http://bit.ly/saudisadism - A woman might end up being lashed 100 times for the crime of being raped. How long will Saudi Arabia get away with this?
http://bit.ly/glaciers-hysteria - And then there is this “Himalayan Blunder” by IPCC. Why should we trust UN’s IPCC and spend millions?
Kartika was fined and came close to being caned for drinking alcohol. An Indonesian muslim was caned six times and jailed an year for the same offence. This happened in Malaysia which I hope  is not truly Asia. This is a tragedy. The travesty is that Malaysia is a member of the UN human rights council. In India alcohol is banned in Gujarat, but atleast you do not get caned. Now the really bizarre part. Malaysia has seperate laws for Muslims. You can get caned for consuming alcohol only if your an Muslim. The more I try to make sense of it the more I am convinced that Malaysia is being ruled by a particularly vile strain of morons. Every country has its share of morons and moronic laws. But isn’t this different?
   Many great men and women have won the Nobel peace prize, however winning a Nobel prize does not make one great or good. After all it is a committee of Norwegian parliamentarians that makes the decision. It is easy to be deceived by the optical illusion created by the list of men and women who have won this prize. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,Martin Luther King, Henry Kissinger,Anwar Sadat, Yassir Arafat, all won the Nobel peace prize. Not all men in this list are men I  admire  and Barack Obama is just another man in this list. Obama has achieved a lot in a very short time and I give him credit for that. But he has not earned my respect yet.
This might well turn out to be a crown of thorns. Whatever the expectations of the world may be, America is a center right country where liberal is a dirty word. The nobel peace prize will pull him down atleast as much as it pulls him up. To the left this award is a vindication of its stand that electing obama will improve America’s image in the world but the for the right this award confirms that obama is a liberal apologist who gains browny points from the world at America’s expense
Obama appears to have won this award because of “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. But Obama does not deserve this prize, atleast not yet, unless being a liberal is qualification enough.
Ever since the demise of the Soviet Union a lot is being said in favour of a multipolar world. Many appear to think fallaciously that a multipolar world is intrinsically better than an unipolar world. Having more centres of power cannot solve the problems of the world. The devil is not surprisingly in the details. Proponents of this idea might even argue that we should allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons to teach washington common sense and restraint. But it will take only a Iranian nuclear strike on Israel to blow holes in their theory. We live in a world as complicated as ever if not more complicated than ever. Familiarity breeds contempt and in this case it would seem that it breeds ignorance as well. We seem to have unlearned the dangers nuclear weapons can pose. The possession of nuclear weapons by America is not a reason for allowing every wannabe to aquire that status. Atleast it is not a reason that can be given to America to convince it that it should allow Iran to point a dagger at it throat. So the bottomline line is that while power matters, it also matters who has the power. I would imagine that we are lucky that Russia is playing second fiddle to the United States rather than the other way around. At this point let me pre-empt a straw-man attack. A few who got to reading this far are probably itching to list out the evil acts of the Imperial empire of the United States Of America. But that is really beside the point. America is not perfect, no nation will be. And America should not be compared against our idealistic conceptions of how a super power should behave. You will be sorely disappointed if you do. That is fine. But we should not react to out dis-satisfaction with America by idolizing countries like Russia, China or Venezuela. We should pause for a moment to think how countries like Russia treated their own. That should give us an idea of how they would treat the world if they are in charge. I am not here advocating an unipolar world. I am simply saying that what matters more is the nature of the powers that be. There is such a thing called benovolent power and there is such a thing called evil power. Though no power is entirely benovolent or entirely evil, the proportions differ and they matter a lot. We should remember that the ills of democracy can prove to be fatal in the community of nations.
