Paris, France—After a year long undercover investigation of the infamous news personality Stephen Colbert from the Colbert Report, information and graphics have come to light that beyond dispute shows Stephen Colbert’s hidden love for bears.

Stephen Colbert, best known for his bizarro Jon Stewart impersonations, often rants about the horrible threat that bears possess to the United States. Colbert (pronounced coal-bear, the t is silent), is the son of Italian immigrants who came over from Montpellier, France to bring the acts of miming to the uncultured American people.

The following graphics may be unsuitable for children under the age of five and any fan of the Colbert Report, please do not continue if you are faint of heart.

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The more and more I see Google gobble up new areas and jump into new verticals, the more I personally envision their own search results filled with just about only their own products. For someone who works on improving client search results for SEO, this will become an ever-increasing frustration as Google’s SERPs will be less and less beneficial for clients looking for direct impacts to their site. How so? Here’s a vision of how the search results could be in a few years (click to enlarge):

Of course, that entirely depends on whether Google is still around. Nonetheless, as frustrating as it can be to see these results, it makes me wonder how much Google is just shooting itself in the foot the more it continues to promote its own products over other results (manually or algorithimically). All one would need is a great advertising campaign to publically make fun of Google for having all its search results as Google.

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Ran across an excerpt on NPR.org on the book “The New Asian Hemisphere” by Kishore Mahbubani that goes into how Asia has been rising economically in turns starting with Japan, then the Asian Tigers, and now China and India which has been dramatically reducing the number of people living in poverty.

Yet, Mahbubani notes that with the rise of Asia, the West is becoming more and more worried of instability and outside threats exactly from the West’s push for other nations to reach Western levels of modernity. Why the fear? Mahbubani believes that:

[The West] is keenly aware that if this trend continues, a great day of reckoning must come. As the spirit of democratization gathers strength and more and more human beings take charge of their own destinies, they will increasingly question the undemocratic world order they live in.

That undemocratic world? The post-World War II structure of the United Nations and the UN Security Council. We have already seen a restructure before and attempts to expand the Security Council in recent years, but to little success.

McCain’s idea of a union of democracies is more enticing to me personally than trying to restructure a post-World War II international order that so far refuses to adjust to new power statuses. Seeing nations that have violated human rights on the Human Rights Council even after the UN tried to adjust to today’s world a sad reality of how stuck in the past the UN is.

That said, a union of democracies does creates more problems by excluding other nations and removes a rather stable international system that has helped to dampen wars from spreading. More than likely, a new international system will not come about until either one of the two (non-disastrous) situations happen: a world filled completely with democracies (with a push for a single democratic union possibly like the EU) or space colonization (where people are no longer concerned about national identity due to the huge distances of space).

In any case, this will be a book worthwhile to buy and read for me.

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Since I’m on the topic of Star Trek, thought to include this awesome detailed map of the Star Trek Alpha Quadrant Universe. The blue areas is the United Federation of Planets, green is the Romulan Empire, Dark Red is the Klingon Empire, red-orange is the Cardassian Union. Click on the picture to see a close-up of it.

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Got forwarded a link that had the following hilarious image:

“Will Work For Dilithium Crystals” — well done. Although, personally I would have used some kind of background such as this one:

To make it more desperate/funny, but that’s just me.

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Because I enjoy politics (international politics all the more), I had to put in my two cents on what I believe the outcome will be for the upcoming election. These are of course my own personal guesses, so feel free to mock me if/when I’m wrong post-November. The images come courtesy of 270towin.com, even providing for the unique electoral situations in Nebraska and Maine!

Let’s begin by showing my “Realistic Prediction” (ie: what I believe the outcome will be):

A best case scenario:

followed by a worst case scenario:

Only time will tell of course… thoughts?

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Looks like a battle royale for the Chinese social networks will soon come to head with QQ launching its own service:

QQ soft launches a new service called QQ Xiaoyou, which is a social networking service targeted at students in universities and high schools. Actually, Xiaoyou is the Chinese Pinyin for alumni. Currently, only invited QQ users are allowed to test the service.

Obviously QQ want to make Xiaoyou another China’s Facebook, it also has the similar UI as Facebook. However, The net culture of Facebook is quite different from that of QQ. In Facebook, people tend to use their real name in offline life, and bring their offline connection online, while in QQ, almost all users take online ID not real name, use avatar not their own photos, and make online friends. Now, QQ Xiaoyou requires its users to use their real name and real photo, and will verify it strictly. Now you need to let QQ Xiaoyou approve your information within three days.

I’d be interested in seeing how they would actually verify it so strictly–there’s no real way unless you’re meeting them in person or having them fill out a form that scares people into being real on it. Otherwise, I would not call anything else very strict.

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Venture Capital continues to increase to China, particularly in advanced of the Olympics, as $3.2 billion has been put into Chinese companies, an increase from $1.8 billion the previous year according to John Boudreau of the San Jose Mercury News on May 11, 2008 titled Money Pours into China, Despite Challenges.

The innovation of the Silicon Valley and its reputation around the world has sparked interest within China to create its own areas, with most of the money being sent to Beijing or Shanghai metropolitan areas as centers of China’s high-tech world.

It may be easy to get money for start-ups within China, but the brutal secret of business within China is just how competitive the environment is. China may still be the new land of opportunity, but to really make a stable Silicon Valley environment, it will require a stable supply of energy for the industry, strong individualistic sentiments, and lack of government regulations that are often hard to come by in other nations.

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