Peace, Love, and Understanding

The pinkos at the Economist's Global Intelligence Unit joined with some other peaceniks at various other think tanks and dandelion-weaving cooperatives to develop a new "Global Peace Index," which ranks every country in the world by its peacefulness, as measured on a zillion factors such as "Level of distrust in other citizens," "level of violent crime," "military capability/sophistication," and political corruption, as well as all sorts of demographic data.

Do I even need to say that the good ol' U S of A comes off badly in the overall rankings? We sit at 96, a notch above Iran but below Turkey, Cambodia, Serbia, et cetera. It's no surprise that Iraq comes in dead last, or that Norway, New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan compose the top five.