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POPSQuotes "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison "Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented notas a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac." – George Orwell "A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny." – Alexander Solzhenitsyn "War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals." – Charles Evans Hughes "Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead." - Arundhati Roy "Children learn more from what you are than what you teach." - W.E.B. Dubois, 1897 "Nonviolence doesn't always work-but violence never does" - Madge Micheels-Cyrus
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POPS Suicide of the West? by Thomas Sowell
the idea of a "war on terror"-- as if that will stop the terrorists' war on us. The ostensible reason for releasing al-Megrahi was compassion for a man terminally ill. It is ironic that this was said in Scotland, for exactly 250 years ago another Scotsman-- Adam Smith-- said, "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." Tragically, those with this strange inversion of values include the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder. Although President Obama has said that he does not want to revisit the past, this is only the latest example of how his administration's actions are the direct opposite of his lofty words. It is not just a question of looking backward. The decision to second-guess CIA agents who extracted information to save American lives is even worse when you look forward. This is not simply an injustice to those who have tried to keep this country safe, it is a danger recklessly imposed on future Americans whose safety cannot always be guaranteed
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POPSTaking a close look at Facebook Facebook.... Over 200,000,000 people have Facebook entries. Facebook claims over 100,000,000 access their accounts every day. The CIA is one of the backers. So is the Department of Defense. Corporate and government surveillance has never been easier.
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POPSObituaries of 2008 2009: looking at Lives that made headlines in death: from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yves Saint Laurent to Sydney Pollack. Singers, performers and DJs who shaped the soundtrack of their eras
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POPSA critical look at democracy and values Although written during the height of the Cold War, Solzhenitsyn provides a useful perspective on ideology and values. The gulf between democratic values and principles and reality is still relevant to today.
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POPSThe Young Turks: "Did John McCain Lie About His P.O.W Record?" I firmly believe that the generation of politicians that came to power before the age of YouTube and the like are going to find themselves bitten in the ass over and over again. They've gotten used to changing their stories over and over, and up until now no one was paying attention.
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POPSHeroism Solzhenitsyn is right. It was heroic. The last time Great Britain was truly great.
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POPSSOLZHENITSYN'S WARNING TO THE WEST "We are approaching a major turning point in world history, in the history of civilization. It's the sort of turning point where the hierarchy of values which we have venerated, and we use to determine what is important to us and what caused our hearts to beat is starting to rock and may collapse. These two crises, the political crisis of today's world and the oncoming spiritual crisis, are occuring at the same time. Your leaders will need profound intuition, spiritual foresight, high qualities of mind and soul. May God grant that in those times you will have at the helm personalities as great as those who created your country."
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POPSAlexander Solzhenitsyn is Dead He was the greatest witness against the horrors of Stalinism and the system of gulags and slave labor camps in the USSR. Not long after moving to the US, he critiqued the materialism of the west. In the end, he seemed to be something of Tolstoyan theocrat. His book "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" had a big impact on me in my youth. His interview with William F. Buckley on the old Firing Line series, if you can find it, is not to be missed.
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POPSRussian Dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dead How symbolic as America has also forgotten the warning of this experienced anti-communist who railed against Stalin while the US was preoccupied with Hitler (which Pat Buchanan laments in his new book The Unnecessary War): "The Gulag Archipelago" is a non-fictional account ...great holocaust of our century-- the imprisonment, brutalization and very often murder of tens of millions of innocent Soviet citizens by their own Government, mostly during Stalin's rule from 1929 to 1953. The present generation has hardly heard of this man who warned of the Russian tyranny of his time coming to America: A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever. Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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POPSRussian Gulag Writer Alexander Solzhenitsen Dies At 89
"His intransigence, his ideals and his long, eventful life make of Solzhenitsyn a storybook figure, heir to Dostoyevsky. He belongs to the pantheon of world history. I pay homage to his memory." Born to a single mother in 1918 at Kislovodsk in the Caucasus amid the bloody aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Solzhenitsyn was initially a loyal Communist. But he went on to undermine the regime's moral foundations, his writings energizing dissent at home and in the West. First though he had to enter the living hell of the Gulag, a vast prison system that stretched from the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea to the steppes of Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the camps in 1945 and was to go on to survive cancer and a KGB assassination attempt. He was released in February 1953, a few weeks before Stalin's death. He spent three more years in internal exile in Kazakhstan, contracted and overcame cancer. "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" 1962
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POPSSolzhenitsyn, chronicler of Soviet gulag, dies MOSCOW (AP) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.