Thomas P.M. Barnett — American Businessman born on December 29, 1962,

Thomas P.M. Barnett is an American military geostrategist and Chief Analyst at Wikistrat. He developed a geopolitical theory that divided the world into “the Functioning Core” and the “Non-Integrating Gap” that made him particularly notable prior to the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq when he wrote an article for Esquire Magazine in support of the military action entitled “The Pentagon's New Map”. The central thesis of his geopolitical theory is that the connections the globalization brings between countries are synonymous with those countries with stable governments, rising standards of living, and “more deaths by suicide than by murder.” These countries form the Functioning Core. These regions contrast with the those where globalization has not yet penetrated, which is synonymous with political repression, poverty, disease, and mass-murder, and conflict. These areas make up the Non-Integrating Gap... (wikipedia)

We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment. We all want to leave the planet in decent shape for our kids. Radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not necessarily the best way to achieve that.
The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today's wars but rather tomorrow's wars.
Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.
China's headlong rush to industrialize was pursued with the most Marxist of prejudices - bending nature to man's will. That's a desperately hard trick to pull off when one fifth of humanity, having previously subsisted on 7 percent of the world's freshwater supply, decides that it wants to instantaneously increase its caloric intake.
In the end, for all of Obama's grand rhetoric on ridding the world of nuclear weapons, history has doomed him to preside over the emergence of two rogue nuclear regimes (North Korea and Iran).