Have you ever wondered how many countries and territories there are in the world? At last count there were 232, the smallest country in the world, by area, being Vatican City and the largest country in the world being Russia. The difference between the size of Russia and the size of Vatican City is quite astounding .Russia is 17,098,242 km and Vatican city is .44 of a kilometer. This means that if we were to divide Russia into Vatican cities we would be able to make approximately 38,859,640 of them. the second biggest country in the world is just north of the United States, it is Canada, but even this huge country is only about half the size of Russia . The United States is no slouch in this area, it is almost as big as Canada and just slightly smaller than China, making it the fourth largest country on the face of the planet.

The next thing I am about to tell you, may really surprise you. If we look at all of the countries in the world and we refer to them by what is known as their account balance, United States comes out with the worst negative balance of any country in the entire world. That is right, we are last and not only are we last, we are last in real big way. The country above us is Spain and it shows a negative balance of $106,400 per person, which in itself is really terrible, but when you get to the good old US of A. we show a negative balance of $862,300 per person, which is approximately 7 1/2 times worse than the next worst country. This certainly does not instill confidence in the US dollar and that is probably a large contributing factor to its decreasing value. To give you an idea of the difference between us and the number one country, which is the peoples Republic of China I will now list their account balance, it is plus $249,900 per person. Folks we are behind such countries as the Ivory Coast, Morocco and Palau, which are all in the plus column. While Cuba is in the negative, it is far better off than we are with -$1218 per person. What does all this mean, we all know that economically most people are better off here than in some of these other countries? It means that we have borrowed far too much money against our future and this was caused by excess spending in many different areas. A good example of this is Iraq where trillions have been lost and on huge defense projects. It certainly wasn't spent on the average American citizen..

If we look at the use of capital punishment throughout the world we begin to notice that many places either don't have it anymore, or have not exercised their right to use it. The latest figures that I have, range from 2004 to 2006. They show that the only country in Europe that had capital punishment and actually executed people in 2004 was Belarus, they had five executions. In South America in 2006, there was no executions. In Africa there were executions in Somalia and Sudan that totaled together added up to 72. Asia had quite a few executions with the People's Republic of China leading the way. They had 1010 executions, . Iran had 177 and Iraq 65. Several other countries in Asia conducted executions but they were under the two figures. When we get to North America and the Caribbean, only one country conducted executions and that was the United States with 53.The area of Oceania, which includes such countries as Australia and New Zealand along with many smaller island countries, conducted no executions in 2006.

One interesting list is that of organizations and countries listed by the total amount that they have spent on defense. Some of these figures are projected out to 2008 and some go back as far as 2003, when the last figures were available. Total arms spending for the entire world for 2007 was projected to be 1,200,000,000,000 US dollars. The leading organization that spent the most on military expenditures was NATO, who spent 849,875,309,000 US dollars. I bet you can guess which country led the world in military expenditures, if you said the US you are correct, because we spent more than double the total of all countries in Europe combined and this is without knowing how much more was spent on Black Projects. The figure projected out to 2008 is 623,000,000,000. This has to make one laugh, because we keep hearing that China is increasing its military budget and we should be worried.Their military budget projected out to 2007 is 45,000,000,000. Even the tiny country of San Marino spent 700,000 on defense in 2005. Will this madness ever cease?

The country with the biggest amount of Armed Forces including all military and reserves is the People's Republic of China, they are estimated to have 7,024,000 people.under arms. The United States is estimated to have1,938,210. If we look at the country that maintains the smallest military force we find out that it is Antigua and Baruda with a force of 245 people.

Looking at the list of countries that had the highest gross world product expressed in millions of US dollars in 2006, we find that if we consider the European Union as a country, it leads the way with 14,609,866. Next on the list it is the United States with 13.194,700.The People's Republic of China was not even third, because both Japan and Germany were ahead of it. The People's Republic of China had 2,644,642. The country that had the smallest world product was Kiribati with 70. If you would like to know what the total world gross product was I will tell you, it was 48,245,198.

Many people worry about carbon dioxide emissions into our atmosphere, so I decided to take a look into this a little deeper. The figures here are in metric tons. The total amount of metric tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in a year is approximately 27,245,758. The world's leading polluter is the United States of America with 6,049,435, which amounts to 22% of all emissions worldwide and if this isn't a sin, I don't know what is. The second greatest polluter and they are rapidly moving up, is the Peoples Republic of China with 5,010,170 or 16.4% of the world's total emissions. This is another tremendous offense against our atmosphere. If we look at major countries and by this I mean fully industrialized countries, the country that pollutes the least is New Zealand with about 1/10 of 1% or 31, 570.

Looking at nuclear stockpiles in the world, we see a list of countries that we know have nuclear weapons, however it is suspected that several other countries may have them but are keeping them secret. One of the countries that I am talking about is South Africa, which is suspected of owning several nuclear weapons. Except for the former Soviet Union and the United States no other countries are suspected of having more than 350 warheads at their disposal. Sometimes a country became a nuclear power only because it had been used by another country, like the Soviet Union, as a weapons storage facility. Three such countries that were suspected of having nuclear weapons are Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine. These three countries have since all signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is thought that the United States still has 5163 nuclear warheads and Russia 5830.

Lastly I would like to mention that there are actually countries in this world that do not have armed forces. I know that this is hard to believe, but it is true and these countries seem to be doing fine without them . There are actually 23 such countries and a couple are even in turbulent areas. One such country is Costa Rica and another is Panama. Iceland has been able to do quite nicely without a military. Even Haiti is without one right now, although some people are demanding its reestablishment. As laudable as this is, I just don't think the idea will ever catch on with the majority of nations on this planet.