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POPSPolitican Cartoons "The United States, some years back, found its new bogeyman "Islam" to replace its former imaginary enemy "Communism." And now the European press appears to have finally (?) found a replacement for the Jewish people that they used to malign and attack. Anti-Islam/Muslimism appears to now have officially replaced anti-Jewish sentiments in Europe. The roots of these attacks are the same: an inability to acknowledge and respect a diversity of people that might result in a Europe that is non-White and/or non-Christian. The anti-Muslim/Islam cartoons of today are little different than the anti-Jewish cartoons that were published by the Nazis during WW II."
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POPSLearn Out Loud This site is fabulous and one of my favourites. When you get tired, why not just lean back and let someone else do the reading for a change. LOTS of stuff here, to make you smarter. Go rummage through the titles. Tons of stuff for FREE and all downloadable. :) I clipped just a few titles at the end (until I ran out of characters) to show you what sort of stuff they offer. Enjoy! .:)
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POPSFISK: "Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11"
....– whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive". Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to
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POPSthe top 10 least religious countries The survey concluded that "high levels of organic atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality. In some societies, particularly Europe, atheism is growing. However, throughout much of the world -- particularly nations with high birth rates -- atheism is barely discernable."
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POPSDouble Standards What do you call it when just over 3 thousand people were killed in the September 11 attack on the US? – An atrocity. What do you call it when nearly 5 million people were killed in the Vietnam war? – A mistake. What do you call it when very rich people exploit poor people? – Greed and selfishness. What do you call it when very rich countries exploit poor countries? – Globalization. What do you call it when someone carrying a gun enters your house and steals your valuable possessions? – An armed robbery. What do you call it when a multinational corporation supported by armed forces enters your country and steals your valuable possessions? – Free trade. What do you call someone who steals from the rich and gives to the poor? – Robin Hood. What do you call someone who steals from the poor and gives to the rich? – The US government.
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POPSGeorge's Legacy: Broken Bodies, Broken Countries. pt1 Shocking but not the most shocking. More shocking is that their commander-in-chip is a coward and deserter. He was AWOL more than 30 days during war. Ironic that the warmonger president, never served but killed more Americans than any other since Vietnam.
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POPS"World needs a vacation from USA" He called for immediate technology transfer from the West to the Third World, to allow development based on clean technology — stressing the need to “reject intellectual property rights”. funds should not be distributed through the World Bank, which was trying to regain legitimacy by portraying itself as a “climate bank” while continuing to push fossil-fuel-driven development. Confronting global poverty and climate change means confronting US power. “I don’t think the world needs US leadership”, he said. “They should be more humble.” Whether the US achieves its goals “is where we, as civil society come in”, Bello said, suggesting that, by making intervention costly for the US, civil society could encourage a “new US isolationism”. The struggle is, he stressed, global. “The world needs a vacation from the messaianism of the US … A few decades of a self-absorbed US would be very good for the world.”
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POPSInterventionism, Not Muslims, Is the Problem
Thus, rather than ceasing its policy of interventionism after 9/11, which is what the U.S. government should have done even while pursuing the perpetrators through criminal-justice means, it did the very worst thing possible — it continued and even expanded its policy of interventionism in the hope of killing those whose differences with America’s values had risen to the level of rage as a result of U.S. interventionism. Not surprisingly, that only fueled more anger and rage. So, what should the U.S. government do now? It should do what it should have done after 9/11: Exit Afghanistan and Iraq and the entire Middle East. Bring all the troops home. Everyone seems to know this, but America. I read a lot of hate against Muslims on CM and I find that highly troubling. It's a crock. Muslims DON'T hate us, they are NOT the enemy and if the US just left other countries alone, the "War on Terror" would be over. Don't buy into it.. Bring the troops home.
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POPSWomen at War Face Sexual Violence In Iraq, women still only make up one in 10 troops, and because they are not evenly distributed, they often serve in a platoon with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military's traditional and deep-seated hostility towards women, can cause problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself - degradation and sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival.
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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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POPSGIANT CAVE PICTURES: World's Biggest Found in Vietnam Vietnam's Son Doong cave, the largest single cave passage yet found. First explored earlier this year by a joint British-Vietnamese team, the cave measures at least 262-by-262 feet (80-by-80 meters) in most places and is at least 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers) long.
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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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POPSWeapons failed US troops during Afghan firefight
A week ago, eight U.S. troops were killed at a base near Kamdesh, a town near Wanat. There's no immediate evidence of weapons failures at Kamdesh, but the circumstances were eerily similar to the Wanat battle: insurgents stormed an isolated stronghold manned by American forces stretched thin by the demands of war. Army Col. Wayne Shanks, a military spokesman in Afghanistan, said a review of the battle at Kamdesh is under way. "It is too early to make any assumptions regarding what did or didn't work correctly," he said. Complaints about the weapons the troops carry, especially the M4, aren't new. Army officials say that when properly cleaned and maintained, the M4 is a quality weapon that can pump out more than 3,000 rounds before any failures occur. The M4 is a shorter, lighter version of the M16, which made its debut during the Vietnam war. Roughly 500,000 M4s are in service, making it the rifle troops on the front lines trust with their lives.
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POPSThe World's Worst Web Censors - Reporters Without Borders the last 6 countries in order of pics are: Saudi Arabia, Turkemenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, Uzbekistan. in source you can slide on, every pic got a short story on this specific state & it`s specific policy of internet censorship. Reporters without Borders Unite !! new kind of union?.. ))
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POPSWaterboarding Demo in Congress !? To Prove not Torture!? "In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. "'All of these trials elicited compelling descriptions of water torture from its victims, and resulted in severe punishment for its perpetrators,' writes Evan Wallach in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law." Begs the question. How could he be charged in WW2 with the WAR CRIME of waterboarding? The recipient was a civilian seemed to be the point? Well so are the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. If there were POWs then it would NOT be a WAR CRIME but as Bush says they are not POWs then it is a WAR CRIME.
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POPSBut Mr. Cheney, Waterboarding is Torture Given that Cheney and others have confessed to authorizing waterboarding, we have very strong evidence that systematic torture was used in our name. Cheney doesn’t get to redefine our values. Waterboarding IS torture.
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POPSWhy the U.S. Loses ‘Small Wars’ a powerful force can easily lose, if it doesn’t fully understand the enemy, fails to describe clear objectives or, worst of all, pursues military objectives that do not contribute to the conflict's political goal. (dd. 1896)
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POPSIraq...Dollar...Euro...Oil ....join dots.... "The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said. "A few days' funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered, he said. "The public had been encouraged by the White House to ignore the costs of the war because of the belief that the war would somehow pay for itself or be paid for by Iraqi oil or US allies.
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POPSMen of War - photo essay TIME in partnership with CNN: "Ninety years of battlefield portraits taken by the greatest combat photographers of all time." last picture: Sergeant First Class Joseph Mosner was injured in Khalidya by a roadside bomb.2004, Iraq War