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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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POPSIs the Search for Aliens a Good Idea? One thing is clear from our searches for ET - there is nobody transmitting strong interstellar beacons in our local vicinity. If "they" are out there, they are keeping quiet, prompting the question that they might know something we don't. Listening for transmissions from space is rational; intentionally announcing our presence to unknown civilizations borders on irresponsible. On Earth, radio technology and nuclear weapons were invented within only 50 years of each other. Any civilization with the capability to receive and understand our beacons will likely have figured out worse. Humans are bad enough at co-existing as it is without near constant war. Could you imagine being forced to enter foreign policy negotiations with another species like our own? It would be calamitous.
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POPSHoly Warriers Set Sights on Iran Check out some of our fellow clipper's comments: "Willhelm, there is no stopping this war. The players are all falling into place. At least we know how it will end." "i agree this could be the final piece to the beginning of armagaddon" "but in the book of revelation and some other books in the new and old testament percieve the bear of the North or the great bear as Russia! Russia is in no way to be taken lightly."
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POPSCensorship in American Universities: Harvard But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans? Why were the property rights of the German perpetrators sacrosanct and those of the guiltless Palestinians adjudged an acceptable casualty? In U.S. foreign policy, not all racial groups are guaranteed the same rights and protections. Otherwise, why does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on EU bank accounts, property, and compensation for labour expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s? As a nation we seem unconscious of the hypocrisy. The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-EU was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defence of slavery in the mid-19th. ...Harvard Crimson
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POPSStudy Of Countries I do not claim that sites such as this are the be all and end all of research regarding any given country. But still they are fairly comprehensive. If any given country or nation intrigues you then I recommend further research. If this site creates a even greater thirst for knowledge then I will have done something useful.
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POPSUS No.1 BoogieMan? A bantam Cock? Worth WAR?
"The right has decided it is at war with Iran, so a routine visit by Iran's ceremonial president to the UN GA has generated sparks. The foremost cheerleader for such a view in Congress is Sen Lieberman, who recently pressed Gen. Petraeus on the desirability of bombing Iran in order to forestall weapons smuggling into Iraq from that country. American hawks are beating the war drums loudly because they are increasingly frustrated with the course of events. They are unsatisfied with the lack of enthusiasm among the EU and UN for impeding Tehran's nuclear energy research program. While the Bush administration insists that the program aims at producing a bomb, the Iranian state maintains that it is for peaceful energy purposes. It wants tighter sanctions on Iran at the UN but is unlikely to get them in the short term because of Russian and Chinese reluctance. They may attempt to create a "coalition of the willing" of Iran boycotters outside the UN framework."
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POPSRe-Thinking The War Here's looking forward to a time when clips on America's reputation are more fitting for the nation we aspire to be. When the next major terrorist attack comes, the question will simply be how much liberty Americans have left. That is a victory al Qaeda could not have achieved by force of arms. It is something they have achieved with our witting and conscious help.
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POPSBUSH Best at American tradition: TORTURING since 1946 at least What is unique is Bush making torture official government policy! What he said may never have in reality had any effect on how others treated captured Americans. BUT, now they have an excuse to justify their behaviour. In time his words may cause a large loss of US soldiers' lives. It was one thing to be torturing but very much different to make it US policy. This a clever man, at least in slippery sly way, behind the moronic appearance and demeanour and the consequences of his words should/would be known in advance of his flawed delivery. He has insured that there never will be American hostages, just dead ones, tortured for fun. This may have been the whole point. His job will be even easier now. No crying family member seeking their loved one's return. They are dead. Cindy Sheehan said he was a cold fish, deadly cold. He doesn't do funerals either. The president of DEATH doesn't do dead. Nor did he serve, unless holding up a bar counts. Some commander-in-chief. 'Elect' TWI
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POPSShabby, Cheap US Politician "Have Blood on their Hands" not Iran "The claims that Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and has called for the destruction of Israel are false. He has called for regime change, which is something American politicians do every time they find a country whose policies they disagree with. Regime change is a change of government, not genocide. As for the Holocaust, he said it raised two questions: Why put people in prison who question details of the official version, which is what several European countries do. Why should the Palestinians be made to pay for it? Both are good questions. "How American politicians can call Iran a dangerous country and claim that it poses a threat to the U.S. is a mystery. On second thought, it is not a mystery. It just tells you that the politicians think you and I are so stupid that we will fall for the exact same parade of lies and exaggerations that was used to justify the war against Iraq. "Think for yourself. Iran has no nuclear weapons, and its military is designed for defence. It has
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POPS"The world’s greatest war criminal" addressed the UN, again "'No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,' a principle that the Bush White House has explicitly repudiated, both by renouncing the Geneva Conventions and subjecting those detained in the US “war on terror” to waterboarding, beatings, sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation and other forms of torture and degrading treatment. "The declaration affirms that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” practices that the Bush administration has carried out with impunity, through the holding of detainees without charges, not only at the infamous detention facilities in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, but also at secret CIA prisons around the world. It has introduced “extraordinary rendition” into the lexicon of foreign policy, a discreet term for kidnapping people, drugging them and then sending them in hoods and chains to other countries so that they can be tortured."
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POPSThe Empire Is Over "We are like all empires in their final stages. We have grown soft. We like our comforts. We don't wish to be inconvenienced. We like poor Mexicans to do our stoop work and poor Americans to do our fighting, provided they do it far away so we won't be disturbed by explosions and screams. We enjoy our decadence, and there are always people in the media who can rationalize anything, no matter how sick and revolting it is."
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POPSA greater evil is more likely as America wakes up to the awesome... Beside the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalising of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the al-Qaida brand; the eruption for the first time in modern history of internecine war between Sunni and Shia - "a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition"; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the west, and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry, pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. For the US, the world is now, as a result, a more dangerous and hostile place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged al-Qaida Central in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed and there was no al-Qaida in Iraq. In 2007, there is an al-Qaida in Iraq; parts of the old are creeping back; there are al-Qaida emulator
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POPSThe Theology of American Empire
Continuing: The liberals were starry-eyed fools, Niebuhr charged, because they trusted people to be reasonable enough to resolve international conflicts peacefully. They forgot the harsh reality of original sin. Niebuhr wrapped that traditional notion of sin in a new intellectual package and sold it successfully, not only to theologians but to the foreign policy elite. Since the 1940s, foreign policy has largely been reduced to an endless round of debates about how to apply Niebuhr's "realism." Policymakers who still tried to follow the Social Gospel path have been marginalized and stigmatized with the harshest epithet a Niebuhrian can hurl: "unrealistic.” Many policymakers, like much of the public at large, have come to find a strange comfort in the world as Niebuhr described it. They see a jungle where evildoers, who are all around, must be hunted down and destroyed. Though frightening, this world can easily become the stage for simplistic dramas of good against evil.
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POPSWe want More WAR, We want More WAR, NOW! A recent congressional resolution on Iran underscores the War Party's lock on the foreign policy 'debate'. Calling on the UN to bring charges of "genocide" against Iranian is yet another example of political pandering and congressional grandstanding that bears little, if any, relationship to reality.
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POPSWhat waterboarding looks like Note that waterboarding was not created to elicit "actionable" intelligence, but rather was perfected a means of eliciting confessions, truthful or not. Anyone who believes these techniques are keeping Americans safer is a little too trusting. Also see this clip .
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POPSClipmarks goes green for 48 hours! A new home page and green clips for the next 48 hours. I look forward to seeing what kind of message we can send as a community. I do want to point out that anyone who does not want to use the green backgound color for their clipmarks during the next two days can click the color widget at the top-right of the save clipmark window to change it.
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