I just finished The United States Of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. I had my doubts about this book originally... but now that I've finished it... I'm glad I read it. First of all... it does take a cheerleader approach to the EU. But the facts that are presented in the book are compelling. The difference is that the author doesn't draw the same conclusions that I would.

Here are a few points that stood out.

We Fund Europe's Social Programs: We are Europe's defense plain and simple. They can afford to have squat for a military because they don't have to, and they take advantage of this. While the author views this as plain fact... I view it as a thing to change. While pulling out of Europe would limit our options somewhat as far as logistics... I have a feeling we could come up with some alternatives. Europe is like a kid whose been given their parent's credit card and buy whatever they want. It's time they see what the bill is.

Europe Owns a lot of America: They invest heavily in, or outright own a lot of "American" companies. While from a purely capitalistic view I don't have a problem with it... it's nice to have their money... from a realistic standpoint this is a problem. Because most European countries cannot lay off workers... when those companies need to trim something in order to be profitable, they look to the U.S. American workers suffer even when the American parts of European owned businesses do well... simply because American workers are the only ones they can lay off. This is a problem.

Europe Has Too Much Political Influence: They have a common currency, a common trade infrastructure, open borders... more and more they act as one country. That's fine. But when it comes to international organizations... they still all have their individual votes. It's as if the United States of America went to the UN (or the WTO, or any number of organizations) with 50 votes because we had 50 states. If Europe truly speaks as a single country, then it's high time they speak with one vote. Otherwise I say we're do 49 extra.

Next on the book stack is Schrodinger's Rabbits: Entering The Many Worlds Of Quantum. Quantum physics has always bothered me. Einstein is often times quoted as saying "God doesn't play dice with the universe"... and this part of quantum physics has bothered me just the same. This book promises to talk about new theories in the quantum world that takes away the random nature of quantum physics that cause so many people like me a problem.