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POPS"What If He Is?" God bless Powell for speaking the truth. As a popular personality, he hit the nail on the head.
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POPSAn Icelandic woman's experience visiting the US What is wrong with the United States of America? Is it the stimulus-response mechanism of experiencing terror → making war on terror → terrorizing ? Are the United States of America a hysteric or paranoid nation? I wonder if Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl (that's her correct name) will experience any excuse on the part of the U.S. administration, and I wonder if those responsible will be removed from office. If not, I would be inclined to declare the U.S.A. a closed mental hospital.
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POPSThe Boy With The Incredible Brain This is the breathtaking story of Daniel Tammet. A twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities, Daniel is one of the world’s few savants. He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. This documentary follows Daniel as he travels to America to meet the scientists who are convinced he may hold the key to unlocking similar abilities in everyone.
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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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POPSCaral: The first city in the New World A brief article on a stunning archaeological discovery in South America. About six years ago, Peruvian/American archaeologist Ruth Shady , introduced the "oldest city in America" to the world. It was Caral; an ancient city on the Pacific coast of Peru, with trade centers, temples and a pyramid complex not less impressive than its counterparts in Mexico and Guatemala. The most exciting thing about Caral was its age: The city was carbon dated to ca. 3000 BCE, which strongly suggested a radical change in history textbooks. All evidence show Caral was not an exception in the region and there are many more ancient towns, waiting to be discovered. Another interesting thing about Caral is, its surprisingly peaceful social order. Archaeologists found no city walls, no forts, no signs of an army and even not a single weapon in Caral. Once again, thanks to Ruth Shady for this fantastic discovery.
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POPSGeorge Bush Doesn't Know Why People Don't Like Him George Bush has been asking around the white house about why people seem to dislike America, or is it just him they dislike. My guess is that the world will once again warm up to America and appreciate us for the great country we are, once the Bush boy is gonzo. I just wish he were heading to the Hague where he could be tired, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld for war crimes.
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POPSBush's America: LESS Safe, LESS Free. In a new book, "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror," law professors David Cole and Jules Lobel argue that the problem lies in the aggressive "preventive paradigm" the Bush administration adopted in the wake of 9/11.
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POPSFascist America in 10 Easy Steps As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air-however slight-lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness. ~Justice William O. Douglas~
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POPSHow dumb are we? Though I tend to agree to the general proposition here, it might be that we witness the arising of a different kind of intelligence, that adapts to the information explosion. Perhaps knowledge is not equated with understanding, and books are not the nexus of intelligence anymore? Perhaps nowadays we need to learn more about the future than we learn about the past?
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POPSThings Americans don't like to talk about Read the whole article, it is illuminating to say the least. I thought this passage said it best: " If you listen to a lot of conservatives, they'll tell you that the difference between them and us is that conservatives love America and liberals hate America.... They don't get it. We love America just as much as they do. But in a different Way. You see, they love America the way a 4-year-old loves her Mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world."
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POPSDubya dissed by world leaders: Or is it? [SEE COMMENTS] 11/21/08 Okay, CNN has come out with the official explanation . Maybe it wasn't an official snub after all. Protocol & all that. I still bet Angela Merkel thinks Bush is a dick and that he'll be remembered as the WORST PRESIDENT EVAR! We liberals don't hate America, we love America. We just hate Bush and what he stands for and what he's done to the country. Nor do we think speaking bad of the Great Leader is disloyalty to the state like the right-wing Kool-Aid drinkers seem to. ORIG COMMENT: Notice how the WORST AMERICAN PRESIDENT IN HISTORY doesn't even make eye contact with Angela Merkel of Germany, nor she with him. Guess she figures getting groped on camera by a by him once before was enough. There's an old Irish saying that 19 world leaders seem to have gotten wind of: Touch the Devil and you can't let go.
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POPSChristian Zionism: A story everyone should know RABBI MICHAEL LERNER: Well-- I'm hoping we have a few more years here. And I think in the 21st Century the growing wisdom of the American people and of all people is that our well being depends on the well being of everyone else on the planet, and I think that the Israeli population increasingly are coming to understand that their well being depends on the well being of Palestinians and of the Arab world. That there's that fundamental interdependence.
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POPSThe Inalienable Right to Get High The infamous President Nixon instigated this unwinnable war in 1971," Perigo recalls. "As with the equally misbegotten alcohol prohibition of 1919-1933, the only actual winner has been organized crime. The big loser has been the founding tenet of America: freedom. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness implies ownership of one's own body, which subsumes the right to ingest any substance of one's choosing, regardless of the moral status of such an action.
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POPSA Tragic Legacy And the president who vowed to lead the war for freedom and democracy has made torture, rendition, abductions, lawless detentions of even our own citizens, secret "black site" prisons, Abu Ghraib dog leashes, and orange Guantánamo jumpsuits the strange, new symbols of America around the world. New essay by Glenn Greenwald on the future legacy of America's reaction to 9/11.
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POPSQUIZ: What American Accent Do You Have? If you think you don't have an accent, think again. This short quiz is a way to find out which dialect of American English you speak. Different regional accents become more prevalent in countries at different times throughout the years for various socio-economic and geographical reasons. These accents come to be perceived as "neutral" or "accent-less" by the majority during these times. For a while, the American dialect sometimes called "Standard Midwestern" has dominated but, like accents themselves, this "standard" constantly evolves. Recently, the spoken aspects of American English have trended westward along with the population center of America. Many features distinct to Northeastern accents (think NYC, Boston) are being replaced in popularity with those from Western accents (think LA) across America. This shift tends to be more prominent the younger the speaker is.