of English-speaking people that India has.

There is one conflict in the world that I truly do not understand. If the original reason for the split of the Islamic religion into two main branches, Sunni and Shiite, was the question of who should be caliph, or overall leader of all Moslems similar to a pope, then why is there still such animosity now that the caliphate has long since been abolished by Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey?

Immigration in the world can only increase. The world's demographics push people from one country to another. People in wealthy countries do not have enough children to work and pay enough taxes to continue to support the social structure. People in poorer countries have more children than the country can provide opportunity for. We need each other.

I wonder if countries that try to be a melting pot will inevitably have a higher crime rate and more difficulty integrating immigrants. Requiring people to put their identity away and put on a new identity can be a perilous thing to do. A person's birth identity and values prompts that person to control their behavior (behaviour). An immigrant melting into the melting pot can pick up on the undesirable characteristics of his new home as well as the good.

I believe that the Christian God wants Moslem immigrants in Europe. The reason is that Europe has gotten so secular that people have forgotten what a life based around religion is like. In polls taken in England, white English people are more likely to say that they believe in God if they live near a community of Moslems than if they don't.

Mexico produces more people than it has opportunity for. Many Mexicans, particularly from the southern part of the country head for the U.S., which seem to be getting increasingly unwelcoming. There are also Mexicans in places like Toronto and London. I was wondering, what about Spain? It is prosperous and has a relatively warm climate. It speaks Spanish, of course, and has less strict immigration regulations.

Immigration has a great effect on the politics of a nation, not just immigration in but emigration outward. Britain is less socialist than it's European neighbors for a simple reason. The world speaks English. This makes it easier for a businessman or one who is ambitious to leave and settle somewhere else than one from another European country. Leaving Europe for a foreign land that has fewer taxes and is more laissez-faire usually necessitates learning a foreign language as well. But someone wishing to emigrate from Britain faces no such necessity. Britain is thus forced to be more business-friendly to avoid driving it's ambitious people away to other lands. I see this as a vital factor in European politics. America can afford to be so far to the right simply because America is a country that people immigrate to and Americans do not have much of a tradition of moving to other countries, although that is slowly changing.

England's history seems to me to have two of what I will call "tonics". The country was a backwater until it enthusistically joined the Protestant Reformation. It was as if it was some kind of national tonic and it found itself in a position of world leadership that lasted for centuries. Protestantism was the First Tonic. Even as it led the world, England was not an ideal place to live for the average person until socialism came along. It took some time to get socialism right and learning not to take it too far but by the new millennium, it was one of the best places in the world to live for the average person. Socialism was the Second Tonic.

The people who really make history are radicals that turn out to be right. The way to make history is not to follow the crowd but to sense when not to follow the crowd.

I agree with the opinion that Japan was pushed into a decade-long recession beginning in 1990 because of pressure on it to ease it's trade deficit with the U.S. by increasing the value of it's currency. It is surprising how fragile a modern economy can be.

The spread of global news, easy international travel and, mass higher education across the world has brought the end of ideology. If a nation wants other countries to do things the way it does, it should forget about ideology and use force of example. If a nation comes up with a better way of doing things, it will not be long before others take notice. While if a nation puts forth an ideology, it will be a waste of effort if others cannot see that it produces better results.

The current mortgage crisis in the U.S. is a manifestation of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The techniques of mass-production of goods in factories was perfected in the 1920s and a vast amount of consumer goods rolled off assembly lines. The trouble was that factories were trying to maximize profits by paying their workers low wages. The average person did not earn enough money to buy much of what was being produced so goods were just piling up in warehouses with no one to buy them. Factories began cutting back on production, which meant that workers had even less money, and it spiralled into a devastating crash. Today, America has an impressive number of billionaires but tens of millions of people are struggling from paycheck to paycheck. It is not so much that people are not earning money but that they are weighed down with so much they need to live. They cannot afford their adjustable rate mortgages after the rate resets. Since mortgages are often sold by the lenders and bundled into securities, this threatens the entire economic structure just as in 1929.

