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POPSWhy America Will Survive George W. Bush Otto von Bismarck saw how American blunders led to American power and allegedly said that God has a special providence for drunks, fools, and the United States of America. Walter Russell Mead (of the Council on Foreign Relations) puts Bush's 8-year stint in the White House into proper perspective. America's foreign policy has been short-sighted and often self-defeating from the get-go, alternately collaborative, passive, and interventionist. And, yet, miraculously, we always come out ahead. With the unstoppable rise of a global capitalist economy, Mead makes the case that America, for all its past and current faults, will continue to be the inevitable leader of this new international buoyancy. Not even our latest mistakes (unprecedented though they may be) can derail such a powerful incentive that is the modern American world trade system. Which means, more than ever, we're literally all in this together.
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POPSThe Stick Figure Guide to Winning in Iraq As described in the article, the creator of this humorous, optimistic cartoon, a young Captain Travis Patriquin, was killed by an improvised explosive device in Iraq just last Wednesday. His creation has been circulating among the troops and, lately, across the internet. PDF version of the presentation .
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POPSFootrot Flats Growing up in New Mexico, I happened to live next to (and be good friends with) a family from New Zealand. Of the many novel cultural items they introduced me to, nothing left as much an impression as reading their collections of this formerly famous, utterly unique comic strip about a Border Collie on a NZ farm. As a typical US kid, the foreign humor went completely over my head, I couldn't come close to understanding the native colloquialisms, I had never heard seen rugby, didn't grow up on a farm, etc... But for some reason, I was fascinated by the strips and couldn't get enough. For a comic strip it was rather dark...there was a very high prevalence of dirt, mud, manure, blood, bodily fluids, violence, implied violence, swearing, and more...what boy wouldn't be fascinated by such vulgarity? (I started to use the word "bloody" in conversations after reading those comics...until the family told me later it wasn't polite to do that. :) )
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POPSGarfield Remixed Who knew that removing Garfield's thought balloons would turn out to be so hilarious...at Jon's expense. (Via canbebesi . I had to clip more of my favorites for posterity.)