>Check out their Current Account Balance . Maybe you need to define 'best' when it comes to economics.

Wow. That's some serious poker game being played... a Texas hold'em?

>>Military:
>>- by far the strongest and most effective military. It is said that no combination other other militaries can defeat.
>
>No argument

It can't be defeated, but than it also can't defeat anything larger than Grenada. And I'm counting both Iraq and Afghanistan here. These guys aren't defeated yet.

>>Arts:
>>- music - they invented every new music form in the 20th century (Jazz, Blues, Rock, Rap, Hip-hop, Punk, Grunge)
>
>Reggae? Calypso? Not being overly familiar with some music forms does not mean they don't exist.

Add salsa. And, besides, these aren't musical forms. Those are just branches of popular music. Besides, punk is British, AFAIK. As for house, rap, techno, grunge etc, these seem like invented names for current trends in pop music. If we counted these as separate branches, we'd have to count twist, cha-cha-cha, sympho rock, jazz-rock, prog rock, psychodelia etc etc. And, again, most of these were just names given by critics and record labels to certain fashions in music.

>>- movies - more good movies than anyone else (Schlinders List, Munich, Capote, Shawshank
>Redemption...)
>
>That's an opinion, not a fact.

How would they know? If you define "movie" as "Hollywood movie", then of course the best maker of those is USA. Specially if the composer of the best-movies-ever list hasn't had a chance to see more than two movies a year from the rest of the world.

>>- art - the last great artist with world-wide fame was an American Andy Warhol

Ondřej Warchola, the Czech?

>>- literature -
>
>Define 'great'. I think he was laughing all the way to the bank.

Just reading the '99 "year's best SF" by Gardner Dozois. Same shortsightedness - in the 54 pages of the summation (aka foreword), Australia got about half a page, Britain a few honorable mentions, Star Wars One got two pages, WorldCon (in Australia) half a page, rest of the world: not a mention.

And, each author's contribution is prefaced by a brief editorial, where the words "sold his/her first story {insert year here} to {insert publisher}" appear in more than half of the cases. Mind you, not "published", but "sold".

>Did you look at that? Women's suffrage was growing all over the world before the U.S. really took it seriously.

The international Women's day is March 8th, celebrated all over the world, except in USA, where it originated - and where they have Mother's day instead.

And the greatest ambition for a high school girl is to be a cheerleader? Gimme a break. Or rather, wake me up once they have male cheerleaders for female teams.