Now I am become death, the destroyer of all worlds"

**The most known lines of the Bhagavad Gita said by Robert Oppenheimer after observing the Trinity atomic blast.

Following my last, incoherent rant of 2013,it is not inappropriate to cite the annual international year-end Gallup poll on who's perceived as the greatest threat to world peace.  The WIN/Gallup poll was conducted in 65 countries with 67,806 interviewees. 

The Greatest threat to peace is...drumroll...
1. The United States --24%
2. Pakistan               --  8%
3. China                   --  6%
4. Afghanistan          --  5%
5. Iran                      --  5%
6. Israel                    --  5%
7. North Korea          --  5%

Russia came in at 2%.

Why should this surprise anyone?  We spend on "defense" over what the top 30 countries spend combined. We have more prisoners than the entire earth combined. Americans killed more of each other since Newtown than died in the whole Iraq war. We have been in "hot" wars for over two decades. The last president declared that we could launch a war unilaterally as part of a pre-emptive strategy. The world has seen in the past year that we have everyone on planet earth under surveillance. And we have military bases scattered across the globe--so many we don't even remember where they all are.And we are obsessed by a small group of Islamic terrorists who named themselves after a science fiction novel written by an American Jew. And our opposition party wants to plunge the world into a Great Depression by defaulting on our debt. 

Even British writer D.H. Lawrence sensed the darkness in America. "The essential American soul is hard,isolate,stoic, and a killer."

Can you blame the rest of the world for being a little wary of us?