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POPSIn TV Interview, Cheney Confessed to War Crime "What occurred in the last eight years was an assault on who we are," Turley said. "I think that President-elect Obama's going to have to decide whether he wants power without principle or whether he wants to start with a true change, to say that no matter where an investigation will take us, if there are crimes to be found they will be prosecuted." Personally, I vote for the latter. The neocons came up with a lot of creative legal arguments to excuse torture and we ought to make them test those arguments in a criminal court. I think they'd find that their arguments were BS and that they are, quite literally, criminals. I also think that we ought to make it 100% clear that working in the White House isn't a free pass to commit war crimes. We're a nation of laws, not men, and those who break the law should have to answer to the law -- no matter who they are. That's what you call "justice."
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POPSThe Next Big Sensation? "Technological advances will someday be complemented by cultural changes, and cavorting with robots just won't seem weird anymore." Why is it important to humans that machines are beginning to touch us back? "It was incredibly important to humans when robots started to look at you, recognize a face and make eye contact," "The eye contact turned out to be a significant Darwinian button. We are hard-wired for that. That's how we sense the presence of an other. Same thing with touch. That is the way we connect with an other that knows about us, that understands us. It is in our evolution. We are hard-wired to communicate with each other by touch. It's how we stroke babies, how we want to be comforted. . . . "A heartbeat is a powerful way of signaling the presence"
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POPSScientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth Physicists at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who underwrote the VLEC's construction with donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agree that there are "some troubling variables" whenever attempting to launch Earth through the vacuum of space into a massive body of solid matter. Yet, they insist, the academic benefits of a planetary collision outweigh any risk of annihilating the Earth. While the project remains controversial, physicists agreed in late November to reconvene and evaluate the risk factor of the project after a small-scale field test, during which the Very Large Earth Collider will be turned on at 10 percent capacity, catapulting Earth into the moon at only half the speed of light.
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POPS Wondeful images - 2000 years of human culture Awards competition winner -Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.
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POPSNet Neutrality At A Risk The shifting positions concern some purists. "What they're talking about is selling you the right to skip ahead in the line," says Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, a Washington-based advocacy group. "It would mean the first part of your business plan would be a deal with AT&T to get into their super-tier -- that is anathema to a culture of innovation."
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POPSFalse Memory Syndrome there is the danger of false memory syndrome, defined by the Royal College of Psychiatrists as the recollection of an event that did not occur, but which the individual subsequently strongly believes. Some therapists think that adults who were abused as children but cannot recall the incident can be helped to "recover" their memory. The RCP disputes this, stating that it leads to the creation of false memories: "The evidence does not support the view that memory enhancement techniques actually enhance memory… these are powerful and dangerous methods of persuasion." Interesting reading and thought provoking. Can we trust, that which seems so true... meaning our own mind?
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POPSAl-Zaidi Did What We Journalists Should Have Done Long Ago NOTE: Speaking of shoes and the White House, Skip Mendler of Honesdale, PA has a great idea. He suggests that everyone who is disgusted with the outgoing Bush/Cheney administration send a shoe to the White House. Just imagine a pile up of a million smelly old running shoes in the White House mailroom! I think he's got something. Spread the word! A million shoes? That is probably a bit of an underestimate, eh? :lol:
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POPSShoe-Thrower was Reacting to US Aerial Bombings In related news, al-Zaidi has apparently been abused by Iraqi forces while under arrest, suffering "a broken arm and ribs," along with internal bleeding. Yeah, George. Iraq's a real goddam paradise now. You must be so proud.