I am not an international person. I am just a person from a small town in North Carolina. All I know of economics and the movement of capital and investing, at best, is limited.

When I look at some maximum charts from Yahoo! Finance (most go back only 10 years) of companies related to the production of basic metals, the multi-year lows (based on just 10 years) occurred mostly in 2002.

When I wrote a weblog, I talked about countries such as China and India experiencing what the United States experienced during the Industrial Revolution of the middle to late 19th century CE.

Hardly an original thought.

We truly live in interesting times.

Babies born in certain countries, such as the United States, get educated and then have the opportunity do some extraordinary things related to technology, medicine, hard science, and business, of course.

The propensity for such an outcome to occur has increased all over the Big Blue Marble. Maybe it has accelerated.

What I find interesting about this Big Blue Marble, as it pertains to human endeavor, countries such as India and China, with their combined populations making up something like 35% of total global population, aren't pursuing military aggression as a political policy.

In regions such as the Pac/Rim where the Islamic religious preference dominates, here one also sees nations such as Malaysia and Indonesia not pursuing military aggression as a political policy.

I wonder how militarily aggressive the politicians are in a county like Iceland.