The big news on the international stage is that representatives of the U.S. and Iran met for the first time in nearly 30 years on May 28 in Baghdad, basically to carve out spheres of influence in the now-liberated (?) country of Iraq.

Reports indicated basic agreement on most issues between the two often-hostile nations because, of course, Iran’s nuclear development and other questions were off the table.  The other part was easy–who gets which part of Iraq for de facto control.

What went unreported, however, is that this easy agreement came about because Iran and the U.S. had forged an understanding before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Interesting, eh?  If you want to know more, you’ll need to subscribe to the daily intelligence reports from Strategic Forecasting.  You’ll feel like you’re sitting in the Oval Office being briefed if you do.

This month marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in Virginia, the first permanent British settlement in the New World. However, most people overlook Jamestown as the beginning of the United States and focus on the Puritans/Pilgrims who settled 13 years later in Massachusetts. We still regard the Pilgrims as a freedom-seeking group whose example led eventually to a free United States separate from Great Britain. (We even honor them with Thanksgiving.)

However, the Puritans were actually a harsh, totalitarian sect, and the only freedom they sought was freedom from religious persecution, which they had experienced in Europe and fled from.

The subject is heating up.  Notice how the media and the cognoscenti, whoever they are (but they are superior to us, you know), just take global warming and human causation of the phenomenon for granted.  For the rest of us benighted simpletons, we need just fork over our taxes, give up cars, turn our heaters and air conditioners off, and live with reduced incomes as corporations and industries are extorted in the holy cause of the 21st century.

As a simpleton, however, I have a few simple questions:  1)  Why was there a second ice age proclaimed just 30 years ago and now we’re convinced of global warming?  2)  Why was it warmer in the Middle Ages than now, but that was okay since there was no industry to cause it, etc.?  3)  Why is Mars heating up at the same level as our planet when, insofar as we know, there are no human activities on that orb?

Simpletons want to know the answers.

With news that Great Britain wants to extradite and try for murder ex-Russian agent Andrei Lugovoi for the death of fellow spy Alexander Litvinenko, do any doubts remain about what kind of regime Vladimir Putin is running?

I’m not saying the assassination trail leads to Putin’s office, but even if there’s a tenuous connection–as in tacit acceptance of such acts of terror–then we know the heart of the Russian dictofiend.

See my earlier post on the Russian Cyber attack on Estonia, and a bigger picture starts to emerge of a return of Soviet tactics to a putative democracy, which of course is about as democratic in reality as North Korea.

Things can get real dicey for world affairs if we lose our senses and elect appeasers and peaceniks like Obama Hosanna and St. Hillary in 2008.  The media will love them and make every excuse in the world for them even as they sell us out to Obama and Putin in the name of "peace."  Voters, then you’ll get what you ardently dream of–we’ll be loved by France and be slaves at home and everywhere we go.  Better to just leave your heads in the sand and not vote.

I’m not sure what all these Latin defense groups are complaining about.  The new immigration bill allows everyone in the U.S. prior to Jan. 1, 2007, to remain here permanently and obtain legal status with the new Z visa. 

Not a bad deal for the 12 million illegals, I’d say.  Plus, how on earth is anyone going to be able to verify when you entered the country?  You could come here tomorrow or next month, probably even next year, and just apply for the Z visa by claiming you came in 2006.  Who can prove otherwise unless you’re stupid enough to get your passport stamped?

In other words, this is a blanket ticket to cross into our nation illegally.

In light of some review events, here’s a question to ponder:  If another country bombed out another nation’s central bank, would that be an act of war?  Most would answer yes.  Now, if that same country were to shut down and virtually destroy the other nation’s banking system through a cyber attack that shut down its Internet presence, would that be an act of war?

This is a scenario that actually just played out.  Following the decision by Estonia on April 27 to tear down an old Soviet Union monument to its fallen soldiers, the nation’s banking, media, state ministries and public and private companies were subjected to DDS, dynamic denial of service, attacks on their Web sites.  Source of attacks: Russia.

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair got together one last time yesterday at the White House.

It’s good to see that at least two world leaders took the lessons of 9/11 to heart, and both paid the political price in a world that has its head in the sand, expecting the Jihadist tide to pass it by before it pulls that appendage out again.

Said Blair:

"I have taken the view that Britain should stand shoulder to shoulder with America after Sept. 11.  I have never deviated from that view." 

Blair, evidently the most quotable of the two on this day, also noted that it was much better to be heckled in a democracy, as he and Bush were on that day, than to live under "a brutal, secular dictatorship or religious extremism."

As always, the far-left newspeople in the audience had no clue that there’s actually a choice, or a chance, that they or anyone in the West might actually have to stand up for democracy.

After all, hasn’t all the present trouble in the world been caused by Bush and then supported by Blair, who was browbeat into submission by Karl Rove and others?

A tidy worldview that I supposed Osama bin Laden and others may have something to say about in the near future.