One advantage of outsourcing work overseas is that it gives the host country a stake in the world. A country that hosts a lot of work or industry from abroad is more likely to be a good global citizen to avoid jeapordizing such beneficial relationships than one that doesn't.

The thing that is important in the global economy is not so much resources as knowledge. The wealth of a nation is determined by the knowledge and skill of it's workers as anything. One new trend in the world seems to be the election of scientists as national leaders, such as Germany's Angela Merkel, a former physicist.

Standing for principles is a difficult thing for a nation to do. If a country claims to stand for some set of high principles, then those principles must actually be considered as more important than the state itself. If a nation puts forth a set of principles to the world and then throws those principles away while defending itself from some threat, whether internal or external, it makes the principles seem meaningless.

The European Union would never have gotten started if Europeans had not gotten used to operating as one unit for a few years while under Nazi control.

One key word we should remember when dealing with the present round of terrorism is "spectacular". Terrorists aim not just to destroy and disrupt but to make news headlines across the world. The planners of the 9-11 attacks (11-9) were like movie directors as much as anything. More people could have been killed in New York if the two towers had been hit at the same time or as close to the same time as possible to prevent an evacuation of the second tower to be hit. Instead, there was more than twenty minutes between the impacts. This was just enough time to allow hundreds of cameras to be trained on the North Tower so that they could broadcast live the impact on the South Tower. This attack may have been so successful that it has prevented another attack on America by Al Qaeda so far. If they attacked again and it turned out to be less spectacular than 9-11, the attack would not be perceived as a success but as a let down.

One problem with launching a war against terrorists is that it provides them with experience with explosives and weapons. The current crop of terrorists met their peers and got their experience in the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. We can be sure that no matter what happens in Iraq, that it has produced the next generation of terrorists. Another issue is the jailing of terrorists. If they are put in prison together, they will inevitably form bonds and compare notes and the terrorist organization will be strengthened as a result. The mistake of the ages in Iraq was to disband the Iraqi Army in 2003. Suddenly thousands of men with military and weapons experience and who knew where the armaments were stored in the country had lost their respected profession and had no way to earn a living and soon, a roiling insurgency was underway.

Terrorist organizations will always be able to recruit a certain number of people in some western countries simply because of how rude, alienating and, coarse the culture can be. All they have to do is treat potential recruits with respect.

A simple way to support a war effort is to treat prisoners of war well. If enemy soldiers know that they will certainly be treated well if they surrender, then they will be more likely to be willing to surrender. It does not require a Rhodes Scholar to figure this out.

Regardless of the quality of it's armed forces, how can a nation really be secure if it could not feed itself or manufacture all it needed in wartime without importing from other countries?

One factor that does not seem to have been considered before invading Iraq is what I will call the "war shadow generation". A country is at it's most warlike when the children from a baby boom following a previous war grow to military age. Boys whose father have started families after returning from war grow up hearing stories of military heroics and thinking of going to war as a normal part of life. The Second World War followed the First World War in such a way. The War of 1812 happened when the sons of Revolutionary War veterans reached military age. Likewise, Iraq was invaded in the war shadow of the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s and this made it stronger than it would have been otherwise. It requires a large-scale war to produce a war shadow.

Has anyone noticed that countries across the world are issuing their soldiers uniforms that are very similar to those of other countries. It seems as if just about all countries now use the green camoflage design. There is too many friendly fire incidents as it is. What happens when two countries go to war with soldiers dressed in very similar uniforms?

I observe that when a country achieves a great military victory, it cannot help but try to repeat that victory in later combat. The Allied High Command in the Second World War should maybe have anticipated that the Nazis would try to repeat their tank offensive through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg that led to the Battle of the Bulge. It seems as if the Vietnamese Communists were trying to redo their earlier victory at Dien Bien Phu with the attack on the base at Khe Sahn during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Doesn't it seem like the jump from Afghanistan to Iraq is somewhat of a replication of the successful island hopping campaign of World War Two. Afghanistan represents Guadalcanal and then it's on to the next island.